Jason Heller

Dexter Palmer does not do simple. His debut novel, 2011's The Dream of Perpetual Motion, was a complex, intricate mechanism of a book, a postmodern steampunk sprawl set in a dreamlike world. His second (and unrelated) novel, Version Control, is equally complex. But Palmer picks a far less fantastic setting ...

Naming an album More Rain and then kicking it off with the sound of an actual rainstorm is either gutsy or foolhardy. Luckily, it's M. Ward who's made that decision on his eight and latest full-length record; if anyone can pull off such an on-the-nose premise, it's him. Throughout ...

"Don't get me started about how hard it is to start or stay on track," Matthew Caws, singer-guitarist of Nada Surf, sings in "Cold To See Clear" — one of the many anthems that grace the group's eighth album, You Know Who You Are. Not that Caws and ...

"Clouds came in / Pushing through a window open to the wind." Those are the first haunting lines of "Confusion," one of the standout tracks on School Of Seven Bells' new SVIIB, sung in an icy whisper by Alejandra Deheza. It's a delicate song, serene and full of ethereal ...

In Engines of Desire, Livia Llewellyn's debut collection of short stories from 2011, reality was just another raw material to be stretched and reworked. Llewellyn's follow-up collection, Furnace, is a slightly slimmer volume, but it doesn't skimp when it comes to her distorted vision. Beautiful and hideous in the same ...

There's something telling about the fact that the cover of Wolfmother's fourth album, Victorious, was posted online in blank black-and-white, with fans encouraged to color it in themselves. Since the Australian group's self-titled debut in 2005, singer-guitarist Andrew Stockdale has written songs that are magnificently generic — a stew ...

"If you could go back in time and see any band play, what would you choose?" Karl Bender, one of the main characters of Mo Daviau's debut novel Every Anxious Wave, uses this question to lure customers into his incredible new enterprise: Sending music fans through a time-warping wormhole to ...

Five pages into A Decent Ride, Irvine Welsh's newest novel, he makes a mention of Sick Boy — one of the main characters from his popular 1993 debut Trainspotting. That doesn't mean A Decent Ride is a sequel to Trainspotting (Welsh already did that with 2002's Porno). Instead, it's yet ...

As a genre, science-fantasy is often as basic as it sounds: People with swords meet people with lasers. (In some cases, like Star Wars, the swords and lasers are even the same thing.) But there's so much more potential in the overlap between science fiction and fantasy, a fact that's ...

In the middle of Johanna Sinisalo's novel The Core of the Sun, the reader is interrupted by an ad. It's for Fresh Scent, a personal fragrance available from the State Cosmetics Corporation of Finland. It's marketed to woman, although "marketed" is an understatement. In Sinisalo's nightmarish, alternate-reality vision of her ...

Rain is falling when siblings Scott and Madeline Madden return to Caveat — the sprawling Los Angeles estate where they grew up — at the start of Tim Powers' Medusa's Web. As it should. Powers, a versatile author who's as adept at Gothic horror as he is at science fiction, ...

Stuart A. Staples is not tense. When the Englishman and leader of Tindersticks is asked by phone if the recent terrorism in his adopted home country of France has him rattled, he laughs gently and says, "No." He does, after all, reside in Limousin, France's least populous region. And amid ...

"In a dark and stormy night / With the light coming over your halo," Jace Lasek sings, his voice high and whispery, in "Golden Lion," one of the standout tracks from The Besnard Lakes' fifth and latest album, A Coliseum Complex Museum. Lasek's reference to "It was a dark ...

"Green things did not last long in the Scorched." With simple yet foreboding lines like this, Megan E. O'Keefe paints a vivid portrait of a tough, bitter world in her debut science-fantasy novel Steal the Sky. It takes place in the city of Aransa, a mining town on the Scorched ...

What does it take to make a zombie novel fresh and intriguing? Dozens of authors have tried to answer this question over the past few years, as the zombie wave swelled into a zombie glut. But few have deconstructed the genre with the heart and soul David Towsey has in ...

In 1950, Isaac Asimov revolutionized how we think about robotics with his short story collection I, Robot. The world has changed a lot since then, a fact Curtis White points out — and points out, and points out — in his book We, Robots. Subtitled Staying Human in the Age ...

Humor and horror taste great together, a fact Paul Meloy knows well. The British author's debut novel The Night Clock strikes exactly that balance, with the added perk of dark, far-flung fantasy. Set in contemporary England, it revolves around Phil Trevena, a 40-something who — like Meloy himself — works ...

Ian Svenonius is a strange man. Anyone who's followed his career over the past 25 years knows he has a knack for incendiary sloganeering that often borders on the surreal, first as the singer in the legendary Washington, D.C. punk band The Nation of Ulysses (he currently leads the "crime ...

What if Raymond Chandler had written science fiction? The premise behind Adam Christopher's latest novel, Made to Kill, is as simple as that. That said, he milks that idea for all it's worth. Set in an alternate version of Los Angeles circa 1965 — a timeline where John F. Kennedy ...

Daniel Alarcón did not grow up a fan of comic books — which makes it all the more startling that City of Clowns, his debut graphic novel, is such a complex, assured, and rewarding work. First published in Peru in 2010 and finally seeing print in the U.S., City of ...