Book Review: Trad Wife by Sarah Langan

 

Trad Wife by Sarah Langan

320 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: September 29, 2026 by Atria Books

OUT NOW in the UK!

One of the benefits of getting to interview our favorite authors, is towards the end of the interviews, you get to ask the question “What are you working on?” For the moment, Sarah said I am working on a novel called Trad Wife I was almost sweating, wanting to pick that up.  

Let's talk about the elephant in the room, there are two novels released this year with this title, and even more that explore the right-wing Trad Wife trend like Yesteryear. There are several real-life horror stories, but fairly Langan has pointed out that she didn't want to pick on the women who choose this life.

Langan released two truly fantastic speculative novels in a row, so honestly, I was not expecting a return to horror, but we got a taste in this year’s Stoker Award-nominated Pam Kowalski is a Monster. In a long-standing genre tradition, the novella felt like a warm-up for Trad Wife.

I want to talk about the last two novels, Good Neighbors and A Better World. They are entirely the reason I invited Sarah to be a guest of honor at PKD fest this summer.  Twilight Zone might be a more obvious influence on Good Neighbors, but A Better World was Dickian to me. While it might be horror, Trad Wife takes on reality slippage. I think readers are catching that, but many are missing, and that is Dickian in a great way. 

Jenny Kaplan is a canceled journalist whose career went sideways when she wrote an article about an abortion she had. Fired from the magazine she was writing for, she is offered a chance to redeem herself in the editor’s eyes ( and more importantly, the bean counters) by doing a Freaky Friday-style article where she switches places with a trad wife influencer, Mia Wright.

Mia has chosen her to open up to, something that makes Jenny nervous.

“Mia Wright.

Though she looked twenty years old, she was forty-two. According to her bio, she grew up in rural Maryland and went to a small community college there, where she studied library technology. She met her husband, Steadman Wright, on an Amtrak ride from Baltimore to

Philly. They were seatmates who got to talking, drank too much cheap wine, and got silly. Mia characterized it as love, pinot grigio style.”

She seems perfect, a brood of kids, a business. The perfect submissive trad wife. She is popular, and her videos go viral. She has a strange presence. For Jenny, it gets creepy.

“What had just happened? Had Mia Wright known her name through the screen? Had she made the lights flicker?”

Like Mia is calling to her. Like she knows her.

Now, for those of you who don’t want the slight clue, this is a good time to stop reading the review, as I am going to explore the themes. Langan is an author who excels in unified themes that could be best described as a domestic/suburban black mirror. From the climate change update of Monsters Are Due on Maple Street in Good Neighbors. To the techno utopian burbs of A Better World. Trad Wife does mock women who choose this life, but it is a theme about how motherhood, with all the struggles inherent, can consume anyone.

It starts with cleaning, cooking, and looking after the kids, and after a couple of days, Jenny loses herself. 

“There were four wet towels on the floor, and the toilet was unflushed. Dried toothpaste crusted the sink. Homemade deodorants and soaps were out of their drawers. Someone had pulled all the snarled clumps of hair from the combs and brushes and thrown them on the floor like human tumbleweeds. She decided to help Mia and cleaned what she could, gathered the towels, wiped the toothpaste from the sink and mirror.

When she got back to her room, she locked the door like she locked it every night.

Three days down.” 

The reality slippage becomes more and more real as the role takes over. Mia falls apart slowly, and Jenny not only steps into her role but also sees Mia in the mirror, and the number of people who mistake her for Mia grows. Rosemary’s Baby comparison keeps being made for these Trad Wife novels, but what separates Langan’s novel is that the structure is built entirely around my two favorite storytelling pillars. Parallel and reversals. Reality never snaps away; it simply bends, mutates. IT slips in subtle and frightening ways. IT is the building dread that makes this an effective horror novel. It is not about motherhood, but motherhood meeting the ideals of those who watch and judge. It is about a monster, who becomes that because she lives life in the spotlight, and two women who experience the spotlight in different ways exchange places. In this way, this novel fits thematically with Isabel Kim’s soon to be released novel Subliminal. 

Langan set a high bar with the last three books, and if there is any negative, it is that I knew the ending was coming pretty early on. The references to Freaky Friday might have been needed for some readers, but I thought it telegraphed the end a bit.  It is silly to nitpick such a good novel; also, it is Okay because that feeling of knowing a crash is coming can help build the dread. Trad Wife is another argument for Sarah Langan being one of the best voices in genre.

Book Review: Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler

 

Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler 

384 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: May 19, 2026 by MCD

A couple of years ago, a science fiction novel came out that hit me like a lightning bolt. I assumed at some point a science fiction novel would appear that would unseat Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson as the best of the century so far. A Mountain in the Sea is a book I have never stopped thinking about. It is the only modern SF novel I have highlighted and studied. The title is something I just figured out, thanks to an interview I did with Ray as a part of Global Time Slip. As a matter of fact, I kinda feel stupid not getting it. You would think I would consider the title.

Book-wise, Nayler is a 4/4 genius to me. I think his last novel, Where the Axe is Buried, might have lost some readers who thought they were getting a SF takedown of Trump, but it was a deeper look at the Putin dictatorship. Hell, I liked it a lot, although it didn't hit me quite as hard as this one. 

Ray Nayler is one of the most exciting writers working today, and when he told me in our last interview that he was working on a historical novel, I was beyond excited. His publisher seems to be pushing the (minor) speculative elements in an attempt to maintain his SF readership. I think Rayś readers have to be smarter than that.  They are there, but they are based on real science, and nothing annoys me more than humans who dismiss the intelligence of crows. Yes, I saw a review of this book where they took away a star (in the review) because the crows were "supernaturally smart." My dude, crows are smart, they have a sense of navigation that humans could never understand…never mind, take a breath and focus on the book.

“He heard the crows’ alarm.

It was distant – half a kilometer off? But he had come to know that call well: What Neriya called “the bad man” call.”

I was surprised that I didn't highlight more of these moments. These are light SF touches because the science of animals is almost always a part of the iceberg under the ocean in a Ray Nayler novel.  Set mostly during the 1940s ( although it jumps decades a few times) in Lithuania. A group of teens survives the Nazi invasion with the help of Crows, whom they have been feeding and slowly befriending.  If that is enough to sell you the book, just know that this is the best novel I have read so far this year. I suspect that at the end of the year, it will be in my top spot.

Our main point of view character is Neriya, who dreams of becoming a biologist, and from a young age has watched, named, and in her own way studied a group of Crows, including Buster, who is the other most important character of the book.  Her family is killed when the Nazis invade the country, and then she has to hide in the forest as the Nazis and the Red Army fight over the land.  

“We’re Hungry,” the knife man said. “The Germans took everything from our village. Every scrap of bread.  And all the livestock. They didn’t do to us what they did to your people…But what they did to us was enough. If we don’t find food, we’ll be dead when winter comes.”

“What did they do to my people?” She said.

Buster and his crow friends help warn Neriya, show her the way to food, and distract the armies looking for folks hiding deep in the woods.  She eventually meets Czeslaw, who is a teenage deserter from the Red Army. He is an important character, as he has to be convinced that Buster and the crows are really helping.  Circumstances also bring a teenage Roma girl and a mute boy, whom they know as The Boy. They need help with more than Nazis to survive.

“They will be prepared to fight you for it. This forest is filling up with people. Most are from the cities, the town. They do not know the woods. They will only be able to survive by taking what others already have.”

When I interviewed Ray Nayler recently, he talked about the influence of hyperobjectivity in the work of Philip K. Dick in his work.  On the surface, this is historical, but Naylor was hinting at this hyperobjectivity in the title of his most famous novel. Much of that novel exists under the water, hidden; you have to explore the ideas.  You don’t have to dig as deep with this novel, but the heart of the novel is not just bonds forged over survival during war, but an outsider's eye watching our species at its very lowest moment. It goes deeper still.

Palaces of the Crow might seem like a historical novel, but many themes and concepts of this novel are still below the surface. Sure, it is a story of four teenagers surviving the war. Similar to Mountain it is about communication, animal intelligence, and the tight web of nature that humans find themselves entangled in. The crows feel separate from the war. I often thought about how much the conflict and human folly looked to these birds. This is a powerful thread woven into the novel.

The nature of war and the behavior of the soldiers provided one of the most haunting moments in the novel. “He has a recording inside him; if you opened his head, you would see it, the tape going from one reel to the other.” This odd observation also felt Dickian to me in a really positive way. The next line is a very cold description of the results of the interior dehumanization. “Dead men were scattered all around the smashed staff car the politruk had been hiding behind. The parts of dead men.” Thus, the one-two punch here is brutal and powerful.

A part with Kezia, the Roma girl, also highlighted this disconnect. “She remembered what she had said to her. “Even if a gadjo claims to love you, even then remember: we are nothing to them. For the gadjo we are not alive. We sing and dance and are lovely, but we are no more alive to them than the mechanical wonders at the fair.”

Palaces of the Crow is a historical novel,  rich with many textured philosophical themes, and it is also an example of an author with a singular voice. Many authors could have written parts of this novel; one reason why I feel Nayler has released four masterpieces is that they are all books no one else could write. Masterpiece is a word I don’t hand out lightly, but here is a novel that demands this kind of praise.  Reviewing this novel on the week that Daniel Kraus just won the Pulitzer Prize it makes me think. I don’t know if this novel will find the acclaim I think it deserves, but damn if I don’t think this novel is worthy of the best of the year from me.

Book Review: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

 

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

 293 pages, Hardcover
Published October, 2025 by Penguin Press 

So I am not a big Thomas Pynchon fan, although I have enjoyed everything that I have read. I was under the impression that my man had retired from writing; maybe he had, I still don’t know. When this came, I was surprised. After two friends I respect said nice things about the novel, I peeped at the plot and put it on hold at the library. It was a good thing I was 88th in a queue, because after one copy of the 30 that the San Diego Library made it my way, I forgot what interested me in the first place. I went in cold enough when I didn't know when the book took place or what it was about.

This going-in-cold method worked for me, so if you absolutely don’t want spoilers, know that I think this novel is great. Let's talk about why. 

This novel is set in another one of those periods of American political strife, this case the early 1930s. While the obvious strife in most folks' minds is prohibition, but labor fights, race, and the near rise of fascism. This was the era when Sinclair Lewis was warning that it could happen here; he was about 90 years early. 

This is the reason that TP seems to have chosen this era to write about. It almost speaks better about our era than doing modern set novel. Right from the opening paragraph, I was into it... 

“When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the north shoreline. What with tough times down the lake in Chicago, changes in the wind, prohibition repeal just around the corner, dig out in the federal pokey in Atlanta, outfit affairs from jumpy and unpredictable, anybody needing an excuse to get out of town in a hurry comes breathing up here to Milwaukee, seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody's fish.”

What amazing world-building and tone setting in this paragraph. It is a little detail, but there is something wildly symbolic about talking about Chicago first in a novel set in Milwaukee, which always felt like a smaller sister city due to its location. TP setting this in the smaller sleepy city is a choice, which has a little bit to do with the cheese heiress thing. You see, this is the story of Hick McTaggart, a former strikebreaker turned private detective who is hired to find a kidnapped cheese heiress. Hicks could’ve been a cop, and nine out of ten writers would’ve made him a cop who got thrown off the force for being violent. TP really centers the story in the period by making Hicks a strikebreaker. It didn’t endear me to the guy that he was breaking knuckles for the company, but putting him at the center of labor strife was smart.

I mean I could pick a dozen random paragraphs of fantastic writing that classed up the joint…

“At the federal courthouse can take on a sinister look, a setting for a story best not told at bedtime, the jagged profile of an evil castle against the pale light reflected off the lake, bell tower, archways, gargoyles, haunted shadows, Halloween all year long. Or, as some like to think of it, Richardsonian Romanesque. Heavy icicles all along the overhangs, waiting to let loose and Pierce your skull, with no safety hat on the market known to be of any help.”

But many parts made me laugh. Some stuff, like BAGEL, just got me.

“And how many of you are there?”

Not as many as there should be, thanks to BAGEL, the Bureau Administering Golems employed Locally, whose agents are always snooping around, hoping to interrupt funny business and progress.”

Shadow Ticket probably is not one going to get the accolades that his earlier books got, but I enjoyed it alot. Many authors, as they get into the age TP is at start to lose their fastball, but I didn’t detect it.  Fantastic read.

Book Review: Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern by Christopher Palmer

 

Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern by Chris Palmer (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 27)
 272 pages, Hardcover
Published January 7, 2003 by Liverpool University Press

I recently asked a PKD fan who has been into his work for decades if they read this book, and she responded, "It is on my shelf, and I started it.” I laughed because I understood. This is some dense academic language. In fairness, I believe Chris Palmer wrote this as a PH.D paper, and it is not for mass readership. I pushed through, but there were a few times when I laughed at how academically intense the language sounded. This is how the cover flap explains it.

“Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction.”

So yeah, not lightweight stuff. First off, I feel postmodern is like a term that a percentage of people use without really understanding what they are saying.  Philip K. Dick fits the definition of postmodern science fiction because of the political and philosophical questions his books consistently raise. 

Palmer’s book is a deep dive into the PKD megatext and how PKD’s inherent desires to express empathy and humanity come into conflict with postmodern questions. The end result is 44 novels and 123 short stories that express that conflict. Palmer knows the megatext from classic novels to the underappreciated early novels, and importantly, even devoting a chapter to the realist novels. 

Every chapter is interesting, and I gave my yellow highlighter a workout. Much like Evan Lampe’s Philip K. Dick and the World We Live In, or Lapoujade’s Worlds Built to Fall Apart, each of these books highlights different aspects that make their analysis one of a kind. Lampe’s focus on Capitalism, labor, and the Frontier separates his book. 

The two chapters that felt the most unique to me were “The Man in the HighCastle: The Reasonableness and Madness of History” and “Eating and Being Eaten: Dangerous Deities and Depleted Consumers.”

Lets start with the High Castle chapter. Palmer makes a point to look at the various malleable histories in PKD novels that show the marsh of time as another lost reality we should question. High Castle is obvious, but many short stories, Eye in the Sky, and Dr. Futurity are all examples of the past as a narrative tool.  Of course, Phil believed in his futures as much as our past, so there is that. I always try to remind folks that High Castle is not as much about scary Nazis as it is about history being another squishy reality. Palmer’s chapter makes many excellent points about this. “If it is true that the element of humanism in the Man in the High Castle depends on its engagement with history. Then that engagement cannot be straightforward. History in the second-half of the 20th century is complex and daunting. It's open to reasoned analysis, it is a product of instrumental rationalization, and it is seemingly irrational or insane.”

 The Nazis are a part of it, but High Castle is a postmodern novel that questions all history, and Palmer makes the point that it cannot be done rationally.  “But the side of the novel which concerns the Nazis sets limits to this coherent space. The Nazis dominate history, but they are not of history in the sense in which history has a local rationality that can be reacted to or built on.”

We get into very unique material in the chapter “Eating and Being Eaten: Dangerous Deities and Depleted Consumers.” One of the most important points here is that despite the sources of paranoia many of Dick’s characters experience the shaky reality, the artificial origins often end up with the characters ( and the readers with the feeling of being consumed) “And those of his fictions that are concerned with being merged with or consumed by a deity, Dick's strong valuation of individuality, in people as in things. Battles against his sense that the ordinary people need help and need to join in a fellowship or common purpose, such as the superior being may offer, but at the risk of their individuality.”  This is not only something I have considered but something backed by stories across PKD’s canon. UBIK, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Maze of Death might be the strongest examples, but it is everywhere across the megatext.

Christopher Palmer’s Exhilaration and Postmodern Terror might not be for everyone, as the words are big and the ideas even bigger. It is a deep and thoughtful look at the PKD. I felt daunted a few times reading it, but thumbing through it again, I realized how much of it stuck with me.

 

Book Review: Headlights by CJ Leede

 

 

 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. 

Book Review: The World According to Philip K. Dick edited by Alexander Dunst and S. Schlensag

 

 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