A very fun combination of sword & sorcery and Bosch-esque hellish horror. For fans of the likes of Fritz Lieber, Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.

Pretty rare book, nab it if you can if you're lucky to spot it at a used bookstore!

A strange but marvelous debut from one of SFF's most masterful writers, The Deep is genuinely unlike anything I've ever read. Wholly unique in its setting and characters, medievalist and alien all at once.

A strange and lightly humorous little novel that has elements of social satire, Mr. Pye has been branded as a moral comedy, oftentimes described as being about the nature of good and evil. I really don't think Peake was thinking in such binaries here--while I need to do some further reading about the book to maybe give a better, more well thought-out analysis, the evaluations I've seen of this story on Goodreads and whatnot have been generally kind of hackneyed or try to paint it in a more simplistic light than it deserves. is it really a religious allegorical fable? I don't think it's that cut-and-dry-- the eponymous character comes to Sark to spread goodness in the name of a pantheistic God, but is he truly good to begin with or just pretentious and unusually charismatic and persuasive? is it actually a good-natured criticism of Missionaries or an anti-colonial novel? Points can be made.Is it a love letter to the island of Sark and its insular, genteel and eccentric inhabitants and culture? Certainly. it's an odd-duck of a novel, but one thing is clear-- Peake's sensibilities for character work that he demonstrates so masterfully in his Gormenghast novels is still on display here. The caricature-quality of how they emote, converse and are physically described is never not vivid and amusing, and you can tell Peake was an illustrator just by his writing style (speaking of which, the art that accompanies this novel is so charming and brilliantly drawn). In any other sense, it's not really worth comparing to Gormenghast, as it's a completely different thing, but Peake only left behind a small handful of books to be read, and I'm going to relish every one of them.

Probably my favorite read 0f 2026 so far, The Magus is a novel that is somewhat out of my usual genre wheelhouse in that it's not strictly fantasy, horror or science fiction, but something that still certainly draws upon those genres in an adjacent manner. I initially came to discover this book because it comes highly recommended by not one, but two of my all-time favorite authors, perhaps my two favorites ever; Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison. It also appears in David Pringle's book, "The 100 Best Fantasy Novels" which, despite its title, has an excellently curated selection of work that has entries like this one that don't neatly fall into the typical expectations of said genre.

At the core of the novel is the relationship between our narrator, Nicholas Urfe and the mysterious man known as Maurice Conchis (whose in-narrative preference for the anglicized version of his name sounds cheekily like "Conscious"). In addition to their own places within the narrative of the novel is how both characters are essentially used as rhetorical devices-- functioning as arguments of a particular viewpoint or surrogate of a particular kind of reader. Conchis's playful name is, I think, an allusion to a Luciferian "light-bringer" trickster/magician, of making Nicholas more 'conscious' of who he really is through this elaborate psychological game that plays between the two. When confronted with who he really is in this process, Nicholas has the choice to accept this and learn or continue in his frankly self-destructive ways, and in this way, feels like a call to action for any prospective reader that may identify with him and his self-imposed victimhood.

Though nothing about the novel is overtly fantastical, I can see why Harrison refers to it as a great work of fantasy and why it appears in Pringle's compilation book-- it does have a very mythic quality in its setting that feels somewhat alien and wholly antiquated (in addition to the many allusions to mythological and theatrical characters in the dialogue) and the character of Conchis has his own qualities that are reminiscent of a Devil-like figure and Count Dracula in equal, but subversive measures. It's phenomenally written and its nuanced examination/interrogation of fascism, misogyny, religion and academia and how those things intertwine make it feel all too timeless.

Arguably Bradbury's most beautifully written novel.