14 more sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books to check out this October

As I noted last week, October is packed with books, including some of the ones that I've been really looking forward to this year. One of the books on the list is Joe Hill's King Sorrow, which I've been engrossed in: it's a really fun romp about promises, murder, and one particularly cunning dragon.

I'll also throw in a plug for an event that I'm helping to run in Burlington this weekend: The Green Mountain Book Festival, which'll feature John Scalzi as our headliner and an excellent lineup of local SF/F authors: Craig Alanson (Expeditionary Force), William Alexander (Sunward), M.T. Anderson (Nicked), Emily Hamilton (The Stars Too Fondly), Margot Harrison (The Midnight Club), Mike Luoma (The Star Seeds of Earth), and Brian Staveley (Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne), and myself!

I'll be interviewing Scalzi at 7:00PM at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. If you're in the area, you should come!

Green Mountain Book Festival 2025

Join me in Burlington to talk about science fiction with John Scalzi!

Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak

In case you missed it, here's the first October book list, and as always, you can check out the other book lists here.

Okay, here are 14 new SF/F books hitting stores this week and next:

Extremity by Nicholas Binge (October 14th)

In the nearish future, a detective comes out of retirement to investigate the murder if a billionaire she once worked with, only to find that there’s two identical bodies. She works to track down the killer, who’s been going after London’s elite and finds a secret world of secrets about the future and stumbles on a strange time travel conspiracy that could spell the end of humanity.

Writing for SFF World, Mark Yon says that Extremity "manages to make you feel for these characters very quickly and ground the SF stuff into something that feels quite ordinary. As a result, I think that it’s another book that might persuade those who don’t normally read SF to do so."

Red Rising (Deluxe Slipcase Edition) by Pierce Brown (October 14th)

Pierce Brown's Red Rising is one of those recent classics that I've heard a lot about, but I've never gotten around to picking it up, despite the hype. That might change with a new edition: it's getting the deluxe slipcase treatment, with new covers, a slipcase, a fold-out poster, and full-color illustrated endpapers with a new map.

The novel is about Darrow, a member of Mars' lowest population caste, the Reds, and he and his family believe that they're hard at work making the planet survivable for humans. But he soon learns they've been betrayed, and he works to infiltrate the Institute, where the planet's elite fight for power.

Sprayed edges, special covers, and ribbons: limited book editions are on the rise

Publishers are increasingly turning to special features, like sprayed edges and special editions to entice readers in a social media age

Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (October 14th)

The city of Tiliard is carved into an ancient tree, where the wealthy live in the heights of the canopy, while exterminators search for a mythical giant worm that is said to have an appetite for beauty. Guy Moulène has a singular goal: keep his sister out of debt, and to that end, he's willing to take on any job, including as an exterminator. He's now after a massive, dangerous centipede, and as it consumes beauty, it's reshaping Tiliard.

Local Heavens by K. M. Fajardo (October 14th)

K.M. Fajardo retells The Great Gatsby a couple of decades in the future. Nick Carraway has just moved to New York City in a fractured America, where he finds a nation that's fragmented along class lines. When he meets Jay Gatsby, he falls for his charisma, even through in this brave new world, there's plenty of secrets in the tech-enhanced bodies of the ultra-rich.

Publishers Weekly says "Fajardo expertly transfers the themes of exploitative capitalism, mysterious and possibly illegal wealth, and complicated desires haunted by loss and queerness to a dystopian setting. The result is an evocative and powerful reworking of an American classic."

King Sorrow by Joe Hill (October 21st)

I've been a huge fan of Joe Hill's novels, from Horns to NOS4A2, to The Fireman, and his collections of shorter works, like 20th Century Ghosts and Full Throttle. He's back with his first novel in a number of years, King Sorrow, and I've really been enjoying it so far.

It follows Arthur Oakes and his friends. When a local drug dealer and her partner threatens his imprisoned mother, he begins stealing books from the Rackham College's rare books collections to pay off a debt. To try and escape, he and his friends make a daring move: they summon a dragon through a spell they find in a journal bound with human skin, and get it to do their bidding. But King Sorrow is a proper dragon and deals with dragons aren't to be undertaken lightly.

Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, saying "There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls...at turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood."

When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-yi Lee (October 21st)

In 1972 in Singapore, a group of Chinese criminals some of the last connections to their ancestors gods, practicing their magic in the shadows and out of sight of the modern world.

A schoolgirl named Adeline Siow has powers of her own: she can create fire from her fingertips, and when her mother is killed in a housefire and she finds the symbol of a butterfly burned into her skin, she begins to track down those responsible, finding an underworld of magic and that her mother had a connection to it.

With her mother now dead, Adeline is the last living connection to a goddess, and she becomes entangled in the ensuing power struggle and with one of the gang's members, Ang Tian.

Chris Kluwe, writing in Lightspeed Magazine, says "The writing is exquisite, the pacing is near perfect, and the slow burn of Adeline’s discovery of herself, as well as the uncovering of the various mysteries surrounding her mother lead to the nearly impossible task of trying to put the book down instead of reading one more chapter."

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu (October 14th)

It's been a while since we've gotten a Ken Liu novel, and I'm really excited for this one. It follows Julia Z, a young woman who became known as the "orphan hacker" and who has tried to keep a low profile in Boston. Her life is upended when she decides to come to the aid of a lawyer named Piers after his wife Elli is kidnapped.

Elli is an artist who specializes in working with dreams in a shared virtual reality space, and happened to connect to the head of a criminal organization, and he's demanding the return of his dreams before she's returned.

Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, saying "Liu has a rare ability to flesh out sci-fi concepts—like Elli’s dream art and Julia’s talent for AI communication—with just a few words, and his pacing is pitch-perfect."

Red City by Marie Lu (October 14th)

The world's criminal organizations have harnessed the power of alchemy into a drug that they can market to the world's elites, who use it to create more perfect versions of themselves.

The world's two criminal syndicates, the Grand Central and the Lumines, have managed to exist in a delicate balance, a balance that's upended when two friends find themselves in the middle of the trouble. Sam has been working for years to work her way up the ranks in Grand Central to get out of poverty, while Ari was taken as a boy to become a Lumines apprentice and has a promising future there. The two are now facing off in a growing conflict that threatens to transform the world.

Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, saying that it's "both heartbreaking and action-packed: an immense achievement."

Beings by Ilana Masad (September 23rd)

Ilana Masad takes inspiration from one of the first UFO abduction incidents in the US: in 1961, an interracial couple were driving through New Hampshire when they believed that they were taken by aliens. Masad takes us through the aftermath through three stories: through the couple, through the letters of a science fiction writer named Phyliss and in the modern day with an archivist who's trying to figure out an experience from their childhood, while obsessing over other abduction stories.

In the years that follows, Phyliss tries to figure out her identity and sexuality, the couple tries to keep track of the narrative of the story they've unleashed, and the archivist tries to figure out the truth between them.

Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, saying "Masad makes this dense braid of stories easy to follow, elegantly blending serpentine sentences, endearing and intimately observed characters, natural dialogue, and playful, generous asides to keep the reader in enthralled suspense."

As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories edited by Terese Mason Pierre (October 14th)

Terese Mason Pierre brings together this new anthology of short fiction that showcases Canada's Black writers. It's got a great TOC that includes Trynne Delaney, francesca ekwuyasi, Whitney French, Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Chimedum Ohaegbu, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Chinelo Onwualu, Lue Palmer, Terese Mason Pierre, and Zalika Reid-Benta, who recount stories about newly-discovered families, memories, safety, and one's perceptions of reality. It looks like a great way to catch up on some great authors.

Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce (October 21st)

In the Reconstruction after the American Civil War, Phee St. Margaret has been raised by a family of Black business owners in New Charleston. Phee is desperate to escape from her family's coddling and over-mothering to pick her own direction in life.

When an estranged relative passes away, Phee decides to step up and take over the role of pomp for the family: the rite of planning her funeral service. When she travels to her late aunt's home, she finds that there are plenty of secrets lurking below the surface.

Library Journal gave the book a starred review, saying that "this Southern gothic historical fantasy is a coming-of-age story set in the magical, semi-mythical towns of New Charleston and Horizon, amid a post-Reconstruction free Black social order that will delight readers of Leslye Penelope, Nekesa Afia, and C. L. Polk."

Dracula (Penguin Speculative Fiction Special) by Bram Stoker (October 14th)

Just in time for Halloween: Penguin Classics is adding some vampire novels to its Clothbound Classics lineup (it's joined by The Vampyre and Carmilla by John Polidori and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez). There are a whole bunch of editions of this out there, but this looks like a really handsome one. This edition of Dracula comes with a foreword by noted film director Robert Eggers.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Deluxe Edition by Matthew Stover (October 14th)

One of the best novels in the Star Wars EU was Matthew Stover's novelization of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Stover is an astonishingly good author, and this is a book that has no right to be as good as it is. This year marked the 20th anniversary of the film's release, and to celebrate, we're getting a deluxe edition, with some fancy endpapers, sprayed edges, ~170 annotations from Stover, and a neat slipcase.

Black Hole Heart by K.A. Teryna and translated by Alex Shvartsman (October 14th)

Teryna is an author for Russia, and this collection brings together her stories that've been appearing in places like Reactor, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and more. It looks like a really fascinating read.

That's it for today, thanks for reading!