My grandfather was a clown prophet. I mean he was a clown. A literal clown. He wore clown makeup. And he foretold the end. Accurately. John, the Puranas, Snorri Sturluson, Nostradamus, any of those apocalypse writers—they didn’t know shit. The guy who really knew the magic, the guy who really knew about how the end of the world would come, was my grandfather.

In Folktales of Mexico, compiled by Américo Paredes (one of the founding fathers of Chicano studies in the U.S.), I read a story about a man who discovered that his wife was a monster. Any night the man was away, the wife stripped away her skin and flew through the air as a skeleton, terrorizing the people of the town and stealing infants to eat.

The last few summers here in Oregon have been pretty lousy. We’ve had wildfires, riots, threats against our governor’s life, and of course, a nightmarish heat dome that killed seventy people here in Portland. For those of us who once enjoyed summer for outdoor adventures, berry-picking, and Vitamin D production, summer has been transformed into a horror villain.

It’s Alive! by Julian David Stone is not a horror novel. It is indeed being published in the historical fiction category, appropriate enough because it does involve actual people and actual events. So why does Adam-Troy Castro think our readers will want to read it? Check out his review to find out!

Arctic temperatures are at a record high. Next year they will be even higher, and then even higher than that. Oh, friends, we shouldn’t panic; we can’t give in to despair, not when there’s work to be done. But sometimes we need to feel it. We need to shine a light into the hole and see how far down the bottom really is.