A year after her sister, Adeline, dies under mysterious circumstances, a ragtag group of teenage girls descend upon Roslyn Volk’s small Midwestern town and make her an offer that she can’t refuse in Alexis Henderson’s When I Was Death. The girls (Naomi, Skye, Riley, Iona, Chloe, and the enigmatic Shiloh, who catches Roslyn’s eye from theRead More
Drew Huff’s Landlocked in Foreign Skin Gets Under Your Skin
With only a few weeks left in the year, 2025 still managed to thrill me with a brilliantly strange and unexpected sapphic sci fi novella: Landlocked in Foreign Skin by Drew Huff. Thus, my novella kick continues. What can I say? Things have been hard lately and sometimes you just need a confection, oozing and tentacled asRead More
The Camp of “Bottoms” Meets the Drama of “The Bachelor”: Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen Review
Whatever you think you’re getting into with this one…think again. Patricia Wants to Cuddle is a queer comedy/horror novel told from multiple POVs, including contestants after the star of a dating show called The Catch, the producer of said dating show, the host of a remote bed & breakfast, and a series of blog posts. It starts withRead More
Old Gods, New Cities, and An Arsonist’s Lullaby: When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-Yi Lee
One of my favorite tropes in fantasy is magic linked to body horror. Especially more so when it is treated as a volatile resource, calling into question the price of chasing power. Naturally, I had a fantastic time with Wen-Yi Lee’s When They Burned the Butterfly (October 21, 2025): a bloody, fiery saga about the horror andRead More
An Inverse Handmaid’s Tale: Eleven Percent by Maren Uthaug Review
Eleven Percent has been marketed as an “inverse Handmaid’s Tale”—a world where women are in control and only 11% of men remain (kept under lock and key for reproduction and such). But while that pitch might catch your attention, what Maren Uthaug actually delivers is a much more unsettling and layered exploration of power, gender,Read More
An Open Wound of a Novel: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Review
This is a book I respect, and it’s one I struggled to get through. The subject matter is difficult—not only is it set in a near-future dystopia where prisoners fight each other to the death for a chance at freedom, but it also includes footnotes about the real-life atrocities of the prison-industrial complex. I canRead More
A Wicked Wonderland: Off With Their Heads by Zoe Hana Mikuta Review
It’s been five years since young witches and lovers Caro Rabbit and Iccadora Alice Sickle were both sentenced to Wonderland, the dark forest where monsters called Saints lurk, for a crime they didn’t commit. In the process of escaping, they break one another’s hearts. Now Icca will stop at nothing to exact her revenge onRead More
A Haunting Gothic About Family in (Climate) Crisis: Private Rites by Julia Armfield Review
As an avid reader of all of Julia Armfield’s fiction, I was eager to pick up her newest novel. From the author of Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), Private Rites (Fourth Estate, 2024) promised to be poignant, haunting, and literary. Set in a future world where environmental disaster has flooded much of the world with ceaseless rains, threeRead More
A Brutal Colonial Horror Story: To the Bone by Alena Bruzas
To the Bone is the story of Ellis, an indentured girl in the Jamestown settlement of the Virginia colony. Ellis aspires toward little more than goodness; born poor in the late 1500s, she can neither read nor count, but understands the world as preachers sketch its edges. She works hard as a servant to the semi-prominentRead More
Feral Eldritch Ballerinas: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea
Laure is a ballet dancer who has devoted herself entirely to her profession. She spends every waking moment honing her skill. And she is perfect. But as she soon learns, perfect is not enough. It doesn’t matter that she’s the best, because she’s fighting to rise up in an institution that sees her working classRead More
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