Max is an immortal witch. Literally, she keeps dying and something always brings her back. It is a fact she keeps from most people she knows, as trauma has shown her most people don’t handle coming back from the dead very well. Yet she and her best friend Striker have stuck together, especially at her tattoo parlor. One day a rather disgusting man comes in with his heavily pregnant wife and as the two of them conspire to get her away from him, the man turns out to be less than human. Which comes as a surprise, because Max didn’t notice. Protecting the pregnant girl is the name of the game, as Max finds herself the newest target of this demon’s attention.

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Cat Caliban has decided to start a new career after her children have grown and become parents. As an independent woman who had never had the opportunity to be so independent because of the times she lived in, she decides to go for detective work. Because that’s the sort of book she likes to read! While studying up for it, a crime happens in the apartment complex she owns and she has her very own murder case on her hands. However, it is less a matter of her wanting to prove herself (though it is true she does) and more of how the police aren’t putting enough manpower into solving the crime of a old homeless woman.

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Sam Ballard returns to his hometown after the change of the guard in Washington DC, only for the world to fall apart. After hooking up with his one time hookup Jules after his return to his small town, all technology fails to work in the morning and no one knows what is going on. Instead of doing anything about it, Sam and Jules want to have sex and drink wine. Only the world around moving on drags Sam around to try to figure out anything that is going on.

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Miranda lives on Gale, where those in charge demand everyone to be the same and to only be allowed the same amount of resources. Miranda is not the same: she suffers from seizures, which aren’t on the approved list of illnesses to be treated, and she has started having visions. In a short amount of time, she begins to learn why her world is how it is and what the truth of the dragon is from her visions.

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Jayce is a homeless man with a beast inside of him, quite literally. A monster he calls wolf, who keeps him solitary from other people and barely making it day to day. Elsewhere, in a nursing home, a man named Max is looking for Jayce. Or for a way out of his prison, which he thinks he will manage if the son he has never met finds him something he wants.

Brian Cave’s Old School Evil takes a while to get going, but after it gets there it is a wildly fun ride. It exists as a love story to 80s cartoons and it succeeds in that regard. The old supervillains are old, bodies wasting away as they managed to live so long. And their children have suffered, if not directly, than indirectly from the crimes of their fathers’ pasts. It is both realistic and not at the same time.

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Tavia and Effie are not-blood-sister-sisters. Tavia is a siren, who must keep the fact she is a siren under wraps. Effie is not a siren, but is plagued by events which happened when she was nine, the loss of her mother, and currently lives with Tavia as they go to high school together. While Tavia is trying to figure out how to permanently silence her voice so as to stop fearing what will happen if people find out about her, Effie is struggling with not knowing who she is and her fear that the events of her past will happen again. Together they fight for themselves and each other.

I really loved this story. Certainly a lot of the magical influences were straight up one-to-ones for racism and sexism, but as all of this is still ever present, it’s certainly a subject that needs pushing in our literature.

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Keiichiro Hirano’s A Man follows the story of the deceased Taniguchi Daisuke – who was never Taniguchi Daisuke. His wife, Rie, discovers after his death that the man she married is not the man he claimed to be. She asks the help of an attorney, Kido Akira, in discovering who her husband actually was. Kido goes on an investigation to discover who Rie’s husband was, what happened to the real Taniguchi, and why a man would pretend to be another.

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Josephine Tey’s story is about a man in the hospital. Except no, it isn’t really about that. It is about his fight against boredom. His solving the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, about learning who Richard the Third actually was and why he has become synonymous with “monster”.

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