Rating: ★★★
Audience: Short Stories Collection
Length: 304 pages
Author: Alix E. Harrow
Publisher: Tordotcom
Release Date: October 20th, 2026
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads
BOOK SUMMARY:
From the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Everlasting and Starling House comes a new fantastical collection of stories about tricksters and ghosts, magics ordinary and spectacular. Alix E. Harrow spins tales never-told and seen just outside the periphery of reality–in the tradition of Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, and Carmen Maria Machado, these hauntingly resonant and defiant stories leap from the page and dance in and out of a history that never was (but could have been) and into a future startingly like our own.
Before I was a liar I was a historian, which is a kind of storyteller who doesn’t make any money and likes footnotes.
These are stories about the past as it wasn’t quite, but might have been, from ancient battlefields all the way up through roadside attractions off I-70. They’re about the people caught in the mean jaws of history: the women and workers, the soldiers and mothers, everyone shoved into the margins of the world.
But these aren’t singular tragedies―these are the stories of the ones that got away. The ones who defected and dissented, who broke the rules, who ran and tossed a match behind them. SLANTWISE HISTORIES AND OTHER STORIES collects the best known short fiction of Alix. E. Harrow, including the Hugo-award winning “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” and for the first time in print, Amazon original titles “The Six Deaths of the Saint” and “The Knight and the Butcherbird”. Updated to reflect the author’s preferred editions, Slantwise Histories also includes “The Long Way Up”, “Roadside Attraction”, “Mr. Death”, “The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly”, “The Sycamore and the Sybil”, “Do Not Look Back, My Lion”, “The Whisper in the Weld”, “Dustbaby”, and four all-new short stories.
Thank you Macmillan Audio for the gifted audiobook.
GO FOR THE EYEBALL READ.
I had no issue with the narrators. They read this book wonderfully. My issue with doing the audiobook is that everything starts to run together. There were a LOT of short stories. And I tend to listen to one audiobook in a day and this combo made things worse. If you go for the audio definitely space it out more.
There were some stories in here that were good, one that made me absolutely bust out laughing, and others I was very bored with and skipped through. The entire vibe of the book is perfect for a spooky season read though. Many different topics, themes, and conversations throughout.
I still really enjoy Harrow’s writing and I will continue to look forward to her next book.
Overall audience notes:
- Short story collection
- Language: some
- Violence: high
- Content warnings: child death, loss of life, misogyny, homophobia, sexual assault
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