Sections
Spiderlight picks a classic fantasy story – the hero’s journey that revolves around the battle against a dark lord – and subverts it to shed light on how its tropes are rooted in a binary worldview. With strong characters and a great discussion on the dehumanization of the “other”, the novel, written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, offers a thoughtful and self-aware adventure.
Spiderlight shines when it’s working with different points of view and it starts by following the perspective of what would usually be considered a classic fantasy villain: giant spiders. In their eyes, men are painted in dark colors: they disrupt the natural order of the forest with their uncontrolled anger and [...]
Written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale is a book that builds a very creative urban fantasy setting with witty prose, finding in the absurd the ideal medium to explore its nihilistic worldview. Based on a podcast of the same name, Welcome to Night Vale is a funny and surprisingly thoughtful novel.
The setting is the town of Night Vale, a place that looks like the aberrant child of Lovecraft and Kafka, with its own rules of time and space, where monstrous creatures coexist with humans so immersed in their routines that they don’t have the time and energy to care about the fact that nothing around them makes any sense. It’s a city where hooded [...]