October 2025 Round-up and Short Fiction Miscellany

Somebody on the Internet told me that October was Black Speculative Fiction Month. I figured that was cause for a little bit of TBR shuffling, and I found some true gems mixed in with my usual new release reading schedule. As always, let’s start with short fiction before moving on to the longer works.

Short Fiction

The vast majority of my short fiction reading this month has already been reviewed in my Clarkesworld/GigaNotoSaurus review or my super-sized Magazine Minis. I recommend checking out both, but if I were to highlight any stories in particular, they’d be the short stories “Catch a Tiger in the Snow” by Ray Nayler and “Wilayat in Seven Saints” by Tanvir Ahmed and the novelette “Woman Like Stone Like Water” by Malda Marlys. But for now, we’ll move on to the miscellany.

October Favorites

Now You See Me (2021 novelette) by Justin C. Key. This one pairs Twilight Zone vibes with unflinching commentary on the strange combination of invisibility and hypervisibility of Black people in American culture. The speculative conceit allows it to consider the themes directly without feeling preachy, and the quality of storytelling immerses the reader completely, making it impossible to look away.

Strong Contenders

The Venus Effect (2016 novelette) by Violet Allen. This one is similarly pointed in its commentary, with a clever metafictional element focusing on the senseless tragedy of police brutality. But while the metafictional element is clever, it also inhibits the stories within the frame from being particularly striking on their own. There’s a lot to appreciate here, but the experience didn’t reach the level of the Key novelette.
Zimmer Land (2018 short story) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It’s easy to immerse in the lead’s distress as he tries to make a positive difference working at a park that allows patrons to pantomime justice–but with financial incentives increasingly pushing those performances toward vigilante injustice. This one may suffer a bit in the way it reminds me of a couple stunners with similar themes (Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” first and foremost, but also Russell Nichols’ “To Live and Die in Dixieland” and Key’s “Now You See Me”), but it remains a very strong story.
The Last Sin-Eater of Harfolk County (2025 novelette) by Grace F. Hopkins. Thematically quite different from the previous three, this one features monsters in an increasingly desolate hill country. The main character’s story arc isn’t especially hard to predict, but the telling makes it a compelling journey nonetheless.

Others I Enjoyed in October

The Magnolia Returns (2025 short story) by Eden Royce. A few vignettes stitched together about a butcher shop that gives you what you need when you need it, with a particular focus on ingredients that are either so scorned that supermarkets won’t stock them or so trendy that the poor can’t afford them.
Jump (short story) by Caldwell Turnbull. A short piece of magical realism about a relationship falling apart due to one party’s obsession with recapturing the magical moment in which they’d teleported together.

Novels and Novellas

Reviews Posted

The Underground Railroad (2016 novel) by Colson Whitehead. This has the plot of an escape from slavery, but it’s much less interested in a tight, personal account of the lead’s harrowing journey and more interested in exploring a series of alternate histories, zeroing in particularly on the way oppression is recreated in each.
Knife Children (2019 novel) by Lois McMaster Bujold. A short novel in which the pair of main characters are forced to take on more responsibility and mostly work out their problems with their words. There’s an instance of questionable consent in the backstory, but the main story is largely what you’d expect from an entry in The Sharing Knife series.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025 novel) by Stephen Graham Jones. A horror novel digging deep into the true-to-life horrors of American westward expansion, along with a more fantastical and extremely gory revenge narrative.
Katabasis (2025 novel) by R.F. Kuang. A cross between a dark academia and an adventure fantasy, with some truly excellent passages but two halves that tend to undercut each other more than they support each other.
Howl’s Moving Castle (1986 novel) by Diana Wynne Jones. A delightfully whimsical novel for younger audiences that suffers from an overly complicated plot but is plenty of fun regardless.
Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon (2025 novel) by Mizuki Tsujimura. The author of the tremendous Lonely Castle in the Mirror returns with another fantasy novel digging into mental health struggles, this one stitching together four different first-person narratives with a capstone third-person chapter bringing a degree of closure to what came before.
If Wishes Were Retail (2025 novel) by Auston Habershaw. A lighthearted fantasy about a jinn opening a suburban mall kiosk and failing to understand local customs, with generally hilarious results and a surprising amount of thematic depth underneath.
The Nine (2017 novel) by Tracy Townsend. A lot of the trends of 2010s fantasy–a seedy setting, a thieving lead, myriad factions working at cross-purposes–put together in an excellent and underrated package.

DNFs

Beloved (1987 novel) by Toni Morrison. A ghost story about an unspeakably traumatized family of former slaves, its slippery prose style frequently changes timelines or even perspectives mid-paragraph. That may well be true to the perspective of PTSD sufferers, but at the same time, it provides a barrier to emotional engagement of the reader. DNF at 41%.

Tar Vol on

Science Fiction and Fantasy