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Book Review: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

Cover of P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, featuring a dark-skinned woman wearing dreadlocks, a gold cat mask and black leather gloves, holding a pair of swords crossed across her chest.

In all, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a lean and mean novella that goes down like liquid fire and leaps through the reader’s mind like dancing across rooftops in Tal Abisi.

Book Review: HOLLOW TONGUE by Eden Royce

Cover of Hollow Tongue by Eden Royce, featuring bout two dozen butterflies lined up in rows on a board or paper.

… Known for her Southern Gothic horror writing, Royce writes with the same genre vibes in Hollow Tongue, but approaches the field in unexpected ways that emphasize the psychological horror of trauma and symbolism…

Book Review: THE TUSKS OF EXTINCTION by Ray Nayler

Cover of The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler, featuring the skull and huge, curving tusks of an elephant, mammoth or mastodon.

It touches on big issues, features biological speculation that is near and dear to me, but it does all this without skimping on character-driven aspects and precise language that evokes empathy and reflection.

Book Review: 12 HOURS by L. Marie Wood

Cover, 12 Hours by L. Marie Wood. Illustration by Lynne Hansen features a cab parked in an alley, with some people approaching with lights.

The reader of L. Marie Wood’s short novella 12 Hours will realize what has happened to this cabbie long before he grasps the truth about himself. And that’s an integral part of the construction of the novella, of how Wood is directing the reader’s emotions and connection to her protagonist through his psychological horror.

Book Review: BLEAK HOUSES by Kate Maruyama

Cover of Bleak Houses by Kate Maruyama (Safer & Family Solstice)

Bleak Houses, by Kate Maruyama, represents the debut of this line, consisting of two novella-length stories: Safer and Family Solstice. The small independent press Omnium Gatherum previously published Family Solstice in 2021, when Rue Morgue Magazine named it Best Fiction Book of the year. The release of Bleak Houses by RDSP thus represents an opportunity for new readers to discover that story while also being treated to another previously unpublished story born from the horrors of pandemic isolation.

Book Review: Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

Cover of Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

In Green Fuse Burning, Morris takes Dylan Thomas’ theme of the intertwined nature of life and death in an endless cycle of time and applies it through a spectrum of ecosystems from the grandiose to the individual to explore the psychology of grief and guilt both personal and collective.