Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post where today I’m letting author Thomas Parrott loose on the site to look ahead to 2022 and talk about some of the debut fantasy, horror and sci-fi novels coming soon that have caught his eye. I couldn’t be happier to have Tom on the site and I’m really keen to check out some of his suggestions (in fact as chance would have it I’m currently reading one of them), and I hope you’ll find some great new books to check out too! In addition, if you haven’t read any of Tom’s own work yet then I can highly recommend you check it out – I’ve included a link at the end of the article to all of my reviews of his stories, and keep an eye out for his debut novel Recruited, coming in February 2022 from Aconyte Books as the first of their stories set in the world of Tom Clancy’s The Division.
In the meantime though, over to Tom…
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Hello, dear Track of Words readers, and welcome.
I want to take a quick moment to thank Michael for having me as a guest on his blog. I don’t care what the rest of you say about him [um…do I want to know? – ToW], he’s a scholar and a gentleman. He also gave me a slot in his advent calendar with zero discussion of what I was going to write about. Some would call that reckless. I have a (not undeserved) reputation for being a bit quixotic. He really could have gotten anything back. [Don’t worry – I have faith! – ToW]
And indeed, I am tilting at a windmill today. It is, however, a topical windmill. That could be called restraint of a kind.
Today’s topic, beautiful souls, is books. They will not, however, be just any books.
One of the great joys of my childhood was getting to go to the library or bookstore. It would come with that most blessed of commands: “Go on, pick something out.” For better or worse, these expeditions were never built around reviews or name recognition. They were a process of pulling books down from the shelf one by one. Sometimes the cover art or title would catch my eye. Sometimes it would be the back copy.
Either way, it was that most frowned upon process: judging a book by its cover. It’s a fraught thing. I never knew what I was going to get. It could be a frustrating slog or a new favorite. It was always a discovery, though.
If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’d like to recreate one of those expeditions with you as my companion. Each of these options I present to you will be unreleased. It will be an authorial debut. I haven’t read them because I can’t have, and there’s no fine pedigree to rely on. There’s no safety rails. No waiting for 300 reviews to aggregate a score.
We’re gonna let go, and we’re gonna take a chance.
C’mon, let’s pull some books off of shelves.
Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji
“On a generation ship bound for a distant star, one engineer-in-training must discover the secrets at the heart of the voyage in this new sci-fi novel.”
It’s the setting that really snagged me on this one. I love giant spaceships. I’ve never made any secret of that. A generation ship in particular strikes me as such a ripe idea. Humanity squeezed into a bottle just to survive, knowing they will soon have to leave behind everything they’ve known. A main character pressed into an important role in a strict social hierarchy, driven by a mystery to rebel. It’s the setup of a beautiful analogy.
One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig
“Elspeth needs a monster. The monster might be her.
For fans of Uprooted and For the Wolf comes a dark, lushly gothic fantasy about a maiden who must unleash the monster within to save her kingdom. But the monster in her head isn’t the only threat lurking.”
I’ll be real with you, I’m not a big fan of romance as a book’s A-plot. I love a good romantic B-plot though, and this book sounds like it will deliver. And if I can be personal for a moment, the idea of the worst enemy being the one you carry around inside is familiar. That definitely caught my attention.
Rise of the Mages by Scott Drakeford
“Scott Drakeford’s epic fantasy debut, Rise of the Mages combines gripping, personal vengeance with compelling characters for an action packed first book in a trilogy.”
I’m gonna be real with you here. I do not expect this book to interrogate our society and the role we all play in it, or any other deep philosophical questions.
What it does sound like is a ripping yarn, and I’m a sucker for a good adventure story. I also cannot resist a Fallen God, particularly a hungry one.
36 Streets by T.R. Napper
“Altered Carbon and The Wind-Up Girl meet Apocalypse Now in this fast-paced, intelligent, action-driven cyberpunk, probing questions of memory, identity and the power of narratives.”
Now, this one may actually ask those aforementioned questions. Cyberpunk is usually good for it. (A friend of mine once told me about my own work: if you aren’t confronting society, you’re not writing punk anything. You’re just painting things chrome.)
Honestly, though, what grabbed me instantly was that stylish cover. Gorgeous.
Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes
“Titanic meets The Shining in S.A. Barnes’ Dead Silence, a SF horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn’t yet ended.”
Okay, so, if you’re familiar with my own body of work, it will not come as a surprise to you that I love ghost ships. I once had an editor suggest that it was becoming something uncomfortably like a very specific niche for my short stories. (I’ve branched out since, okay? Shut up, this isn’t about my shortcomings.)
Anyway, point being, it will come as no surprise that I am in love with this book already. The Titanic meets The Shining IN SPACE? I mean, COME ON. That’s beautiful. I wept a tiny tear of joy from that elevator pitch alone.
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So, I could keep going, but this feels like a good stopping point. You see, while I do hope that something I’ve shared has caught your attention, that’s not the point. Any list I make is going to reflect what catches my eye. Who knows what might catch yours if you went digging?
Every great author was a nobody at some point. Every “must-read” recommendation needed a first reader. It’s fun to read the things everyone else has read and be able to talk about them, absolutely. But it’s also a joy to be the one who goes literarily spelunking and comes back with treasures unseen.
And nowadays, you don’t even have to leave your house. You just have to leave the confines of the obvious choices. The whole world is your bookstore, just waiting for reckless browsing.
So go on, pick something out.
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Thomas Parrott grew up reading science fiction and fantasy from a very young age. This was only compounded by the discovery of video games and tabletop roleplaying. This has led to a life of dealing with the mundane while dreaming of dragons. He is the author of the Tom Clancy’s The Division novel Recruited, along with several short stories. He lives in Georgia.
You can find Tom on Twitter.
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Big thanks to Tom for taking the time to research and write this great guest post, and for making these excellent recommendations! At the time of writing I’m actually reading 36 Streets and thoroughly enjoying it, but the other four are all new to me – and they’re definitely going on the TBR list!
See also: all the other Thomas Parrott-related reviews and interviews on Track of Words.
Tom’s debut novel Recruited, due out from Aconyte Books as an ebook and US paperback in February 2022 and a UK paperback in March 2022.
Check out the links below to pre-order* Recruited!
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
If you enjoyed this interview and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave a tip on my Ko-Fi page.
