An air of dark whimsy pervades Valentin’s thoroughly entertaining debut. In the five years since Mateo Borrero’s less-than-maternal witch of a mother went missing, the 23-year-old has just been trying to get by; not helping matters is the fact that he’s possessed by a demon. Working at a print shop barely pays the bills for him and his best friend and roommate, Ophelia De La Garza, who finds it hard to hold on to a job due to her partially involuntary powers of astral projection. Doing magic makes Mateo’s demonic possession worse, but it’s his best path to earning some fast cash, so he puts up an online ad offering his supernatural services. Enter the wealthy and endearingly naive Topher Nystrom, who hires Mateo to break the bad-luck curse that keeps killing the people around him. As Mateo and Ophelia dig into Topher’s life and the magic that’s affecting him, Mateo’s situation grows worse and they discover things may be more connected than they thought. Valentin puts a light comedic twist on a gripping story filled with dark magic and murder, and a budding romance between Mateo and Topher adds to the fun. Fans of queer romantic fantasy and cozy horror will be delighted. Agent: Cameron McClure, Donald Maass Literary. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

Madrid’s spooky debut effortlessly unspools a supernatural mystery across two timelines, twining a present-day haunting with a decades-old brush with something mysterious lurking in the woods. Told from the perspectives of three women, the creepy tale opens in queer-friendly Copper City, where teenager Audrey Hennessey is shocked by the murder of her cousin Mara Quinn, whose body is discovered in the town’s abandoned mine. Mara’s ghost soon takes up residence in Audrey’s body, determined to avenge her death. But Mara is easily distracted by her on-off girlfriend, Zadie Slade, whom she spies flirting with Rhea Uckleman, daughter of the local police chief. When schoolmate Isabel Walls goes missing, Audrey and Zadie fear Mara’s killer has claimed his next victim. Every third chapter flashes back half a century to Audrey and Mara’s grandmother Shirley as she experiences inexplicable visions. These flashbacks aren’t quite as arresting as the main narrative, until, as the connection between the two story lines becomes clear, Shirley’s fuzzy premonitions snap into startling focus. Madrid uses the familiar genre trappings of murder and possession to dig into questions of consent and power, asking what it means to share a body, a connection, or a heritage. Add in some wonderfully complex female leads, and this is a pleasure. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

A fae falls in love with a human mage in this middling romantasy series launch from Mihalik (the Consortium Rebellion series). Riela is the last mage in her village and the only one who might be able to defeat the monster that’s been hunting the townsfolk. She heads into the Forsaken Forest to track down the beast and is brutally attacked. Just as she accepts that she’s about to die, she’s saved by Garrick Ryv’ner, “King Stoneguard, the Silver King, and ruler of the Silver Court,” who whisks her away to his court. There, Riela learns about the world beyond her village, the magical Etheri people, and the truth of her own identity. A slow-burning but still steamy romance sparks between her and Garrick as their relationship progresses from mistrust to desire. Unfortunately, the gripping action of the opening dissipates in the plot’s middle section as the stakes of Riela’s unraveling of her magical identity feel relatively low. A final reveal ramps things up once more, setting the stage for excitement to come. Readers will hope for more action in the next installment. Agent: Sarah Younger, Nancy Yost Literary. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

Putting a twist on the magical school setting, Anderson’s rocky debut follows a nonmagical woman who accompanies her younger brother as he is recruited by a monster-fighting secret society. Victoria “Vic” Wood made a promise to her late mother to protect her brother, Henry, and she won’t go back on her word, even when the mysterious Acheron Order identifies him as a witch and insists he come to Avalon Castle for training. Though she is unable to perceive or perform magic, Vic garners attention from an Elder of the Order and the head of the Brotherhood, a rival organization, who both knew her mother. As war brews, Vic navigates Order politics and wrestles with her deep-seated insecurities. Vic and Henry’s fraught, sometimes codependent relationship is the most fascinating and freshest aspect of the narrative, but, after the strong opening, it’s pushed aside to make room for a more familiar plot and underdeveloped side characters, including new friends and a brooding love interest for Vic. Intimations that the Order may not be as noble as it appears add intrigue, but, frustratingly, Vic often misses opportunities to interrogate its problematic history. Anderson doesn’t make the most of her promising premise. Agent: Caitlin Mahony, WME. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

This searing anthology of horror fiction mixes the feminine with the feral as it explores lycanthropy, murder, and the transcendence of flesh. In “The Devil Has No Dogs” by Kailey Tedesco, a young woman realizes the only way to find liberation within the suffocating bounds of a colonial settlement is to embrace the power of a terrible transformation. Erika T. Wurth’s “When He Could Have Me” follows two sisters with a sordid personal history who find a brutal way of resolving their differences. “Vestigial” by Kristi DeMeester centers on a young woman who manages to find terrible closure over the cruel circumstances surrounding the removal of her vestigial tail in childhood. In Zin E. Rocklyn’s “Wolf Like Me,” a woman in dire straits discovers someone wild within the forest who may just prove to be her salvation—and the salvation of her unborn child. As with any anthology, some stories hit harder than others, but the guiding aesthetic principle—the repressed wilderness within women that manifests through fangs and claws—is a consistent revelation throughout and the cumulative effect is devastating. Fans of the cult classic horror movie Ginger Snaps will eat this up. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

Five-time Hugo Award winner Swanwick (Stations of the Tide) swirls together myth and science in this wildly inventive collection. A frequent theme is the interaction of humanity and technology, which is probed poignantly in the bittersweet “Artificial People,” narrated by a newly sentient robot who falls for one of the scientists on her team, and “The White Leopard,” about a man who is able to see through the eyes of his leopard-shaped military drone. In “Requiem for a White Rabbit,” animatronic escapees flee a life of misery in an amusement park. The epistolary “Timothy: An Oral History” imagines the consequences of a scientist in an all-female society engineering a male child in a lab. Swanwick’s wry humor comes through in “The Warm Equations,” a space exploration story helmed by the arrogant Dr. Osborne, and in “The Star-Bear,” about a Russian émigré poet who meets a bizarre celestial being. All of Swanwick’s stories awaken insights into the mystery of being human in an increasingly mind-bending technological world. This is an author at the height of his powers. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

Weaving celestial magic into the history of the first crewed NASA flights, the elaborate fourth installment in Glover’s Murder and Magic series (after The Improvisers) pits Black aerospace engineer and mage Cynthia Rhodes against a conspiracy to stop the latest space launch. Super-genius Cynthia, who sleuths in her spare time, is game to tackle the mystery and enlists the investigative help of Prof. Theo Danner, an eminent marine archaeologist and her cohost on a children’s educational magic program. Cynthia and Theo pry into the secret labs at her NASA research center as well as “the most enchanted house in D.C.” to figure out who is responsible for a recent museum theft, what is making a new rocket fuel synthesized from a legendary alchemical mixture fail explosively, and how these things may be connected. As this central mystery grows ever more tangled, readers may have difficulty following along. Fortunately, Glover fills out the stage with domestic drama, the civil rights protests of 1964 America, and budding attraction between Cynthia and Theo, all of which keep the pages turning even in the more convoluted moments. Fans will be pleased to see Glover’s alternate history expanded into a new era. Agent: Jennie Goloboy, Donald Maass Literary. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

Campbell follows her Ursula K. LeGuin Award–winning novella Arboreality with this insightful and impressive collection of 10 genre-defying stories centered on “possibility and transformation, even in pain.” The tales approach the theme of how humanity has arrived at this precarious point in history—and where it can go from here—from several surprising angles. The fairy story “Lares Familiares 1981,” for example, is really about the decline of the Canadian logging industry as experienced by the dysfunctional Thorne family of loggers. Changing tacks entirely, the spine-tingling “The Bletted Woman” follows a widow with early-onset dementia who agrees to join a study that allows just-barely-alive corpses to fuse with natural surroundings, giving humans the potential to communicate with the plant world. The staggering “Conclusion: An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or, Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita” provides a grand finale, examining the strange and mundane miracle of birth through historical oddities like Mary Toft, birther of rabbits, and historical monstrosities like the atom bomb. Throughout, the author’s story notes provide fascinating context. This thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection stuns. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

This promising first installment of a new space opera trilogy, originally published as an audiobook in 2021, from British Science Fiction Award winner Hamilton (the Salvation trilogy) takes place aboard the Daedalus, a generation ship large enough to support an Earth-like habitat. Seventeen-year-old Hazel is honored to be the flower girl on Cycling Day, a disturbing yearly ceremony in which Daedalus residents over the age of 65 are recycled (read: killed) “to make room for the new generations.” Her special day is interrupted by the capture of three Cheaters—villagers who escaped recycling—one of whom tells Hazel that the habitat is running out of air. Hazel almost dismisses the older woman’s words—until an accident paralyzes her brother, Frazer. As he’s no longer able to work, he’s set to be recycled. Instead, Hazel flees with him, seeking out the hidden community of Cheaters. There, Hazel encounters revelation after revelation about the true history of her world as she struggles to help her brother and save everyone on the ship. The twists are frequent and thrilling, though it somewhat strains credulity that Hazel manages to escape so many deadly scrapes unscathed. Still, readers ready to suspend disbelief will be continually surprised and delighted. Agent: Antony Harwood, Antony Harwood Literary. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

Jacka’s third Inheritance of Magic fantasy (after An Instruction in Shadow) immediately immerses readers in his alternate London, where quotidian worries, such as how to pay the rent, coexist with far greater threats, such as being targeted by the Winged, a powerful cult. This time out, Stephen Oakwood finally reunites with his missing father, and learns that he had joined the Winged. The reunion leaves Oakwood more informed, but still in peril. His ability to see essentia, raw energy which “flows through the world in invisible currents,” and which can be used to cast spells, may have been given to him by a demon seeking to use him for an unknown purpose. It also has made him a target for the Winged, who want him to become one of them, or be killed. At the same time, his part-time security job guarding Calhoun Ashford grows more hazardous when Ashford is targeted by an assassin. Jacka’s signature mix of grounded daily life with a thoroughly explored magic system makes it easy to suspend disbelief. This keeps the series going strong. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/17/2025 | Details & Permalink