Review | This winter, 4 fantasy novels portend doom — but offer delights

Polk packs loads of motion into a brief house, together with an honest variety of plot twists, however the coronary heart of the guide is the love between Helen and her longtime girlfriend, Edith, who has a secret of her personal. A romance between two people who find themselves pretty much as good as married is a tall order, however Polk provides them one hell of a spark — and the homophobia they face finally ends up being as scary as any demonic power.

“Sign Here” (Berkley) by Claudia Lux is one other guide about damned souls, however it’s extra satirical, with a chunk that sneaks up on you. In Lux’s model of hell, the damned can work their method as much as center administration, permitting them to journey again to Earth to influence dwelling individuals to signal their souls away. Peyote Journey (who’s been given a ridiculous new identify, as a result of it’s hell) is slowly working to seize the members of the Harrison household, however he’s saddled with a brand new trainee who is aware of greater than she’s letting on.

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Lux shuttles between the cartoonish workplace politics in hell and a extra grounded portrait of a mom and daughter within the Harrison household — and, to her credit score, there’s no whiplash in any respect. As an alternative, she suffuses each storylines with a misanthropic sympathy: Individuals are horrible, however you may’t assist feeling for us. A number of rushed twists on the finish fortunately don’t do a lot to remove from an in any other case pleasant journey.

“The Sunbearer Trials” (Feiwel & Mates) by Aiden Thomas options one other sort of doom: One of many teen demigods (or “semidioses”) competing within the titular trials will probably be sacrificed to replenish the sunstones that preserve evil forces at bay. This unshakable doom hangs over Teo, a trans semidios, as he competes together with his way-mightier friends in a collection of video games and challenges.

This Mexican-inspired fantasy is filled with stunning particulars, however Teo can be a implausible protagonist: beneficiant and type however with a nasty perspective. “The Sunbearer Trials” is a complete thrill journey, one which focuses on friendships a minimum of as a lot as romance, however the guide’s biggest pleasure is in seeing Teo come into his personal and achieve energy, within the face of unavoidable heartbreak.

I handed on this assessment column a tad late, as a result of I obtained sucked into studying “The Last Gift of the Master Artists” (Different Press) by Ben Okri, and it’s not a guide you may rush via. (Okri even exhorts the reader on the very first web page to “Learn slowly.”)

Okri, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, initially printed “Final Reward” in 2007 below the title “Starbook” — however now he’s considerably revised it, he says, as a result of critics missed the central position of the Center Passage and chattel slavery within the narrative. The consequence is likely one of the most stunning and profound novels I’ve learn in ages. It additionally packs an unsettling punch, tracing a mystical love story between a prince and a maiden from a secret tribe of magical artists whose world is about to be destroyed by a menace they will’t but perceive.

It’s simple to get misplaced in Okri’s fable, which weaves the intimate with the communal and is filled with mystical revelations — each protagonists undergo a sort of demise and are reborn, and each of them come to a better self-knowledge, which, we’re advised, is “higher than being a king.” And but a creeping sense of dread additionally suffuses the novel, as a imaginative and prescient of individuals in chains, first revealed in a mysterious nightmare-inducing sculpture, eats away at every part. Okri by no means dwells on the horror of slavery itself — as an alternative, he makes us fall in love with the world it’s about to destroy.

Charlie Jane Anders is the creator of “Victories Greater Than Death” and “Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak,” the primary two books in a young-adult trilogy. Her different books embody “The City in the Middle of the Night” and “All the Birds in the Sky.” She’s received the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus awards.