Browsed by
Year: 2015

Knights of the Dinner Table 224 Now on Sale

Knights of the Dinner Table 224 Now on Sale

Comments 0 Comment

Knights of the Dinner Table 224-smallKnights of the Dinner Table follows the misadventures of a group of misfit gamers from Muncie, Indiana. It is written and drawn by my friend Jolly R. Blackburn, with editorial assistance by his talented wife Barbara. Black Gate readers may remember the KoDT spin-off The Java Joint, which appeared in the back of every issue of BG (and was eventually collected in a single volume in 2012).

KoDT magazine is published monthly. The core of the publication is the comic strip, but the issues are huge — 64 pages — and rounded out with news, reviews, features, and a variety of entertaining gaming columns. It is, hands down, the best way to stay informed on the adventure gaming hobby each month.

I bought the first issue back in 1994, and contributed a book review column for several years in the late 90s. It amazes me to see that, with 224 issues under his belt, Jolly is now closing in on Dave Sim’s legendary 300-issue run with Cerebus. That’s a monumental accomplishment.

KoDT 224 contains no less than nine full-length strips, plus some short “One-Two Punches.” The cover is by Steven Cummings, a smart parody of Seven Samurai.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

Black Gate Online Fiction: In the Wake Of Sister Blue

Black Gate Online Fiction: In the Wake Of Sister Blue

Comments 0 Comment

In The Wake of Sister Blue Mark Rigney-smallHaving contributed blog posts here at Black Gate since 2006 (where does the time go?), it’s time for a change. Time at last to give up on non-fiction, essays, and opinionated screeds. Time to dive headlong into an experiment I’ve long been itching to try, a serialized novel.

According to Black Gate‘s traffic stats, which of course I study daily from the basement of BG‘s vast Indiana compound, my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“) remain perennially popular. That’s flattering – reassuring, even – and I’m grateful for your readership. Indeed, I feel sufficiently encouraged that I’m ready to offer a brand-new fantasy world in hopes that at least some of you will follow me down what promises to be a truly long and winding road.

Think of this as an experiment in tight-rope walking. I haven’t written to the end. I’m not offering you something that’s already complete. Instead, I’ll be doling out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously.

So the journey begins, in what I expect will be bi-weekly installments. Remember, this is dangerous territory; there’s no safety net. There’s only the story, the one unfolding in my head, the one I promise to set down as best I know how, for you.

That adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue, begins today.

Tell your friends. Off we go.

Read the first chapter of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

…

Read More Read More

Needling at Society’s Wounds: Horror in Pop Culture, From the 1950s to True Detective

Needling at Society’s Wounds: Horror in Pop Culture, From the 1950s to True Detective

Comments 3 comments

Invasion-of-the-saucer-men 1957 poster-smallIt appears near impossible to pinpoint what drives popular culture as it develops. If you look back through science fiction and horror of the nineteen fifties, you can hone in on Cold War undertones in retrospect, on the painful obviousness of America’s paranoia during its long conflict with the USSR. Fiction, and especially genre fiction, is a sponge for social anxieties. Horror in particular, since it thrives on fear, excels at needling at society’s wounds.

One need only turn to the seventies, as America moved beyond the optimism of the previous decade into a chilly, post-Summer of Love winter, to see the dynamic at play. The horror fiction during that time is so spectacular precisely because of how it responded to the decaying optimism of the previous generation. With the dream of Civil Rights leading to widespread racial inequality, with the closure of Vietnam, the introduction of long feather haircuts, the dissolution of the Beatles, and the rise of disco, society was wide open for big budget, socially scathing works of terror.

The eighties turned towards renewal and perceived stability, creating prolonged franchises and creature features that intermixed humor and gore with boatloads of camp. The nineties brought forth a self-referential realism that, in this author’s opinion, accompanied the economic boom of the Clinton years, where pre-9-11 excess bubbled in size and gave way to less politically indulgent modes of entertainment. In the current moment, however, in the wake of terrorism, global economic crisis, and two wars, one thing seems abundantly clear: we’ve returned to championing bleakness in pop culture that feels in many ways similar to what was seen in the seventies. But bleakness weaned on a new generation of plenty that can make the convention feel plastic, and even hypocritical, in nature.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

New Treasures: A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

Comments 0 Comment
A Head Full of Ghosts-small A Head Full of Ghosts-back-small

Paul Tremblay is the author of No Sleep till Wonderland, The Little Sleep, and (with Stephen Graham Jones) Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly. His latest, A Head Full of Ghosts, has perhaps the most intriguing premise for a horror novel I’ve read in years — and it’s getting some of the most breathless reviews of the year, as well. Is it worth the hype? Here’s the lowdown from Nathan Ballingrud:

I just finished Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts. The hype is not hyperbole; this book is outstanding. Creepy, surprising, occasionally funny, always compassionate, and both a love song to horror fiction and an interrogation of its assumptions, this easily stands as one of the best horror novels I’ve read in years.

I’m definitely looking forward to this one. Here’s the description.

…

Read More Read More

SeptOberFright 4: Gene Luen Yang on His First Night Terror: The Headless Bride

SeptOberFright 4: Gene Luen Yang on His First Night Terror: The Headless Bride

Comments 0 Comment
Illustration is from the vintage book of horror stories Short and Shivery. This one accompanies a retelling of Irving's "Adventure of the German Student."
Illustration of a retelling of Irving’s “The Adventure of the German Student” in the vintage book of horror stories Short and Shivery

An ongoing theme that arises when I write about horror entertainment is that of tackling the perennial question: Why do we like it so much? And then there is the related question of what possible benefits horror stories might impart.

For this week’s SeptOberFright installment, I’d like to share another voice addressing that idea of horror as healthy. Gene Luen Yang writes Avatar: The Last Airbender — Smoke and Shadow for Dark Horse comics, and he contributed the June 2015 installment of “Horsepower,” the editorial that runs in Dark Horse comic books each month. I came across it in the back of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10 issue 16.

Like many others who have given the question “Why horror?” any thought, Yang suggests that horror stories help prepare us for the truly scary things in life. What makes his take particularly fun is his anecdote about his own first encounter with a horror story. To read Yang’s anecdote, which comprises the first five paragraphs of the editorial, click on “Read More” below. For the complete column (in which he goes on to discuss his work with artist Gurihiru on Avatar), hunt down any June 2015 Dark Horse comic book (I’m not sure if these are archived online somewhere, but a quick Google hunt yielded no results).

 

 

 

…

Read More Read More

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: After the King

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: After the King

Comments 3 comments

AfterKing_CoverBack in January, I wrote a post on Terry Pratchett’s Cohen the Barbarian. It was primarily based on the short story “The Troll’s Bridge,” which was included in the anthology, After the King. That anthology was subtitled, ‘Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien.’

It included tales by nineteen fantasy and sci-fi authors, ostensibly all told in the style of Tolkien. The more cynical among us might view this as a cheap way to cash in on the Tolkien name (back in 1992, pre Game of Thrones, et al, Tokien still had a bigger grasp on fantasy publishing).

But not so much. The stories in this collection don’t bring to mind Michael Moorcock, Steven Erickson, Fritz Lieber or Robert E. Howard. My idea of a dragon hunt looks a lot more like a Dungeons and Dragons game than Patricia A. McKillip’s “The Fellowship of the Dragon.” Elizabeth Scarborough, Andre Norton and Jane Yolen don’t bring to mind Glen Cook. The stories in this collection do have more of a Tolkien, mythic, “pastoral” feel.

With the possible exception of Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shanarra (which is the subject of an upcoming post by Fletcher Vrendenburgh), Dennis L. McKiernan’s Mithgar stories are as close to Tolkien pastiches as we’re likely to get this side of a novel commissioned by the Estate. He’s present with “The Halfling House.” I recently re-read his first Mithgar work, The Silver Call (written as one novel but issued as two books) and it’s as Tolkien as it gets (more on that in an upcoming Mithgar post).

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: She Walks in Shadows, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles

Future Treasures: She Walks in Shadows, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles

Comments 1 comment
She Walks in Shadows-small She Walks in Shadows-back-small

Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles were the editors of the marvelous Innsmouth Magazine, which released its last issue last summer. But they haven’t been resting in the interim — if anything, in fact, it seems like they’ve revved their engines, releasing the Swords & Sorcery/Cthulhu anthology Sword & Mythos, and this brand new collection of Lovecraftian fiction and art from women creators.

She Walks in Shadow ships next week, and includes 25 short stories by Gemma Files, Penelope Love, Angela Slatter, Molly Tanzer, E. Catherine Tobler, Mary Turzillo, Wendy N. Wagner, and many others.

…

Read More Read More

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tips From Cat Rambo

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tips From Cat Rambo

Comments 1 comment

Cat RamboAhead of her trip to the Midwest for writerly things, this Nebula and World Fantasy awards nominee offers up two Pro-Tips for the blog this week. Chicagoans will have the chance to hear Cat Rambo read from her debut fantasy novel, Beasts of Tabat, at Gumbo Fiction Salon on Wed. Oct. 7th.

I have trouble finding the right starting point for my story. Got any suggestions?

Start writing in the middle of it and worry about the beginning later. Often the beginning is something I don’t finalize till the very last end of the draft, and often looking at how the story ends will provide me with ideas for an ending that returns in some way to a moment, location, theme, or other structure from the beginning and helps create a sense of closure. At the end of a story, you need to hear the click of its door swinging shut, and part of creating that is opening the door into it in the right way.

What’s one thing I can do to improve my writing?

Read it out loud. This is perhaps the single best piece of advice I can give any writer other than get your butt in the chair and start writing. Reading out loud will help you create something that sounds good in a reader’s head, as well as to catch all sorts of errors, typos, and ungraceful things.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Ballantine Paperbacks of Vincent King

Vintage Treasures: The Ballantine Paperbacks of Vincent King

Comments 3 comments
Light a Last Cande Vincent King-small Another End Vincent King-small Candy Man Vincent King-small

The sixties and early seventies were a very fertile era for science fiction in America. Writers like Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, and many others were busy launching decades-long careers. Their books are still read and enjoyed today.

And then there are those writers who weren’t so lucky. Who never really connected with a wide audience, and whose entire catalog has been out of print for three decades or more. Folks like the British writer Vincent King, who published three paperbacks through Ballantine in 1969-1971, all with eye-catching covers by Robert Foster and Dean Ellis. None of them was ever reprinted in the US, and they quickly vanished.

There are no digital editions. King is the kind of writer who can only be enjoyed the old-fashioned way: by hunting down his books.

…

Read More Read More

Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1952: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1952: A Retro-Review

Comments 6 comments

Galaxy December 1952-smallThe cover of the December, 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction was creating using a technique called “Camerage.” Editor H. L. Gold describes it as

A three-dimensional montage effect — but it’s not a montage… All the objects in the picture are assembled at one time, illuminated by projected colored lights… and are shot by a number of cameras placed on different planes.

To me, it looks a little odd — or at least this particular use of the technique looks a little odd. (Click the image at right for a bigger version.) Seeing an image online doesn’t quite match up with what you see on an actual copy of the magazine; I can’t quite explain the difference. But however you view it, the cover still doesn’t connect with me.

Ring Around the Sun (Part 1) by Clifford D. Simak — It started with a few inventions — a cigarette lighter, a razor blade, and a light bulb. These items would last forever, the manufacturers claimed. Additionally, another group supplied synthetic carbohydrates for consumption, helping humanity’s food supply. Each had its own effect on the economy, in both subtle and obvious ways.

Jay Vickers learns of the newest arrivals — the forever car and the forever house — with indifference. He doesn’t need a new car and doesn’t like the idea of a new house, no matter how reasonable the financing may be, even if it seems like they’re being given away.

…

Read More Read More