It's a Jumble

  Very late, but here are some stories I read and loved in the last months of 2025—a mix of older stories and new.   “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A.C. Wise in Reactor (published in January 2025) Wolves have always ranged on the outside of the town, snapping jaws at its ragged edges. Sometimes they kill to cull. Sometimes they kill to eat. Sometimes they protect the town from worse things, older things, and newer ones as well. But the town would rather look away from the wolves, because the doe-girls’ radiant magic is so much prettier. Was. Now the doe-girls are gone.   A small town governed by a balance of unspoken powers. Wolves in the hills, and doe-girls in the form of high school students—beautiful and shining. But there are also human hunters, disrupting the balance of power with their greed. And there is Merrow, a high school girl who is a different kind of protector, inheritor to her grandmother’s power. What is Merrow—a semi-outcast, always on the ed...

  This reading round-up is shorter than usual, as I admit that my short fiction reading fell off a cliff these last two months, due to travel and various distractions. Nevertheless, here are seven stories I did read and love.   “The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home” by Renan Bernardo in Reactor   Let me be straight: I’m Adelaide, a space traveler, and I’m a ghost. It took me a while to whisper those words to my ectoplasmic self in the mirror and convince myself of that, so take your time. I wouldn’t believe it easily, were I you. I’m dead and forced to fluster about in the  Sopinha de Feijão , my lovely freighter, previously bound for a moon in the Kepler-32 system but now going back to Earth.   This story is fully as fun as its title suggests. Adelaide is the captain of a space cargo ship. Her dream, after saving up from numerous cargo runs, is to build a street market on a moon in honor of her beloved grandmoth...

  It's out!! My debut collection of short stories, The House of Illusionists , is officially out in the world! It's available at Amazon , Indiebound , Barnes and Noble online , and direct from publisher .  You can go to my personal dedicated book page for more information (including advance praise and interviews). You can also visit the official publisher website here. 

  It’s the last day of September, and this round-up is way overdue. Some things I read and loved in July and August.   Strange Tales of Horror, Darkness, and Beauty   “And the Planet Loved Him” by L. Chan in Clarkesworld I’ve been here a few weeks, and the sunsets never get old. The blue sun scintillates off the spore miasma, glittering into fractal rainbows. The worst part is the waiting. We’re so far off the grid that by the time the distress signal relays back to someone that could authorize the funds requisition for a rescue, there’s a good chance that I’d already run out of air or food or both. We still see the light of stars long gone supernova in the sky. I’m dead already; I just haven’t gotten the memo.   And this is all before my deceased husband’s voice crackles on the radio from outside the habitat.   L. Chan excels at strange, beautiful hard science-fiction stories with striking ideas and imagery. He gives another one here, in th...

  I am far, far overdue for a personal writing/publication update, I realize. 1. Short Story Publication in Lightspeed Magazine In June, my latest fantasy story was published in Lightspeed Magazine . “When the Faerie King Toured the Human Realm” is about exactly what the title says. It’s also about social media fame, parasocial relationships, street food, and the very human need to feel that we belong to a story larger than ourselves. It is one of my favorite things that I have written, ever, and there’s a wonderful podcast version, narrated by Susan Hanfield, if you would rather listen than read.   It was inspired, as you can read in the  accompanying  author interview , by watching   waaaay too many xianxia c-dramas, a genre of  Chinese television drama that is centered  on "xian,” immortal beings from Chinese folklore/tradition. If you, too, are a fan of this   genre, just know that the Faerie King looks exactly like your favorite male xia...

  The winter solstice is past, Christmas and New Year’s are coming. In this brief breath before the major holidays, perhaps you’ll have time to sit with a hot drink and a short story or two. If so, here are some to consider.   Stories of Strangeness and Horror, Dark and Light “Two Motes in the Zuegma Dark” by Sagan Lee in Lightspeed Jules let go of Scarpe’s hand and walked carefully to one side of the platform. “Ever been up close?” “Only on TV.” “You haven’t seen it ‘til you’ve seen it,” Jules said, giddy with the cheesiness of the line. Without looking, he reached for the lever that was right where he knew it would be. It gave way with a satisfying thunk. They were blinded a second time as the hangar bay flooded with light.   A hot-shot pilot impresses his dates by taking them to see Big Blue, the giant battle-mech that he pilots. But things go unexpectedly awry on this particular date. Giant battle-mechs. Jellyfish in outer space! A first date that goe...

  I’ve loved Tara Campbell’s wonderfully strange and often sly short stories (for instance, the marvelously weird and delightful “A Turtle in Love, Singing ”—read it if you haven’t!)    And so I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of her forthcoming novel, City of Dancing Gargoyles, due out in September of this year. It’s every bit as delightful and weird as I hoped, a post-apocalyptic road trip through an American West ravaged by both climate change and secret “alchemical” testing.   Three storylines converge in this novel. In the first, two sentient gargoyles, E and M, flee their church in a drought-ridden land in search of a new home. A few chapters in, they meet up with another questing pair: Rose and Dolores, a mother and her teen daughter who are also fleeing—in their case, fleeing a series of cities ruined by alchemical disasters, including a disaster brought about by dragons. Dolores and Rose are also looking for a new home, a place of stability...

  Beauty and pain are entwined in this gorgeous book by Lee Murray, winner of the 2023 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize. This is a book that weaves together myth and history, the real and the unreal, poetry and prose. It describes the tragic stories of nine Chinese diaspora women in New Zealand from the early 1900s to the present day. Connecting these nine stories is the figure of the fox spirit—a liminal creature of Chinese mythology. In some tellings, a fox spirit can take on human form through wearing a human skull that perfectly fits its head. A fox spirit can also cultivate to immortality through arduous trials. In Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, the story-framing device is that of a nine-tailed fox spirit who must find nine skulls to wear, nine human lives to live, before she can reach celestial heaven.   The nine lives the fox spirit lives through in this book are harrowing. Here are brides brought reluctantly from China to New Zealand, Aotearoa--“the land of the ...