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Sleeps With Monsters: Two Satisfying Stories
Hello, friends! I have two satisfying stories to tell you about this week—so buckle up and let’s get to it. I properly heard about Nina Vareli’s Crier’s War from Tasha Suri on Twitter. I’d seen it...
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Sleeps With Monsters: K.B. Wagers Answers Six Questions
K.B. Wagers is the author of the amazing Indranan War (Behind the Throne, After the Crown, Beyond the Empire) trilogy, a story which continues in the dangerously tense There Before the Chaos and Down...
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Sleeps With Monsters: What to Read When the Whole World’s Falling Apart
I wanted to make a joke about stocking up on your reading for when you’re under a two-week quarantine, but honestly, when 20% of people who contract COVID-19 require hospitalisation, it’s no joking...
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Sleeps With Monsters: What to Read When the Whole World’s Falling Apart, Part 2
I’m writing this post before the middle of March, and I hope that by the time it sees publication the news of the day will contain rather less about quarantine and states of emergency than it does at...
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Sleeps With Monsters: What to Read When the Whole World’s Falling Apart, Part 3
Another week, another column with reading recommendations to hide under a rock with! But first, some bad news. We’re living through the kind of disaster that hits hard at the publishing and bookselling...
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Sleeps With Monsters: What to Read When the Whole World’s Falling Apart, Part 4
What even is time anymore? I went to look up the publication dates of some of the books I want to talk about today, and, well. Are you sure it isn’t June already? Because the last month has been a...
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Sleeps With Monsters: What to Read When the Whole World’s Falling Apart, Part 5
Hello, friends and readers! It’s been over thirty days since I spent time with a human who wasn’t my wife or (from a safe, two-metre distance) my mother. I expect I’ll be looking back another thirty...
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Sleeps With Monsters: What To Read When The Whole World’s Falling Apart, Part 6
It’s another beautiful day in the village. Are you a quarantined goose? As I write this column, my wife is standing on the kitchen countertops and peeling the wall while singing a sea shanty, so we’re...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Spending Time With Physicians and Dragons
Well, it’s the middle (the end? what even is time) of May. As I write this, here in Ireland, we’ve been under movement restrictions for two months, and strict restrictions for one, and while the...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Celebrate Queer Pride by Reading Books
I have very mixed feelings about the idea of June as “Pride Month”, but there’s no escaping that in the usual run of things, this month would see a bunch of queer marches and parades, and a lot of...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Revisiting Comforting Favourites
This year is being A Lot, isn’t it? I’m not sure how to handle it. One of the ways I’m trying to, though, is by revisiting some books that are… I won’t call them “old” favourites, because very few of...
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Sleeps With Monsters: A Little Bit of Epic, a Little Bit of Fluff
I’d planned to reread some more old favourites to discuss this week. Perhaps a saunter through Lois McMaster Bujold or Jacqueline Carey; the under-rated novels of Violette Malan—though I wrote a post...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Revisiting Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife tetralogy never, I think, equalled the popularity and recognition of her Miles Vorkosigan novels or her World of the Five Gods work (Curse of Chalion, Paladin of...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Into the Woods With Emily Tesh and Carrie Vaughn
The theme this week is, it seems, woodland, history, and its secrets. Last June saw the publication of Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood. I missed it until now, with the publication of its loose sequel,...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Revisiting Michelle Sagara’s Chronicles of Elantra
I’ve been revisiting some more old favourites. Michelle Sagara has been writing her Chronicles of Elantra series for the last fifteen years. This year sees the publication of the first of a pair of...
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Sleeps With Monsters: The Best Books I Haven’t Read in 2020
It has been A Year, friends. A year that’s been cruel to so many of us. For me, one of the cruelest personal effects of this year has been the forgetfulness, the loss of time, the anxiety-borne impact...
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Sleeps With Monsters: The Best Books I’ve Read in 2020
What a year. I seem to keep saying that, but really, what a year. January feels like it took place in another century. And I’m sure July happened a decade ago. (Or last week. Are we absolutely certain...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Most Anticipated Books For 2021
I recall writing a Most Anticipated post in previous years that was full of excitement and optimism. This year, well, I’d like to pretend I’m excited. I know there are good books coming in 2021. I know...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Romance and Magic in Julia Ember’s Ruinsong
Julia Ember’s Ruinsong isn’t quite the novel I thought it’d be. The cover copy gave me to expect more court intrigue, but that may be a function of having read far more non-YA than YA novels—and...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots
I had a review copy of Hench, Natalie Zina Walschots’ 2020 novel about supervillains and their employees, on my shelf for months and months before I cracked it open. I have an aversion to superhero...
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Sleeps With Monsters: The Scapegracers by Hannah Abigail Clarke
I’ll tell you one thing about contemporary American high-school or high-school adjacent stories: I find the social dynamics baffling. Even the healthiest ones seen to have a solid underlay of...
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Sleeps With Monsters: C.L. Polk Answers Seven Questions
Canadian C.L. Polk is a writer and gentlebeing of tact and good taste. The concluding volume of their award-winning Kingston trilogy, Soulstar, has just recently come out, and their The Midnight...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Water Horse by Melissa Scott
Melissa Scott’s career spans, at this point, four decades. Perhaps best known for her Astreiant fantasy novels (initially written with her late partner Lisa A. Barnett, and later alone), she’s also...
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Sleeps With Monsters: In Conversation With Tasha Suri
Recently, I caught up with Tasha Suri over Zoom to discuss her life, career, and writing during a global pandemic, in advance of her forthcoming and highly anticipated The Jasmine Throne, a queer epic...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Procedural Fantasy and Queering Historical Epic
I’m finding reading difficult lately, but I’d like to talk about two books that I particularly enjoyed. I think Michelle Sagara’s Chronicles of Elantra series is the longest-running fantasy series that...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Saffron, Robots, and Space Assassins
A few days ago, I looked at the calendar and said, “But what do you mean, it’s more than halfway through May?” My sense of time passing remains disconnected from reality, in a faintly comedic way that...
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Sleeps With Monsters: The Difference Between Survival and Cruelty
Two of the books I want to talk about this time have already been ably discussed on Tor.com by Molly Templeton, whose review of Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak prompted me to get off my arse and order...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Books Visceral and Gripping
What’s the weather like where you are? It’s high summer for me, with temperatures reaching a blistering 18C and sea-swimming looking good in waters with a surface temperature of 12C… which probably...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Making Good Choices
Last time out, I believe I mentioned Jo Spurrier’s Winter Be My Shield, and mentioned that I’d be reading the next two books in the “Children of the Black Sun” trilogy as soon as I could get my hands...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Two Books About Family Situations
I don’t think Zen Cho is capable of writing a book that isn’t a fascinating and stylish delight. Black Water Sister is her latest, and it’s a striking, appealing narrative of family, displacement,...
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