Review: The Adversary’s Good News by Israfel Sivad
★★★★ 
The Adversary’s Good News Israfel Sivad is a surreal, philosophical novel about Christian Michael Anderson who decides to end his life. He’s got the noose ready and aims to go through with it until he has a change of heart at the last minute. Fortunately, he’s rescued from his attempt by a mysterious stranger named Evius, who informs him that he has, in fact, died.
This leads Christian on an odyssey through the underworld, where he meets gargoyles, demons, a drug-dealing Tinkerbell, but most of all begins to confront the demons within himself.
Sivad is an erudite and ingenious […]
The disconcerting tale of Kai by Derek Vasconi follows the harbored Satsuki Takamoto, a girl living through a downward spiral of social exclusion, universal envy and ever-deepening depression; in comparison, Seul Bi Rissiello – a resident of Evanston, Illinois – is caring for the mentally ill as she strives for meaning in her life after the brutal loss of her parents in gruesome circumstance. Although unaware of each others existences, both girls live a seemingly poetic tandem of suffering as an unexpected thread ties their tortures together.
Warning’s Wane by Jaclyn Little is an inventive and moving literary novel about a strange world where touching someone makes both people disappear. Paul Danniers and his wife, Colleen, move to the town of Praxia Island, off the coast of Maine, and finds the residents terrified of disappearing, and fearing each other. Warning’s Wane is a meditation on intimacy and alienation that’s at once shocking and cerebral.
Content warning for depictions of suicide and sexual abuse.
In the gated community of the financial elite that makes up the Commonwealth of Richford Isles, William Schoenhausen, a naïve teenage heir to the Bernhard Schoenhausen fortune and legacy, begins a new term at the prestigious Richtown University. Looking for a way to show himself as worthy, mostly through a cunning scheme of odds and academic adulation, his easy-street plans are quashed when the school’s most popular girl, Julia Rechstaadt, happens to enrol in the school’s least popular course, an enrollment chosen as key part of Will’s scheme of flattery.