Happy Horror Days!

Kicking off our list this month is Samantha Kolesnik’s newest novella, Waif, and can we just take a moment to admire that gorgeous pulp-style cover? You know I’m a sucker for clever cover design, and I just love everything about this one. Plus I think it really sells the gritty feel of the novel itself as we follow former housewife Angela on a strange, dangerous sexual journey into a treacherous underground of pornography and plastic surgery as she tries to escape the “dream” life that was killing her slowly. When Angela falls for a fetish film performer named Reena, and falls in with a queer gang called The Waifs, she finds herself forced to choose between the woman she used to be and the woman she’s becoming.

You know I love it best of all when fairy tales go bad, and twisted, and horrific. So of course I zeroed right in on Shea Earnshaw’s forthcoming book A History of Wild Places. It begins with two unexplained disappearances: Maggie St. James, author of dark, macabre children’s books, and Travis Wren, the private investigator who was hired to look for her. Travis has a talent for locating the missing, but when his search for Maggie leads him to a mysterious commune called Pastoral that’s not supposed to exist, he too vanishes into thin air. It’s only years later that Theo, who has lived in Pastoral all his life, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck outside the border of the community and begins to question the isolated world in which he was raised. But as Pastoral’s secrets begin to unravel, Theo may find himself faced with a truth far darker and more dangerous than expected.

Technically, Ahdieh’s The Beautiful Quartet series is more on the dark fantasy side of the dark fiction line than the horror side, but you know I love my dark fantasy novels, so I’m playing my Basically Weened on Anne Rice Card, and declaring that if vampires, then horror. Or horror-ish, anyway. Though I guess in the case of the The Righteous, if dark, menacing fae, then horror. I mean an angry Good Neighbor will fuck you up, let’s be honest. And Pippa knows that, she does, but when her best friend Celine (heroine of the first two books) suddenly disappears, Pippa has no choice but to travel into the treacherous world of the fae and try to bring Celine back. She’s done losing everything she loves, and she’ll do what ever it takes to find Celine, even if it means dealing with the dangerously charismatic Arjun Desai.

Speaking of ongoing series, if you’ve been waiting on novella number three in Sriduangkaew’s Her Pitiless Command series, your wait is almost over! Shattersteel continues the story that began in Sriduangkaew’s gorgeous dark, queer sci-fi/fantasy novella Winterglass, which you might remember from last month’s fairy tale retelling newsletter! But where in Winterglass Nuawa was a bold insurgent, determined to destroy the Winter Queen and end her reign of cold and darkness, Shattersteel finds her laid low. Her attempt to assassinate the queen has failed and now the weapon that Nuawa had so carefully turned herself into is just a tool that the Winter Queen can use. And one that the Queen would happily sacrifice to make her lover, General Lussadh, immortal at last. Unless Nuawa can stop her, and is willing to pay the cost to do so. This final attempt to kill the Queen might just succeed, but if it does, Nuawa will lose not only her soul, but Lussadh as well.

I mean, was I supposed to NOT include Alex White’s new Star Trek book? What, when I am still absolutely obsessed with their recent Alien tie-in novel, Into Charybdis, and when I’m such a Star Trek fan? Please. Now excuse me, I have to marathon Deep Space Nine so I can read this book when it comes out. When Trill Trade Commissioner Etom Prit askes Jadzia Dax to help recover his wayward granddaughter from a resort casino while on shore leave, it seems like an easy favor to do for an old friend. But the Nemi she finds when she arrives planet side isn’t the young woman she remembers, and Dax’s struggle to find the truth of what happened to Nemi will expose a terrifying web of secrets and lies.