Happy International Una Cat Day

A joyful International Una Cat day to you all. In celebration of this wondrous annual event, Una requests that you don't travel here to pay your respects. In line with paragraph 7 of the Fickleness Accords, other cats may also celebrate this as an international holiday dedicated to them providing everyone maintains a strict policy …

Capitol Punishment by K.D. McQuain

Following the life of a young gay man, this novel provides an engaging, if sometimes bleak, perspective on being homosexual in the US from the post-civil rights hope of the 1970’s to the new puritanism of the 1980’s. Fired from his job and cast out of his parent’s home for finally responding to years of …

Not Excused

Opinions differ on what influences people to a particular course (and whether free will even exists in a real sense). I incline strongly toward theories of it being a series of events and experiences—some unnoticed or apparently unconnected—that combine to create critical momentum. However, sometimes I look back and think that if I wanted to …

Joe Coffin Returns, Part One by Ken Preston

Preston continues his fusion of modern British underworld thriller and vampire tale, showing the aftermath of a human victory without either losing tension or parachuting in a new threat. This is the seventh book in Preston’s Joe Coffin series. Your opportunity to be surprised by previous volumes might be drained beyond this point. Vampires still …

Music of the Congruent Spheres

Sometimes alien stars strangely align, raising up things that cannot be put down. Such as this rather fine collaboration on a Lovecraftian dance club by Cibex and Midjourney. Is it better not to speculate what arcane blasphemies might creep forth from that miscegenation of musical samples? Or set sail into the smoke-machine dark voids of …

Bona Fides by Ash B Whitley

Whitley blends para-science with modern espionage tropes, creating a novel that is both gritty, street-level superhero action and James-Bondian thriller. One moment Rowan Miller was a young woman looking forward to university, the next she found herself undetectable to other people. Being a living ghost is great for watching lectures, but after four years of …

A Verse about Childhood

A reminder that they don't make nostalgia like they used to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eVMWh71SmE You might wonder if there is some message behind my sharing this poem now... but I couldn't possibly comment.

Haunting in Fettig by Jordan Elizabeth

Elizabeth blends a classic ghost story with the Covid pandemic and a teenage protagonist, creating a tale that has all the supernatural tension without any dry archaism. When a freak combination of her father’s mistake and snap pandemic restrictions leave Portia stranded at her grandmother’s farm without a change of clothes or the internet, she …

From That Angle

I recently started playing Pine, which the developers describe as an “open-world action adventure game set in a simulated world that does not belong to humans”. What they don't describe it is a “third-person adventure game with a lot of platform jumping puzzles”. Which stoked my pondering of what people choose to prioritise, both when …

Cirsova Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense, Volume 2 #11, ed. P. Alexander

Alexander offers another collection of modern speculative fiction, united it its echoing of the pulp sensibilities of moral clarity and action over introspection. This magazine contains five short stories, a novelette, and three reasonably sized extracts from longer works, spread across a variety of genres but each firmly echoing the style and substance of classic …