It's a Jumble

  Some stories I read and loved from this spring. Selections from Weird Horror Magazine Issue 12 My last round-up featured two stories from this issue of Weird Horror. For this current round-up, I finished reading the issue and have selected three more. Weird Horror lives up to its name with extremely weird, unsettling stories.   “A View from the Window” by Rory Say Laughter from outside sends Mona up from her desk and across the room. She feels the blood in her face grow warm. How often has she told Caleb he’s not to go out to the yard by himself? She has her hand on the window, ready to shout, when all at once her thoughts go blank.   Two boys stand in the yard below, her son and someone else.   A tiny, just-over flash length piece about the fears of motherhood, of losing one’s child. The horror of not knowing if one’s child has actually been lost or not. Primal fears and horror are packed into this strange, unsettling piece.     ...

  Some updates: (1) I’m delighted to say that I am now a book reviewer for Locus Magazine ! My first review appeared in the May 2026 issue, for S.L. Huang's brilliant novella, The Language of Liars. It's about an adorably nerdy (and naive) linguist who infiltrates a mysterious alien race to try to understand their secrets. It's a tautly plotted spy-thriller mystery, and also a sharp and devastating meditation on exploitation, greed, and the power of language.  Here's a screenshot of part of my review below! You can buy the full issue here . Book and short story reviews eventually appear online some time after print publication. I'm delighted to be writing for such a storied publication, the trade journal of the science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction field. I'm also delighted that one of my own stories, "Lotus Dew for the Emperor's Tea," got a shout-out from short fiction reviewer Maria Haskins in her column in the same issue.  (2) Dovetai...

  Point #1: Does the world need another book review of Project Hail Mary ? No, but you're getting one anyway (adapted slightly from the Goodreads review I posted back in April)  Point #2: I loved the movie. Go see it.    Someone on social media complained that this book is “80% math equations.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but the protagonist does spend a lot of time math-ing. I’ve seen people complain that the book is all “science” at the expense of character and literary quality. Yes, there’s loads of science here, and yes, Andy Weir is never going to win acclaim for lyrical prose. In fact, this book is mostly structured as a series of escalating science puzzles to be solved in ingenious ways. Some people will be annoyed by that. Another type of person will eat it up. Turns out I’m the type of person who eats this up. By now, you've probably heard the plot basics of this best seller and basis for the blockbuster movie of the same name. Something is dimm...

  Well, I fell way behind on my short fiction reading over the last few months, for a number of reasons.  But here are a few stories that I did manage to get to--a mix of old and new-- that I loved.   Stories of Love and Darkness   Last Flesh Ice-Skaters by Claire Jia-Wen in Khoreo  The first time I saw you, you laced up your skates, adjusted your knee mods, and I was just another unremarkable face as you fluttered to the ice. My mother snapped at me to watch you, but it was like asking a mallard to observe a flamingo. Our legs didn’t work the same. You’d been competing across the national circuit, in Boston and Orlando and Frisco, and this was my first competition.    A near-future science-fiction tale about two figure skaters—both Chinese-American, both from Southern California, and both using the latest in sports body modifications.   A propulsive sports rivalry story about competition, obsession, attraction, and love for the sp...

  A few years ago, I came across a stunning story, “Sweetbaby, ” in Clarkesworld.  It opens with a scene of shocking violence. And yet despite the violence and weirdness in this tale, there’s also a tone of quiet introspection. It’s a story about a girl struggling to unravel the truth of her circumstances, the truth about her world. And it’s about others who are doing everything they can to deny reality. It’s about parents and children; it’s a wild mashup of genres; it extends compassion even toward what seems unforgivable, and it left me with a quiet ache in my heart. I knew then that Thomas Ha was a writer to watch.   And how. In the last few years, Ha has released one brilliant tale after another--weird, unsettling tales that mix horror, science fiction, and fantasy. His work has garnered major award nominations, and placed as a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, and Shirley Jackson awards. It all culminates (for now) in this first collection of his work, Uncertain Son...

Some stories I’ve read recently.   Tales of Strangeness, Beauty, and Horror “Cicadas, and Their Skins” by Avra Margariti in Strange Horizons  I spent my first summer as an orphan watching cicadas fuck, scream, and molt. Wasn’t long before I plucked one of the cicada skins from the dry village soil. I brushed it clean against my secondhand clothes I was already beginning to outgrow. Dappled by sunlight, the carapace looked hard though I knew it to be brittle. A coat, people called it. To me it looked like a veil I yearned to slip into.   A fierce, angry, bloody tale. An orphaned girl has lost her mother and moved from the city to a small, stultifying village. Watching the cicadas, she learns that she can slip into a cicada’s skin. She can find herself in the skins of mice, birds, and more. And she can teach the other children of the village to do the same. An angry tale of wildness, of desperation and freedom, of seeking escape from the judgmental eyes of th...

  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 ...

The haunted house is a staple of horror tales. But in their new books Gwendolyn Kiste and Ai Jiang bring us haunted neighborhoods —Ai Jiang’s work actually involves an entire town—that threaten to entrap and swallow their protagonists whole, keeping them locked in with ghosts of the past. Both books are confrontations with loss and trauma; they’re both about making peace with the dead and letting them go (if you can). They take different forms in these explorations and approach these themes from different angles and with differing outcomes. But they are both gorgeously told works, and haunting.   The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste Twenty years ago, Velkwood Street—a little block of eight houses, in a “blink-and-miss-it sort of subdivision”—disappeared from the face of the earth. Or rather, it part-way disappeared: it’s still visible, glowing, half-there and half-not, a kind of suburban Brigadoon behind an invisible, supernatural barrier. Scientists, government agencies, a...