I read this novella for the indie novella competition, SFINCS. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.

From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos is a dark fantasy-horror novella that starts us in the enigmatic mansion of St. Edah’s, as we watch Lethe and Petunia, two servants, struggle with their appointed work as they tend to a group of immortal creatures who throw exuberant parties every night, unzipping from their skins and dancing as skeletons. Neither of them remember how they got here, although Petunia has vague memories of a previous life, a child. Both of them are searching for the way out, but the mansion is a prison, impossible to break out of. And even though the lady of the house, Erinyes, keeps giving hints that Lethe should be, used to be, could be something different, something more, Lethe only wants to help Petunia. And when one of the immortals disappears, perhaps a chance will present itself.

The entire setup of the novella is like a fever dream, and the description of the reveler skeletons is absolutely horrifying and some great gory imagery. Just like Lethe and Petunia, I was kept in a constant state of confusion and fear, trying to make sense of the things I was seeing, learn the strange internal logic behind the events. I was very much taken by the situation and the sort of uneven but powerful characterisation of both human protagonists. The inscrutable gods and their inhumanly secrets made me think about Kerstin Hall’s work, just like the moody, poetic-without-being-purple writing style. When the events started unraveling in truth, I had no idea what to expect, and indeed the novella surprised me with the directions it took in the second half, expertly pairing human problems and emotions to the dark, twisted, abstract imagery and setting. Despite the wild turns the plot was taking (talking rat? postpartum depression?) I always felt there was a strong underlying goal and intention from the author that I could trust will lead me to a satisfying ending.

And that’s exactly what the novella did. There were many things I wished were more fleshed out in that second half after the revelation of how Lethe and Petunia got to St. Edah’s and why, but as we rushed towards the resolution, I could let go of them. It was a glimpse onto a mythology, a slice of a larger story we haven’t seen the beginnings of and won’t see the end, and what I really, really appreciated, that it was, chiefly, Petunia’s story, with its simple, horrible, human roots. I’m not enough of a literary critic to define exactly how the novella achieved this, but all its little pieces that were, looking at them for the first time, a truly wild assortment of symbols and characters and themes, somehow smoothed into such a satisfying, bittersweet, consistently interesting and exciting read with just the amount of layered-ness that I like, that it has easily become one of my favourite reads in the competition.

Lovers of vibe-y, dark, dreamlike prose and fantasy stories that wrap very real emotions and events into the weird and the unknowable will find their enjoyment in this one, I think.

I read this novella for the indie novella competition, SFINCS. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.

Of All The Stars by Kris Madigan is a slow, pensive fantasy novella about a snowy town with disappearing magic and the woman who strives to figure out the answer. As Kosma and her snow fox companion, Nipa, attempt to trek to the strange chasm in the woods that is the apparent source of the city’s magic, they somehow gets lost during a teleportation spell and ends up in a distant desert town. There, Kosma is immediately seized and thrown into jail due to her magical abilities. An enigmatic woman, daughter of the guard chief, Avaline decides to free her, however, and accompany Kosma back to her people for her own mysterious reasons, and the story shows their trek through the wilderness, their growing relationship, and the surprising solution to some of the magical questions posed in the beginning.

I really enjoyed the writing in the novella which conveyed natural beauty and Kosma’s emotions and reserved personality very effectively and had a sort of dreamlike feel to it. The setup also grabbed me as I love a magical mystery, and Kosma and Nipa’s pair was very cute and easy to root for. As Kosma, Avaline, and their navigator, Mikael, start their journey, the setup and all the secrets were intriguing: what is Avaline’s ultimate goal? What are her feelings towards magic, really, and why? And what will happen when this powerful woman arrives in Kosma’s city: a conflict or is some kind of collaboration or peace possible? Why did the teleport spell go awry anyway? Even when it became clear that a large portion of the novella will be the exploration of how trust evolves between Kosma and Avaline, these questions stayed in the forefront of my mind, and in the end, I can say I was not entirely unsatisfied with the answers. I also enjoyed the contrast between Kosma and Avaline’s personalities: both quite taciturn and reserved, but with entirely different flavors and hidden qualities. I was looking forward to how they will soften towards each other.

At the same time, perhaps because of the length, perhaps because of the poetic style and because the story placed character and relationships in the center rather than plot, I found myself consistently wanting more. I wanted more specifics about Kosma’s city and a better sense of what it meant that magic was failing and what was at risk. Avaline’s stubborn silence on her goals was enigmatic in a good way first but started to feel a bit too much, alongside with how Kosma wasn’t trying to get information out of her (or Mikael) very hard either. It was understandable, since she was basically at their mercy, but still, at that point of the story I found myself less involved because of everyone’s persistent silence about everything that felt important to me. For a long time I wasn’t even sure where they were going or how Kosma was so sure they were aiming for her city. I also so wished to get to know Mikael more. And with the gradual development of Kosma and Avaline’s relationship, I felt that a stronger sense of purpose and more clarity in the writing would have supported that important emotional journey better. I liked what was there a lot, but I wanted more.

In the end, however, the novella nicely and effectively managed to pull together all the threads of its weave. It’s a satisfying-unsatisfying ending where I would have loved to read more, to see the full extent of the answers and what exactly is to come, but I also understood why we stopped where we stopped, why the promise of the future is more important to gaze upon than that future itself. And while the inner journey of the romantic pairing could have similarly used more time and detailing, I liked that that was what the author decided to spend time on.

Of All The Stars is a touching tale of trust and letting ourselves find home in unusual places, and I’m confident that lovers of emotional writing, nature’s magic, and romantic storylines will find a lot of beauty in this short gem.

I read this novella for the indie novella competition, SFINCS. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.

The Nome King and the Shroud by Tim Pratt is a quick-paced, classic sci-fi feeling novella that follows the journey of a spaceship carrying thousands of human colonists towards their new home, escaping a chaotic, ruined Earth. During the travel, the ship’s AI, Tug (as in Tugboat) detects a strange occurrance: an unusual infrared source. Tug wakes Mazha Sun, designated “troublesolver” to get to the end of this. But the strange artificial structure starts causing problems even before the ship could approach it, and it is going to be on the ingenuity and courage of the human crew and whatever Tug is evolving into to save the remains of humanity from something sinister…

Well. What you need to know about me is that one of my favourite sci-fi genres is the “let’s check out that weird space objects over there!” and so this novella already started from a great place for me. Mazha’s characterisation, the ship she wakes up in, her interactions with Tug all gave me a really classic sci-fi vibe, with ideas we have mostly seen before, but in such arrangement and presentation that they felt anything but tired. The mystery of the alien Dyson-sphere and Shroud’s (the AI inhabiting that sphere) first interactions with our heroes were very intriguing. I also appreciated how well the ‘sci’ part played together with the ‘fi’, which can be a hard balance to reach especially in a short-length writing. I really loved the AI personalities we get to know, and although their characterisation isn’t very deep, the humans, too: capable, brave (or occasionally less brave) space-people I could easily root for as they started to unravel the secrets of this huge habitat they found. And just imagining the sphere itself was cool, I love Dyson-spheres too. I also liked the idea behind the two AIs relationship and the way it evolved.

As the story progressed and we discovered the different alien structures and systems (and started to really truly suspect that Shroud isn’t as friendly as it showed itself) I also had Rendezvous with the Rama vibes, alongside with Asimov’s Robot stories. I’ve read all these books quite a long time ago, but I felt like the themes, the settings, and the writing style were all in line with how I remember those and must have been inspirations for the author. I wouldn’t have minded some more exploration of Mazha’s, Rhose’s, or Bertie’s personalities, pasts, and relationships with each other to increase my involvement, or some more time spent around the later twists of the story (the revelation of what truly happened on the habitat is a bit fast and easy, evaporating all the tension, although I liked the resolution of the problem a lot), and the last accords of the story made me smile with their grandiose-ness (I don’t think this story is space opera, but that last part did harken back to the style), but I consistently enjoyed myself and had a great time with the novella.

The Nome King and the Shroud will be a quick, entertaining read for everyone who loves smart sci-fi with aliens, AI, and exploration.

I read this novella for the indie novella competition, SFINCS. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.

Reap, Sow by S. H. Cooper is a horror mystery novella that drops us into the middle of a creepy house with the protagonist Luci, who has no knowledge of where she is or how she’s gotten there. She’s trying to get out, but the building seems to intentionally force her to go in circles. A terrifying, screaming old woman is haunting her, and a group of strange monsters chase her through rooms that warp around her into a deadly trap. And her memory is strangely blurry, too: she remembers her family, perhaps a wedding, a lover that might expect her back, but…why would this place want to torture her? What’s going on? As Luci rushes through rooms and rooms that turn into her family barn, orchard, and kitchen, and confronts strangely twisted versions of her brother, mother, and father, a horrifying truth starts to unravel itself amond the pages.

Even though I did guess at one twist in the novella quite early, it didn’t take away from my enjoyment at all. I was glued to the pages to figure out what was going to be the answer, and the pacing and voice of the writing were perfect to convey the fever-dream strangeness that was happening. I compared the experience to playing one of those psychological indie horror games where the protagonist finds out about their own terrible past from the nightmarishly changing, familiar-unfamiliar environments around them that the player needs to survive, and this remained true all throughout. The payoff was also quite satisfying: the chapter with the revelations got under my skin. And the ending is horrifying in an existential but also very human way, playing on and magnifying fears that we all have, just like I prefer my horror.

Th story builds upon a relatively simple idea/twist and executes it skillfully, while giving its protagonist and her circumstances just the right amount of character and unique detail, and I had a great time with it. If I had to find one little bone to pick, it was that due to Luci not remembering much and figuring out things, “watching the show”, basically alongside the reader, there were times when it was harder to feel the emotional connection with her. Right until the revelations, most of her reactions were of confusion, fear, and despair: this was of course, logical, as she didn’t remember much else from her life, but this is where the chosen structure worked a little bit against my immersion and against getting to know her as a character. I wanted to see more from her somehow, connect better with her from the beginning. At the same time, the abovementioned revelation part did hit hard and by the end, I was right there with Luci.

Reap, Sow is a dark little novella with great imagery and a well-executed twist I can easily recommend to all psychological horror lovers. It was probably my first time experiencing a story like this in written form, and the author absolutely pulled it off. Very cool.

I read this novella for the indie novella competition, SFINCS. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.

The Weaver and the Wyrm by Ben Galley is a somewhat dark but also hopeful fantasy adventure about a down-on-his-luck mage sent by his new employer to retrieve a dangerous magical weapon that turns out to be something entirely different than he expected. The novella connects to the author’s main series, Emaneska, which contains many novels and novellas, but in its roots, can be read as a standalone.

Farden is a Written, a magic-user with special tattoos from which he sources his powers. After some unfortunate events in the capital, he asked for a mission far from everyone who would know him, and after a trying journey at sea, ends up in gray and bleak Albion in the servitude of the strange leader of the Arkabbey there, Durnus Glassren. The reclusive scholar immediately has a mission for him: visit a magick market and bid for an artifact that is about to cause problems in the area. Deal with it, diplomatically, the order comes. But of course, Farden’s business will end up everything but diplomatic. After an encounter with the strange, sort of a mafia-boss Weaver then gaining the magical weapon that is more wild animal than object, the mage quickly finds himself in a right mess of a situation.

I found the novella’s writing style, not counting some smaller editing hiccups and confusion in the more descriptive parts, very easy to read, and I was able to quickly orient and immerse myself in the large-scale setting as well. Farden was a relatable main character, and I really liked the community he discovered with the venomous magical animal, the lyndwyrm, both of them powerful but out of place loners in a dangerous place. I also found the plot to be satisfying, and the resolution to the smaller stories presented were much more hopeful and bright than I wanted to assume in the beginning. I definitely think the novella can be a nice taster to the author’s wider world and writing style.

At the same time, like with a lot of shorter and more self-contained stories that connect to series, I found myself wondering about a lot of details that didn’t end up coming up but would have made the experience much more well-rounded. Something I definitely missed was more about Farden himself, his life, his magic and what a Written is, exactly, and his current conundrum that had sent him to Albion which remained very vague. This all would have helped me to be more emotionally involved in his story with the wyrm which seemed to be the main throughline of the novella but it never really got there for me. I was also never entirely clear on the political structure in the part of the world we were discovering, so some topics connected to Durnus also remained vague. And although I got the gist of the Weaver’s character (probably the character with the best-presented personality in the book), I also wished to know more about what he was capable of which would have strengthened the tension and danger.

A short, self-contained fantasy adventure that is easy to breeze through, The Weaver and The Wyrm will be enjoyable to all fantasy lovers who like their magic badass and their worlds grim but still illuminated with a beam of sunshine.