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Month: February 2014

The Adventure Continues: the Return of Renner and Quist

The Adventure Continues: the Return of Renner and Quist

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Sleeping Bear coverWhen I first dreamed up my odd-couple pair of Renner & Quist, one of the many goals I had in mind was to write their stories specifically and consciously as adventures. This was not perhaps the most sensible decision, given a literary market polarized between nominally realistic “grown-up” fare and the highly fantastical tomes aimed at teens. (I shall not deign to even mention Romance; call me biased, go ahead. I can take it.) Nor did my conception of Renner & Quist allow for them to don armor, wield swords, or inhabit some far-flung or alternate world. No, these two, Reverend Renner being a Unitarian Universalist minister and Dale Quist a former P.I. and ex-linebacker, required a contemporary setting; to emplace them elsewhere would be to guarantee that any stories woven around them would be untruthful.

This is not to say that I’m against high fantasy; quite the opposite. I’m here, aren’t I? For further proof, take a gander at my Black Gate trilogy concerning Gemen the Antiques Dealer.

But not all ideas trend that direction and with Renner & Quist, I knew I had nearer waters to chart. Now that their second novella, Sleeping Bear, is out in the world, and with their first proper novel, Check-Out Time, very much in the production pipeline, it seems high time to explore what remains, in the 21st century, of that cracking good term, “adventure.”

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Future Treasures: Irenicon by Aidan Harte

Future Treasures: Irenicon by Aidan Harte

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Irenicon by Aidan Harte-smallI get a lot of advance proofs. I used to treasure them. I remember I got this advance proof for an upcoming novel by George R.R. Martin back in 1996 called A Game of Thrones. Looked pretty good. I took it with me to Archon in St. Louis and sat in on a very lightly-attended reading — just six of us in a cozy room, listening to George act out the character of a dwarf named Tyrion — and George was gracious enough to sign my copy. I eventually gave it away. No sense holding on to proofs once they’ve been reviewed; you just clutter up your house.

Point is, it’s got to be pretty special to grab my attention these days. The latest fantasy epic from Jo Fletcher books got my attention for two reasons. First, I couldn’t make out the title. What that heck is that? Frenicon? Srenicon? (renicon? That’s bizarre. Alice, help me out here. I think it’s some kind of eye test.

Second, the book features a sentient river. That’s right, a sentient river — and not a happy one. That’s worth a read right there.

The river Irenicon is a feat of ancient Concordian engineering. Blasted through the middle of Rasenna in 1347, using Wave technology, it divided the only city strong enough to defeat the Concordian Empire. But no one could have predicted the river would become sentient — and hostile.

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Return to Thieves World in Beyond Sanctuary: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

Return to Thieves World in Beyond Sanctuary: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

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Microsoft Word - 09 12 24 Sacred Band Cover white horse white foLet me start off here with a quote from my Black Gate review of Janet and Chris Morris’s novel, The Sacred Band:

The Sacred Band is much more than great Heroic Fantasy: it is classic literature, filled with sub-plots, a fine cast of well-drawn characters, insight and wisdom and recurring themes of honor, faith, brotherhood and love. This novel spoke to me on a personal level because it’s a story of pure human drama and powerful emotions. While the characters are larger than life, they are also richly-drawn and written with great depth of insight and humanity. What also rings true with the Sacred Band is their military tradition, their ethos. These characters are soldiers, warriors. They are not only mythic heroes, they are also everyday heroes; real people, everyday people who face extraordinary odds and foes… The Sacred Band has the sharp edge of reality, the harshness, the bitterness and the danger of the real world. Love, loyalty, honor — these are the ideals by which these characters live and die. This novel is epic in scope. It is mythic by heritage. It is positively Homeric.

Janet Morris’s Beyond Sanctuary is the first volume in a trilogy that includes Beyond the Veil and Beyond Wizardwall, and the events in this trilogy take place before The Sacred Band, the magnificent novel by Janet and her husband Chris, which I previously reviewed here for Black Gate.

Beyond Sanctuary is a complex novel and truly literary heroic fantasy. It is textured and layered, subtle at times, and yet always powerful. Like the best of all literary fiction, it has emotional depth and human drama, subtext and a philosophy that is expressed through the thoughts, words, and deeds of its characters, and not through narrative lecture and dissertation that slows the pace of narrative thrust.

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Vintage Treasures: The Last Planet by Andre Norton

Vintage Treasures: The Last Planet by Andre Norton

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The Last Planet-smallAndre Norton’s The Last Planet may have been the first Ace Double I ever saw.

Memory is a tricky thing, so I can’t really be sure. It may have been Daybreak — 2250, which sat enticingly in the spinner racks of the St. Francis Junior High School library in Halifax, Nova Scotia. But The Last Planet was almost certainly the first Ace Double I laid eyes on which I was aware was an Ace Double, with a sister book on the flip side and everything (in this case, Alan E. Nourse’s futuristic thriller A Man Obsessed.)

By then, I had begun to build my own collection of SF paperbacks and this fascinating relic of early SF adventure helped pull me towards the entire Ace Double line, like a shipwrecked sailor drawn towards a desert island. A big, lush desert island with a gorgeous library.

It’s Harry Barton’s classic cover for the 1955 paperback that really did it for me. I’ve never read The Last Planet — it took me years just to track down a copy — but nonetheless it has loomed large in my imagination for decades. Three stalwart space explorers, walking through the ruins of an alien city as their crashed spacecraft cools in the foothills behind them, about to stumble upon a metal robot, hiding in the rubble and clutching a rudimentary weapon.

How could it not? For me, at least, it’s one of the signature works of 20th Century SF artwork.

In the years that I searched for a copy, I imagined the story of those three explorers. Would they shoot the robot? Was it friendly? Could be friendly, with those big google-eyes and curious gaze. Those red-shirted explorers looked awfully trigger happy though, with their steely gazes and twitchy hands on their futuristic sidearms. Lords knows, you can’t blame a redshirt for being trigger-happy on an away mission.

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Two-Fisted Justice in an Abandoned Cemetery: Will Esiner’s The Spirit

Two-Fisted Justice in an Abandoned Cemetery: Will Esiner’s The Spirit

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The Spirit 23-smallWill Eisner is one of the most revered comic creators of the 20th Century, and for good reason. I’m continually astounded at the skill and command of the medium he exhibited, even at an early age.

He was inducted into the Academy of Comic Book Arts Hall of Fame in 1971 and he virtually created the graphic novel with his 1978 masterwork A Contract with God. Comic’s most prestigious awards, the Eisner Awards, were created in his honor in 1988.

So I’m a little disappointed that his most famous creation, the good humored crime-fighter The Spirit, isn’t more well known today.

The Spirit is flat-out one of my favorite early comics. Beginning his career as detective Denny Colt, shot and left for dead in the first three pages of his premiere appearance, the Spirit awakens in the abandoned and overgrown Wildwood Cemetery. From this new base of operations, and with his past virtually obliterated, The Spirit throws himself into life as a crime fighter, disguising his identity with a small domino mask (which he wears even while sleeping), an amazingly resilient business suit, fedora hat, and gloves.

With his sidekick Ebony White, an uneducated but resourceful black orphan (who sleeps in a sock drawer), the Spirit traveled the world, bringing justice to criminals and con men all over the world.

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Monster Mash-up: Elizabeth Hand’s Pandora’s Bride

Monster Mash-up: Elizabeth Hand’s Pandora’s Bride

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Pandora's BrideFebruary is Women in Horror Month, and with that in mind I’d like to look at an interesting oddity. In 2005, Dark Horse Books, a then-recently launched imprint of Dark Horse Comics, announced they’d be publishing a set of tie-in novels. These novels wouldn’t tie into the big modern-day entertainment franchises that Dark Horse Comics was known for working with, though. Instead, they’d each present the further adventures of one of the famous Universal Studios horror characters. I happened to stumble across one a little while ago: Pandora’s Bride by Elizabeth Hand. Hand is a fine writer and I was happy to find that she’d taken her assignment here and run with it. Ostensibly, the book’s about the adventures of “the Bride of Frankenstein,” but Hand’s cleverly and amusingly told a story about several other remarkable film characters as well, playing with some of the great works of German Expressionist film and of Fritz Lang in particular.

Her main character, though, is the Bride — is there any other film character that’s made such an impact, become such an icon, with so little actual screen time? The Bride doesn’t appear until the final few minutes of the 1935 movie named for her; and then almost all she does is point and scream. Yet nearly everyone knows who she is. Her image is unmistakeable. Obviously, that’s a function of striking visual design. It may help that Elsa Lanchester, who played both the Bride and Mary Shelley (in a prologue to the film’s main action), ended up settling in to a career filled mostly with character roles and few other starring appearances. But for whatever reason, the Bride exists as perhaps the most literally iconic of movie roles: an image, with no character arc attached.

So Hand’s first task in this novel would be to find a story for the Bride. A prolific novelist and short story writer, Hand’s won all sorts of awards: a Nebula for her short story “Echo,” International Horror Guild Awards in 2001 for Best Long Form work and in 2002 for Best Intermediate Form, two World Fantasy Awards for Best Novella and one for Best Collection, and both a Tiptree Award and a Mythopoeic Award for her 1994 novel Waking the Moon. She’s an excellent writer, and specifically a horror writer, as well as a veteran of tie-in fiction — in addition to writing a number of movie novelisations, she’s produced four Boba Fett children’s books for Lucasfilm. (And perhaps Boba Fett before the prequel films and the Extended Universe would have been the only other character remotely close to the purely-iconic nature of the Bride; but then Fett had appeared in a cartoon segment in a TV special even before his first appearance in Empire, as well as newspaper comic strips.) All told, Hand was a good choice for the job.

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New Treasures: Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

New Treasures: Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

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Broken Homes-smallBen Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels are one of my favorite new series. io9 calls them “The perfect blend of CSI and Harry Potter.” I’ve never watched CSI, but I imagine that can’t be that far off. I think Diana Gabaldon is very close when she describes them as “What would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the Fuzz.”

Even those quotes don’t do justice to how funny these novels are. They’re tightly plotted, too; just the right mix of humor, suspense, and genuine character development. The latest in the series, Broken Homes, just landed this month. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

My name is Peter Grant, and I am a keeper of the secret flame — whatever that is.

Truth be told, there’s a lot I still don’t know. My superior Nightingale, previously the last of England’s wizardly governmental force, is trying to teach me proper schooling for a magician’s apprentice. But even he doesn’t have all the answers. Mostly I’m just a constable sworn to enforce the Queen’s Peace, with the occasional help from some unusual friends and a well-placed fire blast. With the new year, I have three main objectives, a) pass the detective exam so I can officially become a DC, b) work out what the hell my relationship with Lesley Mai, an old friend from the force and now fellow apprentice, is supposed to be, and most importantly, c) get through the year without destroying a major landmark.

Two out of three isn’t bad, right?

A mutilated body in Crawley means another murderer is on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil, who may either be a common serial killer or an associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man — a man whose previous encounters I’ve barely survived.

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Lust, Women, and the Devil: Seven Decades of Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife

Lust, Women, and the Devil: Seven Decades of Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife

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Conjure Wife-small There are a lot of fascinating things you can learn about 20th Century America — and America today — by being a compulsive paperback collector. Seriously. It’s like being a Cultural Anthropologist.

Let’s take a look at Fritz Leiber’s first novel, Conjure Wife. In fact, it’s a near perfect example. The book has been reprinted around a dozen times by roughly as many publishers over the last 70 years, and each time the cover art and marketing copy tell you as much about society as they do about the book. More, even.

First, it helps to know a little about the novel. Conjure Wife was written in 1943; it’s a supernatural horror novel that imagines that witchcraft is an ancient secret shared by most women. Our protagonist Norman Saylor, a professor at a small town college, accidentally discovers that his wife Tansy is a witch. When he convinces her to abandon the mysterious art, the couple rapidly find their luck changing for the worse. Turns out that Tansy’s various charms were the only thing protecting them from an intricate web of curses and counter-spells cast by the women around them.

I always thought that was a fascinating premise. If it seems familiar, it’s because the story has filtered into public consciousness since 1943 — it’s been filmed at least three times: the Lon Chaney, Jr. feature Weird Woman (1944), the Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson collaboration Burn, Witch, Burn! (1962), and Lana Turner’s final film, Witches’ Brew (1980). Of course, the concept of a community of witches and warlocks living secretly among us has gradually become a popular fantasy trope — used in Jimmy Stewart’s 1958 fantasy Bell, Book and Candle, just for example, as well as the 1964 to 1972 TV series Bewitched, and even the Harry Potter novels.

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When Is An Apocalypse Not an Apocalypse?

When Is An Apocalypse Not an Apocalypse?

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Damnation Last week, I was talking about apocalyptic novels – both Fantasy and SF – that I have on my shelves, and once again I got some very interesting and stimulating commentary. There are quite a few recommendations in those comments – along with some great ideas – so I’d advise you to have a look.

I was a bit chagrined when one of the commenters mentioned Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969) as an example of post-apocalyptic SF. Like the other books I cited, this one is on my shelves, and as a big fan of his, I don’t know how I missed it. I’m going to talk about it, and about another of Zelazny’s novels, This Immortal (1965/66), but first, a little clarification.

One of the things we got into in the comments was exactly what we meant by “apocalypse” and “post-apocalyptic.” Now, as someone who not that long ago had a little rant about definitions, I probably should have been clearer about what I meant by those particular terms. Not that there was any name-calling or hair-pulling in last week’s comments. Just that I should have been more careful to follow my own advice.

Here’s my take on it: The existence of a precursor society is insufficient to make a story post-apocalyptic. An apocalyptic event brings about the “end of the world as we know it.” It should happen abruptly, not slowly over the course of time, as with the fall of the Roman Empire, or the disappearance of the civilization of the Caids in my own Dhulyn and Parno Novels. The new, post-apocalyptic society should be starting, effectively, from scratch. Maybe they’ve retained some “stuff” from the previous civilization, even some of the political or social ideas, but their world has changed in a way that can’t be changed back. The apocalyptic event can be natural or man-made – and I’d include magically created events in the latter category.

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The Return of Renner and Quist

The Return of Renner and Quist

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sleeping bearSamhain Publishing has just awakened Sleeping Bear, the second Renner and Quist adventure by Mark Rigney to see publication as an ebook. I discovered the series last year when the same publisher unearthed The Skates, a screwball quest involving tormented Victorian souls, a pair of magic ice skates, a ghostly hound, and dimensional time and space travel.

For the benefit of newcomers, Renner and Quist are an odd couple double act comprising a stuffy Unitarian minister and a rather crude, sometimes boorish, ex-linebacker and former private eye, who team to solve occult mysteries in Michigan. This quirky series is surprisingly literate fiction that calls to mind Douglas Adams’s delightful Dirk Gently detective series.

Rigney’s fiction is built around his characters’ faith (or their lack thereof) in the supernatural and preternatural. The series is thought-provoking as much as it is entertaining. This time out, Sleeping Bear finds Reverend Renner suffering through a crisis of faith as his attempts to minister at a local hospice have fallen on not just deaf ears, but unbelieving ones.

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