• I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN by Joanne Greenberg. This book is a fictionalized memoir about a sixteen year old girl hospitalized in the sixties for schizophrenia, which on its face does not sound particularly uplifting. However, I don’t think I’ve ever read any portrayals of self-compassion this profound—it has contributed to my lexicon of speaking gently to myself and short-handing certain difficulties of mental illness in critical ways. It’s just a truly remarkable novel, and the ways it blends genre to accommodate the interior world of the main character’s illness is innovative and does what I tried to do with Alone with You in the Ether, which is allow you to experience the story from inside the mental illness. 

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• PATRICIA WANTS TO CUDDLE by Samantha Allen. A lot of horror this month, per the damn season, starting with perhaps the least unsettling, purely because it is more absurd than horrific. It’s mainly a story about queer love and loneliness, believe it or not, beneath the veneer of a hyper-contemporary tragicomedy about the final four contestants on The Bachelor, many of whom are delightfully bitchy. Not to bring up myself again, but it did remind me a bit of my story Kill the Bachelor, albeit with some far weirder elements (ahem, Bigfoot). I devoured this one in a single sitting and then I coincidentally happened to follow it up with this short that made me giggle and sigh, Mating Call by Phoebe Cramer.

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• NATURAL BEAUTY by Ling Ling Huang. This one doesn’t necessarily telegraph itself as horror from the cover, but it absolutely is. It flirts with being SFF, because there is a very interesting dystopian sub-world at play here, mostly in dealing with a nightmarish wellness company. There are a lot of interesting thought experiments in this story, especially given the growth of the wellness industry from within an era of girlboss feminism and the interrogation of beauty standards built on whiteness, but for me the most important one was whether beauty is, for women, actually a form of power or just another avenue of exploitation. 

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• NIGHT'S EDGE by Liz Kerin. I’m doing a worldbuilding panel this month at the Las Vegas Book Festival with Liz, who I met earlier this year at one of Catriona Ward’s infamous Los Angeles salons (if that sounds glamorous, good. It is, and frankly I’m not sure what I was doing there). I’m definitely a sucker for a mother-daughter story and this one is basically as if the zombie apocalypse were a vampire apocalypse and everyone behaved exactly as if it were Covid. It reminded me a bit of MOTHERTHING by Ainslie Hogarth in terms of how you feel about the misused daughter narrator, which is that you must protect her at all costs.