I confess I've been going through a terrible reading slump lately. This book of short stories has been a big help with that: whenever I felt like reading at all, I could just grab it and read another story. My relationship to short stories in general is complicated—I don't always like them, even when they're objectively well-written, because I'm more of an "epic sprawling story" kind of reader—but I always have a higher chance of liking one when it deals with one of my favorite topics, and vampires happen to be at least in the top-5 of my favorite things to read about. I can't help it; it's an obsession I never got over. I got through my teenage years watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  reading Anne Rice and Laurel Hamilton, and playing Vampire: the Masquerade with my friends. I still play VtM with my friends a lot. Vampires really never get old.

The thing about anthologies that makes it hard rating them is that any of the stories contained in the book can be hit or miss. This one contained a lot more hits than misses for me. The book is full of fresh, fun takes on the vampire myth. I was delighted by the sheer amount of diversity here. Most of the main characters were somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and there were other types of representation, too. A lot of the authors didn't shy away from choosing big, complicated topics to explore through the lens of undead bloodsuckers, be it something as expansive as colonialism or as claustrophobically private as the darkness that may be found in the relationships between disabled people and their caregivers. 

 

The stories that stood out for me in particular were: 

I spent a long time with this book, mostly because I was not in a big reading mood in the last couple of weeks, but also a bit because this wasn't a very easy novel to get into. There were some time skips and structure decisions that I found arguable. However, for the most part I really enjoyed the book. The main character, Csorwe, was an interesting lead who went through considerable growth over the course of the story, and there were plenty of other compelling characters. Where the novel really shines is the setting: a Planescape-reminiscent multiverse with cool magic, gods, wonders, and numerous mysteries to discover. I also really enjoyed seeing so many queer characters just having adventures, their arcs not being all about their queerness.

There are some weak parts where the author quite obviously struggles to find her voice and to choose the right structural frame for all the events, but this kind of thing is something I expect from a debut. Overall, The Unspoken Name is packed with plenty of cool ideas, and I'm curious to see where the series goes next.

Wow. This book was a trip.

As I try to gather my thoughts and emotions into something coherent, I realize that whatever rambling attempt at coherence is possible will inevitably come at the expense of spoilers. So. Many. Spoilers. I find it impossible to talk about my impressions without mentioning all the big twists and bigger reveals. So I guess I'll just say: this was a wild ride, Harrow's mind is about as dark a place as I expected, the worldbuilding and mystery plots here are even better than in book one, and the storytelling techniques the author applies are devious. 

If you start reading Harrow the Ninth and wonder if you're reading a sequel to the wrong novel, please just keep reading.

Also, can I please have book three right about now? No? Damn. 

InCryptid has never been my favorite out of all Seanan McGuire's series, but I've found it enjoyable. The Antimony books in particular pulled me in. At this point, however, I'm finding myself a bit... fatigued?

On one hand, this book had plenty of cool stuff. All the family dynamics between some of my favorite characters, getting to finally learn more about Cuckoos, the mathematical descriptions (I'm the opposite of a math person, but I love watching how mathematically inclined minds work)—plenty to love! At its core, however, it was the same story I've already read by McGuire, within the same series and beyond. Nature vs nurture, what is a monster, the morality of a dominant species isn't the only morality out there, family sticks together, hold on, you're coming home. Those are all concepts that touch me deeply. I love them in books. I constantly look for stories that show them at new angles, explore them through different lenses. Here, though, I felt like I got nothing new or different.

There were other things I found issue with, like the way all that new exciting information was constantly rehashed, injecting just a bit novelty into each new conversation about instar. Also, how weird is it that a bunch of biologists/people constantly surrounded by talkative biologists didn't know what instar was until they googled it or asked each other or stole it from someone's mind? I know the equivalent of the word in my native language, and I know it from school. It was somewhere in grade 8, I think, that we studied the stages of insect development. Biology wasn't my best subject, I was never interested in it and I got very average marks, so I assume that's not something advanced. Then again, maybe it's a school system difference or something. 

Come to think of it, though, the book was overall full of those heavy-handed "As you know, Bob" conversations that were obviously only needed to cue the reader in. There was very little reason for people with a more or less similar degree of knowledge in a subject to start half of their conversations with, "So here's a crash course into this and that area. While I monologue, you can sit around and think about how you grew up learning these things." This kind of thing really breaks immersion for me, because while as a reader I appreciate getting crash courses into some of these things, I get this feeling that the characters are suddenly dropping everything in the middle of tense moment of their lives and stage a show to educate me instead of moving on with the tension and letting me worry for them. Seeing this, to such an extent, in a book by an author I genuinely love and admire and always name as my absolute favorite was a bit jarring. I'm not sure if I may have been more forgiving if it was a book by an author I didn't already hold to a very high standard, or if, instead, in that case I would simply quit in the middle. The sad thing is that I'm leaning toward the latter.

I still liked parts of the book, and I'm curious about how this arc continues—the ending was very open, to say the least. But I guess I should accept that the InCryptid series is super hit or miss for me, and while the "hit" books hit super hard and make me love them forever, the "miss" books are just really off the mark. 

 

Reading this book was a lot like going on an epic D&D adventure: exciting, compeling, and lore-rich. Unfortunately, in a way the story stuck too close to the medum that inspired it. Tabletop campaigns and novels are both shapes that a story can take, but what works perfectly around the table can't always be perfectly translated on page. When you play a game like D&D, you expect lots of side quests and scenic detours and cool stuff that happens out of the blue, and then later maybe the DM will find a way to tie it into the larger story to make it even more epic, but really, it's not obligatory. A tabletop game is essentially an exercise in improvisation with dice. Yes, we GMs usually do some planning beforehand. We also know that no plan survives contacts with players and sometimes a random generator is a lot more useful during a session than a carefully laid out scenario. Books are somewhat different beasts. I do believe that a background in running games and desigining adventures can be immensely useful for writing novels, but it pays off to adapt the tools to a task, not use them according to the patterns set around the table.

Aching God inevitably reminded me of Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. The premise is somewhat similar, after all. A guy who used to be a professional adventurer recieves news that his daughter (who has also taken up adventuring, making him worry for her well-being, and their relationship is tense for this and other reasons) is in danger, and this prompts him to take up his sword again and go on an epic quest. Of course, that's where similarities largely end; Kings of the Wyld is essentially a "bringing the band back together" story, while the MC of Aching God steps up as a leader of a merry band of younger adventurers. In Kings, the main quest involves storming a dangerous place to rescue someone, while God has the party travel to a dungeon of doom to return a cursed relic there in order to solve a problem. God is far more horror-ish than Kings, and so on, so forth. But it's still hard not to compare them, both because of the similarities in the premise and the overall D&D-ish feel.

As a potential campaign, Aching God kinda wins for me. The familiar tropes are given interesting twists. The main quest and the side quests are all fun and blend together in a beautiful landscape of adventure. The lore is wonderful and incredibly rich. There are great character-focused moments where an NPC steps up or an event happens specifcially to develop a PC's personality and character. The descriptions are vivid and nudge the PCs in exactly the right directions to look in so they can later look back at that one thing X sessions ago and go, "Whoa, foreshadowing ." Sometimes, there's absolute randomness in the middle of the page that is then skillfully tied back into the plot—the kind of plot that happens after the cool choices are made and the dice are rolled.

Note how I keep using D&D terminology. That's because it feels so much more natural for this story. When I read Kings of the Wyld, I didn't feel the need to think about it in tabletop terms at all. It was a novel. It worked as a novel. It was structured as a novel, had character and plot development happen in a way that's more fitting for novels than games, and tied several high concepts together using noveling tools. Aching God, for all the incredible excitment it provides, largely fails here. As a novel, it has quirky pacing, too many infodumps and a whole array of other peculiarities that aren't too hard to gloss over when you realize the medium the author is coming from, but they're still there.

It's a highly enjoyable book that has given me plenty of cool ideas for GMing. I thoroughly loved reading it. But I doubt I'll ever recommend it to anyone not coming from a tabletop background. 

This was an absolutely adorable, quick read. Plenty of magic, witty prose, and found family/found home vibes. Every character stood out for me, the plot developed quickly and with enough interesting twists and gradually revealed mysteries, and each of Molly's victories felt well-deserved. Despite being a book about an allegedly wicked witch, it's so full of kindness and optimism.

100% going to finish this book at some point in the future. It's just that I belatedly realized that well, I've just finished a worldbuilding-heavy novel with lots of gods in it, and this is also a worldbuilding-heavy novel with lots of gods in it. My brain is trying to confuse the two. Oops.

 

This was a bit of a difficult book to get into. After the initial hook of the first chapter or two, I felt a bit detached up until about the 20% mark. Once I reached that point, however, the story got truly compelling and held my interest until the very end. 

I must admit I loved the parts about Xiala and Serapio far more than the second plotline, even though that one was also stuffed to the brim with exciting things and wonderful characters. The entire story is brilliant, but because for a big part of it the two plotlines were so separate, I accidentally picked a favorite, and that made reading the sections about Tova and the priests a bit harder because I sort of wanted to go back to my favorites. That's the reason I'm not five-starring the book: I get why this structure was chosen, but I'm not sure it quite works here. 

Overall, though, a very good read. I absolutely adored the inventive worldbuilding with its Indigenous feel, the entire complex cosmology, the vibrant city of Tova, all the history and all the lore. I loved the sea journey. I loved the characters, even the ones who didn't make my top-two least. I loved how much casual queerness there was, with Xiala being bi, and multiple trans/nonbinary characters being present. 

The ending was a bit of too much of a cliffhanger for my taste—that's where the book lost another half star, because honestly, I'm not opposed to open endings as such, but there's an open ending and then there's "hold on, where's my entire act III, I feel like we missed it?". It sure does do the job of making me positively hunger for book 2, though. And I think once that one's out and I get my hands on it, I'll re-read Black Sun before delving into it. I think that I missed a lot in the Tova storyline for the reasons mentioned above, and perhaps on a second read-through I'll spot more amazing things that I've so far overlooked. 

Oh, and how could I forget? There's one more thing I loved: the crows! All the facts about the crows, and their constant presence, and how those epigraphs from in-universe texts on crows subtly foreshadowed so many things. 

This novella had so many things that should have kept me on the edge of my seat. Space-traveling nuns! Living spaceships! Huge conspiracies! What could go wrong?

Well, something did. Despite all these cool ideas stuffed into the small book, the way they were executed simply failed to grasp my interest. People talked. Events happened. I kept wondering when the fun stuff was going to begin, and it kind of never did. There was a small part about the living spaceships early on that had me curious, but more from the worldbuilding standpoint. And there were some interesting moments in the final third of the book when the entire conspiracy plot was getting tied together. Perhaps it's a format-specific problem; some stories work fine in novella format, and some just need more space to develop characters and concepts.

I suppose it could have been a good idea for me to at least skim the first book before I delved into the sequel. Unfortunately, I didn't—I thought my memory was going to serve me well enough, but apparently it had enough gaps in it to keep me wondering if I was supposed to barely recognize the characters on occasion because of the time skip and the new situation, or not. Because of that, I suspect I didn't get immersed well enough, and that's absolutely not the book's fault, but it did impact my perception of it somewhat.

Overall, in spite of my memory troubles, I enjoyed it. I did feel kind of let down that what felt like a HEA in book one proved to be a HFN at best, but the flashbacks in this book explained the situation well enough. Emily Tesh's writing is as lush and poetic here as it was in Silver in the Wood. The descriptions of every little corner of the setting are amazing, and they really pulled me in. Despite Silver's shortcomings, I couldn't help but feel for him. The central plot was quite interesting, from the vampire hunt to the fairy storyline. There were nice moments of dry humor throughout.

I did feel, though, that the reconciliation/second chance romance in here was kind of… a little too subtle. Some parts of this plotline felt almost abrupt because it felt like the development between some of the major beats happened largely behind the scenes. And I do want to believe Silver and Tobias are going to get it right the second time around, but I'm not entirely convinced. Whether it's my own current state of mind and my possibly misremembering parts of the first book, I can't tell. I'll err on the side of believing in the author and give the book a 4. Huge parts of it were immensely enjoyable, after all. And the prose. Did I mention the prose? It alone deserves all the stars.