"There was only one kind of weather in Camp Sunshine, and the wind threw rain by the rattling bucketload against the office window as Derek leaned myopically close to the typewriter's platen." Back in the 80s, the growing popularity of the role-playing board game, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), met with a confused moral panic. In … Continue reading A Conventional Boy – Charles Stross
"Maskelle had been asking the Ancestors to stop the rain three days running now and, as usual, they weren't listening." In the Celestial Empire there is the Wheel of the Infinite, the pattern that holds the whole world together. Every year it is remade to ensure good fortunes, and every hundred years its reweaving aligns … Continue reading The Wheel of the Infinite – Martha Wells
"On the day the Teller of Small Fortunes came to Necker, the village was in an uproar because the candlemaker's would-be apprentice had lost all the goats." Tao is a fortune teller, leading a lonely sort of existence travelling the lands with just her mule, Laohu, for company. She only tells small fortunes - that … Continue reading The Teller of Small Fortunes – Julie Leong
"People think that ghosts only come out at night, or on Halloween, when the world is dark and the walls are thin." Cassidy Blake was a normal teenager until the day she almost drowned. Or rather, did drown, but was saved by Jacob, who just happens to be a ghost. He follows her back through the … Continue reading City of Ghosts – Victoria Schwab
"I was contemplating the fragments of an unidentified animal's skull, late on a wet, windy Friday in March, when a voice said, 'Booth? Is that you?'" I first met Kyle Murchison Booth in A Theory of Haunting, a 2006 novella I picked up after discovering that the author, Sarah Monette, also wrote under the name Katherine … Continue reading The Bone Key – Sarah Monette
"Although I have loved many, there has been only one genuine love in my near-eternally stretched life - Rachel who fell to the bottom of the library without me." When our narrator dies, he has strong expectations of where he'll end up as a staunch practising Mormon. Heaven and godhood ahoy, right? But no - … Continue reading A Short Stay in Hell – Steven L Peck
Welcome to my contribution to this year's Spooktastic Reads - 13 days (and nights!) of thrills and chills and all things spooky! Also an excellent kick to get back into blogging after the unholy (see what I did there?!) combination of house moves and job interviews happening a little bit too much at the same … Continue reading Spooktastic Reads 2024
"From the topmost tower of the observatory to the floating docks on the beach, the city of Azril lit up with paper lanterns, with candles, with girls throwing flaming knives and boys in firefly crowns, with passion, with desire, with hatred, and with delight." Vitrine is a demon. Centuries ago she found herself in the … Continue reading The City in Glass – Nghi Vo
"Later, not a single person will recall seeing the lady board the flight at Hobart Airport." What would you do if someone told you how and when you're going to die? That's the question faced by the passengers on an otherwise unremarkable - just delayed - flight, when a fellow traveller starts to make some … Continue reading Here One Moment – Liane Moriarty
"To the curious minds whose boundlessness mirrors the infinite spectrum of colors and the vast cosmos they illuminate." The blurb calling this the 'intersection of science and art' is pretty much spot on. We start with an explanation of what colour even is, from both a scientific and slightly more poetic way of thinking about … Continue reading The Universe in 100 Colors – Tyler Thrasher & Terry Mudge
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