Category: Review

Review: Exit Zero: Stories

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Title: Exit Zero: Stories
Author: Marie-Helene Bertino
Pages: 208
Release: April 22, 2025

Bertino tackles heavy themes like grief, estrangement, divorce, and disconnection with the winning charm and dry wit that made her 2024 novel Beautyland such a standout. Her writing is both funny and emotionally resonant – brimming with life, verve, humor and heart.

The stories run the gamut of topics and it was amusing to see simple setups veer so wildly off course. In “Can Only Houses Be Haunted?,” a bickering couple finds that the peaches they bought from a roadside farm stand are haunted by a malign spirit. In “Exit Zero,” my favorite of the bunch, a daughter inherits a house from her estranged father – along with an unenthused, flatulent unicorn living in the backyard. Some stories, like “Edna in the Rain,” in which a woman’s ex-boyfriends literally rain from the sky, end abruptly or feel undercooked. But the majority are satisfying – both absurd and poignant in different ways.

★★★½

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Vanishing World

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Title: Vanishing World
Author: Sayaka Murata
Translator: Ginny Tapley Takemori
Pages: 240
Release: April 15, 2025

An off-kilter and unsettling page-turner, Vanishing World tackles declining birth rates, widespread loneliness, social isolation, and the rise of unhealthy parasocial relationships – issues that feel even more relevant today than when this book was first published in Japan in 2015.

In a world where copulation has gone out of style, Amane longs for the days of old. Yet she quickly learns how difficult it is to swim against the current of established societal norms, no matter how bizarre they may be. Everyone around her feels slightly unhinged, as though facsimiles of real people, adding to Amane’s feelings of isolation. 

This was a tough one to put down and it certainly goes out with a bang. Murata’s dry, matter-of-fact prose is engrossing, even as she hammers home certain ideas and themes to the point of excess. 

★★★½

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: A Drop of Corruption

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Title: A Drop of Corruption
Author: Robert Jackson Bennett
Pages: 432
Series: Shadow of the Leviathan #2
Release: April 1, 2025

Unshackled by the need for extensive world-building, Robert Jackson Bennett has room in this sequel to craft a more complex and satisfying mystery, centered around his winning duo of lead characters. It succeeds as both a mystery and a fantasy novel, blending the two genres beautifully.

While I’m more invested in the evolving interpersonal dynamics between Ana and Din than the “Mystery of the Week” plot in each installment, this sequel lays the groundwork for even richer character development to come in future books.

A Drop of Corruption is a more assured, exciting sequel than its predecessor, and I look forward to seeing where the overarching story goes from here. 

★★★★

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Metallic Realms

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Title: Metallic Realms
Author: Lincoln Michel
Pages: 320
Release: May 13, 2025

A full panoply of sci-fi delights—perfect for genre fans, the terminally online, or anyone caught up in fan culture, geekdom, or general sci-fi nerdery.

Metallic Realms is absurd, incisive, and a (toxic) love letter to classic science fiction, viewed through a sharply modern lens. It details the formation and eventual dissolution of the Orb 4, a group of writers creating short stories set in a shared sci-fi universe while living in a squalid apartment in present-day Brooklyn.

Told through the eyes of Michael Lincoln (a thinly veiled self-insert of author Lincoln Michel… or not, if Michael Lincoln is to be believed), the novel features one of the most hapless, oblivious, deeply unwell, totally unreliable, occasionally sympathetic, but almost always off-putting narrators of all time. He truly believes he’s chronicling the group that will usher in a new Golden Age of Science Fiction, and we are along for the bumpy ride.

The interstitial chapters, each a short story set within the Metallic Realms, are not mere pablum or window dressing. They’re inventive, closely tied to the “real-world” of the novel, and filled with endless geeky goodness.

As someone who enjoys taking very trivial things extremely seriously, I found this to be an exceedingly enjoyable read that I couldn’t put down. It’s a delightfully meta concept, executed to perfection. Count me in for OrbCon 2025.

★★★★½

My thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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Title: The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Author: Haruki Murakami
Translator: Philip Gabriel
Pages: 464
Release: November 19, 2024

Our main character inhabits two parallel worlds—one is the “real world,” and the other is a “dream world” reminiscent of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: a nameless city with labyrinthine streets that feels disorienting yet mesmerizing.

The story is told in an understated and straightforward way, with little drama but plenty of pleasant imagery. Some elements felt downright cozy, though they lacked significant dramatic heft. The main character grapples with existential questions about his inner worldview and his sense of self, which are represented through the parallel worlds he experiences. Is the walled town a construct of his mind? A physical manifestation of the complex bond he shared with his first love? Who’s to say?

Murakami abandons the eponymous city for the “real world” early on, and the farther the narrative distances itself from that place, the harder it becomes—for both the main character and the reader—to return to what we once remembered. The plot clumsily attempts to weave these threads and worlds back together, but the resulting knot felt unsatisfying to me.

Many reviews have noted that Murakami has told similar stories more effectively in the past, so surely this is not the ideal book to start with as a Murakami neophyte—but here we are. I suspect I would connect better with his earlier works, as his writing and style resonated with me, but the story itself felt half-baked.

★★★

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Absolution

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Title: Absolution
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Pages: 443
Series: Southern Reach #4
Release: October 22, 2024

Crossing the border into Area X again feels like slipping back into a strange, hypnotic dream.

A decade in the making, Absolution is the fourth installment in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach “trilogy.” Thankfully, this isn’t an Indiana Jones 4 situation—Southern Reach purists won’t have to hold their noses and pretend this story doesn’t count as canon. Instead, it complements the original three novels nicely, both in tone and by further expanding the mysteries of the Forgotten Coast without feeling like a tacked on, cash grab.

While you won’t find fan service or tidy answers to long-standing questions, you will find a unique story that builds on the lore of Area X in exciting ways. The book is divided into three distinct sections, each offering its own flavor. Your mileage may vary, but for me, Part 1 stood out: Spooky, ethereal, and steeped in disquieting mystery, the story unfolds through captivating first-person journal entries. Part 2 is a slower, more meandering spy tale, while Part 3 goes fully off the rails—VanderMeer at his most unhinged, with intense, creative flourishes. The volume knob is turned up to 11 a bit too long for my liking, but others will find this grand VanderMeerian fireworks show well worth the price of admission.

If you’re new to the series, you will find yourself a bit lost starting here. Even so, VanderMeer’s sharp, electric prose makes it a journey worth taking for anyone craving some madcap science fiction fare. Much like the original trilogy, Absolution isn’t for everyone. Not all of it resonated with me, but the highs are well worth the ride, and this installment is a worthy addition to an already iconic series—which we can now safely call the Southern Reach quartet, without reservations.

★★★¼

My thanks to the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Playground

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No human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land, in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers. All the forests and savannas and wetlands and deserts and grasslands on all the continents were just afterthoughts, ancillaries to the Earth’s main stage.

Title: Playground
Author: Richard Powers
Pages: 400
Release: September 24, 2024

A love letter to the ocean and its hidden depths. Much like The Overstory, Powers employs astounding reverence for one of our most complex and abundant natural resources.

Speculative fiction can hold up a mirror to our current moment — extrapolating, distorting, and ultimately exploring the ripple effects of what our future could hold. Playground succeeds in doing just that as the plot converges and collides with the dawn of the AI age in surprising ways. On those marks alone, it’s a winner. It’s elegantly crafted and consistently engaging, but it never fully won me over.

The narrative ebbs and flows between characters and timelines, with each thread carefully fleshed out and fully realized. My hope that these individual strands would tightly weave back together in the end was not to be. Instead, the ending left me puzzled. I had to consult with other readers and do a careful re-read of the final portion of the book to understand just what transpired. And still, I’m not sure. This may be an issue of comprehension on my end, so I look forward to seeing what others think upon the book’s release. That said, I genuinely enjoyed reading Playground, and I believe many others will find it just as captivating.

★★★★

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Authority

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Title: Authority
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Pages: 341
Series: Southern Reach #2
Release: May 6, 2014
Audio Narrator: Bronson Pinchot

As I continue my Southern Reach trilogy reread, I revisited Authority for the first time in a decade. This time, I experienced it in audiobook form. Initially, Bronson Pinchot took some time to grow on me as a narrator, but I ended up really enjoying his character voicing and overall narration style.

While the main thrust of the book is an interesting character study of Control, a new Southern Reach employee with considerable baggage, the book suffers from being on the outside of Area X looking in. The Southern Reach campus feels reminiscent of the Lumon Building in Apple TV+’s “Severance,” but its oddities struggle to measure up to the true uncanniness found within Area X.

★★★★

Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part

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Title: The Eyes Are the Best Part
Author: Monika Kim
Pages: 288
Release: June 25, 2024

Feast your eyes on this…a young woman with an insatiable hunger for human eyeballs. Truly revolting and captivating in equal measure.

Not for the squeamish nor the faint of heart, The Eyes are the Best Part draws us into Ji-Won’s downward spiral from a floundering student with family troubles to a full-on psychotic murderous madwoman by journey’s end. It’s very satisfying, and I found myself rooting for Ji-Won even as her psyche unravels. The more she indulges in her worst impulses, the stronger her will becomes. 

The abrupt ending left me wanting more, though. There was more meat on the bone here to explore, and it felt like things were tidied up too quickly and without enough fanfare. Perhaps a sequel is in the offing?

★★★¼

My thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.