While I can’t say anything good has come of COVID-19 and isolation, I admit I’ve been enjoying the at-home access to publishing information and author panels. Last weekend, for example, Penguin Random House hosted their Book Your Summer event, and I have have much recent and upcoming book news to report.

Modern Mythology

This panel included several authors who use various mythologies in their work, either by updating its setting or by working with it in a more modern format. They discussed their first exposures to mythology (comics, family stories, Disney movies, and the Scholastic Book Fair), how they integrated older stories into newer works, and the ways in which applying mythology to the modern allows writers to subvert ideas they feel marginalize certain groups.

They also discussed their newest works which include:

The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec (Feb 9, 2021)

Angrboda refuses to give Odin what he desires most: knowledge. For this, he punishes her with burning. Powerless in the aftermath, she hides in the forest where she meets Loki and falls in love. They have three children together: Fenrir, Jormungandr, and Hel. As her gift of prophesy returns, however, and Odin’s All Seeing Eye finds the life she’s made, Angrboda must decide between family and fate.

The Girl and the Goddess: Stories and Poems of Divine Wisdom by Nikita Gil (Sept 29, 2020) 

Paro, a fractured girl in a fractured land, searches for herself in post-Partition India. In poetry and Hindu mythology, she must confront what is darkest to find her empowerment and her light.

Ink and Sigil: From the World of the Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne 

Al MacBharrais can cast spells with enchanted ink – and only with enchanted ink because anyone who hears his voice is fated to hate him. Also, his apprentices keep dying in freak accidents.

Yikes.

Makes it hard to work and even harder to figure out how to crack his curse.

When his latest apprentice turns up a corpse, Al needs to find out why while evading the actual cops (who are starting to wonder why death seems to follow him), survive a race through Scotland’s underworld, and convince a hobgoblin to help him. All without saying a word.

Sure. No problem.

Bestiary by K-Ming Chang (Sept 29, 2020)

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland. One night, Mother tells Daughter the story of Hu Go Po, a tiger spirit who lives in a woman’s body and hungers for children, especially their toes. Not long after, Daughter wakes with a tiger’s tail. Then holes in the backyard spit out letters, an aunt arrives with a mysterious illness, and one of the brothers tries to fly. How will this affect Daughter’s feelings for Ben, a neighbor who also has strange powers? What is Destiny trying to tell the women?

Fantasy

The fantasy panel focused heavily on world building, the interplay of magic and science, and establishing magical systems. Some of the most interesting answers about that last one were from Naomi Novik (Uprooted) who said, “Start with the constraints,” and from Sarah Kuhn (Doctor Aphra), who advised, “Come up with the most ridiculous concept and figure out how to make it work.”

Books featured on the fantasy panel included:

Archive of the Forgotten by A.J. Hackwith (Oct 6, 2020)

Unfinished stories live in the Unwritten Wing of Hell’s Library, cared for by a (usually) carefully trained librarian. That librarian makes sure the stories don’t escape and that, should they happen to do so, they’re recaptured quickly, quietly, and most certainly before they make contact with their author. Were such a thing to occur, were the librarian to be absent too long well, then the Arcanist might attempt a coup and a great many of those unwritten books might burn.

A full review of this one is coming soon. Promise.

Haunted Heroine by Sarah Kuhn

Read our full review of this book here.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (Sept 29, 2020)

The heroine of this story doesn’t want to be saved. Not by Orion Lake and not by anyone else. She also doesn’t intend to kill the thousands it’s been foretold she’s going to slaughter, though he isn’t off the table.

School is definitely hell. Especially this one.

Ikenga by Nnedi Okorafor 

Nnamdi’s father was murdered. He was the only good chief of police the town had known, and it was probably the criminals he spent his life tracking down who did it. But what can a 12-year-old do about it? Nnamdi isn’t sure, until the night he is given a magical object that can imbue him with superpowers and the admonition to use those powers for good. But will it be enough?

Horror

Would it surprise you to learn that horror as a genre experiences a boom every time there’s a Republican in the Oval Office? Nor I. Though it seems counterintuitive, horror actually helps many of us control our anxiety by helping us make sense of what scares us, giving us control over it, and giving us frames of reference to see that, if we can survive something terrifying in the fictional realm, we can also likely survive it in reality.

Training for the apocalypse?

The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

Read our full review of the book here and check out our interview with Alexis Henderson here.

The Deep by Alma Katsu

I actually bought this one while the panel was still going. In this alternate version of the Titanic‘s history, the ship is haunted, passengers are disappearing, and others are dying mysteriously. Before the mystery can be solved, though, the ship sinks and the few survivors struggle to piece their lives back together.

Six years later, two of them meet again on the Titanic’s sister ship, only to find the past may not have been put to rest quite yet…

Malorie: A Bird Box Novel by Josh Malerman   

This sequel picks up 12 years after Bird Box with Malorie and her children still living behind their blindfolds. There is still no explanation for the creatures that cause insanity in a single glimpse… and still no solution.

And then… word of change. Word of hope…

But is it worth the risk?

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

Maggie Holt’s father wrote a memoir about their haunted house. She doesn’t believe a word of it. But when she returns to renovate the old Victorian, locals who resent their town’s literary popularity make trouble and the house… well, the house makes trouble too.

Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (Sept 26, 2020)

Katsu mentioned this anthology, which I immediately preordered. All of the horror tales herein are written by Southeast Asian women who both embrace and reject the traditional female roles in various Asian cultures by reflecting on and dissecting various experiences of “otherness.”

We all have hours to fill these days, friends. Go forth and read!