Dark Muse News: Mad Shadows Book Four: All the Colors of Darkness by Joe Bonadonna

Dark Muse News: Mad Shadows Book Four: All the Colors of Darkness by Joe Bonadonna

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Mad Shadows 4: All of Colors of Darkness by Joe Bonadonna (305 pages, July 18, 2026). Book design by Ruth de Jauregui

Some mysteries leave no fingerprints or footprints — only shadows, strange colors, and the dead. As Dorgo the Dowser investigates necromancers, demons, and a zombie plague, he discovers that darkness comes in many shades.

Book 1: Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser blessed our bookshelves in 2011 (winning the 2017 Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy). The protagonist wields a dowsing rod to sense otherworldly signatures, but this is no Harry Potter wand trickery. Bonadonna’s style is more in line with Michael Shea and Fritz Leiber, and his Mad Shadows tackles supernatural mysteries. In television terms, this would appeal to fans of The X-Files , Supernatural, or Grimm. The author has been a blogger and regular guest at Black Gate forever, and his love for cinema shines through his work. We at Black Gate have already tracked Dorgo’s adventures across three volumes, so we provide a tour guide here to showcase the series.

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Samurai Noir Meets Boardroom Politicking: The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee

Samurai Noir Meets Boardroom Politicking: The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee

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The Last Contract of Isako, by Fonda Lee (Orbit, May 5, 2026). Cover by Thomas Walker

I spent my professional working life as a freelancer, temporarily employed by a various corporations, ad and media companies, start-ups, and consultants on a project, on-call, or contractual for a stated number of months basis. Work might last a month or two, sometimes as much as a year, and then I never hear from the employer again; others develop into long-term relationships, albeit at time with gaps (sometimes long gaps) between assignments.

As a “disposable asset,” I cost the organization less (even as I earn higher pay because there is no overhead expense) and am easier to terminate than a salaried employee. While in today’s gig economy job-seekers often have little choice but to settle for contract work, I turned down offers of full-time permanent employment (though “permanent” is a misnomer given the trend of corporate “restructurings” and “force redeployments” and other such euphemisms to disguise layoffs).

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 7: The Outfit

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 7: The Outfit

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The third Parker novel: The Outfit (Pocket Books, 1967)

What is it?

Volume 3 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels. It is also the third part of the unofficial Outfit Trilogy, the first three books in the series, in which Parker goes up against an organized crime syndicate.

Quick and Dirty Summary

After surviving an assassination attempt by a killer hired by the Outfit, Parker decides it’s time to settle matters with organized crime once and for all.

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By Crom, It’s Cimmerian September: Marvel Does King Conan

By Crom, It’s Cimmerian September: Marvel Does King Conan

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Even as another Summer of A (Black) Gat in the Hand ran in my Monday morning slot (nine years now!), I’ve been spending a lot of time in Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone on West 35th Street, in Manhattan. But I didn’t feel like I could miss out on Cimmerian September. A few of you may recall that last year I joined in the month-long celebration of Robert E. Howard’s mighty-thewed sword slinger.

Later this month I will be on the third and final Solomon Kane Youtube panel by the Robert E. Howard Foundation (here’s the first one). So, getting my REH on this month.

I’ve said that I came late to REH. I was in my forties and my young son would play with the wooden train sets in the kids playroom at Barnes and Noble. One day I picked up the first Del Rey Conan and read it for a bit. I ended up getting it later. And Robert E. Howard would ascend the ranks to surpass all my other favorite writers, with the exception of John D. MacDonald.

My buddy Howard Andrew Jones would stick a verbal elbow in my ribs that I was a rookie sword and sorcery fan, and never changed that opinion, as I still hadn’t shown any interest in C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry (hey – I’m interested in what I’m interested in). But I made up a lot of Conan ground (I had read Moorcock and Leiber by junior high), and I can hold my own in the REH room now.

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Mary Poppins by PL Travers

Mary Poppins by PL Travers

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Mary Poppins gave a superior sniff.

“Don’t you know,” she said pitingly, “that everybody’s got a Fairyland of their own?”

Ultimately, I have Baird Searles (or you have to blame) to thank for pointing to P.L. Travers‘ original Mary Poppins books. To quote the entry in his A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy (1982),

Those who know P.L. TRAVER’s acerbic creation, Mary Poppins, only through the persona of Julie Andrews, do not really know Mary Poppins, despite the best efforts of that charming actress. Mary Poppins seldom has a kind word for anyone, almost never smiles except at heir own prim reflections, and can get four children washed and in bed with No Nonsense Whatsoever.

I didn’t rush out and buy the books, but his words always lingered in my memory, and when I saw the books for sale in the old Borders in the World Trade Center, I bought the first one, Mary Poppins (1934), and promptly devoured it. Strains of the book and its sequels can be heard in the Julie Andrews’ movie, but there are deeper, more mythic moments that I imagine Walt Disney wanted no part of.

Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia in 1899. She took to the stage as a teenager, creating for herself the stage name Pamela Lyndon Travers. For several years she traveled in Australia and New Zealand as part of a Shakespearean company. In New Zealand, she became a published poet and later a primary writer for the women’s sections in a Christchurch newspaper.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, May 1923 (Volume 1, Number 3) Part 1

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, May 1923 (Volume 1, Number 3) Part 1

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Weird Tales, May 1923, front and back covers
The third issue of Weird Tales saw the magazine experiment with a significant change in presentation. The first two issues had been a standard pulp size, about 6 inches by 9; the May 1923 issue went to the bedsheet format, a bit more than 9 inches by 12, while cutting the number of pages from 192 to 120. Open the issue, or look through a pdf file, and further changes become apparent.

The layout’s gone to three columns of text instead of two. There are two reprints in the issue, one of them printed at a reduced type size, presumably to fit the space available. And the magazine boasts interior artwork for the first time, with nine stories getting uncredited illustrations; black-and-white line drawings, usually with heavy cross-hatching.

The artist was presumably this issue’s cover artist, William Heitman, who seems to have done all the interior artwork in Weird Tales’ first year. Heitman’s two-colour cover image is simple, bordering on crude, but conveys a mood. The blurb on the cover is for A. G. Birch’s “The Moon Terror,” though there’s nothing in the story like the picture, for reasons which we’ll come to later on in this post. The colour scheme of the cover’s similar to the last issue, with solid red and black, but the logo’s the third in three issues — though the magazine’s subhead, “The Unique Magazine,” has remained consistent.

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Spoiler Free Review: Coyote vs. Acme

Spoiler Free Review: Coyote vs. Acme

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Coyote vs Acme

In the early 1990s during grad school, I stood outside Professor Derek Penslar’s office, waiting to talk about a class I was taking with him. He had a variety of cartoons and articles posted on his door. Two that I remember were an efficiency consultant’s report on Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and Ian Frazier’s New Yorker article “Coyote v. Acme.” I picked up a copy of Frazier’s collection titled after that piece when it became available.

Tonight, my wife, a friend, and I got to see the movie inspired by that Frazier article: Coyote vs. Acme. We almost didn’t get to see it.

Filmed in spring of 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery announced plans to shelve the film in November 2023 in order to take a tax write-off, much as they did with Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt. After a private showing of the film for the cast and crew, however, Warner Bros. Discovery allowed the filmmakers to seek another distribution deal, partly because of public backlash to the decision caused by comments made by the filmmakers. In March of 2025, Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights, screening it first at San Diego Comic-Con and then releasing it on August 28, 2026.

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Forgotten Authors: T.P. Caravan

Forgotten Authors: T.P. Caravan

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Charles Carroll Muñoz (a.k.a. T.P. Caravan)

T.P. Caravan was born Charles Carroll Muñoz on July 2, 1926 in the Bronx, New York. His parents were O.A. and Constance (née Stoutenburgh) Muñoz.

During World War II, Muñoz served in the United States Navy as an aerial gunner, flying in Avenger bombers. When the war was over, he remained in the U.S. Merchant Marines, serving as a radio officer on freighters, tankers, and passenger ships. He also served during both the Korean and Vietnam Wars on munitions ships.

He earned his Master’s degree from Columbia in 1953 with a thesis about the eighteen century English poet Edward Young. In 1952, while attending Columbia University, he began publishing science fiction under the Caravan name with the short story “Happy Solution,” which appeared in the January issue of Other Worlds. Several other science fiction stories followed over the next thirteen years, including seven sequels to “Happy Solution.”

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Almost Gothic: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers

Almost Gothic: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers

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The Nine Tailors, first edition (Harcourt, Brace, 1934)

The Nine Tailors has been described as the best of Dorothy Sayers’s novels. It certainly has many of the features of classic literary fiction, including a small rural community as a setting; a cast of characters from every level of society; and elaborate symbolism focused on a set of church bells, each with a meaningful name. Indeed the entire novel seems to have a symbolic level of meaning over and above the literal plot of the mystery. Of course mystery novels nearly all begin in medias res, with the discovery of a death, after which the detective reconstructs the previous events; but this novel’s backstory reaches back roughly two decades, to the Great War, and includes much more than the death.

The title The Nine Tailors alludes to the old saying “Nine tailors make a man.” This is sometimes taken as a slur on tailors as cowards or weaklings, saying that one real man is worth nine of them; but Sayers has in mind a custom of ringing nine strokes of a church bell for a man’s death, six for a woman’s, or three for a child’s. There are several deaths in the course of the novel.

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Becoming a Reader

Becoming a Reader

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Andre Norton’s Janus novels: Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus (Fawcett Crest, December 1979 and January 1980). Covers by Ken Barr

I read a lot as a kid and read widely, sampling anything I could find. I always had books on my “want to read” list but also had a lot of chores and never had as much time to read as I wanted.

As a result, when I was a teenager and we were “assigned” readings for school, I resented it. I already knew a dozen books in the library I wanted to read as soon as I could get to them. And, too often, the assigned books were not nearly as colorful or interesting as the stuff I was already reading.

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