Book Reviews by Eitan

I received an ARC of this book from Saga Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.  While I am a big fan of Westerns on the screen, I've never felt any particular interest in seeking them out on the page. Still, when I read an excerpt of The Strange on Tor.com, I was immediately reminded of the Coen brothers' classic film True Grit (2010). When the blurb for the book mentioned it as well, I decided to get a jump-start on the release date next week and went looking for this advance copy. What I found was a compelling story that ended up drifting a little too far from its initial promise for my taste, but still kept me engaged for a weekend and brought some of the classic Western elements to a new setting. Annabelle Crisp is not quite a ringer for True Grit's Mattie Ross (if you haven't seen True Grit , stop reading this review and go watch it! Nobody does dialogue better than the Coen brothers, and Hailee Steinfeld knocks it ou...

I received an ARC of this book from Subterranean Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.  Experienced readers of this blog (are there any of them out there, besides...me?) will notice that Rose/House has already appeared on my "best of 2022" list, so it should be little surprise that I found this novella to be an incredible step up from an author I already held in high regard. Pivoting from the space opera of the Teixcalaan duology to a near-future horror-tinged haunted house story infused with a practitioner's knowledge of architecture and urban planning, Arkady Martine takes a huge left turn without ever leaving her wheelhouse. Despite the radically different setting, Rose/House continues Martine's exploration of many of the same themes from those novels--personhood and exclusion, constructed spaces and their influence, mysterious alien entities with terrifying goals. After being somewhat too genre-savvy to truly appreciat...

I received an ARC of this book from Tordotcom in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers. I don't usually tend to read horror, but I've been leaning more in that direction recently so I decided to give this novella a try. The theme of understanding other minds is one that appeals to me in a variety of contexts, and it was interesting to read a new genre's take on it. For a horror novice like me, this book stayed on the right side of the "overwhelmingly spooky" line while raising genuinely unsettling questions about research ethics and the impossibility of truly sharing another being's consciousness. Mandelo deftly balances two main storylines--in one, Sean tests an experimental neural mesh that allows her to experience life as the grey wolf Kate, while in the other her marriage to Riya slowly implodes as the work becomes ever more consuming. While Sean pours herself into trying to forge a true connection with Kate at work, she ...