2024: Year in Review
Count ‘em up—there are 24 books in that there mosaic!
After working my way up year by year, I finally managed to accomplish my ultimate goal of reading two books a month in 2024. (And to put a cherry on top, look at that synergy: 24 in ‘24!)
Joking aside, I am very proud of myself—for building my reading comprehension muscles so I can read books faster, and for my continued commitment to learning from other authors about writing and storytelling craft.
On to some other accomplishments!
Publications
This year, I had five stories published!
At the end of 2023, I made a resolution: if I reached 5 publications total, I would make a website that compiles all my writing and recorded music in one place. I crested that wave when Apex Book Company’s Strange Locations: An Anthology of Dark Travel Guides was released as part of their Kickstarter, which included “The Theatre Meridian,” my Atlas Obscura-esque entry about a bakery for mystics and the horrific theatre you can travel to if you ask the right questions.
Unfortunately, Strange Locations was only available as a Kickstarter reward—although it may be featured as an add-on in future Apex crowdfunding campaigns. The rest of my published stories, however, you can access from the Writing page!
Reading Trends
Looking at my published stories from this year, it’s clear that the concept of “other worlds” ranks highly on my list of preferred speculative fiction tropes. “The Theater Meridian” is an alternate world unto itself. “Your Entire Universe in One Bite” is about manifesting the world you want—by literally manifesting it as a lump of coal. Even “The Fungus Man of Kimball Manor,” a pretty straightforward creature-feature, involves a dare to descend into parts unknown to find the mythical Fungus Man himself.
I suppose this stands out to me because I found myself reading a lot of portal or dreamworld fantasies this year. (Skip ahead to the next underlined passage if you don’t want spoilers—you’ve been warned!)
At least four of my selected books—The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Dark Matter, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and Piranesi—feature a clear delineation of this world and another (and, sometimes, another and another and another). Others—The City of Brass, The Spear Cuts Through Water, How High We Go in the Dark, and even Signs Preceding the End of the World to some extent—all touch on the concept of the dreamlike or hidden beyond in some way.
There’s something mystical, hopeful, and sometimes profane about the premise of other worlds. They heighten our senses. We imagine the possibilities and the danger they contain. I think that’s what draws me to speculative fiction in the first place. By pushing the boundaries of our imagination, we learn a little bit more about our own reality.
Looking Forward to 2025
That being said, I’m ready to resist the call of other worlds and portal fantasies for a little while.
Next year, my goal is to read more sci-fi, mostly because I want to write more sci-fi and I don’t think I’m very good at it. It’s not my natural inclination, at least. I tend to favor the weird and surreal—sentient moons and telepathic merbabies and that sort of stuff. But I also find myself wanting to tell sci-fi stories and not having the vocabulary and the voice to do it.
Some sci-fi picks I’m looking forward to:
And some other selections I’m planning on delving into this year:
Now, without further adieu, my year-end summary! I’ve followed the same format for my reviews this year where I’ve paired each novel with a short story from 2024. I hope you enjoy!
Novels and Short Story Pairings
Salvage the Bones | Jesmyn Ward (★★★★)
I began 2024 with this swirling, aching story that follows teenager Esch and her working-class family in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. Ward’s language is hypnotic, dripping with the humidity and languor of her setting—which makes the family’s losses sting all the more.
Pairing: “Godskin” | CL Hellisen | Strange Horizons
Hellisen's "Godskin" paints a vivid fantastical world of seafarers, drifting islands, and inherited divinity—a loud, brash oil painting to Ward's softer, watercolor imagery. At the center of both—in the eye of the storm, if you will—are the twin winds of our heroines' grief for what they've lost and the rage they feel toward those responsible.
The Atlas Six | Olivie Blake (★★★)
Blake takes her six central characters and binds them in a tangled web of blood, ambition, sex, and magic in this first volume of her dark-academia Atlas Trilogy. Her characters enter with explosive tension and there are some truly fantastic interpersonal conflicts that Blake explores through rich, layered prose. Unfortunately, the book’s second half struggles to keep up the pace.
Pairing: “Autonomy of a Murder” | Russell Nichols | Lightspeed
Much like The Atlas Six, Nichols' story is a slow burn, full of twists and turns and power plays cloaked in sensuality and the thirst for knowledge at all costs.
The Memory Police | Yōko Ogawa (★★)
When I finished this book back in February, I expressed my frustration with it in a very negative Goodreads review. Looking back, it still makes me feel hollow. Perhaps that’s Ogawa’s intent; initially, I compared it to Camus’s The Stranger, which ends with a similar whimper of existential ennui. Yet I can’t help but feel there’s a more satisfying way to tell this story.
Pairing: “Memories Held Against a Hungry Mouth” | Ann LeBlanc | Three-Lobed Burning Eye
Case in point: LeBlanc's story of a scientist researching a mysterious void grapples with memory and erasure in a way I found much more compelling and dread-inducing.
The City of Brass | S.A. Chakraborty (★★★½)
By far the longest book I read this year, Chakraborty’s swashbuckling epic was fresh and very fun! Main character Nahri survives on the streets of Cairo, working as a fortune teller while she dreams of life as a doctor—before she is pulled into an exciting (and perilous) hidden world of djinni. The worldbuilding is excellent, and Nahri’s rise beyond her station is very satisfying. I’m not sure I’ll stick with the series (mostly due to the length), but The City of Brass is a solid entry into the epic fantasy genre.
Pairing: “The Weaver of Uswalpur” | Abhijeet Sathe | Translunar Travelers Lounge
This year, I joined the team of first readers for Translunar Travelers Lounge, one of my favorite magazines. Sathe's story about a young man with immense power—who simply wants to become a great weaver—reminded me a lot of Nahri's quest to find fulfillment in her work rather than simply fill a role based on her lineage.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built |
Becky Chambers (★★★★★)
A Psalm for the Wild-Built packs volumes of humor, wisdom, and prescient moral questions into a taut 150 pages. Chambers’s novella inspires more joy and enthusiasm among its fans than any other book I’ve read. My co-workers were thrilled to learn I was reading this book. Strangers approached me on my morning train ride to tell me how much they loved it. I’m honored to pass on that same enthusiastic recommendation.
Pairing: “The Library” | N.B. Andersen | Escape Pod
Andersen's story about Dot, a robotic caretaker of a pillaged and plundered library, is a near-perfect fit with Psalm's cozy tone and themes of optimism in the wake of great tragedy.
Trust | Hernan Diaz (★★★★½)
This puzzle box of a novel is entrancing and wondrous. Comprised of four fictional manuscripts—a novel, an unfinished biography, a memoir, and a private diary—written by its characters, Trust unfolds like a cold case file, with each manuscript casting its uber-wealthy protagonist in a different light. Truly one of the most meticulously crafted and inventive, if slightly impenetrable, books I’ve read.
Pairing: “Reconstructing ‘The Goldenrod Conspiracy,’ Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30” | Gabriela Santiago | Lightspeed
Trust is about guarding a legacy, at the cost of personhood, while “Goldenrod Conspiracy” focuses on creating opportunity out of the scarcity of stories. Both question who gets to be the protector of history, and why.
Ring Shout | P. Djèlí Clark (★★★★½)
I went into Ring Shout with no expectations other than what I saw on the cover. Every page held something that made me snicker with delight. Set in Georgia? Amazing. A power trio of badass women? So much fun. And that power trio hunts down Ku Klux Klansmen because they transform into literal monsters? Hell yes. Clark perfectly balances compelling characters with high stakes, even when the mythology of the world gets a bit hard to follow. I’ll read anything he writes if it’s this much fun.
Pairing: “Spread the Word” | Delilah Dawson | Apex
This was the first story I read this year and its imagery of staticky TV screens and Bible-backed cruelty stuck with me long after the story ended. Will begins to notice something is off with his friends' dads and how they act to their families. Dawson imagines an enemy less physically monstrous than Clark's Ku Kluxes, but just as clandestine and pernicious.
Dark Matter | Blake Crouch (★★★★)
I listened to Dark Matter on a road trip with co-workers, during which we made many predictions about the novel’s plot to varying success. Mine were mostly spot on—until the novel’s third-act reveal, which I did not see coming. Twists and turns aside, Crouch’s reality-bending thriller is wonderful from start to finish, and asks some surprising questions of its characters about love, loyalty, and the price of happiness.
Pairing: “Eternal Recurrence” | Spencer Nitkey | Diabolical Plots
This was my favorite story this year. The parallel structuring, the aching beauty of its language, the tall story arc with a gentle landing—I love everything about it. I won't go into detail about its similarities to Dark Matter to avoid spoiling the novel’s twists. However, I can say these both surprised me with how much they moved me.
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself | Marisa Crane (★★★½)
Crane’s novel, set in a dystopian future where the government saddles people with extra shadows as punishment for perceived crimes, is very, very bleak. The book follows “shadester” Kris and her newborn daughter, who already has an extra shadow from birth, as they simply live their lives. To be honest, I struggled to get through the first half, but Kris and her daughter won me over in the end.
Pairing: “The Ribbon Rule” | Mae Jimenez | The Dark
In Jimenez’s “The Ribbon Rule,” when kids come of age, they get their mouths sewn shut. This method of totalitarian subjugation made me feel just as uncomfortable (and much more squeamish) as Crane's extra shadows, so this story was a perfect fit.
Red Hot City | Dan Immergluck (★★½)
My only non-fiction read this year, Red Hot City details how Atlanta’s housing policy has, time and again, catered to capital interests while ignoring—and often displacing—its own residents. Immergluck, one of Atlanta’s foremost experts on housing policy, builds a sound argument; it’s pretty undeniable that Atlanta has made many mistakes related to affordable housing policy and development. However, the book too often veers into the academic equivalent of personal attacks and doesn’t really conclude with any satisfying alternatives.
Pairing: “Bringing Down the Neighborhood” | Bernard McGhee | Apparition Lit
Last year, I didn't pair anything with my nonfiction reads, but I couldn't resist for this one. McGhee's story about very physical horrors manifesting in a gentrified neighborhood is almost too perfect a match for Red Hot City.
Signs Preceding the End of the World | Yuri Herrera (★★★★★)
At the beginning of Signs, Makina, the book’s protagonist, narrowly avoids death when a giant sinkhole suddenly appears right in front of her—and then she simply goes about her day. The rest of Herrera’s novella is imbued with a similar tone of eerie normalcy, as Makina is eventually asked to cross the U.S.-Mexico border to search for her brother. The normalcy is the point, I think, which is reflected in Herrera’s straightforward yet somehow poetic language, expertly translated by Lisa Dillman. Ultimately it ends where it starts—perfectly, and not how you would think.
Pairing: “Let Her Collect Stamps” | Juniper White | Apex
It was so difficult to find a paired story for this one, but then I stumbled upon Juniper White's "Let Her Collect Stamps." I imagined the narrator—who outlines how to write someone's story predictably by starting with the obituary—applying that method to Makina's own life. In some ways, Makina's path does feel a bit like a surreal conveyor belt. She is the warden of her own journey, but she approaches her success and failure as if it was predestined. Perhaps White's narrator is Herrera himself.
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone | Benjamin Stevenson (★★★★½)
Stevenson’s semi-locked room mystery is incredibly fun, smart, and (some might say) smart-alecky. The tongue-in-cheek tone and metanarrative aspects of the novel really work, and the characters jump off the page. I could see Everyone in My Family being frustrating for some, as the book’s narrator (recounting the story in medias res) goes out of his way to emphasize how fairly he drops clues and foreshadows twists. If that’s not a barrier, though, Everyone in My Family is devilishly clever and highly enjoyable.
Pairing: “Happily Ever After Comes Round” | Sarah Rees Brennan | Uncanny
Tonally, Brennan’s story shares nothing in common with Stevenson's capricious tale of murder and mayhem. Thematically, though, each explores the cycle of violence and how, in the end, families understand each other so intimately and yet not at all.
The Sentence | Louise Erdrich (★★★½)
Summarizing Erdrich’s The Sentence in any one way or as any one thing feels reductive, because there is too much to cover. Is The Sentence a ghost story? Yes, technically, but not really. Is it about COVID? Definitely, for some of it. Is it about the criminal justice system and how it fails us? For sure, but it’s more complex than that. At the core of The Sentence is Tookie, a Native, formerly incarcerated woman who works in a small, Minneapolis bookstore and tries to make sense of getting older and connecting with others amidst all the forces that try to tear us apart.
Pairing: “Your Body as a Haunted House, or When the Ghost Moves In” | Lynne Sargent | The Cosmic Background
Much like The Sentence, Sargent’s flash fiction piece isn’t really a ghost story, so it makes for a nice companion piece for Erdrich’s novel.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold | Toshikazu Kawaguchi (★★)
About 50 pages into Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I thought to myself, “This would be better as a play.” Come to find out, it was a play first! Kawaguchi’s novel has an interesting premise, with each vignette illuminating a different facet of nostalgia and regret. The themes could be powerful in the right hands, but the writing itself is basically dialogue and stage directions. It’s popcorn—tasty but not filling.
Pairing: “Roti Time Travel” | Joshua Lim | Podcastle
Lim's story, in which a grieving widower eats magical roti to replay memories of his family, explores similar themes to Kawaguchi's novel: learning to live with the permanence of the past, and how easy it is for that permanence to destroy you.
Whalefall | Daniel Kraus (★★★★)
Kraus’s Whalefall is written like a horror movie looks—not necessarily in its imagery, although there’s plenty of disgusting fluids to go around, but in its frantic, in-your-face pace and garish details. The story—which follows Jay as he attempts one last dive to scatter his father’s bones, only to be literally swallowed by a whale—is relentless from start to finish. But Kraus gives it a certain beauty, too, imbuing even the most visceral details with poetic touches.
Pairing: “The Things That Wash Up on Marble Beach” | M.O. Pirson | PseudoPod
In many ways, Pirson's story is the inverse of Whalefall. Jay's yearning for family closure takes him straight into the belly of the beast, but he fights for the life he has left to live. Pirson's protagonist, however, hides from his family—and though he hopes mysterious sea creatures can provide a cure for his advancing disease, he ends up sacrificing everything with no closure at all.
The Spear Cuts Through Water | Simon Jimenez (★★★★)
Sometimes I find that epic fantasy suffers from a lack of weirdness. That might sound odd to say about a genre built on magic, monsters, and the unexplainable, but reading The Spear Cuts Through Water, I felt it more than ever. This book is weird in the best way: fluid, mesmerizing, lovely at times, and absolutely brutal at others. The story follows Keema of the Daware Tribe; Jun, a prince who’s grown a conscience; and thousands of other characters as they make a pilgrimage to the Old Country’s eastern shore. There are talking tortoises, celestial bodies in love with each other, lots of violence, and lots of dancing. A truly mystifying and dense read.
Pairing: “We the People Excluding I” | Osahon Ize-Iyamu | Lightspeed
The most unique aspect of Spear is its Greek chorus: a multitude of background characters, often nameless, that seize the narrative for a moment then disappear. Greek choruses usually operate as a collective, but Jimenez flips the trope on its head. Ize-Iyamu does something similar with "We the People Excluding I." A collectivist is exiled, then singled out for being solitary, before finding power in allies and chosen family again.
Eartheater | Dolores Reyes (★★½)
On paper, this book is exactly my cup of tea: a woman, nicknamed Eartheater, relives the last moments of kidnapped and murdered women by “scarfing earth,” as it’s translated. Unfortunately, it never really took off for me. Reyes tells the story in short scenes that feel disjointed. The gaps in between make Eartheater unsatisfying; yet, in a story about reliving and recounting snippets of others’ cut-short lives, maybe that’s the point.
Pairing: “Everything, Nothing At All, and All That’s In Between” | Rebecca E. Treasure | Apparition Lit
Eartheater spends a lot of time escaping—both physically and metaphorically, putting distance between herself and her macabre talent. Treasure's story, about kids who are "planted" and then slowly transformed into food, remixes Reyes's loamy imagery with liberation, ending with a satisfaction Eartheater isn't ever really afforded.
(By the way, Apparition Lit announced earlier this year they are shutting down—a real shame, because I vibed with their stories so strongly! All their issues are free to read online. Go check them out.)
If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English | Noor Naga (★★★★★)
If an author writes a novel about trauma she may or may not have experienced, does everyone else get to tell her what she should or should not have done?
I picked up If An Egyptian for $9.99 at Powell’s Books in Portland and it is easily the best $9.99 I have ever spent. This book is rich with texture, layered with so many emotions (pride, shame, heartache, confusion, rage) that I would read over every section twice just to pick apart the beautiful nuances of Naga’s language. The first part is told in a series of questions from alternating POVs—our narrator and “the boy from Shobrakheit”—and gets even more experimental from there, but never loses the beauty and pain at its core. Truly a masterpiece.
Pairing: “A Relationship in Four Haircuts” | Ai Jiang | Welcome to Your Body: Lessons in Evisceration (reprinted in PseudoPod)
The tension at the center of Egyptian is a troubled, lost-in-translation relationship, in which the narrator tries to mold herself to be what the boy from Shobrakheit needs. In “Haircuts,” Jiang takes us through a similar journey of anxiety and self-doubt as her protagonist tries to alter herself to make a doomed relationship work.
How High We Go in the Dark | Sequoia Nagamatsu (★★★★½)
After Naga’s extremely personal novel, my pendulum swung back to something cosmic in scale: how global warming might unleash a prehistoric disease from melting ice that slowly mutates children’s organs—and how we might overcome it. Each member of Nagamatsu’s ensemble cast deals with it differently. Some pledge their intellect to research: how to grow new organs or generate microscopic singularities inside our own brains to power spaceships. Some simply get by, working at euthanasia theme parks or “death hotels.” This book is achingly beautiful and has a surprisingly optimistic streak. It only loses half a star because some of the chapters told from a dark, nebulous afterlife/beyond didn’t really work for me as well as the others.
Pairing: “Reincarnation Waiting Room” | Angie Sijun Lou | BOMB Magazine
Sijun Lou's dark and sometimes humorous story is a spiritual cousin to Nagamatsu's novel, as much in its beautiful prose and oddly specific yet perfect imagery as its anxiety about our collective future.
Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery | Brom (★★★)
The twin hearts of Slewfoot are Abitha—a young English woman, recently shipped off to a Puritan village to be married—and Samson, a reincarnated demon (or so he’s told). Brom slowly draws them together, intertwining their destinies. Slewfoot stumbles out of the gate, like a fawn (or demon) finding its footing on new hooves. But once it gets going, it’s a lot of fun.
Pairing: “The Butcher’s Heart” | AnaMaria Curtis | Strange Horizons
Amel, the protagonist of Curtis's story of self-annihilation, seeks out her witch from the start. Like Abitha's budding relationship with Samson, there is a wary first meeting, flirtation with the unknown, followed by sacrifice and an unbreakable bond forged in blood.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children | Ransom Riggs (★★★½)
Riggs’s protagonist, Jacob, is enthralled by his grandfather’s tall tales of fighting and surviving monsters—which Jacob writes off as a metaphor for Nazis. When his grandfather dies, however, his last words kick off a dangerous, otherworldly search for answers. Overall, Miss Peregrine’s is a solid coming-of-age novel, though I had quibbles with two things in particular: the length of the chase and fight scenes, which dragged on far, far too long; and just how much of a space cadet Jacob is throughout the story. It’s worth reading for the fun of it, but also to admire Riggs’s collection of vintage photographs that inspired the story.
Pairing: “Tree, Gall, Song” | Wren Douglas | Baubles from Bones
I imagine Douglas’s nameless protagonist, a priestess made to serve a cruel prophet, as a companion to Miss Peregrine: fierce in her protection of others, sometimes at a cost to herself.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January | Alix E. Harrow (★★★★★)
I find it very hard to cry (even when I want to!), but Ten Thousand Doors moved me (nearly) to tears. Harrow perfectly balances a page-turning plot—wherein protagonist January encounters doors to other worlds—with the wide-eyed wonder of childhood discovery. To call it a maze makes it sound more puzzle-boxy than it is, but the sheer mastery of Harrow’s craft is extraordinary. Maybe we’ll call it a universe-spanning treasure map instead?
Pairing: “And You and I” | Jenna Hanchey | The Sunday Morning Transport
Without giving too much away about either of these stories, Hanchey deftly weaves a similar tale of star-crossed lovers occupying different worlds—although hers takes a more plaintive tone.
Deaf Republic | Ilya Kaminsky (★★★★)
What’s more intriguing than poems about collective action in the face of violence? Poems about such themes that also have a narrative structure and framed like a stage play! Deaf Republic begins with soldiers shooting and killing a deaf boy. Then, the whole town goes deaf. In their deafness, they find resistance—but they also discover how stubbornly a new status quo will fight to assert itself. These poems were arresting, humorous, bawdy, and heartbreaking. By the end, I wished the collection had gone a bit deeper—but Kaminsky’s closing poem, “In a Time of Peace,” will forever be on my mind.
Pairings: “Softer Shades of Zap and Blue” | Emma Burnett and “The Coercive Institutions” | Andrew Kozma | Radon Journal
Given Deaf Republic's fusion of poetry, theatre, and narrative, I chose to pair two pieces with it—one short story and one poem, both from Radon Journal's fantastic eighth issue. Burnett's story, set against a bleak backdrop, imagines a more optimistic collective action, while Kozma's poem reflects the disorienting nature of an unyielding power dynamic. Kozma’s couplet, "the worming sensation, the snot-slick certainty / she won’t let up. Fear keeps you from voicing your fear." would find its rightful place among any of Kaminsky's poems.
Piranesi | Susanna Clarke (★★★★★)
To cap off the year, I finally read Piranesi, which has been on my reading list for so long. And what a ride. I was hooked from our pure-hearted protagonist’s first diary entry. The featured quotes decorating my copy gushed about Piranesi’s promenade of reveals, each more delightful than the last—and I agree! But the true master stroke of Clarke’s storytelling is how subtly and naturally the reveals unfold. They are both surprising and, in hindsight, completely obvious.
Now for a potentially controversial take: despite how thrilling the journey was, I found the ending to be the most satisfying and thought-provoking section of the book. I won’t go into details (and how could I even begin to summarize this plot?), but suffice it to say that Piranesi shies away from an easy, gift-wrapped ending and forces us to consider the consequences of every character’s behavior, including Piranesi’s himself. It’s like the sour note in a perfume that makes the scent even more intoxicating.
Pairing: “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” | Isabel J. Kim | Clarkesworld
And for my final pairing of the year, I give you this bonkers story with a bonkers title, which is almost certainly going to appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025. It was difficult to pair Kim's excellent, delirious riff on Le Guin's classic story/moral dilemma with anything this year, but I had to go with Piranesi for a few reasons. First, Kim’s and Clarke’s off-beat writing styles, while distinct, may find some companionship in their weirdness. Second, [redacted for spoilery reasons]. And lastly, they both treat their central characters with empathy and moral complexity, even when as outsiders looking in, it may seem uncomfortable to do so.
Rankings, Top to Bottom:
★★★★★
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Noor Naga
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers
Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow
★★★★½
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, Benjamin Stevenson
How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark
Trust, Hernan Diaz
★★★★
Dark Matter, Blake Crouch
Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky
Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez
Whalefall, Daniel Kraus
★★★½
The City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, Marisa Crane
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs
The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
★★★ and below:
The Atlas Six, Olivie Blake
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Eartheater, Dolores Reyes
The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa
Red Hot City, Dan Immergluck
Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery, Brom