The 40 But 10: Molly Gaudry

 

I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today we are joined by Molly Gaudry. Molly is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. Desire: A Haunting, its sequel, and Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, are further explorations of the same storyworld and characters. An assistant professor at Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the BFA and MFA programs. Summers, she teaches fiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.

Describe your book in three words.

 

And so on.[1]

 

 

Describe your book poorly.

 

My first two books were verse novels, my new one is a memoir-in-essays with a novel-in-progress inside it, and hundreds of literary quotations collaged throughout.[2]

 

 

Would you and your main character get along?

 

Yes, because I used to think I sewed us together at the edges with my own hands, pulled the stitches tight and I could unpick them any time I wanted. Now I think it always ran deeper than that and farther, underground; out of sight and way beyond my control.[3]

 

 

What would you do if you could live forever?

 

Read, most likely, because, well, this is what I am already imagining for an immortal character in my current work-in-progress: By now, Beauty has spent nearly two centuries, total hours tallied, curled on a velvet divan beneath a tall stained-glass window, reading her way through the endless shelves of books in the castle’s great library. This library, it should be noted, is home to every book that has ever been written and every book that has yet to be written, so when the Queen declares their story should be recorded for posterity, Beauty, who has already read it—has read dozens of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 425C stories and novels, not to mention hundreds of ATU type 402 and 425A animal bride and bridegroom variants—sends at once for me, the author. Well, not exactly the author, because there are too many to count, really, but suffice to say that I am the author of Beauty’s favorite version, which, as you will see in the pages that follow, is a retelling of my favorite version: Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s The Story of Beauty and the Beast, first published in 1740.[4]

 

 

Do you DNF books?

Absolutely, because grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.[5]

 

 

What’s the one book someone else wrote that you wish you had written?

 

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, because I’ve never stayed still, I’ve always been moving, that’s all I’ve ever been doing. Always waiting either to get somewhere or to come back. Or to escape.[6]

What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?

 

This one, from Raven Leilani’s Luster: Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany and Eric is talkative and filthy but there is some derangement about his face, this pink contortion that introduces the whites of his eyes in a way that makes me afraid he might say something we cannot recover from just yet, so I cover his mouth and say shut up, shut the fuck up, which is more aggressive than I would normally be at this point but it gets the job done and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch though I feel panicked all of a sudden to have not used a condom and I’m looking around the room and there is a bathroom attached, and in the bathroom are what look to be extra towels and that makes me so emotional that he pauses and in one instant a concerned host rises out of his violent sexual mania, slowing the proceedings into the dangerous territory of eye contact and lips and tongue where mistakes get made and you forget that everything eventually dies, so it is not my fault that during this juncture I call him daddy and it is definitely not my fault that this gets him off so swiftly that he says he loves me and we are collapsing back in satiation and horror, not speaking until he gets me a car home and says take care of yourself like, please go, and as the car is pulling away he is standing there on the porch in a floral silk robe that is clearly his wife’s, looking like he has not so much had an orgasm as experienced an arduous exorcism, and a cat is sitting at his feet, utterly bemused by the white clapboard and verdant lawn, which makes me hate this cat as the city rises around me in a bouquet of dust, industrial soot, and overripe squash, insisting upon its own enormity like some big-dick postmodernist fiction and still beautiful despite its knowledge of itself, even as the last merciless days of July leave large swaths of the city wilted and blank.[7]

 

 

If you were stuck on a deserted island, what’s the one book you wish you had with you?

 

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, because they went into José Arcadio Buendía’s room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted into his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.[8]

 

What are you currently reading?

 

Mariana Leky’s What You Can See from Here, because while I was considering what to do next, I noticed I was holding a butter knife as I stood in front of the bookshelf that had not been unpacked for eight years. I cut open the packaging. The assembly instructions included twenty-six steps, but I still gave it a try. And while I was assembling the bookshelf, I thought of Frederik’s letter in which he’d asked what real life was in my opinion. I thought of Martin and the fogged-up window he had leaned against with his eyes closed in intense concentration, also of the strand of hair on his head that never stayed combed down. I thought of Elspeth’s hydrangea-like swim cap, of Mr. Rödder’s breath that smelled of violets, of Selma’s old skin that looked like bark. I thought of the table in Alberto’s ice-cream parlor at which I’d been rewarded with a small Secret Love the first time I read the sugar packet horoscope aloud by myself. I thought of Alaska and how he lifted his head when we left a room, how he weighed whether it was worth getting up and coming with us, and how he usually decided it was. I thought of the optician, who, all his life, was always ready to help others. I thought of Palm, of Palm’s wild eyes when I was young, and of Palm now, how he nodded and said nothing, nodded and said nothing. I thought of the station clock, under which the optician taught us to tell time and about time zones. I thought about all the time in the world, all the time zones I’d had anything to do with, and of the two watches on my father’s wrist. That’s real life, I thought, the whole expanse of life, and after the seventh point in the instruction manual, I crumpled it up and kept assembling without it.[9]

 

 

If you could time travel, would you go back to the past or forward into the future?

 

Neither. I would get stuck in a time loop and happily stay in it until I finished my next book, which is a scenario I have already considered and written in The Time Loop: A Speculative Memoir: A Novel, which is currently on submission.

 

 

 

NOTES

---

[1] Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (New York: The Dial Press, [1969] 2009), 1.

 [2] Molly Gaudry, interview by Robert Lopez, “Beyond the Trilogy: Robert Lopez and Molly Gaudry on Writing Interconnected Books that Defy Expectations of Traditional Series,” Vol. 1 Brooklyn, November 14, 2025.

 [3] Tana French, The Likeness (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 3.

 [4] From the chapter, “Concerning the Story of Beauty & the Beast, and the Queen, and Me,” which opens my current work-in-progress, Finding Beauty: On Love, Death, and Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s ‘The Story of Beauty & the Beast.’

 [5] John Irving, interview by Ron Hansen, “John Irving, The Art of Fiction No. 93,” The Paris Review 100 (Summer–Fall 1986).

[6] Jhumpa Lahiri, “Nowhere,” Whereabouts, trans. Jhumpa Lahiri (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), 153.

[7] Raven Leilani, Luster (New York: Picador, 2020), 40–41.

[8] Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1998), 153.

[9] Mariana Leky, “Meadow, Meadow,” What You Can See from Here, trans. Tess Lewis (New York: Picador, 2022), 263–64.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 December 9, 2025

Rose Metal Press   |     Author Website

In her most innovative book yet, Molly Gaudry embarks on a search for belonging amid loss, framing her memoir around a fictional narrative featuring the tea house woman—a character who appeared first as bride-to-be and then as widow in her earlier books. As Gaudry grapples with traumatic brain injury, family secrets, repressed memories, and the job market in her essays, the tea house woman goes on a parallel quest of identity and desire. Gaudry also delves into literature as guide and comfort, using the words of authors as wide-ranging as Sappho, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marguerite Duras, and Jose Saramago to form yet another text within a text. Artfully braided into a hybrid-genre tour de force, the many strands of Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir ask: to what extent can a fiction reveal more about an author than nonfiction?

 

As the tea house woman manages a mercurial lover, a family business, and caring for her dying father during the winter holidays, Gaudry, too, reflects on some of her own challenges: relearning, post-skating injury, to read and write while in the midst of earning a PhD; questioning her loneliness, desires, and ability to connect; wondering what it would be like if her biological brother flew in from Korea to inform her that their father has died; and navigating her identity as a transnational adoptee. Each essay in Fit Into Me, the memoir, is a testament to resilience, and as those true stories merge with Fit Into Me, the novel, they reveal how literature can become a lifeline that guides us back to ourselves.

Blog Tour: Dark Matter

 

We're happy to help Meerkat Press support the release of their latest title, Kathe Koja's Dark Matter, the final book in the Dark Factory Trilogy, by participating in their blog tour. 

We're thrilled to have Kathe Koja hanging with us today, giving us a sneak peak into Page 69 of Dark Matter. 

Kathe Koja’s books include The Cipher, Skin, straydog, Buddha Boy, Velocities: Stories, Under the Poppy, and the Dark Factory trilogy, Dark Factory, Dark Park, and Dark Matter. Her work has won awards, including the Stoker, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the ASPCA’s Henry Bergh Award. She also creates and produces live and online experiences that bring the story directly to you. Find her at kathekoja.com and on IG, FB and Bluesky.

Check it out: 

Set up page 69 for us.

 The driving engine of Dark Matter is the compelling and combustible Bunny Graves, who laces up her spike-heeled boots and goes after whatever she wants, while keeping her own background secret. On page 69 she’s busy musing over her last lunch with Felix Perez—a gifted DJ who literally brought the house down at a rave—because Felix is married to the man Bunny wants to annex, event producer par excellence Ari Regon, whom Bunny recognizes as a force of nature just as she is. By asking questions and listening, listening, listening, Bunny’s learning more about Felix, so she can use that knowledge to pry Ari away, and involve him in her own explosive plans.

 

What is the book about?

 Dark Matter is about connection, how we find, or don’t find, the people we really need, how we struggle to connect through chaos, jealousy, loss, whatever life throws at us, no matter how dark it all gets. Bunny and Felix both prize connection with Ari, Ari seeks connection with the world itself. And Ari’s friend Max, the gaming guru, finally admits he truly needs that connection, when he meets the quiet genius Charmskool.

 Dark Matter is the third book in the Dark Factory series, and each book blends and interacts with the others, and with the Dark Factory site as well. The story takes place in all those places, in the art, the videos, everything shared by its readers, everything’s there for the reader to interact with—and an ongoing invitation to add to that story, too.

 

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what the novel is about? Does it align itself with the novel’s theme?

Oh it does—everything that happens on this page links, like life does, to everything else these characters do, what they want, how they navigate their relationships, the mistakes they’re about to make . . . Makes me wonder what our own page 69 would say, if our lives were novels (and maybe they are!)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PAGE 69

Page 69 – DARK MATTER

 

She had asked Felix, finally, about the Jericho set, as they sat in late afternoon shadow on some restaurant’s walled-in patio, over the dregs of a salad niçoise and shaobing bread and a bottle of overpriced Riesling. At first he was quiet, then What was it like? he said. The whole place was moving, I was making it move, the people, walls, all of it. I wasn’t even wearing the mask that time, the Mister Minos face, does Felix still have that, is it lost somewhere or trashed? And they never wanted me to stop, Alaine didn’t want me to stop—

Then why did you?

I had to.

Why did you have to?

I couldn’t handle it then, picking up the bottle, refilling their glasses. Let’s finish this off.

But that opened him, finally, to talk about his music, how he studies the power of polyphony, acoustic ecology and musique concrète, the subtle body and the autonomic nervous system and the way sound releases dopamine and serotonin, how certain frequencies can change perception, change behavior, simulate the effects of nitrous oxide and regulate vascular function, and There’s this surgeon, he said, Dr. Ibrahim Abra, he uses music in the ER instead of anesthesia.

And his twin sister is a tournament backgammon player. Razia Abra.

Seriously? you know her? Did you ever play her?

No. I never played tournaments, only money games.

What’s a money game?

I’ll show you sometime.

Only now there is no more time, Ari is in a hurry, so “Expedite,” she says, and the car accelerates, past rowhouses and bodegas, people queueing, walking, hurrying, even stressed and diminished this is still a real city, Ari and Felix have never lived in a place like the place they will live in now. But she knows exactly what it will be like there, a shitty town with a shitty language no one speaks, bad roads and iffy grid access, at least two overpriced state liquor shops and a very old church with a Virgin on top, like the towns around the shrine—

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

December 2, 2025

Speculative Fiction | LGBTQ

Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org   | Amazon

When the world ends, chaos begins–

–for feral Bunny Graves, playing life like a high-stakes game, where the only way to win is to smash the board to bits–

–for Max Caspar and Charmskool the scholar, chasing ancient myth all the way to the real world–

–and for Ari Regon, caught between dangerous jealousy and passionate love, corporate war and ambition so intense that failure is death, making the party to end all parties, a party that never ends.

Dark times.

Dark dreams.

DARK MATTER

The third and final book in the DARK FACTORY series.

What I Read In November

 A decent month of reading, clocking in with 12 books (well, two of them were a DNF but I made it a good chunk of the way through so I'm counting them LOL). 

With only one month left before we kick it into a new year... here's the good, the bad, and the beautiful books of November, which were almost all review copies, and looking for more starry goodness in December: 

The Barre Incidents by Lauren Bolger

I really wanted to love The Barre Incidents. The premise had promise, and I held out hope for as long as I could but eventually, I had to step away. The story felt too disjointed to keep me engaged, and I found myself more frustrated than intrigued.

Bolger’s commitment to layering in weirdness was bold, but it never really found its footing and felt like the plot kept slipping through its own fingers. The structure never quite settled, and the dialogue and character development felt surface-level and read more like a YA novel than the creepy, slow-burn horror I was hoping for.

I know this book will resonate with readers who enjoy surreal, genre-blurring fiction. It just wasn’t the right fit for me. Sometimes you have to know when to bow out, and for me, this was that moment. And it’s not that the ingredients weren’t intriguing. The town of Barre is allegedly a cryptid magnet, with appearances from Mothman, strange dog people, an ancient tree god, and even a skin-stealing doppleganger of sorts who seems to show up right before all hell breaks loose. But instead of building dread or deepening the mystery, the book kept tossing weirdness at the wall to see what stuck. And for me, not much did.

I wanted eerie. I got erratic. Dropped it like it was hot at page 202, with a sigh and a side-eye.

Exiles by Mason Coile

Psychological space horror done right.

I flew through Exiles in a matter of hours. It’s brilliantly engaging from the first page, with a creeping sense of dread that never lets up.

A three-person crew—Gold, Kang, and Blake—is en route to Mars on a no-return mission. Awaiting them at The Citadel, a biosphere built in anticipation of their arrival, are three robots. But when the crew wakes from deep sleep, they’ve lost communication with the base. When they relay this to their Mission Leader back on Earth, she tells them to proceed anyway.

After a tense, chaotic landing, they scramble to find the Citadel and discover it’s in shambles. There’s a gaping hole where the lab used to be, the entry code to the main quarters won’t work, and their oxygen is running out fast. Just as Gold is about to pass out, one of the bots opens the door and pulls her inside, informing her that the other has been put into sleep mode and hidden away —allegedly for protection from whatever wrecked the base.

Once the crew is safe, they begin questioning the two remaining bots. Shay claims the damage was caused by an alien entity awakened during construction. Wes, on the other hand, suggests it was Alex—the third bot—who went rogue and vanished. Blake and Kang are skeptical, but Gold starts to believe… right as the base is attacked again. And that’s when things really kick off.

Who doesn’t love a little human vs. robot vs. “what in the actual hell is that” set on a hostile planet, where the body count rises and trust erodes with every breath? Exiles delivers claustrophobic tension, psychological unraveling, and just enough sci-fi weirdness to keep you guessing.

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

DNF’d with 39 minutes left. I was lost the entire time and, honestly, I just didn’t care. Audio was not the right format for this one—too many characters, not enough clarity, and my attention kept slipping.

Which is a shame, because the premise is solid. A man’s dying mother sends him on a mission to find the father he never knew. He arrives in what turns out to be a literal ghost town, and spends the rest of the story hanging out with spirits and learning what a garbage human his dad was. I think that’s what happened? I’m still not entirely sure.

Great concept, but the execution didn’t land for me. Even the ghosts seemed bored.

Maybe in print it would’ve been easier to follow, but as it stands, I tapped out with a sigh and zero regrets. Ok, maybe there is a teeny tiny regret. But not enough to hit play on that sucker again...

The Tower of Love by Rachilde

Got this one from the Indie Pub Salon when I ordered a blind box of weird small press fiction from them. And wow—this one delivered. Weird in all the right ways.

The story follows a young sailor assigned to a remote lighthouse as the assistant keeper. His predecessor suffered an "accident" no one wants to explain, and the primary keeper he now lives with is a cranky, eccentric old man with some... unsettling preferences.

It’s a quiet, creeping tale that expertly blurs the line between confidence and confusion, chosen solitude and festering intolerance, boredom and full-blown madness. The descent is subtle, unnerving, and strangely mesmerizing.

It’s not the waves or the wind that get to you—it’s the weirdness between them...

The Emergency by George Packer

Everything was fine—until it wasn’t.

What the book calls The Emergency seems to erupt out of nowhere. Three distinct classes of people, once coexisting and supporting one another—the Burghers with their hospitals and elite schooling, the Yeomen with their farms and working-class ethic, and the Strangers, roving outsiders on society’s margins—suddenly find themselves cut off, suspicious of each other’s intentions, and fueling the fires of fear about what each group might be plotting.

In the midst of this upheaval, young adults seize the disruption to dismantle the existing government and implement a new system they call Togetherness. At first, it sounds like an ideal utopia: a mindful, humanitarian society where no one person rules and everyone has a voice in shaping the rules. But the experiment quickly unravels, breeding further division between city folk and country folk, until everything collapses into one tumbling ball of chaos.

While I appreciated the ideas in theory, the execution often felt like a slog. The book could have been more thought-provoking and engaging at half the length, trimming away much of the extraneous detail.

More than once, I was tempted to DNF—it was hard to connect, and I struggled to care about the characters. Still, I’m glad I stuck with it, because the story does improve as it goes along.

This novel will resonate with fans of The Handmaid’s Tale, Earth Abides, 1984, and Lark Ascending—stories where you either fall in line with the new regime or fall at its hands.

Dear Stupid Penpal by Rascal Hartley

I wasn’t prepared for how much I’d like Dear Stupid Penpal. I just want to grab it by its chubby little cheeks and pinch its adorable little face!

It oozes existential cosmic horror vibes—and why shouldn’t it? Set aboard a spaceship drifting into deep space, a handful of astronauts are tethered to Earth only by their government-assigned penpals. Finch, one of the crew, has a lot of time to brood, reflect, and spiral. The void is vast. The silence is louder.

But his penpal Aku? Pretty cool dude. Worldly, poetic, chill, and maybe... a little flirty? Told entirely through texts and letters, we get to eavesdrop as these two stumble through awkward introductions, muse on the banality of being earthbound versus floating helplessly among the stars, and somehow land in a meet-cute bromance that defies the ever-growing dilation of time between them.

I adored the little easter eggs Aku kept tossing Finch’s way—each one missed with steadfast obliviousness. To be fair, my own head was initially pointed in a different direction than Hartley’s. But once I caught up? I was chuffed. Cosmic horror, sci-fi, speculative fiction—they’re all holding hands in the same eerie sandbox. Add a dash of romance and you’ve got quite the little book on your hands.

If you too feel the inevitable weight of the universe and the crushing insignificance of humanity pressing down from the inside out, you are going to el-oh-vee-ee Dear Stupid Penpal.

Strange and Perfect Account From the Permafrost by Donald Niedekker

This is one weird-ass mofo of a book.

Our narrator was a crew member aboard a ship attempting to find the Northeast Passage. Buuutt, he didn’t survive the journey and was promptly buried in the frozen ground.

His consciousness has been trapped under the ice for 'four centuries and a few decades'. Now the ice is melting, his corpse is thawing, and he’s feeling chatty. He spends all 196 pages musing on... well, basically everything. Memories of his father and grandmother. His time on the boat. The parade of animals that have visited the shipwreck—which, of course, never made it to the Passage because the ocean froze around it.

It’s like The Terror told by the ghost of one of the first guys to die—only this time with a cuddly polar bear who hibernates year after year beside our narrator’s body.

Did I like it? Sure.
Was it a little too weird and rambly? Yeah, a bit.
Did I skim some parts wondering where the heck he was going and how it all connected? Absolutely.

If you are still curious about it, here are some pretty passages I pulled out while reading:

"go, go my friend"

"we saw fountains. We saw gleefully spouting fountains above the sea. In the fountains we saw mist."

"Zero is a dream in the polar night. Zero is a faraway summer. Zero is a fever dream. Zero does not exist in the polar night."

"My voice comes from the polar night, from a hibernation lasting four centuries, from the void of four hundred years of ice, ice, and more ice. There is no one to share the bottomless void with."

"we entered into the deliberate darkness of the polar night, that derisive shadow waiting for you like the open maw of a predator. It only has to open its mouth and wait until bedraggled bunglers like us walk into its blackness. Munch, swallow, and gone."

Child of These Tears by Molly McNett

Like early eighteenth century stories set in the time of Queen Anne's war?

Child of These Tears is a polyphonic tale of a family shattered by violence, each voice tracing its own path through loss, captivity, and the search for belonging.

Set in the 1700s, the English and French—alongside their Native American allies—collide viciously in a small hamlet, leaving the Baker family at the center of the devastation. When the chaos subsides, Constance and her mother are swept up with the surviving villagers. Her siblings are brutally murdered, her father has vanished, and the captives are marched into the woods, their futures uncertain.

The story unfolds through a mix of narration, journal entries, and letters as they all try to find thier way back to each other: her father’s decent into madness, her mother’s grief, the observations of a French priest at the camp, and Constance’s own captivity story—a traumatized young girl, separated from her family, clinging to survival. Together, these perspectives weave a chorus of sorrow and resilience.

It’s not a pleasant story, but it is a compelling one. The prose moves quickly, carrying you through brutality and tenderness alike, and leaves you sitting with the weight of what survival costs.

I don't think this will be for everyone, but for those who enjoy epistolary historical fiction, you won't want this one to fly under your radar.

A Veritable Household Pet by Viggy Parr Hampton

A Veritable Household Pet tells the story of a girl lobotomized as a child, and the brutal, heart‑wrenching life that follows. It’s dark, twisted, hopeful, soul crushing, and horrific all at once.

But let’s be clear: this isn’t gory horror, or body horror, or even spooky horror. This is help‑I’m‑trapped‑in‑a‑body‑that‑can’t‑speak-the-thoughts-in-my-head horror. This is toxic family dynamics and psychological trauma horror. This is people‑can‑be‑the‑absolute‑worst horror.

Imagine living every day with the awareness of what’s been stolen, carrying the impossible hope of ever being whole again, and knowing those around you will never truly grasp what you’re struggling against. This is the kind of book that unsettles not because of monsters in the dark, but because of the cruelty and silence that can live inside a home.

I couldn’t help but feel the story would have flowed more seamlessly if Darla’s sister’s notes had been given space as alternating chapters. In full form, their voices could have echoed against each other, amplifying the weight of their shared grief instead of being diluted in fragments.

The ending didn’t completely surprise me - the foreshadowing was strong - but it still managed to twist in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

Alicia is in the Basement by Santiago Eximeno

Throwing all the stars at this one... it's easily going to rank as one of my favorites this year. @tenebrouspress went for broke here and this is by far thier best!!

Alicia Is In the Basement is the painstaking, demented journey of a man who loses his daughter in a public park one afternoon. It's a dark, terrifying glimpse into what it means when a child goes missing, and how far a parent is will go to bring her back home.

Already trapped in a fractured marriage, with another child on the way, the disappearance shatters Santi and Maria. Maria needs to move forward. Santi cannot. Will not. After months of realizing the police will never find her, Santi begins his own investigation. What he uncovers is a chilling pattern of missing children and a trail that leads to a mysterious entity known only as He Who Does Not Speak With Children.

The final pages will leave you staring into the abyss, where hope and horror blur together in the most devastating way.

For fans of Ben Tanzer's The Missing and Nicholas Cage's Pay the Ghost.

Fit into Me by Molly Gaudry

I'm not typically one for non fiction but if it's published by Rose Metal Press and it's written by Molly Gaudry, it's got to be magical, right?!

Fit Into Me is an innovative novel within a memoir, which doesn't sound like it would work but strangely does. Through this mix of narrative autobiographical storytelling, speculative nonfiction, and fiction writing, you get to follow along as Molly manuevers the reader through intricate memories and moments in her life. Meanwhile, we also navigate a parallel series of moments in the life of the tea house woman, a character who has appeared in Molly's previous books.

Also, sprinkled within are beautiful and poignant quotes about the relationship between a writer and their readers, the art of writing, and excerises in writing where she had created word banks (pulling individual words from texts) and chosing 10 of them at random to then build a story around.

It's quite an interesting thing, what Molly's done. I can't pretend to fully understand it, but it seeps inside and moves you nonetheless.

Here are some of my favorite borrowed quotes, the ones that spoke to me the loudest:

'Because every book is a private act, but it joins us across continents and times.'

'Because think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.'

'Because every book is dead until a reader activates it.'

The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan

I don’t usually reach for historical fiction, especially when it comes in a tome as hefty as this one, but The Red Winter was ultimately impossible for me to resist. Marketed as the origin story of the very first werewolf and “a tragic love story, a bewitching twist on history, and a blood-drenched hunt for purpose, power, and redemption”, it delivers all that and more.

Set against the backdrop of the late 1700s and the French Revolution, the novel unfolds as the memoir of Sebastian, an immortal narrator whose morally grey complexity makes him as magnetic as he is unpredictable. He thrives on mystery and mayhem, and Sullivan captures his voice with a mix of menace and wit that keeps the pages turning.

What struck me most was how well balanced it was: it’s dark, queer, and gloriously gory, yet cheeky enough not to drown in its own seriousness. Sullivan juggles three timelines and multiple subplots with the ease of a seasoned storyteller, weaving them into a narrative that feels both epic and intimate. I found myself loathe to put it down, wishing that I didn't have to tend to my real life responsibilities until I had fully devoured it.

For a debut, this is nothing short of smashing — a bold, blood-soaked, and irresistibly entertaining entry into the genre. Cameron Sullivan has announced himself with a howl, and I can’t wait to see what he conjures next.

If you fell hard for Alex Grecian's Red Rabbit, Karen Russell's The Antidote, or Keith Rosson's Coffin Moon, I think you would love this!