Sometimes the only way to become yourself is to go through the door everyone else warned you about. Lucena in the House of Madgrin is gothic fantasy with teeth—and yet, it’s unexpectedly tender, funny in sharp little flashes, and anchored by a heroine you’ll root for with your whole chest. It reads like an old, […]
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The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer
There’s a particular kind of horror that lives in the gap between a small task and its enormous consequences. Vacuum the rug, or the house will bite you. Answer the phone, or humanity ends at sunrise. Marcus Kliewer, one of the more interesting voices working in internet-grown horror today, turns that gap into the central […]
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Momentum by Emily Brown
A searing recollection of one woman’s coming of age and her search for the reasons why after growing up among the jagged shards of a broken family With a controlled writing style and measured pacing, Emily Brown’s Momentum is a devastating story of a childhood unmoored and an adulthood spent seeking a sense of attachment. […]
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Duck It by C.O.B
Content warnings: frequent strong language, implied/depicted suicide; deceased children; references to sex A grimly funny apocalypse travelogue with real heart under the grime C.O.B.’s Duck It! is a profane, funny, and surprisingly tender post-apocalyptic road journal that treats the end of the world less like a bang and more like a whimper. Set in 2035 […]
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Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez
Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez on April 6, 2021 Genres: Fiction / Romance / Contemporary Pages: 284 Format: Paperback Buy on Amazon Goodreads When Vanessa Price quit her job to pursue her dream of traveling the globe, she wasn’t expecting to gain millions of YouTube followers who shared her joy of seizing every moment. […]
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Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth
A cackle-out-loud mystery wrapped around a love letter to female friendship, with the richest narrative voice Sally Hepworth has written yet. The book earns its laughs, earns its tears, and mostly earns its twist. Mystery purists may grumble that the whodunnit mechanics take a back seat to the character work; readers who come for heart […]
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Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac
Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac is a novella, first published in 1830 in the Revue de Paris. It is part of his La Comédie humaine. This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac I was buried […]
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Lion’s Den by Neil Citrin
What would it look like to have a superhero, fully human, walk amongst us?To get the answer, you’ll have to search the Lion’s Den. Johnny Slater’s life is anything but typical. His father, Daniel Slater, runs a martial arts studio by day, but he is a prolific political activist by night. His older brother, Benny, […]
Witty dialog and broad satire make for some humorous courtroom drama. Legal fiction often leans toward high stakes and moral seriousness. Courtrooms become places where reputations collapse, fortunes disappear, and the law itself carries the weight of consequence. Comedy appears less often in the genre, though the legal profession—with its rituals, technicalities, and endless arguments […]
In the early hours of November 29, 2019, a surveillance camera mounted on the headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service captured a slender figure pacing the balcony of a lit flat across the Thames. The young man paused at one corner, crossed to the other, returned to the middle, and jumped. What followed, and what […]