Double review: What Grows in the Dark, by Jaq Evans, and Terror at Tierra de Cobre, by Michael Merriam
I’ve been in a mood for reading horror lately, and a fair number of interesting stories in that field have been crossing my path, so I’m combining reviews here of two debuts from this week. Although they’re both pretty brisk reads that include LGBTQ+ protagonists and diverse casts, they’re quite different in focus and tone.
Book Review: What Feasts at Night
As always, Kingfisher does a wonderful job immersing the reader in whatever environment she’s describing; I was reveling in the description of the countryside from the first page.
Horror Review: Penny Reeve on Victor LaValle’s The Changeling
“When you believe in things you don’t understand you suffer” Stevie Wonder’s words serve as the epitaph to Victor LaValle’s The Changeling; accurately summing up the ensuing 431 pages wherein we’re introduced to a genre-defying novel that mixes horror with the fantastic and monsters both real and imagined come a-knocking.
Reviews: Beautiful Sorrows by Mercedes M. Yardley & Everything That’s Underneath by Kristi DeMeester
Many of the reviewers associated with the Skiffy and Fanty team have a contribution specialty. I’ve always avoided this because I don’t like the limitations; I read/review outside of these genres even. But if I were to have a niche, it would probably be short fiction. I adore the variety it affords and the low […]
Horror review: Penny Reeve on A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge
Although she’s been a name within the young adult horror/fantasy scene for a while now, Frances Hardinge was recently projected into the mainstream public gaze when her novel The Lie Tree won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Prize. After such a bar was set with her last novel, Hardinge’s fans waited with bated […]
Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (reviewed by Penny Reeve)
Carmen Maria Machado’s writing has — very rightly so — been receiving a lot of attention recently. Readers have been champing at the bit for more of Machado’s work since she set the literary world alight in 2014 with the incredible short “The Husband Stitch” and now we’re rewarded with a collection of her short stories with Her […]
