Nov 16 2025
The problem with telling a story, of course, is that you already know that I’m telling you about something significant that happened. It’s not as if we sat down together and you said, “Alex,” tell me a tale where you had a pleasant trip to your homeland and the worst menace you faced was the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/11/16/what-feasts-at-night-by-t-kingfisher/
Nov 12 2025
Extremely happy I could finally fit in some thematic reading for National Native American Heritage Month, especially with Emily beating me to it with her terrific review of the Turtle Island cookbook! And in a not insignificant way, Mapping The Interior reminded me very much of a shorter, scarier and way darker version of one …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/11/12/mapping-the-interior-by-stephen-graham-jones/
Oct 25 2025
When T. Kingfisher, whose real name is Ursula Vernon, was re-reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” two things struck her. The first, as she writes in her author’s note at the end of the book “was that Poe is really into fungi. He devotes more words to the fungal emanations than he does …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/25/what-moves-the-dead-by-t-kingfisher/
Oct 09 2025
One of these days, I’ll like a piece by Ai Jiang, but today is not that day. I’m just so baffled by her writing, and in a way that doesn’t even make me want to lay the blame at her feet necessarily. This is actually one of the few, perhaps only, times that I’ve questioned …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/09/a-palace-near-the-wind-by-ai-jiang/
Oct 01 2025
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/01/dont-sleep-with-the-dead-by-nghi-vo/
Mar 23 2025
In some distant and ultimately irrelevant future, humanity has mastered time travel and discovered not a single causal chain through the unity of time and space, but a vast multitude of timelines. They cluster in groups of similar development. In some, humanity spreads to the stars; in others, humanity remains more tightly tied to its …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/23/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-by-amal-el-mohtar-and-max-gladstone/
Mar 03 2025
Happy Women’s History Month, readers! To begin with, let’s look at an arresting novella about a young woman who refuses to play by the rules of Victorian England, no matter the cost to herself or to anyone around her. Winifred Notty is a troubled soul. Raised by a mother driven to madness by the intolerable …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/03/victorian-psycho-by-virginia-feito/
Dec 27 2024
Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year. In Urs Widmer’s Der Geliebte der Mutter (My Mother’s Lover) the first-person narrator tells the story of his mother’s life, beginning with the death of her lover, many years after her own death. Erwin died as he lived best, leaning over a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/27/wrapping-up-4/
Dec 21 2024
When I read for the Hugos, I like to write a full review for each novel and novella that I finish, but I also like to finish all of my reviews from a given calendar year by the end of that year, and so here I am. There’s not a whole lot of December left, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/21/hugo-awards-2024-wrapping-up/
Nov 19 2024
I can see what Lindy Ryan was trying to do here, given my steeping in world mythology, but I think it needed a little more explaining so that the average reader can figure out what’s actually going on in this horror novella of guilt and grief. Just a few weeks ago, Derek Sinclaire died, falling …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/19/cold-snap-by-lindy-ryan/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire