Courtesy notice to readers: Anbara Salam’s 2025 The Salvage is a haunted novel. Read with care. All playful warnings aside, I hope you’re into slow, creeping dread, because this book is absolutely dripping with it. Set in the early 1960s, on the isolated, insular Scottish island of Cairnroch, The Salvage immediately plunges readers into the icy, freezing waters ofRead More
The Horror of Empire, Tempered with Hope: Countess by Suzan Palumbo Review
Begin your year with revolution! Or at least that’s what I thought when I picked up Suzan Palumbo’s Countess. The novella invokes the anti-colonialist spirit so desperately needed in 2026, and it opens with an inscription that acknowledges the crater of its impact: There is horror here, but there is also always hope. We meet our protagonist,Read 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 Indefinable, Creeping Dread of Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling
Caitlin Starling’s Yellow Jessamine is the novella to reach for on a dreary day. It was gray and rainy in late October when I read it, so the setting was perfect. Starling’s novella is a thoroughly gothic horror with light sapphic undertones, so if the yearning™ isn’t your thing, this may not be the title for you. Read More
An Utterly Strange and Utterly Beautiful Murder Ballad Retold: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar’s highly anticipated solo debut novella, was released in March 2025. Like a ravening beast, I fell upon my preorder package and tore through the novella in a single sitting. It’s 100 pages exactly, from the very first beautiful linocut print to the last, so it isn’t a Commitment. I’llRead More
Ann Rose Shares the Perfect Fall Pairing for A Hexcellent Chance to Fall in Love
A Hexcellent Chance to Fall in Love is a cozy romance from Ann Rose that perfectly sets the mood for fall. The protagonist, Pepper, has a cursed contract managing The Dead of Night, a Halloween store that appears every autumn. When it disappears (instantly, because magic), no one remembers Pepper exists. That’s mostly fine with her,Read More
Daphne Fama on the House of Monstrous Women and the Genius of Filipino Horror Lore
House of Monstrous Women is Daphne Fama’s stunning debut novel out August 12, where, “a young woman is drawn into a dangerous game after being invited to the mazelike home of her childhood friend, a rumored witch, in this gothic horror set in 1986 Philippines.” I found it as deeply unsettling as it was tender, andRead More
Annie Mare Talks Cosmic Love At The Multiverse Hair Salon and the Infinity of Queer Love
Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon is a gorgeous “multiverse novel about two women who fall in love despite living in worlds that are five months apart, as they try to find a timeline that doesn’t end in disaster” by Annie Mare (she/they). It’s every bit as messy and joyous as it sounds, and IRead More
Heart & Heist in Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto
The cover of Makana Yamamoto’s (they/she/he) Hammajang Luck boldly proclaims its niche as “Sci-fi Heist.” Yamamoto further delineates their novel as a “cyberpunk lesbian space heist,” so it’s safe to say that I was all the way intrigued. The first page yanked me in with the phrase, “Mother just grounded me for war crimes.” One unexpected snort-laughRead More
Cozy Meets Eldritch Horror in Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff
A force to be reckoned with, Tanya Huff has been writing books for nearly forty years. I grew up among her worlds, inhaling words and dreaming of places that would welcome me one day. I still have tattered copies of No Quarter (1996) and Summon the Keeper (1998) on my bookshelves. So, it’s not much of a surprise thatRead More