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No Gods, No Monsters is a weird book on many levels, from the unreliable omniscient(ish) narrator to the ant teleportation circles and the finger-eating dragon boy. It’s also a book that asks meaningful questions, both personal and social, and answers them in the ways that life does: enigmatically, heartbreakingly, surprisingly, or not at all. This is not a book to skim: there are many characters and a multitude of storylines, and the prose is worth paying attention to. A rewarding read.

A wonderful, creepy anthology that’s perfect for not reading late at night when you’re alone in the house. The stories feature a variety of styles, themes, and approaches, ranging from folk horror to cosmic, from conventional narrative to experimental. Writers I‘m familiar with are here, like Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due, but I also discovered a few new names for my bookshop.org wishlist.

You have to have a taste for literature that actively resists making sense, but if you do, this is rewarding.

Beautiful music telling us terrible things, to paraphrase Tom Waits. Heartbreaking and lovely. (And if, like me, you get stopped short by the guillotine being used in the 1950s — the last execution by guillotine in France was in 1977.)