A girl is twisted in terror in the poster for the movie "I Was a Teenage Werewolf"

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Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones is not your typical werewolf book. Werewolves have been twisted, molded, and (in my opinion) maligned in popular fiction and movies. Vampires have archetypal antecedents to draw on—Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu, for […]
A man sits at a desk in front of a typewriter and holds his head in his hands

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Genre in fiction can be a slippery beast. Sometimes I don’t know what to say when people ask me in what genre I write. I usually say that I am broadly writing in the fantasy genre. Sometimes I […]
A book cover with an arrow in a circle against a background of a city

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The Magic Circle by Barry Ryerson takes the reader on a twisty, exciting ride through a post-apocalyptic world. I’d call this a techno-magic-thriller. Is that a genre? If not, I just made it up. The devastation wreaked by […]
Two profiles of queens in black and white in the style of a playing card of the Queen of Hearts

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Queen of Hearts is the first in a series of fantasy books that follow the young Princess of Wonderland. Colleen Oakes has taken Lewis Carroll’s work as a starting point to build an interesting and coherent world. This […]
A tattooed man rises above a city skyline

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The City of Bones is the first book in a fantasy series by Cassandra Clare, the Shadowhunter series. The book imagines a world in which magical creatures of all sorts exist, but are generally invisible to ordinary humans. […]
A raven descends from the air, claws out. Four teenage boys are in the background

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The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (Book 1 of a cycle of four books) is about magic and yearning. The main characters, all teenagers of 16 or 17 years, try to solve a magical mystery while they struggle […]
A satyr plays the pips atop a Greek column

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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a dreamlike mystery that unfolds like a rose: first the petals are tightly closed, but as they open one by one, a new flower is revealed. At the start, the protagonist, who narrates […]
A skyline of New York City

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Where do gods come from? Cities have had gods for millennia, but how do the gods of cities come into being? It’s a messy process and, like a turtle egg hatching on the beach, there are always predators […]