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Year: 2013

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Michael D. Langois and Flock Theatre’s Halloween ’13 Macbeth

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Michael D. Langois and Flock Theatre’s Halloween ’13 Macbeth

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BGMacBanWitDear Black Gate Readers,

I must confess.

I confess that I’m not sure I believe in confession, despite a semi-confessional blog style.

I confess that I don’t even really believe in Full Disclosure on blogs. I mean, they’re BLOGS. Whaddya need disclosure for? Come on!

But here I am, about to disclose.

Supposedly there is a chance I might feel guilty if I let you read this entirely fabulous interview all the way through and didn’t tell you that WAY BEFORE (like two whole weeks before) I ever interviewed Michael D. Langois, director of this year’s production of Flock Theatre‘s Macbeth, I also auditioned for the man.

Yea, even auditioned for THIS VERY PRODUCTION! GASP!

So what aren’t you going to get in this interview, dear Black Gaters?

You aren’t going to get a cool, calm, collected, impartial, disinterested, “Oh, so you’re doing Macbeth? How nice! Tell me about the play and its DARK MAGIC!” sort of interview-blog-article-thing.

(In fact, such an attitude would go against my aesthetic intentions for this “Fantasy and the Arts” series of interviews I’m doing.)

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New Treasures: Three by Jay Posey

New Treasures: Three by Jay Posey

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Three Jay Posey-smallIn case anybody has surfed over accidentally from io9 or something, I want to make clear that we’re a fantasy website. Fantasy is J.R.R. Tolkien, Conan, Harry Potter, movies with wizards, pretty much any game with oddly-shaped dice, most anime, and those secret daydreams you have about Scarlett Johansson. That’s fantasy.

We don’t cover much mystery, current events, or science fiction. Except maybe for Star Trek, ’cause it’s Howard’s favorite show, and we’re big William Shatner fans (but who isn’t?)

I mention this because I bought a copy of Three today and thought I would turn it into my Saturday New Treasures column. But no sooner do I settle into my big green chair and crack it open, then I discover it’s actually science fiction. Should have paid more attention in Barnes & Noble. That’s what dreaming about Scarlett Johansson will do to you.

Well, what the heck. Still looks more like fantasy than SF to me. Three is the first book in a new trilogy (see? What’s more fantasy than that!) called Legends of the Duskwalker. Here’s the book description.

The world has collapsed, and there are no heroes any more. His name is Three, a travelling gun for hire in a dying world. He has no allegiances, no family, no ties.

Against his better judgment, he accepts the mantle of protector to a sick woman on the run, and her young son. Together they set out across the plains in search of a mythic oasis, attempting to survive the forces that pursue them, and the creatures of the dark. In these dark times, a hero may yet arise.

Angry Robot, in their efforts to be helpful, have the words “Not a sequel” buried in the copyright page. That was helpful, actually. They’ve also printed handy category labels on the back — apparently Three should be filed under Science Fiction, Apocalyptic Wasteland, A Journey Home, Three For All, and Fear the Weir. Fear the Weir? Let’s just say that book categorization sure has changed since I learned the Dewey Decimal system, and leave it at that.

Three was published by Angry Robot on July 30.It is 480 pages, priced at $7.99 for the paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The moody bloke-in-a-cloak cover is by Steven Meyer-Rassow.

Adventure in a Place of Unholy Shadows: A Review of Crypts and Things

Adventure in a Place of Unholy Shadows: A Review of Crypts and Things

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Screen Shot 2013-09-25 at 10.39.17 Back in the 70s, when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), I spent a long time wanting a ruleset that would let me recreate the sort of sword and sorcery that I was reading back then.

I wanted to play a game that caught the atmosphere of Robert E Howard’s Conan, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories. I wanted to adventure in a place of unholy shadows, where magic was scary and thrilling and men with swords sought lost treasures in glittering towers where old gods and dark secrets waited.

Clearly, D&D was not quite what I was looking for. The white box contained an unholy mishmash of Tolkien, bits of medieval history, and a weird variation of Vancian magic from the Dying Earth which, while awesomely powerful, was not very scary or, well, magical. Magic items were as common as if they came in cereal boxes. And what was with it with those cleric guys and the undead?

The setting of D&D did not look like any fantasy world I had read about, but it was clearly influenced by a number of them. There were thieves that might have been Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. There was a barbarian character class in an issue of White Dwarf that might, if you squinted, have resembled something like Conan.

But D&D did not quite hit the mark. There were also elves and halflings and dwarves and all manner of other things that did not exist in the S&S universes of my particular dreams. There were echoes of Howard and Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith, but they were smudged over with bits of Tolkien and a kind of high fantasy.

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The Devil in the Details: A Review of Lawyers in Hell

The Devil in the Details: A Review of Lawyers in Hell

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Lawyers in Hell-smallLawyers in Hell (Heroes in Hell, Volume 12)
Created by Janet Morris, edited by Janet and Chris Morris, and written “with the diabolical assistance of the damnedest writers in perdition.”
Perseid Press (456 pages, June 8, 2011, $19.95 in trade paperback)

This is volume twelve in the most clever and interesting shared-universe series I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Lawyers in Hell actually precedes Rogues in Hell and Dreamers in Hell, both of which I previously reviewed here. And like those other volumes, this one is also outstanding.  So let me start off with a bit of info on what’s going on this time around in Hell, among the characters drawn from the pages of history, legend, folklore, and mythology.

Hell is a twisted, ironic echo of life on Earth. Here the mighty have fallen, though they retain some delusion of grandeur. Here the lowly have risen in rank, though they are no more than toys for Satan to play with. Everyone in Hell is HSM’s (His Satanic Majesty’s) pawn, his puppet.

Erra is the Babylonian god of mayhem and plague, and rumors of Erra and his 7 Sibitti enforcers running amok in Hell are spreading like hellfire. They have been sent by Heaven to audit Hell, to enforce punishment equally. They are there to make damned sure that every damned soul in Hell “receives injustice justly. Or something like that,” to quote author Nancy Asire. “Lawyers are shaking in their boots or salivating over their opportunities.”

As the title of this volume suggests, each story/chapter revolves around legal battles being fought, court cases being heard, and lawsuits being drawn up. Everyone in Hell wants out of Hell and the damned are going through whatever legal system there can be said to exist in Hell. Where’s Perry Mason when you need him? I don’t think he’s in Hell. Not yet, at any rate.

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Low Adventure: Clasp-knives and Fortunetelling in Carmen

Low Adventure: Clasp-knives and Fortunetelling in Carmen

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Prosper Mérimée Carmen-smallWhy does it have to be the days of “high adventure?”

Low adventure can be extraordinarily riveting, as I recently found when I revisited Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, the novella that inspired the Bizet opera. I’d read it once before, after seeing the (definitive, to my taste) Rosi film of the opera in the early 80s. Thanks to that film, I was so enchanted with the light and color of Andalusia that on my first trip to Europe I spent the better part of it there, on the coasts, in the alleys of Gibraltar, and especially in the stony mountains of Spain’s Sierra Nevadas. Thanks to a stay at an Andalusian cortijo (estate-farm) I was able to see some of the more remote areas on horseback, dragging a dutiful, saddlesore (need I say “ex”?) girlfriend behind who would have much rather been sunning on the beaches of Marbella or examining the wonders of the Alhambra.

Spain is a country of regions. The differences you might notice between northern Italians and southern are trebled in the expanses of Spain, divided as it is by mountains and joined by indirect routes reaching back into the dust of antiquity. There’s something of Robert E. Howard’s Zamora in Andalusia. Rome, the Caliphate, Catholicism, and for the history-minded traveller with a good guidebook, traces of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Napoleon can still be found. Each province has its flavor, industrious Bilbao, pretentiously bustling Madrid, historic Toledo, artistic Barcelona, leaving a distinct impression. The Andalusians are famous for just living life. Every meeting is an excuse for a party, every parting as one between old friends. Visiting Spain revised my personal definitions of “courtesy” and “hospitality.”

I see I’ve imitated Mérimée in framing these notes, elaborating the circumstances of my acquaintance with Carmen and Don Jose and the search into their origins. So enough about me.

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“And They All Lived Happily Ever After”

“And They All Lived Happily Ever After”

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The Snow Queen's Shadow-smallNot a lot of exposition in that type of ending, was there? Didn’t tell us much of what happened “after” – which actually turned out to be quite handy, when you consider the number of writers who have gone on to tell that “after” tale. Take Jim Hines and his Princess Novels, for example, where we learn the true, ever-after fates of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty.

We no longer see much of that type of ending, perhaps because when that phrase was used more often than it is now, there was an understanding of what “after” meant, and what “happiness” was, that removed the need for any further details.

What I’m really talking about here, of course, is that old story structure chart we were taught in school, the action that rises to the climax, followed by the denouement. Where “climax” is defined by “the point at which you know how the story ends” and “denouement” is defined by “what happens after that point” – or, as we might call it, the final exposition.

We’ve all had the experience, when discussing a movie or a book with our friends, of finding that some of us want the “final” explanation, the wrap up after the climax, and some of us are satisfied that we know what happens “after,” without having it spelled out for us.

The fact is that often where you as the writer want to stop isn’t where readers want you to stop – or so my editor tells me. In my own case, with my first novel, The Mirror Prince, I had what I thought was the perfect spot to end the story. Both my agent and my editor told me that I had to tell a little bit more, that the readers would want to know what happened after.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Drums of Fu Manchu, Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Drums of Fu Manchu, Part Two

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drums2dofm-cover-front-300Sax Rohmer’s The Drums of Fu Manchu was first serialized in Collier’s from April 1 to June 3, 1939. It was published in book form later that year by Cassel in the UK and Doubleday in the US. The second quarter of the book picks up with a weary Sir Denis Nayland Smith contemplating whether he is too old to continue warring with Dr. Fu Manchu and the Si-Fan. Their conflict has stretched for nearly thirty years and the Si-Fan is growing in strength, while Nayland Smith is growing old.

Chief Inspector Gallaho of Scotland Yard brings news that galvanizes Smith back into action. Dr. Martin Jasper, research director of Caxton armament factory, has received his final notice from the Si-Fan. Smith, Bart Kerrigan, and Gallaho immediately depart for Jasper’s Suffolk estate, Great Oaks. Naturally, they arrive too late. The staff of the great house is in an uproar as their master has barricaded himself in his laboratory and is believed to be dead.

Breaking through the barricade, they discover the latest victim of the Green Death is not Dr. Jasper, but his Japanese employer, Mr. Osaki. While interviewing the staff, Smith learns Dr. Jasper had a frequent Eurasian visitor – a woman whose description does not match Ardatha, to Kerrigan’s relief, but rather Fah lo Suee, the now deceased daughter of Fu Manchu.

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New Treasures: The Doomsday Vault by Steven Harper

New Treasures: The Doomsday Vault by Steven Harper

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The Doomsday Vault Steven Harper-smallThere’s no shortage of intriguing new SF and fantasy series out there and more arriving every month. So how is a busy reader supposed to choose?

Easy! Based on cover art, of course. Duh. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to apply what I like to call The O’Neill Rule — always wait until at least the fourth installment in a series arrives before you commit to the first one, so you’re less likely to get caught in a George R.R. Martin-like wait between volumes.

The Havoc Machine, the fourth novel in Steven Harper’s Victorian steampunk-zombie Clockwork Empire series, was published earlier this year. And that means I can finally crack open the first, The Doomsday Vault. Good thing too, because it has a killer cover and the wait was killing me.

The Honorable Alice B. Michaels is in a life or death struggle for survival — socially speaking, that is. At twenty-one, her age, her unladylike interest in automatons, and the unfortunate deaths of most of her family from the clockwork plague have sealed her fate as a less than desirable marriage prospect.

But a series of strange occurrences are about to lead Alice in a direction quite beyond the pale. High above the earth on the American airship USS Juniper, Gavin Ennock lives for the wind and the sky and his fiddle. After privateers attack the Juniper, he is stranded on the dank, dirty, and merciless streets of London. When Alice’s estranged aunt leaves her a peculiar inheritance, she encounters Gavin under most unusual — even shocking — circumstances.

Then Alice’s inheritance attracts the attention of the Third Ward, a clandestine organization that seizes the inventions of mad geniuses the plague leaves behind — all for the good of the Empire. But even the Third Ward has secrets. And when Alice and Gavin discover them, a choice must be made between the world and the Empire, no matter the risk to all they hold dear.

Steven Harper also writes SF and movie novelizations under the name Steven Piziks, and romantic suspense under the name Penny Drake. The Doomsday Vault was published by Roc Books in November 2011. It is 382 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the digital and paperback version. It was followed by The Impossible Cube (May 2012), The Dragon Men (November 2012), and The Havoc Machine (May 2013).

Goth Chick News: A Naked Haunted House – Or One More Thing We Don’t Need to See

Goth Chick News: A Naked Haunted House – Or One More Thing We Don’t Need to See

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image002“You can do that one without me. No way.”

“Come on, it’s all just theater. You’re not really going to die.”

“Nope, not happening.”

“Think of what a great write up it will make.”

“Write it up then. I can’t bring my camera in there anyway.”

Black Gate photographer Chris Z and I are debating whether or not he will accompany me to the traveling version of the extreme haunted attraction, Blackout Elements when it rolls through Chicago later this year.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this experience, the annual version of Blackout that pops up in a different LA or NYC location every October has been compared to a voluntary prison assault that you actually pay fifty, non-refundable, dollars to have inflicted on you.

Let’s face it. An experience that requires you to sign a six-page disclaimer and memorize a safety word is not your neighborhood Jaycee’s “haunted house.” And for someone who has been through about a bazillion October attractions, this one sounded like something I really needed to do.

But apparently I was doing it without Chris Z.

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The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in August

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in August

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The Black Fire Concerto-smallThere’s a few new faces on the Top Fiction list this month.

Mark Rigney’s “The Keystone,” third and final chapter of his epic fantasy series The Tales of Gemen, broke into the Top Five. Tangent Online called it “Masterfully told… The tension never stops, starting with nightmares, followed by chases across half the world… Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop.” Both of the previous chapters made the list as well, including the opener “The Trade,” which Tangent Online called “Marvelous!” and “The Find,” which it described as “Reminiscent of the old sword & sorcery classics… A must read.”

Also making the Top Five for the first time was our excerpt from Mike Allen’s new dark fantasy The Black Fire Concerto, which Tanith Lee called “A prize for the multitude of fans who relish strong Grand Guignol with their sword and sorcery.” And Vaughn Heppner had two of his Tales of Lod in the Top 10:  “The Serpent of Thep” and “The Pit Slave.”

Also making the list were exciting stories by Howard Andrew Jones, Joe Bonadonna, E.E. Knight, Paul Abbamondi, Martha Wells, Aaron Bradford Starr,  David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, Ryan Harvey, Judith Berman, Robert Rhodes, Emily Mah, John R. Fultz, and Jamie McEwan.

If you haven’t sampled the adventure fantasy stories offered through our new Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. Every week, we present an original short story or novella from the best writers in the industry, all completely free. Here are the Top Twenty most-read stories in August:

  1. An excerpt from The Bones of the Old Ones, by Howard Andrew Jones
  2. “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
  3. “The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
  4. “The Keystone,” Part III of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney
  5. An excerpt from The Black Fire Concerto, by Mike Allen
  6. “The Serpent of Thep,” by Vaughn Heppner
  7. “So Go the Seasons,” by Paul Abbamondi
  8. “The Pit Slave,” by Vaughn Heppner
  9. The Death of the Necromancer, a complete novel by Martha Wells
  10. “The Find,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney

     

    11. …

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