Skip to main content

Featured

Yours Celestially by Al Hess

After divorce, death, and having his reformatted soul uploaded into a new body, Sasha expected resurrection to be a fresh start. His time spent in digital Limbo with the program's cheeky AI guardian angel, Metatron, was cathartic, but what good is a second life when he only sees his daughter on the weekends, he has all the same problems he had before he died, and he can't seem to shake the ache for the married life he lost? If that weren't frustrating enough, a glitch in the program has given Sasha the ability to sense Metatron even outside of Limbo. And Metatron is in love. The angel's sickly-sweet yearning for one of the souls still in Limbo has turned Sasha's stomach into caramelized lead. It's hard enough to move on without someone else's feelings making the emptiness in his own life even more acute. He didn't have playing wingman to an actual winged being on his bingo card, but he's determined to help Metatron make a move on their crush so he ca...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

Winter Masquerade by Kevin Klehr

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

Winter Masquerade is a bizarre and wonderful fever dream of a story, a magical mystery tale running on dream logic, punctuated by nightmares; speaking slantwise of slowly coming out from gaslighting, falling out of love, perhaps realizing it was never love at all. 

It conveys how it feels to slowly realize that everything is wrong, that it's okay to not be okay, and how hard it can be to try and make a change. This runs on witty banter and dream logic; that's a style which I specifically enjoy, and this is a particularly concentrated version of that type. The story has a recognizable kind of structure, a narrative style which mimics how dreams feel when you try to remember them; the pieces connected so beautifully while you were asleep, but upon waking they feel disparate and discordant. This mimics how it can feel to realize that things are a little bit wrong, a little bit broken. That maybe what you thought was “good enough” is actually neither “enough” nor “good”. That air of wrongness permeates this fantasy, hinting towards the reality which undergirds it. It gradually becomes more overt as the MC strains to figure out how to feel and what to do about it when this dream finally ends. 

CW for graphic violence, domestic abuse, and drug use.

A man in a suit and a party mask, his shirt partly open


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts