Dark – Marked for Plot

Novella Readathon #19: Cabaret in Flames

Last year one of my favorite reads was Pueyo’s debut novel But Not Too Bold, which was a delightfully gothic monster romance – with an emphasis on monster. Cabaret in Flames was one of my most anticipated releases of the year, and I’m mostly disappointed in it. As with some of my other three star novella reviews, I still think it’s worth a look for readers who are excited about the specific premise and tone of Cabaret in Flames, but not for a more general audience.

Elevator Pitch:
Ariadne is a doctor, and her patients are Guls, creatures with unnaturally long lives who can feed only on human flesh and blood. When a strang Gul comes looking for her 5-years vanished mentor, she is forced to confront her dark past that Erik saved her from. This Gul, Quaint, wants to find Erik and asks for Ariadne’s help as they travel to a Rio De Janerio club that serves Guls almost exclusively.

Read If Looking For: characters processing intense childhood sexual trauma, monster romance, stories unable to be separated from their setting (Brazil, in this case)

Avoid If You Dislike: why the fuck won’t you two just talk to each other!, uninspired prose

Novella Readathon #17: The Whisper that Replaced God

The Whisper that Replaced God has a reputation as one of the better Grimdark novellas out there. I don’t read a ton in this subgenre, but my enjoyment of Michael R. Fletcher’s novels has me exploring it a little more every year. Overall, I found this book very successful and will happily pick up the sequel. Your enjoyment of it is going to depend heavily on whether you enjoy the narrator, so it might be worth reading a page or two before committing to purchasing it.

The Premise:
Mute is the convenient assassin for his younger brother the King. Born with a gift from The God of Silence, Mute can suck all sound out of the room. His childhood of ostracization and violence have left him mentally unstable, passed over for the throne and obsessed with Dorothy, whom he visits in the brothel whenever possible. When he sees his uncle and Dorothy together, he kills the man in a fit of range, and both Mute and Dorothy are captured by foreign troops. He lives a life without meaning, and perhaps this new adventure will fill that void.

Read If Looking For: depraved and traumatized protagonists, fucked up noble families, the silent scream of a dying man

Avoid If Looking For: happy endings, characters with clear motivation and purpose, exemplars of good parenting

Novella Readathon #15: The Salt Grows Heavy

As I slowly grow into reading horror, I’ve had a complicated relationship with the more grotesque side of the genre. I thought I disliked it, and certainly I need to avert my eyes in any medical show I watch. Body horror authors like Andrew Joseph White capture that visceral repulsion that forces me to skip pages. I thought that The Salt Grows Heavy might be similarly challenging for me. This book features the plucking of eyeballs and the cradling of intestines in one’s hands, yet it was palatable even for me. Khaw married this body horror to a dark fairy tale atmosphere; the result so enchanting that I couldn’t look away.

The Premise:
The mermaid has given birth to her children, and they have feasted upon the land. The country which stole her from the water lays in ruins, a corpse to rot in the sun. Now she travels with the plague doctor, seeking a new country and a new home. They come upon a commune of children and their saints, the strange trio who pursue surgical immortality. The mermaid and the plague doctor’s shifting relationship is confronted by the plague doctor’s past, and the mermaid must decide what is important to her, versus what is simply meat to be consumed.

Read If Looking For: bespoke body horror, the tentative love of monsters, uncommon word choices, inhabiting the mind of a creature of the deeps

Avoid If Looking For: windowpane prose, genre romance, Disney mermaids, fast pacing

Japanese Gothic – Time Travel Behind the Sword Ferns

I knew very quickly that this was a new release I wanted to carve out time for. As much as I don’t love derivative naming conventions, I loved Mexican Gothic and had high hopes for Japanese Gothic. Ironically, they are very different types of Gothic fiction, and I don’t think this book references the style of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s at all. Considering this one is getting a good amount of buzz, I think you can expect to see more [Country] Gothic titles in the future. It’s a shame, because I think Japanese Gothic stands on its own two feet as a really delightful horror story, even if not every element worked for me.

The Premise:
Lee is a college student who fled to Japan after murdering his roommate. His father lives in an old Samurai house with a rotating cast of short-term Japanese girlfriends. Meanwhile, Sen is the son of a disgraced Samurai in the late 1800s, and she desperately wants to live the path of the warrior and live up to her father’s hopes. The world has moved past Samurai, however, and she knows her father’s living breath is a testament to his cowardice, which he takes out on Sen. These two protagonists discover that they can communicate through time. Lee hopes that Sen – obviously a ghost – can give him insight into how he can find the mother who was kidnapped when he was a child. Sen hopes to find details of her family’s fate, for she would do anything to protect them.

Read If You Like: paranormal time travel, historical settings, turtle myths, a creeping sense of unmooring from reality, psychological horror

Avoid If You Dislike: abusive families, unreliable narrators, dead animals, descriptions that feel claustrophobic

Karmen – Deadly Bad Decisions

After loving my time with The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, I decided to chase down some comics that people have shared are comparable. I can see why Karmen was mentioned: it asks a character to confront death as they grow and change. Despite being published in 2020, the book felt dated. It’s an enjoyable enough read if you don’t think about things at all. Plus, its a short and quick read. However, it definitely irked me in ways that modern media rarely does. This story triggered thematic red flag after thematic red flag despite being a great book to read on a long car ride.

The Premise
This comic follows Cata, who commits suicide after learning that her longtime best friend (since elementary school) Xisco is cheating on his girlfriend with Cata’s roommate. Turns out Cata’s been in love with him the whole time and this was the last straw. At this point, she turns into a ghost and meets Karmen, an immortal responsible for helping souls pass from one life to the next, determined by how they have cultivated their virtues in their life. Cata is destined to reincarnate as a lower life form. Karmen asks Cata to confront various parts of her personality, eavesdrop on others to learn lessons from them, all in an effort to help Cata’s soul improve in her next incarnation.

Read If You Like: meddling immortals, confronting your character flaws, cat ladies, emotional conclusions

Avoid If You Dislike: men and women unable to have a close platonic relationship, lots of female nudity (all non-sexual, but it’s nonstop), committing suicide because a man didn’t love you

Comparable Media: The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, It’s a Wonderful Life

The God Eaters – Soul Crushingly Good

Sometimes, a book hits you like a ton of bricks. They help you redefine your taste, shift the types of stories you pick moving forward, and relentlessly find their way into your recommendations to other readers. Over time, I’ve noticed that my version of these books tend to have rigorous character development, a strong narrative voice, and something to say that goes beyond ‘kill the villain’. The God Eaters is one of those books. Like most of the stories that rip my heart out of my chest, I don’t think it will be for everyone: This novel has too much romance for the typical Fantasy fan, and it trades the tropey goodness Romance enthusiasts crave for a more serious examination of trauma, colonialism, and survival, and most Western fans don’t want to read about two dudes kissing. For me, those elements add up to lightning in a bottle.

Will it be my book of the year? I hope not, only because I would love to read other books that hypnotize me like this one does. It’s definitely a frontrunner though

The Premise:
In a religious theocracy, a pair of remarkable men end up as cellmates in a prison for the magically talented. Kieran is a bandit fighting back against the country who killed his people, forced him into sexual slavery, and addicted him to opium. Ash and his Aunt published rebellious propaganda. The bandit can kill those he hates with a thought, and the writer has a minor empathic gift he uses to avoid trouble. Their journey involves ancient gods, prison breaks, treks across vast deserts, and a lot of agonizingly slow negotiation of their feelings towards each other. They mostly just want to live their lives free from the shadow of religious tyranny. However, the White Watch is relentless and the god who rules them even more so.

Read If You Like: Fantasy Westerns, introspection, anti-colonialist Fantasy from decades ago, awe-inspiring storms, thematically rigorous Romance

Avoid If You Dislike: yearning and pining, underexplained magic, tonal shifts in the third act, ‘he could never like me’

Comparable Media: Heart of Stone, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, The Fall of Kings

Kyn – An Action Packed Cyberpunk Adventure

Cyberpunk is an interesting genre to me. It’s this weird mashup of insane ideas, tightly focused critiques of our world, and intense action scenes. My experiences with it are mostly with television and TTRPGs, and the books I’ve read have been a bit more theme heavy. Kyn swings hard in the opposite direction, and I had a ton of fun with it as a book that didn’t require too much dedicated focus as I crawl to the end of a school year.

The Premise
Kyn is an Envoy. He is a killer who serves at the whims of the Sentry, who rule the city from their towers and media conglomerates. He is one of the few who survived the ordeals children are forced through, which has graced him with the ability to heal from any wound. Kyn’s handlers begin to reign in his rebellious behavior as he tries to maintain a relationship with his hacker boyfriend (whom he’s pretty sure works for a freelance information broker), and terrorist attacks threaten the Sentry’s reign. Kyn is on a short leash, and he’ll kill for his owners. You can bet that he’ll take his pound of flesh from them at any opportunity, however.

Read If Looking For: extended combat sequences, capitalism at its worst, vibrant and bleak worldbuilding

Avoid If Looking For: tight editing and proofreading, deep character arcs, books likely to get a sequel written

Comparable Media: Assassins Creed, The Effaced, Ajin

A Parade of Horribles – Dungeon Crawler Carl #8

Like so many people, I am an ardent Dungeon Crawler Carl fan. I hopped on the bandwagon just as it was taking off, and I’ve been overjoyed that it has prompted publishers to take a hard look at supporting more self-published authors. This is Book 8 in the series, which means you should probably skip this if you’re trying to figure out if the series is good for you (a shortish review of book 1 can be found here).

The Premise:
This book follows Carl and Donut as they traverse the 10th and 11th floors – though floor 10 takes up most of the page count. Floor 10 is styled as races, where crawlers must make a variety of unwieldy vehicles and mounts function in increasingly zany environments. As it becomes clear this floor is designed to pit crawlers against each other, the team hunts for various ways to help their fellow humans escape the dungeon through increasingly esoteric loopholes. Meanwhile, the Dungeon AI is growing in power, threatening the very universe itself.

Read If Looking For: More Dungeon Crawler Carl, increasingly unstable Artificial Intelligence, crawlers getting whittled down to near nothing

Avoid If Looking For: new achievements, leaderboard updates, lootbox openings

Comparable Media: Mad Max, Fast and Furious

The Red Winter -A Bloody Debut

Are werewolves going to be a theme of 2026 for me? This is the second book in as many months that did some really interesting things with werewolves in historical France (read this for more straightforward and readable style, or try The Wolf and His King for a more bespoke experience). My partner and I are watching the Twilight films for some fun date night mockery. I really want to read The Devourers by Indra Das soon. Werewolves just seem to be everywhere in my life right now.

If you’re interested in a werewolf story that focuses on hunting one down and killing it, this is your jam. No werewolves were kissed in the reading of this book, and they spend most of their time ripping the hearts out of any living thing they can find. I actually think that a good comparison point for this story is The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, but darker and geared towards adults. The Red Winter is one of the most competently-written debut novels I’ve picked up recently, and I’m excited to read more by Sullivan in the future.

The Premise:
Sebastian was granted immortality when he bonded with Sarmondel, his demonic Guest. This book him reminiscing about his time in France in the 1700s. One storyline follows him joining a large hunt for a monstrous beast ravaging the countryside, falling in love with the young lord Antoine along the way. Another is set 20 years later as he is summoned by Antoine’s son to kill the beast that returned to ravage the countryside. The final storyline is told by Livia, Sebastian’s succubus slave, as she investigates the supernatural oddity that is Joan of Arc. At the center of all three storylines is the Warfather, Ares, Mars, whom Sebastian’s Guest hopes to feast upon.

Read If Looking For: brisk narration, a trail of bloody bodies, snarky footnotes, religious zealotry

Avoid If Looking For: deep characterization, romantasy, impactful female characters

Comparable Media: The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obafulon, These Burning Stars

The Spear Cuts Through Water – Epic Fantasy told Three Ways

Words are not enough to describe how nervous I was to suggest my in-person book club read The Spear Cuts Through Water. Was it everything I remembered, or are my memories clouded by the pink haze of nostalgia? Would my friends like it as much as I did? Was the brutality and violence of the book excessive? Would I still think about this as my favorite book of all time? That’s a lot of pressure to put on a book, and expectations are the mother of all disappointment.

Thankfully, it absolutely stood up to the book of my memories. I think I liked it more this time around, and I certainly noticed things that I had missed in my first readthrough. The jury is still out on whether or not my friends will love it like I do. My only regrets are starting this book a little too close to our book club meeting – it’s tomorrow! – which coincided with a bout of brain frog that left Jimenez’s gorgeous pose a bit more difficult than I was equipped to handle after a long day of work. However, I consider it the best book I’ve ever read, and it represents the direction that I wish epic fantasy would start to explore.

The Premise:
In the inverted theater, the child of Moon and Water performs for you a story of your people’s history. You’d heard this story before. It is the one your Lola told you and that you told your brothers in turn. It follows Keema and Jun, one an outcast with one arm and the other a monster of a man searching for a path towards redemption. They escort the Moon in her desperate bid to escape the empire freeing her from 8 generations of servitude and the people from 8 generations of tyranny. This is a tender story of the journey of two boys, a chronicle of the death of an empire, an exploration of guilt and shame and violence, and it is a story about how our past ripples into our future.

Read If Looking For: a simple story transformed by its format, an ode to the oral history of Fantasy, standalone epic fantasy, a very wise tortoise

Avoid If Looking For: straightforward storytelling, books free from graphic violence or sexual assault, rapid pacing

Comparable Media: Spear (by Nicola Griffith), Hyperion, Princess Mononoke