Lesley Hart Gunn

Jun 24, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Premee Mohamed |Lesley Hart Gunn |Emily Verona |Joanne Rixon

When her bell sounded at midnight, Firion the wizard grasped her stoutest staff (crowned, for non-magical reasons, with a razor-sharp chunk of amethyst) and put her lips to the doorjamb. “Who goes there?”Nothing but the slap of rain against stone, like thrown gravel. But was that a voice she could discern between the droplets? Perhaps a mumbled Apprentice? She opened the stone door and retreated smartly to let the boy collapse on the rug. He had not, she felt, made a good first impression.

Jun 21, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Shannon Fay |Lesley Hart Gunn |Emily Verona |Joanne Rixon

A staple of the Gothic is the horror of the domestic sphere and how women are confined within it. That certainly fits Harry Adams, the protagonist of Christina Henry’s The House that Horror Built: she is a woman who, through a domineering man’s sinister machinations, slowly becomes entrapped in a possibly haunted mansion. But, while the lead character of these stories is often the lady of the house, that’s not the case with Harry. She’s not Bluebeard’s wife, but Bluebeard’s cleaning lady.

Jun 19, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | William Shaw |Lesley Hart Gunn |Emily Verona |Joanne Rixon

The jacket copy for A Magical Girl Retires describes it as a “whimsical and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.” For once, a book’s marketing blurb provides a useful lens on the text itself: A Magical Girl Retires certainly has whimsy and imagination, but what stands out most is the sheer comic book of it all. As well as the evocative cover, comics artist Kim Sanho provides dynamic and thoughtfully composed illustrations for the beginning of each chapter.

Jun 17, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Joanne Rixon |Lesley Hart Gunn |Emily Verona |Areeb Ahmad

May 16, 2075Orchard St and S 19th/Highway 16 on-ramp, Tacoma, WAEllie MathieuEllie Mathieu can tell when the Big Easy arrives by the smell of its engine. A full bouquet of other smells blooms at the train station: there’s the solid green smell of the Douglas firs that overlook the building and the electric-spark smell of the power lines on the tracks. The seagulls fighting over food wrappers they stole from the compost cans, they don’t smell like roses.

Jun 17, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Lesley Hart Gunn |Emily Verona |Joanne Rixon |Areeb Ahmad

To fly is to deny deathas the body’s natural state,to break from gravity’scold grip, to reject tombsof rocky teeth and salt watersand embrace the blueof wind-chilled eyes,frost-bitten toes. But we were not madefor wings, bones densewith marrow madefor contact and resistance.