Assaph Mehr's Blog

Malik is one of those authors whose works I’ll read on principal, knowing that they’ll be outstanding (see my reviews for Dragon’s Tail and The New Magic). This novel uses the same world as his previous ones, albeit at a different location and characters so it’s independent from the others. I’ve had the pleasure of reading an early ARC, and it did not disappoint.

Expect a portal-fantasy story of military forces from our world finding and exploring an alien world. There’s...

A few weeks ago I posted the below image across socials, which made the comments explode… In a good way. So here is some more fun stuff about historical fashions.

This was accompanied by my caption/addition of:

Yes, you’re going commando. There is no effing way I’m teaching you how to put on a loincloth.

Many people continued the theme in the comments, mainly on Threads. On Facebook, Eric Klein pointed out that if you have time travel you can live outsid...

Readers of my reviews and blog know I love Lumsden’s noir modern alt-history fantasy world.

A new adventure for Shade the Collector and his buddy Dwayne. This time a river spirit entrusts him with a coprolite (petrified excrement) to hide and guard. Naturally, the shadowy intelligence agency that employs him on occasion immediately gets him to find a matching piece — or else.

When follows is a small-town adventure, where nothing is quite what is seems on the surface a...

Mole Creek is not far from where I live, and as I enjoy Tasmanian crime fiction I thought I’d give this a try.

Expect a fast-paced thriller, taking place in modern day Australia and during the Vietnam War. Most of the novel is from the point of view of the protagonist, Xander McAuslan, a crime journalist, while some chapters are told from his grandfather’s days in 1970. When Xander refuses to accept that his grandfather has taken his own life, affairs grow increasingly o...

I’ve had this on my TBR for a while, and when it was recommended by The Rest Is History podcast I decided it was time.

A Rashomon-style story in 17th century England. A Venetian dilettante physician arrives in England nominally to address his father’s collapsing business concerns, but spends very little time on that. He goes on a trip to Oxford, where he gets involved with the local men of science, and treats an old lady whose daughter is then hanged for murder. 20 years...

I see variations of this floating around the net:

Funnsies aside, here’s an explanation of why authors find it hard to write blurbs for their own books (so you feel smarter) and what to do about it (so you can act smarter).

This comes down to a few cognitive biases. The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias where someone with a lot of knowledge about a subject finds it hard to place themselves in the position of those who don’t. We as autho...

Because who doesn’t need a bit of escapist fun on occasion?

Expect a light-hearted comedy, a satire about Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy role-playing games. A city guard finds himself accompanying a team of professional dungeon-clearing dwarves due to mistaken identity, and everyone gets a bit stressed when they find his an orphan (a prime attractor of unwanted destiny). The novel culminates with appropriate twists and turns in a big boss-fight against the evil n...

This came up as a random recommendation, and looked cute enough to try.

A modern day, hard-to-classify, fantasy tale about an apprentice magician and unusual circumstances. AS Raj is following various assignments towards graduation as a ‘mathemagician’, he runs further into all sorts of situations. At the same time, Eliza, a baby dragon, is finding her feet in the world under the care of an elderly woman.

Not urban fantasy, not magical realism, definitely not a parody...

This post originally appeared on Simon Williams newsletter. He writes dark fantasy, and we’ve hosted his characters on The Protagonist Speaks. Go check his work out!

Readers are often surprised that straight-up historical fiction requires “world-building,” a term most often associated with fantasy and science fiction. I mean, it’s just history, right? Don’t we know what happened, how our own world was at the time?

Well, not quite. Dependin...

Continuing my quest of reading Tasmanian crime fiction and mysteries.

Expect a psychological thriller set rural Tasmania, in a fictional village that feels true to real life. A husband comes home late at night to find the front door open and everything in place except his wife which seems to have gone inexplicably missing. The novel then goes back a week, where we get to know – and slowly change our minds – about the people of the novel. The story continues for ten days ...