by Dale Stromberg

Many of the pieces in yves.’s short fiction collection Something’s Not Right (2023, tRaum Books) could qualify as what Diana Callahan has called curio fiction: stories which “place the fantastic alongside the mundane” within “a world very much like our own, except one thing is slightly… off.” yves.’s stories are brief, sometimes radically brief, and they deposit you directly into scenarios where the magical blends in to the humdrum, leaving you (just a few paragraphs later) imbued with a mood of unease, or sombreness, or amusement, or half-smiling hope.

yves. is gently playful with the genre conventions they toy with: horror, fantasy, the occult. We encounter fae folk, goblins, augurs, vampires, witches and the like. Sometimes these brushes against magic disquiet the reader (as magic should); other times the magic is part of the ordinary, and the emotion and charm of the work emerges in how it humanises the extramundane by pairing it with the struggle to make ends meet, the helplessness to resist our drab modern systems, or the tongue-stuck-to-roof-of-mouth hopeful anxiety of seeking to leap the gap so as to know and be known by another person.

Read the full review here.

by Zilla N.

The chance to be the first people to travel space and discover alien worlds could be the opportunity of a lifetime—or the end of one.

Cargo Hold 4 is a gripping, suspense-filled science fiction horror, where nothing is as it seems and even your closest friends might not be who you think. An alien presence trapped in the cargo hold on an isolated space ship pushes a close-knit crew to the edge of madness, past the boundaries of morality they believed in on Earth. By the end, the horrors within the ship compete with the horrors they brought from their own psyches. If you like your science fiction action-packed and thrilling, this is the book for you.

by Zilla N.

Sometimes a person is a friend, sometimes they’re the daughter of a cult leader, sometimes they’re the ideal of femininity, sitting in a room daintily eating estrogen pills. But would the ideal of femininity make a good roommate? Worse, imagine living with someone who wants to be the ideal of feminity but is, at best, a movie star with a good pout.

When Elena’s mirror shards reflect her paintings, the only face shown clearly is the portrait Zoe accidentally smeared the paint on. I’m not certain I’m making sense, but you know what I mean.

If you’ve ever read a postmodern novel and thought, that was cool but what if instead of cis masculinity this book was about trans femininity, Love/Aggression is the book for you.

by Zilla N.

The Night Garden is a grown-up fairytale romance. Ellie and Max are foolish new adults, trying to navigate a world that doesn’t have a place for people like them—people who live passionately and in the moment. This struggle between who they are and who the world demands they grow up into comes with a fairytale curse: behave, or be turned into a Bèist, forced to live by day as a cat wandering the moors.

Nicole Northwood once again captivated my heart and my imagination. I loved Ellie and Max, and all the side characters who were as real and loveable as the main couple. A fantastic book from a consistently fantastic author.

You can find it here.

by Zilla N.

“Better for a beautiful woman to be terrifying than terrorized, she decided.” In Mewing, those are the only options available, and everyone is beautiful.

I have a notoriously low tolerance for gore or body grossness, and I found myself squinting during reading this book, unwilling to look away despite the squelching of my gut. I think Margo would have approved of my body’s response, that strange mix of fascination and revulsion, beauty and horror, seduced and repelled in equal measure. I’m certain the thing in the basement would have approved.

Mewing‘s gender politics are as visceral as its characters. Beauty is a standard created by and for men, but women are the ones best at making each other bleed. There’s hardly a man in sight—I can’t recall a single line uttered by a human male character—as women destroy and reconstruct each other for fleeting moments of validation. Men may hold ultimate power, but it’s women who enforce it.

Steel your stomach, and read this book.

If you’re looking for your next great read, how do you find it?

Shepherd’s website lets authors suggest their favourite books on a theme. Ira Nayman, editor of The Dance (an anthology that contains “Do You Love the Colour of the Sky” by Rachel A. Rosen), picked books about the multiverse. Read his suggestions here.