Next SFF Author: A.M. Stanley

Previous SFF Author: Michael A. Stackpole

Series: Stand-Alone

These are stand alone novels (not part of a series).

Battle of the Linguist Mages: Might make a fun video game

Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore

My low rating of 2022’s Battle of the Linguist Mages comes from the distance between my anticipation of this book based on its excellent title, and the reality of reading it. I think people who like watching other people play video games will enjoy this book. I don’t, and so I didn’t. Your mileage, as we say, may vary.

Battle of the Linguist Mages is filled with awesome ideas. Here are a few:

a “battle language” that changes reality
extraterrestrials who live in human consciousness as punctuation marks
a powerful,

Little Eve: Best gothic horror book I read in 2022

Little Eve by Catriona Ward

Little Eve is the best gothic horror book I read last year. Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2018, it won the Shirley Jackson award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel. It’s a book saturated with atmosphere, filled with clues, puzzles, masks and secret identities. Ultimately, it’s about cults, serpents, sisters, lies, and love.

The book starts in the 1920s, when a local man in a remote Scottish village discovers the bodies of everyone who lives in the rotting castle on the bluff.

Even Though I Knew the End: Powerful setting and period piece

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk

Let me start with what I loved about C.L. Polk’s 2022 novella, Even Though I Knew the End. I loved the premise of the magical system at play here, and the story delivered a 1940s Chicago, Illinois, that was both familiar and convincingly strange. The Wink, a lesbian bar that has rolled through several incarnations in its lifetime, is a sheer delight of evocative description.

I liked the fast-moving plot and Polk’s spin on the hard-boiled detective story.

City of Last Chances: An intellectual pleasure

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky

City of Last Chances (2022), by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is one of those novels that I completely admired all the way through but had a hard time connecting to many of the characters, so that while the reading experience was enjoyable, it was more an intellectual pleasure than an immersive, emotional one.

The novel is set in the titular city of Ilmar, suffering under the heavy boot of an occupation force left over from the city’s conquest three years earlier by the Palleseen,

Stonefish: Not your basic horror novel

Stonefish by Scott R. Jones

2020’s horror novel Stonefish by Scott R. Jones is not your basic horror novel. I tend to forget that, like every other genre, horror has an array of subgenres, styles, and tropes. Even so, it’s hard for me to “sum up” what kind of horror story Stonefish is. I’m settling for futuristic-dystopian-gnostic-phantasmagorical weird horror, with Sasquatch.

Climate change and leaps in high technology have created the everyday world of Den Secord, who writes things for his generation’s version of the internet.

The Nightland Express: A solid YA fantasy

The Nightland Express by J.M. Lee

The Nightland Express (2022) by J.M. Lee is a solid YA fantasy that has its moments but also doesn’t quite reach its full potential due to several issues. It also suffers a bit perhaps from trying to take on too much, where a more streamlined approach might have allowed for more full development of its issues as well as a more tense narrative. A minor spoiler follows, one revealed quite early in the book and one whose “reveal” doesn’t really impact the reading experience,

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau: A lush SF melodrama

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

It’s 1877, and on a decaying rancho deep in the Yucatán peninsula, Carlota Moreau’s sheltered life — and world — is about to change. Carlota’s father, Doctor Moreau, conducts experiments on human-animal hybrids, with a stated goal of improving humanity. When his patrons, the Lizalde family, threaten to withdraw their support, catastrophic events are set in motion with Carlota at their center.

“Melodrama” has a bad reputation, but when it’s done intentionally and well, it is a high-quality entertainment form. In the hands of a prose stylist as good as Moreno-Garcia,

The Inheritance of Orquídea: A book filled with secrets, magic, and heart

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova

2021’s The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina was practically a perfect book for me. It’s filled with fantastical magic that baffled me and thrilled me, and it brought to mind the early books of Isabel Allende. The Montoya family were complicated and realistic, in a real-world setting that simmers with magic and strangeness. While much of the story takes place in an undesignated “present” that seems very much like now (without pandemics), the history of Orquídea Divina’s life takes us to Ecuador in the late 1950s and early sixties.

Echo of a Curse: “A very long and very strange story”

Echo of a Curse by R.R. Ryan

In several of my earlier musings here on FanLit, I made reference to the list that editor/author Karl Edward Wagner released in the pages of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine back in the summer of ’83; the so-called Wagner 39 List. This overview of KEW’s favorite horror novels, and those that he felt were most in need of being brought to the public’s attention, was divided into three categories: The 13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels, The 13 Best Science-Fiction Horror Novels, and The 13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels.

What Lives in the Woods: A mysterious MG haunted house story

What Lives in the Woods by Lindsay Currie

Ginny — or Gin — Anderson is looking forward to the summer writing workshop she’s going to attend with her best friend Erica, in their hometown of Chicago, until Dad upends the family’s plans because of a job. He’d going to restore a century-old house-turned-hotel, The Woodmoor Manor, in Michigan. The family will live there while he works.

This sounds terrible to Gin and her older brother Leo. While Leo is soon appeased by the news that Saugatuck, the nearby small town,

Next SFF Author: A.M. Stanley

Previous SFF Author: Michael A. Stackpole

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