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Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Magical Realism
Length: 299 pages
Publisher: Alcove Press
Release Date: November 18, 2025
ASIN: B0DMTN56GS
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: eGalley from NetGalley
Rating: 3/5 stars

“Leeann Wu’s hands have started glowing at the most inconvenient times, and the single mother and midwife doesn’t know why. Could it be perimenopause? A hallucination brought on by a lack of sleep? On top of that concerning development, her daughter is off to university in a few months, her tenuous relationship with her ob-gyn mother is in peril of cracking, and she’s attracted the attention of a younger man who sees far more than she’s comfortable with. Her hands, glowing or not, are already full.

But as widespread insomnia plagues the town and life-threatening accidents begin to pile up, Leeann discovers the glow is not an anomaly at all—rather, she’s part of a long line of women who possess a power unlike anything Leeann’s ever known. Yet, even with the cryptic clues left by her great aunt before her untimely death, Leeann has no idea how to use her new skills.

With her town in imminent danger, Leeann doesn’t have time to waste. She’ll need to make peace with her magical heritage and do whatever it takes to find out if her glow means something more—before it’s too late.”

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got this on ebook through NetGalley for review.

Thoughts: This was a strangely timely read for me, with my son having just started college and the main character working on dealing with her daughter heading off for college. I related to the issues the main character was going through and was drawn into the story. However, the writing itself felt a bit jarring, and I didn’t love the ending.

Leeann Wu is trying to deal with her daughter leaving for college, her mother’s opinion that Leeann could be more, the attractive brother of a client who she has a crush on, and…oh yeah, her hands have started glowing. As Leeann tries to deal with life, things are crashing down around her. Accidents and depression are happening more and more as people aren’t able to sleep. Leeann and her daughter and mother have to figure out what this strange power is and if it can somehow be used to solve the insomnia gripping the town.

This story has a very magical realism feel to it rather than straight contemporary fantasy. I normally really like magical realism, but oddly for this book, that was the part of the story that felt awkward to me. I could relate to Leeann’s complicated feelings about her daughter moving away for college (having just gone through that myself). I was also drawn in by Leeann’s self analysis of her life to this point. I can sympathize with her complicated relationship with her mother. I also could relate to her feeling of being at a changing point in life where she could re-invent herself or, in her case, start a new romantic relationship after not being in one for years. However, the whole glowing hands thing was odd and never well explained. The sleeping plague was also fairly vague. I felt I never had a good handle on what was causing it, and the ending of the book left me feeling even more confused and lost about what happened.

This ended up being a fairly quick read for me; the story was engaging enough and the characters felt real. However, the writing itself is a bit awkward, disconnected, and didn’t flow that well. Additionally, the dialogue was unnatural sounding. While I eventually got used to the cadence, I didn’t really enjoy it.

My Summary (3/5): Overall this was a quick read and it was engaging. I did like how it showed a family working through a challenging time and difficult family dynamics to support each other in the end. I think this book resonated with me more because I am in a similar life stage as Leeann than it might have at another time in my life. Those positives didn’t quite offset the fact that the writing felt unnatural and the dialogue did not flow well. In addition to that, the magical realism elements to this book remain vague and unexplained. The ending left me feeling lost and confused. I probably won’t seek out another book from Hung in the future, while I appreciated the subject matter the writing and magical realism elements felt unfinished.

In reply to Benedict.

Do the companies also offer a paltry discount when replacing them, if the employee turns in the worn out sigl? I imagine that the profit margin could be increased further if the company did so.

Obviously it would take multiple busted sigls to offset the essentia cost of a new one, but if they’re all produced at the same well or wells they could probably get some amount of return. (Based on your sigl recycling articles)

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

Her Last Breath by Taylor Adams

Mogsy’s Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Genre: Thriller

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: William Morrow (February 17, 2026)

Length: 323 pages

Author Information: Website | Twitter

I now find myself frantically looking up every single book by Taylor Adams because I genuinely can’t believe I have never read him before now. Her Last Breath was my first, but it will absolutely not be my last. It’s been a while since a thriller gripped me like this; I finished this book so exhilarated I could barely catch my breath.

The story centers on two women, Tess and Allie, whose lives have been intertwined since childhood despite very different beginnings. Tess grew up in an abusive home, and it was Allie’s family who took her in and gave her the stability she desperately needed. From there, they became lifelong friends, though as adults, their paths diverged. Allie’s bold, outgoing personality led her to a career as a successful travel influencer, while Tess, who is more cautious and anxious, stayed closer to home, helping manage Allie’s accounts as a way to pay her way through law school. But after returning from a long period of jet-setting around the globe, Allie suggests a caving trip as a chance for them to reconnect, and Tess reluctantly agrees.

Things get off to a bad start when they arrive and find a strange man lingering near the cave entrance, asking unsettling questions. Then, the encounter quickly spirals into something far more dangerous. As it turns out, the man wasn’t just there by random. He has a purpose, and he’s determined that neither women will leave the cave alive. The real question is why they were targeted in the first place.

The book opens with Tess in a hospital bed, referred to as “the survivor” by the detective interviewing her. The story next alternates between this present-day interrogation and Tess’s detailed account of the women’s harrowing ordeal that occurred underground. It’s a structure that works beautifully, with information carefully revealed and sometimes deliberately withheld. I won’t say much more than this, because Her Last Breath is one of those books that’s best experienced without knowing too much. Just trust that there are plenty of surprises waiting.

The pacing is tight, and once things start moving, they do not slow down. Even the quieter, “safer” interview scenes carry tension because you can feel that something bigger is lurking beneath the surface. There’s a mystery here that won’t be revealed until it’s good and ready, and looking back, I realized all the perspective changes were planned deliberately for maximum effect. The author knew exactly what he was doing, when to give and when to hold back, when to drop a detail that makes the reader rethink everything they just read.

The cave scenes also shredded my nerves. If you’re claustrophobic, or heck, even if you’re not, I would strongly recommend asking yourself if you really want to tackle this book. The writing was so immersive, I actually felt physically uncomfortable reading it. The descriptions of the cramped tunnels, the suffocating darkness, and the cold hard rock pressing in on you from every direction are no joke. The sense of being trapped, of not being able to stand up straight or turn around or even expand your lungs to take a full breath, is so vivid that it’s hard not to feel it yourself.

I also really appreciated the character dynamics. Tess and Allie’s friendship is layered and complex, shaped by years of history but also the differences in their personalities. When met with a challenge or danger, they have different ideas on how to confront it. These emotional currents make the experience feel more personal and lead to uncertainty when questions arise. If you read a lot of thrillers, you might spot a few of the tricks Adams has up his sleeve, but honestly, even though I did catch onto some things, it didn’t lessen the fun I had with this book at all. The suspense, the atmosphere, and the execution were solid and carried the story, not to mention there were still plenty of twists that floored me.

By the end, I was in disbelief at how brilliantly everything came together. Her Last Break is tense and claustrophobic, but also incredibly entertaining. It’s the kind of book that reminds me why I love thrillers and why I will never agree to go caving in a million years. Plus, now I have a new must-read author in Taylor Adams, and I’m very happy about that.

…and here’s the video. I just finished it. As you can tell, I had a blast doing it.

If you want to be notified at the time of launch, click here.

I’ll have more information for you on Tuesday. Stay tuned!

Alien Influences Kickstarter Low Resolution

I had a lovely February of reading. Lots more time than I expected, which is fun. As regular readers of this feature know, I don’t recommend everything nor should I, considering I’ve also been reading 300-year-old plays for my Theatre History class. But there’s lots of good here, including a nonfiction book that everyone in the U.S. should read.

You’ll note some recommended articles from On Wisconsin, the alumni magazine for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I learned something rather amazing. The University has a foundation that has existed for 100 years to manage its intellectual property. Well…hmmm…made me wonder if most universities do that. I know the bigger ones do. This one is proactive, though. I did not link to the article, but found its concept interesting.

Started a book by a well-known producer, songwriter, and DJ, the stepson of a rock star, and the child of privilege. As interested as I was in the start of his career, I couldn’t get past all the sweaty teenagers at raves in the 1990s. Clearly the book was a compilation of the stories he tells his friends. So, I donated it to the library. Maybe someone else will like to read about sweaty wealthy teenagers taking drugs and learning about music, but not me.

And then there was the science fiction novel I pulled off my TBR shelf. The novel is fifteen years old, but new to me. I like the author’s work. I’ve read some of his books before. This one started really well. It was scary and dark and intriguing…but the mystery that drew me in got resolved halfway through and suddenly we were in some kind of galactic war that wasn’t well described and read like an outline of a larger work. I actually got bored. So I won’t be recommending that, which kinda makes me sad because it started so very well.

Even though I recommended a lot of stories from the Best Mystery Stories of the Year, I’m not recommending the whole volume. I had to skip too many due to my own issues with child endangerment. Also, some of the stories I read just didn’t hold me. So, if you want to see what else I thought good in the volume, check out November’s Recommended Reading List.

I am also recommending a story from a collection that includes a story by a now-disgraced sf author. Dunno if the editor knew the accusations before buying the story; I’m guessing not. But just be cautious if you don’t want to buy anything with that man’s name on it.

Here’s what I recommend from my reading in February.

 

February, 2026

Armstrong, Kelley, This Fallen Prey, Minotaur Books, 2018. Yes, yes, I know, I came to this series late, but OMG, is it keeping me enthralled. The problem is that it is so dark I cannot read one book right after another. And, the deeper I go in, the more it violates a few of my personal reading rules, but I’m committed, which is a testament to Kelley Armstrong’s writing.

SPOILER ALERT for those of you who share my aversion to children/animals (cute ones, anyway) harmed in books:

an animal we care about gets injured…and some baby animals die.

END SPOILER ALERT

Note that I’m a hypocrite because I’m writing a story right now with a five-month old baby in mortal jeopardy. (It is a Nelscott story, which are often dark and noir, but still…)

Anyway…this book is amazing. I thought of trying to describe it to Dean, but I can’t because there’s so many areas where you must suspend your disbelief, starting with the town of Rockton itself. But within the world of Rockton, this story is a true thriller, filled with situations that would never happen anywhere else. And that’s a great thing. Kelley Armstrong has created a world so vivid and powerful that I believe every word she writes about them. (And I’m so happy I don’t live there.)

I really can’t say anything else without spoiling the story. Start with City of the Lost and read on. These books are that good.

Boschert, Sherry, 37 Words: Title IX And Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination, The New Press, 2022. First a note on the link: I sourced the New Press’s site because I couldn’t get any of the other places that will give me links to various ebook sites like Kobo and B&N didn’t work. I’m happy to have you all order directly from the publisher, even though they slapped an awful cover on this book. I mean truly terrible. And I only found the book while I was buying books on women’s basketball, so there wasn’t much promo either. It makes me grumpy, since this is a good book and an important topic that got buried by publisher mistakes.

The book was published in 2022 and written before that. So it does not reflect the era we’re in at all. There’s a lot more hope in this book for the future, and an assumption that the rebuilding we’d have to do was rebuilding from the previous time the orange menace was in office. Sometimes that made me sad.

But Title IX was passed in my lifetime. I did not benefit from it because it took forever for schools to implement it. I watch now with joy, tears, and a little bit of envy over the girls who get to play sports I was denied. I have no idea if I would have been good, but getting the opportunity would have been nice.

The fight for Title IX impressed me. Even though it happened in my lifetime, and I really study the time period, I had no idea what these women went through to get it passed. And as I write this, the WNBA and the players are negotiating a CBA for their next contract…and can’t agree on revenue sharing which every male professional sports league  has (even the minor sports, like bowling). This, after A’ja Wilson just won Athlete of the Year. Not Female Athlete of the Year. Best athlete in general, male or female or nonbinary.

If Title IX had passed in its original, there wouldn’t be the fights over trans kids in sports. There wouldn’t be a lot of problems that we have now. But we also have the WNBA and other great professional women’s sports now because of it. The book does show the deeply embedded misogyny in U.S. culture, which partly explains the situation we’re in with our leadership right now. (Let’s vote for a white man who failed the first time over a highly decorated and extremely competent Black woman. Sigh.)

There’s a lot of hope in this book and it’s not false hope. It’s the strength of people fighting for ground, inch by important inch. Read this, even if you think you remember or know what happened with Title IX here in the States. Understanding what happened in the past is essential to our future.

Kilkenny, Katie, “Extras! Extras! Read All About Them!” The Hollywood Reporter, December 3, 2025. At the end of every issue of The Hollywood Reporter, they pull something from the history of the magazine. Usually, they’re fun things related to current events. This one was fascinating. The thug in charge uses the phrase “central casting” to describe people. The cliche has been around for 101 years, and The Hollywood Reporter explains why, and what Central Casting really was. (And, oh, yeah, it still exists.) A short, fascinating read.

Millman, Ethan, “‘I Think Everything I Write Is Going To Be A Hit,'” The Hollywood Reporter, December 3, 2025. This link is to the Songwriters Roundtable that The Hollywood Reporter runs every year. Usually, there’s a quote or two that I pull from the roundtable, but this time, most everything here was strong and good and (weirdly) not very pithy. So writers, music fans, read this one.

Schmitt, Preston, “A New Era For College Sports,” On Wisconsin, Fall 2025. Dean follows college sports more than I do. He’s been griping about some of the changes for years now, especially the transfer portal. I know he supported the changes in students being allowed to profit from their name, likeness, and image. In other words, they can earn money, which is something that he has been held against the NCAA for more than fifty years. (He was disqualified as a student athlete because he taught skiing, so he couldn’t be on his college’s ski team because he wasn’t an “amateur.”) I’ve been griping about the Big 10, calling it the Big 100—which, right now, has 18 “member institutions.” 18 is not 10, and yes, I understand why the branding hasn’t changed but…get off my lawn.

Anyway, this article explains in great and clear detail about all of the changes in college sports. From deals to laws to sports agents, it’s all here, and it finally made the era we’re in clear to me. I hope it helps out those of you who haven’t been following this as closely as Dean. And, from a contract/negotiation/intellectual property standpoint, it’s fascinating as well.

Specktor, Matthew, “After Burn,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 2, 2026. A fascinating article about Los Angeles, one year after the fires. The piece (and the sidebars) show a city divided between haves and have nots, between people who are still dealing with the fires and people who “know someone who lost their house.” Worth reading.

Stegman, Casey, “Effie’s Oasis,” Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mystery Stories of The Year 2025, edited by John Grisham, Mysterious Press, 2025. As regular readers of this little blog feature know, I hate children-in-jeopardy stories. I have a system: when I hit the mention of a kid in a story/book/novel, I skip ahead to see if the kid is mentioned (and alive) at the end. If the story seems a bit too rough, I quit then and there. (I do the same with pets.) Usually, I find out that the kid’s dead or not important, and I don’t read the story.

So, when I read Stegman’s story, with its wonderful voice and great main character, I got to page four or so, when a child starts crying after being called a name, and I of course skipped to the end. Yep, the kid’s there. And the ending was so fascinating that I did something I hadn’t done outside of my editing days.

I read the story backwards. That usually means something kicked me out in the middle, but I’m intrigued enough to want to know what happened. And in this case, I had no obligation to read the story, but I did so anyway. It’s good, it’s smart, and it’s powerful. I suggest reading it forward, however.

Wenc, Christine, “Fake News!” On Wisconsin, Fall 2025. Well, I ordered a book because of the alumni magazine. I had forgotten that The Onion was founded at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and came from a particularly Madison sensibility. I had already moved away from Wisconsin when it started and hadn’t seen the early editions—which I guarantee that I would have since I never missed the free newspapers around town. I even wrote for one, Isthmus, for years before I moved.

This is a fascinating little excerpt on the actual start of The Onion. It’s worth the read to see how crazy ideas can often work, and work well.

Wignall, Kevin, “Retrospective,” Ink and Daggers, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Titan, 2023. I have to admit some disappointment with this anthology. It’s a collection of stories chosen from the short list for the British Crime Writers Association Dagger awards. It took until I got halfway through the book before something really held me. (Except for one story that might’ve worked for the Brits of the world. I had to look up all the references, which took some of the punch out of the ending.) “Retrospective” is a story of a war photographer who has given up his work for a reason that we learn later. Very powerful, and worth reading.

The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated by Danusia Stok and David French (Gollancz editions)

If there is one group of people that deserve more praise in the literary community, it’s translators. Recent years have shown us just how vital they are to our bookshelves and TBR lists. Its them we have to thank for every Roadside Picnic and Eternaut that dares to tantalize English speakers the world over.

Make no mistake, theirs is a challenging, sometimes even thankless job. The difficulty of translating an entire novel into another language should not be underestimated. Finding the right expression, the correct syntax, ensuring the lyricism of a work is properly communicated are just a few of the challenges translators face. Calling it an art of its own would be no exaggeration. And as a result of that art, we as readers, have been gifted a Smaug’s hoard of titles. Think entire subgenres, fresh visions of tomorrow, and treasure troves of inspiration. Our beloved speculative genre is so much richer thanks to the riotous rogues and deadly dames translated works have introduced us to.

Here are seven translators who have had a massive impact on the SFF community over the past two decades.

Megan McDowell

Mariana Enriquez’s work translated by Megan McDowell: the novel Our Share of Night (Hogarth,
February 7, 2023), and collection A Sunny Place for Shady People (Hogarth, September 17, 2024)

Richmond, Kentucky might seem impossibly far from the summit of Latin America’s literary world. But that’s exactly where one of the past decades most prolific translators of South American literature hails from.

Megan McDowell’s translations include long-standing collaborations with writers like Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin. It’s her work with the former where she has translated some truly remarkable speculative pieces of fiction including Our Share of Night and A Sunny Place for Shady People, which won a World Fantasy Award in 2025.

David French The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated by Danusia Stok and David French (Gollancz editions)

Few franchises of the modern era have had the staying power of The Witcher. Andrzej Sapkowski’s magnum opus has captured the imagination of millions through his much-loved books and the many games based on them. If you have read Sapkowski in English chances are you’ve seen some of David French’s work.

What has turned into a massive translation effort originally began with a young Englishman that made the fateful choice to venture beyond the Iron Curtain. That man was none other than David French. His motivation? As explained in multiple interviews, he began teaching in Poland in 1988 to learn Polish so that he could speak to his paternal aunt Marline in her native tongue.

Years of mastering the Polish language led to opportunities to work as a translator. When Witcher author Sapkowski began looking for a new translator in 2011, French leaped at the chance. He hasn’t looked back since.

To date, French has translated all but two of Sapkowski’s Witcher novels (The Last Wish and Blood of Elves being translated by the wonderful Danusia Stok) as well as the highly underrated Hussite trilogy. It is no exaggeration to say that millions of readers would not know Geralt, Sapkowski’s black humor, or the grim worlds his characters inhabit without the hard work of one man that just wanted to get closer to a loved one.

Lucia Graves The Cemetery of Forgotten Books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, all translated by Lucia Graves: The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game, Labyrinth of Spirits, and The Prisoner of Heaven, plus the short story “Rose of Fire.”

To understand just what makes Lucia Graves such an important translator, you first have to appreciate just how influential the late Carlos Ruiz Zafon was. Despite dying in 2020 at the age of 55, every one of the four books published during his lifetime were celebrated like special events. And every single one was translated into English by Graves.

Graves grew up in Mallorca, Spain, the daughter of legendary British author Robert Graves. According to a 1999 interview with The Independent, the younger Graves was brought up speaking English, Spanish, and Catalan. She would initially make a name for herself translating her father’s books into Spanish. While she has written many books herself, including A Woman Unknown, it is as a translator for Zafon that she is most principally known.

In 2012 she was nominated for a Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation award for her work on Midnight Palace. Since then, she also translated most of the stories in Zafon’s posthumously published book The City of Mist.

Elisabeth Jaquette

Works by Basma Abdel Aziz translated by Elisabeth Jaquette: The Queue
(Melville House, May 24, 2016, cover by Archie Ferguson), and 8 Minutes

The diversity of Elisabeth Jaquette’s oeuvre is impressive. Her Arabic to English translations span multiple genres from sci-fi to nonfiction to political thrillers. Many of her translations offer a window into the post-Arab Spring Middle East. Geographically, they have helped expose readers to authors from North Africa to Yemen.

In 2016, her translation of Basma Abdel Aziz’s dystopian novel The Queue received the English PEN Translates award. Another translation of an Abdel Aziz story was featured in The Apex Book of World Sci-Fi Vol.5. Other speculative works Jaquette has translated include the graphic comic 8 Minutes by Mohamed Salah.

Giuseppe di Martino

Japanese-English translations by Giuseppe di Martino: Hiroyuki Morioka’s
Crest of the Stars Volumes 1-3 Collector’s Edition (JNC, March 3, 2020), and
Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki’s Billy Bat, Volume 2 (Kana, September 1, 2026)

The number of great Japanese-English translators of fiction is so vast, we could spend hours talking about the individuals feeding the world’s hunger for light-novels, short stories, and manga. You have folks like Yuki Tejima (translator of Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lost Souls series), Ajani Oloye (The Deer King by Nahoko Uehashi), Alexander O. Smith (All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka) and so many others.

But in terms of speculative novels, Giuseppe di Martino is definitely among the best. He’s translated several of Hiroyuki Morioka’s space operas, such as Crest of the Stars, as well as numerous light-novels. For the more manga-inclined, di Martino is the translator of one of the year’s most hotly anticipated titles, namely volumes two and three of Naoki Urasawa’s Billy Bat.

Anton Hur

Translations by Anton Hur: Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires (HarperVia, April 30,
2024), and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City (Grove Press, November 16, 2021)

South Korea has long been a heavyweight in the world of literature and when it comes to the speculative genre, Anton Hur has had a hand in translating some of the nation’s best into English. The Stockholm-born author’s CV reads almost like a ‘Who’s Who’ of South Korea’s most acclaimed works including major prize darlings like Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires, and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City.

This year we’ll have a chance to read perhaps his most ambitious translation yet when The Bird That Drinks Tears is released on June 2. As the first of four books in one of Korea’s wildly popular The Heart of the Nhaga series, don’t be surprised if the novel and Hur enjoy Witcher-levels of success.

Ken Liu Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death’s End, and The Redemption of Time (Head of Zeus Press UK editions, 2015-2017)

The author of The Grace of Kings wears many hats. His work to bring greater attention to contemporary Chinese sci-fi has been tremendous, include editing the massive anthologies Broken Stars and Invisible Planets. But most importantly for this list are the large number of translations he has done.

Fiction translated by Liu has appeared in Clarkesworld, The Best Science Fiction of the Year series, SQ Mag, Lightspeed, and Galaxy’s Edge. Some of the finest science fiction authors in China have trusted them with their work, a longlist that includes Chen Qiufan, Xia Jia, and Bao Shu.

It is as the translator of Cixin Liu’s work, however, that Ken Liu is best known. He translated the first, third, and fourth books in the best-selling Three-Body Problem series. Other efforts to bring Cixin Liu’s work to English-speaking audiences include translations of short stories such as The Weight of Memories.

What’s your favorite translated sci-fi work? Let us know in the comments below!

Ismail D. Soldan’s last article for Black Gate was Sci-Fi Dystopias We Should Learn From. He is an author, journalist, and poet. His work has previously appeared in Illustrated Worlds, LatineLit, and The Acentos Review among other publications. A proud explorer of both real and imagined worlds, some of his latest published work include The Right Kind of Royalty (on swordsandsorcerymagazine.com) and Heavenfall (in JR Handley Presents: Contested Landing Volume 2). 

In February I read 9 books. You can see the reviews for all of them, which ones were my favorite, etc. below. Hope you all had a great month of reading!

I started the following series:

• Quicksilver (Fae and Alchemy, Book 1) by Callie Hart (2/5 stars)
• The Faithful Dark (The Brilliant Soul Duology, Book 1) by Cate Baumer (3/5 stars)
• Mimic & Me (Mimic & Me, Book 1) by Cassius Lange and Ryan Tang, Narrated by Jeff Hays, Various (3/5 stars)

I finished the following series:

• None!

My Favorite Books of the Month Were:

• The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula (4/5 stars)

– Goodreads Reading Challenge (Progress: /150)

The full list of books that I read this month are shown below:
1. Carnival Fantastico by Anglea Montoya (4/5 stars)
2. The Elsewhere Express by Samantha Sotto Yambao (2/5 stars)
3. Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman (3/5 stars)
4. Kirkyards & Kindness (A Rip Through Time, Book 4.5) by Kelley Armstrong (4/5 stars)
5. Quicksilver (Fae and Alchemy, Book 1) by Callie Hart (2/5 stars)
6. The Faithful Dark (The Brilliant Soul Duology, Book 1) by Cate Baumer (3/5 stars)
7. Mimic & Me (Mimic & Me, Book 1) by Cassius Lange and Ryan Tang, Narrated by Jeff Hays, Various (3/5 stars)
8. Black Butler Vol 34 by Yana Toboso (4/5 stars)
9. The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula (4/5 stars)

I've officially started work on The Commander!

Of course, "started" is a bit of a fuzzy concept. I'd done some initial work on The Commander last year, along with The Pilot, but now I'm full-on writing the book.

What did I write in between? I'll share more details on that when I'm allowed to. Currently, your security access isn't high enough.

If my new, secret manuscript were in Resident Evil 9, it would be hidden behind two doors, one of which is opened by a horse-shaped crystal and the other by a crystal-shaped horse. Top security, that's what I'm saying.

But for now, it's back to the open ocean for me, where I will return to The Last Horizon while on the deck of a ship. A regular water ship, not a spaceship, unfortunately. I've only written while on a spaceship once.

​In preparation for The Commander, I re-read the existing four books, which was pretty fun. It's always hard to read your own stuff, but I don't get to read enough about wizards flying spaceships. So it's a welcome break from what I normally read: arcane tomes written in languages that only exist in dreams.

If I were a Resident Evil 9 character, I would end this by saying something like "I sure am glad to not be getting eaten by zombies right n--"

-Will

P.S. You get no points for guessing what game I'm playing.

Great plot so far can not wait for book 4 to come out. Its fantastic to see you continuing on with writing on book 5.
Its a pity edits for book 4 is taking longer but it can’t be help.
keep going….

Yes, we find out the Queen put members of the Seelie Court under a geas that prevented them from saying certain things about Ash to outsiders/non-Seelie Court members. We find this out from a different faerie under the geas, who tells it to Kit, and it's mentioned in relation to Nene as well. We haven't explored the concept of the geas much before, but it's an old part of Faerie folklore and would supersede the "not lying" — especially since most of what Nene says in TDA (that she doesn't know exactly how old Ash is now and wouldn't recognize him) — is true.

Tom’s Crossing (Pantheon, October 28, 2025)

Every now and then I reach for a copy of Anna Karenina on my TBR bookshelf, but hesitate to wonder, “Do I really have time to get into this kind of heavy reading of some 800 plus pages right now?” So far, the answer has been, “No.” I really do intend to get to it at some point because, well, it’s Anna Karenina. Just not quite now.

Why then, did I pick up the 1,227 page opus by Mark Z. Danielewski, Tom’s Crossing?

Mainly because of the one and only blurb on the book jacket:

This is an amazing work of fiction. I absolutely loved it. At the heart you’ll find a blood drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there’s so much more. I immersed myself in. Have never ready anything like it.

So, despite what we know about glad-handing you-blurb-my-book and I’ll blurb yours endorsements, this is the only blurb on a book by an author with a low profile and cult status, and the if it’s genuinely that great a read for Stephen King, it’s certainly good enough for me. (And, besides, I was going on a long trip where it made as much sense to take one big book rather than several. Sorry Tolstoy.)

So who is Tom and what is he crossing?

Tom is a Gatestone, a family that has a generational McCoy-Hatfield feud with the Porches. The story takes place in 1982  in Orvop (an anagram for Provo), Utah and neighboring Orem (i.e., Rome) amidst the mountains of Mt. Katanogos (Timpanagos) in the Isatch (Wasatch).  Why the need for a slightly alternative universe? Possibly to convey a heightened sense of the mythological. Add to this a mild dissection of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and some Native American folklore, but, most essentially, references to Homer’s Odyssey. For, indeed, this is a hero’s trails and tribulations quest in the classic  Joseph Campbell sense.

The crossing refers both to a treacherous mountain expedition to fulfill an oath as well as the transition from life to death — indeed, the eponymous Tom dies by page 37:

Tom always said he was gonna die young. The way he described it, with a glee his mother abhorred, he’d be hung up on some mighty bull, hand caught in the ropes tied by his own division, swung this way, that way, until he was broken, scraped off, gored, ground down, and finally stamped into an icy black dream, and in front of thousands too, maybe even on television, Gone like that and not even twenty-seven.

Gored by cancer rather than a bull, Tom is not entirely gone. Only his physical presence. Tom becomes a spiritual guide from the grave, albeit not all-seeing, a ghost to escort travelers to  safety, even while sometimes unsure of how to get there. (So while not strictly speaking a fantasy, the ghostly presence and narrative foreboding of horrors to come — “Hard to figure how so much awful horror could have started out” is the opening line — I think qualifies it as Black Gate adjacent. Plus if Stephen King likes it, Black Gate readers should.)

On his deathbed, Tom extracts a promise from his friend Kalin March, like Tom a natural equestrian, to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter and take them across the mountains  to the safety of “the Crossin.”  (The omniscient narrator, possesses a sophisticated command of English mixed with hick slang and spellings, such as dropping the “g” in “ing” ending words; somewhere toward the last 100 pages or so you’ll begin to guess who the narrator is, though how the narrator knows as much about events to which they are not present only becomes evident at the end. Note that the title page identifies the “author” as E.L.M. and to an anonymous transcription.) This request reflects how Tom had earlier rescued Kalin from a bullying attack, and that “aside from Tom, no one else welcomed him into their fold.”

Kalin is the true outsider, neither Gaestone nor Porch, the archetypical, if even a teenaged one, Western hero (the novel’s subtitle is “A Western”). Kalin is also the naive protagonist in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn, eager to do the right thing despite societal pressures to do otherwise. Indeed, Tom’s indefatigable good humor is somewhat reminiscent of the mischievous Tom Sawyer.

Tom is Kalin’s literal spiritual guide from the grave, though not all-seeing, a ghost that helps escort Katlin and the horses across the mountains to “the Crossin,” even while sometimes unsure of how to get there. (So while not strictly speaking a fantasy, the ghostly presence and narrative foreboding of horrors to come — “Hard to figure how so much awful horror could have started out” is the opening line — I think qualifies it as Black Gate adjacent.)

Navigating steep mountainous terrain during winter is a challenging enough pursuit, but further complicating matters for Katlin is the unwanted addition to the treacherous journey of Tom’s sister, Landry, who serves simultaneously as sidekick, cheerleader, adolescent crush, and, ultimately, redeemer.  A rescue mission of another kind is also underway by the respective mothers of the two adolescents, who bond despite their different religious views and that Katlin is (falsely) accused of a murder and the kidnapping of Landry.

It wouldn’t be a Western without the bad guys, of which there are more than a few. The patriarch Old Porch, whose set-to-be-butchered ponies Kalin has “stolen” (it can’t get any more of a Western story than a horse rustling), in a fit of rage commits a murder he attempts to blames on Kalin. Old Porch and his for the most part equally no-good sons set out to follow Katlin, Landry and the horses ostensibly to gain vengeance and return of their property, though actually to cover up their father’s crime.

Further adding to the tales’ fabulism are constant references, sometimes including extensive description of their often unpleasant demises, to various local folks who’ve painted or sketched depictions of key events during these escapades. For example:

Both Marsha Taylor, a baker, and Lou Keele, a florist, would in 1985 admirably render this moment on thick sheets of cotton paper, watercolors for Marsha, colored pencil for Lou…

These works of arts at some point go on display, are destroyed in a fire, and somehow resurrected as part of a memorial art show. There are also re-enactment ceremonies of the Crossing events among the “many commentators”:

Not entirely on their own in the creative retellins, rants, iterative speculations, and musins regardin the events that transpired in and around the Isatch Canyon and Katanogos massif that late October in 1982.

These “musins”serve as a sort of Greek chorus, lamenting how fate dictates bad outcomes that could have been avoided, if only if:

Kay Shroeppel would many years hence, and in an empty theater in Helsinki, in 2028 in fact, declare to her friend Gaylene Zobell, who was just then visitin from Belgrade, Serbia… that if only Old Porch had embraced his thespian inclinations, he might’ve lived a more fulfillin life.

And because this is a Western, there is a stolen gun of seeming worth. And in keeping with Chekov, since there is a gun, it eventually goes off.

How the narrator somehow knows all these things and the way they are conveyed may prove annoying to some readers. And given that this is the proverbial doorstep of a book, these readers might be inclined to abandon the journey.

That would be their loss. Like another not always easy-to-read novel, Moby Dick, the hunt must be seen to its conclusion. As any worthy journey must.

David Soyka is one of the founding bloggers at Black Gate. He’s written over 200 articles for us since 2008. See them all here.

Yes, you'll see his POV in Last King of Faerie.

In the Anna and Ariadne story in Better in Black, we do see what Matthew and Sylvain are up to! There are also hints about them in several of the other stories, like Who The Wolf Loves (Luke/Jocelyn.)

Hey LitStackers! Here’s a Double LitStack Rec, of two wildly good reads, The Marriage Plot…

The post “The Marriage Plot” and “Thief River Falls” appeared first on LitStack.

In reply to Jim Sackman.

Yes, there’s no such thing as an off-the-shelf sigl.

And essentia is very much a limited resource. That doesn’t stop companies from selling it to their own employees, providing those sales are profitable.

In reply to Celia.

It’s roughly measurable, so yes, buyers can take manufacturers to task over it.

In reply to Jason Enberg.

Yes, the “you can’t buy sigls off the shelf” thing was discussed back in book 1.

Lead time is going to vary. The cheaper the sigl, the lower the lead time.

Okay so I guess I misunderstood when I was listening. Stephen was offered Locator sigils that were threaded for a price. My read of that was that these were off the shelf and available at will. But after reading this, he would have had to buy a threaded locator sigil made just for him. Correct?

I recognize that this became overcome by events, but it seems to me to be a waste of good essentia. That, in turn, leads me to believe that essentia is not a scarce resource. Otherwise there would be more profitable ways to employ it.

I will share a thing to think about? Ash has the power to make people love him and want to please him, so how does that go when he can't turn it off? Even if he wants to? :-)

Well, you can’t say that reading Fantasy genre books is ever boring. Having last read and reviewed a lovely book involving magic and cats at a cat shelter, this novel is a bit of an about-turn. Between Two Fires is in the publisher’s details described as a story of medieval horror. For those of a…