The Crossed Keys Chronicle

As I've mentioned in past reviews, I'm really not into actual horror or very disturbing types of novels, but especially around this time of year I do like a little bit of spooky or atmospheric creepiness in my books. I had heard a lot of advance praise for Solace House by Will Maclean going into this spooky season, so I had some high hopes, and I'll spoil the suspense here: I really loved it.

Our story begins in 1993 England, where Alex Lane has just finished his term at university and while his wealthy friends are spending their summer going on exotic trips, he has left his summer plans utterly and completely open. He doesn't have enough money to actually move off campus, but the school isn't keen on students living there during the summer. After meeting with someone with the school, he learns of an exciting summer opportunity to help clear out a potential future university housing building, where not only will he get a place to stay for the summer, he'll make a good amount of money in the process.

Alex quickly arrives at the Marshlands property and meets up with a ragtag bunch of other students who have been working on clearing the building for a short while already. After a week or so, the plan for the summer changes as the group's mission changes targets to the extremely spooky Victorian mansion adjacent to the property, known as Solace House. The mansion is going up for sale and the university has an interest in it after the death of its reclusive owner, Edwin Flayne. The mansion is stuffed full of decades upon decades of newspapers, books and ephemera stacked from floor to ceiling. As the students work through cleaning the house, they uncover more and more about the creepy life that Edwin lived and why even after his death, the house and its surroundings have secrets to be discovered.

As I started with, I really loved this book. Maclean gives the story a lot of room to breathe, and we get a great sense of the main characters and their motivations. Just the setting alone gives the story a general background level of unsettledness that the reader always feels in the back of their mind. I could often picture in my mind how creepy some of the settings in the book would be in real life, or even your typical A24 horror movie.

The main mystery in the story centers on Edwin Flayne and his lifelong obsession with performing a ritual he believed would allow him complete mastery over time, and in turn enperpetuate himself and the mansion, which as an aside is an amazing neologism. He detailed his manifesto and explanations for how to accomplish this in a giant set of journals that the students find in the mansion. One thing I really loved, which is only a minor spoiler, was the incorporation of acrostic poems into the story. In fact, towards the end of the book we even get nested acrostic poems! Which I have to say is a really fun idea and now I want all my spooky found poetry stories to feature it.

Even though the novel is just three pages shy of five hundred, it's the rare long book that I really wanted even more of. The pacing was perfect for a good slow burn spooky story, but it never felt plodding. I personally would have liked the last section of the book to flesh out its ideas even more, but alas, as they say, always leave them wanting more. Despite the fact that the calendar says the official end of spooky season is upon us, I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a great atmospheric read and I look forward to whatever Maclean comes out with next.

There is a certain trope of sci-fi novels that never ceases to hook me into a book, and that's the one with lots of very odd and exotic proper nouns. The novel All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu had so many of them in the first few pages—cephaloscripts, neuromesh, egolets, just to name a few—that I had a pretty good idea that I was going to enjoy this novel.

In this book we follow Julia Z, who is a very experienced hacker in near-future Boston. She is approached by Piers Neri, who is looking for help finding his missing wife, Elli, who he, at least initially, believes has been kidnapped. His wife is a moderately famous oneirofex, another amazing proper noun by the way, which in the book universe is a person who facilitates group dream sessions that are mediated and augmented by personal AIs. Julia declines to help Piers initially, but her own AI, named Talos, lets her know that she might be in danger due to the group of henchmen that tracked Piers to her place. Julia then engages in some great spycraft to leave her apt undetected and eventually meet up with Piers to help him in his search. From there we learn a lot more about the fascinating world of the vivid dreamers that Elli was a part of and try to figure out where she might be.

Beyond just really enjoying the near-future world building that Liu accomplishes, I really enjoyed the story as well. From the first page of the book, the reader is aware that Elli hasn't been kidnapped and instead went on the run for her own purposes, so it's interesting to see how the characters eventually come to terms with that reality and how it impacts them. I think Liu also made a few bold choices. While I wouldn't call it a twist, around sixty percent of the way through the book there is a big plot turn that I wasn't expecting from this kind of book.

We also learn a lot about the backstory of Julia Z, and she herself is a very interesting character. Daughter of an immigrant whose mother became a very vocal and outspoken activist, which caused Julia to have a tumultuous childhood. She eventually ended up living on her own in a number of bad situations before getting involved with a radical hacking group, which is where she learned so much of her tradecraft. Beyond just being interesting background on her character for the book, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler due to the way Amazon even catalogs the book, but it seems like there will be future books with this protagonist as the lead.

If you are looking for a light techno-thriller set in a world that isn't too different from our own, I would highly recommend All That We See or Seem. Don't let all the neologisms scare you off from a well crafted and well told story. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, which is currently scheduled for release in the Spring of 2027.

Even though we are still a few weeks away from the crowning of the 2026 Booker Prize winner, time keeps marching onward. Thanks to a recent TikTok, I discovered that the list of books that are eligible for consideration for the 2027 international version of the prize has been compiled by an industrious book influencer, which I’ll link here. In 2027 the award will actually be renamed the Bukhman International Booker Prize. The influencer is going to make an effort to catalog their reading of most or all of the possible books. I absolutely am not committing to anything like that, but it will be interesting to see how many of them entice me to try them out between now and next year. In going through the list I did realize that I had already read one of the eligible books, so consider this your first Booker Prize 2027 related review!

The book in question is If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, which is a collection of science fiction short stories by an apparently world-famous South Korean author named Kim Choyeop and translated by Anton Hur. Historically I’m a much bigger fan of the idea of short story collections than I am of the actual short story collections themselves. Typically if I enjoy a single story out of a collection I consider that a decent collection, but I can say this collection easily passes that bar. Of the seven stories, there was really only one that I didn’t care for at all, and all the rest I thought were pretty good to even great. While I wouldn’t dispute that the stories fall under the science fiction banner, I wouldn’t call Choyeop’s writing anything like hard sci-fi or even cyberpunk. Her style and approach are very much more grounded and would even be more along the lines of speculative fiction in a lot of cases.

The first of the short stories in the collection was by far my favorite by virtue of the big swing it takes as its premise. “Symbiosis Theory” opens with a short passage about Ludmilla Markov, who was a world-famous artist whose work consisted of art drawn from memories of places she’d never been to before. We then cut to the Institute for Neurointerpretation where scientists, through a set of experiments, have made a startling discovery about human development. They have found that as babies and up through around age seven, all humans have a mental symbiont that is an alien consciousness that they dub the “Them”. They further find that it’s that alien component that is vital for teaching humans such concepts as morality, ethics and altruism, the very foundation of humanity. The presence of the symbiont then disappears around the time that humans typically start to develop strong personal memories of self. The scientists struggle with whether or not they should even release these findings to the world, but they eventually realize that the fantastical art and world that Ludmilla had described in her works were actually the real memories of the homeworld of the aliens themselves. The story ends with the understanding that, out of all of humanity, she was the only person who had ever been able to sense them directly and was able to get them to not leave her consciousness as she aged, thus she never had to feel alone. A very touching and poignant end to such a high-concept story idea.

The other story I really enjoyed was “Spectrum”. The narrator retells the story of their grandmother, who was a deep-space explorer who had been missing for over 40 years. During her lost time, she crash-landed on an alien world where she was befriended by some of the intelligent life there, most particularly an individual by the name of “Louey”. While they were never able to communicate directly with one another, Louey became her protector and they lived for some time together on the alien world. Eventually the narrator’s grandmother (named Heejin) discovered that the aliens are very short-lived, only three to five years on average. But what she also learned is that they seem to maintain some continuity of self through a set of written papers that they store and maintain. They were sets of papers that, after many years, Heejin was finally able to look at, but was never able to fully understand because much of it was written in colors that human visual systems weren’t able to interpret. In the end, the fifth and final Louey she knew was killed in an animal attack, and she was able to find her crashed ship and eventually escape. Heejin then spent another decade alone in space before finally signaling for help in order to hide the location of the alien planet from humans. She knew that while on her own she was welcomed as a friend, the next time humanity would encounter that race, they would do so from a position of power and it probably would not end well for them sadly.

If you are looking for a quick sci-fi read, I think this is a good choice for you. The entire book clocks in around 186 pages, and each individual story rarely gets above 30 or 40 pages, so it’s easy to dip in and out of as you have the time. Based on my experience with the 2026 Booker shortlist, I absolutely don’t think this book will make it due to its actually being relatively upbeat and positive, but maybe positivity can reign over the translated works version this coming year.