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Wow. For one thing, it's very rare that I am consistently impressed with every story in a collection, even single-author ones. And it's a wonderfully varied collection too, in subject matter, mood, and form: everything from a two-page story that's actually satisfying to the title one which could have been published as a novella on its own. There are common themes about outsider perspectives and unexpected viewpoints, but a huge range of what those things actually mean. Many of the stories are clearly informed by the author being an intersex Jewish immigrant, but again that shows up in very different ways from one story to the next - this is not an author who just has one thing to say.

Content note: some of the stories have disturbing imagery and themes around abuse, body horror, and/or being trapped. There's a list of specific content notes at the back of the book - if those sort of themes could be a problem for you, it's worth flicking to that first.

I enjoy a good mystery novel on its own, but when one brings in enough worldbuilding that can stand on its own, it makes the mystery so much sweeter. Tainted Cup is one book I read earlier this year that did this to great effect, and The Last Murder at the End of the World strikes a different blend that kept me engaged the whole way through. Unlike Stuart Turton's previous time loop-esque murder mystery, I found this one to be temporally more straightforward and the worldbuilding to be much stronger and more intriguing. There's still plenty of red herrings, questions, and multilayered deceptions.

The premise is delightful. The first quarter of the book is an intriguing worldbuilding and character introduction. The earth is covered in a deadly fog and a single Greek island is the only part free from the apocalypse. The villagers and elders who live on this island have some peculiar routines and customs. Finally, and most importantly, Abi (the first person perspective of this book) is able to read everybody's thoughts and can speak to them internally.

Then, the hook. Everybody wakes up. There's a fire. Everybody's memories of the past night have been forcibly wiped by Abi. There's been several murders, people have injuries and blood on their clothes. The murderers could be anybody, even the person investigating it, as nobody has any memory of that night. As a bonus wrinkle, there's time pressure that these murders must be solved in two days or everybody will die.

For a moment only she allowed herself to be irritated that the woods could take as much of her blood as they liked, while she was not permitted to take even a drop of theirs; it wasn’t fair, nothing in here was fair. That was how it worked. No different without than within.

Forced into a second journey into a magic forest that nobody has ever gotten out (but her), Veris is tasked with going back and retrieving a tyrant's two children before the day is done and they are lost forever. It opens strong, with Veris being kidnapped from her home and forced into this very unwanted task. The forest is deeply creepy in a way that manages to feel fresh--there's dead sentinel deer corpses; a floating "cloth" manages to be one of the most terrifying monsters; there's also bargains, games, and tricks galore. I quite enjoyed this novella.

“In exchange? You dare, you worm, filth, you ask anything of me? If you do not recover my children your village will be razed to the ground and burnt, and we will roast your people alive upon it and eat them.”

Many pieces of fiction also have fey creatures ask "are we truly the cruel ones, given the action of humans", but I quite enjoyed the parallel that this book makes about the unfairness of power dynamics within and without the magical realm. Veris must play the games and take the deals of the fey creatures, but she also is forced into taking whatever deal the Tyrant forces upon her too. When the reader discovers later that one of the rules of the forest is to never try to negotiate deals, it echoes the way the book opens with Veris's attempt at negotiating with the tyrant.

The Husbands is a light-hearted book whose core premise is a marriage-themed time loop/multiverse situation: whenever Lauren's husband goes into the attic, an entirely new husband comes down instead, and reality warps itself so that this is the husband she's always had. Shenanigans.

This goes in a lot of directions I enjoyed. It explores the "what if" feeling of imagining what different relationships and lives would like with different people in them. There's funny montages of "nope not this one, nor this one, nope nope nope". There's a hilarious "is this husband cheating on me" scene. There's an incredibly awkward "oh I have a different job and I have no idea how to do it or even who my boss is" moment. There's also the nature of understanding who you are by seeing the ways you do and do not change in different multiverse situations.

Some of the time loop-esque bits reminded me of playing the game In Stars and Time recently, in the feelings of impermanence and loneliness through living a life that you can't share or record. There's also questions of how responsible you are for the state of other people's lives when you have reality-changing powers.

(That said, there were also some dark moments that I found quite discomforting; when reality can only be reset by getting one specific person into one specific attic, Lauren goes to some awful places a couple of times, knowing that whatever she has done will be un-done.)

Despite being a book about a magical series of marriages, I wouldn't say this is a romance book. Lauren's major character trait (to me, at least) is that she is pretty accommodating and so the book's core arc here is her learning about herself and what her wants are, now that she has the power to make reality-changing choices.

When a post-human spacecraft and a human love each other very much...

Overall, I had mixed feelings about this book. The writing is from the third perspective of Jayanthi (the human) and Vaha (the post-human Alloy pilot/spacecraft), but is very much in each of their thoughts. Subjectively, it felt like a matter of fact writing style that just didn't quite grip me. I wish I could pin down more why I struggled here with this prose. That said, there were a bunch of things I enjoyed about it:

This book played with some neat ideas. One is that "all matter possesses some level of consciousness" and thus people are encouraged to change themselves rather than environments were possible (big To Be Taught, If Fortunate feelings). Jayanthi has sickle cell anemia, and the book uses this as a prime example of talking about how bodies are not good or bad but rather ones that are more or less suited to particular environments. Along these same lines, the Alloys can go through a process of "full rebirth" and totally change their bodies and genetics, although there's some limits there.

There's a surprising amount of disability topics here too. Jayanthi declines at several points to change her biology to remove ways in which its perceived as hindering her (as well as declining to edit her mind to remove unwanted desires [!!!]). There's also some bits about Vaha's relationship with prostheses and relearning to fly that I think were really well done. All in all, it's more disability politics than I expected even if it feels like a number of perspectives lean on some pragmatic reasoning that "biodiversity is important" and "your lifestyle adaptations may provide useful knowledge to others". (And, these also seem like Jayanthi's own biased perspective as well.)

This is a very different story than a A Half-Built Garden but there's some echoes of it regarding the parentalism towards humans and the climax of the book focusing on legal arguments. In this book, I feel like the Alloys have a more well-trodden "can't trust these humans based on their past behavior" bent (vs the Ringers more novel "our own vast experience tells you you're wrong"), but I feel like this book takes it to new places, where it tries to ask questions about how to determine when a group of people have changed enough to be owed self-determination.