Feb 01 2026

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher’s third Sworn Soldier novella — following What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night — takes Alex Easton and their* batsman Angus to America at the urgent behest of their friend James Denton, a doctor last seen by readers not far from where the House of Usher had fallen. He had returned home, still shaken, only to encounter … something that spooked him enough to send a telegram imploring Easton to come “with all haste.” (p. 10)

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

Upon their arrival in Boston, Angus and Easton are met by Denton’s assistant Kent. He takes them from the harbor to their hotel, where Denton and his friend John Ingold are waiting in the dining room. Denton, it transpires, has inherited an abandoned coal mine in West Virginia, among many other things. His cousin Oscar recently disappeared while investigating the mine, and Denton wants Easton’s help finding out what happened.

Denton coughed. “At any rate, it’s your experience with … unusual … circumstances that I need.”
I raised an eyebrow. Angus raised both of his. “You mean like what we saw at Usher’s lake,” I said flatly. “Because I’ll tell you, that was the first time I’ve dealt with anything like that.” …
“The first time for me, too,” said Denton. He looked suddenly weary and much older than I remembered. “But you did deal with it, and you know there are terrible things in the earth. If you encounter another one, you won’t waste time insisting that there must be a different explanation or that I’m lying to you or that none of this can possibly be happening.”
Terrible things in the earth. Yes. Denton and I had seen a terrible thing in the earth and ended it … (pp. 16–17)

Oscar, Denton relates, had “always liked digging, whether it was papers or actual dirt.” (p. 19) He was the one who discovered the deed to the mine, which had been abandoned for decades. He was experienced with caves, and wanted to try to figure out why the mine had been abandoned. At first, Oscar sent regular letters. Then he sent one about observing unusual phenomena in the mine. What Stalks the Deep is a creepy adventure story, but it is also very much a T. Kingfisher book, as the next paragraph shows:

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Jan 31 2026

A Brief Visit to DNFland

Most years, I set aside a couple of books that I have gotten a decent way into and decide that I am just not going to finish them. (Each year since 2020, it’s been either one or two.) This year, I’ve already DNF’d two and it’s only late January. I’m not one of those people who commits to finishing every book they start; a few years as a bookseller cured me of that. As did the loss of teen reading speed, no doubt. Nor am I one of those people who ditches a book after a couple of paragraphs or a few pages; I don’t mind a slow start from time to time, and I love big books. Nothing against folks who take either of those approaches. People read in all sorts of ways — boy howdy did a few years as a bookseller teach me that.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Here in middle age, I think I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on books that are going to interest me. I like books that show me new places (even if they are old or imaginary), new ways of seeing the world (or worlds), new ways of being. The German word for curious, neugierig, translates literally as “new-greedy,” and yes, that’s me. I’m a cat whom curiosity will probably eventually kill. I think that’s what draws me to history, to historical fiction, and to fantasy and science fiction. While I can mostly tell what I will enjoy, I don’t think I’ve fallen into a rut: last year I tried 18 authors whose work was new to me.

So a DNF feels a little bit like a failure. I chose the book for a reason, or several. There was something I was looking forward to, or something in particular drew me in, and nowadays I have plenty to choose from. I didn’t bounce immediately, I got a substantial ways into the book, and decided I didn’t want to go on at all. (Sometimes if a book is short enough, I’ll just go ahead and finish it; this is not always a good approach.) Why?

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Jan 29 2026

Tantalizing Tales — January 2026 — Part Five

Ooh, is this the first Part Five I’ve ever published of this monthly series? It can’t be because this year’s January has lasted forever can it, hahahahahuuuuuuuunh.

Anyway, this column is coming out on a Thursday this week because we’re taking part in the USA’s General Strike tomorrow. No work, no school, no shopping for one day, which — if you’re like me — could be the perfect opportunity to just curl up with a good book to read for fun. We have some excellent suggestions for you here should you need them, with five upcoming releases you can pre-order in anticipation of the next time you need a temporary respite from the horrors, as well as a throwback from warmer days in 2025.

First up, we have W. M. Akers’ To Kill A Cook, the first in a planned duology set in 1970s New York City. Fast-talking, hard-charging Bernice Black is the city’s busiest restaurant critic, juggling her career with her fiance and his two young sons. When she stops by the restaurant of her favorite chef and mentor Laurent Tirel one morning, she’s horrified to discover his severed head perfectly preserved in a mold of jellied aspic.

The cops are clueless, and with layoffs looming, she makes a reckless bet with her editor to solve the crime and get the scoop within a week. But Laurent’s killer has no qualms about striking again, much less eliminating any nosy journalists who keep getting in their way.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/29/tantalizing-tales-january-2026-part-five/

Jan 28 2026

Murder Before I Do by Rosie A Point and Charles Timmerman

Being confined to the house by a double whammy of flu and ice storm sure has made me appreciate books like this even more than usual!

The third in the Cranberry Creek Word Search mystery series finds our heroine, bookstore owner Abby Jones getting ready for the wedding of her best friend, baker Rose Turner. As maid of honor, Abby has been pretty busy, and is now looking forward to the welcome dinner for the relatives of Rose and her intended Paul Blakely, who’ve been trickling into town for the festivities.

While the Turner side is all in for the celebrations, Paul’s guests prove to be a little pricklier than expected. During dinner at The Barn, Abby has a front row seat to the tensions simmering below their pleasant surfaces. But things get really bad when a sudden power outage strikes. Abby goes looking for help… only to find the best man bludgeoned to death in another room.

Despite her sheriff’s deputy boyfriend having a dim view of meddlers in his investigation, Abby isn’t about to let anything as awful as the cloud of an unsolved murder hang over her best friend’s wedding. Will she be able to figure whodunnit before anyone else gets hurt?

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Jan 27 2026

Initial Condition by Ian Domowitz (EXCERPT)

Hello, dear readers! Today we have an excerpt from a centuries-spanning novel of science fantasy that will appeal to lovers of the esoteric and the technological.

I’m gonna let the publicity materials for this latest book in a series speak for themselves, for fear of accidentally giving anything away with my own writing:

“A twelfth century vision of artificial intelligence foreshadows a sixteenth century recipe to produce it. A nineteenth century prison nurtures it. A twenty-first century golem befriends it. And a boy without a century stands at the intersection of real and virtual, moments into the future. They call him The Mechanic.

“A kidnapping leads Hanzi Boss to a sanctuary community where religious law forbids speech by the artificially intelligent. For beings like him, the penalty for existing is death and his true nature must remain secret. But the community has its own secrets. An ancient immigrant hides there, a monster made not born, a being who can know Hanzi for what he really is. When the price of life is death, who survives—infinite strength steeped in the silence of the past, or intelligence guided by lived experience?

“This is a story of arcane knowledge, alchemy, and strange philosophies. It is the story of a being not created by God, who does not know what he is and searches for something more. Initial Condition is the third book in The Mechanic’s Diary series following Wake the Whirlwind and Neurojuggler.”

Read on for an excerpt on the creation of one of the mysterious figures at the heart of the novel:

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/27/initial-condition-by-ian-domowitz-excerpt/

Jan 26 2026

Precious Metal by Darcy Van Poelgeest & Ian Bertram

with colors by Matt Hollingsworth and letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.

There’s no escaping the fact that Ian Bertram’s art is far and away the most arresting aspect of this project. The best way for me to describe it would be horror manga through a 70s psychedelic lens, as a far-future America where body modifications are the norm is beset by religious strife. Mr Hollingsworth’s colors do a terrific job of turning the volume both up and down on the gore where necessary, but if you’re squeamish when it comes to body horror, this is probably not the graphic novel for you. If you’re okay with a significant amount of gore and grotesquerie tho, then the panels very much reward extra scrutiny. Biology is gross, y’all, and none of the art in these pages felt like it was being any more nasty, brutish and short than life in the natural world actually is. Most of it felt, in fact, like an extrapolation of scientific advances that are more concerned with function over form.

The story itself revolves around a tracker named Max Weaver, who’s hired to find and return what’s basically a runaway enslaved person who’s about to be absorbed by the Twelve, a death cult that worships a deity cobbled together from flesh. What Max doesn’t expect is that the target is a kid, who is both deadly and engenders a weird feeling of kinship in Max. Not wanting to snatch the kid only to hand him over to one of the most notorious and powerful gangsters of New Empire, he takes off with the target instead.

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Jan 23 2026

Tantalizing Tales — January 2026 — Part Four

The last* roundup column of January features some terrific upcoming thrillers, as well as a few books I wish I’d been able to get to back in 2025.

First up, we have a non-fiction examination of two of my favorite pastimes and one of the places where they intersect. John Curran’s The Murder Game examines the birth of the mystery genre and its explosion in popularity, coinciding with the mainstreaming of light intellectual pastimes like crossword puzzles and deductive board games. He posits that these trends were helped along by the sudden abundance of both leisure time and literacy, with curious minds hungry for stimulation.

Dr Curran believes that the novels of the Golden Age of Detecting (essentially the 1920s and 30s) continue to be as popular as they were a century ago due to the fact that they’re essentially games set up between author and reader. There are unspoken rules best exemplified by the Fair Play movement, where all the clues to a mystery’s solution are laid out in the story such that astute readers should be able to figure out whodunnit alongside the fictional detective. He also examines the many different kind of games at play in the experience of reading, whether between detective and murderer, publisher and book buyer, or between authors themselves. It’s a fascinating study of the genre that provides real insight into the enduring popularity of Golden Age detective fiction and its many successors today.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/23/tantalizing-tales-january-2026-part-four/

Jan 22 2026

Wandering Souls and other stories by Philip Caputo

I tend to read a lot more female authors than male, which apparently puts me in the minority of readers worldwide. It’s especially unusual for me to read “serious” fiction by men, and while there’s a touch of the supernatural in each story collected here, this is still very much the kind of literary writing I actually admire (and regular readers will know how much I despise the vast majority of modern literary fiction churned out by American MFA mills.)

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by my own reaction here given that Philip Caputo won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism back in the 1970s. You know, back in the day when the fourth estate wasn’t primarily owned by the obscenely wealthy, who use it to hoard their fortunes by influencing the populace to not demand our nation’s rightful due via taxation. Ahem. Mr Caputo’s writing in this collection showcases his rightfully lauded journalistic background. It’s clear and strong and entirely devoid of fluff, even as he discusses such ephemeral subjects as guilt and its attendant ghosts. Because there are a lot of ghosts in this book, as troubled men seek to deal with the mistakes of their pasts, whether small or grand.

Vietnam figures heavily in the proceedings, again unsurprisingly given Mr Caputo’s experiences as a combat veteran in the Vietnam War. The title story begins with a former GI learning that he has a chance to help a woman recover the corpse of her brother Paul Salerno, who vanished while on a combat mission. Our unnamed narrator had actually been part of the squad who originally discovered the remains of Paul’s team. The extraordinary circumstances in which the corpses were found meant that our narrator’s company had had to leave them behind, in contradiction of the warrior ethos our narrator holds dear. The guilt of that has lingered over the decades, and comes roaring back to the fore when he learns of the ongoing grief of Paul’s remaining family.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/22/wandering-souls-and-other-stories-by-philip-caputo/

Jan 21 2026

Pig Wife by Abbey Luck

w an art assist by Ruka Bravo.

This was my first 5-star read of books published in 2026, and you’d best believe that I didn’t think it would be when I first went into it. Abbey Luck has done something exceptional here, writing of horrors both everyday and extraordinary with humor and hope, and without ever descending into gratuitousness. Her artwork, which is heavily influenced by alternative comix luminaries like R Crumb and Art Spiegelman, perfectly walks that line between the glorious and the grotesque, as a young girl comes of age under the most distressing of circumstances.

Mary Martinez hates that her mother Vee left Mary’s musician father and married wealthy Roger Harlow instead. Now they’re on the way to his recently deceased Aunt Pearl’s house, ostensibly to settle her estate but really to look for her will. Aunt Pearl was not a well woman mentally, and lived alone in a town that hated her. Admittedly, the town of Eden had pretty good reason to: in a fit of pique, she closed down the gold mines that were their livelihood, consigning over half the town to poverty even as she kept to herself in her remote farmhouse.

This house, as Mary’s family discovers, is basically a sty. Mary hates every minute of being there, even before she gets into a series of fights with Vee and Roger. After a particularly vicious argument, she runs out into the storm that’s descended over Eden and soon finds herself trapped in one of the gold mines. Worse: she’s not alone.

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Jan 20 2026

Upcoming Speculative Fiction by Beloved Authors!

The next few months are giving us a lot to look forward to, book-wise! Authors we already know and love are coming out with new works in new worlds, offering that delightful combination of known quality in form with exciting novelty in content. Nightshade and Oak by Molly O’Neill coming in February, Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher coming in March, What We are Seeking by Cameron Reed coming in April, and Kill All Wizards by Jedediah Barry coming in June are all engaging and satisfying books that solidify their authors’ places in my list of faves.

the cover of Nightshade and Oak by Molly O'Neill shows the two protagonists arranged like the figures on a playing card behind the title Nightshade and Oak by Molly O’Neill will hit the shelves (or your ereader; you do you) on February 3rd, published by Orbit. Molly O’Neill’s previous book, Greenteeth first caught my attention because it was likened to T. Kingfisher’s work, and I certainly see the connection. Both authors have protagonists and supporting characters who lead with kindness, and try to do the right thing by each other in imperfect circumstances.

In Nightshade and Oak, a goddess of death is accidentally turned mortal, and she and the witch who is responsible end up questing together to try to save the witch’s sister and restore the goddess’s status. As they share situation after situation, and explore realm after realm, they develop a romance, but I do caution the reader (this is maybe a spoiler but I’m going for it) that this is not capital R Romance as a genre and thus one should not automatically assume a Happily Ever After for the couple.

I recommend Nightshade and Oak if you enjoy Arthurian legends but think they could use some more explicit sapphic elements.

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