After years away, Laura Mauro returns with Biographies of Valiant Drunken Tigers, a short story and a novella steeped in Japanese folklore. Shadowsick sends a decapitated head into spectral flight, while Lovesongs of the Nonmigratory Birds pulls the Yuki-Onna into a bleak, heartfelt tale of two people coming apart. A comeback well worth the wait.
Mia Dalia’s Lullabies for the Lost brings musical horror to the Black Shuck Shadows list, with four short bursts leading into the novella Discordant. The shorts remix familiar devil child and cosmic horror ideas, while the novella channels Don DeLillo by way of Faust. A fun horror short story collection, though the novella is already sold on its own.
Kim Bo-young takes Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth and relocates it to a quarantined Korean fishing village in A Plagued Sea, her first horror novella in English. Translated by Sophie Bowman for Tor Nightfire, it turns cosmic horror into a pandemic elegy about grief, guilt and the people we cannot protect. Our five-star review explains why this hundred-page Korean Lovecraft retelling lingers.
