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This body horror pregnancy trans dysphoria story was... a lot, but it was also raw and real and quite good.

Crane is part of a local cult, run by a hive of sentient flies and worms, and when he gets pregnant the hive insists he carries the child to his utter distress and terror. It's visceral and disturbing--full of trauma and abuse, self-loathing and self-injury, and shitty choices in a shittier world.

This review seems like a recapitulation of my feelings after Witch King: I was gripped by the world, have mixed feelings about the book as a whole, wish more characters had depth, and was disappointed by parts of the ending. It's not to say I didn't enjoy it (and maybe it's just that my expectations were too high) but overall it was "fine".

One thing I really enjoy here is that we get into some really good Martha Wells fantasy ruins. Witch King and Queen Demon both follow in the path of City of Bones (my favorite Martha Wells fantasy story) and some of the Raksura books as well. I'm not sure what makes these so appealing, but I think there's something about her use of dangerous and creepy structures full of unknown danger that she does a great job with.

This book continues with interleaved narratives from the past and present. (As an aside, I do wonder if this will be a trilogy and the past narrative will cover all the way up to the present narrative in the first book.) The first book interestingly had both narratives in the same Summer Palace location at different times, which echoed nicely. This book's present timeline foreshadows some of the dust witch history, but otherwise feels quite disconnected.

I continue to be somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of this structure for this story; there's not much tension about what's missing in between the two parts and they are not particularly great foils for each other. If the book weren't committed to this structure, some flashbacks to more moments with Arn would have gone a long way to making some emotional moments feel more impactful.

But maybe that's a larger problem of feeling the book is a bit muddy. Both halves of the first book ended with wanting to unburn the world, but I don't know if I'd say that's the story here. Is working to destroy the Hierarchs truly unburning the world? If there's any consistent theme, it's coming together to resist authoritarian rule of any sort, but even that is maybe a stretch.

The characterization also continues to feel pretty shallow for everybody who is not Kai and Bashasa. Tenes and Sanja especially feel like they need more screen time and characterization or reason for being with the rest of the party. Nightjar and Highsun similarly feel like they're important characters but we hear and see quite little of them despite them being involved in pivotal moments.

The ending is my biggest disappointment. At least the present narrative carries the tension, but the past narrative just ... elides it? Maybe this is just a big editing decision here to just cut out action to keep the book at four hundred pages, but it feels like there could be such an emotional contrast to Kai's rescue in the Summer Halls and Kai's actions in Descar-Arik and all we get is a small concluding moment with Bashasa at the end. Additionally, there feels like there's some uh pretty momentous reveals at the end of the present narrative and they just get buried :drum: in the final moments of action and they're gone almost as soon as they appear. Both halves end unsatisfyingly, each in their own way.

I will almost certainly read the next book, but I really hope it can tie everything together in a more satisfying way.

This book isn't even 100 pages long, so I finished it in a single sitting, and I don't regret doing that. I loved Ray Nayler's debut novel and this short novella was just as great, if not better in many ways.

He tackles so many serious issues with such sincerity and depth despite the length and the multiple character perspectives really highlight the positionality of different people in society and how it affects their views and what they care about and their memories. Obviously what can't be ignored about this book is the idea that you can bring back extinct species and the underlying current of the climate crisis and humans and destruction, but those issues weren't really at the forefront of my mind as I was reading--they only came later.

This book showcases breathtaking cruelty, but also a heartbreaking kind of kindness too. Very good. Will buy whatever he publishes next.

How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?

I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.

It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly focussed.

And it has one of the best closing sentences of anything I've read, up there with The Dispossessed for how perfectly it recapitulates the whole story, and how little it will mean prior to having read the story.

#SFFBookClub

Time Shelter was our #SFFBookClub October 2025 pick.

I have such mixed feelings about this book. Thematically and topically, it manages to be quite consistent, but it felt like there were too many ingredients in the soup. It feels like there could have been a much tighter and less rambling story or two (or three) assembled from the various pieces of this novel, but then it wouldn't have been this book, either.

There's a lot that I enjoyed about this book, in terms of its discussions about the weaponization and productionization of nostalgia and the past. But also the way that we produce and manufacture memory as well, in similar fashion. I liked the parallels of the national and personal with respect to the uncertainty of the future and wanting to dwell safely in the past. The slow collapse of the narrator during the final chapters.

Despite that, I also struggle with "was this a good story" or "did I enjoy reading this". Probably not, if I'm being honest. I was gripped the most by the personal narrative and the narrator's relationship with his imagined collaborator/self Gaustine, but the story took so many tangents that I'm not sure that any of its threads came together for me satisfyingly.

(Truly also, I have been struggling with reading this month, and a book that challenged me so much as a reader is likely not the best fit for my current capacity. I feel like there is probably more here that I was unable to connect or fully grasp.)

Finally, my first Akwaeke Emezi book. Not the one I'm most interested in, but one that sounded not too stressful. And it really wasn't – I was surprised by how fluffy, calm and cute this story is. It's about love and feeling safe with someone and deciding for that, even if it's the less expected choice, and one that some people disapprove of. The sonewhat stressful part of the story is this friend who has a crush on the main character and is not just upset when she gets together with his dad, but actually turns into a total asshole, violent and misogynist. There's a lot of difficult feelings and grief, but there's also a deep comedy to the whole thing: as a reader I know that these two people are so obviously good for each other, they're both very solidly adults, the side characters don't seem to mind so much, only the guy's kids are super freaked out about how horribly inappropriate this is and how everyone will talk.

It's a very bi story for what it is, but what I liked even more is that next to a story about big unexpected love, it's also a story about relationships that didn't happen, or didn't last long. Also, I'm not a fan of detailed descriptions of penis-in-vagina sex, but it was ok, the rest is good enough that it doesn't matter.

There's an excellent book in here. An engaging story about individual and collective self-delusion and amnesia, with some very clear political messages and a grim humour to it. But at times, especially in the second quarter or so of the book, the author seems unclear whether he's writing a novel or a NY Review Of Books essay about individual dementia, collective amnesia, and the selective remembering of nostalgia. It's clear that he could write a fine essay and I'd enjoy reading that too, but the hybrid is clunky. From the POV of a novel reader the essay portions make the plot drag slowly enough that I started to lose interest. From the POV of a creative nonfiction reader, the actually fiction parts are jarring and confusing.

#SFFBookClub