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 commitment to discover new authors. It’s easier to convince myself to step away from work for a moment to read a short story, compared to equal time reading a portion of longer works that may not have obvious stopping points. Most importantly, some of the most exciting writing I’ve seen comes from the short form.
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 breath for her newest, A Skinful of Shadows. Luckily it is an intricate and masterfully told coming-of-age tale, full of intrigue and more than a little creepy, which lives up to expectations. Plus, it was nominated for the Waterstones Book of the Year Award 2017. Take that, Costa. A Skinful of Shadows is a dark fantasy novel, set during the English Civil War. We meet our protagonist, Makepeace, as a young girl who lives in the attic of her Puritan uncle’s house, along with her mother. She is haunted by very realistic dreams of ghosts and other terrifying things, and to help her deal with her strange affliction, her mother often forces her to stay in a church overnight to deal with the demons in her head.
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 Body and Other Parties, which I’m already slating as one of my top reads of 2017. Machado has some serious literary strings to her bow, having written for NPR, Electric Literature, VICE and the New Yorker. Her short stories have appeared numerous anthologies including Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and Best Woman’s Erotica. The new collection, featuring the aforementioned “The Husband Stitch” — which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and Nebula awards, as well as being longlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. and winning a Pushcart Prize special mention — has received praise from just about everyone, including author du jour Roxane Gay, LA Times and Kirkus, which shortlisted Her Body and Other Parties for their annual titular prize, despite it only being published October 3.
Book Review: A Passport to a Nation of Talking Slugs by Andrew Kozma
In all honesty, this should really be called a booklet review, or, to be fancier, a chapbook review, because this is a slight little thing that a person could easily read all the way through while waiting in line at the DMV, still having time to start on another short story collection or anthology before her number was called. Which is to say that A Passport to a Nation of Talking Slugs could actually fit into a passport, as its amusingly apt cover might suggest. But though it be little, it is fierce, is this collection of Kafka-meets-Ionesco-as-Introduced-by-Borges bits. With just four wee stories, Kozma manages to sneak a few emotional wallops among what seems like whimsy, and, to readers like me who have been trained on Gene Wolfe for so long, he’s managed to suggest a degree of intertwined meaning that he might not have intended but feels like it’s there.
