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Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker
Because what would Thanksgiving be without devouring a few corpses? In a village in rural England, a capstone from long-fallow ground is removed and Rawhead Rex emerges. He walks nine feet high, with...
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26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss by Kij Johnson
Aimee has a circus trick. A bathtub is hoisted ten feet above the stage, 26 monkeys climb into it via a ladder and vanish. Aimee has no idea how the trick works, just that the monkeys come back to the...
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The Tear by Ian McDonald
Summing this up is difficult. More than one person has said this novella has enough ideas for a trilogy of novels. That’s not a downside, the vast scale of the story doesn’t feel compressed, or too...
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Tattercoats by Midori Snyder
While sometimes described as an erotic variation of the Donkeyskin fairytale, I also see this as an effective take on the ‘after the happily ever after’ that has become common in fairytale...
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The Cambist and Lord Iron by Daniel Abraham
The two couldn’t be more different. Olaf, the cambist, is a humble exchanger of foreign currencies with a good reputation. Lord Iron is a wealthy nobleman nototious for debauchery and indulging in all...
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Two Perfect Thefts from Seamark and Sinclair Lewis
Here are two stories so similar to each other it makes me wonder whether there’s a decades-old case of plagiarism going on. (An online search doesn’t reveal anyone comparing these together.)...
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The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World by Harlan Ellison
Fan fiction. It’s usually considered to be stories written by amateurs about licensed characters (usually from film or TV) without permission, nowadays posted on the internet. My own definition is a...
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Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre by Seth Fried
This summary is going to sound ridiculous. An utterly implausible premise for a story. You’ll have to take it on trust that the story manages to make it work uncomfortably well. Every year the Frost...
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The Adventure of the Field Theorems by Vonda N. McIntyre
There must be other stories in which Sherlock Holmes meets Arthur Conan Doyle. But I doubt there are many that get such mileage out of their contrast. For this story has the Conan Doyle of later years,...
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Arbeitskraft by Nick Mamatas
A steampunk story starring Friedrich Engels. Nope, I haven’t seen that one before. It’s another 1890s. Karl Marx is dead, and Friedrich Engels is making a big display of publicly burning all his...
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