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Month: September 2016

New Treasures: Dead Boys by Gabriel Squailia

New Treasures: Dead Boys by Gabriel Squailia

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Sometimes I want to settle down with a straightforward adventure fantasy novel. And sometimes… sometimes I want something a bit more off the wall. Something like Gabriel Squailia’s debut novel Dead Boys, in which Jacob Campbell sets off across the Land of the Dead, accompanied by a boy with strange powers over bones, and the hanged man Leopold l’Eclair, searching for the Living Man, the only adventurer to cross the underworld while still alive.

Author Brendan Mathews calls it “A macabre, madcap picaresque full of fast-talking corpses and philosophical skeletons,” and Publishers Weekly praises it for its “Exquisite worldbuilding alongside a mix of humor and philosophy… This underworld is a fascinating city.” Sounds like just the thing I’m in the mood for.

Dead Boys was published by Talos on March 10, 2015. It is 278 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Brian Peterson. Click the images above for bigger versions.

Fantasia 2016, Day 10 Part 1: Sequels and New-Told Tales (Assassination Classroom: Graduation, Revoltoso, Nova Seed, and the Samsung Virtual Reality Experience)

Fantasia 2016, Day 10 Part 1: Sequels and New-Told Tales (Assassination Classroom: Graduation, Revoltoso, Nova Seed, and the Samsung Virtual Reality Experience)

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Assassination Classroom: The Graduation Saturday, July 23, was going to be a long day for me at the Fantasia film festival, filled with some tough choices about what to watch. Some of those choices were clarified early on, when thanks to the good work of the people at Fantasia I was able to watch a screener of Assassination Classroom: The Graduation. That resolved a schedule conflict later in the day, and just after noon I’d see my first theatrical screening: Nova Seed, a Canadian animated feature that was playing with an almost half-hour-long short film from Mexico, Revoltoso. After that I had a couple hours until the next set of movies, and I planned to get a good meal. This did not happen. Instead I’d end up taking a test drive of the future — or what seems to me like the future, or at least like a future.

First, Assassination Classroom: The Graduation, directed (like the first live-action Assassination Classroom film) by Eiichiro Hasumi, from a script by Tatsuya Kanazawa based on a manga by Yuusei Matsui. I saw part one of the Assassination Classroom story last year at Fantasia and loved it. A whirlwind science-fiction comedy, it followed a high school class in Japan filled with underachievers, given the mission to kill their new teacher before the end of the school year. That professor, dubbed “UT” for “Unkillable Teacher,” was a grinning yellow smiley-face with tentacles who could move at supersonic speeds and had already blown up the moon. The more the movie went on the more imaginative and frenetic it got, adding characters and sub-plots with abandon.

The second movie keeps some of the same tone, but immediately begins deepening it: the students have to start thinking about their career paths, letting us know that their time with UT is almost up one way or another. A school festival starts out with the same surrealist humour as the first movie, as a government sniper attempts to infiltrate the festival to kill UT — who in the meanwhile has cast himself as the lead in a stage performance of the Momotaro story. Again, though, some of the goings-on here are darker, as two of the girls are briefly taken prisoner by older boys demanding sexy pictures. The girls rescue themselves, but the tone’s definitely taken a turn.

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The Ancient Roman Vomitorium: It Wasn’t What You’ve Been Told

The Ancient Roman Vomitorium: It Wasn’t What You’ve Been Told

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The Roman theater at Cádiz sez: “Ugh, I’ve eaten too much dormouse. BLAARGH!”

I’ve often heard an odd rumor about the ancient Romans. Supposedly they had a special room in their villas and public houses called a vomitorium so that after binging on food and wine they could purge themselves and start stuffing their gullets again. You’ve probably heard that rumor too.

I’ve never believed that story, but while exploring the Roman remains at Cádiz, Spain, I discovered that the vomitorium actually did exist, it just wasn’t what we’ve been told.

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Art of the Genre: Top 10 ‘Orange Spine’ AD&D Hardcovers by Jeff Easley

Art of the Genre: Top 10 ‘Orange Spine’ AD&D Hardcovers by Jeff Easley

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Did The Wilderness Survival Guide make the list?
Did The Wilderness Survival Guide make the list?

Now you might be thinking, ‘Top 10, really? How many did he do?‘

Well, the answer to that is 12. And, considering how iconic each one is, how much they meant to D&D players in the 1980s, and how many folks still use these books 30 years later, it is little wonder that this was a much harder list to trim down than one might think. But, I’m going to give it a shot nonetheless!

So I essentially started with the concept that I’d fold in overall book importance to game play, but then decided against it, instead relying on nostalgia for the cover alone. This would be tempered by the fact that the three most beloved and used books in the AD&D series are the Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual, which were all re-released with different covers in the late 1970s, so a lot of players prefer those versions to the more uniform Easley editions produced in the 80s.

Still, TSR sold a boat load of these books during the initial days of the 80s, so I know Easley’s covers did introduce a good deal of players to the hobby (and likely more in the 2nd Edition cover he also did). My first DMG and PHB were Easley covers, so he was my ‘gateway drug’ so to speak and all his ‘orange spine’ hardcovers still sit proudly behind my desk for easy access since I use them almost daily.

I hope those reading this will remember these books as fondly as I do, and perhaps, want to see another one produced to make it thirteen ‘orange spines’ in total, but I’ll talk about that later. Until then, enjoy this beautiful fantasy art Top 10.

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Exploring the Leonaur Science Fiction and Fantasy Catalog

Exploring the Leonaur Science Fiction and Fantasy Catalog

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I first discovered Leonaur Books when I went looking for in-print editions of Stanley G. Weinbaum, the pulp author who died in 1935. Leonaur has virtually his entire science fiction output in print in four handsome and affordable paperbacks. How cool is that? Shortly thereafter, I found Leonaur has a back catalog with enormous appeal to pulp fans, including the complete Arcot, Morey & Wade space opera stories of John W. Campbell, Jr, Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola tales, and collections by Homer Eon Flint, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert E. Howard, Arthur Sellings, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and many others.

These guys are clearly serious about vintage fantasy and SF. But they don’t just do single-author collections. Over the past few years they’ve also assembled some top-notch original anthologies as part of their extensive Supernatural Fiction Series, like the two volume Leonaur Book of Supernatural Detectives, edited by Morgan Tyler, which contains “The Door Into Infinity” by Edmond Hamilton, a Carnacki tale by William Hope Hodgson, and stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Richard Marsh, Gordon McCreagh, Enoch F. Gerrish, and two dozen more.

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You Say Acolyte, I Say Assassin

You Say Acolyte, I Say Assassin

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grayshade-smallStormtalons 02: Grayshade
by Gregory A. Wilson
The Ed Greenwood Group ($9.99 CAN digital, released September 30; $49.99 CAN hardcover, January 1, 2017)
Website

Servants of Argoth maintain balance in the world by meting out justice; sometimes, that justice can only be obtained through death. That’s where the Acolytes — some call them assassins — come in. Grayshade and his brethren receive assignments from Father Jant, the head of the order, who is guided by Argoth’s will.

When Grayshade receives an assignment to kill Lady Ashenza, a member of the government of Cohrelle, he accepts it as a matter of course. Being a power broker in the local government isn’t why she’s been marked for a hit, however. She’s also rumored to be a part of the Vraevre, a religious sect that in recent weeks has begun to assassinate Cohrelle political figures. In order to restore balance, she must die, and Grayshade is sent to do his duty.

However, when he enters her room, Lady Ashenza tells Grayshade that she isn’t a threat to him or his order; no, the real threat is the Order of Argoth itself. While this gives Grayshade pause, he does complete his mission. During his exit, he spots another Acolyte near the Ashenza home, and he soon realizes the evening’s events are more complicated than they appear. Before long he questions everything he’s ever been taught, and soon realizes he can only trust himself.

Grayshade by Gregory A. Wilson has everything I love in a fantasy novel: a fully-realized setting, complex characters with hidden motivations, political intrigue, and a touch of humor. As I read, I felt the clay-tiled rooftops beneath my feet and smelled the stench of garbage in alleyways. By the end of the first few chapters, Cohrelle felt very much like a real city with a life of its own.

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September 2016 Clarkesworld Now Available

September 2016 Clarkesworld Now Available

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clarkesworld-september-2016-smallThe September Clarkesworld, issue #120, is packed with new fiction by Jack Skillingstead, Rich Larson, Bogi Takács, and others, plus reprints by Tom Crosshill and Nick Wolven.

Here’s the complete list of stories.

“The Despoilers” by Jack Skillingstead
“Aphrodite’s Blood, Decanted” by Jennifer Campbell-Hicks
“The Green Man Cometh” by Rich Larson
“The Opposite and the Adjacent” by Liu Yang
“Toward the Luminous Towers” by Bogi Takács
“The House of Half Mirrors” by Thoraiya Dyer
“The Dark City Luminous” by Tom Crosshill (from The Baltic Atlas, 2016)
“No Placeholder for You My Love” by Nick Wolven (from Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2015.)

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The Religion by Tim Willocks

The Religion by Tim Willocks

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oie_1331351pip0pgfdOne of sword & sorcery’s primary inspirations is historical adventure, like that of writers Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. That noble genre continues today in Tim Willocks’ insanely violent The Religion: Vol 1 of the Tannhauser Trilogy (2006), for one, set in the cauldron of the Great Siege of Malta. Into it, Willocks introduces the rogue Mattias Tannhauser, son of a Saxon blacksmith from Transylvania. At the age of 12, Mattias’ mother and sister are killed by Ottoman militia and he is taken captive. Every five years, the Turks would take Christian boys, convert them, and raise them up to be ferocious, elite soldiers, known as the Janissaries.

For thirteen years, Tannhauser served as a true and loyal soldier of the sultan, but eventually he leaves and returns to the West. A dozen of so years later, Tannhauser and a pair of friends, English soldier Bors of Carlisle and Sabato Svi, Jewish trader, have established themselves as important arms and opium dealers in Messina, Sicily.

Now, as the Ottoman tide is ready to break on Malta, Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, lures Tannhauser to Malta. The great powers, Spain and France, embroiled in their own internal problems, have lent only token aid to the island’s defense. De Valette wants every resource he can lay his hands on, and what better than Tannhauser’s intimate knowledge of the Turks he once served with?

In the 16th century, the centuries long struggle between Christendom and the Moslem world seemed to be coming to a conclusion. In the century following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Christian West seemed headed for ultimate defeat. Under the brilliant Suleiman the Magnificent, the Knights of St. John, one of the last remaining military orders, had been driven out of the Eastern Mediterranean when Rhodes was captured in 1522. The knights, also known by their nickname the Religion, had been established in in 1099 to escort pilgrims to the Holy Land.

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Future Treasures: Crooked Kingdom, the Sequel to Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Future Treasures: Crooked Kingdom, the Sequel to Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, published in hardcover last September by Henry Holt and Co, became a #1 New York Times bestseller. Which hardly seems fair, since she already had a bestselling young adult series in The Grisha Trilogy (Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising), but some people just hog all the attention, I guess.

Six of Crows is a caper novel set in the same world as The Grisha Trilogy, in which criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker dreams of a brazen heist in the bustling hub of Ketterdam, and manages to assemble a talented team of geniuses and misfits to pull it off. Author Holly Black called it “A twisty and elegantly crafted masterpiece,” and the Los Angeles Times says it’s “Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones… with a caper twist.” How can you resist a description like that?

The sequel, Crooked Kingdom, arrives in hardcover at the end of the month, and sees Kaz Brekker and his crew thrown right back into the thick of things. Here’s the description.

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Gypsies, Monsters, and Very Spooky Real Estate: Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories by Ray Russell

Gypsies, Monsters, and Very Spooky Real Estate: Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories by Ray Russell

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Ray Russell received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991 and the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992. His novels included The Case Against Satan (1962), Incubus (1976), and Absolute Power (1992), and he published a half dozen horror collections in his lifetime, including Unholy Trinity (1967), Prince of Darkness (1971), and The Book of Hell (1980).

Stephen King called his novelette “Sardonicus,” his best known work, “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written.” It was collected, with the follow up tales “Sanguinarius” and “Sagittarius,” in Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories, published in hardcover in 1985 by Maclay & Associates, with a cover by Stanley Mossman (above left). Penguin Classics released it in a new hardcover edition in 2013 with a new foreword by Guillermo del Toro, and the book will be released in paperback for the first time at the end of this month, with a deliciously creepy new cover (above right).

Here’s the description.

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