Speculative Fiction releases coming out this week that caught my eye!
I’ve reviewed two very exciting titles (first two) in this week’s post so check out the provided links for my full review for each!
Anything formatted in quotes is from the publisher or the authors website and are not my words.
Pronouns are from official author bios or websites – please let me know if you believe there is a mistake anywhere!
What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne (she/her)
274 pages
Publisher: Bindery Books – Boozhoo Books
fiction horror young adult adventurous dark tense fast-paced
FULL ARC REVIEW HERE!
Publisher synopsis:
The darkness isn’t empty. It’s hungry.
At the edge of the City of the Void, a massive chasm extends miles into the earth, its treacherous terrain overrun with vicious monsters and carnivorous plants. For orphaned best friends Petra and Jade, guiding treasure-seeking tourists down into the Void is the only way to earn enough to pull themselves up out of the slums for good.
Petra prefers to play it safe and take jobs only in the Void’s upper levels, where the dangers are better understood, while Jade wants to risk a descent to the deepest and most mysterious Sixth Layer. Because the deeper they go, the better the payout, and the sooner their dreams can become reality. Their friendship is Petra’s whole world, and Jade’s approval means everything—so Petra agrees to do it Jade’s way.
When their job goes wrong and Jade is lost in the Void, Petra must plunge deeper than she’s ever dared to save her friend. But she doesn’t know the truth of the Void . . . or what really waits for her in its depths.
About the Author:
Strange Lights by Mira González (she/her)
464 pages
Publisher: Ezeekat Press
fiction fantasy science fiction
FULL ARC REVIEW HERE!
Publisher synopsis:
Parenting is never easy, but it’s a hell of a lot harder when your toddler is a chupacabra.
Paranormal investigator and cryptozoologist Reggie has embraced her fate as parent to an adopted toddler, Eldi—a blood-sucking chupacabra with a fondness for goats. Reggie wants nothing more than to put her complicated past in the rearview mirror and fade into as much obscurity as her toddler will allow. But a rash of UFOs in the night sky and a couple of crop-circle-carving Roombas force Reggie into an investigation that attracts the attention of an old enemy, an anti-supernatural agency hunting for creatures like Eldi. To outwit them, Reggie must team up with Calvin: a podcaster-turned-werewolf whose charm is a real threat to Reggie’s rule against romantic attachments.
With Reggie’s history quickly catching up to her and Eldi in the agency’s crosshairs, any shred of normalcy evaporates. Reggie must decide: Can she confront her dark past to save Eldi—and an entire alien species—from getting wiped out of the universe?
About the Author:
Mira González is a full-time chaos manager of three small humans and the author of Strange Lights. You can find her escaping into novels when she isn’t traveling. Mira currently resides in Fiji, but she grew up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and worked on oil rigs under the northern lights in Alaska. Equal parts personal experience and a wildly overactive imagination inspire her stories, which center the queer and diverse characters she relates most to.
Though her children are the inspiration for the monster toddler in her book, her husband is regrettably not a werewolf, and she can only dream of a sentient Winnebago.
Find Me Where It Ends by Cassandra Khaw (they/them)
128 pages
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
fiction fantasy horror dark emotional sad fast-paced
Publisher synopsis:
A woman wakes up to find the black hound of Death at her front door in this hauntingly beautiful tale from USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw.
Antigone is no stranger to death.
For the women of her family, death always comes in the form of a black dog.
When Antigone’s own black dog arrives, she isn’t afraid. She invites it inside, where it soon becomes a daily source of companionship and comfort. It also forces her to reflect on the life she’s led—the parts of herself she’s hollowed out for the sake of others, and the bone-deep exhaustion that’s hounded her every step.
Her Death’s arrival must be a sign, permission to finally let go. To rest. Because while mortality is inevitable, living is a choice.
But a good death comes at a price.
About the Author:
CASSANDRA KHAW is an award-winning game writer, and USA Today bestseller. Khaw’s work can be found in places like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Khaw’s first original novella, Hammers on Bone, was a British Fantasy award and Locus award finalist.
Substack link here!
A Wall Is Also a Road by Annalee Newitz (they/them)
304 pages
Publisher: Tor Books
fiction lgbtqia+ science fiction adventurous emotional medium-paced
Publisher synopsis:
From bestselling author Annalee Newitz, A Wall Is Also a Road is a thought-provoking science fiction adventure about the meaning of life and love, seen through the many eyes of an alien grad student studying a familiar backwater planet. Perfect for fans of Becky Chambers, Ryka Aoki, and Martha Wells.
Gardenpath is a graduate student in biology who desperately wants to pass their exams with the highest honor possible: a prize given to scholars who discover something truly novel in the universe. Gardenpath also happens to be an amoeba–a slime mold, to be exact–from an ancient civilization that dwells in a vast network of towers between the stars. Seeking their prize, Gardenpath heads to a remote, dangerous planet that other researchers have dismissed as dead and uninteresting. There, they are surprised to discover a complicated ecosystem unlike anything they’ve ever encountered–including some peculiar, multicellular animals who seem to have language and culture.
To learn more about these animals, Gardenpath changes their shape to resemble one of them. And that’s how they meet a creature named Murtis, who lives in a city she calls Pompeii and works in a brothel known to locals as “the lupanar.” Unfazed by a visitor who says she’s from the stars, Murtis takes Gardenpath into her care, introducing her to the seaside tourist town full of immigrants and shopkeepers who are just trying to get by.
About the Author:
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist who also writes science fiction. They are the author of several books, including Automatic Noodle, an instant USA Today bestseller, The Terraformers, which was nominated for the Nebula Award, and Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. They have a monthly column in New Scientist magazine, and are a member of the Flaming Hydra collective.
The Scarlet Ball by Nghi Vo (she/her)
336 pages
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
fiction fantasy dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Publisher synopsis:
From USA Today bestselling author Nghi Vo, this all-consuming tale of ballrooms and bloodshed weds The Gilded Age with the Gothic vision of Guillermo del Toro.
Pick a face, pick a fate.
Judith Ban, former convent girl, courtesan, and failed thief, is on the lookout for her next identity. The daughter of a Vietnamese adventuress and a French naval officer, she’s no stranger to risk, but she’s unprepared for the secrets of New York’s legendary Four Hundred, or for the women who build their power at the city’s heart through blood-soaked, gold-etched rituals of demonic marriage.
In exchange for enough wealth to outrun her past, Judith strikes a deal with the matriarch of the powerful Howard family: she will stand in for the missing Howard granddaughter, who was poised to make her debut when she disappeared. With Miss Iphigenia Marshall’s face stitched over her own, Judith is white, rich, and about to risk body and soul in the deadly games that determine which girls will find a match—and which will be devoured. If she can keep her wits and her life, her reward will be a husband with undreamt-of power who will be hers to command…so long as she can keep his infinite hungers fed. But to survive the season, Judith will have to seduce a storm in the shape of a man, before the night to which everything has been leading—the Scarlet Ball where the demons choose their brides.
About the Author:
Nghi Vo is the bestselling author of the novels Siren Queen, The Chosen and the Beautiful, and The City in Glass, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and Lambda Literary Awards and the LA Times and Ursula K. Le Guin Prizes, and has won the Crawford, Ignyte, and Hugo Awards. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.
If the Dead Belong Here by Carson Faust (he/him)
400 pages
Publisher: Viking Penguin
fiction horror literary magical realism thriller challenging emotional sad medium-paced
Publisher synopsis:
When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family’s secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic
When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel’s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel’s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.
About the Author:
CARSON FAUST is the debut author of If the Dead Belong Here (Viking, 2025). He is two-spirit, and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He is the recipient of artist fellowships and residencies from the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation. His fiction has appeared in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology (Vintage, 2023). He lives in Minnesota, where he is at work on a second novel.
Your Beloved Remains by Quinn Connor (pen name for two authors, she/her)
304 pages
Publisher: Pine & Cedar Books
fiction horror lgbtqia+
About the Author:
Quinn Connor is one pen in two hands, Robyn Barrow and Alex Cronin.
Both writers from a young age, Robyn and Alex met at Rhodes College in Memphis and together developed their unique co-writing voice. They are thankful that no matter what, there’s always another person in the world who cares about their characters as much as they do. An Arkansan and a Texan, when they aren’t writing, they’re arguing about the differences between queso and cheese dip.Robyn is a medieval art historian and visiting assistant professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. Though often in the northlands, Robyn loves writing about her home state of Arkansas. Alex is a Texan living under a Brooklyn zip code, working in PR to fund her writing habit. In her free time, she can be found exploring the city, topping off her tea, and amassing a collection of winter coats. Whether Robyn is wandering the Far North, or Alex is chasing down homemade pasta in Prospect Heights, they write all the time. It’s their preferred form of conversation.
Publisher synopsis:
As fascination turns to obsession, two women drag each other into an academic horror of forgery, murder, and rage, destined to be devoured by readers of Plain Bad Heroines and If We Were Villains.
Archivist Celia Kiel has spent her life on the remote campus of Basin College in the Southern Ozarks. Once a jewel of women’s higher education in the South, the school now molders on its mountaintop, its endowment thinly supported by the bequeathed estate of 19th century writer, Beatrice Donahue. Celia guards the legacy of this venerated, yet scandalous author, who has been the object of her illicit desire since childhood.
When the administration announces the college’s imminent closure, Celia discovers a manuscript pickled in formaldehyde, and with it, a chance to save the only home she’s ever known. She will forge Beatrice’s infamous lost work, a spellbinding horror written toward her life’s tumultuous end. To do it, she is forced to recruit her professional rival, literature postdoc Joan Harriot, who has both an astounding talent for mimicry and a dark secret of her own. As their world closes in and the ghosts of the Victorian past encroach, their creative collaboration spirals into an obsession more twisted than even their beloved Beatrice could have penned.
Hear the Dead by Ann Dávila Cardinal (she/her)
368 pages
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
fiction magical realism thriller
Publisher synopsis:
One woman. A string of unsolved murders. Only she can hear the victims.
Elena Altieri never wanted to be famous, and certainly not at sixty-six years old. For over forty years she’s been hiding from her New York City punk rock youth in the hills of Vermont, but now, the past is catching up with her in more ways than one. Not only is she losing her hearing, but the photographs she took of a recently deceased musician are going viral. Suddenly, she finds herself summoned back to the city for an exhibit celebrating her work and thrust into a world she’d hoped to keep locked away forever. A world where her best friend, Sin, is dead.
At the exhibit, Elena hears the screams of a woman ringing among the hum of her tinnitus, and she’s sure something horrible has occurred. But since no one else can hear them, she convinces herself it’s just her damaged ears playing tricks. She tries to put the event behind her, but when the auditory visions continue whenever she touches something of Sin’s, she becomes convinced she’s hearing her friend’s murder. Desperate for answers, she has no choice but dig into the past, and what she’ll uncover will not only force her to reckon with her own fractured memories, but might prove that Sin, and other innocent women from their youth, were the victims of an unspeakable crime that only she can solve. Old punks never die, and Elena’s going to prove that.
Edgy, mysterious, and full of heart, Hear the Dead is at once an inventive and biting story following one aging woman desperate to solve crimes from her past, and a thought-provoking meditation on friendship, justice, and what it means to remember who we are.
About the Author:
Ann is a Nuyorican, Vermont-based author and educator with an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has a numerous amount of titles published both adult and young adult fiction.
Fitcher’s Bird by A.G. Slatter (she/her)
160 pages
Publisher: Titan Books
fiction fantasy horror
Publisher synopsis:
Once upon a time, three young sisters survived a catastrophic house fire… Years later, one of them disappears and then another and it is left to the eldest sister to find out whether something else survived… A dark, twisty, page-turning modern gothic horror from the multi award-winning author of The Cold House.
When sisters Chloe, Zoe and Dido were children, their father died and their mother could no longer care for them, so they were sent to live with the local doctor’s family: mother, father and three sons. Soon after, however, Ashwood Farm burned to the ground, and only the three young girls survived.
Years later, the sisters live very separate lives, each dealing with their painful past in different ways. But when first Chloe, and then Zoe disappears, it’s left to Dido to rake through their history and find out if her sisters are still in the world or paying the price for what happened that long ago summer night.
About the Author:
A.G. Slatter has won a Shirley Jackson Award, a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, three Australian Shadows Awards, eight Aurealis Awards and a Premier Ignotus. Most recently, All the Murmuring Bones was shortlisted for the 2021 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards Book of the Year and the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award; The Path of Thorns won both the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel and the Australian Shadows Award for Best Novel in 2022; and The Briar Book of the Dead has been shortlisted for both the Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards for 2024. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and has been a judge for the World Fantasy and Aurealis Awards. Angela’s short stories have appeared in many Best Of anthologies, and her work has been translated into many languages. She lives in Brisbane, Australia with a superannuated beagle and a TBR pile which will likely be the death of her. Find her on her website angelaslatter.com and on social media @angelaslatter
