Dec 032021
Nov 302021
Arabic rights to New York Times bestselling author Jim Butcher’s STORM FRONT, FOOL MOON, and GRAVE PERIL, the first three books in the Dresden Files series, to Ebhar Publishing, by Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.
Dutch rights to Annika Martin’s MOST ELIGIBLE BILLIONAIRE and THE BILLIONAIRE’S WAKE-UP-CALL GIRL, to April Books by Emma Lind and Phillip Sane at Lennart Sane Agency on behalf of Katie Shea Boutillier for Cameron McClure.
Russian rights to New York Times bestselling author Martha Wells’ WITCH KING, to Eksmo, by Igor Korzhenevski at Alexander Korzhenevski Agency in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.
Russian rights to Martha Wells’ FUGITIVE TELEMETRY, the newest installment in the New York Times bestselling Murderbot Diaries series, and also a Murderbot omnibus edition, to Eksmo, by Alexander Korzhenevski at Alexander Korzhenevski Agency in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.
Turkish rights to USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw’s THE ALL-CONSUMING WORLD and NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH, to Ithaki, by Merve Öngen at ONK Agency in association with Michael Curry.
Nov 232021
In the first reports of every mass shooting, there’s always mention of a second shooter—two sets of gunshots, a figure seen fleeing the scene—and they always seem to evaporate as events are pieced together.
Commissioned by a fringe publisher to investigate the phenomenon, journalist Mike Karras finds himself tailed by drones, attacked by a talk radio host, badgered by his all-knowing (and maybe all-powerful) editor, and teaming up with an immigrant family of conspiracy buffs.
Together, they uncover something larger and stranger than anyone could imagine—a technomystical plot to ‘murder America.’
Time for Karras to meet his deadline.
Nov 232021
Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She’s always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories.
Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he’s been cast from home. He’s found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake.
Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli’s best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven’t been in centuries.
And there are some who will kill to keep them apart.
Darcie Little Badger introduced herself to the world with Elatsoe. In A Snake Falls to Earth, she draws on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure to weave another unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. It is not to be missed.
Nov 192021
Financial Times: Nick Mamatas’s The Second Shooter likewise revels in weirdness, delving into America’s conspiracy theory culture. Mike Karras, a down-at-heel journalist working for a small-press publisher, is carrying out research for a book about mysterious, half-glimpsed additional gunmen whom eyewitnesses claim to have seen at assassinations and mass shootings.
Karras’s investigations into the phenomenon lead him deep into the realms of rightwing radio talk-show hosts and QAnon-style paranoia. In its final third, the story takes a turn for the metaphysical, following its own dark logic to a downbeat conclusion. Along the way Mamatas offers plenty of scathing commentary on gun violence and misuse of social media, in a novel that is both smart and topical.
Nov 172021
Cassandra Khaw’s THE SALT GROW HEAVY, in which a mermaid joins a strange doctor on a journey through an eerie taiga, and they must embrace the darkest parts of their true nature if they hope to survive, to Kristin Temple at Nightfire, with Ellen Datlow editing, for publication in spring 2023, by Michael Curry.
Nov 122021
NPR: Nothing But Blackened Teeth is visually stunning. Of course, a novella is just words but Khaw’s command of language in service of an image — their brilliance when it comes to wedding image with emotion — is sheer perfection here, with gorgeous turns of phrase that deepen our understanding of the characters and their responses to one another. Atmosphere seeps from every page, and you really feel like you too are exploring this house, like this house is closing around you, too. You feel like you just might be able to notice what’s wrong, or where the wrongness is springing from, before anybody else.
I like the characters. They form a unit more because of shared history than because they would be friends in the present, which serves this particular type of story very well. Readers will get frustrated with one person’s choices and say “Why are you being so stupid?” or “Don’t do that!” — but so will another character. One of Khaw’s strengths is their ability to show fully realized, nuanced social dynamics.
This is a creepy, meticulously-crafted tragedy and frankly, one of the most beautifully written haunted stories I’ve ever read. As in the best ghost stories, the house is full of ghosts, but it’s the people who are the houses. We’re haunted by our histories, by the ugly things we want to keep buried, by the things we just can’t let go. Nothing But Blackened Teeth will linger with you.
Nov 082021
Nov 012021
Oct 272021
Tor.com: Nothing but Blackened Teeth fills the mouth like a big bite of tendon—meat that requires chewing with all the muscle in your jaw, mixing savor with a visceral density. As a novella, of course, “one big bite” is especially apt. At the exact moment the brutality of the climax started to provoke the first wash of nausea for me, the grisly tension unspools and the remainder can be swallowed whole.
Khaw has a truly deft hand at crafting gruesome poetics within their prose fiction. Whether it’s the sensation of sipping from a water bottle to find it clogged with algae and old hair, or watching a friend use his fingernails to dig loose his own tooth roots and all, or devouring a sumptuously marrow-fatty wedding/funeral meal… the novella’s world is a felt world, one the characters engage through their bodies. It’s as nasty as it is delicious, as much rotten as sweet.
Which brings me to the other aspect of Nothing but Blackened Teeth that made me wriggle with delight: the merging and twisting of several generic forms into one dense, scary package. Khaw effortless interweaves source materials from the gothic to youkai tales, spooky traditions such as hyakumonogatari kaidankai to literary tropes about “loathsomely rich twenty-somethings and their murderous interpersonal drama.” And, more to the point, they explain none of those wellsprings to the audience. You’re either going to come along, or you aren’t. I appreciate being required to engage with a text on multiple levels—and Khaw’s novella allows the reader to dig as deep or coast as light as they like.
Critiques of power and violence are also woven into the manor’s original ghost story—an entombed young bride and the hundreds of girls murdered to be with her over the decades creating a ghost made from loss and desire, betrayal and loneliness. Ultimately, there is an intense emotional realism underlying the blood-soaked, claustrophobic horror of a night spent in the haunted manor. From the twistiness of Cat’s limping psychological recovery, to her miserable friends and their miserable attachments to one another, Khaw constructs a memorable and cautionary spooky story of their own.
Turn down the lights and give it a read, some dark night.