What are you reading in 2025?

[jian]

Finished The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong, which was a very pleasant cosy fantasy book. Recommended to those who enjoy such books, similar to Ursula Vernon's or Sarah Beth Durst's work in that line.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Predator, Aliens

Two examples I had in mind, in fact, though the Resident Evil movies land there, too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not really. Neither is a Western in any real genre sense. They each have one character from the Old West in Victorian England in a Gothic Horror story, but in no real way does the presence of that single character change the genre of the whole. Especially in Dracula where the cowboy is a tertiary character at best. But in Penny Dreadful, Ethan, the cowboy is also a werewolf, reinforcing the horror genre. So in neither case would anyone reasonably describe either as a Western.

You seem to have assumed I was suggesting they were Westerns. I was not. I was noting this was a case of a crossover between the otherwise normally distinct Western and Victorian genres.

Yes, exactly. But other than a few jump scares in most of those films, they feel far more like war movies than anything I'd call horror. The two mentioned examples, Predator and Aliens, are great films. Two favorites of mine, especially Aliens. But at best they are action movies that have a horror monster in them.

And yet, action-horror is commonly listed as a horror subgenre.

Compare those two to just about any movie that would normally be called a horror movie. Saw, Sinister, Hereditary, etc. You can even look them up on ScaryMeter. Aliens gets a 5.7. Predator gets a 3.9.

Not the first place subgenres tend to differ from the main branch of a genre. That's usually what makes them subgenres.

 

[Thomas Shey]

To bring this back to novels and reading . . .

My first thought is that Romance Supernatural Thriller pretty much seems Laurel K. Hamilton's whole thing for her Anita Blake series. magical vampire hunter who gets involved romantically with a vampire and werecreatures and deals with big dark supernatural plot stuff.

I read the first few in that series a couple decades ago so I can't say whether the whole series continued in that vein.

You can make an argument that's also what almost all Patricia Briggs urban fantasy books are, too.

 

[prabe]

Finished The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong, which was a very pleasant cosy fantasy book. Recommended to those who enjoy such books, similar to Ursula Vernon's or Sarah Beth Durst's work in that line.

My wife has enjoyed those books immensely. I'll forward your recs to her. Thanks!

 

[jian]

My wife has enjoyed those books immensely. I'll forward your recs to her. Thanks!

I hope she likes it. I liked it well enough to preorder her next book (The Keeper of Magical Things).

What The Teller of Small Fortunes has that’s a bit different from other cosy fantasy I’ve read is a knowing wink at D&D and similar games - at one point Tao and her friends are mistaken for an adventuring party by a NPC who distinctly feels to me like a reference to Dungeon Master from the D&D cartoon. I’d bet that Julie Leong is a D&D player (as is Ursula Vernon).

 

[prabe]

I hope she likes it. I liked it well enough to preorder her next book (The Keeper of Magical Things).

What The Teller of Small Fortunes has that’s a bit different from other cosy fantasy I’ve read is a knowing wink at D&D and similar games - at one point Tao and her friends are mistaken for an adventuring party by a NPC who distinctly feels to me like a reference to Dungeon Master from the D&D cartoon.

I might not have been clear. My wife has read several of Leong's books and enjoyed them all. Turns out she's also read Durst. Vernon might be a possibility, though.

 

[jian]

I might not have been clear. My wife has read several of Leong's books and enjoyed them all. Turns out she's also read Durst. Vernon might be a possibility, though.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

Durst has written quite a few different types of book - the ones I'd count as similar to Leong would be her two explicitly cosy fantasies (The Spellshop and The Enchanted Greenhouse) and some of her books aimed at children (such as The Shelterlings).

Not all of Ursula Vernon's fantasy output would count but many of her more romantic work such as Paladin's Grace and some of her more child-friendly books such as Minor Mage, A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, Castle Hangnail, and Illuminations would. Her adult books might be under T Kingfisher.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'm not sure if he meant it to be accessible to readers of his own (Victorian) time. His relentless use of archaisms seems intended, rather, to place the reader into a relationship with the somewhat alien syntax of a high and far-off time. He literally does this at every conceivable opportunity in a way which never ceases to surprise.

Heh, yeah, even then Morris was evoking the past.

He's on my list, but I wanted to go back to the beginning of the genre first, so once I'm done with Morris, I'm planning on reading some George MacDonald.

Lord Dunsany is so good in my book. Eminently readable, painting fantastical views with a most magical brush. George MacDonald is hit or miss for me. I didn't care for Phantastes (though I do keep meaning to give it another read), but "The Day Boy and the Night Girl," also known as "The Romance of Photogen and Nycteris" was wonderful. It felt like a Studio Ghibli story a hundred years earlier.

 

[Autumnal]

Lord Dunsany towers over the field. To my taste, waiting on reading him is like postponing Shakespeare for a bunch of generic Jacobean revenge tragedies. I mean, there’s good bits in MacDonald, but nothing to compare to one of my favorite Dunsany lines:

He was in the emerald-cellar. There was no light in the lofty vault above him, but, diving through twenty feet of water, he felt the floor all rough with emeralds, and open coffers full of them. By a faint ray of the moon he saw that the water was green with them, and easily filling a satchel, he rose again to the surface; and there were the Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And, without saying a word, or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.

Italics in the original.

Meanwhile, as of midnight, the audio version of Christopher Ruocchio’s Shadows Upon Time, is here in my hot little hands. Okay, Audible app on my phone, same diff. This is the concluding volume of his Sun Eater Saga, and it is an ox-stunner: 884 pages, 44h 26m at 1.0 speed. But I’ve really, really enjoyed the series so far, and so far this volume iOS holding up just great.