Trippy – Marked for Plot

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr – Vignettes on Death

This book has been sitting on my desk as a potential whole-class read for high school level comics classes. It’s award-nominated and generally has a phenomenal reputation. At 128 pages, this story is absolutely worth a look if you’re in the mood for something contemplative with some light humor elements. It feels very much like an Autumn book, in that it asks readers to think about their own relationship with death, but it remains pretty accessible throughout. Plus, it’s popular enough that you can likely nab a copy from your local library!

Read If Looking For: a god experiencing mortality, episodic story structures, casual cigarettes, quiet storytelling with vibrant colors

Avoid If Looking For: the political machinations of gods, experimental art, novel and original endings

Comparable Media: Cloud Atlas, Sandman. I’ve also heard that it pairs delightfully with Daytripper and Karmen, both of which I’m intent on reading soon.

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).

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

Works of Vermin – When Bugs Go to the Opera

I have been dying to read this book for ages. Eldritch bugs + magic perfume + creepy operas = one hell of an idea for a book, and every review I’ve seen has said it lives up to its premise. I got lost wandering the streets of Hiron Ennes’ imagination. It is a decadent new entry in the New Weird genre, and it feels extremely apt for a world that sees the potential for the first human being to become a trillionaire. This book is a masterpiece, and I really wish I hadn’t read it near the end of the school year as my brain is struggling to remember which hallway the copy room is in.

Read If Looking For: violent revolutions, weird worldbuilding, the dangers of capitalism, so many operas, big ass bugs

Avoid If Looking For: windowpane prose, clear explanations of how things work, dramatic fight scenes

Comparable Media: Perdido Street Station, Ambergreis, The Divine Cities

Monkey Meat – An Anticapitalist Fever Dream

I knew nothing about Monkey Meat other than its title and cover art. I didn’t quite know what to make of a hand crushing a Spam-esque can with a monkey on the front, but I knew I was interested in reading more. Monkey Meat: the First Batch is a zany and dark anthology that I fell in love with. It’s not the most original critique of capitalism I’ve seen, but it’s certainly one of the most engaging. I truly believe that if companies could get God to sign over the rights to people’s souls, they would absolutely do so. My only regret is that it doesn’t seem likely to get a sequel, but I will certainly be chasing down more of Juni Ba’s work in the future.

Read If Looking For: unbridled creativity, unconventional art styles, episodic structures

Avoid If Looking For: consistent worldbuilding, subtlety and nuance, grounded characters

Comparable Media: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Invader Zim, Rick and Morty

Asunder – An Episodic Eldritch Fantasy

I think I’ve taken Asunder off my TBR about three times as I try to keep it at manageable levels. Invariably, I see a review that piques my interest enough for it to go back onto the pile. If I’m honest, the cover art put me off. It’s unfair, I know (don’t judge a book by its cover and all that), but Asunder’s cover is as beautiful as it is misleading. When I opened the pages, I assumed I’d be walking into a well-written romance with a teenage year old lead. Instead I walked through the dreams of dead gods as a 29 year old woman scrabbles to retain her personhood in the face of uncaring worlds. It will make you feel small and wonder and disgust and hopeless. If you’re willing to give it the space to breathe, it will take your breath away.

Read if: you like eldritch beings who bend reality to their will, episodic horror/fantasy hybrids, you want to feel the weight of selling your soul

Avoid if: you want a quick moving plot or dynamic action scenes, agreeable protagonists, straightforward romantasy

Comparable Media: The City of Stairs, Spirited Away, Wizard of the Pigeons

Lifelode – A Domestic Fantasy to Chew On

I am so happy that I read Lifelode. It isn’t a perfect book, but I love how it defies easy comparisons and pushed boundaries of fantasy in the 2000s structurally and thematically. It’s got delightfully weird worldbuilding and, if pressed, would use One Hundred Years of Solitude as the closest comparison I’ve read (though even that isn’t right). More selfishly, it’s also probably one of the best books I’ve read for a book club, simply because I think Lifelode makes so many bold choices that will spark interesting discussion. Certainly my views here on how Walton handled theme don’t seem to be universally shared amongst those who, like me, ended up reading far ahead for our midway discussion. Lifelode isn’t necessarily a dense book, but there’s a lot of interesting choices here which set a great foundation for discussion whether you loved or hated the directions the story took.

Read if Looking For: books without easy comparisons, celebration of traditionally feminine work, Gods as hiveminds, reimagined family structures

Avoid if you Dislike: pastoral settings, relationship drama, complex family trees, peas, petty characters

Children of Time

I meant to read this book ages ago, but my dad (who never reads) picked it up off my bookshelf while visiting and took it back to Kansas. I finally resigned myself to not getting it back and grabbed another from a used bookstore. I’ve only read one other book from Tchaikovsky, and this confirmed that I like his books a lot, but they’re probably only for when I’m in the mood for something on the more breezy/readable end of things.

Read if Looking For: so many spiders, batshit crazy worldbuilding, spaceship politics

Avoid if Looking For: inhuman narration, stories focusing on first contact, messy thematic work

Tongues

It has taken me much longer to write this review than is normal. It’s tough to figure out how to talk about this book, or why I enjoyed it so much. I found this to be a bit like trying to point out a bird in the forest. The problem lay not with getting a friend to find the bird on the tree, but rather trying to get them looking at the right tree in the first place. Too zoomed in on specifics and a review loses any sense of cohesion, but too zoomed out and you have nothing interesting to say. There’s a lot to say about Tongues. Even when I end up disliking the choices an author makes in stories like this, I appreciate the gradual blurring of lines between Literary Fiction and Genre Fantasy. Thankfully though, I ended up liking Tongues a lot.

Read if Looking For:
– something weird
-something disturbing
– something baroque

Avoid if Looking For:
– something quick
-something sweet
– something simple

The Divine Cities Trilogy

Robert Jackson Bennett is currently getting laude for his Shadow of the Leviathan series (which are quite good on the whole). However, I think his Divine Cities Trilogy is by far the superior work, even if it’s taken me about four years to read the entire thing (I wrote in my review of book 2 that the finale would be ‘a priority for 2024’ yet I’m only getting around to it in 2026). These books are unlike anything I’ve read. The prose is straightforward enough, Bennett’s thematic work is ambitious and so very different from the examinations of imperialism we see in the 2020s, including his current series. It’s the type of mind bending and ambitious fantasy I love to read, and it safely sits as some of my favorite books in the genre.

Read if Looking For: spycraft/action hybrids, competent protagonists, weird gods, thorny questions without easy answers

Avoid if Looking For: direct sequels, purely happy endings, John le Carre style bureaucracy spycraft, straightforward morality

The Chromatic Fantasy

I’m all about unapologetically queer books, and The Chromatic Fantasy definitely fits that brief. This book isn’t a tour-de-force on the trans experience, but it’s an extremely fun romp a book with great art that didn’t disappoint in the slightest. I need to wait a week or two to see if this has the emotional staying power to crack my top 10 of the year, but I think it’s got a pretty good shot.

Read if Looking For: tricksters and thieves, anachronism and whimsy, more color than a chameleon at a rave

Avoid if Looking For: fully coherent plots, historical accuracy (or even consistency in the intensity of historical inaccuracies), memorable villains, books without nudity