Marked for Plot

The Absolute Martian Manhunter – Are Psychedelic Visuals Enough?

I’m … well I’m not sure. This comic was pretty widely regarded as one of the best releases in 2025, won a bundle of Eisner awards (mostly for the art of Javier Rodriguez, but it also won Best Limited Series). It felt right that this was my first foray into DC’s new Absolute line. It’s well worth the read for the page count, but I’ll need to finish the series to see if it can stick the landing. What I saw here wasn’t quite enough to cement it into my favorites list.

The Premise:
FBI Agent John Jones has been seeing things, reading minds, and all sorts of other strange phenomenon. As his personal life begins to fall apart, his work is consumed by more and more bizarre crimes. Middletown is beset by synchronized arson, widespread impulsive violence, and people lacing hamburgers with glass. At its heart is the White Martian, who seeks to bring an end to earth. And John hosts the Green Martian, who seeks to protect it.

Read if You Like: experimental art, metaphorical warfare, eldritch investigations, light horror elements

Avoid if You Dislike: cohesive plots, unhealthy marriages, emotionally detached characters

Super Supportive – The SLOWEST of burns …

… and not in a romantic way, either. It’s just slowwwwww and an absolute fucking delight. This is one of the more popular Royal Road stories out there, and it has kept me grounded during the past two months of craziness! This is what I’m staying up at night reading. I dove back in as a distraction, rereading from the beginning, only to decide I was going to keep going … and going … and going. Now that I am caught up with this serial, here’s my sales pitch.

The Premise:
Alien wizards have made a contract with Earth: we give you superpowers in exchange for being able to summon (and generously pay) said superhumans for various services, including hunting demons, cooking a formal meal, or dressing up as a mythological figure and serving cocktails. Anyways, Alden thorn is a kid whose parents were killed by a supervillain. So when he’s chosen, he wants to be a support hero focused on preventing collateral damage.

Read if You Like: slow burns, intense platonic friendships, lovable characters, explorations of mental health, light Video Game elements

Avoid if You Dislike: a single day to span several dozen chapters, tonal shifts between intense existential dread and lighthearted action slice-of-life

Books that Bring me Happy Memories

I debated a long time about whether or not I wanted this post to just be about books I read as a kid and have fond memories of. I ended up deciding no, but it’s certainly going to weight more heavily on this list than my kids-lit picks normally do. I still find a great amount of joy in reading, but I think I am able to more concretely link books to parts of my life as a kid, wheras now reading has taken on a life of its own.

The Halls of the Dead – The Dirty Side of Necromancy

It’s no secret to those who’ve been in my orbit for a while that How to Survive this Fairytale is one of my absolute favorite books. So, when Hallow dropped her next book, I knew I was going to have to pick it up. Halls of the Dead is a very different reading experience, and I didn’t jive with it quite as much. However, the through-lines between these two books (relentlessly queer, unconventional takes on common tropes, and unusual structural choices) is something I’m very interested in, so Hallow remains on my list of authors whose release schedule I will be avidly following.

The Premise:
Irene is the first necromancer to perform a resurrection since Jesus himself. She brought back her love, Agnes, with the help of her husband John. John is himself ancient, sworn to keep the necromantic arts alive despite not practicing them himself. This story weaves these three characters’ past and present, tangling them together in a desperate knot as they try to secure a future for the necromantic arts. It’s a horror/fantasy hybrid about gore, necromancy, and revenge.

Read if You Like: magic that doesn’t shy away from grime, literal beetles inside your stomach, character-focused stories, getting lost in the language

Avoid if You Dislike: another book in Victorian London, bugs, stories that de-prioritize plot, frequent flashbacks

Fabulous Bodies – A Riot and a Gorefest

My only previous experiences with Chuck Tingle have been his Comedic Erotica, most notably My Macaroni and Cheese is a Lesbian Also She is My Lawyer. I left having had fun, but not seriously considering Tingle as a novelist despite knowing he’s unrelentingly queer, was an icon during the Hugo debacle that was Rabid Puppies, and generally seems like an all-around good guy. Turns out, his Horror was delightful and I want to read more by him. Fabulous Bodies isn’t going to hit my favorite books of 2026, but it’s certainly in the top half of the 200-odd stories I’ve tackled this year. A very fun way for me to start America’s obligatory spooky season.

The Premise:
By day, Poppy is a dedicated mom and queer fashion influencer. By night she steals dead bodies for the black market. When her biggest job (a famous musician’s corpse) reanimates and is on his own macabre mission, Poppy suspects something is very wrong. She has no idea how much she’s underestimating the situation, and it’s about to get very bloody.

Read if You Like: assertive and competent protagonists, realistic portraits of a girlboss, high-energy horror

Avoid if You Dislike: characters who aren’t parenting paragons, horror without deep social commentary, body horror (see below)

Body Horror Content

graphic and plentiful once you hit the midpoint. Most notably, violent self-harm (mind-controlled), stabbing of eyeballs, stripping skin, cannibalism

September Reading Wrap Up

This might have been one of the hardest starts to the school year I’ve ever had. Lots of factors contributed to this, including me completely disconnecting from teaching over the summer. This allowed for a lot of self-care, reading, and ensuring I have a life and identity outside of teaching. However, it did make diving back into the deep end a very abrupt transition. My stress levels are much lower now than at the start of the month, but it meant for a lot of more mindless reading, which is normally something that kicks in nearer to Christmas time.

I also got stuck in the Chicago Airport for an entire day because Trump decided to go golfing in Chicago and used the public airport. Missed my connecting flight and I have never seen a more packed airport than that. I am writing this post having only gotten a few hours of sleep, and hoping that October brings a bit more calm my way.

Longform Reviews

10 of My Favorite Books about FALLing in Love

I tend to focus more on the speculative fiction side of my reading on this blog, but I’m also an avid Romance reader! I decided to be a little cheeky today and go for a pun instead of something properly Autumn themed. I decided that I’d like to share some of my favorite genre-romances. It was surprisingly tough to narrow down my list, and I erred on excluding a few of my favorites that felt too close to some of the others here. For those new to my blog, the vast majority of these are going to be gay (all except the first, in fact). I do read Romance outside m/m, but it’s a lot fewer and tend to have less of an impact on me.

I have excluded hybrid stories that also focus on other A-Plots in addition to Romance, such as Captive Prince (Military Fantasy), The Darkness Outside Us (Existential Thriller), or How To Survive this Fairytale (The Messy Process of Healing from Trauma). Also, happy endings are guaranteed! Most of these I don’t have longform reviews for, but the covers will take you to their goodreads pages!

Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons)

I’ve been finding it more difficult to focus on audiobooks recently. Lots of stress at work means music is generally the better choice. After a come-to-Jesus moment with spacing out for an entire novella (my sincerest apologies to Bujold; I’ll return to you in print format) I thought I needed to disconnect from audiobooks totally until things calmed down. Turns out I just needed a cozy little fantasy story about a middle-aged woman inheriting a dragon egg.

The Premise:
Miss Mildred Percy doesn’t love her life. She lives with her sister far longer than she ever planned to, doesn’t particularly like her sister, and has disconnected entirely from her adventurous youth. When she inherits a trunk of oddities from her great-uncle, it turns out that a dragon was in her future, as was a vicar whom may or may not be the type of man she could envision her life with.

Read if You Like: cozy fantasy that isn’t overly twee, incompetent villains, finally standing up for yourself

Avoid if You Dislike: small stakes, petty family drama, larger characters getting the spotlight

My Fall Reading List

As we’re staring down the last three months of the year, I already know that I want to prioritize catching up on sequels. That was a fairly recent topic for a Tuesday Top 10 post though, so instead I’m going to focus on new-to-me reads that I’d like to read before we ring in 2027. Typically the winter months see me moving more into comics and romances, but I don’t want to get totally disconnected from reading queer speculative fiction either.

I will happily say that I have read (or attempted to read, in the case of An Accident of Dragons) every book I promised to read in 2026, so I don’t need to worry about anything on that front. However, will I be cramming all of these plus the sequels I want to try to prioritize plus wherever my mood takes me? Probably not. Let’s consider this list an aspirational one, rather than the most realistic portrait of what you can expect to see me reviewing in the near However, if I keep saying that I can read every book, it’ll come true someday.

Automatic Noodle

There are only 2 novellas that I hadn’t yet read from the 2026 Hugo Nomination slate. I know I’m not interested in Vernon’s offering (though part of that might simply be exhaustion at her getting nominated every year), but had wanted to read Automatic Noodle before the awards were announced. In the end, this was a fairly disappointing slate of Novellas. My pick was Cinder House, which I authentically enjoyed. I was happy to see it on the shortlist, but am still not sure if I consider it Award-Winner material. Automatic Noodle, like the rest of the lot, has some areas I see as significant flaws. However, it’s not the style of book that I would have ever put forward as a nominee, so perhaps I’m judging it on criteria that don’t really fit. It’s great chill pick for someone looking for something quirky, knowing that it isn’t going to be an emotional rollercoaster.

The Premise:
Four robots wake up to find their company has absconded to the United States (California is its own country now), threatening their already dubious freedom. They decide to open a a hand-pulled noodle restaurant, despite robot corporate ownership being very illegal.

Read if You Like: allegories for otherness, weird futuristic worlds, stories with personal stakes

Avoid if You Dislike: robots that feel like humans, heavy-handed themes