The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.

At Crime Reads, Scott Blackburn includes Joe R. Lansdale’s COLD IN JULY among 7 Great Crime Novels with First Person Narrators.

What sets this novel’s narrator, Richard Dane, apart on this list is the fact that, as a standalone character, he’s pretty unremarkable. Richard is just a simple family man that gets thrown into a terrible situation. And he’s really damn nice. So nice, in fact, that after he shoots and kills an intruder in his home, he feels awful about it and decides to show up to the guy’s funeral to pay his respects. This decision kicks up a shitstorm when the victim’s supposed father shows up at the funeral as well, hellbent on revenge. From there, the plot takes some serious twists and turns, and introduces a cast of colorful characters including Jim Bob Luke, a martial-arts-loving, Cadillac-driving, private investigator. But it’s Richard Dane’s steady, level-headed narration amidst this violent joyride of a novel that makes it really ring true. 

7 Great Crime Novels with First Person Narrators

Albin Michel Imaginary revealed the cover to the French edition of UNITY by Elly Bangs.

Zionist and post-Zionist visions, a conversation on May 30 2022 between Arie M. Dubnov and Dr Isabelle Hesse, focused on the implications for the transmission of ideas and how these complex processes can impinge upon the creation of identities in numerous ways, not least in terms of Jewish and Palestinian identities. One of the centerpieces of this discussion was Dr. Hesse’s paper on works by Jewish writers who imagine what would have happened if a Jewish state had not been established in Palestine but in a different geopolitical location. Nava Semel’s IsraIsle (2006), Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), and Lavie Tidhar’s UNHOLY LAND (2018) can be seen as examples of what Crystal Bartolovich has termed “critical counterfactualism,” which is a “recapturing [of] the memory of [a] transformative desire—and countering the forces that continue to refuse it” (2006: 66).

On a lighter note, Tidhar’s new short story “Dr. Wasp and Hornet Holmes” appears in Nightmare (issue 117, June 2022).

Dr. Wasp and Hornet Holmes were gathering nectar one day when Holmes made a startling observation.

“The Queen has been behaving rather oddly in recent days,” she said.

Dr. Wasp pulled her proboscis from the flower and regarded Holmes with surprise.

“However do you mean?” she said.

“Do you ever feel that not all is as it seems?” Holmes said. “That what we see is illusory, that dark forces move unseen behind the bright façade of the world?”

Lightspeed (June 2022, Issue 145) delivers the new Susan Palwick story “Picnic, with Monster“.

Journal Prompt: What does freedom mean to you? How do you know when you’re free?

Freedom means walking through the park on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, instead of being locked up in the hospital or a group home. Caleb was released from the hospital this morning, not because he’s well—he knows he’ll never be what the doctors call well—but because they had nothing left to offer him. He dutifully took their pills when he was locked up, because otherwise, they just get a court order to force you. No freedom in hospitals. But he’s not going to take the meds here, on the outside. Meds make him so slow and heavy he doesn’t recognize himself. Freedom means not having to take meds.

The Spring 2022 issue of Weird Horror features “A Red Promise in the Palm of Your Hand” by Josh Rountree, whose first novel THE LEGEND OF CHARLIE FISH is coming out next summer from Tachyon.

I clasp my hands in prayer as Mr. Amos sews wings onto my dead brother’s shoulders. Mr. Amos approaches his task with care. He works the catgut thread in and out of Robert’s skin, pulling every stitch taut. He is carrying out God’s plan, though I’m not sure what god he means anymore. We abandoned our Christian god sometime back, just as the Christian god abandoned us.

So claims Mr. Amos, in any event.

This is wrong, Bess.

Mother’s voice again. She is two years dead, but her spirit remains. This clapboard house is her living corpse. The wind presses against the walls and gives her breath. She speaks through groaning timbers and the door clattering in its broken frame.