If you’ve been unable to recover from that gut-punch of an ending to Holly Black’s Book of Night, then I anticipate you picked up the sequel, Thief of Night, as soon as humanly possible in September. Apparently, I like suffering and prolonged my misery to just now, and let me tell you, Black wanted you…
Short, sweet, and to the point: this is one of my favorite books I have ever read. It feels very odd to be reviewing the ninth book in a series, but Dead Hand Rule is a strong contender for my best book of 2025, and that is saying something in a year that is so…
Come for the demons and stay for the relationship drama in S.T. Gibson’s newest book, Evocation. In this story, we follow two ex-lovers trying to play nice in their secret magical boys club, and there is plenty of character development and paranormal problems to satisfy your spooky soul. The only thing that can make the…
I have been reading a lot of urban fantasy lately, more by an artifact of my review schedule than by conscious effort. My high-level takeaway from this experience has been that I don’t actually like urban fantasy. I often find their worlds surprisingly shallow, their themes uninteresting, and their characters somehow less relatable than those…
Continue reading ➞ The Unseen World Duology – Shadow Carpentry
It’s 2023 and we are finally getting another Craft novel by Max Gladstone. For those unfamiliar, The Craft Sequence is a confusingly laid out set of books set in a modern fantasy setting about corporate employees using magic to fight gods and horrors in a terrifyingly broken world. I feel comfortable saying the setting is…
I became a devoted Holly Black fan after reading The Folk of the Air series. It has stuck with me for years, and I find myself revisiting scenes from the books often. It should come as no surprise that I picked up her newest release, Book of Night, and consumed it in three days. I…
Last Exit, by Max Gladstone, is a beautifully written character story that I had an extremely hard time connecting with. Many readers who pick up this standalone adventure will find a mesmerizing story about self-discovery, penance, and the nature of the world. Max Gladstone is a favorite author of mine for his work on The…
When I picked up Gutter Mage by J.S. Kelley, I expected a fairly tried and true fantasy/mystery thriller based on the back of the book. What I got instead was a mix of horror, profanity, existential crises, and a tried and true fantasy/mystery thriller. The book is profound in that it manages to both be…
Cadwell Turnbull’s sophomore book, and opening novel in the Convergence Saga defies expectation and easy definition. Turnbull’s first book, The Lesson, was one of my favorite books of 2019, so this next one was saddled with high expectations. In a lot of ways, those expectations were met, but I also experienced a lot of confusion…
Continue reading ➞ No Gods, No Monsters – But Werewolves and Metaphors
Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files has always been a complicated subject for me. On one hand, Butcher has a special knack for melding lore that is modern, ancient, well-known, and obscure into a giant melting pot of exciting action that gets the blood pumping. On the other hand, the series has a number of issues…
