Rich & Strange + NPR Best Books of the Year

This week’s instalment of Rich & Strange is up at Tor.com! I reviewed Max Gladstone’s “A Kiss With Teeth,” which was also published on Tor.com. That may seem odd at a glance, but when I agreed to host the column on Tor.com I said I’d still like to consider the stories there for review, and they agreed, so here we are!

“A Kiss With Teeth” is a tense, tautly written piece about an old vampire, Vlad, who’s settled into married life with Sarah, the woman who hunted and tried to kill him. They’ve been married for ten years, have a seven-year-old son, Paul, and for their son’s sake are pretending to be a normal couple. But Vlad develops a dangerous passion for his son’s school teacher, and finds his carefully cultivated control of his supernatural strength and hunger slipping.

It’s a beautiful story, and made me feel and realise complicated things that I discuss in the post.

In other news, NPR’s Book Concierge is here for all your holiday book-buying needs! Here you can peruse about 250 books that NPR reviewers — including me! — considered the best of 2014.  It’s a really cool system, too, with stackable filters and stuff. I was also delighted to see that two anthologies in which I have stories, Women Destroy Science Fiction and Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, made the list.

#SFWApro