As we get a little further into 2025, indie presses appear to be ramping up their schedules. What’s in store for readers? If this list is any indication, everything from innovative short fiction to novels that revisit mythology, magic, and mad science. March and April of 2025 will see the release of everything from some highly-anticipated books from up-and-coming writers to cult classics that have something very relevant to say to contemporary SFF enthusiasts.
File Under: Secret Histories
Never underestimate the appeal of an irate trickster god. The narrator of Kurt Baumeister’s second novel, Twilight of the Gods, is none other than Loki—and it turns out he’s not thrilled with some of his fellow Norse deities cozying up to neo-Nazis. Cue the plots, whispered secrets, and ruminations on human history. (Stalking Horse Press; Mach 2025)
One is a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and comics; the other is the creator of Hellboy, among others. Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola teamed up for a new novella with the deeply unnerving title Father Gaetano’s Puppet Catechism, a story about the aftermath of war, the legacy of trauma, and some very creepy puppets. (Bad Hand Books; April 8, 2025)
You may well be familiar with Errick Nunnally’s name from his time as one of the editors of the acclaimed fanzine Journey Planet. With his new novel The Queen of Saturn and the Prince in Exile, Nunnally brings a different side of his knowledge of science fiction to the foreground, telling the story of a young science fiction enthusiast whose own family history might be traced to the stars. (CLASH Books; April 22, 2025)
There’s a lot going on in John Pistelli’s novel Major Arcana—and, as you might guess from both the title and the fact that one character is named Simon Magus, some of it involves magic. In interviews, Pistelli has spoken of the influence of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on this book, with some recent comic book history also in the mix. (Belt Publishing; April 22, 2025)
Ethan Rutherford is no stranger to tales of seafaring or the surreal, as this 2021 interview reveals. His new novel North Sun; Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther is about an ill-fated whaling expedition in 1878 that finds the crew of a ship traveling off the coast of Alaska becoming increasingly detached from the world they thought they knew. (Deep Vellum; March 11, 2025)
File Under: Miraculous Places
If you were following book-world debates earlier this year, you probably saw plenty of people talking about the role of book blurbs. There’s a good case to be made for their importance based on one of the quotes attached to Elizabeth Broadbent’s Blood Cypress—specifically, one from Clay McLeod Chapman that compares this book to Michael McDowell’s excellent Blackwater. Interest: piqued. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; April 3, 2025)
You may well have encountered an excerpt from Julia Elliott’s new collection Hellions in these very pages not so long ago. Elliott has a penchant for blending lived-in settings with big conceptual flexes; these stories continue in that tradition, covering everything from strange familial dynamics to magic’s effect on an art colony. (Tin House; April 15, 2025)
Set against the backdrop of a remote town in Ecuador, Natalia García Freire’s newly-translated novel A Carnival of Atrocities (translated by Victor Meadowcroft) is a tale of a community haunted by its past. That’s meant in the most literal sense; publisher World Editions promises “a series of strange events, disappearances, and outbursts of collective delirium.” (World Editions; April 1, 2025)
Summarizing Zoë Gadegbeku’s novel Blue Futures Break Open isn’t easy—it’s about an island where formerly enslaved Africans are reborn, and where the very landscape responds to violence in harrowing ways. A post-colonial riff on Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld books and Kevin Brockmeier’s The Secret History of the Dead, perhaps? Gadegbeku’s rundown of the books that informed this one is an especially intriguing list of influences. (West Virginia University Press; March 2025)
In 2018 at this very website, Liz Bourke called the title location of Melissa Scott’s Astreiant novels “a rich and atmospheric setting” and praised the series thus far. Scott’s new novel Point of Hearts: A Novel of Astreiant abounds with intrigue, plots and counter-plots, and a full immersion in a location both fantastical and familiar. (Queen of Swords Press; March 20, 2025)
File Under: Journeys Through Time and Space
If this column awarded a prize for the best title in each installment, Marcia Douglas would win this time out for The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: being dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs. As with Douglas’s other acclaimed work, this book juxtaposes past and present and pushes at the limits of literary formats as this narrative weaves itself through time and space. (New Directions; April 22, 2025)
Aurora Mattia’s fiction juxtaposes the personal and the mythic in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Her new collection Unsex Me Here reckons with supernatural histories and the birthplaces of gods, all the while pushing at the limits of language and form. (Nightboat; April 1, 2025)
Writer and artist Bette A. has many footholds in different creative disciplines and styles. (She’s also collaborated on a book with one Brian Eno.) The new collection The Killing of Arturo Venturi & Other Stories showcases her range as an author—and demonstrates that range’s ability to carry the reader into uncharted speculative territory. (Unnamed Press; April 1, 2025)
You may be most familiar with Patrick O’Leary through his prose, but that’s not the only literary form he’s used for science fiction over the years. His new collection Obviously I love you but if I were a bird shows off his poetic side, collecting some of his most notable poems written over the course of the last 50 years. (Fairwood Press; April 2025)
File Under: Remaking Bodies and Souls
The great Ted Chiang contributed a new introduction to this edition of J. D. Beresford’s novel The Hampdenshire Wonder. What’s it about? In this case, it’s about a superhuman child whose observations of—and detachment from—the rest of humanity lead to alarm and the collapse of his family. (MIT Press/Radium Age; March 4, 2025)
Do you enjoy your dystopian futures with a bit of body horror on the side? In Hon Lai Chu’s novel Mending Bodies (translated by Jacqueline Leung), the protagonist lives in a city that encourages its residents to become surgically conjoined with one another. Publishers Weekly called it “an unsettling fable about an extreme form of cohabitation.” (Two Lines Press; April 8, 2025)
Rebecca Fishow has been chronicling uncanny spaces for many years now: a review of her 2020 collection The Trouble With Language hailed its “juxtaposition of these almost-realities and surrealities.” Fishow’s new collection How to Love a Black Hole contains more strange transformations and unsettling journeys. (Conium Press; March 4, 2025)
Pedro Iniguez is a writer whose work encompasses multiple genres and literary forms, including speculative poetry. His new collection Fever Dreams of a Parasite, meanwhile, shows off his penchant for horror—including several stories that reckon with contemporary politics as well. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; March 13, 2025)
File Under: Someone Ominous Is Watching
Full disclosure: I’ve spent time on the road on a book tour with duncan b. barlow, so I’m not entirely objective when it comes to his work. But given that his fiction has included surreal genetic experiments and uncanny children, it certainly seems to be in this column’s remit. Awry is his latest collection, encompassing multiple windows into uncanny alienation. (Bridge Eight; April 2025)
There’s a long history of satirical science and speculative fiction, and that’s the tradition that Bobby Miller’s novel Situation Nowhere situates itself. Among the elements at play here are an extreme version of being ostracized, a secret society, and an energy drink with literally explosive side effects. (Maudlin House; March 2025)
If you’re of a certain age, the title of 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era may well summon up memories of Dave Kendall guiding viewers through a host of early-90s cult bands. Editor Nick Mamatas has assembled a new anthology that draws on this moment, and features contributions from the likes of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paul Tremblay, and Josh Malerman. (Ruadán Books; March 2025)
File Under: Things Get Liminal
In Roisin Dunnett’s new novel, characters in the past, present, and future wrestle with surreal visitations, violent acts, and—in one case—the literal end of the world. A Line You Have Traced is an ambitious book with plenty to say about history, community, and the ties that bind. (Feminist Press; April 15, 2025)
In a recent post on social media, Jamey Gallagher described his new collection American Animism as “[a]bout 30% weird/magical realist, about 48% percent realistic, character-driven stuff, about 12% crime/grit, and about 10% something else.” Also, it sounds like cryptids are in the mix as well, which is never a bad thing. (Cornerstone Press; March 2025)
Commas can go a long way, an adage bolstered by the title of Jeanette Horn’s new book Play, With Knives. It’s appropriate for a novel about a traveling theatrical troupe where the lines between reality and imagination start to blur and characters from one writer’s work begin to make their way into the real world. (Regal House; March 4, 2025)
“I wanted to create an uncanny atmosphere, kind of like a modern tale. In many ways, I think tales are the purest form of horror.” That’s what Meghan Lamb had to say when asked about her new collection Mirror Translation. Lamb’s work often makes the familiar feel uncanny, a quality that meshes well with the ways in which this new book delves even further into the strange and fantastical. (Blamage Books; March 15, 2025)
File Under: The Return of Mad Science
When mathematician Eric Temple Bell wasn’t writing nonfiction under his given name, he was exploring the world of science fiction under the pseudonym of John Taine. A new edition of Taine’s novel The Greatest Adventure revisits this tale of genetic engineering gone overboard in Antarctica; S.L. Huang wrote the introduction. (MIT Press/Radium Age; March 4, 2025)
Aleksey Tolstoy occupies an interesting place in the history of global science fiction, including several books that were the basis for popular films in the Soviet Union. (Though it’s also worth mentioning that George Orwell was not a fan.) This new edition of George Hanna’s translation of The Garin Death Ray might well bring Tolstoy’s tale of mad science and deadly weapons to a new readership. (Tough Poets Press; March 1, 2025)
