Congratulations to DMLA authors Cassandra Khaw and Eugen Bacon for making the 2023 British Fantasy Awards shortlist!
Newbery Honor-winning Darcie Little Badger’s SHEINE LENDE, a prequel to the Locus Award-winning ELATSOE, in which a young girl searches for her mother and a lost child – spirited away by a mysterious faery ring – as well as a return to her family’s homeland, again illustrated by Rovina Cai, to Nick Thomas at Levine Querido in an exclusive submission by Michael Curry for publication in spring 2024.
Publishers Weekly: Transporting readers to a blood-soaked Ireland, Sharpson (When the Sparrow Falls) delivers modern horror at its best. One stormy night in 1979, Etain comes across a faceless corpse on the road; days later, she’s found half dead near a burnt-out farmhouse, her shattered mind a blank. Then, one of her twin daughters disappears in 1989, and soon after, her husband is found dead in a suspected suicide. By 2003, the only person still looking for an explanation to this mysterious series of events is Etain’s surviving daughter, Ashling, a university drama student who’s just entering into a passionate love affair with a woman. Ashling’s convinced, however, that what she remembers of her sister’s disappearance can’t possibly be true: it involved a popular children’s TV show about a goat puppet that would only come out of his box if someone had been very bad. According to everyone else who watched the show, the box never actually opened—but Ashling remembers it differently, and the more she investigates, the more she comes to fear that what’s inside is no cuddly puppet, but something old, crafty, and hungry. Sharpson does a masterful job of weaving together the three timelines, handling each story with tremendous sensitivity and skill while supplying genuine scares. By turns tender and terrifying, sexy and stomach-turning, heartwarming and heartrending, this folklore-steeped exploration of generational trauma is a high-water mark for the Irish horror novel.
Locus: Cassandra Khaw has cemented their status as horror royalty, once and for all, with their latest novella, The Salt Grows Heavy. All hail and long live! Here’s the thing, though: I’m not even sure how or where to start telling you about The Salt Grows Heavy. Nothing I say can quite capture the creeping body horror, the marvelous disorientation, or the toothy, sumptuous, and marvelously off-putting prose of the thing. Fans of Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth will be happy to see that Khaw’s vision and aesthetic remain as dark as ever, and relish that—in my opinion—they have managed to push further into the weird and the unsettling….for those of us who find darkness irresistible, especially when beautifully presented, The Salt Grows Heavy is a grotesquely perfect feast.
Congratulations to our DMLA authors who are finalists for the 2023 Hugo Awards!
BEST NOVEL
BEST NOVELLA
BEST SERIES
LODESTAR AWARD FOR BEST YOUNG ADULT BOOK
And special recoginition to Premee Mohamed in BEST SEMIPROZINE for Escape Pod!
DEMONS OF GOOD AND EVIL remains on the USA Today bestseller list for a second week at #46!
Rachel Morgan, witch-born demon, suspected that protecting the paranormal citizens of Cincinnati as the demon subrosa would be trouble. But it’s rapidly becoming way more trouble than even she could have imagined.
While Rachel and her friends may have vanquished the trickster demon Hodin, his mysterious associate known only as “The Mage” is eager to finish what Hodin started, beginning with taking down Rachel’s power structure piece by piece.
With her world falling apart, Rachel desperately needs help. But with all of her supporters under attack, her only hope is to make a deal with the unlikeliest of allies. . . .
WITCH KING debuts at #93 on the USA Today bestsellers list!
After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well.
But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?
Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.
He’s not going to like the answers.
Publishers Weekly: Heartfield (The Chatelaine) injects some magic into European history with this lush and enchanting outing. In 1768, close-knit sisters Charlotte and Antoine, daughters of the Habsburg emperor, are sent their separate ways to marry powerful husbands: Charlotte to Naples and the brutish King Ferdinand, and Antoine to France, where she is renamed Marie Antoinette and weds the future King Louis XVI. Isolated and alone, the two rely on lessons from a book of spells they discovered as children to reclaim power over their lives while trying to do right for their respective nations. As tension mounts both politically and in the magical world, the sisters find themselves on opposing sides, turning from close confidants to bitter rivals. Heartfield’s accounts of both queens are detailed and insightful, with a fresh take on Marie Antoinette and a fascinating look at her less famous sister. The magic system, which demands a sacrifice for each spell cast, is a cool concept, but in execution it’s a bit murky and occasionally feels like an afterthought to the story at hand. Still, fans of historical novels looking for just a touch of the fantastic are sure to be sucked in.
Congratulations to DMLA author Cassandra Khaw for her 2022 Shirley Jackson Award Nomination!
Audio rights to Premee Mohamed’s NO ONE WILL COME BACK FOR US, to Sonia Brand-Fisher at Tantor Media, by Michael Curry.
Audio rights to Katherine Addison’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series, to Kim Budnick at Tantor Media, in a four-book deal, by Katie Shea Boutillier for Cameron McClure.