Reviews – Page 12 – Marked for Plot

Beyond Redemption – Addictive and Epic Grimdark

Historically, Grimdark hasn’t really been my speed. Plenty of books I’ve enjoyed, but the hopelessness and gore kept me from picking up the sequels. Beyond Redemption has convinced me that, as with my Horror journey – I might not dislike Grimdark as much as I thought. Certainly it’s reminded me that I need to read more by Fletcher, because I adored The Storm Beneath the World. Beyond Redemption is quick moving, intense, and dark without going too far. The mix won’t be right for everyone, but it worked for me.

The Premise:
Belief defines reality, which makes the delusional very dangerous indeed. This book follows two main groups within this world: a theocratic ruler with manipulation powers trying to build himself a god, and a trio of criminals who (eventually) get it into their head to kidnap the little boy being groomed to become god. You’ve got gruff veteran soldiers with more scarred skin than smooth, a man turning himself into the greatest swordsman in the world, scientists who try to bring about delusionists with torture, doppelganger trying to take the place of their creator, and a pyromaniac who can light a city ablaze with a thought.

Read If You: like an innovative premise executed to its fullest potential, don’t mind a little backstabbing or cannibalism, enjoy dry humor that doesn’t overdo itself

Avoid If You: want heroics, characters who have their shit together, positive representation of … pretty much anything.

Comparable Media: The Storm Beneath the World, First Law, Angels Before Man

Unexpected Stories – Octavia Butler’s Posthumous Publication

Octavia Butler is, rightfully, a legend and institution in the speculative fiction world. I’ve taught her books in high school classes, enjoyed them on my own, and have found that she is one of the best writers at engaging in the uncomfortable messiness of the human experience. Unexpected Stories is a novella and a short story published posthumously. Both stories are part of the Patternist series, but stand on their own without context – I haven’t read the main series yet. It’s worth noting that Butler wanted both stories published while she was alive – one story was sold to be published in an anthology which fell through, and the other never got picked up by a publisher despite Butler shopping it around – so neither story is being published against Butler’s wishes.

At 81 pages, it was easy to devote time to these two stories from one of the genre’s masters. I enjoyed the first and felt rather unimpressed with the second, making this far and away my least favorite of Butler’s writing. That this volume is still worth recommending is an indication of just how much of a gift Butler has been to Speculative Fiction.

Read If: you like reading Butler’s work, are interested in exploring alien social dynamics, enjoy short stories with themes of justice and power

Avoid If: you’re looking for Butler’s deeper explorations of ethics and morality, look for friction between narrative and protagonist

The Cloak and It’s Wizard

After reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, I knew that I wanted something a bit less intense and heavy for my next read. The Cloak and its Wizard seemed just zany enough to satisfy. This met my needs for a fun and mindless breather book, though I found that I was ready for the story to wrap up about 100 pages before the book itself did. Ultimately, if the idea of a snarky magic item telling the story appeals to you, this is likely at least worth a look.

The Premise
The Cloak of Sunset and Starlight hasn’t attached itself to a wizard for a full century. When an unusual initiate joins the Order of the Open Eye, however, he can’t resist. Veronica is a surgeon, and the only reason she’s a wizard at all is because she was immune to the mind-altering magic that the Order used to try and remove her memories of her brother’s death at the hands of a monster. The cloak and its new wizard quickly get on the wrong side of The Order, but things are also looking especially grim with an unusually large number of interplanar beings invading Earth.

Read if: you enjoy harmless chaos, you want something lighthearted and pulpy, like adults with functional lives outside of The Plot

Avoid if: you’re looking for something deep and meaningful, you’ll get annoyed with the phrase ‘my wizard’, you like twists to help move the story forward

Comparable Media: Dr. Strange, Striker V, Dad Magic

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

As I continue exploring whether or not horror is the genre for me, Stephen Graham Jones has flitted in and out of my orbit. I had mixed feelings about Mapping the Interior, but Buffalo Hunter Hunter not only had glowing reviews, but also has one of my favorite covers of all time. There’s a lot to love here, but I found myself wishing it were a lot shorter than its actual length. Mixed feelings overall, but Stephen Graham Jones is definitely an author I want to read more of, because the parts of this book that worked really worked.

The Premise:
This is a story within a story within a story. A PHD student studies the journal of her great, great, great grandfather, hoping to convert its contents into a tenure track position (note: this gets the least screentime). Said man is a Lutheran priest in Montana in the 1900s who is visited by a mysterious Blackfoot stranger. This man tells his own life story over the course of several conversations. He is something akin to a vampire, telling the story of how he got his powers and how he began to use them. The tone shifts into something more and more sinister as the tale continues.

Read if: you like epistolary horror and framing narratives, enjoy framing narratives and/or epistolary formats, don’t care if the dog dies

Avoid if: you prefer books that get to the point right away, want traditional vampire representation, have an aversion to graphic depictions of violence – including historical events

Comparable Works: The Route of Ice and Salt, The Black Hunger, The Woods all Black

The Paper Menagerie and other Stories

One of my 12 Must Read Books of the year, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is the type of collection that gets spoken alongside Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang. I think this is a classic example of when I need to divorce my own reading experience from the hype a title collects as it gets recommended and re-recommended. Ultimately, this was a good collection (especially in the midpoint and back half). However, it didn’t match the pedestal I had placed the book on. In fact, I don’t think it would hit my top 5 anthologies of all time, and I haven’t read that many. I think I was expecting a bit more magic, a bit less of a history lesson. And while history lessons aren’t bad, Liu’s approach in some of these stories felt less like storytelling and more like lecturing. It didn’t help that some of the weaker stories (in my mind) were placed up front, and that Liu is perhaps too fond of parallel narratives as a framing device for his shorter work. Not a bad technique, but tiring and predictable when they come in a constant stream.

The collection was at its most successful when it explored ambiguity, moral nihilism, and the complexity of family relationships. All of my favorites explored various familial ties (an estranged father and daughter, a woman navigating the grief of her dead daughter, a son’s reflection on how he treated his mother, etc. There’s some emotional gut punches, interesting thought experiments, and moments of wonder here. Had I entered the collection with no prior knowledge, I think I’d have enjoyed it more.

Below are my short thoughts on each story. However, my highlights were Simulacrum, The Regulator, The Paper Menagerie, and The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

An Inheritance of Magic – Featherweight and Enjoyable Urban Fantasy

An Inheritance of Magic has been buzzing around my circles as one of the better Urban Fantasy series to come out in the past few years. This isn’t a subgenre I spend a ton of time with, but I’ve found that widely loved series tend to be reliably enjoyable for me (other than Dresden Files), and An Inheritance of Magic certainly lived up to that premise. It’s not perfect, clearly wants to prepare you for a long series, and seems to be a solid and readable ‘zero to hero’ story.

The Premise:
Stephen is an aspiring mage who wants nothing more than to make enough to pay rent and to start hunting down his father who vanished mysteriously a few years ago. When a strange woman claiming to be a distant relative of the mom who walked out on Stephen when he was a baby, his life is set to change. The assholes of that family see him as nothing more than a pawn, and the cost of growing in magic is exorbitant. Still, it gives Stephen the clues he needs to finally start making progress in his own craft and the connections needed to begin looking for his father. Before any of that though, he needs to make sure that the capitalist chokehold the rich have on magic doesn’t crush his dreams before they can even begin.

Read if: you enjoy reading about plucky underdogs making it work, are in favor of Orca whales crashing billionaire Yachts off the coast of Spain, are looking for something tropey and simple

Avoid if: comedically evil villains put you off, you dislike explanations of magic, religious logic problems put you off

Comparable Media: Tarot Sequence, Arcane Ascension, Witch Hat Atelier

By Blood, By Salt – Slow and Nuanced Political Fantasy

I haven’t read a ton of the books in the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off competition. Some of the finalists I’ve liked(Wolf of Withervale) others I found supremely disappointing (By a Silver Thread), but the winners I’ve read have been universally good. By Blood, By Salt is the most recent winner. Its political and military pitch sounded very different from a lot of the self-published work I normally read, and there was enough in the blurb for me to grab a copy. The story feels surprisingly traditional and old-school, but Odom does a good job of layering fresh thematic elements on top of a tried-and-true framework. Imagine if Game of Thrones focused on a single storyline and was set in an Arabic-inspired society, and you’ve got a good portrait of By Blood, By Salt.

The Premise:
Azetla is a Jackal. His land and people are forbidden from carrying weapons, from holding positions of power, and from living free from violence. He serves as an unofficial commander in an archaic military unit free from much oversight. When a bastard prince decides to make a play for the throne, Azetla finds himself hunting a creature (demon, djinn, or devil he doesn’t know) in the southern deserts. But when they capture her, she has just as much of an agenda as he does, and Azetla’s first priority is to his people, not his country.

Read if: you appreciate minority cultural groups not being written as monoliths, scarily competent protagonists are up your alley, you want complex fantasy cultures influenced by West Asia

Avoid if: you like your books fast paced, want heavy supernatural elements, or are hunting for fight scenes, you want a breadth of female characters

Comparable Media: Game of Thrones, Traitor Baru Cormorant

Wynd – A Casual and Delightful Middle Grade Adventure

I picked up the first book in this series as I collected books for a class on Queer Comics and Cartoons. It didn’t end up making the cut as a whole-class read, but it quickly found its way into my classroom library and has become quite popular. While the series isn’t quite finished – final book is releasing this year! – I figured finishing book 4 was enough to write a review about the series more generally. It won’t tickle the fancy of anyone looking for serious or deeply thematic fare, but it’s fun and quick and a truly delightful kids book that I think many adults would enjoy as a casual read.

The Premise:
In a city where being touched by the unnatural wilds marks you for death, young Wynd hides his ears at all costs. However, Pipetown is simmering with tension, and few realize how close the continent is to open warfare. Wynd ends up fleeing with a reluctant prince, a cute gardener, and his adoptive sister, and his adventures put him in contact with several human factions, a bug-faerie culture in the midst of its own political revolution, and a very militaristic society of vampires.

Read if: you love classic fantasy tropes, comics with vibrant illustrations are your style, faeries-as-bugs sounds fun

Avoid if: simplistic morality will bug you, you dislike chosen ones & prophecies, fantasy racism isn’t a worldbuilding trope that works for you

Comparable Media: Fablehaven, Septimus Heap, Cece Rios, Amulet

The Memory of the Ogisi – A Haunting Conclusion to the Forever Desert

I’ve been chewing on the Forever Desert Trilogy since 2023. Books that are interested in the art of storytelling are candy for me, and this trilogy takes a different approach than most. I actually use the first book in the Speculative Fiction course I teach to high schoolers. This series benefits from gaps between each book in the series: the way Utomi plays with history in this trilogy works best when your memory of the past book is a little bit fuzzy. I liked the first two books in this series a lot, but this book is by far my favorite of the three. It’s pretty bleak, and probably not for everyone, but it really worked for me.

For reviews of the first two books in this series, see The Lies of the Ajungo and The Truth of the Aleke

The Premise
In this iteration of the Forever Desert, a minor historian departs from The City of a Thousand Stories in search of the famed Tomb of Osi. His journey brings him into contact with historians from other cities in search of other cities. What he finds causes him to rethink his society’s role in the world, and what he brings back sparks the change that will bring The Forever Desert into its next generation of oppression, control, and violence.

Read if: you’re looking for a blend of folkloric storytelling and epic fantasy, you’re interested in darkly thematic explorations of truth, power, and history

Avoid if: you dislike books that lack hope,you want worldbuilding to feel consistent and explainable

Comparable Titles: 1984, A Conspiracy of Truths, The Giver Quartet

January & February Comic Mini Reviews

It’s been a slow month of comic reading. While I had some fantastic reads in early January (see the mind bending Tongues and the emotive Shadow Life), an awful lot felt fine, but not meaningful enough for me to keep investing in comics as aggressively as I did at the end of 2025. I’ve got a bunch waiting on my bookshelf, and I can see exploring them more deeply once r/fantasy’s bingo challenge resets in April.