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UNREASONABLE OPINIONS BY KNR
Go Everywhere Else First
A place to hear unasked-for opinions expressed with utmost zeal by someone who is an expert on nothing.
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Une Vie and Other Stories, Volume I
I had never heard of Guy de Maupassant when I walked into an old-timey room in Los Angeles’ the Last Bookstore. But I was determined to...
Jun 9, 20232 min read
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In the Watchful City: Fragmentary Beauty
This novella details an exchange of stories investigating colonization, freedom of migration, surveillance, human agency, and...
May 19, 20231 min read
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Magic for Liars: Contemporary Fantastic Noir
Sarah Gailey constructs a fun, engaging magical mystery in Magic for Liars. It’s a classic whodunit, set in a magical high school, with a...
May 12, 20231 min read
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Starless and Bible Black: A Horror Extravaganza
From creeping dread to psychological horror to outright terror, Susan York’s short story collection has you covered. The range of the...
Apr 28, 20231 min read
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Under the Pendulum Sun: Victorian Tragedy at Its Strangest
Ee~~~ew. This one, nah. Content warning: incest, violence, christian themes, excessive englishness, and if you can believe it, even more...
Apr 21, 20231 min read
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Dead Collections: Vampiric Tale of Love
Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman is a speculative romance novel where the main character is afflicted with vampirism: here, a...
Apr 14, 20231 min read
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FINNA: Multiversal Traveling With Your Ex
The way many spec fiction authors write, this novella could easily have been a four-hundred page tome that opens dozens of subplots and...
Apr 7, 20232 min read
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Phantastes: Aged But Potent
First published in the mid-1800’s, Phantastes is a dated but influential and fascinating work of fantasy fiction. It indulges in...
Mar 31, 20232 min read
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The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Tome That Overflows With Meaning
Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, deal with the loss of his father in very different ways. Their mourning is the fabric that the rest...
Mar 24, 20232 min read
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Hell Followed With Us: Beautifully Gruesome
The gore! Lord Jesus, the gore! This is a post-apocalyptic sci-fantasy story about a plague that induces horrific body transformations on...
Mar 17, 20232 min read
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The City We Became: Suck It, Lovecraft
Contemporary cosmic horror that centers a diverse cast. Excellent plotting, but it’s a part-one-of-x so it fails to tell a complete...
Mar 10, 20231 min read
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The Poppy War: Action-Packed Sadness
The Poppy War is a dark fantasy war story in which embracing power holds the inherent risk of losing oneself. Its pacing is smooth as...
Mar 23, 20223 min read
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The Shadow Rising: And A Yawn As Well
Book four of the Wheel of Time series is the best so far. Fewer of its subplots stall out without going anywhere, more of it is pulp...
Feb 21, 20222 min read
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Gideon the Ninth: Bones and Swords, and More Bones
So the book starts out, and there’s some swords, and then it’s like BOOM BOOM BOOM with some skeletons, and then some casual...
Apr 25, 20211 min read
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Dhalgren: the Poem For Which You Had To Be There
abrasions through which blood slowly wept. Days or years, seconds or months: the gouges did not go away. Oozing and clotting and cracking...
Apr 16, 20213 min read
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Titus Groan
Peake starts his masterpiece with what will become his hallmark: a seemingly unending stream of descriptive text. Whether or not you...
Apr 2, 20214 min read
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A Series of Unfortunate Events: the Bad Beginning
The series’s reputation precedes it, and I’m sure the reader likely has some opinion about the property before hearing mine. After all,...
Mar 5, 20212 min read
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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
“Piranesi is an exquisite puzzle box,” a quote from David Mitchell claims on the dust jacket of my copy. Based partly on this quote, some...
Feb 19, 20212 min read
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Eye of the World: About Three Times As Many Words As Needed
Eye of the World is the first book in the incredibly long Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. It is long, meandering, cartoonish at...
Jan 8, 20213 min read
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Windhaven: I Do Not Want a Pair of Wings
Windhaven is a fix-up novel co-written by George R.R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle. While both are authors with respectable catalogues, I’m not...
Oct 13, 20202 min read
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