2026 read #43: Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf.

Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf

317 pages

Published 2021

Read from August 3 to August 25

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

We’re anhedonic as fuck but we’re gonna keep reading, baby! Back at it again with another British Library Tales of the Weird volume, this time one I bought at retail price at Barnes & Noble right after a breakup just to feel something.

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“The Sphinx” by Edgar Allan Poe (1846). As a precocious reader at the turn of the 1990s, I was excited to find a dusty collection of Poe when I stayed in my family’s ancestral farmhouse one summer. Countless Looney Tunes had primed me to expect macabre frights in its pages. The actual experience of reading Poe, of course, disappointed me even then. I remember tearing through this brief anecdote, growing excited by the appearance of the ominous beast, and correspondingly let down by the denouement. A faintly comic bauble, only a classic thanks to inertia.

“The Blue Beetle: A Confession” by A. G. Gray, Jun. (1857). Basically Frankenstein, except shorter, less poetic, and about a guy who inadvertently makes a beetle. The most interesting thing about it to me was the narrator’s search for a singular “germ” of life, two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. We tend to forget how the common origin of life and its subsequent diversification was already in the popular European zeitgeist even before Darwin.

“The Mummy’s Soul” by Anonymous (1862). The editors’ introduction to this story positions it as the earliest “mummy curse” story as we know it in English literature. I was excited to read it. Alas, it’s amateurish and plodding, and peppered with little nuggets of racism. I will say the story’s second half prefigures the Weird Tales vibe in the narrator’s feverish visions.

“After Three Thousand Years” by Jane G. Austin (1868). Rather rote Victorian romantic melodrama that happens to include a scarab necklace. I know I’m depressed right now, but I could not sustain any interest in this piece.

“A Dream of Wild Bees” by Olive Schreiner (1895). Brief moral fable with just a touch of eeriness about it. Moderately interesting.

“The Moth” by H. G. Wells (1895). An especially Wellsian ghost story, in which a quarrelsome entomologist is troubled by a moth that resembles his recently deceased rival. It’s fine enough.

“The Captivity of the Professor” by A. Lincoln Green (1901). This is more like it: an early weird fic about cerebral ants who Ratatouille various animals to perform functions and use them to construct ant civilization in the remote Amazon. The story, unfortunately, resides in the catalog of “white slave” narratives, but the pseudonymous Green doesn’t get especially egregious with the theme. In general weirdness and interest, this might be my favorite story so far.

“The Dream of Akinosuke” and “Butterflies” by Lafcadio Hearn (1904). Two fables from the exoticized East, in classic Nineteen-Oughts fashion. Hearn had an interesting life that landed him in Japan, where he married and became a citizen. These two entries purport to be examples of Japanese folktales. They’re fine enough, especially the myrmecological pageantry of the first, albeit filtered through the customary Orientalist norms of Western publishing of their time.

“Caterpillars” by E. F. Benson (1912). There’s an interesting occult story somewhere in this tale of supernaturally carcinogenic caterpillars infesting an Italian villa, but it’s buried under anachronistically stiff, comma-laden prose.

“An Egyptian Hornet” by Algernon Blackwood (1915). A cheeky Man vs Nature affair, as an Anglican reverend confronts a big hornet in a hotel bathroom. Doesn’t really qualify as a weird fic story at all, despite the editors’ insistence that the reverend’s point of view magnifies the insect’s malignity into something diabolical. I will say the character’s puritanical anxiety over the bug’s snatched waist made it a worthwhile read.

“The Blue Cockroach” by Christopher Blayre (1921). A trifle about the bite of a blue cockroach momentarily dissipating habitual English reserve. Had that annoying prose trick from this time where Random Words are capitalized for humorous Emphasis.

“The Wicked Flea” by J. U. Giesy (1925). We finally reach the era of Weird Tales proper, the original venue for this silly mad science caper. There’s a modest quantity of pulp entertainment value to be found in the tale of Xenophon Xerxes Zapt and his experiments with hypertrophied fleas, but the story goes on much too long.

“The Miracle of the Lily” by Clare Winger Harris (1928). Self-serious scientifiction in the early Amazing Stories style, which feels like an inevitability given the chokehold “man vs insects” had on the first years of that magazine. It tries to be an epic account of two thousand years of future history, but just reads as silly today. Harris offers a criticism of modernism and the destruction of beauty and sentiment in the name of “efficiency,” but inevitably, the usual modernist concerns (“struggle is essential for the race!”) crop up as well.

“Warning Wings” by Arlton Eadie (1929). Inoffensive little tale about a moth transmitting an SOS to an ocean liner.

“Beyond the Star Curtain” by Garth Bentley (1931). One of the things that keeps me coming back to old SFFH stories is encountering the standard tropes much earlier than I expect. This is a space-faring time dilation tale that sees our square-jawed adventurers landing on a far-future Earth after a trip into a parallel universe. They find themselves in a man’s-life wonderland: a planet overrun with giant insects, fungal jungles, and the occasional damsel in distress. It’s silly pulp fun.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants” by Carl Stephenson (1937; English translation published 1938). A more quotidian man’s-life affair in the Amazon, pitting a cocksure colonial planter (and his four hundred indigenous workers) against a rampaging migration of ants. It has all the casual bigotry one might expect, and is much too long. Bum note to end on.

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So yeah. I don’t know if it’s the depression talking, or if this was just an unusually disappointing entry in the Library of the Weird series.

2026 read #41: All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

143 pages

Published 2017

Read from August 16 to August 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Eons ago, just three months into the life of this blog, I read one of the first books I truly didn’t like: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells. That book’s puerile gargoyles smirked their way through interminable banter, every last one of them sounding like a YA protagonist with a chip on their shoulder, even the venerable elder. Whenever I’d see someone talking up Wells as an author, I just couldn’t understand it. Surely we couldn’t be reading the same books.

Then I got hooked on the Murderbot TV show last year. I’m an autist who has always felt awkward, uncomfortable, and unwelcome in basically all social situations; Murderbot was the genderless autistic binge-watching reluctant hero we all needed. I didn’t want to, but eventually admitted to myself I needed to give Martha Wells one more try.

Having such an engaging and well-done television adaptation already in my mind means All Systems Red doesn’t stand on its own. I can’t tell whether the show does the heavy lifting for an otherwise insubstantial novella (I’m already attached to the characters, which is good, because they’re pretty thinly sketched here), or whether the show is so faithful that this book reads like a 1980s novelization of itself. I’m inclined to think it’s the former; Wells’ narrative is more of an outline that the show helped fill in, especially with the human characters. The characters here have more than one character trait between them, though, so at least Systems is an improvement over The Cloud Roads.

I’m not here to give any kind of “real” review. I read books and I record them here, and the MLM scrapers are the only things that read what I write. So I’ll just give this a fond rating because of how much I liked the show, and leave it at that.

2026 read #39: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 8 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 8 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

193 pages

Published 2025 (English translation published 2026)

Read from July 30 to July 31

Rating: 3ish out of 5

Every six to ten months, it seems, I pick up a fresh installment of Dinosaur Sanctuary and have to reckon up how much the world, and in this case my private life, has deteriorated since the last volume. This time, in addition to the political and economic realities of the failing capitalist system in its far-right death throes, as of last week I’m newly out of a brief but intense relationship that failed precisely when it should have been hitting its stride. I had to break it off with him right after our first joyous visit. I’m reading this while fucking bummed.

All of this will be interesting to see scraped up in whatever MLM summary you might read about this series later. Fuck you specifically, person who uses the slop machine to read for you.

Anyway. As has become the norm in recent installments, the light workplace drama of Dinosaur Sanctuary overshadows its potential as dinosaur fiction. We spend more time with quarterly earnings reports, marketing strategies, and corporate synergies than we do with dinosaurs. I’m not invested in Enoshima Dinoland as a fictional entity, and the characters are too one-dimensional for me to care about them.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother keeping up with this series, but then we get storylines like Momo the constipated Camarasaurus, which remind me just a bit of the best parts of Dinosaur Summer. And then I conclude, sighing through my anhedonia, that maybe it’s worth coming back to Enoshima each time.

2026 read #37: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.

The House on the Borderland: From the Manuscript, discovered in 1877 by Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog, in the Ruins that lie to the South of the Village of Kraighten, in the West of Ireland. Set out here, with Notes. by William Hope Hodgson

Introduction by Ann VanderMeer

204 pages

Published 1908

Read from July 12 to July 17

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Long-time bots (the only regular readers of this blog) know my fascination with the development of what we now call fantasy fiction. In recent years, I’ve expanded that interest to encompass the related and parallel but still distinct evolution of weird fiction.

The House on the Borderland is a major weird fic milestone, predating the more famous cosmic weird of Lovecraft (and, for that matter, Weird Tales itself). In a remote part of Ireland, two anglers on holiday follow an unmapped river to an uncanny pit where it disappears into the earth, and the mysterious ruins that perch on a projecting crag above the drop. There they find a weathered manuscript of strange events penned by an old man who lived in the house before it was ruined.

Borderland is an exercise in atmosphere, forming a missing link of sorts between the early Dying Earth of the late chapters of The Time Machine and the “I traveled through space and time in a dream” of Olaf Stapledon. As a novel, it feels like a string of sketches held together by its flimsy framing story (which emphasizes how Hodgson felt it would be best not to “edit” the manuscript). Cosmic-scale Dying Earth material segues into an interminable siege by swine-men, which leads to a half-hearted dungeon crawl in the bottomless pit, and then we loop back to a protracted retread of the first and last time travel scenes from The Time Machine. A mysterious, supernal “Her” is randomly introduced halfway through and treated as if she’s always been in the narrative, lampshaded by a footnote from “editor” Hodgson.

Hodgson, like many of his contemporaries, is wrestling with the vastness of time and space only recently delineated by science. There is an element of pantheism to his thinking, though even the great pagan gods of old Earth are reduced to creatures crawling under the darkness of the dead sun. There are hints of samsara, perhaps, in the continued joys and agonies of drifting souls. But mostly it’s a surfeit of prose poetry about turn-of-the-century cosmology, full of giant dying suns and black nebulas. It’s pretty, but goes on perhaps a few chapters too long for my taste.

There are glimmers of interest here and there, strange visions and luminous wounds, vast wordless mysteries in between its half-stated ideas. It is a first draft of several subsequent genres, rough and overlong but fascinating.

2026 read #34: Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove.

Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove

275 pages

Published 2022

Read from June 26 to July 1

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Let’s just get this fact out of the way: this is literally just Sphere. Because it’s Turtledove, it’s played as alternate history, packed with every 1970s cliche you can think of, from bellbottoms to boiling-over radiators to Richard Nixon, but it’s still just Sphere.

Jerry Stieglitz is a young longhair academic who occasionally sidelines in sci-fi stories (which is such an old-school self-insert trope that I haven’t seen it done so nakedly in a long time). He gets hired by some shady feds to lend scientific cover to their search for a lost Soviet sub in the Pacific. Naturally, the Soviet sub recovery is a cover story for an attempt to haul an alien spacecraft from the seabed. It’s Sphere.

Well, okay, I guess Down doesn’t involve deep sea habitats or reality-warping constructs. It’s more interested in progressive Jerry’s crisis of conscience than it is in gee-whiz sci-fi. And Turtledove’s politics center on wry cracks about “at least we defeated fascism and don’t have to face it again” and “American politics can only be better fifty years from now,” rather than Crichton’s “only a straight white man is above identity politics and can keep a cool head on his shoulders in a crisis.” Which makes it a lot less cringy to read than Sphere.

More than anything, the book feels like an excuse for Turtledove to indulge his nostalgia with an authorial alter ego and ramble through every stray bit of ’70s lore he could recall. His characters stop and make pop culture references nearly every page. Whenever the plot threatens to start moving, we get wisecracks instead. It gums up the pace, just not enough to aggravate me, mostly. Overall, Down is both inoffensive and inessential, a self-indulgent adventure that’s worth a read if you’re into that sort of thing.

2026 read #31: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey.

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

176 pages

Published 2020

Read from May 11 to May 13

Rating: 3 out of 5

It was the summer of lockdown. My local library had just reopened on a “reserve books and pick them up” basis. As with so many other folks, I had taken the preceding months to reflect upon and reevaluate myself. The queerness that had always lurked in the background of my self-understanding wanted to take a form. For the first time, I wanted to make a conscious effort to seek out queer fiction. Fortunately for me, the last few years had seen a change in publishing norms; queer genre fic was in the mainstream like never before.

Upright Women Wanted was in the first batch of books I requested that lockdown summer. Like every other book I tried to read, it glanced off my anxious, preoccupied brain. I don’t think I finished a full chapter before abandoning it with the rest. I didn’t even get far enough to realize it’s set in a post-collapse future of patriarchal assholes and climate change rather than a Weird West alternate history. (I wonder why I read only six books that year.)

Here we are now, bounds and bounds closer to the dusty patriarchal dystopia Gailey portrays, with its state-controlled media and furtive queerness surviving in its margins. Women feels uncomfortably relevant in ways the last few years have only exacerbated; its message of “No matter what, be yourself and don’t let the patriarchs control your fate” is urgently needed.

As a story, Women could have used some space to breathe. The characters don’t develop much beyond archetypes, which makes big twists feel perfunctory, reading more like an outline than a novel. Rushing as we do from one scene to the next, the world doesn’t get much of a chance to shine, either. Gailey gives us some of the texture and odor of her future West, but I would have liked a lot more.

2026 read #27: Club Contango by Eliane Boey.

Club Contango by Eliane Boey

277 pages

Published 2024

Read from March 12 to May 4

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I haven’t read much economic sci-fi, so perhaps it’s inevitable that this novel would remind me of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. There’s only partial overlap between Gateway and Contango’s near-future corporate dystopia of asteroid cities and indebted labor. But their structures are a little bit similar: both begin in the aftermath of a major change in the narrator’s life, which gets revealed piecemeal over the course of alternating flashbacks and scenes in the present.

Flashback or present day, Contango comes front-loaded with exposition and worldbuilding details. We begin in media res with narrator Con inadvertently winning a bet that threatens to ruin all the regular customers at the titular underground gambling club. I found it a bit difficult to get invested in all the contextless wisps of backstory and setting, until enough had accumulated that I finally got into the book’s rhythm, somewhere around page 60 or so (which just happens to be around the time the narrative finally explains the nature of the bet). It’s a slow start, given my current struggles with attention span.

Once it clicks, Boey’s universe of contract workers, predatory employers, hustling holograms, and gamified work is compelling, offering a grim but lived-in vision of working class neo-serfdom. It functions equally well as a projection of the climate-fucked future and an allegory for the present. The story also becomes a gutting account of impoverished parenthood in a society built around exploitation. It also turns into a murder mystery and develops a touch of the classic Philip K. Dickian “who or what is even real?” dislocation.

Contango is a lot. It’s ambitious, and not all of it worked for me. But there’s also a lot to enjoy here: a moving, well-realized texture of life, full of food and heartache and uncertainty. “People shouldn’t have to be strong just to survive,” says one character—words just as relevant now as they are to any possible future.

2026 read #26: Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl by P.A. Cornell.

Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl by P.A. Cornell

Illustrated by Ahmed Raafat

79 pages

Published 2026

Read April 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

Between the large font and a “behind the scenes” essay from the author, this story only barely qualifies as a novella. The story itself is 42 pages long, less if you deduct the illustrations. But the tale of the titular working class archetypes with big dreams in a vaguely 1920s retrofuture packs in charm to spare in its brief span.

2026 read #23: Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald.

Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

117 pages

Published 2026

Read from April 6 to April 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

We might have something of a holy grail here: an inventive, book-length dinosaur story written with panache. In tersely evocative prose, McDonald presents snatches of a colorful, dilapidated near-future of dinosaur rodeos and masked militia checkpoints, an America fragmented by bush war and technofascism and evangelical warlords, where circuses ride what’s left of the highways.

All in all, it’s dishearteningly similar to the dinosaur apocalypse novel I’ve been working on for well over a year. What’s worse: I think it’s better than my book, in a lot of ways. Whereas mine is a mix of 1990s flashback and an altered approximation of the present, McDonald goes full near-future sci-fi with his setting, giving us glimpses of weird tech and weirder social conventions. Boy gives us something all too rare in dinosaur fiction, perhaps even rarer than good prose: solid worldbuilding.

The Tatterdemalion Circus invites inevitable comparisons to the early chapters of Greg Bear’s Dinosaur Summer (which would only have benefitted from more dinosaur circus screentime). But with Silver Clowns and the Dust Tarot, both left to the reader’s devices to expand upon, McDonald populates an alien future, vaster and stranger than local warlords and fundamentalist turf wars.

McDonald’s terseness, and the book’s brevity, can sometimes work against Boy. It is somehow dense and diaphanous simultaneously, wisps of intense clarity air-gapped by narrative leaps. Also taking leaps: McDonald’s grasp of dinosaur biology, which turns hadrosaurs into carnivores and gives alvarezsaurs big sharp teeth. But the dinosaurs he gets right are some of fiction’s most vivid individual dino presences since Dinosaur Summer.

2026 read #18: The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.*

The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells*

342 pages

Published 1901

Read from March 10 to March 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Growing up as I did living in a car with a father possessed of religious psychosis, I was rarely permitted to read anything more current than the Edwardian era. I came to cherish the works of H. G. Wells. The First Men in the Moon was a particular favorite back then. Wells’ droll social humor gives it a different flavor from his earlier scientific romances, but it’s still a novel of adventure on (and within) an alien world, one of the earliest alien worlds (that I know of) built upon the aesthetics of science rather than mysticism.

Perhaps I’d feel that way now if I read it for the first time. As it is, revisiting it felt disappointing, in a way that neither The War of the Worlds nor The Invisible Man had been. (Disregard the higher rating I gave The Invisible Man back in the day; I don’t like it better than War of the Worlds, I simply became much more critical over the years.) There’s a tonal mismatch between the social humor, which is both manic and mean-spirited, and the lunar adventure, which prefigures A. Merritt’s idiom of vast subterranean dungeons. As a preteen, I didn’t mind the mixture, but it feels to me nowadays like Wells wanted to write an observational comedy but felt constrained to churn out a scientific romance.

The overall effect is… fine? I expected more of a nostalgia kick from Moon, more in line with what I found in Worlds and The Time Machine, but it just didn’t click with me that way this time.

2026 read #17: The Tomorrow People by Judith Merril.

The Tomorrow People by Judith Merril

192 pages

Published 1960

Read from March 6 to March 10

Rating: 2 out of 5 (generously)

This novel is a weirder beast than first meets the eye. Buried deep inside of it, perhaps, there might even be an interesting story.

After the haunting, poetic prologue segued into dry space-race and Cold War fare, I felt bamboozled. The narration was the 1960 ideal of literary, naturalistic, “Manly Man drinks because he doesn’t know how to process Feelings” fiction, written with a modest amount of flair—enough flair to place it in the higher echelons of midcentury slop, but at the end of the day, I still thought it would be slop. I was pretty sure I would abandon it unfinished.

However, Tomorrow is structured with more ambition than most concurrent sci-fi. In the distant future of the 1970s, two rocketships make it to Mars: one Soviet, one American. The Soviet one disappears, the American one limps back with a solitary survivor, who seems to have blocked out what happened at the very end of things, when his companion disappeared into the Martian night in a rover. The story seems like it will be a psychological mystery, attempting to open the psyche and unravel the memories of Johnny Wendt.

Of course, this is 1960, so the “psychology” angle consists of “The first Americans on Mars feared they might be gay for each other.” (Seventeen years later, Frederik Pohl would steal this concept for Gateway, right down to the psychological analysis to uncover suppressed memories plotline, and sweep the major awards with it.) And of course, this is still a Merril novel, which means the majority of the story is phone calls and social drinking and significant lunches where no one speaks plainly and all the important stuff is beneath the surface, and then more drinking. It seems like 80% of the novel is men almost saying something while drinking. It is rather tedious.

Merril was one of the early movers in what would become sci-fi’s New Wave, which shows up here in nascent form—not just in the rather dull literary verisimilitude, but in the appearance of psionic powers as a plot point. Space amoebas amplifying psychic connections feels like a New Wave bit, too, but I guess that’s spoilers.

Also noteworthy: how openly sexual this book is. I haven’t read much midcentury literary fic, but for 1960 sci-fi, Tomorrow is positively raunchy. In addition to the pathologized queerness, we get mentions of nakedness, prostitution, a couple conceiving out of wedlock, and even an orgasm joke. Also, “bitch” appears a lot. Way too much, in fact.

Much like Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth, Tomorrow is more interesting for its place in the evolution of the genre than it is as a novel one has to read. Unless you really like midcentury scenes of drinking.

2026 read #15: OTHERSIDE, March 2026 issue.

OTHERSIDE, March 2026 issue (1)

Edited by V.M. Ayala, M. R. Robinson, Ash Vale, Rukman Ragas, Emily Yu, Jess Cho, and Angel Leal

127 pages

Published 2026

Read from March 4 to March 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is the very first issue of what I hope will be a long and rewarding run for this brand new queer SFFH magazine. I was fortunate enough to have a poem of mine selected for this debut. I fully plan to buy paper copies once they’re available, but I don’t want to wait until then to read it, so I’m starting in on my digital contributor’s copy.

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“blessing for molly grue.” by Elisheva Fox is a gorgeous poem weaving together unicorns, Judaism, and sensuality. An excellent start.

“This Is Not Your Extinction Event” by Elena Sichrovsky. Thinly disguised Marvel multiverse fanfic; the two leads are even named Robert and Chris. I didn’t expect I’d like it as much as I did. The central emotional question (what do you do after your partner’s multiversal twin tortures you?) has substance and unexpected relevance, and the multiversal portions are vast and strange and incredibly queer.

“The Vetala of Crystal Vellam Inlet” by Simo Srinivas (originally published 2022). Vibrant and absorbing tale of a young wizard’s attempt to contain a plague. Tinged with body horror as well as gentle humor. Quite good.

“Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen” by Ann LeBlanc is a poem every bit as stimulating as its title. Excellent.

“Vitrification” by Ishmael Grey. The author’s first published story, it is beautiful and heartbreaking.

“The Claywife” by Tanadrin. Spellbinding tale of animated clay and a young woman on the run. The narrative voice is superlatively rendered, sorrowful and beautiful and perfectly strange. It feels like a timeless story, as likely to be the best story of 1986 as it is to be the best story of 2026. My favorite piece so far.

Next is a poem I wrote: “Vulture bees transfigure the man I tried to be.” It will never be comfortable including a piece of mine in a review. Rereading my work is awkward at the best of times, let alone in such magnificent company. I’m partial to the subject matter, naturally, and I do enjoy how I played with sound and assonance here.

“Your First Days Back in the Court of Arthur” by Abigail Eliza. Queering the story of the Green Knight. For such a brief piece, published so close to the cultural memory of the Dev Patel movie, it unexpectedly moved me to tears. Delicately beautiful.

“Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain” by Sarah Pauling (originally published 2023). Another solid entry, set in a high-concept fantasy creation: a completely transparent pyramid housing a kingdom, from royalty to commoner, without a glimmer of privacy. In the heart of the mountain shines an ageless princess. It’s a unique (in my experience) spin on a fairy tale.

A poem: “Eat It Out” by Cypher. Queer body horror triumphant over internalized queer shame. I liked it.

“Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive” by Nadia Radovich. Another unique spin on a well-worn topic, this time a YA-ish post-pandemic apocalypse survival tale that manages to feel fresh and strange and moving.

“Situationship” by Seoung Kim. A time-loop story set on a doomed spaceship, given depth and emotional substance with a deceptively light touch. Brief but terrific.

Nico Santana’s poem “Electrolysis” is vivid, a gallop of impressions.

“The Homeowner’s Bride” by Ayida Shonibar. Another banger of a tale, this time told from the perspective of a house displeased at being disturbed. At turns deliciously erotic and devastating.

We close with a nonfiction piece: “He Is Survived by His Wife” by Jackie Hedeman. It’s a well-written essay at the intersection of one person’s experience of queerness and the broader erasure of queer experience in obituaries and other public markers of life.

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And that’s it for the debut issue of OTHERSIDE! All in all, an amazing achievement, an exemplary first issue. It’s rare to have this level of quality so early in a publication’s lifespan. I expect such great things from this place!

2026 read #14: The Second Stop Is Jupiter by upfromsumdirt.

The Second Stop Is Jupiter by upfromsumdirt

132 pages

Published 2023

Read from February 28 to March 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

I’ve woefully neglected poetry in my recent reads. The last single author collection I read was May Chong’s Seed, Star, Song last summer. I also want to devote more time reading authors I “know” (in whatever capacity) through social media connections.

This collection begins with the powerful statement of “The Hero With An African Face,” and from there upfromsumdirt’s poems balance adroitly at the intersection of Black embodiment and futures, mythology and exploitation, the narratives stolen away and the narratives constructed anew. Ben Sisko of Deep Space Nine obeys obeahs; Dorothy’s not in Kush anymore.

“The Three Sulas” is a particularly staggering work, a tale of three diasporic witches raising the narrator from the dead. Equally brilliant: a nine page, double columned epic titled “The Underground Rubaiyat.”

upfromsumdirt particularly excels at long form poetry. Sprawling, multi-movement celebrations of embodiment and sexuality leap between the stars. A sequence of thirty-eight poems outlines the legendarium of a character named Fayre Gabbro. I only wish I could sustain poetry at that level. I suppose it would help if I truly knew what I had to say.

2026 read #13: Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle by Renan Bernardo.

Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle by Renan Bernardo

135 pages

Published 2025

Read February 28 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle is a novella brief enough (just 73 pages) that it’s packaged with two of Bernardo’s short stories to round out a modest volume. The novella is solid enough, a rumination on corruption and capitalism (but I repeat myself) on a failed colony ship mission to the planet Kapteyn d. As is so often the case with novellas, the pacing can be choppy; some breathing room would have benefitted the story.

“A Lifeline of Silk” (originally published in 2023) is a tale of an abusive relationship told from the perspective of a robotic “autodoc” aboard an interstellar sampling expedition. Sentient machines are the sci-fi of a bygone era, especially now that rapacious capitalists have destroyed the cachet of “Artificial Intelligence,” but Bernardo finds a fresh story to tell here. Quite good.

“Callis Praedictionem” (originally published in 2021) is another space medicine story, this time centering on a fungus that gives its sufferers visions of the future — but only if they’re killed on purpose. It’s all very Weird Tales, a contemporary update of the mad scientist archetype. Interesting enough, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other two stories.

2026 read #9: Allosaurus in Wonderland by Jennifer Lee Rossman.

Allosaurus in Wonderland and Other Tales of Avalonia by Jennifer Lee Rossman

151 pages

Published 2025

Read from February 13 to February 15

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I’ve been so excited to read this collection. I preordered it months ago, and have had my copy since November. But as so often happens with ADHD, I’ve had it all this time and just haven’t cracked it open until now.

Rossman is our finest contemporary author of dinosaur short fiction. (Michael Swanwick would be in the same conversation, except I don’t think he’s published any dinosaur stories in the last two decades.) I may be a little bit biased; after all, I put together the Mesozoic Reader anthology, and Rossman’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentinosaurus” is one of my favorite stories from that book. Likewise, their “Joan of Archaeopteryx” is one of the only worthwhile entries of the otherwise disposable Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology. Even if the stories are humorous, Rossman takes storytelling seriously, somehow turning punning titles and pop culture references into affecting, empowering fiction.

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“Allosaurus in Wonderland” is as delightful an Alice pastiche as the title suggests, though it’s brief, mostly serving to introduce Avalonia, a realm where all periods of history and prehistory have mishmashed together thanks to random creatures (and little girls) who came stumbling through wormholes. There isn’t much to the story, but I enjoyed it.

“Baryonyx and Clyde” is the brilliant combination of dinosaurs and 1930s crime pulp that Katharine Metcalf Roof’s “A Million Years After” (reviewed here) teased but didn’t deliver. It even centers on purloining a dinosaur egg. Lindy and Campbell are time crooks, taking advantage of the Avalonian portals to loot old shops for antiques to sell in the future. I can’t say more without spoiling it, but I fucking loved this story.

“The Good, the Bad, and the Utahraptor” (original version published 2018) is the tale of Rosita, who longs to escape her dying little town and make it in a Wild West show. Her plan? Tame and ride one of the big raptors that have been killing cattle and depopulating Hell Creek. The story ends before achieving the emotional resonance of “Baryonyx,” but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

“A Tale of Two Citipati” extends Rosita’s story into the founding and naming of Avalonia, as misfits from Hell Creek cross over and meet, by chance, modern Ren Faire goers who hopped into a shimmery portal and got stuck. This is less of a standalone story than it is exposition for the setting as a whole, looping Lindy and Campbell back into the mix along with Rosita and Marcus from the Ren Faire, and setting in motion a generations-long conflict.

“Pirates of the Cambrian” sees Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan stranded on the wrong side of a wormhole, where they meet Anne Bonny and her pirate crew. With that setup, I had high expectations for this piece, but the brevity of all these stories works against it. I assume it’s here to set up later appearances from Earhart and Bonny.

“A Connecticut Yangchuanosaurus in King Arthur’s Court” likewise sees D.B. Cooper plummet through a wormhole in order to set up his presence in Camelops, medieval LARP kingdom and repressive regime. While I prefer more standalone stories, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with moving pieces into place.

Allosaurus is turning out to be something of a short novel told in vignettes rather than a conventional collection.

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spinosaurus” introduces us to Enid, former knight of Camelops, who agrees to defect to New Hell Creek in hopes of someday liberating her home from its repression. The first half was quite strong, movingly depicting Enid and her life and her conflicted loyalties. I think the structure of this collection, each story more like a chapter than a standalone piece, makes the ending less satisfying, bending it into a preordained shape.

“Pterodactyl We Meet Again” has perhaps this collection’s most strained pun for its title. Fitting for the story that leans most into absurd humor. In a book crammed full of Jurassic Park franchise references, this story takes the extra step and brings us to “an island off the coast of Costa Rica,” where cryptid-sighting blogger (and bumbling goofus) Josh investigates reports of prehistoric creatures emerging from a wormhole. The humor gets laid on a bit thickly for my personal taste (there’s even the old chestnut about “the P is silent”), but I still had a good time.

“Joan of Archaeopteryx” (original version published 2021) was a bright spot in the bleak Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology, and it more than holds its own here. It might be my favorite story in the book: a blend of comic and deeply personal, deeply moving but also a hell of a good time.

“Polter-Gastonia” shifts gears a little bit, bringing us back to the conventional world, where Rosalinda, descendant of the old Hell Creekers who stayed behind to guard the wormhole, has to get creative to defeat industrial development threatening the portal. Fun story!

“Don’t Cry for Me Argentinosaurus” (original version published 2021) is another one of my favorite stories here, and not just because I picked it for The Mesozoic Reader. It’s a fun wrinkle on the time portal formula: Veronica returns to the modern world after an extensive stay in Avalonia, only to be marketed as a pinup cavegirl. A sweet story of homesickness and feeling lost in time, and also about how capitalism destroys everything.

“Prehistoric in Pink” jumps us a few decades into the future, after the events of the previous story revealed the existence of Avalonia to the people of Earth. It is a world of discreet time tourism via stable wormholes, slightly reminiscent of Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth. The story itself is a teenage slice of life centering (naturally) on prom (and ecoterrorism). It also has the most audaciously bad dad-joke in the book. I quite liked it.

“Iguanodon Quixote” might be my favorite punning title of all time. The story itself is a courtroom scene interspersed with what led to the narrator participating in the act of ecoterrorism that delayed the industrial exploitation of Avalonia. A bit scattershot, but in the end, satisfying.

“Allosaurus through the Looking Glass” wraps things up by bringing back the narrator of the first “Allosaurus” story, older and wiser and more aware of the importance of stories, pulling threads together in the background of history, packing a lot of Whovian timeline manipulation into a tidy package. It was unexpectedly moving, a fitting culmination of this uneven but undeniably brilliant collection.

Undoubtedly the best dinosaur fiction book of this millennium.

2026 read #7: Dinotopia Lost by Alan Dean Foster.*

Dinotopia Lost by Alan Dean Foster*

319 pages

Published 1996

Read from February 5 to February 10

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Such is the sad state of dinosaur fiction that Alan Dean Foster, mercenary page-filler and franchise novelist, treats us to better prose here than we find in most novels I’ve put under that tag. Which isn’t to say it’s good prose. It’s workmanlike at best, often belaboring us with over-description. It’s the sort of storytelling that gives adverbs and introductory clauses a bad rep. Yet Dinotopia Lost’s prose still comes out ahead of Cretaceous Dawn, The Sky People, and especially Triassic. (But then, I’ve read Facebook comment sections better written than Triassic. Less misogynistic, too.)

I read Dinotopia Lost sometime around 2002, and don’t recall a single thing about it. To be fair to my past self, there just isn’t much to remember here. The Prehistoric Pulp blog describes it as “Treasure Island [thrown together with] a lighthearted Jurassic Park,” but I have to disagree; that sounds so much more interesting than what we get here. It is, in fact, astoundingly dull.

The actual plot is “What if some meanies came to utopia?” But the pirates, and the narrative, get distracted by other matters before the idea can be explored. The characters, despite pages of physical description, never develop greater depth than a cardboard standee. And bereft of James Gurney’s iconic artwork, it turns out that talking dinosaurs don’t interest me all that much. The one exception, a Deinonychus ascetic who studied martial arts and wishes to meditate his way out of samsara, arrives too late to make much difference. (It also illustrates the broad stereotypes Foster traffics in.)

Still, I’ve read so many worse things. Especially where dinosaurs are concerned. At least the dream of the nineties is alive in Dinotopia.

2026 read #5: Queens of the Abyss, edited by Mike Ashley.

Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird, edited by Mike Ashley

350 pages

Published 2020

Read from January 25 to January 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

I collect old magazines. I have a lot of them. I want to make a point of reading some of them this year, especially as I make progress on my current novel project and hope to focus my energies back on short story writing later this year. So I plan to read short stories, ideally in the form of old magazines I own, for at least 20% of the reviews I write this year—the collapse of my nation, of course, permitting.

Naturally, I’m beginning this pattern with an anthology instead of a magazine.

This is another entry in the British Library Tales of the Weird series, featuring a selection of women authors from the heyday of pulp short fiction. I’ve read just one of these stories before, which is unusual after all the anthologies I’ve encountered in recent years. My partner R got it for me for the holidays, and I’ve been looking forward to it. Or as much as one can look forward to anything days, I suppose.

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“A Revelation” by Mary E. Braddon (1888). The author’s life is more interesting than this story, which is a rote gothic ghost number featuring clumsy descriptions, amateurish exposition, racist caricatures, and a see-through plot. It ends with an absurdly convenient twist and a middle aged man marrying his dead friend’s teenage child. It’s very much 1880s magazine fare. Not a promising start. F

“The Sculptor’s Angel” by Marie Corelli (1913). This medieval tale of an artistic monk who takes advantage of a poor young woman, only to be visited with dramatic irony after her death, is at least a step up from the previous story. We get some ever-relevant commentary on “the pitiless egotism of men,” though I think the narrative lets the sculptor off too easily. Perhaps a solid D

“From the Dead” by Edith Nesbit (1892). After his new wife confesses a past deception to him, our narrator, against his own conscience, gives her the cold shoulder. She disappears, only to summon him to her deathbed some months later. This being the type of story it is, he arrives too late. Macabre melodrama though it may be, it serves as an empowerment fantasy: maybe, somehow, even if by paranormal means, men might be made to suffer the consequences of their actions. I think we all can vibe with that right now. C-

“The Christmas in the Fog” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1914). This quasi-autobiographical anecdote begins with about seven pages of justification (almost a third of the essay) for why a quasi-autobiographical anecdote is worth writing down and being read. The incident itself sees the author, referring to herself in the third person as the Romantick Lady, stuck for three days in an unusually Londonish smog on the Mersey. She decides to scrape together some kind of Christmas gift for each of the 150 immigrant children down in steerage. It ends with her musing whether her self-appointed charity might have “planted the seeds of pauperism” in the poor children. Horrors! All in all, you couldn’t get more pre-war 1910s than this.

“The Haunted Flat” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1920). Banal self-improvement-aided-by-a-spirit yarn. I liked the small domestic details of a young working woman setting herself up in a rental flat. The identity of the helpful spirit is an absurd coincidental twist of the sort beloved by religious revivalists (including, in this instance, Spiritualists). D?

“A Modern Circe” by Alicia Ramsey (1919). Ramsey lays it on a bit thick with Italian stereotypes, up to and including labeling Italians a “primitive race,” but otherwise her writing is quick and modern, her descriptions evocative, and the titular “Mad Virgin” is positively delightful after a slog through generic ghost tales. Possibly C-

“The Nature of the Evidence” by May Sinclair (1923). Another piece inclined to Spiritualism, this time an account of well-to-do heterosexual unhappiness involving the man’s late first wife. Well-written, and interesting for hinting at ghost-fucking at such an early date, but otherwise forgettable. D+

“The Bishop of Hell” by Marjorie Bowen (1925). This story begins with more promise and unique vibes than anything else in this anthology so far. A defrocked priest in the late 18th century, so dissipated that his intimates give him the nickname in the title, hatches a desire to corrupt the bride of his generous cousin and benefactor. The story is twenty shades of purple, but enjoyably so. C

“The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (1949). I read and reviewed this story in Women of Weird Tales. There, I said, “I enjoyed the element of loom-weaving; the hidden message in the antimacassar was an interesting touch that deserved a better story.”

“White Lady” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1933). Brought down by clumsy prose and absurd dialogue (“Now, as always, you prefer your unnatural flowers to me”), this story of a woman competing with an anthropomorphic flower for the affections of her fiancée gets points for embracing its own pulpy ridiculousness. C

“The Laughing Thing” by G. G. Pendraves (1929). The prose and atmosphere of this Hudson Valley-set haunting were fine. Pendraves’ dialogue was another matter, hammering obvious plot points into the ground; it takes the better part of two pages for an old man, fleeced on a land deal, to fully articulate just how hard he’s going to haunt the place once he’s dead. (“Wha-a-a-at?” responds the swindler.) Still, a solid example of its type. C-

“Candlelight” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1931). I believe this tale of middle class philandering is meant to be humorous, or at least ironic. An awkward dinner party is interrupted by the arrival of a Romani girl from the woods, who gets goaded into telling their fortunes (and spilling all their tawdry secrets). Altogether on the wrong side of 1930s pulp, and felt interminable to boot. D-

“The Wonderful Tune” by Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1931). Snowed in at a Swiss inn, the narrator and his companions find themselves in the company of a master violinist, who plays elf music that compels all things to dance—including the avalanche-crushed corpses stashed in the other room. Somewhat ridiculous in the way all the “OooOooh, watch out, a corpse!” stories were, but not painfully bad. D+?

“Island of the Hands” by Margaret St. Clair (1952). Out of every story on the TOC, I’d been looking forward to this one the most. Immediately, we find ourselves in the hands (hehe) of a storytelling professional. Garth is a watery planet that feels remarkably like a midcentury floatplane-and-cabana getaway. That’s just set-dressing for a standard (but well-written) Weird Island story. Aside from the inevitable skeeviness of midcentury heterosexuality, I enjoyed this one quite a bit. If only more of the anthology had been like this! B-

“The Unwanted” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1951). Our narrator is climbing Alabama hills for the census when she happens upon a broad Appalachian stereotype (because boy howdy did midcentury writers love Appalachian stereotypes). The mountain man points a gun at her and tells her to leave. But the woman of the house invites her up to chat, and we quickly find ourselves in a gentle, sad, unclassifiable tale of motherhood and lost children. Just as quickly, this story went from forgettable page-filler to a minor wonder (however dated and iffy it might be for modern readers). B-

“The Seventh Horse” by Leonora Carrington (1943). A surreal little fable about a horse (or a woman?) in a garden. One of the best (and weirdest) stories I’ve ever read from the 1940s. B+

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And that’s it! After slogging through so many forgettable ghost stories, the last few entries were an unexpected delight.

2026 read #3: China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

312 pages

Published 1992

Read from January 4 to January 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (would be higher but it aged badly)

CW: fictional sexual assault, anti-queer violence

This Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novel dates from the heyday of white authors appropriating other cultures to make their writing seem more interesting. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time, only to bounce off casual anti-Chinese slurs on the first page. Because this was also the era of equating bigotry with gritty realism. Bad times!

Unfortunately, I already spent $9 on a paperback copy from eBay, so I felt obligated to finish it.

Zhang is one of the foundational queer sci-fi texts. Its queerness, like its Chinese background, was appropriated. McHugh handles it more respectfully than, say, Frederik Pohl did in Gateway, but it’s still broadly stereotyped: Zhang cruises Coney Island, and has a penchant for blond white guys. McHugh also tours queer trauma and state violence in ways that may have been adventurous in 1992’s mainstream, but verge on feeling exploitative from a straight author nowadays (and probably did at the time, too).

Structurally, Zhang is more like a loosely linked series of short stories and novelettes than a cohesive novel. Classic first novel stuff. We follow Zhang himself from Brooklyn to Baffin Island to China. But we also get chapters from other perspectives, filling out the world: an extreme sports kite racer; a goat farmer in a Martian dome; a sheltered young New York woman who alters her face to fit beauty standards and promptly gets raped. 

One unifying thread, the central character of the whole book, is the setting McHugh has created. Another unifying thread, the book’s emotional motif, is that you can never go far enough to escape yourself, that you have to find your own reason for continuing despite the seeming futility of it all.

McHugh is an excellent writer; her POVs pulse with interiority, and the universe is vividly realized, full of life and texture. However, her future New York, despite the intervention of centuries and Maoist revolution, isn’t far removed from the New York of the 1990s imagination. Homosexuality is still frowned upon outside gay clubs. Gay men are still described as “bent.” It’s a strange mix of future extrapolation and not being able to imagine certain things ever changing.

2026 read #1: Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril.

Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril

277 pages

Published 1950

Read from December 31 to January 3

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

The most interesting aspect of this tale of nuclear war is its domestic perspective. After bombs drop on Manhattan, the danger isn’t a breakdown of civil society or roving bands of Westchester wastelanders. Rejecting the notion that America could be caught flatfooted by its enemies, Merril has a secret squad of all-American white men prepped and organized in every community for this very eventuality. Instead, the danger comes from radiation sickness, boozy socialite neighbors, and gas leaks, plus the occasional over-zealous members of the White Man Squad all too eager to replace our main character’s missing husband or flirt with her teenage daughter.

Hearth is, inevitably, tainted by its era’s assumptions of gender and divisions of labor. It also sags in the middle, abandoning anything like pacing in favor of moment to moment verisimilitude and repetitive conversations. It is not, in any modern day sense, a good or essential novel. (I only began reading it because I was on a plane and I had it on my phone.) Still, it was worth a read, if only to get a different contemporary perspective on nuclear anxieties.

2025 read #96: Valley of the Flame by Henry Kuttner.

Valley of the Flame by Henry Kuttner

156 pages

Published 1947

Read from December 8 to December 18

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

In the remote future of 1985, there are still lost worlds. Brian Raft works in an experimental clinic deep in the Amazonian jungles, until a strange and seemingly inhuman man arrives, steals a mysterious medallion from a dying pilot, and escapes upriver with one of Raft’s protégés. Raft pursues the pair into the mountains, and stumbles into a realm of cat-people and titanic trees.

Valley is interesting as a bridge between the early twentieth century Lost World motif and the later twentieth century trope, “a weird thing came from space and altered a spot on Earth around it.” An asteroid impact created the titular Valley, packing in enough “life energy” to accelerate metabolic processes in all lifeforms. In the thirty or so years since some random dude triggered the metabolic process, millions or billions of subjective years have passed for creatures in the Valley.

The summary is the most interesting thing about this book. As can be expected from a story of this date, there’s an awful lot of chatter about race and racial types and “degeneration.” That brings it down a lot. Also spoiling it for me: it just doesn’t pay off on its concept. There are a couple cool scenes, including an encounter with a garden of sensual delights that nearly pleasures Raft into defeat, something I’d love to recycle / improve upon in a Sword & Sorcery story. But that’s about it.