Two things worth your attention this week.
Harbour of Hungry Ghosts, by Eliza Chan
Released July 28 from Orbit, this is a 19th-century Hong Kong fantasy built around the Hungry Ghost Festival, colonial disruption, and a family obligated to hunt the monsters slipping through the resulting cracks. Eldest daughter Kiamling is forced into the role her grandmother has always held after her grandmother is taken by something new, something the old rules do not account for. She is not doing this alone: a civil servant ally, a childhood sweetheart turned merchant-pirate, and a younger sister keeping her own secrets round out the group she has to rely on and cannot fully trust.
What makes this one worth flagging is specificity. The folklore is not decorative. The stakes are generational and familial before they are cosmic, and the colonial disruption driving the plot is treated as a structural problem the characters have to navigate, not a backdrop. Readers who want epic fantasy built from a tradition other than the usual European template, and who appreciated Eliza Chan's earlier work in Fathomfolk, have a clear next read. Available now from Orbit and independent booksellers.
The Dungeon Book, by Gareth Hanrahan
A small child is thrown into a dungeon full of monsters who decide to raise her rather than eat her. Bait grows up in the dark with goblins as her adopted family, a vengeful minotaur as her protector, a sentient skull as her tutor, and a corridor slime as her main source of nutrition. Narrated by that skull, Cornelius, the premise reads like a mash-up of Dungeons and Dragons and The Jungle Book, and Gareth Hanrahan, author of The Gutter Prayer, has the range to make a found family out of monsters land as something genuinely heartfelt rather than a joke stretched past its length. Releasing this month from Orbit.
Both of these build found family from material that would usually be treated as the threat: an unfamiliar ghost, a dungeon full of monsters. Neither one flinches from that.
Map's Edge Media publishes The Hearthlight Cycle for readers who want their found family earned the hard way too.