dawn.vogel | June 5, 2024
Addison Smith’s Fractured Realities (2024) is another great collection of sci-fi and fantasy fiction in small stories. There’s a mix of drabbles, microfiction, flash fiction, and a few short stories, with a trend toward stories that pack a lot of emotion into few words. The stories in this collection include a number of previously published stories […]
dawn.vogel | May 15, 2024
A.Z. Louise’s Off-Time Jive (Neon Hemlock, 2023) is a gorgeous fantastical history, detective novella with fascinating characters and a great twist at the end! Set in an alternate version of the Harlem Renaissance, the story weaves deftly between magical dark academia and everyday people going about their lives. The main character, Bessie Knox (who mostly goes […]
dawn.vogel | May 8, 2024
Reading: I’ve actually been really bad about this lately. Work has been hectic, with lots of editing, so the last thing I want to do in the evenings is read. I need to get back on track with that, though, because those books won’t review themselves! Watching: It’s been a whole lot of K-pop lately, […]
dawn.vogel | April 24, 2024
Loving Safoa by Liza Wemakor (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a novella featuring Black lesbian vampires, with aspects of vampirism that I haven’t seen in many stories featuring vampires. But this approach is interwoven into a story that spans centuries and locations. Cynthia begins the story as a mortal woman who is very close to changing […]
dawn.vogel | April 10, 2024
Reading: Books for review and occasional game books, as I realize I need to learn more about some of the games we’re playing now or in the future! Watching: Not a whole heck of a lot, because most of our TV time has been spent on watching K-pop things. We did watch Spin Me Round for […]
dawn.vogel | April 3, 2024
Foz Meadows’ novella Finding Echoes (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a secondary-world fantasy story packed with great characters (queer and otherwise) and worldbuilding, plus a whole load of feelings. Snow has the ability to speak with the dead, getting information from them and sometimes helping them move on. When his ex-lover Gem shows up in need of […]
dawn.vogel | March 13, 2024
I backed last year’s Neon Hemlock novella series Kickstarter, and I’m looking forward to this year’s as well! From last year, I’ve reviewed Hybrid Heart and The Killing Ground, along with Suzan Palumbo’s Skin Thief, a collection including short stories and a novella, and I’ve got more of these on tap to review! If you’re curious to […]
dawn.vogel | March 6, 2024
Reading: Books to review, including some anthologies and some stand-alone books. Watching: Not much recently other than K-pop related things. Listening To: Recent additions to my list have been Boy Story (which is actually a Chinese group, trained in the K-pop system, and now making a Korean debut) and Just B. The latter is because […]
dawn.vogel | February 28, 2024
The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Henry Herz (Blackstone Publishing, 2023), is a speculative fiction anthology that blends historical fact about Marie Curie’s life as a young woman and fantastical, science fiction, and horror elements to present new and intriguing experiments a young Marie might have undertaken. Most […]
dawn.vogel | February 21, 2024
Addison Smith’s Darkling Dreams (Shacklebound Books, 2024) is a collection of drabbles–stories of exactly 100 words. The themes in these stories are often dark and sci-fi, but they show an incredible mastery of the drabble format in their breadth and scope of approaches to this tricky length. I was familiar with some of Smith’s drabbles through […]
