by Zilla N.

Reading Melancholic Parables is like listening to someone speaking what sounds like gibberish but you understand every word.

What is this book, this compilation of microstories? It’s about all those tiny thoughts that run through your head, which you’ve never bothered to ask if anyone else wonders too. How would it feel to live your life twice, if you remembered everything? Is that weird feeling of being watched because of time-travelling tourists? What if there was a language in the dial-up modem buzz? Bellatrix Sakakino wonders along with you, and lives through the answers. That’s part of this book. But that’s not all of it, not exactly. This is a book about being born in the wrong time, the wrong body, the wrong world. It is a book about failing to belong. It is a book about loneliness.

The microstories are absurd and deeply meaningful. I found myself wanting to quote them, but all-too-often unable to pull apart passages into neat quote-sized fragments, because sentences hung on paragraphs, on microstories, on the book.

“Not every book is for every reader. A book must rhyme with you, or you with it.”

This is a witty, clever book, but it’s also a dark work: a work of uneasy ghosts and climate change, of loving your abuser and hating yourself. It might be better for me if this book didn’t rhyme. But it does. This is a book for me. It might be for you, too.

Preorder Melancholic Parables ahead of 29 November 2022 at Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple Books, or Smashwords.

(We received an advance copy of the book for review purposes.)

by Zilla N.

Merey’s books lodge themselves in my heart, take up residence somewhere near the left auricle, leave me breathless and internally bleeding. His books are raw and visceral and they hurt like memory.

The characters in The Pink and the Blue are drawn in their truest sense, sometimes so transparent that you can see the city through their outlines, sometimes melting off the page, sometimes with limbs scattered around the bedroom. It’s body horror, but the horror is that it reflects a reality that we fail to observe when we look at a person in meatspace and think they are whole, think they are okay. As always, art is truer than life, because art is not bound by physics or convention.

I got this book in physical form because I needed to touch it. It’s hard to explain why. It’s digital art, and there’s a note that the colours are brighter in the pdf version. But I need to touch the pages, to run my fingertips over the smooth paper of textured pixels and images of cut outs. I needed the book to be as real in my hands as it is in my heart.

You can find it here.

by Zilla N.

We were given a review copy of The Phantom of Nob Hill Theater in exchange for an honest review.

This book is ridiculous in the best possible way. John Luke Maxwell wrote a gay romance with enough spice to burn off the roof of your mouth. An ordinary guy falls in love with his former porn-star crush, who is also a top-notch chef, painter, and sleuth. Named, appropriately enough, Holmes. Good thing too, since crimes seem to be piling up all over the place. The world needs a man with a smoking pipe, deductive reasoning, and several pairs of tearaway pants, and Holmes is up to the job. Very up for it.

The writing in this book is solid, but the style is playful. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. I never had a moment’s concern that the men might fall short of their happy ever after, but I was still curious enough about the murder mystery to stay engaged the whole way through.

A perfect book for a summer read! Find it on Amazon here.

by Zilla N.

In Flames opens with Sera telling us, “I am attuned to three things: blood, fire, and love”, and this book delivers on all three.

Sera is a sorceress with a rare gift for predicting love matches, and when she goes to college—a magical medical school—she meets her own celestial matches. But nothing is as she expected. Instead of one partner, she’s matched with two men, and they matched with each other as well as her. And the college itself holds darker secrets, secrets of blood and murder. Sera and her partners need to fight for their match to survive.

This book is in the best tradition of magical dark academia. Imagine a grown-up, poly Harry Potter. A sexy Ninth House. I’d originally been quizzical about the idea of a matchmaking sorceress, but I loved the worldbuilding of a sex-positive culture where love is considered divinely inspired. The world exists at an intersection of magic and technology, where sorcerers text each other on their phones and hockey fans are kept magically warm in the arena stands. Then, of course, the mystery calls into question the entire society which built this so-called school of healing. It’s a delightful play on a familiar genre, and I was left hoping for a sequel where I could see something of the world outside the school.

“But I’ll burn for you, Seraphina. I’ll burn for you if you ask me to.”

Then there’s the romance plotline, which is sizzlingly hot. There is a reason this book is called In Flames. Do not read this book in a drought or you might be accused of arson. I adored Seri, Alexi, and Dario, and it was pure delight to have a novel where no one had to choose between love interests in a love triangle. I will avoid spoilers, but I’ll leave you with two words to end this review: hot chocolate.

We received a review copy of In Flames. Get your copy here.

by Zilla N.

by Sabitha F.

Ghost in the Vending Machine by Saevelle is a Wattpad novel, but don’t let that stop you from reading it. In fact, that should have you running to it, as not only can you read it for free, you don’t even have to wait for your hold on it to come in at the library. You can read it right now!

Now, as one of the founders of Night Beats, I’m heavily biased. Maybe you are too, since you’re reading this very blog. If you’re new here, though, Night Beats is a Creative Commons-licensed concept for a cheesy early Noughts paranormal police procedural—think X-Files meets Supernatural meets Forever Knight. Basically, you can slip it into your creative project if you need to make a reference that won’t get dated.*

So it’s been used in various creative works quite a bit already, and you can find out more on this very website. But to my knowledge Saevelle is the first person to actually write an entire episode. And it’s glorious. It’s so wonderful.

The story alternates between the episode itself and the behind-the-scenes filming of it. In the episode, a sex worker is murdered by some kind of monster, and Jordan and Jane have to both solve the case and keep her ghost, trapped in a coin, safe. Meanwhile in Toronto, the actors, stunt people, and makeup artists deal with the ups and downs of minor celebrity and on-set romances. It’s sweet and funny and as a Torontonian one degree away from the film industry, I believe she gets it perfectly. And I love the episode itself—it has all the dramatic beats and character moments of a show like this, and Saevelle’s cinematic writing style lets you picture it as if on screen.

Basically, I adore this story with my whole heart, and if you’re a fan of campy, witty, self-aware fiction, I’m guessing that you will too.

*In other words, it exists purely because JKR is a TERF and Rachel had to edit all the Harry Potter references out of the second draft of Cascade. True story.

by Zilla N.

Now is not the first time the Earth’s climate has changed. Now is not the first time that temperatures changed, that animals were driven to the brink of extinction, that food production dwindled. Noema is a story about human survival through environmental change twelve thousand years ago. But Noema is much more than historical fiction.

This book is about the price of survival, and who pays it: the animals, the people, All Life. It is about the Law of Unintended Consequences and about complicity for what is done in what is done in your name, when you have been the one to teach people your name. Or when those people are the ones who gave you a name in the first place.

Names and identity are major themes in Noema. I still can’t tell you who the narrator is, but then, I think that’s the point. We are interconnected. We are the living and the dead. We are the humans and the horses and the wheat. We are All Life, and sometimes to preserve All Life, we have to make terrible sacrifices.

Noema is a book that lingers with you, that offers up its precious secrets deliciously slowly. It is a book you can read over and over. Find it here.

by Zilla N.

We were given an Advance Reader Copy of Planet Oster: Fertility Fusion (The Holiday Hedonism Series #4) by Vera Valentine, J.L. Logosz, in exchange for an honest review. And we were simply not prepared for this novel.

I knew this book would be funny, and it was hilarious. The premise is delightfully silly–an eternally horny space smuggler agrees to carry the eggs of a triad of anthropomorphic bunny space pirates. It’s treated with enough seriousness to tell a great story, but enough joking that I quite literally laughed out loud.

I knew it was gonna be sexy, and it was incredibly hot. The sex is weird, by human standards. There are tentacles, and multicolored goo, and more nipples than most humans possess. But the thing that makes erotica sexy isn’t sharing bits with the characters. It’s people being deeply devoted to each other’s pleasure, and experiencing their own. This book knows how to have a good time.

The thing no one warned me about was the feelings. No one told me I’d be deeply invested in alien bunny people discovering love and acceptance in a found family. I was not prepared for how much I’d care about this disaster-magnet of a space smuggler and her socially awkward space pirate boyfriends navigating a relationship through very different cultural expectations and past trauma of social rejection. When you read this book and you find yourself biting your lip in concern because Zul’s lying again to avoid disappointing his partners–at least I warned you.

Best of all, this book is another addition to the Night Beats extended universe! It’s seamlessly worked into the story, and the characters all love this terrible TV show as much as we do.

You can find this romp of a hilarious, surprisingly heartfelt erotic science fiction romance here.