Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Thousand Fiendish Angels | 2013 | J.F. Penn | Buy |
| 2 | The Buried and the Drowned | 2025 | J.F. Penn | Buy |
A Thousand Fiendish Angels was first published in 2013 and remains J.F. Penn’s most distinctive short fiction work. The three stories use Dante’s Inferno as a structural framework, with each piece corresponding to a different sin from the Inferno’s moral taxonomy. The connecting device, a book made from human skin passed from one story to the next, gives the collection a cohesion that most multi-story volumes lack.
The three pieces move across wildly different settings. Sins of the Flesh involves an investigator and an author’s occult diary. Sins of Treachery sends twin brothers north to the Arctic after inheriting an alchemical map. Sins of Violence is set in a walled post-apocalyptic city controlled by a figure called the Minotaur. Penn’s interest in mythology and religious history is visible throughout, filtered through darker, more visceral scenarios than her novel-length work.
The second collection extends Penn’s short fiction further, and together the two volumes provide a useful companion to her longer work for readers interested in the more experimental edges of her writing.