“I try to avoid labels”: Jeff VanderMeer on his new novel, ecological disaster, and why he won’t run for public office
Nominally a hardboiled noir, Hummingbird Salamander is also a cri de coeur about our current ecological crisis.
No future, or, the submerged punk ethos of Susan Sanford Blades’s Fake It So Real
In these tales of mothers, daughters, fathers, and lovers, punk is more attitudinal than aural or political.
Novelist Kim Echlin ventures into dark territory in Speak, Silence, a Bosnia-set novel about rape as a war crime
“For 2,000 years or more, women in literature have been represented as the spoils of war,” says Echlin about one impression she wanted to correct by writing this novel.
What’s in a name? Alexandra Andrews’s debut investigates literary fame and duplicity
Who Is Maud Dixon? is about ambition, identity, and the malleable nature of personality.
The anxiety of influencers: Ellery Lloyd’s Instagram mommy thriller People Like Her
The twisty, fast-paced debut effectively skewers online culture while telling a tense story about a family threatened from within and without.
Debut novelist Rebecca Watson reckons with how form can be used to reflect the realities of contemporary society
little scratch acts as a kind of bridge between Modernism and our current culture of distraction.
Feminism and the capitalist impulse collide head-on in Leigh Stein’s blistering second novel
Self Care skewers the performative progressiveness that attends capitalist tech companies obsessed with clicks and user engagement.
The Horror Show: Good faces off against evil in James Herbert’s The Dark
Herbert’s novel combines elements of a haunted house story, a zombie tale, and a meditation on the nature of evil.
The Horror Show: Michael McDowell combines Southern Gothic and a haunted house tale in The Elementals
McDowell’s mashup of Southern Gothic and a traditional haunted house story provides a slow burn as opposed to the anarchic energy of his earlier novel.
The Horror Show: Stephen Graham Jones’s self-aware metafictional slasher The Last Final Girl
The American novelist’s violent, cheeky 2012 book displays a true fan’s knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the cinematic subgenre.