Mark Stevens

Mark Stevens is the author of The Flynn Martin Thriller series including No Lie Lasts Forever (2025) and Two Truths and A Lie (2026); The Fireballer (2023), and The Allison Coil Mystery Series including Antler Dust, Buried by the Roan, Trapline, Lake of Fire, and The Melancholy Howl.

Buried by the Roan, Trapline, and Lake of Fire were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award. Trapline won.

Recently I asked Stevens about what he was reading. His reply:

The collaborative writing team of Linda Keir (Keir Graff and Linda Joffe Hull) have a new heart-pounding thriller out called I Did Not Kill My Husband. Think of the old television show The Fugitive (or the movie of the same name starring Harrison Ford) but with a female lead and all the modern-day trappings of social media. One big chase, start to finish.

More of a slow burn but with atmosphere in abundance, The Lost House by Melissa Larsen. Set in Iceland, a murder mystery built around a decades-old tragedy that has haunted a fractured family.

Matt Goldman’s mysteries are always solidly built and The Murder Show is no exception. The main character is a show runner for a television series called, yes, The Murder Show. He’s desperate for a new crime to feature in the television production, so why not dig back into the sad, long-ago murder of a high-school friend and see what he can dig up? Very enjoyable.

Don Winslow’s The Final Score. Six beautifully varied crime fiction stories. Nobody pulls you in like Winslow.

And I recently read George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. The first two-thirds show off Orwell’s reporting and writing skills as he chronicles the life of coal miners in northern England nearly a century ago. The second half devolves into Orwell’s rambling thoughts on socialism. But the first part is worth reading for Orwell’s colorful eye for detail and the empathy Orwell brings to the page.

Visit Mark Stevens's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Fireballer.

Q&A with Mark Stevens.

My Book, The Movie: The Fireballer.

Writers Read: Mark Stevens (June 2025).

The Page 69 Test: No Lie Lasts Forever.

My Book, The Movie: No Lie Lasts Forever.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Robards

Karen Robards is the New York Times, USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of fifty novels and one novella. She is the winner of six Silver Pen awards and numerous other awards.

Her new novel is The Moonlight Runner.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

Thanks to the movie that just came out, what I’m reading, or re-reading, right now is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, one of my very favorite books of all time. I first read it when I was around ten years old. I’d been sent to stay with my grandparents while my parents traveled. Theirs was a big old house in the country and it seems to me in retrospect that it rained the entire time I was there. Which meant I was trapped indoors with little to do except explore the house, so explore I did, all the way up to the cobweb-festooned attic. In the attic I discovered a trunk filled with old books. I was already an avid reader of Nancy Drew and that type of mostly age-appropriate fiction, but what I found in that trunk was a literary revelation. Gone With The Wind, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, The Hobbit – and, among many others, Wuthering Heights. I loved them all (well, maybe not The Grapes Of Wrath, though I grew to appreciate it later), but Wuthering Heights is the story that lodged in my heart and remains there to this day. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” said by Cathy about Heathcliff, was and is the most romantic line I’ve ever read. And yes, this is a romance, a tragic and tortured romance, but a romance nevertheless. Orphaned, foundling Heathcliff is the ultimate antihero, spoiled, privileged Cathy the classic gothic heroine doomed by her own hubris. Theirs is a haunting tale of passion, obsession and revenge – and ultimately, redemption. This comes in the form of the younger version of their characters, Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw, finding happiness together, while (in my mind, at least) the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy are left to wander the Yorkshire moors together for eternity in their own dark version of a happily ever after.

Visit Karen Robards's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paulette Kennedy

Paulette Kennedy is the author of The Artist of Blackberry Grange (2025), The Devil and Mrs. Davenport (2024), The Witch of Tin Mountain (2023), and Parting the Veil (2021), which received the HNS Review Editor’s Choice Award. Her work has been featured in People Magazine, The Mary Sue, and BookBub. Originally from the Missouri Ozarks, where as a young girl she could often be found wandering through the gravestones in her neighborhood cemetery, Kennedy’s affinity for fog-covered landscapes and haunted heroines only grew, inspiring her to become a writer. She now lives with her family and a menagerie of rescue pets in sunny Southern California, where sometimes, on the very best days, the mountains are wreathed in gothic fog.

Kennedy's new novel is The Two Deaths of Lillian Carmichael.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Kennedy's reply:

The Other Moctezuma Girls by Sofia Robleda

An epic coming-of-age story set in 16th-century Mexico, after the Spanish Conquest, centering Isabel, the daughter of the last Aztec empress. After her mother's death, Isabel embarks on a journey to discover her mother's story, and unveil the intriguing secrets hidden in her past. Robleda transports readers to a time when women used their wiles and intelligence to survive during an era when men colonized and claimed dominion over the countries they invaded, and viewed the women in their lives as political pawns. Isabel, and Tecuichpoch, the proud daughter of the famed Moctezuma--who relays her story through compelling diary entries Isabel finds on her quest--are both formidable, proud women, who inspire with their matriarchal strength and resilience. I especially enjoyed the elements of magical realism, which were so beautifully woven into the body of the story and convey the author's deep connection to her heritage. There's also a tender love story between Isabel and a young man she befriends on her quest, Juan, which helps to provide levity and contrast within the travel-themed narrative. Robleda is a brilliant author, whose novels are steeped in historical resonance, and deserve acclaim and pride of place alongside the works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez.

Sing Down the Moon by Robert Gwaltney

In this gorgeous, redolent Southern Gothic, Gwaltney explores the complexities of generational trauma through a surrealistic lens, as 16-year old Leontyne Skye reckons with an uncomfortable legacy after the death of her mother. Like all of the Skye women before her, Leontyne becomes the caretaker of an ancient fig tree which houses the souls of the dead in its fruit, which Leontyne is tasked with harvesting and distilling into an addictive elixir called Redemption. "Sinners" seeking Redemption visit Good Hope, the remote barrier island off the coast of Georgia where Leontyne lives, in the hopes of procuring this elixir, which carries the desires and hungers of all of the haints entrapped by Damascus. Bottling Redemption requires sacrifice, and Leontyne must grapple with the calling that will ultimately destroy her. When a mysterious stranger arrives on Good Hope, Leontyne is forced to face the scars from her past, and the expectations of those who wish for her to abandon herself to fulfill their demands. Filled with colorful, unforgettable characters, like Leontyne's childhood friends--a charismatic pair of twins wrestling with their own dark legacy--Sing Down the Moon soars with Gwaltney's rhythmic, lyrical prose, grounding the fantastical against the realistic tragedies of loss and betrayal. Sure to become a classic of Southern Gothic literature.

Visit Paulette Kennedy's website.

The Page 69 Test: Parting the Veil.

The Page 69 Test: The Devil and Mrs. Davenport.

My Book, The Movie: The Artist of Blackberry Grange.

The Page 69 Test: The Two Deaths of Lillian Carmichael.

--Marshal Zeringue

Albertine Clarke

Albertine Clarke received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida and studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh where she won the Lewis Edwards Memorial prize for creative writing. Raised in London, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Clarke's debut novel is The Body Builders.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

Right now, I’m reading Septology by Jon Fosse. It’s great, very long and very meditative, and tells the story of an ageing Norwegian painter living in a tiny fishing village. I like books that I can tarry with when I’m supposed to be doing other things, and Septology provides that. I also lost it for a couple of days and found it in my bed, so I feel that I’ve absorbed part of it through my skin.

Before that, I read The Hitch by Sara Levine. It was very funny, and I read the whole thing in a couple of days. There’s a flip kind of conceptual humor that I find off-putting in literature, and although she verges on it, the earnestness of the ending bought it back for me. It’s also just a very unusual book.

Before that, I read George Saunders’ new novel Vigil, which I didn’t like very much, although I’m a huge fan of his, and The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère. The Adversary altered me permanently. I can never go back to the person I was before I read that book. It’s about a man who kills his wife and children, and Carrère befriends him to try and figure out why. If you like narrative nonfiction that reads like a brilliant novel, I recommend any of Carrère’s work, although they can be so dark they verge on upsetting.

Finally, when I finish Septology, I’m looking forward to reading Marie Ndiaye’s The Witch. I read That Time of the Year recently and I loved it; she has such a subtle and unnerving sense of the uncanny.

Follow Albertine Clarke on Instagram.

Q&A with Albertine Clarke.

My Book, The Movie: The Body Builders.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garrett Curbow

Garrett Curbow is the author of Whispers of Ink and Starlight and the Daughter of Light trilogy, which was short-listed for the Publishers Weekly Selfies Award. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Curbow's reply:

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

This is a brutal WWI historical fiction following the love story of two men in combat. Winn puts you right there in the trenches, describing all the horrors of war, not gratuitously, but with enough realism to give you nightmares. I don’t read a copious amount of historical fiction, but I fell in love with the main characters of this novel, Gaunt and Ellwood, and found myself fascinated by the real-world events they had to endure. Their story, spanning the years of war, is stained with loss, fear, and longing. Two men stuck in Hell-on-Earth and politically restricted from being in love. It is both a heartbreaking and hopeful novel, and I definitely recommend it, especially if you’re overdue for a cathartic cry.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I’ve been fascinated by the cosmos recently, and this novel scratched that itch for me. It follows Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher on a suicide mission to save Earth from a deadly parasite. Up to the halfway point of this novel, I was enjoying the ride, but I wasn’t in love. Then, a friendship starts to bloom between two characters that changed my reading experience. This friendship becomes the beating heart of the novel. By far, one of the most creative and heartwarming pieces of science fiction that I’ve read.

Visit Garrett Curbow's website.

Q&A with Garrett Curbow.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Herodotus’s Histories:

Homer, the epic poet who wrote the story of the Trojan War, lived some four hundred years before Herodotus, who wrote the history of the Persian War. Thucydides, who lived just a generation after Herodotus, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, a war, he insisted, that was the greatest war that had ever happened, a war that lasted twenty-seven years and ended with Athens defeated and its empire destroyed. The defeat of Athens, and the long decline that, some believe, still continues, gives some reason to think Thucydides was right, that the war between Athens and Sparta was the most important war that had taken place, but there never would not have been a war had Athens not become an empire which seemed to threaten the freedom, if not the very existence, of Sparta and its allies. And Athens would not have become an empire if the Athenians had not had the courage, and the foresight, to stand against the attempt of Xerxes and the Persians to make, as Xerxes promised, “a Persian empire that has the same limit as Zeus’s sky. For the sun will look upon no country that has a border with ours, but I shall make them all one country, once I have passed in my progress through all Europe.” Why this did not happen, how Xerxes and the Persians were defeated, is what Herodotus wants to understand.

Herodotus will tell the story of the war, and will tell it better than the story Homer told of Troy. He will investigate, and uncover, the real causes, and not, like Homer, invent a more entertaining story. In Homer’s story Helen - Helen who launched, as they still say, a thousand ships - was the reason Troy was attacked, the reason why Hector and Achilles and all the others fought their battles and died their deaths. Homer’s story had been told a thousand times. Every man and woman, every child, in Athens, and not just Athens, had listened as a rhapsode, one of those dull-minded men who can only memorize someone else’s words, recited every line with all the exaggerated enthusiasm of a poorly paid actor in a play on stage. Everyone knew the story, and everyone was wrong. Helen never got to Troy. She was not there. The ship that had taken her had sailed to Egypt. While the Greeks and the Trojans were shedding blood at Troy, Helen was safe in a city somewhere near the Nile. Herodotus distinguishes Homer’s story from what “my eyes, my judgment and my searching” have revealed and what he has heard from, among others, the Egyptians. Helen was brought to Egypt. The Trojans did not have her. It was not that Homer had been deceived; it was that Homer was deceptive. “And I think Homer knew the tale; but inasmuch as it was not so suitable for epic poetry as the other, he used the latter and consciously abandoned the one here told.”

We hear about other places and other times, the stories, the histories we are told, but this is not the same; it is not as trustworthy, as what we are able to see for ourselves. Herodotus shows us this by telling us, that is to say, by letting us hear from him, the story of how a king lost his kingdom by insisting that the truth be seen and not heard. Candaules, the ruler of Lydia, tells Gyges, his trusted bodyguard and confidante, that his wife, the queen, is the most beautiful of women. Gyges believes what he is told, but that is not enough for Candaules: Gyges will not really believe what he tells him unless he sees for himself how beautiful she is. Gyges is made to hide in the bedroom when the queen comes in and removes her clothes, but he does not go undetected. When the queen discovers that Candaules has let her be seen by someone who has no right to see, she tells Gyges that he must either kill the king and take his place, or be killed himself.

What exactly does this mean? Why does Herodotus tell this story at the very beginning of what is supposed to be his history of the Persian War, the war in which, to everyone’s astonishment, the Greeks, led by Themistocles and the Athenians, defeat a Persian army so large that when Xerxes crossed into Europe it took seven days and seven nights to make the crossings, a war that made it possible for Athens to create an empire of its own? Is it only to establish a rivalry to Homer that Herodotus begins his history with a story of a woman who, like Helen, was so beautiful, and so desirable, that kings were killed and kingdoms shaken to their foundations? Or is Herodotus teaching a deeper lesson?

The story of Gyges is told again, a generation later, when Plato tells it with reference to a ring, the ring of Gyges, that allowed whoever wore it to become invisible and in that way, free from observation, do whatever he wants to do without fear of getting caught. He can take what belongs to others, including not just their lives, but even the kingdom of a king. Everything depends on what is seen. What cannot be seen, what remains invisible, can only be explained by words, which are themselves invisible until someone writes them down. The most important words, the authoritative writings, are the laws, the rules, the customs and beliefs by which the citizens of the city, whether Athens or Sparta; the citizens of any country, any nation, whether Egypt or Persia, live together. The laws, to be obeyed, must not to be questioned. Socrates, we all remember, was put on trial and condemned to death on the accusation that he did not believe in the gods of Athens, that he did not believe what the city believed.

Gyges, according to Herodotus, was more than willing to believe what he had been told but, compelled to see the truth, could only live if he became himself the one who decided what everyone else would be told to believe. By telling us this, Herodotus forces us to at least begin to doubt what we have been told before, including, most importantly, what we thought about our own laws, our own way of life. Every nation, Herodotus tells us, thinks its customs best. Darius, at the time he ruled Persia, called together some Greeks to ask what they would take to eat their dead fathers. No price in the world, they replied. Then he asked some people who did eat their fathers what price to burn their dead fathers with fire. They were horror stricken. Herodotus does not make comparisons simply to demonstrate the difference in customs between nations; he makes them to compel us to take up the question of better and worse, a question that leads of necessity to the question of what is best, what is the standard by which to judge what is better and what is worse. Though it is not generally noted, Herodotus was a very careful writer, not just in what he wrote, but how he makes the reader forget while he is reading his own beliefs. He makes what is foreign seem familiar, and yet, at the same time, safe from view. He describes what he calls the “very wisest” custom of the Babylonians as if he were doing nothing more than what any playwright, any storyteller, might do, and in that way hide a profound critique of any city, any nation, that permits itself to become divided against itself, two cities instead of one, a city of the rich and a city of the poor.

Once a year in Babylon the girls who were ready for marriage were brought for auction, an auction that begins with the best-looking girl, the girl who will bring a “great price.” And then, following her, the next good-looking girl. “All the rich men of Babylon who were disposed to marriage outbid one another in buying beauties.” But what of those of “the lower classes who wanted to marry,” but could not afford to bid? The money collected from the auction of the desirable women was used to provide dowries for the girls no one wanted to take on her own. The poor took the “uglier girls, with money to boot.” With the cry of the auctioneer, “Who will take the least money to live with this one?” every man who wanted to marry found himself a bride. The rich got the women they wanted, and the poor got their money. Instead of two cities, Babylon stayed one. Until, that is, Babylon was conquered and in the “general ruin” the poor had no choice but to prostitute their daughters.

If it is always better that the city, the nation, remain one instead of two, the question is who should rule: what form of government has the best chance to keep the city, the nation, united. Herodotus reports a debate among the Persians in which Darius insisted that monarchy, the rule of the one best man, is always better. Oligarchy, or even aristocracy, the better kind of government by a few, always leads to faction, and faction always leads to murder, because everyone always wants to rule by himself alone. Athens, in its experience, gave a different answer. Under the rule of princes, that is to say, of tyrants, it was not better in war than any of her neighbors, but “rid of those princes, was far the first of all.” Herodotus explains: “When held in subjection they would not do their best, for they were working for a taskmaster, but, when freed, they sought to win, because each was trying to achieve for his very self.”

More than the question of monarchy or democracy, tyranny or freedom, it is the question of what we look up to, what give our lives meaning, how we understand the best way to live. There is for Herodotus a reason in things, a logos, that explains the movement in human history. “The Persian War will prove to be a surface phenomenon that has its basis in the principles and elements he discovered in the first few books,” explains Seth Benardete in his remarkable and too little read study, Herodotean Inquiries. The Egyptians and the Persians believed in different gods, and those beliefs determined who they were. “Hesiod and Homer, in giving the Greek gods their human shape, did more than just duplicate human beings. They radically separated human beings from all other living things and stamped them with a specific excellence. The gods thus imposed a standard which the Greeks could look up to, so that they could judge whether to respect or despise themselves. … The Egyptians…gave their gods, in so far as they had one, an animal shape. They made men look down rather than up, to reverence the subhuman rather than the human, only to despise and never to respect themselves.” The “gods of the Persians represent a more natural theology. The very supra-humanity of the Persian gods might have been that which proved fatal to the Persians.”

Xerxes crossed into Europe and “watched his army crossing under the lash. Seven days and seven nights did his army cross, and never a moment’s break.” He brought with him 1207 ships with 200 men per ship, or 241,400 men. The navy and the army together numbered 2,317610. Add to this the forces of some allies and the service train that went with them and the number totals 5,283,200. To feed them took no less than 1,100,340 bushels of wheat every day. And yet, despite all this, the war was lost at the sea battle of Salamis in which Athens “supplied by far the most ships and those that had the greatest speed.” Xerxes, as he promised, got to Athens, but he found nothing there. Themistocles and the Athenians had abandoned the land and the buldings and, in effect, taken the city to the sea. Afraid the Greeks would sail to the Hellespont and break down the bridge over which his army had crossed into Europe and which supplies the only return to Persia, Xerxes had no choice but to run away. The Athenians announced to the Spartans, when they were still afraid of what the Persians might do, that, “So you know now, if not before, that while a single Athenians survives we will not make terms with Xerxes.”

The Athenians were the saviors of Greece. “They chose that Greece should remain free…they stood their ground and withstood the invader when he came against their own country.” Themistocles, more than anyone, was responsible. While others thought only of their own, private, wealth, he had persuaded his fellow citizens that instead of distributing among themselves the money that came from the silver mines the city owned, they should spend the money to build 200 ships for war. Like that “very wisest” custom of the Babylonians, the Athenians understood that the city, the nation, has to act as one.

How much of what Herodotus has told us is true is for each of us to discover by a careful reading of a careful writer who after all that he has written leaves us with the reminder that, “I must tell what is said, but I am not at all bound to believe it, and this comment of mine holds about my whole History.” It is worth the effort to see for ourselves whether what we hear from Herodotus over the centuries is true.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Reid

Born in Scotland, Andrew Reid worked as a research scientist for almost a decade on projects including DNA synthesis, forensics, and drug development. He now teaches Science and lives in Stockholm with his wife, three children, and two cats.

Reid's new novel is The Survivor.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Reid's reply:

Virtual Light, by William Gibson

The first book in Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, Virtual Light is - at its heart - exactly the kind of plot you would anticipate in an early-90s thriller: a piece of extremely sophisticated technology falls into the hands of a humble but extremely hip bicycle courier. With her on the run, it’s up to a down-on-his luck detective to find her before a more powerful and distinctly less merciful rogue’s gallery of villains do. The meat of it, however, is so much more.

Gibson earned his place in the modern cultural canon with his 1984 debut, Neuromancer. A science fiction heist novel about an augmented-human hacker strong-armed into hacking an AI so powerful that just interfacing with it can kill you, the book remains a cornerstone of the cyberpunk genre. The Bridge Trilogy, which Virtual Light opens, feels like an attempt to shed some of the weight of expectation that might have come with that accolade. The scope is less broad; instead of a globe-trotting romp that showcases the glittering peaks, it is set in a shanty town district that has sprung up in the aftermath of an earthquake that devastates San Francisco.

I have been working through Gibson’s backlist over the past year or so, and I am always struck by how real his science fiction feels. He once professed in an interview that he was not interested in “capital-F future”, and there is always a sense that no matter how wild the concept or the technology might be, the shine has already worn off. The future is shabby, lipped with peeling electrical tape, the previous iterations already crumbling under the pressure of weeds reclaiming the land, benign folded down into the strata of the past.

Trickster Makes the World, by Lewis Hyde

For nonfiction, I have been reading Lewis Hyde’s work of comparative mythology focusing on the Trickster archetype across multiple cultures including stories from the Winnebago, Yoruba, Greek, and Norse legends. I picked the book up because it was in the recommended reading list of Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This - which I enjoyed a great deal - and the phenomena of recurring motifs in folklore appeals to me. It’s tempting to believe that there is something primal at work beneath the parallel of foolish Coyote breaking the bones of his ever-renewing cow and Loki snapping the leg of one of Thor’s goats, but Hyde arms the reader against it by threading a healthy dose of scepticism throughout. He is careful and thorough in accounting for how myths have been recorded, and have been changed with each recording, across generations. He makes no accusations, but it is easy to imagine how it would be tempting for a translator educated enough to have a passing knowledge of European mythology to use that as a framework to commit an oral tradition to a written record.

Mort Cinder, written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, illustrated by Alberto Breccia

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, written by Kanehito Yamada, illustrated by Tsukasa Abe

Mort Cinder is an Argentinian comic published between 1962 and 1964 about an immortal man who, whenever he dies, comes back to life; he has lived and witnessed a host of historical events - from the toppling of the Tower of Babel to the Battle of Thermopylae - and through the comic he recounts them to an antiques dealer he has met. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is an ongoing manga that follows a functionally immortal Elf who is retracing the path she took as part of a hero’s party, decades after the death of one of that party’s members.

Both the graphic novel and manga tread the same conceptual ground - interrogating the consequences of immortality - but move in opposite directions.

Mort Cinder as a character and a complete work reaches constantly for death; the art is stark, the panels filled with long slashes and pools of black ink that drag the eye relentlessly downwards. Living flesh is left white on the page, and Mort Cinder himself is gaunt, as though the endless cycle of rebirth has been nothing more than a curse. Death has refused him, so Mort stalks Death in turn. Untethered from time and humanity, the turn of the world seems insubstantial to him, and he becomes nothing more than a shade, waiting to be released.

Frieren, by comparison, is a celebration of life. Frieren, so long-lived that she exists in a state of ageless adolescence, is forced to mature by her interactions with the hero Himmel and his party, and - decades after Himmel’s death - must reckon with the realisation that she loved him. Bittersweet, certainly, but there is genuine joy to be found in Frieren’s nostalgic retreading of her hero’s journey: that to live in each moment, no matter how few or how many of them there are left, is what really matters.

Follow Andrew Reid on Instagram and Threads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.

Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. is an advocate, educator, author, and Kentucky Teacher of the Year. His work is focused on advocating for LGBTQ+ rights and creating inclusive spaces for students, especially within the context of Appalachia. He is the author of Tore All to Pieces, a fragmented novel about a small town in Appalachia and the interconnectedness of our identities, as well as Gay Poems for Red States, a bestselling collection of narrative poetry about his childhood growing up queer in Appalachia.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Carver's reply:

I was asked what I am reading. An easier question might be what I'm not reading, since I have a propensity for reading dozens of books at a time.

I just finished Needlework by Julia Watts. A gorgeous novel set in east Tennessee. What I love the most is that she doesn't shy away from the ugly and painful; in fact, she takes a second look. She allows ethics to articulate itself where things feel hopeless. She flings something nostalgic into the future.

Yesterday, I finished Mickie Kennedy's Worth Burning, a stunning poetry collection. That's another book unwilling to look away. But here, the focus isn't nostalgia or hope. It's the courage of witness.

I am halfway through Joshua Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed. It centers an indigenous two-spirit person who navigates a life following trauma, and there is a haunting that I recognize in it. A haunting in bodies.

I am also halfway through Bearwallow by Jeremy Jones. He traces a lot of things—story, place, ancestry. But he never gets lost in the past. He anchors us in the moment, but softly. Lets us see the shape he's feeling.

Lastly, I am finishing Dear Mothman by Robin Gow. What a tender collection! It centers the diary of a 6th grader with autism who has lost his best friend, a diary written to Mothman. Written for children, it reminds us that we all know the feeling of being someone's monster.

Visit Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.'s website.

Q&A with Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

My Book, The Movie: Tore All to Pieces.

The Page 69 Test: Tore All to Pieces.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ava Morgyn

Ava Morgyn is the USA Today bestselling author of The Bane Witch and The Witches of Bone Hill. She grew up falling in love with all the wrong characters in all the wrong stories, then studied English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University. She is a lover of witchcraft, tarot, and powerful women with bad reputations, and she currently resides in Houston surrounded by antiques and dog hair. When not at her laptop spinning darkly hypnotic tales, Morgyn writes for her blog on child loss (forloveofevelyn.com), hunts for vintage treasures, and reads the darkest books she can find.

She is the author of YA novels Resurrection Girls and The Salt in Our Blood.

Morgyn's new novel is Only Spell Deep.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m very much a mood reader, which means I don’t like to keep a towering TBR and tend to jump around a lot between genres. Though I pretty consistently read books with darker themes—so horror, Gothic literature, dark fantasy, thrillers, and the like.

I just finished books by two of my favorite authors. I devoured Play Nice by Rachel Harrison, a contemporary horror about an influencer who inherits her late mother’s old haunted house and tries to remodel it for views. It was a dark, winding adventure through childhood trauma, unreliable memories, attempts to control the narrative, grief, and the phenomenon of women not being believed. Highly recommend!

I also just turned the last page on Eve Chase’s The Midnight Hour—a beautiful mystery set in London’s Notting Hill that jumps between time periods and points of view as it unravels the secrets at the heart of one family’s legacy of love, betrayal, loss, and second chances. Eve’s prose is stunning and her stories are like intricate knots waiting to be untied. I treasure them.

Visit Ava Morgyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bane Witch.

Q&A with Ava Morgyn.

The Page 69 Test: Only Spell Deep.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lyla Lane

Sonia Hartl (AKA Lyla Lane) is the author of YA, romance, and cozy mysteries. Her books have received starred reviews from BookPage and Booklist, and earned nominations for the Georgia Peach Book Award, YALSA’s Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers, Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books of the Year, ALA’s Rise: A Feminist Book Project List, and ALA’s Rainbow Booklist, and was named an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Young Adult. When she’s not writing she enjoys board games with her family, attempting to keep her garden alive, or looking up craft projects she’ll never get around to completing on Pinterest.

Hartl/Lane's new novel is The Best Little Motel in Texas.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I just finished Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack, and I can say with certainty that this is going to be one of my favorite reads of the year. It was an epistolary novel about a sex worker who assassinates a right-wing politician known as Meat Neck. With one story told three different ways, depending on who the unreliable narrator was trying to persuade, this absolutely unhinged book was a delight from start to finish.

Visit Lyla Lane's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Best Little Motel in Texas.

Q&A with Lyla Lane.

The Page 69 Test: The Best Little Motel in Texas.

--Marshal Zeringue