Dark Vampire Fantasy, Scads of SFF Stories, and More Great Recommendations

You go, little alien. I believe in you! This shop also has lots of other great stickers for readers. I find that people who love books also love stickers, and one can never have too many stickers—just ask my office walls. $4.

First up: a debut romantic dark fantasy with vampires! Shan LeClaire is set on getting revenge for her life as the disgraced daughter of a Blood Worker. Samuel Hutchinson has discovered the first victim of a magical serial killer and winds up in the court of the vampire king. With Samuel’s secret ability, Shan’s need for revenge, and the help of Blood Worker Isaac, the trio are plunged into treacherous schemes, desire, and vengeance. This is just one of many books with vampires headed our way in the next few weeks. There are always new books about vampires because vampires—say it with me—never get old. (Sorry, not sorry.)

Holy cats, this collection of 15 sci-fi space stories has an AMAZING line-up of SFF authors. Check this out: Ann Leckie, Becky Chambers, T. Kingfisher, Charlie Jane Anders, Anya Johanna DeNiro, Yoon Ha Lee, Lavie Tidhar, Arkady Martine, Aliette de Bodard, Karin Tidbeck, and more! With the sheer amount of talent and imagination in one place, space travel never sounded so good!

This is one of my favorite story collections. It’s an incredible array of speculative stories infused with science and history, set in many different eras and places. There’s a woman who decides to change her living arrangements while waiting for her beloved to return from war; a fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid shadowed everywhere by a huge shark; genetically modified septuplets fall ill to a mysterious disease; a terrible accident occurs in a factory; and much more!

Before I fell in love with the WTF-ery of Gideon the Ninth, this novel sunk its rusted fangs in my brain. It’s a wild, bananapants novel about a group of siblings who were taken in as children by Father, a cold and distant god. Father raises the children in his library and teaches them all his customs and the wisdom of the universe. But now they are adults and Father is missing, and some of the siblings are behaving better than the others. Grabs for power, brutal acts of violence, mind-bendy situations, and a whole lot of humor drive this wildly original novel. If you like to say, “What the hell did I just read???” when you finish a book, this is the novel for you!