THE FICTIONFOX

Translator : Daisy Gibbons (Ukrainian -> English) Genre: Speculative Fiction, Dystopian Published: Seven Stories Press, April 2026 My Rating: 4/5 stars "The weathering away of every person is a weathering away inside everyone left behind. Any man’s death diminishes me." With echoes of The Road and Roadside Picnic , and clear resonance to recent history, The Weathering is a Ukrainian-set dystopian novel that feels timely and timeless at the same time. The Story: A young U

Genre: Contemporary Fiction Published: Soho Press, March 2025 My Rating: 1/5 stars "You look at him, puppy-eyed. At this man who looks like Leo, but isn’t Leo and want to say “my husband always kept pens in his pocket too. I miss you already.” I thought long and hard on how to rate this novel. What I eventually ended up with was the longest review I've ever written, and a rating of a single star. Although it has a bunch of redeeming qualities, which I will address below, I u

Genre: Science Fiction Published: William Morrow, January 2025 My Rating: 3/5 conflicted stars “We cannot escape our creators. I keep saying this. You can't erase that which made you. Even when they are gone, their spirit remains.” I’m not sure if I remember a the last time was that I felt thís conflicted about a book… my reading-journey was a rollercoaster that swerved from hate to love, and ultimately landed in a very mixed area. It took me a little while to detangle my

Genre: horror, haunted-house Published: Tin House Publishing, March 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars "What would Lele say? What would Lele do? She asked herself these questions all the time, her answers feeble and uncertain, never knowing if she was right. She’d made this ghost. It couldn’t tell her anything new." The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is an incredibly effective ghost-story with themes of grief, trauma and social isolation. It drew me in with its atmosphere, but truly snuc

Genre: Non-fiction, Disability, Self-help Published: Penguin Life, March 2025 My Rating: 1/5 stars This is Body Grief is a non-fiction book about disability and the titular concept, that I was truly excited about ever since its release. Once I got to it though, I found I could not have disliked it any more if I'd'tried... Unfortunate and deeply disappointed rant incoming. What I liked: What drew me to this book originally was the title. Body Grief as a concept is extremely va

During the past month, I’ve been on a bit of an eco-fiction-kick, picking up stories that deal with environmentalism, nature vs humanity, and growth and transformation in various ways. Today, I want to combine 3 recent releases- each with their own spin on this theme – and review them side-by-side. From young-adult horror to literary fiction with a speculative twist; modern eco-fiction has something for everyone. Despite the fact that I didn’t rate any of these books very hig

Genre: Poetry Published: Tin House, February 2026 My Rating: 4/5 stars “Beloved, if I titled this poem My Mothers America, would it contain her mother? And how long before you know the urgency of this sentence is lost” Maybe the Body is a debut poetry collection by Filipino-American author Asa Drake, that centers themes of belonging, nature-vs-nurture and body, alongside undertones of political dissonance and predator-prey-dynamics in our everyday lives. I was positively sur

Genre: Science Fiction Published: Erewhon Books, February 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars “First there was the fear of being. Fear of being became fear of not-being. Those are the two original fears.” Consider this a PSA to all sci-fi-fans: mark February 28th on your calendars to go out and pick up this novel upon release. You won’t regret it! A.D. Sui blends a beautiful, meditative and philosophical science-fiction story with a closed-room-murder-mystery in space, and although tha

Genre: Eco-fiction, novella Published: Quercus Books by Riverrun, February 2026 My Rating: 4/5 stars “Nature doesn’t give a fuck.” Eradication is an apt eco-novella with a strong undercurrent of grief and morality, both personal and with regard to the larger world around us. We follow Adi, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher, as he accepts a curious “eco-conservation” job on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora. Here, armed with nothing but survival gear

Genre: literary horror, gothic, queer Published: Little Brown and Company, January 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars, first favourite of 2026 "Because no matter how far you run, she knew—no matter how hard you try to shed your old skin and become something else—the place you come from stays with you. It always calls you back." The second I finished Hemlock , I realized two things. First, this was going to be a marmite-book that I won’t be able to recommend to just any wide audience.

Genre: literary fiction Published: Henry Holt and Co, February 2026 My Rating: 2/5 stars Framed as a story within a story, Sarah Bruni has crafted a tale of motherhood and power disparity, that unfortunately didn’t click with me. We follow A., an unnamed translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. She is still recovering from a medical trauma that took her reproductive organs, and spends her days nannying for another woman’s boy and her nights out

Genre: Horror Published: Erewhon Books, January 2026 My Rating: 2/5 stars On a semi-objective level, Allison Mick’s eco-horror debut deserves about 3/5 stars, so that’s the rating I settled on for now. However, on a personal level, I had more of a 2-star experience with it. This is not a bad book, but it’s a type of horror that’s not for me. Unfortunately, I would’ve known to avoid this beforehand, had the marketing been a little different. More on this later in the review.

Genre: sci-fi, detective/murder-mystery Published: Grand Central Publishing & Brilliance Audio, January 2026 originally independently published by the author, November 2023 My Rating: 4.5/5 stars Small-town police-procedural meets cosmic sci-fi in this fantastic genre-bender that had me hooked from start to finish. If you're in the marked for something in the vein of True Detective , or Sleeping Giants meets a Blake Crouch -style mystery: consider this one to add to your TB

Genre: Literary Fiction Novella, Magical Realism, Post-apocalyptic. Published: New Directions (US)/ Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) , March 2024 My Rating: 1/5 stars "That was the future. This is now. The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same." I wanted to love this novella so bad. A magical realism story of an undead woman, tracking across a desolate landscape with a crow living inside her chest, explori

Genre: Science Fiction Published: Mariner Books, November 2025 My Rating: 2/5 stars “I knew that she was right. She would forget me. but perhaps I could make sure of it; even long after she was gone, the world would never forget her.” It took me a while to put my thoughts to paper, as this book gave me the biggest whiplash I’ve experienced in a long time. For the first half or so, it was on a five-star-course. I absolutely loved the ideas this book engaged with, and was hook

Genre: Cozy horror/fantasy Published: Titan Books, November 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars "'It was a small kindness you did' they said. 'But you and I are both small creatures, are we not?' So the kindness feels larger.'" In the afterword, T. Kingfisher herself describes Snake-eater as “The platonic ideal of a Kingfisher horror novel”, and honestly, I have nothing to add... Neither to that description of the essence of this book, nor to the formula of cozy-horror that is synonym

Genre: Cozy Fantasy Published: Tor UK, July 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars “People were cruel to you, and it didn’t make you bitter. What else would you call that?” “Naïve? Needy? Pathetic?” “Strong,” he insisted.”   For the longest time, I felt left out of the hype of cozy fantasy. I desperately wanted to like it, but somehow just couldn’t find one I truly loved. Last year, The Spellshop made my Most Surprising-list of the year, for changing that, and this year its sequel cemen

Genre: Fantasy Published: DAW, August 2025 Original publication : HarperCollins India, September 2023 My Rating: 3.75/5 stars “So we wander down the giant corridors in search of what we didn’t know we were missing. We seek to become whole”. I’m starting this review off bold by comping this “ Piranesi meets The Spear Cuts Through Water ”. You're going to have to hear me out on that one, though, because it's not as straigh-forward of a comparison as that may seem. Ambitious, o

Genre: Literary Fiction, Disability/Illness Published: October 2025 My Rating: 2/5 stars ‘I was fearful of disturbing it, like the disorder was some animal that would go berserk if it realised it was confined in the cage of my body.’ One day at work, a young newspaper reporter is suddenly struck with a mysterious pain in her hands that renders her unable to type. A string of doctors offer her a string of diagnoses, ranging from carpal tunnel, to arthritis, to her body’s way o

Genre: Horror Published: Zando Press, September 2025 My Rating: 4.5 stars "Leave the dead. Look after the living." The Story: A woman wakes up inside a wooden coffin six feet underground, with no memory of her identity or supposed “death”. She desperately claws her way to freedom, emerging on the frozen ground of Inishbannock - an island just off the coast of Ireland. Not everyone in the small isolated island-community welcomes Mara’s return though... With the help of a han

Genre: Historical fantasy, Western Published: Quirk Books, November 2025 My Rating: 4.5/5 stars “Romantic love was a clear-cut institution, bolstered by orthodoxy and ritual. When a man lost his wife, it was expected that his world would unravel. But friendship… friendship was a wilderness with no guide. There were no courting rituals one might follow to pursue it, and little sympathy for the gut-wrenching horror of its loss.” Who would have thought that I could enjoy a weste

Gerne: Dark Academia, Mystery, Fantasy Published: St. Martin's Press, October 2025 My Rating: 3/5 stars "The philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as the hesitation between the supernatural and a mundane explanation of an occurrence. In a work of fiction, when a woman in the woods sees a monster and turns out to be crazy, then that is realism. If it turns out that there really is a monster in those woods, then that is horror. But if one can make an argu

A reading-blog in which I attempt to beat my readingslump by reading recently released horror-novella's until I find a 5-star...

Genre: Contemporary Fiction with Speculative element Published: ECW-Press, October 2025 My Rating: 4/5 stars “If I were to tell someone...

Genre: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism Published: Grove Press, August 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars ‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘goodbye isn’t...

Genre: Fantasy Published: Del Rey, January 2025 My Rating: 4/5 stars "Life is about finding joy in the space between where you came from...

Genre: Middle-grade fantasy Published: Quirk Books, January 2025 My Rating: 3/5 stars The Story: Nick and her mother Theo are traveling...

Genre: Horror Published: Wicked House Publishing, June 2025 My Rating: 4/5 stars "Everyone deserves to have someone at their side when...

Genre: Fantasy Published: DAW Publishing, July 2025 My Review: 4.5/5 stars, rounded up because I love Joshua Philip Johnsons creative...

Genre: Literary Fiction, Sci-fi/Speculative Fiction Published: Bindery Books, June 2025 My Rating: 3/5 stars The Unmapping was one of...

Genre: Literary Fiction Published: J onathan Cape, August 2024 My Rating: 4/5 stars "The Echoes. His parents thought it was a good name...

Genre: Horror Published: Night Shade Books, 2012 My Rating: 3.5/5 stars “The deepest cavern in the world is the human heart.” The Croning...

Genre: (cozy) horror Published: ECW Press, September 2025 My rating: 3.5/5 stars I was originally drawn to this novel based on both its...

Genre: Sci-fi Novella Published: Lanternfish Press, May 2025 My Rating: 4/5 stars “…Life permanently fixed in a homage to itself. An...

Genre: Cozy Fiction, Magical Realism Published: Doubleday, September 2024, originally published March 2023 My Rating: 1/5 stars “The...

Genre: Sci-fi, Horror Published: Daphne Press (UK)/ Tor Nightfire (US), May 2025 My Rating: 1/5 stars "We were the weeds of the...

Genre: Speculative Fiction Published: Atlantic Press, Augustus 2016 My Rating: 2/5 stars This is one of the weirdest book I have ever...

Genre : middle-grade, magical realism. Published: Feiwel & Friends, March 2025 My Rating: 4.5/5 stars "Surprisingly, it was the pigeons...

Genre: Horror, Supernatural Published: Shortwave Media, April 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars Fans of Iain Reid’s We Spread will delight in...

Genre: Sci-fi, dystopia Published: Angry Robot, April 2025 My Rating: 3/5 stars Three individuals separated by 200 years are linked by...

Genre: Eco-fiction, horror, novella Published: Stelliform Press, April 2025 My Rating: 3/5 stars "The fen belongs to itself. Like us, it...

Genre: YA horror/thriller Published: Harper Collins, April 2023 My Rating: 2.5/5 stars Chances are, many of you have seen the TV-show...

Genre: YA paranormal mystery Published: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, March 2025 My Rating: 3.5/5 stars “A feeling that...

Genre: Magical Realism Published: Lake Union Publishing, March 2025 My Rating: 5/5 glowing stars "My mother is a willow. She stands by...

Genre: science fiction Published: Tor, February 2025 My Rating: 4.5/5 stars “Let me put this in terms you can understand…” Consider this,...

Genre: Magical Realism, Novella Published: Graywolf Press/Charco Press (EN) & Vleugels (NL), first publication 2020. Rating: 3/5 stars...

Genre: Middle-grade, contemporary Published: Clarion Books, May 2023 My Rating: 5/5 stars “We are here to help you carry the sky when you...

Genre: kinderboek (vanaf ca 10 jaar) Publicatie: Luitingh-Sijthoff, September 2020 Sterwaardering: 4/5 sterren "'Kon ik het verdriet...

Genre: horror Published : Rising Action Publishing, March 2025 My Rating: 1/5 stars I truly wished I could justify a higher rating than...

Genre: Literary Fiction, Horror Published: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, February 2025 My Rating: 2/5 stars To start off this review, I have to...