Second paragraph of third section:

His voice was like bubbles rising in a swamp. “Kicktoad no more, Little Tommy! I am called Bufotenine the Great now, yes I am. Apprentice no more, but Master! Yes!”

This ended up on my unread list as part of the 2015 Hugo packet. It was a story that was slated onto the Best Novella ballot, which I refrained from reading at the time, as I was always going to vote No Award in a category where all five finalists had been put there through an organised campaign by a racist misogynist whose declared aim was to destroy the Hugos. However, I decided that I'd work round to it eventually in good faith; and here we are.

It's not very good. It's a story about four people who as children had a very Narnia-like adventure and are now dragged as adults into a new encounter with the other world by Tibalt the talking cat, who is killed and resurrected towards the end, in case you hadn't got the point. As my regular reader knows, I am not a huge fan of the comic series DIE, by Kieron Gillen and others, but it takes a similar idea and does it much better.

The dialogue of One Bright Star to Guide Them is florid. Many important points of the action happen off stage. (Our protagonist is a captive at the end of one chapter, and free at the start of the next, a transition that is never explained.) All of England is next door to all the rest of England. Wright had his moments earlier in his career; this is not one of them. His behaviour around the Puppies in 2015-16 would anyway have disinclined me to vote for him (yeah, I know, artist from the art, but the Hugos are community awards and choices have consequences). But this story is in no way Hugo worthy.

You can read it for free online here if you want to cross-check my take. I am sorry to report that I cannot now find the rest of the 2015 Hugo packet in my archives, so unfortunately I have had to remove Big Boys Don't Cry, by Tom Kratman, and Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, a collection of essays by John C. Wright, from my unread list. If you happen to have kept your own copies of those from the 2015 packet, please don't feel under any obligation to send them to me. Doing so would be a violation of the honour code on which the Hugo packet is made available.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2015. Next on that list is Seven Deadly Sins, by Neil Gaiman.