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.

Jun 9, 20232 min read

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...

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May 19, 20231 min read

In the Watchful City: Fragmentary Beauty

This novella details an exchange of stories investigating colonization, freedom of migration, surveillance, human agency, and...

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May 12, 20231 min read

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...

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Apr 28, 20231 min read

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...

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Apr 21, 20231 min read

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...

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Apr 14, 20231 min read

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...

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Apr 7, 20232 min read

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...

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Mar 31, 20232 min read

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...

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Mar 24, 20232 min read

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...

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Mar 17, 20232 min read

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...

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Mar 10, 20231 min read

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...

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Mar 23, 20223 min read

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...

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Feb 21, 20222 min read

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...

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Apr 25, 20211 min read

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...

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Apr 16, 20213 min read

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...

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Apr 2, 20214 min read

Titus Groan

Peake starts his masterpiece with what will become his hallmark: a seemingly unending stream of descriptive text. Whether or not you...

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Mar 5, 20212 min read

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,...

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Feb 19, 20212 min read

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...

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Jan 8, 20213 min read

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...

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Oct 13, 20202 min read

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...

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