Two Non-Romance Novels to Read This Month

by MK French

With Valentine's Day being this month we are usually inundated with romance novels. But not everyone is into that genre so today I'm featuring a couple of books for those not wanting to read romance. The first one is a horror novel in the vein of Lovecraft and the second one is a horror-tinged space adventure.

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Bogganmor by Mark N. Drake

February 2025; Indie; 979-8309029815
ebook, print (279 pages); horror

Jack Glennison visits his alma mater, where his current paramour is working and he has some shameful memories of past youthful shenanigans. He still has no memory of the events that led to his expulsion, but apparently, the librarian who had resigned might have taken a book out of the special collections and blamed it on Jack and his friend. He apparently had gone to Darkisle, and the book itself is a draw to the same people Jack had dealt with before.

This is the fifth Darkisle novel, following The Gathering of Shadows, Those Under the Hill, What Festers Within, and Falls the Darkness. Even if you haven't read the prior Darkisle novels, just know that oddities abound on the small insular island of Darkisle. It's located off the coast of England, with a single steamer connecting the two. Jack Glennison is a private investigator repeatedly drawn back to the island to investigate the odd occurrences, which often brings with it cosmic horror and creatures that see humans as bait or food.

The beginning of the novel proceeds slowly, setting up the importance of the Book of Shadows before sending Jack and Josine back to Darkisle. They aren't the only ones looking for Arthur Grainger and the book, and murder complicates the acquisition. Local history and the legend of the Bogganmor come up, so the second half of the book is an investigation as to the murder, and the concern for the monster in the moor. The story proceeds swiftly, and we get to see some of the prior characters of Darkisle. The murder mystery is tied to the book and the cults that still live on the island. Everyone has an ulterior motive here, so it's repeated rounds of questioning to get to the truth. I liked seeing how Jack found all the threads and made a coherent story out of them, though his growing temper is likely to cause him trouble in future books.

Buy Bogganmor at Amazon

Future's Edge by Gareth Powell

February 2025; Titan Books; 978-1803368634
audio, ebook, print (320 pages); science fiction

Archaeologist Ursula Morrow accidentally infects herself with an alien parasite and fears her career is over. This is irrelevant when Earth is destroyed, and there are few surviving humans. Two years after the destruction, Ursula is tasked with retrieving the artifact that infected her, as it just might hold the key to humanity’s survival. It's located on a planet in hostile territory, so she might have to become a pirate to retrieve it before the enemy’s final onslaught.

The Cutters are a race of aliens that are bent on destroying every intelligent race of aliens connecting to the tramway, a series of interstellar linkages that had been built by some kind of Precursor race. They have disappeared but their links remain, which other spacefaring aliens had repurposed and used. Unfortunately, so did the Cutters. Earth is so recently involved with the tramway after another spacefaring alien race essentially came to proselytize, but it was enough to get the Cutters arriving to destroy the planet. Few escaped the planet, and most human survivors were already off-world. Ursula had been studied by multiple doctors after her parasite infection, which entwined itself so deeply into her DNA that there was no erasing it from her system. It wasn't infectious and seemed bent on making her a healthier and sturdier version of herself; when we meet her, she blithely puts out a flare with her bare hand that would have run thousands of degrees hot. She wants out of the refugee camp, and her ex of sorts explains that the parasite might have been a way of connecting a host with some kind of alien weapon. Desperate to find any solution to save the rest of sentience in the galaxy, Ursula joins them on their desperate run for this weapon.

We get to know Ursula well, from her past as a student and then as a traumatized adult before Jack found her again. She and the team have the hope that the artifacts the team had found were Precursor weapons that could help them destroy the Cutters and get to another arm of the Milky Way galaxy. This gets us into an adventure across different worlds, with injuries and losses along the way. It hits hard for us because it's hard on Ursula, and the final part of the book is the culmination of everything that came before. I liked the ending, tying up all the threads from before, and giving the characters hope at the same time. That's the future's edge, where they're balanced to build a way forward with the lessons and warnings from the past.

Buy Future's Edge at Amazon

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