REVIEWs ARCHIVE

INTERVIEWS

IN ACADEMia

  • Thorton, J.: ‘Climate Change and Pregnancy in Naomi Booth’s Sealed and Marian Womack’s Lost Objects.’ Paper, presented at the Representing Women’s Health conference’s “Speculative Fiction”.
  • Imre, A.: ‘Rendering Science Fiction, Culture, and Language While Translating Ready Player One’, Scientia Kiadó, 2020:3, pp. 70-87
  • Martin, S.: ‘Spanish SF: A Phantom Genre’, Science Fiction Studies, 44:2, 209-215
  • Cordasco, R.: ‘Speculative Fiction, Translation, and Transformation’, in Science Fiction in Translation. Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave MacMillan, 2023, 19-31
  • Marshall, H.: ‘The State of the Weird’, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, vol. 4
  • Marshall, H.: ‘A coming-of-age tale set in a brilliantly realised future’, New Scientist, 252 (3363) 2021: 36
  • Wheatley, M.: ‘On Gary Budden and Marian Womack (eds.) An Invite to Eternity: Tales of Nature Disrupted‘, in Gothic Nature Journal, 2, pp. 224-227

Book REVIEWS

Out of the Window, Into the Dark (2024)

  • The British Fantasy Society blog: “A collection to be savoured”.
  • The Fantasy Hive: “The new collection confirms her as one of the modern masters of the short story form, exploring a similar combination of liminal spaces and apocalyptic imaginings as Lost Objects but with six years more anger at our collective inability to meaningfully face the challenges of climate change and species extinction… [I]t triumphantly confirms the power and importance of Womack’s work and her dedication to her craft.” Jonathan Thornton
  • Runalong the Shelves: “Excellent… [A] beautiful and often eerie set of tales to beguile and intrigue a reader.”
  • A.C. Wise Blog: “[It effectively explores the unreliability of memory, the way narratives shape our experience of the world, and blurring between reality, dreams, and imagination.”

Lost Objects (2018) / New Revised Edition 2024:

  • Rachel Robinson in Full Stop. Reviews, Interviews, Marginalia: “Womack is a master at using realism to enhance the uncanny.”
  • Jonathan Thornton in The Fantasy Hive: “These stories deal with landscapes that have been transfigured by humanity’s carelessness and hubris, worlds in mourning for everything we have so casually destroyed. They serve as a vital and timely reminder of our current climate crisis, and the responsibility we have to both the world and ourselves. The Weird and the uncanny are effectively weaponised to bring home the enormity of our heedless destruction of our planet, and the strength of our connection to the landscapes we inhabit. Gaia will not take this lying down, nor will we emerge from our wanton destruction unscathed.”
  • Timothy J. Jarvis in Los Angeles Review of Books: “Addresses humankind’s senseless despoliation of its home in subtle, profoundly affecting ways”
  • Thierstein.com: “Claustrophobic, haunting, and fascinating. Golden age SF meets the New Weird… Charming.”
  • Nina Allan in Interzone #276: “[T]he themes of climate change and ecological destruction are more urgently expressed in this short book than in any other I have recently read, yet it is Womack’s bravery in stating these themes in terms of poetry, of metaphysics, of personal loss that lifts them above polemic… This book, with its sharp edges and its thematic urgency and its painful admissions of weakness and of fear, is a collection that highlights everything that speculative fiction, of all possible modes of literature, excels at.”
  • Laura Mauro in Black Static #65: “Lost Objects is a gorgeous, intelligent collection, both masterfully written and cannily prescient… and crafted in a manner that I suspect we will come to recognise as uniquely Womack.”
  • Rachel Cordasco: “I loved Lost Objects because of its exquisite prose, mesmerizing imagery, and apocalyptic/postapocalyptic vision that was anything but dark and depressing. Womack has the gift of bringing other/future worlds to life such that we lose ourselves completely in her vision… I hope to see much more from Womack because my brain demands more collections like this one.”
  • Runalong the Shelves blog: “Womack’s use of language is something to savour and enjoy with the natural world of flowers and animals featuring prominently but rather than just offering a sense of wonder it offers strangeness, an unreality; and a sense of the unknow that makes you realise humans are not the centre of the universe.”
  • Simon Strantzas in his blog: “Marian Womack’s Lost Objects is a collection of short fiction that illuminates our emotional states of existence in this threatened world… Marian writes with an ear for emotional truth that resonates within the reader, and the book continues to reward even after the covers are closed. Another prime example of a first collection powerful enough to scar, and one you can expect to see on award short-lists next year.”
  • Leif Schenstead-Harris in Weird Fiction Review: “On balance, they offer much to a generous reader. In the effort, they continue the response that weird fiction shapes to the question of the Anthropocene (Capitalocene? Chthulucene?), even while they broaden the ambit of weird fiction by introducing new spaces and settings for creative imaginations… For a debut, Lost Objects looks to a great range of sources and shoulders an immense weight.”
  • Charles Payseur‘s blog: “[U]nderstated but incredibly powerful.”
  • More2Read: ‘Authors and their favourite characters and books.’

The Swimmers (2021)

  • Publisher’s Weekly-Starred Review: “Womack draws inspiration from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in her meticulously detailed sophomore novel set in a vivid, believable eco-dystopia… Womack draws in readers immediately with her dreamy depictions of the landscape and its dangers. At its heart, however, the novel is a probing examination of cultural and class differences. Readers will be captivated.”
  • The Guardian: The Best Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy: “A richly imagined eco-gothic tale.”
  • Sheperd: The best speculative fiction novels that crackle with feminist themes
  • The Times: 10 Best SF Books of 2021
  • The Frumious Consortium: “This is a fascinating study both of ecology and sociology, and how myths and stories grow to make history more palatable to the average person. It’s an excellent fast-forwarding of the class and feminism issues highlighted in WSS to apply to an imagined future in the aftermath of eco-disaster and social stratification via futuristic technology. Perhaps most surprisingly, The Swimmers is also a critique of collection vs curation.”
  • The Fantasy Hive: “The Swimmers is a beautiful, sad and wise book. Womack’s prose remains as luminous as ever, her character work deft and convincing, her worldbuilding intricate and challenging. It is a reflection on the importance of being able to recognise and tell one’s own truth. It teaches us the lesson that in order to save the world from humanity’s destructive impulses, the answers will not be found by recapitulating the past, surrendering our agency to technology or hoping for an escape but by confronting the inequalities that got us here in the first place with honesty and openness so that we may build something new. As such it is a timely and necessary book, and a powerful demonstration of how speculative fiction is best suited to help us confront issues as all-encompassing and complex as climate change.” 
  • Runalong The Shelves: “The Swimmers creates a disturbing future that not only looks at environmental change but class, race and the use or abuse of knowledge… All the credit though is to Womack’s amazing use of imagery – this a is a novel more of feelings and visuals or atmosphere rather than endless exposition explaining the science making this for me much more effective… A very impressive piece of storytelling.”
  • Set The Tape: “The Swimmers has a strange, dreamlike quality that makes reading it a  unique experience.”
  • Little Bird Book Blog: “Womack’s depiction of an Earth ravaged by climate change and the excess of plastic was my favourite aspect of the novel. Although Womack’s writing is beautiful and lyrical in places, the idea that this kind of world could be a reality was very much present gave the book a different edge that was unsettling.”

On The Nature of Magic. Walton & Waltraud Inquiry Agents, 2 (2023):

  • The Fantasy Hive: “Beautifully written and artfully constructed, On the Nature of Magic is just as compelling and thought-provoking as its predecessor, and shows Womack continuing to move from strength to strength as a writer.”
  • Runalong The Shelves: “A deliciously strange occult thriller. Offering mysteries to be solved, a sense of the strange just out of our sight and a delicious alternate history idea that feels strangely plausible too all told in Womack’s hallmark poetical style.”
  • The Bibliophile Chronicles: “A captivating read, full of mystery and magic.’

The Golden Key. Walton & Waltraud Inquiry Agents, 1 (2020):

  • The Fantasy Hive: “A bold, ambitious and genre-bending novel, one that isn’t afraid to assume a sensitive and intelligent reader.”
  • Once Upon a Bookcase: “An extraordinary, page-turning Gothic mystery.”
  • The Spider’s House. Nina Allan Homepage: “Richly textured and intelligent writing.”
  • BookPage: “The Golden Key bends genres. It’s part Shirley Jackson’s stories of inner demons, part Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, part Astrid Lindgren’s faith in children’s resilience and part ghost story… Enter a mysterious world in the hands of capable women. Getting drawn into this story is easy; getting out again is trickier.’
  • Runanlong The Shelves: “A wonderful gothic thriller perfect (I can confirm) for reading on dark stormy days and nights… That uneasy boundary between rational and the strange really came to life to me reading Marian Womack’s sumptuously atmospheric gothic mystery.”
  • Publisher’s Weekly: “Womack‘s ethereal debut novel is precise and eerie… Patient readers willing to wade through Womack’s murky, off-kilter world will be rewarded with moments of disquieting beauty.’
  • Booklist: “Womack’s first novel, following her acclaimed dystopian anthology, Lost Objects (2018), continues her exploration of other worlds.”
  • Reactor Mag: “It’s in keeping with Womack’s past work that the most resonant moments in this novel are those where the landscape becomes a character, and arguably the most sinister one to be found within these pages.”
  • Foreword: “Amid the phantasmagorical developments of Marian Womack’s The Golden Key, which include spiritualism, changelings, and cracked doors between worlds, a parable against privilege arises… A  fairy tale with a twist.’
  • Libri Draconis: “Helena Walton-Cisneros is a fantastically complex character.”
  • Set The Tape: “An interesting supernatural mystery, with intriguing characters and some unique ideas.”
  • The Bookwyrm’s Den: “The women in this are fantastic, daring to be scientific and smart in a world that deems it unfit for their gender… An extraordinary, page-turning Gothic mystery.’
  • Istoria Lit. Celebrating Everything Art Shaped: The characters were true to the period. Through them Womack wove themes that gave the world a weight of reality that balanced out the more fantastical elements… I was enthralled.’

Short Fiction, etc (2015-2018):

  • “Nox Una”: “A story that is a compulsion to read – unusually ‘page-turning’, bearing in mind its rich and satisfying, sometimes constructively cloying, style of narrative.” Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
  • “The best stories take innovative risks and have better payoffs… The eponymous “Orange Dogs” in Marian Womack’s tale are carnivorous butterflies, born in a future of floods and climate change.” Publishers Weekly
  • “Orange Dogs”: “Haunting and half-engorged, a tale to savour.” Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
  • “Frozen Planet”: “A dark, cold setting, with mirage and vision become indistinguishable. Descriptions are vivid, the ubiquitous snow displaying more colors than Lawrence had thought possible.” Locus Magazine
  • “Black Isle”:”[E]choes  the most beautiful traditions of British language writing.” Strange Horizons

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