James Nicoll Reviews

Alix E. Harrow’s 2024 Starling House is a Southern gothic horror novel.

Eden, Kentucky is paradise… for Don Gravely, CEO of Gravely Power, and his luckier kin. For the less fortunate inhabitants of Eden, the town is a polluted, misfortune-plagued prison from which entrenched poverty makes escape impossible¹.

Twenty-seven-year-old Opal may never escape. She is determined that her bright younger brother Jasper will. For Jasper to escape, Opal needs money for his tuition.

Enter Starling House, infamous mansion of E. Starling, author of The Underland.

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Alix E. Harrow’s 2021 A Spindle Splintered is the first volume in the Fractured Fables series.

Twenty-one-year-old Zinnia Gray has her whole future ahead of her … which, thanks to the Generalized Roseville Malady she has lived with her entire life, will consist of the next few weeks. She is the last survivor of GRM and her disorder is very rapidly catching up with her.

This makes her 21^st birthday party special, since she will not have a 22^nd birthday.

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Alix E. Harrow’s debut novel The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a standalone portal fantasy. 

January Scaller rarely sees her beloved father, because Julian Scaller is absent running errands for wealthy Mr. Locke. She has been raised mainly by Mr. Locke’s servants. Her life is cozy and safe, but January increasingly feels that she is just one of Locke’s carefully guarded treasures. Not at all a person.

But a person who is a one-of-a-kind human, one who might not do well in the harsh outside world. 

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