Books Indie Press Spotlight Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for January and February 2025 This season’s indie press titles include ambitious looks at consciousness and intelligence along with memorable trips into literary history. By Tobias Carroll | Published on January 24, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share This might go without saying, but: when it comes to speculative fiction books on indie presses, 2025 is off to a weird start. That’s the good kind of weird, though, as opposed to the less-than-enticing versions on display elsewhere in the world. January and February bring ambitious looks at consciousness and intelligence along with memorable trips into literary history. Here’s a look at some of the highlights from what independent presses have in store for us to ring in 2025—and some of the unexpected journeys these books might take you on.  File Under: Intelligence, Artificial and Otherwise Writer Deni Ellis Béchard has earned praise for his fiction and nonfiction alike—as well as work that draws upon his experience with both. In his latest novel, though, he takes readers into the speculative. We Are Dreams In the Eternal Machine tells the story of a technological intelligence attempting to reduce human conflict in the wake of a civil war, and the ramifications it has for the planet as a whole. A recent review in Necessary Fiction notes that this novel “confronts the infinite—and often incomprehensible—aspects of human life.” (Milkweed Editions; January 2025) We’re currently seeing a boom in the number of works by the late Italian author Dino Buzzati being made available in translation. That includes the acclaimed and head-spinning novel The Singularity, released last year. This year brings with it a career-spanning collection of short fiction: The Bewitched Bourgeois (translated by Lawrence Venuti), which covers an array of his work and includes a surreal encounter between Albert Einstein and the personification of Death. (NYRB Classics; Jan. 7, 2025) The late Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet is best known for his work as an archaeologist, but he also engaged in some memorable forays into fiction. The gloriously-titled The Virtuoso Parrot and Other Stories—translated by Doug Skinner—includes what the publisher describes as “odd short stories” touching on everything from mysterious societies to surreal languages.  (Black Scat Books; Jan. 9, 2025) Upon its publication in the U.K. in 2024, The Guardian’s Toby Litt called Sam Mills’s novel The Watermark “virtuosic” and made a comparison between it and Doctor Who. The plot involves a frustrated writer who traps two people in a series of stalled manuscripts, with all of the genre components that that implies. (Melville House; Feb. 11, 2025) Ambitious writers throughout the years have sought to chronicle the inner workings of consciousness under duress. With her new novella 12 Hours, L. Marie Wood applies this approach under harrowing circumstances. Wood’s novel follows the aftermath of an unsettling accident and the tactile and metaphysical dimensions that follow. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; Jan. 11, 2025) File Under: Religions and Deities It’s not a frequent occurrence, but some writers have drawn on the Abrahamic religions to inspire their works of fantasy. (See also: James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah; Geoff Ryman’s HIM.)An earlier entry in that same subgenre is now appearing in English translation for the first time: José Maria de Eça de Queirós’s Adam and Eve in Paradise, translated by. Margaret Jull Costa. Think of the Book of Genesis, but with Neanderthals and dinosaurs, and you’ll have the general idea. (New Directions; Feb. 4, 2025) Across his long career, Steve Stern has delved in and out of realism and the supernatural—his 2010 novel The Frozen Rabbi is one especially memorable example of this. This year sees the publication of his new novel A Fool’s Kabbalah, which blends real-world horrors with forays into the absurd and mystic. (Melville House; Feb. 18, 2025) The idea of ancient deities returning to the modern world offers writers a rich vein of literary possibility, and it’s in this mode that Sophia Terazawa spans past and present in Tetra Nova. If the idea of an obscure goddess reinventing herself as an assassin, and then again as a performance artist, doesn’t pique your interest, I’m not sure what to say. (A Strange Object; Feb. 4, 2025) File Under: Mysteries and Vengeance In an interview last year with Nightmare, V. Castro said that her story collections “showcase the strange brain I have been given.” The latest of those is The Pink Agave Motel, a collection that encompasses everything from unlikely murder investigations to extraterrestrials discovering beguiling ways to conceal themselves on Earth.  (CLASH Books; Feb. 11, 2025) It’s not surprising that writers have used genre conventions as the settings for their work. (Nick Mamatas’s I Am Providence is one notable example.) In their new novel Strange Stones, Edward Lee and Mary SanGiovanni uses one such gathering as the initial setting, telling the story of a horror scholar transported into a Lovecraftian universe by an irate witch. (CLASH Books; Jan. 22, 2025) I tend to shy away from quoting the publisher’s descriptions in this column, but I can’t quite resist what Ghoulish has to say about Jeremy C. Shipp’s new book Familiar. They describe the book as “What if Junji Ito had made Little Women?”—and, look, as someone who has images of Ito’s Uzumaki permanently embedded in his brain, I’m very intrigued by how that narrative combination plays out. (Ghoulish; January 2025) File Under: Communities and Societies Set in a near-future New York City, Amy DeBellis’s novel All Our Tomorrows follows a trio of women as each of them attempts to live a stable life in a world that’s rapidly accelerating towards chaos. In a recent interview, DeBellis spoke about the unlikely inspiration for the book and the way that recent events have shaped it. (CLASH Books; Feb. 25, 2025) In her new book Station in the Sky, Caye Marsh follows up on her earlier novella Peace in the Sky with a very different story tracing the history of that book’s protagonist and the society she calls home. It’s an ambitious work, one that both follows a community over an extended span of time and is also a murder mystery of a kind.  (Space Wizard; February 2025) Shirley Jackson Award nominee Tim McGregor returns with a story set in the Orkney Islands at the end of the 18th century. The protagonist of Eynhallow is a restless woman frustrated by the circumstances that have left her isolated there—and whose path soon intersects with that of, shall we say, a modern Prometheus. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; Feb. 15, 2025) Acclaimed writer (and Reactor contributor) Nisi Shawl returns with a new novel-in-stories titled Making Amends that’s been twenty years in the making. Aqueduct Press publisher Timmi Duchamp explained that this novel—about the creation of “an interstellar penal colony”—emerged out of Shawl’s story in the anthology So Long Been Dreaming. That anthology’s co-editor, Nalo Hopkinson, contributed the introduction here.  (Aqueduct Press; January 2025) File Under: Reshaping Reality Over the course of his long career, Robert Bloch left a substantial impact on the world of horror fiction. This year, Valancourt is releasing a new edition of his collection Pleasant Dreams; the presence of a new introduction by the great Joe R. Lansdale is a welcome addition. This features several uncanny tales set in malleable realities, focusing on strange rites and unsettling pursuits. (Valancourt Books; February 2025) The late Joel Lane wrote about alienation better than nearly any other writer I can think of. Sometimes that alienation was due to artistic pursuits or the legacy of trauma; at others, that alienation was due to the uncanny or horrific. The Terrible Changes is the latest of his books to be reissued; it covers decades’ of his disquieting, surreal works—and may well draw the interest of a new generation of readers. (Influx Press; Feb. 27, 2025) Listening to great music can feel like the world is changing shape. But what if music actually could alter the world? That’s the concept at the heart of Jessica Sequeira’s Jazz of the Affections. In a 2022 interview, Sequeria called it “a narrative but also a semi-theoretical text”—an intriguing description for sure. (Sublunary Editions; Jan. 28, 2025) [end-mark] The post Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for January and February 2025 appeared first on Reactor.