Showing posts with label weird fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weird fiction. Show all posts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Raymond St. Elmo is a programmer of artificial intelligences and virtual realities, who has no time for literary fabrications of fictitious characters and world-building. And yes, that was meant to be ironic.
A degree in Spanish Literature gave him a love of Magic Realism. Programming gave him a job. The job introduced him to artifical intelligence and virtual realities; as close to magic as reality is likely to get outside the covers of a book. And yes, that was meant to be cynical.
The author of several first-person comic-accounts of strange quests for mysterious manuscripts, mysterious girls in cloaks whose face appears SUDDENLY IN THE FLASH OF LIGHTNING. And yes, that was meant to be dramatic.
Publisher: St. Elmo Labs (April 14, 2025) Length: 414 pages Formats: ebook, paperback
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Book links: Amazon, Goodreads
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nicole Cushing is the Bram Stoker Award® winning author of Mr. Suicide and a two-time nominee for the Shirley Jackson Award. Various reviewers have described her work as “brutal”, “cerebral”, “transgressive”, "wickedly funny", “taboo”, “groundbreaking” and “mind-bending”. She lives in Indiana.
Published: August 27, 2019 by Word Horde Length: 290 pages Formats: ebook, paperback
Miranda by John R. Little
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John R. Little was born in London, Canada, and started writing short stories at the age of twelve. The stories he wrote at the time are not memorable.
His first novel, The Memory Tree, was published by Nocturne Press in 2007. It was nominated for the Bram Stoker award for best first novel.
Publisher: Bad Moon Press (January 1. 2008) Print length: 109 pages Formats: ebook, paperback
Other books by the author:
GREENSMITH - FBC Review - Amazon
THE LOOSENING SKIN—FBC Review —Amazon
THE BEAUTY - FBC REVIEW - Amazon
AUTHOR INFO: Aliya Whiteley writes across many different genres and lengths. Her first published full-length novels, Three Things About Me and Light Reading, were comic crime adventures. Her 2014 SF-horror novella The Beauty was shortlisted for the James Tiptree and Shirley Jackson awards. The following historical-SF novella, The Arrival of Missives, was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, and her noir novel The Loosening Skin was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award.
She has written over one hundred published short stories that have appeared in Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, Strange Horizons, The Dark, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction.
She also writes a regular non-fiction column for Interzone
Publisher: Solaris (March 16, 2021) Length: 300 pages Cover art: Dominic Forbes
Sunday, October 10, 2021
Book review: Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud
AUTHOR INFO: Nathan lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter. He writes literary dark fantasy and horror. He is a big fan of writers like Richard Ford, Annie Proulx, Lucius Shepard, and Clive Barker. He thinks the world is a pretty dark and unforgiving place, but a beautiful place, too. That's what he likes to write about.
Release Date: April 9, 2019 Publisher: Saga Press Pages: 288
The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley Review
Order The Beauty over HERE(USA) or HERE (UK) or directly from the publisher
Monday, May 4, 2020
The Origin of Birds in The Footprints of Writing by Raymond St. Elmo (reviewed by Lukasz Przywoski)
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of Quest of the Five Clans series
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Stations of Angels
Order Borne over HERE(USA) or HERE(UK)
OFFICIAL AUTHOR INFORMATION: VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.
Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.
FORMAT/INFO: Borne is 336 pages long. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 25, 2017.
OVERVIEW: Imagine a wasteland seething with the weirdest kind of flora, fauna, and biotech. Imagine the unimaginable and you’ll get close. Borne, set in a ruined, nameless city at some point in the not-too-distant future, paints a world in which civilization has collapsed as a result of environmental degradation.
Survivors are terrorized by Mord, a massive flying bear more than five stories high. Mord once prowled the corridors of the biotech organization known as the Company, which lies at the outskirts of the city, until he was experimented on, grew large, learned to fly and broke free. Apart from being an insane monster, he provides also sustenance as sometimes some food or biotech can be found on him. When he’s asleep, scavengers try to “feed” on him. One of them, a woman named Rachel, finds a mysterious creature entangled in the fur of Mord. At first Borne looks like a green lump, but later on, he’s described as:
a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and greens. Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin. The texture was as smooth as waterworn stone, if a bit rubbery. It smelled of beach reeds on lazy summer afternoons and, beneath the sea salt, of passionflowers.
Rachel brings Borne home – to a decaying apartment complex she shares with her lover Wick, who used to work for the Company. Wick produces biotech drugs – mainly beetles that can be swallowed or stuck in the ear, and then release powerful memories of other people’s happier times or pull out forgotten memories from the user’s own mind—or just produce beautiful visions that provide an escape from the barren, craterous landscapes of the city.
Soon, Rachel discovers that small green lump transforms into sentient, rapidly growing and utterly inhuman life-form. Borne grows fast, it starts not only to think and read about the world but also "sample" living things, absorbing people and their experiences whole.
At its core, Borne is a novel about human relationships and limits of cognition – Rachel who has five senses try to communicate with the creature that perceives the world through nine senses. Playing with the concepts of dark and light, good and evil in its backdrop, the book focuses on Rachel and Wick as they try to survive in the savage world and figure out what’s between them. Rachel seeks some kind of sense in all of this. Not an easy task in a decaying world. For some time raising Borne gives a sense of direction. But it won’t last. Children grow and turn into teenagers, teenagers tend to rebel and leave their houses.
Borne is alien and he doesn’t have a knack for assimilating the rules of what is right and what is wrong. By nature, he’s a supernatural predator, by his upbringing wannabe pacifist. It won’t work.
The prose is smart and poetic in places. Especially when describing decaying wasteland or shapes Borne takes at a given moment. It’s not particularly flowery, it’s just very visual. On the other hand, it’s not very dynamic and, given that the pacing is a bit slow in places, the narrative lacks a certain punch that would make it stronger. Additionally, a lot of things are simply told and not shown (when Rachel speaks about Wick’s anger, sadness, etc). I guess the focus of the book lies elsewhere, it’s more about intellectual adventure than tight plotting.
While I usually don’t particularly like descriptions, it’s not the case this time. The world described by the author is easy to visualize and disturbing at the same time. My imagination was challenged in good way.
Having said that, the plot itself lacks tension and drama. The book lacks some cohesive mystery that would make a reader turn pages. I turned them because I was hooked by the world. The plot, though, wasn’t as interesting as the descriptions of the city and relationship dynamics between characters.
Overall, I’m rather impressed. The detailed and strange post-apocalyptic landscape presented in Borne is fascinating and unsettling. The city is a weird, artificial ecosystem in which bioengineered organisms live alongside buildings, people, and pollution, finding their place in this strange new hierarchy. Borne contains bleak moments, but it also shows light-hearted moments reminiscent of E.T. It’s creepy but entertaining.
I think it won’t appeal to people who enjoy fast pacing and tight plotting. On the other hand, I’m such a person and yet I enjoyed the book quite a bit.
I think it’s a book worth trying, especially if you want to taste New Weird subgenre (although VanderMeer work is also called Bio-Punk or Ecological Uncanny).
If, however, you happen to be a bear – don’t read this book. It may misrepresent your formidable species.
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