Published in 1998, Nalo Hopkinson’s debut novel was Brown Girl in the Ring, the first winner of the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. It went on to be shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree Junior Award, to win the Locus Award in the First Novel category, and to help Hopkinson (who had already published several short stories) win the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She’s gone on to write five more novels, along with two collections of short stories, as well as editing and co-editing several anthologies.

Born in Jamaica, Hopkinson has lived in Toronto since 1977, and a near-future version of that city is the background to Brown Girl in the Ring. In this dystopian imagining, the core of the city’s been abandoned by all levels of government. A young mother named Ti-Jeanne lives in the community that’s sprung up; she’s the granddaughter of one of the community’s leaders, Gros-Jeanne, a healer with apparently magical powers — and Ti-Jeanne herself has begun to see strange visions. When elements of the Ontario government reach out to a local boss, asking him to supply a human heart for an emergency organ transplant, both Jeannes become involved in the resulting violence.

The novel deserves the acclaim it got. On one level, it’s a strong adventure story with a fast-moving plot. But the book’s also notable for its language — specifically the dialogue, largely written in a Caribbean English. And for the story’s use of both science fiction and fantastic elements; as it works through a powerful family tragedy, played out in a dark future through the invocation of spirits and gods, it convincingly evokes the mythic.

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My mother was Spanish and my father was Polish, so there was a little north vs. south going on in my home all the time as I was growing up. My mum would encourage us to watch Zorro and El Cid, my dad was all for Taras Bulba and whoever else Yul Brynner was portraying that week on late night TV. When my mother would make remarks about the superiority of the Mediterranean culture, my father would remind her that the Spanish culture, at least, came mostly from the Moors, and that Rome fell, crushed beneath the heels of the – you guessed it – northern barbarians.

Aside to the historically educated: Yes, I know that isn’t exactly what happened. Otherwise, why did it take Gibbon seven volumes to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? I’m not talking history here, I’m talking popular (mis)conceptions.

Last week I took a look at the rise of the hero in popular culture – by which I meant not just among our genre-respecting selves, but with all those other people. This week I’d like to take a look at where heroes come from – or where we expect them to come from.

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This review wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m up in the Albian wastes in Alberta for my day job and the review that was scheduled to run this week fell through. John O’Neill came to my rescue with a short ebook just published by Samhain Publishing. The book is called The Skates and it is part of the series of Renner and Quist adventures written by Mark Rigney. I’ll be honest up front in stating I had not heard of the publisher, author, or series before this time, although I’ve since realized Mr. Rigney is a fellow Black Gate blogger with several short stories to his credit already published by the online magazine. My main relief was that John allowed me to get a review done without missing a week and the ebook was short enough to read through in barely an hour.

Then I read the damn thing and my perception changed instantly.

I curse simply because I envy Rigney for his talents. This wasn’t a fun, enjoyable read so much as it was a story I instantly loved. I’m sure the folks at Samhain Publishing are nice people, but why hasn’t Rigney’s fiction been noticed by editors at major publishing houses? Yes, it is that good. I’m fairly familiar with the New Pulp world and Rigney can write circles around most of us as he seamlessly blurs the lines between genres and switches voice from one first person narrator to the other.

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“If they knew what horrible things were available to them they would take comfort in their own suffering.”
                                                                        -Dr. Spencer Black

I have been sitting here for long moments and I am still not sure where to start telling you about this.

It is art and science and masterful storytelling packaged and tied with a blood splattered ribbon. It is at once indescribably beautiful and nightmarishly horrifying. It is my latest obsession and my signed copy caused me to remove everything else from my coffee table to ensure no other object would detract from it.

It is The Resurrectionist, by EB Hudspeth.

Hudspeth is one of the people I couldn’t wait to introduce you to, whom I met at this year’s C2E2 event in Chicago.  When Nicole at Quirk Books got in touch, she described EB (he said we could all call him Eric) as “author, artist and creator of ‘Frankenstein meets Gray’s Anatomy.’”

Couple this with Quirk’s charter of publishing only 25 strikingly unconventional books every year, and this amounted to an opportunity there was no way I was going to miss.

Eric Hudspeth came in out of the rain (literally) to sit down and talk about The Resurrectionist during his visit to Chicago – the 1893 version of which figures prominently in his tale.

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You can’t judge a book by its cover.

But you know what you can judge by the cover? The cover. And since that’s an important part of a book, I guess you can make a successful partial judgment just by holding a book at arms length for a few seconds. Admit it — you do it all the time, I’m just giving you some air cover here.

Come to think of it, it’s a pity you can’t judge books by their covers. Because, man, that would save me a lot of reviewing time that I could put to good use playing Mass Effect.

Until that happy day, we’re stuck doing things the old fashioned way, with hours of bleary-eyed reading late into the night. Unless you’re like me, of course, picking through the weekly new arrivals until you find a cover that makes you say, “Whoa. That looks cool. I should tell people about it.”

Which brings us nicely to Sarah Pinborough’s new novel A Matter of Blood, the first volume of The Forgotten Gods trilogy. Which, if you haven’t guessed, has a great cover, with an upside-down London skyline and a cracked overlay that looks like reptilian skin.

And the book description sounds pretty intriguing too.

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After Death. . .
An Anthology of Dark and Speculative Fiction Stories Examining What May Occur After We Die
Edited by Eric J. Guignard
Dark Moon Books, an imprint of Stony Meadow Publishing, Largo FL (292 pp, $15.95, trade paperback, April 2013)
Reviewed by Michaele Jordan

As you can guess from the title, Eric J. Guignard has assembled an assortment of viewpoints about the afterlife. These thirty-four stories (illustrated by Audra Phillips) cover a surprising range, especially since the viewpoint most professed by science fiction fans is the least represented. Please do not interpret that remark as a criticism. There’s not a lot of story to tell in a story about nothing happening. Yet even the perception of the afterlife as nothingness is included with ‘The Last Moments Before Bed,’ in which Steve Rasnic Tem confronts the dreadful hole remaining after a loved one is gone.

These stories run the gamut from blissful to black; John Palisano’s ‘Forever’ anticipates a joyful reunion, while Kelly Dunn’s ‘Marvel at the Face of Forever’ is one of the darkest horror stories this reviewer has ever seen. Several authors contrast the Christian afterworld with the pagan, as in the Christian displacement of the Greek afterlife in Jonathan Shipley’s ‘Like a Bat out of Hell,’ or Valhalla’s continued rowdy intrusion into the Catholic middle ages as told by Christine Morgan in ‘A Feast of Meat and Mead.’

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Child of Fire
Harry Connolly
Del Rey (357 pages, mass market first edition September 2009, $7.99)

When we first meet Ray Lily, he’s in unpleasant circumstances. He’s less than 48 hours out of prison, driving a junker van through a Seattle rainstorm, and serving as chauffer to a boss who a.) is a powerful sorcerer, b.) wants to see him dead at the first possible opportunity, and c.) is paying him a wage of zero dollars per hour. Ten minutes after we meet him, he’s watched a boy die in front of his parents by exploding into sorcerous flame and melting into a swarm of silver worms. And then he’s watched the boy’s parents immediately forget they ever had a son, and drive away only vaguely confused.

It only goes downhill from there.

Child of Fire is a dark book. Sometimes shockingly, disturbingly dark, as is apparent right from the opening. That said, it’s also hugely entertaining, with noir-styled prose, a likeable narrator, and one of the most imaginative and horrifying monstrous adversaries I’ve ever encountered in fiction of any medium.

Our hero, Ray Lily, narrates the book in first person, and he bears comparison to hardboiled heroes like Philip Marlowe and Archie Goodwin, as well as the fantasy genre’s own Harry Dresden. He’s not quite as, well, heroic as Harry, though.  He’s a criminal, recently out of a prison sentence that came at the tail end of a car-jacking career in L.A. county, and he still has a tendency to sort everyone he meets into two categories: victim and dominant.

But mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his childhood friend have pulled him into the shadowy world of the Twenty Palaces, a league of sorcerers formed to protect the secrets of magic from outsiders and to hunt down the supernatural entities known only as “predators.” These are hungry creatures from an extra-dimensional world called the Empty Spaces, who exist in a constant state of hunger. When summoned to our world, they can offer terrible power in return for a chance to sate that hunger on humans.

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It began in October 2011, when an anonymous poster on Reddit, going by the username 1000vultures, posted a creepy little short titled simply “Footsteps.” Over the following weeks, the fanbase for 1000vultures swelled as five more stories were posted. Eventually, Dathan Auerbach (the author’s “civilian” name) began the process of revising those six little pieces, connecting and expanding them until he had his first novel, Penpal. After a successful Kickstarter campaign (where he made more than ten times his initial goal), he was ready to publish the thing.

Honestly, I picked up all of that after the fact. I’d never frequented Reddit’s No Sleep page, nor did I catch the Kickstarter campaign when it was going on. I just heard about a creepy little book by a new name on the horror scene and thought I’d check it out.

The book is broken into six parts, each set in a different point in the narrator’s childhood. Taken together, the stories come away like snapshots of one great horror, taken from different angles. The first story, “Footsteps,” evokes the universal fear felt by every child at least once: the fear of being lost. “Balloons” is the story that lays out the groundwork for what is to come. “Boxes” takes the story out of being strictly psychological horror and into something more physically threatening. “Maps” is the point when we are shown that the mystery might truly be something unknowable. “Screens” is the point when the author lets some of his own influences show. And the last story, “Friends,” wraps up the cycle with a couple surprises and a revelation of what truly is the heart of the story.

To be sure, this is the author’s first novel and there are some learning curve mistakes made in the narrative. The only problem I really had with the story was a sort of floating timeline. Ordinarily, it shouldn’t matter in what specific year a story takes place, but cell phones and the Internet seems to float in and out of existence. (Seriously, how do you not know how to find somebody’s phone number?) Otherwise, it’s a creepy little novel from a rising talent who hopefully produces many more.

You can pick up Penpal in print ($9.99) or as an e-book ($4.99) and learn more about the imprint 1000 Vultures (including how Auerbach came up with the name) at his website.

Five years ago, I embarked on a writing and publishing journey, finally fulfilling a lifelong dream. By doing so, I unknowingly became a part of a legacy that began long before I decided to set fingers to keys to write my first novel.

Decades earlier, Charles R. Saunders sat before a different type of keyboard to create a character that added an important perspective to sword and sorcery, Imaro.  His motivation was similar to mine, although we came to the same conclusion years apart.

After falling in love with Robert E. Howard’s Conan and other stories and heroes that comprised Sword and Sorcery, he began to see the inequities. So to rectify the situation, he created Imaro, a man whose skills rivaled that of Conan’s, but whose world was grounded in African culture, history, and tradition.

My journey was sparked in a similar way, leading me to create my first Sword and Soul novel, Meji. Meji is a celebration of the diversity of the African continent, told through the story of twin brothers Ndoro and Obaseki.

It was coincidence that Charles and I were sparked to create characters from the same source; but it was fortuitous that we met through a mutual friend. It was Charles’s positive review of my Meji manuscript that convinced me that my decision to self-publish was the right thing to do.

But enough about me.  What’s been happening with Sword and Soul in the five years since my publishing company MVmedia hit the ground running?

A hell of a lot.

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You’re not reading enough great short fiction.

You know it’s true. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

I have a suggestion (I know — when do I not?) You should read Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

Solaris has been a fast-rising brand in science fiction and fantasy for the past six years, since they were founded in 2007. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve covered several recent titles of note, including Juliet E. McKenna’s Dangerous Waters and The Good The Bad and the Infernal by Guy Adams. See? These guys are serious.

They’re serious about great short fiction, too. They started with three annual volumes of The Solaris Book Of New Science Fiction, edited by George Mann and published between 2007 and 2009. They relaunched the series last year as Solaris Rising, under new editor Ian Whates, and the book was a significant critical success.

Solaris Rising 2 looks like one of the best volumes yet. It includes stories by Mike Allen, Kay Kenyon, Nancy Kress, James Lovegrove, Robert Reed, Norman Spinrad, Liz Williams, Allan Steele, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Paul Cornell, Eugie Foster, Nick Harkaway, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Vandana Singh, and many others.

Editor Ian Whates is no newbie to SF and fantasy. His novels City of Dreams & Nightmare and City of Hope & Despair were published by Angry Robot and The Noise Within and The Noise Revealed were released by Solaris. You should take advantage of expertise like that, and let him guide you to some quality fiction.

Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction was published by Solaris Books on March 26. It is 448 pages, priced at $8.99 in paperback. There is no digital edition.