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1 month ago | 
strangehorizons.com | Anushree Nande |Em Setzer |M.C. Childs |Elle Engel
“Language is pitiable when weighed against experience,” wrote Adina Giorno, the protagonist of Marie-Helene Bertino’s quietly stunning Beautyland (2024); perhaps true, but equally true is the transportive weight of Bertino’s writing, which allows us brief, but vital, glimpses of what it’s like to be in the shoes of the people she brings into existence in her stories.
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Jan 29, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | William Shaw |Nicola Lombardi |Guy Goffette |Elle Engel
“That’s right, I’m doing lockdown material.” So spoke Alexei Sayle in the most recent series of his Imaginary Sandwich Bar radio show. “You don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to do it, but this stuff happened to me!” As we enter the fifth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a tendency in popular media to try and bury what has happened.
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Jan 22, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Shannon Fay |Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra
FOUND is an anthology that traffics heavily in nostalgia. This is made clear by the cover, a brilliant design by Ann Shetelia, via which the book is made to look like a stained and faded VHS cover. The title doesn’t even appear on the front but on the “label” (aka the book’s spine): FOUND: An Anthology of Found Footage Horror Stories. The book contains eighteen stories which are a mix of those told through “found” media and others told in a traditional first- or third-person voice.
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Jan 17, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Eric Hendel |Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra
Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a book that I both loved reading, and also a story which I think falls short of its full potential. Based in part on a series of shorter works written by the author (all of which have here been compiled into a larger narrative), Kritzer’s novel centers around the experiences of Beck Garrison, a sixteen-year-old girl who, along with her father, lives on a scattered network of artificially created islands and repurposed cruise ships known as a seastead.
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Jan 15, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Jessy Randall |Elle Engel |Archita Mittra |Eric Hendel
All quotes are from The Journal of Beatrix Potter 1881-1897, Transcribed from her code writings by Leslie Linder (Penguin, 1989). The fungus starred the ground apparently in thousands …I walked there nearly every day,saw the place in every season. My boots sunk into the marshy groundif I stood still for long. If walking, a woman. If not, a mushroom.
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Jan 15, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra |Eric Hendel
Oh fuck yeah I wanna be a metal girl / with metal in my skull, veins, spine!! -- big leather stomper crushing my head/pedal // wanna go fast -- hypersonic superspeed: shed shitbox aluminum for steel to rival / god’s design: rudimentary, uninspired stock product // + flash titanium at pretty muscleboys, tongue on teeth -- being so deliciously artificial + freefalling across hot asphalt // fuck biology, biological lovers worship my divine intervention! + I ooze oil gallons from my gorgeous girl...
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Jan 15, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra |Eric Hendel
The last person in the world lay asleep at the top of the tower. She waited not in a bed of silk and roses for the kiss of a destined lover, but huddled at the foot of a steel door in the hope that she wouldn’t have to be the last person for more than a few hours, that if she stayed right where she was, her family would come to their senses and return to her. Her name was Lena. She was nine years old.
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Jan 15, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Archita Mittra |Jessy Randall |Eric Hendel |Elle Engel
Dreambound by Dan Frey is probably one of my favorite reads of the last twelve months. Told entirely through a series of documents—such as letters, emails, journal entries, interview transcripts, excerpts from best-selling novels, and even police reports—the novel chronicles a father’s frantic search for his missing daughter, a quest that takes him all across Los Angeles, into Fae-populated fantasy realms, and the fandom communities that believe in them.
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Jan 9, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | M. Krishnan |Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra
I. Marakatam, or the End of Her BeginningOnce there lived a princess who was a girl, a corpse, a slippery amphibial nymph. She was tucked within several lives, each life pleating and creasing into silken layers of woe. But for our purposes, we will restrain ourselves to one of those lives. Maybe even two. Her name was Marakatam, but it was not the name she was born with. It was a name she was bequeathed, and this was how it happened.
