Jason Heller

Whether or not you know the term "portal fantasy," you know what it means. In portal fantasies, a doorway — either literal or virtual — opens up between the real world and some magical land where strange beings live and strange things happen. The unassuming hero passes through this portal, ...

Josh Kolenik isn't trying to blow anyone away. If anything, the soft-spoken frontman of Small Black sings as if he barely wants to be noticed at all. Across the synth-pop band's previous releases, including 2013's Limits Of Desire, Kolenik exhales his words more than he belts them out, letting his ...

"I'm going out in style," Joe Casey chants at the end of "Cowards Starve," one of the most riveting songs on Protomartyr's new third album, The Agent Intellect. Casey isn't being literal. An unassuming Detroit resident in his mid-30s who speaks more than he sings, he's helped Protomartyr become ...

Music has been used an untold number of times in fantasy, both as part of the backdrop and as a central component of the plot. And there's a very good reason for that perpetual fascination: Music is, in its own way, a form of magic. Ilana C. Myer takes that ...

As someone who cut his teeth on the punk subculture of the late '80s and early '90s, I'm captivated by David Baillie's daring debut novel What We Salvage. But I also wonder how tough it might be for those who aren't familiar with that subculture to wade through the tangle ...

Stevie Smith's famous poem "Not Waving but Drowning" has been interpreted in many ways since its publication in 1957, and one of those interpretations deals with our ability to see the same thing multiple ways and what that says about our view of reality. It's not entirely clear whether ...

Seven years is a long time to wait for a new album — but it's particularly vexing when the album in question is by Eagles Of Death Metal. After all, the hard-rock group whose core comprises Jesse Hughes and Josh Homme (the latter of Queens Of The Stone ...

Chris Holm can't leave well enough alone. His Collector trilogy — The Big Reap, The Wrong Goodbye, and Dead Harvest — might have worked fine as good ol' retro-noir. Instead he jabbed a dose of eerie urban fantasy into the series, resulting in a grim, imaginative take on the detective ...

"Someone smarter than me once called America's small towns the lost continent." So says Cody "Razzle-Dazzle" Kellogg, a radio DJ who's only one of the multitude of colorful characters populating Patrick Wensink's new novel, Fake Fruit Factory. That "someone smarter" is the real-life writer Bill Bryson, whose 1989 book The ...

From inhuman growls to operatic trills, heavy metal has long been home to a broad range of voices. But few singers summon the gutsy, unadorned immediacy of Dorthia Cottrell. The frontwoman of the Richmond, Va., metal band Windhand ventured out on her own earlier this year with her

At first glance, Cecelia Holland's new novel Dragon Heart is a straight-down-the-middle work of fantasy. (The dragon depicted on the cover might just be the dead giveaway.) But there's another genre lurking beneath the book's mythic, majestic surface, one that's equally as intriguing and far less expected: The Gothic romance.

Despite numerous, valiant efforts over the past few years to broaden the palette of epic fantasy, the genre still has a default setting: some fictionalized version of medieval Europe. Add Bradley P. Beaulieu's new novel, Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, to the growing list of proud exceptions. Set in a world ...

Stories within stories: It's a structure as old as, well, storytelling itself. In the Western canon alone, everything from The Canterbury Tales to Hamlet to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities has played with the idea of nesting narratives within each other. Speculative fiction authors such as Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman ...

"We would write our songs soft / Then we would try to make them tough." That's a line from "Before We Stopped To Think," a song by the obscure, now-defunct indie-rock band Great Plains, covered by Yo La Tengo on its new album, Stuff Like That There. The choice ...

Hardly a day goes by without some new form of technological menace rearing its head, from the outfitting of drones with handguns to the hacking of cars' navigation systems. It's a fear — and fascination — that science fiction author Chuck Wendig cranks up to 11 in his ...

Anyone who caught the national television debut of Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats on The Tonight Show recently witnessed something special: the arrival of a force of nature. The song was titled "S.O.B." Rateliff, backed by his gritty band — which comes complete with an organist and ...

Pizza is a lot of things to a lot of people. Mostly, though, it's just food. Colin Atrophy Hagendorf is keenly aware of both sides of this not-quite-burning issue in his debut book, Slice Harvester. Subtitled "A Memoir in Pizza," it chronicles a two-year period in Hagendorf's life, from 2009 ...

Magic happens in "Soul Case," one of the standouts from Nalo Hopkinson's latest short story collection Falling in Love with Hominids. Not a metaphorical kind of magic, either. Set in a Caribbean village that's based on the historical phenomenon of marronage — former slaves escaping into the wilderness and forming ...

There are two ways to look at the kind of fantasy novels that come with big glossaries at the end. Negatively, they're self-indulgent exercises in building fictional worlds, with the author fixating on the sheer quantity of settings and characters to the exclusion of all else. Positively, fantasy-novel glossaries help ...

Pavement's minor MTV hit, "Cut Your Hair," came out in 1994, and the song's offbeat, ramshackle charm introduced the cult indie band to a broader audience. It also marked the end of an era. Pavement had been releasing records for five years at that point, most of them ...