Oct 02 2025

The Dungeonmeister Deck Of Side Quests by Jef Aldrich & Jon Taylor

subtitled 75 Mini Adventures to Empower Your Fantasy Campaign.

I genuinely enjoy every Dungeonmeister product Jef Aldrich and Jon Taylor put out. A lot of this is due to the fact that I’m a busy Dungeon Master myself, so every little bit helps in bulking up my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. This is especially true of the game I’m currently running, based on the Ghosts Of Saltmarsh 5E book. I love my nautical adventures, but the GoS campaign book is really just a string of sea-themed modules sandwiched between two hard covers, with very little connecting tissue between each. Thus I’ve had to write a bunch of my own side quests to flesh out the story, often relying on any suitable pre-written ones to help liven things up and give my player characters something to do while traveling between point to point in the book.

So this deck was a definite godsend, with seventy-five oversized cards and an accompanying guidebook. The cards themselves are printed front and back: the front has the hook/description, while the back has possible outcomes depending on how the PCs plan to deal with the issue presented. The scenarios, while all fantasy-themed, range the gamut from urban to rural, from benign to potentially lethal, from whimsical to potentially campaign-changing. Ofc, this means that you’re probably not going to be able to incorporate every card into one campaign, but that’s okay.

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Oct 01 2025

Don’t Sleep With The Dead by Nghi Vo

I didn’t super love the book for which this novella is a sequel. The Chosen And The Beautiful was Nghi Vo’s somewhat uneven, I felt, retelling of The Great Gatsby. But I do enjoy Ms Vo’s writing, as well as the novella form, so was happy to dive in here.

Don’t Sleep With The Dead is set in New York City some twenty years after the disastrous events of TCatB, as 1939 fades into 1940. Jordan Baker has moved to Paris, where the phantoms of dead soldiers march through the streets. Our viewpoint character here instead is Nick Carraway, who’s recently published a book that sounds a whole lot like F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

As DSwtD begins, Nick is caught up in a raid on gay men cruising in Prospect Park. He manages to escape with the intervention of someone he can barely believe is alive again: Jay Gatsby himself. But was Nick mistaken? Was his desire to see Gatsby again the reason for this unexpected manifestation?

Unable to let go of the idea of Gatsby somehow being alive, he begins to wander the city, in search of answers and, perhaps, solutions. Along the way, he leads readers on a mystical tour of the strange reality he lives in, powered by magic and demons, punctuated by occasional phone calls with Jordan, who saved him once but can only do so much over distance and time. But the shade of Gatsby lingers over everything. What will Nick do — and what will he sacrifice — to either find Gatsby or lay his spirit to rest for good?

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Sep 30 2025

Next Up in Beloved Speculative Series from TOR!

the title of what stalks the deep appears in white against an animal head on the cover For me, it takes a certain amount of faith to read an ongoing series – I need to either know that I will feel satisfied after each installment, or I need to trust the author has a plan for the following books, which will stick the landing eventually. I absolutely trust T Kingfisher to do one or the other, and luckily, the next up in her Sworn Soldier series, What Stalks the Deep comes out today!

What Stalks the Deep

As has previously been addressed, I am a big fan of T Kingfisher’s work. In the Sworn Soldier series, our point of view character is Alex Easton, whom we grew to love in What Moves the Dead, a retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and with whom we got scared witless all over again in What Feasts at Night. As long as you remember Alex, I don’t think you need to reread the first two to dive into this new book, and frankly, if you are willing to be a little bit in the dark about references to past experiences, I bet you could read this one fresh.

In What Stalks the Deep, Alex goes to America to help old pal Dr. Denton, whose cousin seems to have gone missing down a possibly haunted coal mine. Alex investigates the disappearance in this West Virginia setting somewhat unwillingly, meeting a new cast of characters and being confined to small, dark, subterranean spaces. It has just as creepy and just as satisfying of a resolution as the previous installments in the series.

This Fall you can also look forward to Queen Demon by Martha Wells, which continues the Rising World series; A Mouthful of Dust, the sixth book in the Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo; and Brigands and Breadknives, a sequel to Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes. Thanks, TOR Publishing Group, for keeping us all going with reliable speculative series in these trying times. More on each of these beyond the cut!

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Sep 29 2025

Lizard Boy #2: The Most Perfect Summer Ever by Jonathan Hill

Readers who’ve already enjoyed Book 1 will likely warm up to this quicker than I did, but once I realized this wasn’t just escapist (sub)urban fantasy, I was all in!

The Lizard Boy series revolves around the titular middle schooler, Tommy Tomkins, who fled with his mom and older sister Tiffany from the underground realm of Elberon. Assuming human guise, they settled in Eagle Valley, building new lives for themselves. Tommy eventually became close friends with five other kids, all of whom are outsiders for one reason or another. There’s alt/hippie Scarlett, one of two humans in their group, along with the other human, Dung, whose family is from Vietnam. There’s Sara the robot, Greg the Sasquatch, and Allie whose body is composed entirely of snakes. All of the non-humans pass easily as human, having learned how to shapeshift long ago.

Alas for the friends, Dung is about to move with his family back to Vietnam. Scarlett is particularly upset by this, and vows to make this last summer they all have together absolutely perfect. Things get off to a pretty good start when Greg shows the others the cool treehouse his older brothers built in the woods but have since outgrown. Using that as their headquarters, the friends plan the perfect summer shenanigans. Only trouble is, the outside world has a big way of intruding.

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Sep 28 2025

They Were Found Wanting by Miklos Banffy

After introducing readers to the lost world of Hungarian nobility before the Great War in They Were Counted, Miklós Bánffy continues their stories toward the great catastrophe that is coming, that only a very few of them can see looming on the horizon. These two books, along with They Were Divided form Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, sometimes called The Writing on the Wall. Though it is split into three volumes, it is essentially one long tale. When he began the work, the world he wrote about was already lost in the calamity of the Great War, which blew the Austro-Hungarian Empire into its constituent parts, and whose peace settlement gave Transylvania to Romania, suddenly putting lands that the Hungarian nobility he wrote about had ruled for centuries into a foreign country. By the time that Bánffy finished the work in 1940, Hungary was again fighting in a world war, again on the losing side, as Bánffy, who had been foreign minister in the early 1920s, surely recognized. After the war, a short-lived republic gave way, under Soviet occupation, to a Communist dictatorship. These authorities had no interest in a work about a lost aristocracy, and so Bánffy’s brilliant work languished for decades.

They Were Found Wanting by Miklos Banffy

The trilogy was translated into English in 1999, and into German in 2012. I don’t know if it’s been translated into other major languages yet; I hope that it gradually finds the vast and admiring audience it deserves. Patrick Leigh Fermor found it a remarkable work and wrote a foreword to the edition that I have. During his 1933–34 walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, Fermor encountered Transylvania while Banffy was writing, and offers this perspective:

It was in the heart of Transylvania — in the old princely capital then called Koloszvar (now Cluj-Napoca) that I first came across the name of Banffy. It was impossible not to. Their palace was the most splendid in the city, just as Bonczhida was the pride of the country and both of them triumphs of the baroque style. Ever since the arrival of the Magyars [Hungarians] ten centuries ago, the family had been foremost among the magnates who conducted Hungarian and Transylvanian affairs …
Banffy is a born storyteller. There are plots, intrigues, a murder, political imbroglios and passionate love affairs, and though this particular counterpoint of town and country may sound like the stock-in-trade of melodrama … it is nothing of the sort. But it is, beyond question, dramatic. (pp. xviii–xix)

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Sep 27 2025

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe

No Longer at Ease follow Things Fall Apart a generation later, although that is not immediately apparent. What is immediately apparent is that Obi Okonkwo is in a heap of trouble. He is in the dock, on trial in a case that has been the talk of Lagos for weeks, and the only thing remaining in the trial is the judgement. Achebe soon relates that Obi is on trial for taking bribes. To illustrate how unusual a trial is and how pervasive corruption is, on the very first page right after noting that the case is the talk of the town he adds “anyone who could possibly leave his job was there to hear the judgement. Some Civil Servants paid as much as ten shillings and sixpence to obtain a doctor’s certificate of illness for the day.” (p. 1)

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe

It’s clear that the trial will not end well for Obi, and although Achebe does not spell out the sentence at the beginning of the book, the judge says “I cannot comprehend how a young man of your education and brilliant promise could have done this.” (p. 2) In the next paragraph Achebe heaps further woes upon Obi: his mother has recently died, and Clara has gone out of his life. A reader has no way to know who Clara was, but the context implies that she was important to Obi. From the outset, Obi’s fate is clear. The book is about how all of this came to pass. Telling the story in flashback in No Longer at Ease did not annoy me quite as much as it did with The Kite Runner, but it did not endear the book to me either.

Achebe makes his authorial view even clearer about a third of the way through the book:
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Sep 26 2025

Tantalizing Tales — September 2025 — Part Four

Hello, dear readers! We’ve officially entered that time of year where it’s chilly in the morning but sweltering in the afternoon, at least over here in Maryland. So what better time to check out other mystifying North American scenarios such as those brought to us in Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes’ upcoming America’s Most Gothic!

Subtitled Haunted History Stranger Than Fiction, this nonfiction title explores some of the most hauntingly Gothic episodes of American history. And I do mean literally haunting, as ghosts abound in these folk tales and legends that all share the hallmarks of creepy Gothic fiction but are all very much rooted in real lives and tragedies.

Included here is the case of teenager Mercy Brown: was she a victim of Rhode Island’s vampire hysteria of the 1890s, or a predator? “Mad” Lucy Ludwell was an eighteenth century socialite who fell on hard times, but none so hard as her internment in the insane asylum where she died. Her ghost continues to haunt the Virginia estate that should have been her final home. The spirit of Helen Peabody still watches over the women’s college, now part of Ohio’s Miami University, where she was once a president who strenuously opposed coeduction. Meanwhile, the spirits of the many workers who died while building the Hoosac Tunnel aren’t the only ones haunting it till this very day. Further north and further back in time, French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque was condemned for “sexual crimes” and exiled to Canada’s phantasmic Isle of Demons, in a shocking story of death and, against all odds, survival.

Rich with little-known episodes of history that still reverberate with the flavor of Gothic literature, this collection is a can’t miss for fans of spooky Americana!

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Sep 25 2025

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy by Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti & David Mazzucchelli

Containing graphic adaptations of City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room.

When I was in my 20s, I dated a guy who loved Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster. Those weren’t the reasons I dumped him, but they should have been signs. And it’s not like I didn’t try my darnedest either! I did get some enjoyment out of the Murakami I read, but bounced right off of Paul Auster’s pretentious ass. And you know what, pretentious isn’t the worst thing in the world. Trouble is, Mr Auster’s fiction was guilty of a far greater crime, IMO: being clinically boring. With so many books and so little time, I was pretty sure I wasn’t missing out by skipping any more of his work after City of Glass.

Smash cut to the present, where I’m contemplating a graphic novel version of the three books in Paul Auster’s The New York trilogy. I’d recently read and deeply enjoyed Manu Larcenet’s graphic novel adaptation of a book I loathed, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Could the acclaimed trio of illustrators here do the same for my opinion of Mr Auster’s works?

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Sep 24 2025

Spotlight On Ariana Grande & Spotlight On Cynthia Erivo by Elizabeth Dennis, Hunter M Green & Ruth Burrows

or some (honestly quite excellent) combination of the three.

Listen, I read a lot of gossip and entertainment magazines. It’s a running joke in my trivia circles that I get the vast majority of my news from Us Weekly and Variety. So, as an adult, I am tamping down all the salacious details I know of both Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s personal lives to check out these Wicked movie franchise tie-in picture books for kids.

And honestly? They’re as delightful and charming as both actresses can be, and showcase them at their best, in exactly the way that the movies inspire viewers to be their best, too.

It starts with the sparkly covers, where each entertainer’s outfit glitters with an eye-catching combination of pink, green and their gradients. Ruth Burrows’ illustrations throughout recognizably evoke each woman while placing her in scenes that feel, if not outright familiar, then entirely rooted in reality. I loved both the connecting color schemes, as well as the way that the thematic hearts for Ariana and stars for Cynthia make cameos in the other’s book.

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Sep 23 2025

Edgar Allan Poe: The Master Of The Macabre by Levi Lionel Leland

Hunh, I think Edgar Allan Poe might be the one writer — if not one person outright — of whom I’ve read the most biographies.

And certainly, what a wealth of material and mystery there is surrounding one of the most famous writers to ever live! From a life marked with more than its fair share of drama and scandal, to a death people still can’t quite figure out, Poe has been talked about almost incessantly since the day he was born. His genius and creativity, however, left a legacy that still resonates today.

Levi Lionel Leland takes on the great man in this Pocket Portrait biography, that serves as an excellent, digestible introduction to the Master of the Macabre and, coincidentally, the Father of the Detective Story (the awards handed out by the Mystery Writers of America are named after him for a reason!) Each chapter is brief and punctuated with a fascinating bit of trivia. Excerpts of Poe’s work also dot the text, often as they’re referenced and usually around the point of their creation. There’s a useful index included, as well as a list of suggested Further Reading towards the end.

Mr Leland’s accounting of Poe is highly readable, setting down all the facts of his life and legacy, acknowledging all the controversies, and relating the inspirations behind Poe’s prolific output. While clearly sympathetic to his subject, he doesn’t spend an excessive amount of time attempting to excuse him. Perhaps this was why I realized, while reading this biography, that Poe was likely an insufferable person to be around.

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