Somehow, the halfway point in this year is in sight. This preview of science fiction, fantasy, horror and speculative fiction released by indie presses takes us all the way to the end of June—and yes, that’s left me thinking that I may be unstuck in time, myself. Here’s a look at some of the notable books due out on small presses in the next two months.
File Under: Technology Will Save and/or Doom Us All
Let’s say you’re an academic offered a high-paid residency an ocean away from where you live. You take it and quickly learn that the people operating it have brought together a selection of doppelgangers. That’s the concept at the heart of Ángel Bonomini’s The Novices of Lerna, available now in Jordan Landsman’s translation. Things get stranger from there—and a selection of Bonomini’s heady, existential short fiction rounds out this collection. (May 1, 2024; Transit Books)
Dino Buzzati’s 1960 science fiction novel The Singularity—translated by Anne Milano Appel—tells the story of a scientist summoned to a mysterious research outpost. In his review of a collection of Buzzati’s short fiction, Lincoln Michel observed that “Buzzati’s work is Kafkaesque in the truest sense.” This is another memorable entry in a stunning bibliography. (June 4, 2024; NYRB Classics)
Inventions are at the heart of many a science fiction story, whether that takes the form of a time machine or brain implant that enhances its user’s mind. In a new edition of Gaston de Pawlowski’s New Inventions and the Latest Innovations, translated by Amanda DeMarco, contemporary readers can experience de Pawlowski’s satirical take on advanced inventions a century after it was first published. (June 2024; Wakefield Press)
Premee Mohamed’s 2021 The Annual Migration of Clouds memorably chronicled what it might be like to live in a future where apocalyptic events left technology even more unevenly distributed than it is now—with different communities adapting in very different ways. Mohamed’s new book We Speak Through the Mountain returns to that setting, following protagonist Reid as she leaves home and discovers something unexpected at her destination.(June 2024, ECW Press)
File Under: All Things Re: Bodies and Desire
In the fiction of K-Ming Chang, bodies can turn unruly and the stable ground on which one walks can suddenly turn into quicksand. Chang’s new novella Cecilia heads into surrealistic territory, and follows two former classmates who reunite in adulthood. Things get weird from there, as they tend to do; you can also read an excerpt from it at The Adroit Journal. (May 21, 2024; Coffee House Press)
Few writers can summon the visceral power that Joe Koch does in their work. Koch’s new collection Invaginies promises to bring more of that quality to the forefront, blending apocalyptic imagery with haunting analysis of social dynamics. “I’m aiming for the reader to have an experience, not to just sit back and get comfy with a book,” Koch said in a 2022 interview—which may give you a sense of what to expect here. (June 25, 2024; CLASH Books)
You may not be familiar with the work of the long-lived Decadent writer Rachilde, though her work is considered to have influenced everyone from Marcel Schwob to Oscar Wilde. Shawn Garrett’s new translation of Rachilde’s The Demon of the Absurd brings these visions of absurdist situations and supernatural beings to Anglophone readers for the first time. (May 7, 2024; Snuggly Books)
If you’ve ever wanted to get in on a publishing imprint from the ground floor, it’s worth noting that E.K. Sathue’s novel Youthjuice is the first book to be published by Hell’s Hundred, Soho Press’s new horror imprint. At the heart of this novel is a cosmetics company with a moisturizer that can work miracles—and which has an unsettling secret at its heart. (June 6, 2024; Hell’s Hundred)
A wish gone awry puts the protagonist of C.J. Spataro’s novel More Strange Than True at odds with the queen of the faeries—and if that summary has you thinking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you’re in the right place. (Spataro chronicled some of her influences in a recent interview.) Set in Philadelphia and encompassing questions of desire and mortality, this debut blends the familiar and the unexpected. (June 24, 2024; Sagging Meniscus Press)
File Under: Histories Familiar and Otherwise
Set in Atlanta in the early years of the 20th century, Maggie Nye’s novel The Curators is set in the aftermath of a very real event: namely, the murder of Leo Frank. The teenage girls at the center of Nye’s book are haunted by these traumatic events, and come up with a very supernatural response—all of which is to say, a golem is involved. (June 2024; Curbstone Books)
Late last year, I got to hear David Leo Rice read from his novel The Berlin Wall—and what I heard left me dazed, in the best possible way. It imagines a world in which fragments of the Berlin Wall come to life, where subterranean residences thrive, and where the contours of history have turned malleable. It’s a welcome addition to a fascinating bibliography. (May 14, 2024; Whisk(e)y Tit)
As an editor, David Sandner explored the legacy of Mary Shelley in the recent anthology The Afterlife of Frankenstein. With his new novel His Unburned Heart, he revisits Shelley’s life in a different way, focusing on her search to recover the missing heart of her late husband, Percy Shelley. You’ve never seen literary history quite like this before. (May 9, 2024; Raw Dog Screaming Press)
Literary historian, book collector and acclaimed author, Mark Valentine has plenty of disparate credits to his name. His new collection Lost Estates offers readers a host of short stories in which Valentine’s interests converge—think one part heady reading, one part spine-chilling yarn. (May 2024; Swan River Press)
File Under: Reinventing Time and Structure
There’s a long science fictional tradition of time being malleable—whether that’s in the form of a place one can travel to or via the blessing/curse of precognition. Alexander Boldizar’s new novel The Man Who Saw Seconds falls into the latter category, given that its protagonist can see a few seconds into the future. If you think that sounds like an ability that could go to some unsettling places, you likely have a sense of where this book is headed. (May 21, 2024; CLASH Books)
I don’t usually quote from the publisher’s description here, but this passage revealing some of the contents of Steve Gergley’s The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories was too enticing not to share. Specifically, there’s a story about a couple whose paths cross with “naked cult members, a transatlantic highway, the ghost of Robert Oppenheimer, and microscopic people in their teeth”—and that certainly got my attention. (June 2024; Malarkey Books)
Formally inventive and wholly absorbing, John Madera’s stories of alienation and troubled psyches aren’t always easy to summarize. Readers who enjoy a blend of the surreal and the cerebral will likely find plenty to embrace in his collection Nervosities, which comes endorsed by the likes of Brian Evenson and Rikki Ducornet. (May 2024; Anti-Oedipus Press)
Next year, Tordotcom Publishing is set to release a new book by Eden Royce titled Psychopomp and Circumstance. Readers looking to explore Royce’s own take on Southern Gothic can also take in a new book from her this year, the novella Hollow Tongue, about a woman who returns to her childhood home and finds herself changed by the experience—literally. (June 21, 2024; Raw Dog Screaming Press)
File Under: Strange Investigations
The protagonist of Michael D. Dennis’ new novel Lonely Riders has something in common with other well-intentioned fictional characters: he gets involved with a cult. Where things get a little stranger in this case is that the cult in Dennis’s novel has an interest in alternate dimensions. (May 1, 2024; Ocean Street Press)
Upon its release more than a decade ago, Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey garnered plenty of critical acclaim, with Niall Alexander calling it “an exceptional satire of the way the world works today set against a vision of tomorrow so anomalous as to excite” in these very pages. Now, its long-awaited sequel Red Side Story is set for release, following several characters in the dystopian society of Chromatacia as they contend with arranged marriages, murder trials, and furtive relationships. (May 7, 2024; Soho Press)
Boris Vian may not be a household name to most American readers, but you may have encountered his work—Michel Gondry’s 2013 film Mood Indigo was an adaptation of one of Vian’s novels. May brings with it Terry Bradford’s translation of his novel Trouble in the Swaths, written when the Nazis occupied Paris and featuring Vian’s satires of both fascism and pulp adventuring. It’s a surreal espionage novel like none you’ve seen before. (May 2024, Wakefield Press)
File Under: Communities Gone Askew
At the center of Sydney Hegele’s novel Bird Suit is a seemingly-idyllic tourist town, with plenty of scenic options for residents and visitors alike. Also? Bird women. The protagonist of Bird Suit finds herself with a host of challenges, of which a secret community of flying people is just one—and it makes for a memorable juxtaposition of the folkloric and the quotidian. (May 7, 2024; Invisible Publishing)
Wellness gone awry seems to be a theme in the spring of 2024—see also, the entry for Youthjuice above. J. Nicole Jones’ The Witches of Bellinas follows the story of a couple who seek out a health- and wellness-inspired community. As the title might suggest, things take an unsettling turn for the Gothic not long afterwards. (May 14, 2024; Catapult)
Cherie Priest’s wide-ranging fiction often reckons with questions of trauma both personal and historical. Her new book Cinderwich follows two women who return to a small town that’s fallen on hard times in the aftermath of a mysterious murder—and learn that there’s something deeply uncanny at the heart of things there. (June 11, 2024; Apex Book Company)
The 20 stories featured in Elizabeth Stix’s new collection Things I Want Back From You share a setting: the town of San Encanto. California, where the mundane and the fantastical both exist in equal measure. All of which includes, among other things, a guy turning into a dirigible. As points of intrigue go, that one ranks pretty high on the list. (June 2024; Black Lawrence Press)
