THE FICTIONFOX

My Suspiciously Specific Series came into life as a way for me to explore and examine highly (often very specific) microtropes or trends I’ve been loving within my reading lately. A love for novels set in liminal spaces has been on the list of microtropes that I wanted to cover for a long time. Inspired by the trailer of a soon to be released movie, The Backrooms, that is soon to spark broader interest in the topic, I decided that today was the day to tackle this one. For tho

Genre: horror novella Published: Nictitating Books, March 1st 2026 My Rating: 4/5 stars “Humans are meat that dreams. Impulses of flesh within flesh, sinew and gristle, movement and longing, electric and chemical signals that create an experience called human.” There are a few tropes that I’d consider my “buzz-kill-words” in books. They are basically the opposite of buzz-words, meaning that if I hear your book contains one of these tropes, I will almost instantly lose interes

Genre: Sci-fi, adventure Published: Podium Publishing, May 26th 2026 My Rating: 2.5/5 stars What would you get if you mixed an Indiana-Jones-style plot with a female protagonist, Mesoamerican Shamanism and a liberal helping of hallucinogenic mushrooms? If you said “an intriguing premise for a novel”, then you and I were on the same page, which is exactly why I requested The Gatepost for early review. Unfortunately, this didn’t quite live up to my expectations, and I was left

Mermaids are a staple of folklore, and almost every culture historically has a variation on this half-human half-fish creature embedded in their mythology somewhere. As a lover of the ocean, bodies of water, and swimming myself, I've been equally fascinated with these creatures, but less so with their romanticized version in popular culture. Today (on the 12th of May) I bring you 12 recommendations for books featuring mermaids, where all of differ a little from your typical p