Many recent works in the fantasy genre have attempted to make the monsters less monstrous, and there is a place for those stories. Kendra Namednil, by contrast, uses touches of humanity to make the monsters in
Borehole Bazaar even
more monstrous, and the result is a wonderfully uncomfortable, brutally grim story of desperate survival. Namednil drags us down to the seedy underbelly of a vibrant world filled with familiar (but uniquely rendered) high fantasy tropes to tell a story of culture shock, racism, and abuse.
Borehole Bazaar is not for the squeamish, but it is
definitely worth reading.