dawn.vogel | April 22, 2026
I thoroughly loved Clara Ward’s Be the Sea, so I was excited to read their novella, Dream the Deep (Atthis Arts, 2026). Set on a near-future Earth that the wealthy and privileged have fled, it takes place over a few days and features a number of people who are being left behind. Ren is a non-binary […]
dawn.vogel | April 8, 2026
The Dead Withheld by L. D. Lewis (Neon Hemlock, 2025) is a queer, gritty, urban fantasy novella that I absolutely flew through once I started reading it. The worldbuilding is fantastic, as are the characters inhabiting that world! Dizzy Carter is a private investigator and deadwalker, a type of witch who can communicate with the […]
dawn.vogel | March 25, 2026
Adria Bailton’s Worlds Divide (Balance of Seven, 2026) is a wonderful young adult sci-fi novel of love despite the odds centering a non-white young woman with a disability and touching heavily on mental health issues. Nina has always been able to “slip” into other worlds, but it’s an ability she can’t control, leading to significant […]
dawn.vogel | March 18, 2026
Tea and Treachery at the Infinite Pantry by Jo Miles (2026) is a delightful cozy mystery set in a fantastical world, filled with tea, delicious foods, cats, and the promised treachery! Glendevyn is the recently appointed head curator of the Infinite Pantry, a museum dedicated to food. When the preservation spells that keep the museum’s […]
dawn.vogel | February 25, 2026
The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas (Neon Hemlock, 2025) is a charming novella that mashes up academia and superheroes with a largely LGBTQ+ cast of characters. Professor Laxman Yadav, who specializes in art history and archaeology, is brought in to examine a recently unearthed artifact, a rare example of a fully intact technology from […]
dawn.vogel | February 4, 2026
The Cellar Below the Cellar by Ivy Grimes (Apex Book Company, 2026) is a folktale-inspired horror novella with a fascinating cast of characters and themes of family inheritance and isolation. While Jane is visiting her grandmother, an extreme solar event wipes out power, communications, and even car batteries, stranding her in the semi-rural location. As […]
dawn.vogel | January 14, 2026
Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács (Broken Eye Books, 2024) is a beautiful collection of speculative fiction stories centering queer characters, Jewish characters, and sometimes characters who have become plants. Standout stories in the collection for me included “And I Entreated,” which features a Jewish woman who has been converted into a […]
dawn.vogel | December 31, 2025
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s collection So You Want to be a Robot (Robot Dinosaur Press, 2024) contains 22 fabulous speculative fiction stories with queer and neurodiverse characters living their lives and dealing with the world around them, which is not always kind. Normally, when I review an anthology or collection, I talk a bit about specific stories […]
dawn.vogel | December 3, 2025
T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead (Tor Nightfire, 2022) is, at its core, a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This novella takes the classic tale and puts a new spin on it, lending something of an explanation to the original while taking it in an amazingly cool direction! Rather […]
dawn.vogel | November 19, 2025
ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, edited by Marissa Van Uden (Apex Book Company, 2025), is a collection of previously published stories from a wide variety of venues that look at a variety of issues related to climate change, capitalism, and colonialism, along with other aspects of ecological fiction. A number of the stories in […]
