Happy September, friends! I’m ngl, I enjoyed summer, tho I’m certainly glad that my kids have gone back to school so I can have some peace and quiet around the house again. The difference has been, like the title of our first selection this month, Night & Day (lol, sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Acclaimed horror editor Ellen Datlow is back with a new anthology that features a delightful tete-bouche twist, as part of the Saga Doubles series! On one side of the book, you have Night — Dreadful Dark: Tales of Nighttime Horror, featuring stories about the things that haunt the darkness. On the other, you have Day — Merciless Sun: Tales of Daylight Horror, where the stories dwell on the terrors that exist in the light of day.
Each side features nine stories from writers like Pat Cadigan, Stephen Graham Jones, Eric LaRocca, Josh Malerman, Benjamin Percy and Priya Sharma (all of whom have written things I love!) I’m definitely in the mood for more short, readable horror stories as the weather cools and the sunlight wanes, so I can’t wait for the opportunity to dive into what’s sure to be an exciting, satisfying collection!
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/05/tantalizing-tales-september-2025-part-one/
How serendipitous that I could finally dive into this right as the preceding book in the Shadow Of The Leviathan series (also an Ana And Din mystery) deservedly won the 2025 Hugo for Best Novel!
I’d venture to say that A Drop of Corruption is even better than The Tainted Cup, and not just because of the excellent, blistering afterword Robert Jackson Bennett includes here. It’s always good to read when genre authors are using their writing less for escapism and more as a way to grapple with the realities of our present-day. It’s even better when they argue against those seeking to use genre as a way to reframe bad concepts into palatable ideals. Let me tell you, when RJB gets mad in his afterword, he gets Big Mad, and rightfully so.
The story itself continues in the strange and magnificent world of the Khanum Empire, a realm beset by the Leviathans that come in from the sea every wet season and threaten to destroy everything in their path. They do not, however, come so far north as here to Yarrowdale, one of the Empire’s vassal kingdoms. The waters here are so safe that the Empire has built one of its greatest research facilities in the harbor, to the benefit of both Imperials and natives.
When a Treasury officer disappears from an unreachable locked room, leaving copious amounts of blood behind him, Imperial Investigator Ana Dolabra is sent to investigate. As is her wont, she sends her assistant Dinius Kol ahead of her to collect evidence and pave the way, so she can seclude herself in her eventual lodgings and digest the information he faithfully brings to her in his capacity as an Engraver, one of those people specially enhanced by the Empire’s research to remember everything they see.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/04/a-drop-of-corruption-by-robert-jackson-bennett/
subtitled Poems of Love, Loss, and Connection. Truly an interesting, holistic take on how humanity’s relationships to animals speak to our own existence as individuals.
Divided into seven parts — Praise; Lament; Companionship; Fear And Vulnerability; The Least Among Us; The Sacred, and The Future Of Animals — each section begins with an ancient text that links the theme with our perception of the animal world, grounding this contemporary examination in traditions of the past. The Hymns To Inana that open the FaV section, as well as The Flight Of Quetzalcoatl that open Lament, are both strong pieces from the distant past that evoke animals in their descriptions of their deities. A more recent, if still written and set in the 18th century, poem provides another throughline, being mentioned well ahead of its inclusion in the Companionship section. Christopher Smart’s celebrated Jubilate Agno is excerpted here, to remind readers how people have long esteemed their animal companions. Pieces by Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins are also included, but by far the bulk of the book is written by poets still practicing in the 21st century.
This makes for a refreshingly unprecious collection of poems. Kelly Grace Thomas’ Koalas slyly pokes fun at our modern-day obsessions even as she links them unerringly to that restless human need to be loved. Michael Collier’s Boars Gleaning Through Cities At Night puts the hidebound past in its place as it embraces a wild and wonderful present. Similarly, Craig Santos Perez’ A Sonnet At The Edge Of The Reef revels in the beauty of the seabed even as it worries about how we’re preparing our own children for an uncertain future.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/03/the-gift-of-animals-by-alison-hawthorne-deming/
These covers always confuse me a little. I want to say The Sherlock Society: Hurricane Heist every time I see one — and I get that this is the best way to market any series novel aimed specifically at children — but the fact that the series name is so large in comparison with the actual title always throws me off. It even keeps me from fully appreciating how terrific the art is on the cover, which is a pity since Yaoyao Ma Van As captures the vibe of this Florida-set mystery perfectly.
And that’s pretty much the only complaint I have about this entertaining book, the second in James Ponti’s latest mystery-adventure series for children. Written as an homage to his Florida home, this latest installment follows Alex, Zoe, Yadi and Lina as they prepare for Hurricane Clyde… and work to solve a decades-old mystery uncovered in its aftermath.
Alex is feeling a little bummed that summer is coming to a close and his Sherlock Society has only solved one case, to little acclaim. But Al Capone’s millions are still hidden somewhere in the state, and maybe he and the gang can find the money before Hurricane Clyde hits. Lina, having recently moved to Florida from Wisconsin, is especially nervous about the incoming storm, as everyone prepares to ride it out.
Fortunately, the Sherlock Society and their loved ones get through the bad weather relatively unscathed. The same can’t be said for the glamorous Moroccan Hotel. Part of the pool construction crumbles, revealing a body that’s been buried there for over sixty years, ever since the night Hurricane Cleo made landfall. Alex’s grandpa Peter knows this because he was there that day, as an eleven year-old delivering last minute supplies with his dad, who owned a hardware store. He didn’t see the murder or the body but he’s pretty sure he knows who it is, as the case has been troubling him ever since he learned about it.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/02/hurricane-heist-by-james-ponti/
I never did finish writing my review of Ancillary Mercy, the final book of Ann Leckie‘s Imperial Raadch trilogy, but here is part of its beginning:
Presger Translator Zeiat may be my favorite character in science fiction from 2015. I’ll have to think about it a little while more to be sure, but she is so vividly hilarious that off the top of my head, I’m having a tough time recalling a science fictional character who has brought me more delight. The characters around Zeiat, however, more likely find her unnerving because she could cause all of them to be destroyed without any great effort on her part; indeed, she might do it without even properly noticing that she had. A bit like a porcelain teacup full of nitroglycerin, being carried around by a rambunctious puppy.
In the universe that Ann Leckie has written about in Ancillary Mercy (and, of course, in its predecessors Ancillary Sword and Ancilary Justice), the Presger are immensely powerful aliens who caused great destruction in human space before that misunderstanding was cleared up by treaty, some 20 years before the action of the novels. The Translators mediate between the humans and the Presger; they look human, but they are clearly not, and their thought processes are unnervingly alien.
Not quite a decade later, Leckie returned to that universe with Translation State, although to a part of it far from the Raadch. (Her 2017 novel Provenance, which I have not read, is also set in the same universe.) While the title implies that the Translators will play a role, and the text on the book’s back cover confirms it, Leckie starts the novel from the point of view of a human named Enae. Sie uses sie/hir pronouns and has been caretaker to hir grandmother for many years. The grandmother was the fantastically wealthy matriarch of an old and prominent family; she was also both tyrannical and petty. The extended family pretended to revere her, in hopes of inheriting. She saw through it, of course, and surprised them all by cutting them out of the will. Even more surprising was that she had long since squandered the family fortune, and had been propped up in her later years by a rich parvenu, whom she had secretly adopted as heir. The arriviste got the house and the name, which she wanted; grandmother never had to let go of the style to which she had become accustomed; the extended family got to find out about the joke, which they somehow failed to find amusing.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/01/translation-state-by-ann-leckie/
The first two pages of The Kite Runner establish that as a child in Kabul in 1975, the first-person narrator witnessed or did something life-changing, something that so indelibly marked him that he carried it into the novel’s present day, which is December 2001. The summer of that year the narrator, who is living in San Francisco, received a call from a friend in Pakistan. “I knew it wasn’t just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins.” (p. 1) The friend offers him “a way to be good again.” (p. 2) Without any further explanation, the second chapter takes readers back to the narrator’s childhood.
Hosseini sets up the first part of the novel with that introduction and jump. What did the narrator, whose name is Amir, do that was so bad? What happened to mark him for decades? What would it take for him to atone? This kind of very short framing, with most of the story happening in flashback, can be effective, and Hosseini’s version sets the stakes and stokes a reader’s curiosity. But it’s also a technique that gets used a lot: the protagonist is in a mess, now the author will take some time telling readers how they got there. For me, the approach has lost effectiveness with repetition, and I am beginning to think that authors use it because they want to grab readers quickly, as if they think a straightforward telling of the tale would not be interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention. In The Kite Runner, it’s also a sign that the author is going to lean very heavily on melodrama.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/08/30/the-kite-runner-by-khaled-hosseini/
A Tantalizing Tales Part Five, dear readers! That’s a first for us over here at The Frumious Consortium, but oh what delicious books we have in store for you this week, covering tomes just published and those about to come!
First is my personal favorite of the bunch — and the one I’m hoping to love enough to get a copy of for my favorite redhead, in part to repay him for the invaluable help he gave me in training for Jeopardy! — Uncanny Ireland edited by Maria Giakaniki. Subtitled Otherworldly Tales of the Strange And Sublime, this fourth volume in the British Library’s gorgeously bound Gilded Nightmares series is a fascinating compilation of twenty short pieces from the past two centuries. The contents range from accounts of weird folklore and rare reimagined myths, to classic ghost stories and modern spectral chillers from the likes of Irish literary giants like Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Bowen, W. B. Yeats, Dorothy Macardle and more.
With the weather slowly but surely getting chillier in my neck of the woods, this is the perfect book with which to welcome in autumn and the start of spooky season! Also, that gorgeous cover with its metallic accents has to be seen to be truly believed!
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/08/29/tantalizing-tales-august-2025-part-five/
God, given the week I’ve been having, it’s so nice to be able to slip into a book about young people whose deeply felt and very real problems are solved by the end of its 300+ highly readable pages.
So look, when I compare Alexandra Brown Chang’s debut novel By Invitation Only to Cecily Von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl novels, I need you to understand that that is very high praise. The characters are lived in and kind and flawed and mostly just doing the best they can with the hands they’ve been dealt. Sure, some of them are born rich and feel no guilt about spending their money but my God, wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had the money they needed for food and rent and education, with extras for the frivolity that at the very least maintains the labor that fuels our capitalist hellscape?
One of the main characters in this book sure doesn’t have that kind of money. Despite winning the International Science Fair, Piper Woo Collins won’t be able to afford her first year at Columbia, after her scholarship was suspended due to a dispute between the school and the benefactor who was supposed to endow her funding. She’s understandably distraught, and frantically trying to figure out what to do instead. Her dad’s a hardworking EMT while she herself works at the local Claire’s, but higher education in this country is absurdly expensive even before taking into account the attendant costs of living.
Meanwhile in Paris, the exclusive organization known as Le Danse des Debutantes is trying to rehabilitate its image after one scandal too many. In an effort to show that they do care about the common person, they extend an invitation to Piper to attend the most exclusive debutante ball in the world. Piper thinks it’s a joke, until they offer to pay for her first year at Columbia. That, however, is entirely contingent on her making a good impression on their behalf.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/08/28/by-invitation-only-by-alexandra-brown-chang/
translated from the original Kurdish by Sami Hezil.
It feels a little strange to be talking about a(nother) book on the subject of the legacies of the departed, especially since this definitely takes the opposite tack of yesterday’s What Happens After? That book talked about grief and acceptance, whereas this speaks of guilt and vengeance. Weirdly, those have also been preoccupations of mine, which might go some way to explaining the reading hangover I’ve been feeling recently.
Lovers Of Franz K goes a step further from my personal dilemmas to speak of the impact of writers on their audiences. The Franz of the title is the celebrated author Franz Kafka, ofc, whose will requested that his unpublished works be destroyed after his death. His best friend and heir Max Brod went ahead and had them published anyway. The literary world was torn: should Brod have honored Kafka’s wishes, or had he been right to share these last glimmers of genius with the world?
The book itself opens with the arrest of a young man named Ferdy Kaplan, after the fatal shooting of a student in 1960s West Berlin. Ferdy is Turkish and assumed to be an anti-Semitic radical hiding others of his cell. He mocks the interrogating Police Commissioner Muller’s lines of inquiry, even as he expresses regret for what he’s done.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/08/27/lovers-of-franz-k-by-burhan-sonmez/
I really needed to read this terrific book, on the heels of Lauren Munoz’ absolutely devastating (to me) YA mystery Very Dangerous Things, which triggered yet another round of grief over a long-ago loss that I’m still trying to grapple with.
The nice thing about What Happens After? is that it doesn’t try to dive into rhetoricals of what happens to the person who leaves us. Everyone’s got their own ideas of the afterlife, and this book is not at all interested in litigating any of that. Instead, this thoughtful, tender children’s picture book discusses what happens to us survivors in the wake of loss, and how we can keep going while still honoring and loving the ones who’ve passed away.
(I may or may not be tearing up while writing this. It has been a weird and hard few weeks of it, y’all.)
The prose is simple and matter-of-fact. Diane Namm confronts loss head-on, never shying away from the inevitability of death and its attendant grief. She acknowledges how hard it can be for those left behind, and that it sometimes takes a really, really long time for things to stop feeling so hard. But then she does something beautiful by talking about how we can remember our gone-away loved ones still, and how we can continue living with the joy of their memories in our hearts.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/08/26/what-happens-after-by-diane-namm-laura-jager/
Acclaimed horror editor Ellen Datlow is back with a new anthology that features a delightful tete-bouche twist, as part of the Saga Doubles series! On one side of the book, you have Night — Dreadful Dark: Tales of Nighttime Horror, featuring stories about the things that haunt the darkness. On the other, you have Day — Merciless Sun: Tales of Daylight Horror, where the stories dwell on the terrors that exist in the light of day. 
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire