These Deathless Bones

10 best books like These Deathless Bones (Cassandra Khaw): A Cup of Salt Tears, A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers, Brimstone and Marmalade, Red as Blood and White as Bone, A Kiss With Teeth, Waiting on a Bright Moon, Lullaby for a Lost World, Triquetra, Into the Gray, The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections

AuthorIsabel Yap
Makino’s mother taught her caution, showed her how to carve her name into cucumbers, and insisted that she never let a kappa touch her. But when she grows up and her husband Tetsuya falls deathly ill, a kappa that claims to know her comes calling with a barbed promise. “A Cup of Salt Tears” is a dark...
AuthorAlyssa Wong
The day my sister ended the world, the sky opened up in rain for the first time in years, flooding the desert wash behind our house. The snakes drowned in their holes and the javelinas stampeded downstream, but the water overtook them, and the air filled with their screaming as they were swept away.

this...
AuthorAaron Corwin
ISBN1466856394
Just in time for Halloween, we have a funny, sweet, and slightly skewed short story by Aaron Corwin, an up-and-coming writer from Seattle.

All Mathilde wanted for her birthday was a pony. Instead, she got a demon. Sometimes growing up means learning that what you think you want is not always...
AuthorTheodora Goss
ISBN0765389428
I am a daughter of these mountains, and of the tales. Once, I wanted to be in the tales themselves. When I was young, I had my part in one—a small part, but important. When I grew older, I had my part in another kind of story. But now I want to become a teller of tales.

this story is everything that's...
A Kiss With Teeth
AuthorMax Gladstone
I'm upping my rating from 4.5 stars to 5 stars on rereading this Tor.com online freebie. I love this story! Vlad the vampire is married to a human (in fact, the woman who was originally hunting him down!). They have a young son, and Vlad tries to live like a regular human, denying his darker self and powers....
Waiting on a Bright Moon
AuthorJ.Y. Yang
Xin is an ansible, using her song magic to connect the originworld of the Imperial Authority and its far-flung colonies— a role that is forced upon magically-gifted women “of a certain closeness”. When a dead body comes through her portal at a time of growing rebellion, Xin is drawn deep into a...
Lullaby for a Lost World
AuthorAliette de Bodard
ISBN0765389819
Charlotte died to shore up her master's house. Her bones grew into the foundation and pushed up through the walls, feeding his power and continuing the cycle. As time passes and the ones she loved fade away, the house and the master remain, and she yearns ever more deeply for vengeance.

At the...
Triquetra
AuthorKirstyn McDermott
"Triquetra" by Kirstyn McDermott is a dark fantasy novelette about the fraught relationship between Snow White and her stepmother after Snow White has married the prince and has her own child. She visits her stepmother monthly promising to kill her in ever more horrible ways, at the same time attempting...
Into the Gray
AuthorMargaret Killjoy
ISBN1250198178


“I know a better place than your room at the inn,” I said.

“If you’re not a working girl, there’s no shame to be seen with you.”

“I know a place, a better place, where the wind runs cool off the water. Where I can rinse, where you can rinse, where we’d taste our best...
The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections
AuthorTina Connolly
ISBN1250296994
Nebula nominee for best novelette in 2018! 4.5 stars for this excellent Tor fantasy story, free online here at Tor.com. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:

Saffron is one of the official food tasters for Duke Michal, the regent for an infant prince. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind...
AuthorTheodora Goss
ISBN0765395673
I am improbable, am I not?

Almost, but not quite, impossible.


theodora goss won my heart with the stunning free tor short Red as Blood and White as Bone, and after giving me something so perfectly perfect, it would have taken a complete dud to mar my high opinion of her. fortunately,...
A Human Stain
AuthorKelly Robson
ISBN0765392798
2017 NEBULA FOR BEST NOVELETTE!! I TOLD YOU GUYS THIS WAS GOOD!

Under one of the beds she found a thin rib from a rack of lamb, riddled with tooth marks. Somewhere in the house was a dog. She’d have to take care to make friends with it.

i have gotten really REALLY bad about reviewing these...
Daughter of Necessity
AuthorMarie Brennan
i do love stories like this - stories that take a well-known work as their foundation and then poke around in it to locate the parts of the story that stick out in our minds as unfinished or unexplored. where the heck did heathcliff go for those three years? what were bertha and miss havisham like before all...
The Martian Obelisk
AuthorLinda Nagata
ISBN1250162408
This is a 2017 Hugo nominated SF short story, free to read online here at Tor.com. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:

In another tale that explores human choices in the face of apocalyptic events, Susannah Li-Langford is an eighty year old architect who has spent the last seventeen...
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