The novel begins by taking the real-world concept of Japanese yonige-ya, companies that help desperate people vanish and begin new lives, and turning it into a supernatural business. Haruto, a twenty-eight-year-old man with long silver-white hair, operates an elegant little stationery shop in Tokyo during the day. At night, however, the shop becomes the headquarters […]
Andrea Morstabilini’s In Vacuo is a Gothic science-fiction novel about Henry Caxton, a poor boy who becomes the ward and eventually the medical apprentice of the brilliant, secretive Dr Robertson Hammond. What initially appears to be a Victorian Gothic mystery about a suspicious childbirth and a locked room gradually reveals itself as a story about […]
This is a surreal science-fiction satire set during the fourteenth month of an alien invasion of Earth. Its central human character is Margaret Wiggle, a recently separated Florida woman who has moved back into her parents’ home, while its first-person narrator is Angus, a young extraterrestrial cadet assigned to observe her. What initially looks like […]
Tea & Time Loops is a cozy fantasy murder mystery about Wen Ashwood, the anxious, accident-prone owner of the failing Gilded Cup tea shop in Marrowind, who gets trapped in a repeating day after the town magistrate, Lady Orlaine, is poisoned in their shop. It wants to be a whimsical time-loop detective story, a queer […]
Wonderkin is a near-future robot-child custody novel about Charles Wright, a lonely widower who rents two artificial “temporary units” from a company called WonderKin, keeps them past the end of the contract, calls them his sons, and eventually destroys his own life trying to save them from being returned, recycled, or legally erased. It wants […]