fiction

There are many reasons that I don’t understand arguments against diversity in media, but outside of the obvious ethical arguments, sometimes I just want to grab writers by the shoulders and scream “You have such an easy shortcut to originality! Just write a story about people that nobody else is writing about!” Because originality is often held up as the diamond standard of a storytelling, and yet we still keep seeing the same cookie cutter ingenues and heroes that we’ve always seen. Ok. Rant over. But it does relate to this particular story, because this is a story that spans…

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Have you ever wanted a book to just really deliver on its name? My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix (author of Horrorstor) will give you what you signed up for. It will give you best friendship, and an exorcism, and that huge side of kitsch and nostalgia that you probably also had your fingers crossed for after a glimpse at the cover. 1988... Now I might have been an 80s baby, but I was not an 80s kid. Even so, after years of rifling through my older sister’s seventeen magazines during those early years, I’m prone to letting the…

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Does Not Love tells the story of spouses that continue to orbit one another, but fail to collide in passion anymore. Damaged by a painful failure to conceive, we find them each questioning whether what they have is still considered love. Had the premise stopped there, I would’ve likely never sought the book, however, the world that the couple faces their challenges in, an alternate reality Indianapolis infused with Big Pharma conspiracy, skirts reality just enough to render the novel wholly original… and fascinating. Personally, I had been seeking a book like this, that explores a complicated relationship without being…

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In my recent reading streak of modern fiction, I’d had yet to read anything set in a time period other than the present day. Margaret the First, however, is a historical work; a fictionalization of the life of Margaret Cavendish. And yet, it is so thoroughly modern, and that’s where it delights. Dutton’s writing is incredibly skillful, owing to its lilting, almost hypnotic style. The book is brimming with research and references, but they’re laid so gentle-handedly, that pure immersion is still the result. The story focuses on the near maddening ennui that Margaret suffers whenever distanced from her self-expression,…

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