[Lidija]

Da, izgleda veoma interesantno. Ako si uspela da do sada to nekako nabaviš, seti se mene… 

[Lidija]

The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.

Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious, if disquieting whole.

[Lidija]

Hart (Take Out, 2019, etc.) is best known for his private eye novels about Ash McKenna and a novella co-written with James Patterson (Scott Free, 2017), but he’s tapped a real vein of the zeitgeist with this stand-alone thriller about the future of work that reads like a combination of Dave Eggers’ tech nightmare, The Circle (2013), the public’s basic impression of an Amazon fulfillment center, and Parzival’s infiltration of IOI in Ready Player One (2011). In the near future, following a series of mass murders at retail outlets, traditional commerce is dead. Every need has been ported over to Cloud, a worldwide fulfillment facility where anyone who wants to survive works—those who don't either give in eventually or are a customer—in something of a feudal society where algorithms decide your role. Cloud is the brainchild of Gibson Wells, a mad genius who is dying of pancreatic cancer but whose role in the story is assured by his broadcasts to his millions of employees. Our two leads are Paxton, a former prison guard whose entrepreneurial invention was co-opted by Cloud and who has reluctantly taken a security job with his enemy’s empire, and Zinnia, a secretive operative with deadly skills whose role on the product-picking floor is only a means to an end. While touching on income inequality, drug addiction, and corporate espionage, Hart creates a compelling and intriguing thriller that holds up a black mirror to our own frightening state of affairs. Hart dedicates the book to a real victim, Maria Fernandes, who worked part time at three different jobs and accidentally suffocated on gas fumes while sleeping in her car in 2014. That’s a profound inspiration, and Hart has written a hell of a prosecution of modern commerce and the nature of work, all contained in the matrix of a Cory Doctorow–esque postmodern thriller that might not turn out the way you hoped.

Part video game, part Sinclair Lewis, part Michael Crichton; it adds up to a terrific puzzle.

[Lidija]

In this science fiction thriller, set in the not-too-distant future, automated cars are in common use and no cause for any concern. Until one day, when eight people—including an illegal immigrant, a faded TV star, a pregnant woman, and a wife fleeing her abusive husband—find themselves locked inside their cars, their predetermined destination changed, and a voice telling them they are going to die. Their ensuing panic is broadcast to the world from cameras hidden in their cars. Used as a (if you'll pardon the expression) vehicle to examine the effects of social media and mob mentality, this taut thriller is being described as "an episode of Black Mirror meets Agatha Christie by way of Speed."

[Lidija]

Newman's Drachenfels (written in 1989 under than pseudonym Jack Yeovil and newly reissued under the Warhammer Horror imprint) is a vampire story that the author himself in a recent video additionally characterizes as a backstage murder mystery. The story imagines a world twenty years after a malevolent force is defeated. It's set in a haunted castle, the location for a theatrical group's production of that great evil's demise. The castle is the fortress of Drachenfels, the very site where he was killed. But even after twenty years, evil remains. Newman's story is about what happens to heroes who are still holding onto the past while it cleverly puts unconventional heroes in an intriguing locked room mystery.

[Lidija]

Recursion by Blake Crouch

Wayward Pines and Dark Matter author Crouch has a knack for accessible science fiction—that is, he writes stories that even casual readers of sf will enjoy. The same is true of Recursion. Here, a groundbreaking new technology—one that allows people to relive every detail of their past—is abused, thus causing a new affliction called False Memory Syndrome, in which its victims are driven mad with memories of lives they've never lived. Recursion is a fast-paced thriller with a cool science fictional premise that anyone can enjoy.

[Lidija]

Swanwick's third fantasy (The Dragons of Babel, 2008, etc.) set in an industrialized Faerie bristling with weird entities.

Curious readers will learn that this is just one of many worlds (Aerth, or Earth, is another) that are "different energy states of the same place...the surfaces of an n-dimensional tesseract." Now you know. Caitlin Sans Merci serves in Her Absent Majesty's Dragon Corps as the pilot of a malevolent iron dragon, 7708. The Corps' purpose is to steal children's souls from Aerth so they can be embedded in soulless high elf bodies; Cat herself is one such. As her story opens, she returns from a raid discovering that somehow she's acquired a secret stowaway in her cranium, the mysterious Helen V. from Aerth. Soon, Cat's half brother, Fingolfinrhod, a full-blooded elf, will inherit House Sans Merci from their dying father. Fingolfinrhod, appalled at the prospect, instead vanishes (after warning Cat of a conspiracy against her) into what Cat will later learn is the city Ys, drowned long ago beneath the waves. Cat, framed by her superiors and betrayed by 7708, flees, determined to clear her name and reclaim her position. The scintillating narrative, sprinkled with black humor, bulges with symbols and allusions to topics in science, alchemy, magic, folklore, mythology, fantasy/science fiction, and literature. Remarkably, all the major and most of the minor characters are female, not to mention an alluringly innocent protagonist. A few signs warn that Swanwick's extraordinary inventiveness may be running down, with recycled characters and scenarios and too-frequent passages where descriptions lapse into itemized recitations, like laundry lists. Still, these are minor blemishes in what is primarily another bravura performance, with a surprise ending that, after a moment's reflection, isn't so surprising after all.

Discworld meets Faust. They do not like each other. Philip Pullman picks up the pieces.

[angel011]

Da, izgleda veoma interesantno. Ako si uspela da do sada to nekako nabaviš, seti se mene… 

Nije to još gotovo, koliko znam.

[Lidija]

We can swallow our fear or let our fear swallow us.

Single mother Kate Reese is on the run. Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with Christopher at her side. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It's as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one highway in, one highway out.

At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six awful days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a tree house in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again.

Soon Kate and Christopher find themselves in the fight of their lives, caught in the middle of a war playing out between good and evil, with their small town as the battleground.





The poet laureate of everyday terrors returns with a baker’s dozen of deliciously sinister tales.

Novelist and short story writer Hill (Strange Weather, 2017, etc.) is, of course, the son of Stephen King, with whom he collaborates here on two stories, including the title tale. As ever with King, the stories have ordinary settings with ordinary people doing ordinary things until something extraordinary happens, in this case involving the familiar King nightmare of menacing vehicles (“Could you supercharge a goddamn semi?”). If one bears in mind that in his last collection Hill posited that near-future rainstorms would shower down steel daggers instead of water, some of his setups seem almost logical. The most memorable comes in “Late Returns,” in which an out-of-work trucker (there’s that semi again) finds himself behind a bookmobile delivering volumes to denizens of the afterlife, most of whom owe late fees; as one such fellow tells him, the service he offers is something of a reward “for returning overdue books in spite of the inconvenience of being dead.” There are other benefits: In the weird chronology of the other dimension, those who are about to enter the great beyond get previews of books that haven’t even been written yet—including, perhaps the most frightening moment in the entire collection, “The Art of the Presidency: How I Won My Third Term by Donald J. Trump.” Hill plays with form; one story, “The Devil on the Staircase,” is told in triangles of carefully arranged prose, a storyline worthy of Poe unfolding with eldritch intent—and a nice punchline to boot. In yet another story, this one of a more satirical turn, Hill depicts a world in which the zombie apocalypse and addiction to social media are hard to tell apart. In a series of tweets, the narrator recounts a zombie being hauled before a human audience and a box of hatchets. “Don’t like where this is going,” she says. Exactly.

Miniature masterworks of modern horror proving that life is hard, weird, and always fatal.

[Lidija]

Percy’s (The Dark Net, 2017, etc.) story collection explores a natural world, tired of being misunderstood and threatened by humans, that is finally threatening back.

The humans in these tales are beaten down by the financial collapse, the threat of disease, the mind-numbing routines of their lives; and the wilderness, kept at bay for so long by our construction and our expansion and our money, has begun to creep in at the edges, swallowing those who are lost and stretching, hungry, toward the center of our world. In “Heart of a Bear,” a bear begins to assimilate to human life only to face tragedy and loss that drive him back to the wild. In “Writs of Possession,” an unfinished luxury subdivision becomes the playground for wild animals as the human inhabitants are evicted one by one. There are small offerings of hope: the suggestion that a pair of trespassing children would have been welcomed, fed, and adopted by a homeowner in "Writs of Possession," for instance, or the ending of “The Balloon,” where, in the midst of a deadly pandemic, two misfits may find solace in each other. For the most part, though, these stories echo with paranoia and loss; there is, Percy suggests, a hollow, empty core beneath the trappings of our modern lives. As he describes a main character in “The Uncharted”: “His friends call him a warrior poet. They have misinterpreted his emptiness for depth.” Despite the loneliness and violence of these tales, however, there is icy beauty in Percy’s language, even as he describes depression: “We take Xanax. We take Lorazapam. We take Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft. Dozens of little moons dissolve inside us and make our brains deaden and our hearts fizz. Sometimes we are so sad we do not move.” This beauty redeems the vision of darkness that he offers—held out before us, these words suggest that there is still something worth saving in our broken human existence.

Like modern Grimm fairy tales, the stories in this volume are cautionary and haunting.




Rose is a freshman at Ozarka University—a contradictory “land of white mansions” and “lurid binge drinking,” Bible study and date rape—where she is trying to pivot away from her painful childhood (first an EF5 tornado, then a neglectful mother, then a foster home) by remaking herself as a sorority sister, “carefree, upper class, and virtuous by means of…inaccessibility.” Then, during finals week, a student named Eli—a child of loss himself who feels, among other things, “overlooked, disenfranchised, promised one thing and given another”—smuggles a rifle into the crowded library and opens fire. When he’s done, 12 people are dead, and Rose’s anodyne visions, her talent for imitating the absurd, prove a flimsy antidote for the pain. Similarly remade by the shooting is Eddie Bishop, an adjunct writing instructor whose wife, Casey, is both the rebar around which his adult identity was poured (before her, he was the browbeaten replica of his brutally religious father) and one of Eli’s victims. While the media grabs for explanatory scripts (Eli comes from a nonnuclear family! He’s a drug user!) in hopes of conveniently distancing the killer from the rest of us, Englehardt’s characters—Rose, Eddie, and Eli—struggle in a more intimate sphere, a sphere where slogans don’t heal, where confusion is identity, where questions about who you were and are and want to be run like threads through the dark eyelet of Eli’s murderous act. Following each character in alternating second-person chapters—a clever and daring structure in which Eli's creative writing instructor operates as the guiding first-person consciousness at the novel's core—Englehardt’s brilliant and insanely brave debut is a culturally diagnostic achievement in the same way that Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Libra are culturally diagnostic achievements; his sentences are brutal and unflinching and yet mystically humane in the spirit of Denis Johnson’s Angels; and his America is at once beautiful and love-swirled and a kaleidoscopic wreck—a land whose cultural geology mirrors its physical one, routinely generating the “mindless malignancy” of town-wrecking tornadoes and desperate young men with guns.

Hugely important, hauntingly brutal—Englehardt has just announced himself as one of America’s most talented emerging writers.

[Lidija]

Time travelers battle for the future in this feminist sci-fi thriller.

We begin in 1992, where (or is it when?) “traveler” Tess has appeared at a punk concert in California. She’s on the lookout for “anti-travel activists” who want to shut down the mysterious “Machines,” structures of unknown origin that somehow facilitate time travel. Tess discovers that a group of misogynist crusaders, centered around the ideas of 19th-century conservative moralist Anthony Comstock, are trying to change events in the past so that women are stripped of all human rights. Tess and her friends, who are diverse in both race and gender, chase these “Comstockers” through time to stop them from fulfilling their evil plans. Meanwhile, teenager Beth, who is really living in 1992, escapes her oppressive home life to revel in the California punk scene with her best friend, Lizzy. But what is Beth supposed to do when she meets a traveler from the future who warns her to stay away from Lizzy? And why is that traveler, Tess, making detours in time to find Beth when she has a conspiracy to thwart? Newitz (Old Media, 2019, etc.) does well enough with the time-travel premise, but where this book really shines is in its page-turning plot and thoughtfully drawn characters. The Comstockers’ plan, with its rhetoric plucked straight from present-day “men’s rights” online forums, is truly terrifying. Between careful attention to Tess’ development, Beth’s chapters, and the near-constant jumps through time, the story charges along until Newitz suddenly ties it all together with breathtaking finesse. The humdinger of an ending is a perfect cherry on top.

An ambitious adventure that keeps the surprises coming.




In pre–Civil War Virginia, people who are white, whatever their degree of refinement, are considered “the Quality” while those who are black, whatever their degree of dignity, are regarded as “the Tasked.” Whether such euphemisms for slavery actually existed in the 19th century, they are evocatively deployed in this account of the Underground Railroad and one of its conductors: Hiram Walker, one of the Tasked who’s barely out of his teens when he’s recruited to help guide escapees from bondage in the South to freedom in the North. “Conduction” has more than one meaning for Hiram. It's also the name for a mysterious force that transports certain gifted individuals from one place to another by way of a blue light that lifts and carries them along or across bodies of water. Hiram knows he has this gift after it saves him from drowning in a carriage mishap that kills his master’s oafish son (who’s Hiram’s biological brother). Whatever the source of this power, it galvanizes Hiram to leave behind not only his chains, but also the two Tasked people he loves most: Thena, a truculent older woman who practically raised him as a surrogate mother, and Sophia, a vivacious young friend from childhood whose attempt to accompany Hiram on his escape is thwarted practically at the start when they’re caught and jailed by slave catchers. Hiram directly confronts the most pernicious abuses of slavery before he is once again conducted away from danger and into sanctuary with the Underground, whose members convey him to the freer, if funkier environs of Philadelphia, where he continues to test his power and prepare to return to Virginia to emancipate the women he left behind—and to confront the mysteries of his past. Coates’ imaginative spin on the Underground Railroad’s history is as audacious as Colson Whitehead’s, if less intensely realized. Coates’ narrative flourishes and magic-powered protagonist are reminiscent of his work on Marvel’s Black Panther superhero comic book, but even his most melodramatic effects are deepened by historical facts and contemporary urgency.

An almost-but-not-quite-great slavery novel.