320 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: September 29, 2026 by Atria Books
Full Review on the way!
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Book Review: Trad Wife by Sarah Langan
Book Review: Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler
384 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: May 19, 2026 by MCD
Full review coming...
Book Review: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
293 pages, Hardcover
Published October, 2025 by Penguin Press
Full review on the way...
Book Review: Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern by Christopher Palmer
272 pages, Hardcover
Published January 7, 2003 by Liverpool University Press
Full review on the way...
Book Review: Headlights by CJ Leede
400 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: June 9, 2026 by Tor Nightfire
This is the third novel by CJ Leede, and she is quickly becoming an important voice in horror. Which is interesting, because unlike most of us in genre, she didn’t grow up a nerd for this stuff. She had a writing teacher tell her something to the effect of “hey, you know what you write is horror.” So on behalf of the horror reading community, thank you to the teacher. We owe you for that. I was not a massive fan of Maeve Fly, her first book, but I know I was in the minority on that.
I loved Leede’s second novel American Rapture and had an excellent conversation with her about it that you can listen to here Listen to my conversation with CJ Or Or watch it
That novel, in the very normal quirk of publishing, was her first novel. American Rapture had a scope that felt more epic than the page count. This is a neat trick that I felt Leede managed to capture again. Headlights benefits from something all three of CJ Leede’s novels do: they are built on things that are very unique to her as an author and a person. The best authors do that; they make their books one of a kind. If you listen to interviews with CJ or talk with her, one of her favorite things to do is travel road trip style around the western US, and she is a serious hiker. Headlights is fundamentally a love letter to Colorado, and one of the most famous works of horror to come out of the state, King’s The Shining. (I'm nervous as a dog person that she might do a dog rescue horror novel, and it will break me)
At first, the Shining references were jarring to me. I am used to Lovecraft works being mentioned, but he was in the ancient past in my head, so I was disturbed. I thought to myself, referencing modern horror is strange, and then I had to remind myself that The Shining is almost half a century old. SHIT.
The novel has a real True Detective vibe, which would benefit from an even longer form of storytelling, but the damaged detective, tracking a serial killer, is like a power cord driving a great rock song. It is common for a reason. So yeah, you will hear it compared to the first season of True Detective and Longlegs, which is fair, but personally, this to me is a better story than the latter.
Our POV character is Daniel, set to leave the FBI, when a case that has haunted him resurfaces. A serial killer who keeps a victim alive wrapped in the skin of their victim, a pretty big escalation of the killer trophy. This setup is effective and disorientating.
“That's what you want to know,” Hannah says. “I'll tell you,” she braces herself. “I know those plains. I know how to stalk and what is to be stalked, and I heard and sensed nothing. Until that twig snapped. And then in the next second, I was in a motel room with my arms duct taped behind my back and my legs taped together, and I couldn't move. I was paralyzed, I guess. I figured he must have given me something. And um, I…”
The horror elements work in this novel; there are moments of head-shaking gruesomeness, but the unique elements that make this a CJ Leede novel are the strength. One reason this is the literary equivalent of an A24 movie is that you wonder how it got made (in a good way) It is the opposite of the cookie-cutter style some authors banked on a few decades back. James Patterson or Lee Child appeals to a market looking for the same book. All three CJ Leede feel unique both to the greater genre and to each other, and that is perhaps the coolest magic trick. There is also a moment on page 344 that made me cringe hardcore.
Headlights is a part of an exciting horror trend that is built on unique voices. Leede’s first novel, Maeve Fly didn’t work for me, but I respected the unique flavor. Headlights has it all. Highly recommended.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Book Review: The World According to Philip K. Dick edited by Alexander Dunst and S. Schlensag
246 pages, Hardcover
Published April, 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan
I was not able to find an affordable copy of this one, but since it is an academic book, there was an open-access PDF of it. If I were the editors, I would look into putting it back into print. While it came out in 2015, the essays are of course still relevant to modern PKD studies. For me, the baseline thing I need in a non-fiction book about PKD is something that makes me think, oh, I know an article I can quote that in, or it presents ideas in new ways of looking at PKD and his work.
Every essay here was worth reading; a couple of them do stand out for sure. This is a very international work, with scholars from all over the planet. At the helm were two editors who came from Germany, A country PKD had respect for, despite the Nazism he found to horrible to write about, which is why he never finished his High Castle sequel. I think he would have been happy about this book being helmed by German Scholars.
The essays are broken into four sections: History, Theory, Adaptation, and Exegesis. Personally, the first two sections are the strongest parts of the book. But my interest in the later VALIS incident and the writing of that era is not as great as some. That said, Erik Davis the Hymn of Philip K. Dick is powerful and thoughtful. Mark Buold takes an oversaturated subject like the movies and gives it reason to be read.
My Favorite three articles and why
The Shock of Dysrecognition': Biopolitical Subjects and Drugs in Dick's Science Fiction by Chris Rudge
From Here to California: Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra, and Post-War Integrations of Germany; Laurence Rickels
Mr. Tagomi's Planet: Philip K. Dick and Japanese Speculative Fiction; Takayuki Tatsumi
Is this worth dropping tons of money for? Hundred dollars. Probably not, but an inexpensive copy, or checking out a library or open access, is wise. Better yet, an inexpensive re-issue like a $20 trade paperback should happen.
Complete TOC
Introduction: Third Reality: On the Persistence of Philip K. Dick; Alexander Dunst
PART I: HISTORY
1. Diagnosing Dick; Roger Luckhurst
2. 'The Shock of Dysrecognition': Biopolitical Subjects and Drugs in Dick's Science Fiction; Chris Rudge
3. Cold-Pac Politics: Ubik's Cold War Imaginary; Fabienne Collignon:
PART II: THEORY
4. Between Scanner and Object: Drugs and Ontology in A Scanner Darkly; Marcus Boon
5. From Here to California: Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra, and Post-War Integrations of Germany; Laurence Rickels
6. Remember Tomorrow: Biopolitics of Time in the Early Works of Philip K. Dick; Yari Lanci:
PART III: ADAPTATION
7. Dick without the Dick: Adaptation Studies and Slipstream Cinema; Mark Bould
8. Mr. Tagomi's Planet: Philip K. Dick and Japanese Speculative Fiction; Takayuki Tatsumi
9. On Three Comics Adaptations of Philip K. Dick; Stefan Schlensag
PART IV: EXEGESIS
10. The Hymn of Philip K. Dick: Reading, Writing, and Gnosis in the 'Exegesis'; Erik Davis
11. Stairway to Eleusis, or: Perennially Philip K. Dick; Richard Doyle
12. From Exegesis to Ecology; James Burton
Book(s) Review: Star Trek: New Frontier by Peter David (Concept co-created w/ John J Ordover)
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Published July 1, 1997 by Pocket Books
Book 2: 151 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Book 3: 152 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published August 1, 1997 by Pocket Books
Book: 184 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published August 1, 1997 by Pocket Books
We need to get back into the wayback machine to talk about these books and why I wanted to re-read them. I didn't live through the golden age of science fiction, but I did experience the golden age of Star Trek fiction. On TV, we can look back at the 90s as a great era of ST, but in print, it was truly under the editorship of John J Ordover. I am a fan of John, whom I interviewed a couple of times on podcasts, and, best of all, he showed up in his robe to do a panel about Picard Season 3 -> Watch it here...
Under his editorship, Star Trek hardcovers were often bestsellers, and organized as tie-ins for the TV shows, several as big events during the year. At the same time, Pocket Books was releasing two paperbacks a month based on various shows in the franchise, and sometimes series like Day of Honor, which featured a story set in each show (TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY) on the Klingon holiday. Voyager even did a Tie-in episode.
I was one of the Trek fans who bought the new paperbacks each month, sometimes skipping authors or concepts that I didn’t like, but those were rare. LA Graf was the pen name for two authors whose Trek novels I found dense, for example. Still, I might as well have had a subscription. I set aside money for the books. I went to the Borders at the Carousel Center in Syracuse every month to pick up the new books; they were my bus and break at work reads, as at home I was reading for school and activism.
The one problem these books had was that the stakes for the main characters couldn't be threatened outside the show's canon. So often ST novels like Diane Careyś Dreadnought worked because it created original characters that were engaging. One of the smartest moves an editor (at the time)John J.Ordover did was to put the year's titles inside the cover of the paperbacks. You saw all the titles for the year, it would build anticipation, and give a collect them all feeling.
In 1997, I was excited for months about a new title, Star Trek New Frontiers. What was that? Basically a Star Trek show, built in books instead of TV. Ordover got Paramount to okay this idea, but they wanted a few characters from TNG, assuming that readers needed an anchor. Smartly, the first book brought in Spock and the Enterprise-D itself. Picard in many ways, chooses our new Captain for the mission.
ST had a deep bench at the time of the authors, including Greg Cox, who is the only still active Trek author from that era. Peter David was a great choice; he got his start writing comics, but by this point, he had many, many Star Trek novels. He was one of the most popular who was very smart at typing TOS and TNG together. Peter David was the first to suggest (in Qpid) that Trelane from the Squire of Gothos was a Q (made canon by Strange New Worlds), and in the novel Vendetta, played with the notion that Spinrad’s Doomsday Machine was built as a weapon to fight the Borg.
Peter David played with the canon, was a great storyteller, and a solid writer, so he was perfect to create his own series. The first novel was serialized (like Stephen King’s The Green Mile) over two months. June and July of 1997. While serious Trek fans were digging DS9’s growth into the final seasons, getting used to Voyager, and enjoying the TNG movies, we got a new series.
Spock and Picard assigning this mission to the Captain was a similar hand-off we got in the TV series, and a smart way to bridge the gap. New Frontier was the story of a volatile region of space left in chaos as an empire falls. Starfleet is worried about this region that borders Federation space.
They want to send a ship, but who will command. Riker and Lt. Commander Shelby renewed their rivalry from the classic TNG episode Best of Both Worlds, but Picard thinks it should be a local. Mackenzie Cahloun (a humanized name he took), on the surface, is a disgraced officer, but has been acting as a spy. The rough around the edges captain grew up a revolutionary on his home world, but Starfleet only smoothed some of his edges.
Shelby was a character who was in two very important episodes of TNG. We get a crew member, Robin Lefler (who was in two episodes played by a pre-stardom Ashley Judd), but mostly a new crew. This makes the stakes higher off the bat. We learn that Shelby (who is the first officer) on the new ship is the Excalibur. The crew and the setting is perfect for expanding the ST universe.
I wanted to re-read this one because I was thinking about what a cool thing was to have a ST series that was originally created for prose. This is something I would like to see the franchise do again, maybe with a writers' room (SW High Republic style). I mean, give me a call S and S.
ST: NF holds up nicely, with excellent characters and settings. The serial style made each book fly by and feel like an episode. Each of the four holds up and feels like the Berman era, I mean that as a compliment (although I am a fan of most of Kurtzman era Trek)
I will have to slowly make my way through the ST NF books, which I didn’t keep up with. I admit I burned out on ST novels a bit at the end of the 90s. Thanks to excellent new novels by Greg Cox, Dayton Ward, and David Mack, I am back. I really enjoyed revisiting this classic.
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