Shannon Fay

Annihilation is the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi Southern Reach trilogy (all three books are being released this year). One back cover blurb compares VanderMeer to Stanley Kubrick and it’s easy to see it with VanderMeer’s distant but unsettling writing style. Content-wise he’s closer to Lovecraft, with his characters slowly breaking down as they […]

In her latest novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi uses loose allusions to fairy tales and folklore to examine race in mid-century America. It’s 1953 and Boy Novak is a young white woman escaping an abusive father. After fleeing to a small Massachusetts town she marries Arturo Whitman, a local jeweler, and becomes stepmother to […]

Wonderbook is the creative writing textbook you wished you’d had as a teenager. Rather than dictating rigid rules, it encourages play and creativity: instead of charts and diagrams it uses pictures of gangly monsters and abstract paintings to illustrate its points. This fits, as Wonderbook is aimed at sci-fi and fantasy writers, and also because […]

At first Marisha Pessl’s horror-mystery Night Film tries a little too hard to draw you in. The book is quick to showcase whatever documents the characters are looking at: police reports, websites, newspaper clippings. This could be fun texture if done right but these extras don’t show us anything that isn’t covered in the narrative […]

Woman Rebel is a comic book biography of Margaret Sanger, turn-of-the century birth control proponent and woman’s right trailblazer. A large part of the book’s charm comes from the cartoonish art style: It looks like a Little Lulu strip, if Lulu grew up and traded in pranks for activism. The book is an interesting look […]

We’ve all got our vices, and for some of us it’s YA novels. No judging. But even if you aren’t looking for your next hit of teenage-vampire love, Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown will still hook you. Sure, there’s a vampire love interest and the pacing is weird (every other chapter is either […]

Childhood is one of Taiyo Matsumoto’s favourite themes and his manga often depict worlds both whimsical and slightly sinister. Sunny, his latest work to be published in English, is more down to earth than his past series. This fits, since Matsumoto is drawing from his own childhood—specifically a time when he lived at a group […]

The Shining Girls is the third novel from South African writer Lauren Beukes and her first real push at breaking into the mainstream. While her first two novels (Moxyland and Zoo City) were fun, cutting sci-fi stories set in Cape Town and Johannesburg, The Shining Girls is a thriller with a sci-fi trappings set in […]

For something so strange, House of Leaves made a big impact when it was published over 10 years ago, drawing in readers with its weird fonts, stranger formatting and narrative quirks like footnotes that went nowhere1. Mark Z. Danielewski’s latest book, The Fifty Year Sword, shows that he’s still capable of crafting a unique puzzle-box […]

Nicole is your average Portland hipster, chugging along, happily raising chickens and hosting karaoke nights at the local dive bar. But when a palm reader reveals a long-buried family secret (Nicole’s mom lied about the identity of her father), Nicole has to re-examine her childhood in light of the news. As Nicole tries to track […]