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Our Infinite and Inevitable Ends by A.D. Sui is the author’s second novel to come out this year, following their fantastic debut, The Iron Garden Sutra, which was published in February. The books are quiet different tonally, and in terms of setting and general vibe, and I mostly only mention them together in that they’re both excellent reads and that A.D. Sui is an author whose work is always worth checking out!

ECW Press was kind enough to send me a copy of Sui’s latest for review consideration. As a side note, I’m consistently impressed by the titles ECW publishes, and I highly recommend browsing through their catalogue.

The novel opens with Cas working on the Pacific Garbage Patch, which is now more of a garbage island, monitoring the fungi meant to be eating the plastics. Great strides were made toward fighting climate change, until the discovery of deleria, a drug that lets people watch, but not interact with, other timelines and realities. Rather than focusing on the here and now, researchers put all their time and energy into reality-hopping, certain that the solution to the climate crisis must be present in some other timeline, thereby letting them shortcut the work and skip straight to the answer. Cas’ ex, Yana, just happens to be the leading expert on deleria. Cas receives a call from Yana out of the blue saying “I’m sorry it had to end this way”, before blowing herself up, along with her laboratory, an act which gets her labeled a terrorist and has Interpol showing up to haul Cas away as a suspected accomplice.

What follows is a twisty narrative that wraps Cas right back up into her obsession with Yana, her childhood-friend turned-lover-turned-ex, with whom her relationship was borderline toxic at times. In an attempt to prove her innocence, and to understand Yana’s final words to her and the truth behind her death, Cas begins taking deleria, hoping her glimpses of other versions of Yana will help her unlock the mysteries surrounding her own Yana. In the meantime, she’s being hounded by Agent Cromwell, who seems intent on proving Cas’ guilt, and she’s thrown into the orbit of Dr. Sandra Okazia, a famous and respected scientist whom Yana was working with, secretly having an affair with, and who also appears to be running an underground drug ring.

Sui does an excellent job of lacing doubt throughout the novel, with each new secret revealed leaving Cas uncertain who to trust, even as she becomes increasing uncertain whether she can trust herself as her use of deleria causes her to hallucinate and bits of other timelines to bleed into her own. The climate fiction angle and the idea of alternate realities work well together. It feels all too plausible that if humanity did discover a way to peer into other worlds, we’d use it to try to shortcut any hard work and solve all our problems magically.

The exploration of grief and obsession are similarly effective. Rather than doing the hard work of healing, many in the world of the novel turn to deleria as a means of deferring grief, or avoiding it all together. The parallels between individuals unwilling to let go of their loved ones and scientists unwilling to let go of the idea of an easy solution are threaded throughout the novel, both ignoring the here and now in favor of some idealized past or idealized future where everything was or will be perfect rather than taking any action to improve the present.

There are also some nice parallels drawn around the idea of fate and control, as Cas feels like others are controlling her life and the idea of alternate realities raises the question of whether certain things will always happen and whether choice even matters. Relatedly, the novel explores the theme of responsibility, with both Cas and Sandra feeling responsible for Yana’s death, again in parallel or in contrast to the idea of the present generation avoiding responsibility for the climate crisis by clinging to the idea of an alternate reality where all their problems are solved.

Against all this backdrop, the characters shine, and their relationships are wonderfully complicated and messy. Ultimately, the novel is about letting go and how damaging the refusal to do so can be on both a personal and societal level. Overall, it’s a highly satisfying read with a perfect balance of well-rounded characters, action, suspense, and exploration of weighty issues.

Crawl Space by Steve Toase is a novella published by JournalStone Press in March 2026. The author was kind enough to send me a copy, and I’ve be woefully negligent in posting a review!

Rachael and Ben are contractors hired for a very specialized archeological job, unearthing documents that their employer, the mysterious Durchsickern Institute, believes may be caught up in the remains of the old city-wide pneumatic mail system. While searching through various abandoned buildings, they make a series of odd and seemingly unrelated discoveries – a capsule with measurements larger than the tube they found it in that shouldn’t possibly be able to fit, and yet does; a capsule inexplicably containing a collection of mismatched human teeth, all from different individuals of different ages; and a capsule containing a knot of strange, aggressive worm-like creatures.

As they continue their search, Rachael increasingly feels like they’re being watched, suspecting the man who hired them is also spying on them. She watches a woman pull the teeth out of her gums one by one right in front her, and shortly afterward, Ben calls her from his hotel room, claiming someone attacked him and ripped out all his teeth. After a hospital stay, Ben is able to return to work, but Rachael catches him shoving dirt and plaster and brick dust into his mouth, saying cryptic things about “they are trying to return” and the “backstage remaining pure”, ultimately revealing to her that he removed his own teeth, a necessary sacrifice to access what he calls the Crawl Space – a kind of world between worlds made up mostly of trash.

The novella is highly atmospheric and visceral. Toase does a wonderful job with his descriptions of abandoned buildings, so much so that you can practically feel the gritty floors, the sweaty heat, and the grime clinging to your skin as you read. The imagery throughout the novella is striking and the fact that Rachael and Ben are urban archeologists unearthing artifacts from relatively recent history is a nice twist on the trope of a long-buried, ancient relic from a lost civilization unleashing unspeakable cosmic horrors. Similarly, that they are searching for documents in an old postal system also underscores the often mundane and banal nature of evil. It isn’t all sinister robes and chanting cults; evil is more likely to be lurking in corporate offices, reshaping the world to their liking behind the scenes through the power of their bank accounts.

The novella is well-paced, with the weirdness building slowly and steadily throughout. The imagery and setting continue to be highly effective once Rachael and Ben find themselves in the Crawl Space with its dampness, rot, and dust. It’s the kind of read that may leave you wanting a shower, but it a good way, and a refreshing take on the cosmic horror genre.

P.A. Cornell’s debut collection, The Astronaut Among the Flowers, was released in August 2026 by Stars & Sabers. The stories tend toward the sci fi end of the speculative spectrum, touching on family, loss, love, and finding one’s place in the world against a backdrop of distant planets, time travel, and futures both near and far.

The collection opens with “Vinyl Wisdom” a sweet story about reconnecting with family and a finding the balance between honoring their wishes for you and striking your own path. Joey lives with their grandfather who cares for the community and tries to live by his late wife, Rebel’s, ways, adhering to a punk lifestyle. Joey wants to move to the City with their best friend Aiden, which essentially means uploading their mind and giving up all individual freedom, which is decidedly un-punk. Joey confesses their plan to John, and John in turn reveals that he ultimately took Rebel to the City at the end of her life because he couldn’t bear to let her go, showing how messy and complicated relationships can get, and how you can end up feeling like you betrayed someone even when your actions were taken out of love.

“Decorative” is a brief piece about a robot named Annie purchased as a companion to cook and help out around the house. At first, she and Dean are friendly, gardening together, but over time, he begins to neglect her. The story manages to pack a good deal of emotion into a short space, and works both as a painful character piece and a commentary on how quickly technology changes, and how humans tend to lose interest in things once they are no longer new and shiny.

“Bright Horizons” is a chilling near-future story that feels all too plausible as an employee raises concerns over an AI teacher named Tisha and has her concerns ignored, even with evidence that Tisha has the potential to harm children, offering advice on hiding STDs from sexual partners and weight loss tips to someone who is already underweight. The story is framed as a series of emails that feel like they could have been exchanged within a company like Instagram or Facebook, ignoring potential harm in favor of potential profit.

“440 Broad Street, Apartment 4C” is an effective and quiet apocalypse story, focused on a group of neighbors in an apartment building who are largely strangers to each until they’re forced to band together to try to survive an alien invasion. It’s a lovely look at community coming together, and the one or the few sacrificing themselves for the many.

The titular story, “An Astronaut Among the Flowers”, is one of the original pieces in the collection, and also one of the standouts. As a child, Miranda is fascinated by the mystery of a dead astronaut discovered in a field of flowers on Equinox. She appears human, but her remains are ancient, predating humanity’s arrival on Equinox. Her suit contains advanced technology beyond anything the humans on Equinox have, and it appears to be time machine. Over the course of her life and her career, Miranda and her colleagues recreate the tech and she volunteers to be the first to test it, accidentally sending herself farther into the past than she ever intended, where she lands in a field of flowers. The time loop aspect of the story doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise, nor does it feel like that’s the intention. It’s more like a satisfying arrival at a known destination, with the story providing gorgeous imagery along the way.

“8 Laws I Wound Up Breaking While Attempting to Restore the Timeline” makes for nice paired reading with “An Astronaut Among the Flowers” in that it’s a time travel story with a very different approach. The story has a fun voice and makes good use of its list style format as the narrator tries to fix the fact that they accidentally erased their best friend from existence while time traveling.

“Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont” is a bittersweet and lovely story about a group of people living in an apartment building where various time periods overlap. There are complicated rules to keep people from learning the future so that neighbors are still able to interact. Sarah from 2026 falls in love with Roger from 1940, but is unable to warn him about the coming war, or stop him from enlisting. It works well with the other two time travel pieces to show how much depth and breadth there is within the subgenre and how tropes can be combined in infinite ways to tell fresh, new stories.

“The Body Remembers” effectively explores trauma and the idea of soldiers being used as exploitable resources in war as the protagonist and his fellow soldiers try to cope with losing and constantly regrowing limbs, experiencing phantom pain and having that pain dismissed by the doctors whose only goal is to make better soldiers.

The collection comes to a close with another standout, “The Smell of Sawdust”, an excellent story with a strong sense of place and compelling characters. The protagonist is a pit fighter approaching the end of her career, her body too damaged to continue on for much longer. A man named Oliver runs the town, and uses the fact that she cares for a young girl named Elena and wants to protect her as a way to force her to continue fighting. A man comes to town with a salvaged piano for the local bar and she learns there’s a place back East where she could teach music and tune pianos, however she doesn’t have the money to make the journey. When Oliver finds out about her arthritis and the fact that she’ll soon be useless as a fighter, he tells her to deliberately lose so he can win by betting against her. She pretends to agree, but plans to win her last fight and asks the piano man to bet on her, which will make enough money for her, Elena, and the piano man to escape together.

It’s a strong collection and the thematic groupings across the three sections work well, putting various stories in conversation with each other – for example the three stories dealing with time travel. The genre trappings and tropes are put to good use as a way of exploring various aspects of the human condition, with the stories about humanity’s relationship to technology feeling especially relevant to the the here and now. Whether you’re already a fan of Cornell’s work or new to it, The Astronaut Among the Flowers is well worth your time!

The Lamp in the Window: A Victorian Ghost Story by Tom Mead is a novella from PS Publishing that absolutely does what it says on the tin. It is a ghost story in the Victorian tradition, set around Christmas time, complete with a framing narrative and nesting stories within stories. Mead perfectly captures the voice and vibe of a Victorian ghost story, using the structure to good effect to make the story more personal, and leaning into to some of the inherent queerness that seems to linger beneath the surface of many traditional stories. Mead even embraces the abrupt ending present in many traditional tales, with The Turn of the Screw by Henry James being the example that jumps immediately to mind. Even as novellas go, it’s a relatively brief one, though no less effective for that. There may be some spoilers ahead, so be warned.

As mentioned above, the nested structure is used to good effect here, with a father haunted by his past telling a ghost story to his young son. Unlike many classical Victorian ghost stories where the connection is tenuous, something that happened to someone the framing narrator knows, but not necessarily intimately, this ghost story takes the narrator, Kershaw, back to his student days. One of his professors, Spence, used to host an annual gathering for Kershaw and three other students, Sullivan, Walsh, and Everett, on Christmas Eve, ending the evening by telling them ghost stories. A further layer is added to the narrative as Mead then relates the stories the professor told the boys, but rather than simple one-off horrors, these tales too relate back to the larger overarching narrative.

The queerness in Victorian tales like The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, which was largely edited out and obscured, is made into a plot point here. Everett becomes convinced that Spence is gay and that Sullivan is as well. He suspects a secret relationship between the two, leading to Sullivan receiving special treatment, and creating tension between the four boys, which leads to the incident that ultimately incites the story’s central haunting.

The elements of structure, voice, and the nested stories all work well together. There is some genuinely unsettling imagery within the ghost stories that Spence tells the boy, from the ashen child creeping out of the fireplace, and Old Spindlejack with his head and limbs twisted the wrong way around. It’s a quick read, but a satisfying one, the sort of thing you might want to settle into on a wintry evening while sitting in front of a roaring fire. As with all of PS Publishing’s novellas, there’s a lovely signed, limited hardback edition available. The cover art by Yorgos Cotronis is spot on as well, making for a gorgeous physical object as well as a satisfying ghost story.

Red Ants by Kimberly Blaeser is a short story collection forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in October. The publishers were kind enough to send me an early copy for review.

On the whole, the collection tends toward literary and contemporary stories, with hints of other genres peeking through. Common threads resonating across the various pieces are friendships, family, memory, and characters reconciling with their pasts or where they came from versus where they are now in their lives. Anishinaabe traditions and traditional stories are also central to many of the tales, giving slice-of-life pieces that capture a specific moment in time the depth and weight of history and making them feel like part of a greater whole.

One of the standout stories opens the collection, “River Dreams”, a bittersweet murder mystery about coming home, reconnecting with family, and seeking justice. Bineshi’s Uncle Smoke supposedly drowned accidentally, but she suspects foul play stemming from his advocacy for environmental justice. She and her cousin Sherri set out to investigate, ultimately finding a sense of peace and closure at the end. The story has a wonderful sense of place and highlights the idea that leaving home and forging your own path in life doesn’t mean abandoning one world for another.

The title story, “Red Ants”, touches on some similar themes, with characters who feel caught between worlds as it looks at tribal membership rules and who can and cannot be officially recognized. The piece is centered on two childhood best friends, one of whom has a tribal ID card and the other who does not, both on the cusp of going off to college and figuring out their futures while they reckon with their pasts, family bloodlines, and heritage. “Copper Traces” also shares some similarities with “River Dreams” as the narrator’s brother, an environmental activist, is missing, and presumed dead. She sets out looking for him, and is repeatedly visited by a wolf she believes may hold the key to his location or at least in some way help her find the closure she needs.

“Growing Things” is a sweet story that looks at the intersection between science and faith as both offer a form of connection to something larger than oneself. Connection between individuals is another central theme in the story as Spanish invites a tree doctor to give her advice advice on caring for a sick oak, and his visits seem to indicate the beginning of a potential romantic relationship. “Birch Tally” is a bittersweet story about a woman who keeps a mental count of all the horrible statistics around life on the rez – unemployment rate, suicide rate, abuse, and addiction. She meets a young boy and they become chosen family. Despite or because of the abuse in his birth family, he is always telling jokes, but his attitude and experiences inspire her to speak out and change statistics into names and people with specific stories, rather than just numbers that are easily ignored.

Another one of the standout pieces in the collection is “Sky Stories” in which a sheriff comes to the rez following a tip about a fugitive named Nanabozho. Suz and her friends try to tell the sheriff he’s chasing a myth, but when he refuses to believe them, they decide to lead him on a wild goose chase to the burial grounds on the edge of the woods, where they call to the Trickster, planning on wasting the stubborn cop’s time, but end up possibly calling the real Nanabozho to their aid.

“Translation for Dummies” has a strong voice, told from the perspective of a dog named Finn who lives with a woman whose boyfriend is an abusive asshole. One night, when he gets especially violent, Finn steps in to defend Kari. “The Broken Year” is another story about finding balance as Maddy struggles with taking care of her elderly father after a fall, while also having recently been laid off, and raising two kids alone. The difficult year leads her to reconnect with both her Roman Catholic and tribal roots, helping her find new sources of strength that allow her to carry on.

The stories are largely quiet and meditative, with struggles and triumphs that are both deeply personal for the characters and also universal. Lovely prose and imagery are evident throughout the collection, and the themes that echo across stories give it the feeling of a cohesive whole while dipping in and out of various characters’ lives.

Never Whistle at Night Part II: Back for Blood edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., officially releases in August 2026. I was lucky enough to nab an advance copy at StokerCon, and having recently finished devouring it, I wanted to highlight it as a truly excellent anthology. The first Never Whistle at Night, also edited by Hawk and Van Alst, was fabulous, and I was thrilled to learn they’d be publishing a second volume. I’m keeping my fingers crossed this becomes an ongoing series.

In their introduction to the anthology, the editors invite readers not just to “sit with darkness” but to “listen to it breathe”. They also ask readers to consider many of the stories as “a handoff, a door left unlatched on purpose” and further ask them to think about what comes next. Horror isn’t always contained safely on the page or in a single moment in time. It’s ongoing and recurring and sometimes the most frightening thing is what you have to live with after the initial moment of fear is over and done. That thread echoes through the anthology – what comes next and how do we live with the horrific on a day-to-day basis.

“Miss Cherokee Princess 1996” by Jessica Doe starts the anthology off strong, looking at the horrors of the pageant circuit, beauty standards, and the idea of “authenticity” and who gets to define it as a pageant hopeful steals features from other women that she believes will be perceived as ideal and beautiful by a panel of largely white judges.

“Animal Dumb” by P.C. Verrone is beautifully-written and explores queerness and monstrousness, looking at horror as a refuge for those who feel they don’t fit in elsewhere. The experience of puberty and growing into oneself/figuring out who you want to be parallel nicely with the idea of shapeshifting.

“Civilized” by A.J. Eversole touches on some of the same themes as Doe’s story in its consideration of the outside gaze and whose definition shapes who you are and how you move through the world. Charley is white-passing and his horror mounts as he stumbles across a series of dead bodies and finds the police not only assuming his innocence, but all but outright stating they would protect him if he was in fact a murderer, because as a white man, violence would be his right.

“Ivories” by Shane Hawk is deeply eerie and unsettling as a father trying to watch over his baby daughter begins losing his grip on reality, ultimately finding himself banished from his own body and something else taking hold, in a look at generational trauma and the darkness that comes from within.

“Found Footage” by Shawaan Francis Keahna is another standout with strong voice, full of unsettling and creepy imagery as Casey tells the story of the thing that has lived inside her her whole life, wearing her skin and using her to move through the world and get what it wants. Like Hawk’s story, it considers the question of inherited monstrousness or monstrousness that is intrinsically part of a person and how to live with the darkness inside.

“We Don’t Talk About It” by Alina Pete draws effective parallels between addiction and the Hungry One/That One, delving into how certain hungers never truly leave you, and also how refusing to name or talk about something can sometimes invite it or leave one vulnerable to it.

“The Corpse Room” by Debra Magpie Earling is a truly chilling story told in the collective voice, the blends the real-world historical horror of a boarding school where Indigenous girls have their language stolen and are subjected to torture and rape, with the supernatural when one of the girls dies and comes back, bringing a vengeful power with her. Here again “monstrousness” is a comfort and a haven and the idea of what a monster is depends on who is defining it.

“Toothjar “by Ramona Emerson is another standout with a strong voice that does a wonderful job of conjuring one of its central horrors while also keeping description to a minimum, largely leaving the full picture to the reader’s imagination. The narrator’s family lives on a remote farm and when a virus kills everyone around them, their father and uncle turn to murder to protect the property, feeding the remains to their monstrous pig, Pinky, to hide their crimes. Pinky is only seen in glimpses and is all the more frightening for it.

These are just a few examples of the delicious darkness you’ll find in the anthology. Overall, Never Whistle at Night Part II: Back for Blood is an incredibly strong collection of short horror fiction and well worth adding to your TBR pile!