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Nadia Afifi’s debut novel The Sentient is the kind of science fiction narrative that comfortably inhabits the realm of plausi­bility. There is superb technology on display here, including ways of dealing with trauma that would be very useful today, but human suffering, stress, death, and the dark side of religious fanaticism are at the core of the novel, showing that annoying human trait of moving forward in terms of what we can do while simultaneously staying behind on the things that matters most. Amira Valdez is a young neuroscientist with dreams of bringing her talents to outer space....

People are the amalgamation of their memo­ries and experiences, and Jonathan Maber­ry’s Ink explores what happens when we lose our most important memories. A sprawling, dark narrative made up of the interwoven stories of a set of misfits that struggle to get by, Ink is a moody horror novel that deals with grief, anger, guilt, and Otherness in a small town. Patty Trang, known as Patty Cakes, is a Viet­namese tattoo artist living in the small town of Pine Deep. She runs a tattoo shop she opened after spending some time in New York. She has a tattoo of her dead daughter’s face on the ba...

Sarah Tolmie’s Disease is a strangely funny book about fictitious diseases and psychological conditions. Presented in a scholarly tone that resembles a series of academic case studies, this book looks at some bizarre ailments that range from scavenging, a psychological affliction in which people compulsively move into old houses, to a poor guy who developed an allergy to comedy. Tolmie’s imagination runs wild in this book. There are new diseases being discovered all the time, as the COVID-19 pandemic so violently reminded the world, but the illnesses presented in Disease are not only ne...

Fishing for Dinosaurs and Other Stories, Joe Lansdale (Subterranean Press 978-15960-6993-0, $40.00, 384pp, tp) November 2020. Cover by Timothy Truman. “It’s no secret that I like to write stories in a variety of genres, and my favorite of those is the Lansdale genre.” That’s the opening line of the introduction Joe Lansdale penned for his own Fishing for Dinosaurs and Other Stories, and it gets to the heart of what makes this collection so great. Lansdale sounds like Lansdale, and that applies whether he’s writing horror, crime, thrillers, weird westerns, or science fiction. Fishin...

Gabino Iglesias We all know 2020 was a horrific year, but it was also a superb year for horror. As the world struggled through the pandemic, readers stuck at home turned to horror narratives as much – if not more so – than they regularly do because fictional horrors offer us an escape from real ones. As always, the genre delivered. The greatness started early with Andy Davidson’s The Boatman’s Daughter, a book that seemed to be pulled from the muddy rivers of the South and carried all the spookiness and grit hidden in every bayou in this country. With great characterization and sharp...