Somehow, September also saw me in New York City. We can thank the CDC for letting me reunite with my best friend from my childhood in Poland, along with several others who I haven’t seen in years even before the pandemic. This is also a reminder for folks to get the bivalent booster if you are 18 and haven’t had COVID within the last 3 months.
I finished my revision and resubmitted it, which is my big project completion that robbed me lots of reading time. Now, I’m resting an embarking on a reading adventure to learn how to write a horny goth book. Hopefully, I’ll be able recapping that in October’s post. But we’ll see.
This month’s blog interviews were:
- Freydís Moon released a dark fantasy erotic novel, With a Vengeance
- Aden Polydoros released his sophomore YA, Bone Weaver
- Valkyrie Loughcrewe debuted Crom Cruach with Tenebrous Press
ARCs
- Crom Cruach by Valkyrie Loughcrewe (adult, horror)
- A novella-in-verse that’s also a fever dream
- Satanic panic-esque attacks that might also be fueled by folkloric nightmares
- Author interview went up on 9/22/2022
- Direwood by Catherine Yu (YA, horror)
- 90’s aesthetic, vampires, and complicatred feelings of friendship and sisterhood
- Steeped in atmosphere with aesthetically-appropriate grubs and butterflies
- Lucky Girl, How I Became a Horror Writer: A Krampus Story by M. Rickert (adult, horror)
- Told over several Christmases, each one worse than the one that came before it
- Characters that feel realistic and makes you wonder if Krampus is real
- Nona the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #3) by Tamsyn Muir (adult, science fantasy)
- Nona teaches in a school, was born six months prior, and just wants to have a birthday party in a dystopian city under zombie attack
- My favorite of the three books so far
- The dog does not die
- The Story of the Hundred Promises by Neil Cochrane (adult, fantasy)
- Fairy tales told within a lived-in world across a story centering queer voices
- Tropes, magic, and immersive world-building galore
- Author interview forthcoming on 10/4/2022
- The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg (adult, fantasy)
- The stars are not all right as earthquakes threaten Gelle-Geu
- Tender romance coupled with calamity and excellent neurodivergent rep
- Author interview forthcoming on 11/29/2022
Audiobooks
- Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin (adult, horror, 2010)
- A collection of short stories that overall were rather hit or miss for me
- The titular story and a handful of others, however, slap
- Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy (adult, non-fiction, 2022)
- A follow-up to Dopesick which follows the work being done on a grassroots level
- Do not be fooled by “hope” in the title – many things got worse, and the pandemic did not help
- Concrete calls to action feature at the end of the book
- Sinkable: Obsession, The Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic by Daniel Stone (adult, non-fiction, 2022)
- At once about the Titanic, but also not
- Clear passion and wide breadth of historical knowledge focusing strictly on shipwrecks and sinking
- Really fun, really informative, full of equally hyper-fixated characters
Manga
- Fire Punch Vol. 1 & 2 by Tatsuki Fujimoto (horror, seinen, 2018)
- This is the manga that came before Chainsaw Man
- It feels made in a lab with me in mind, complete with cannibalism, an ice witch, and powers that make people horrible
- Please heed the content warnings
Jo Writes Fantasy 