Профиль

This means you can get a cheap copy of The Skull & Laurel #3, that has Josh Pearce’s “Witches in Cold Mountain Halls” in it. One of the best short stories I’ve read in years that’s a sort of New Weird dark fantasy dungeon crawl told in postmodern epic prose poetry. It’s fucking sick.

Samir has such a way with their writing of picking at the scabs of complicated relationships and "Starspeaker" really digs into a parental relationship that encompasses pain, resentment, duty, love, and all the contradictions that having all those feelings at the same time involves. Love this story.

I’m gonna be dusting off my reviewing hat over the next few weeks in the Seize The Press newsletter. I’ve read some great stuff recently and the first books I’ll be reviewing are OLYOKE by Vincent Endwell, PERSONA by Aoife Josie Clements, and THE CELLAR BELOW THE CELLAR by Ivy Grimes.

I genuinely love A Game of Thrones but using the word ‘bunghole’ in a fantasy setting inspired by Wars of the Roses era medieval Europe is a crime against literature.

Chicken Finger is NM Whitley at it again. He writes with a specific level of off-kilter surreality that unbalances you just enough to make you wobble before you realise you’ve fell flat on the ground.

Big shout out to the STP team James, Rebecca, and Karlo by the way. I started this thing solo four years ago with no expectation it would go anywhere and it somehow found an audience. Now there are four of us keeping the ship steady and I'm so grateful for everything they do to keep the mag going ❤️

I love reviews where the critic is openly grappling with their reading of a book. Too often it seems reviewers feel compelled to have formed an opinion set in stone, but one of the benefits of the critical review is the space to ask more questions. Rabbit, Fox, Tar sounds like a fascinating book.

Conjuring Toni: Review of P.C. Verrone’s Rabbit, Fox, TarSullivan Summer Under Review:Rabbit, Fox, Tar. P.C. Verrone. Catapult, June 2026. “To call Original Hill a place alone,” writes P.C. Verrone in his debut novel, Rabbit, Fox, Tar, “would have done i…ancillaryreviewofbooks.org

It particularly caught my attention as I read it immediately after listening to the most recent Meal of Thorns, where @casella.bsky.social mentioned how Adrian Tchaikovsky's Pretenders to the Throne of God has so many disparate plot threads and yet it's specifically one of the novels strengths.

I found this review interesting because of its assertion that a weakness of Radiant Star was its 'unfocussed plot'. That CAN absolutely be a weakness, but it can also be something interesting and engaging. Got me wondering what the deeper qualities are that make an unfocussed plot a weakness.

The Race to Radiant Sainthood: Review of Ann Leckie’s Radiant StarDavid Tierney Under Review:Radiant Star. Ann Leckie. Orbit, May 2026. Ann Leckie’s multi-award-winning Imperial Radch trilogy holds a special place as one of my favorite SF works, and Radiant Star,…ancillaryreviewofbooks.org

This story also made me think more deeply as an editor. The ambiguity and thorniness about whether what happens at the end of MYCOPHILIA is 'good' for Asher isn't really the point; it's the contextualisation of how he got there and why what happens can be viewed as both horrible and relieving.

You need to read the rest of the preceding thread for this to make sense contextually, but this made something whir in my brain.

Enjoying the old notes I made on my last read of A Game of Thrones.

Reading an Iain Banks lit novel from the 90s where the characters watch a video and mean a VHS tape. A missing uncle leaves clues to his whereabouts on a floppy disc. They forget the name of a hotel they stayed at and can’t google it - they remember by finding a hotel-branded matchbook in a drawer.

As the editor of an anticapitalist genre magazine, I've been crystalising my thoughts over the years about the kind of anticapitalist fiction we look for. I've never been able to adequately articulate it before, but this Zach Gillan essay gets really close. It's about form, not content.

Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of FascismZachary Gillan I have been thinking, for obvious reasons, about living in a world of reactionary politics, and about the political valences of the irreal, and about ARB’s insistence upon the radica…ancillaryreviewofbooks.org

So appreciative of eco-horror like Tiffany Morris' "So Full of the Shining Flesh", stories that lean into the bleakness of ecological collapse without offering 'hope'. 'They hadn't seen much point in trying not to die' is such a grim line, and I'm glad it just lets me wallow in how bad it feels.

I think this is important to remember when talking about reviewing as criticism and analysis - we're engaging with art, and art isn't always fully translatable to formal communicative language. Arguably not being able to do so is a quality of great art.