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Year: 2016

Future Treasures: The Ferryman Institute by Colin Gigl

Future Treasures: The Ferryman Institute by Colin Gigl

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Here’s another debut fantasy with an original and intriguing premise: ferryman Charlie Dawson, condemned to transport souls to the underworld for all eternity, finds his existence unraveling after he prevents a young woman from committing suicide. And his life — such as it is — rapidly gets very complicated. In her review, Jaclyn Fulwood at Shelf Awareness writes,

Since the moment of his near-death more than two centuries ago, Charlie has been in the employ of the shadowy Ferryman Institute, guiding newly deceased souls through the departure process. When a Ferryman fails to convince a spirit to cross over, it becomes a vengeful ghost; Charlie Dawson, star of the Institute’s stable, never fails… In an age when the Institute competes with comparable organizations like the Sisters of Valhalla, Charlie is simply too good to let go. Supported by his refined mentor Cartwright, but stalked by internal affairs liaison Inspector Javrouche (the only person who actively despises him), Charlie limps through his malaise until he receives a special assignment from the president of the Institute — to see to the soul of one Alice Spiegel, a soon-to-be suicide — and is surprised with options: “Be a Ferryman or save the girl. Your choice.”

Gigl pays homage to Greco-Roman mythology while poking fun at corporate structure, but this fast-paced fantasy has its serious side, taking the real-life problem of getting stuck in a dead-end job to a more mystical but still weighty extreme. Gigl seems to realize his concept treads familiar ground; readers will find easy laughs here, but more introspection than in novels with similar premises.

The Ferryman Institute will be published by Gallery Books on September 27, 2016. It is 432 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. Click the images above for bigger versions, or read an excerpt at the Simon & Schuster website.

When a Trilogy Becomes a Sextuplet

When a Trilogy Becomes a Sextuplet

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Michael J. Sullivan
Michael J. Sullivan

After the launch of his newest book a few weeks ago I asked writer Michael J. Sullivan if he could spare some time to talk about his writing process. In addition to being talented, Michael also happens to be one of the humblest and kindest writers it’s been my pleasure to meet. It’s my pleasure to turn the blog over to him.

I recently released Age of Myth, the first novel in my new series. It’s the one with the big tree on the cover. Since people ignore advice, and nearly everyone actually does judge books by their covers, it’s a good thing for me that trees appear to be popular (no pun on poplar intended… okay maybe it was).

My first series The Riyria Revelations is six books long. This new series was supposed to be a trilogy. You’ll note I used the word supposed in that sentence. When I write a novel it almost always tops off around the 100,000-130,000 word mark (around 375-450 pages). I don’t plan it that way — just happens. It’s the length I need to tell a self-contained tale. Apparently I also have a set number when it comes to how many books it takes to write a series. You guessed it, my trilogy grew to six books long (okay, you had help from the post’s title). No, the publisher didn’t make me expand it, and Peter Jackson had nothing to do with it. The story takes place during a great war, but the story stopped before all the conflicts were over. I had a suspicion readers weren’t going to like that. I didn’t either. Quitting before the war was 100% resolved felt unfinished.

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Can-Con: The Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature

Can-Con: The Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature

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covergame-badgeLast weekend I attended Can-Con as a Special Guest. The Guests of Honour were Eric Choi (Science), Tanya Huff (Author), Sam Morgan (Agent, JABberwocky Literary Agency), and Sheila Williams (Editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine).

It’s a small con, as these things go, and as the full name of it indicates, its mandate limits it to speculative arts and literature in Canada – though I don’t think the attendees felt much in the way of limitation. There were workshops, and panels, and publishers and parties. The workshops covered building (both worlds and plots), researching the science, and  using mythic worlds. The organizers cleverly scheduled the workshops outside of the regular programming, so attendees didn’t have to choose between workshopping or panelling.
They also did something I’ve never seen before, they turned the entire con into an adventure game, where attendees who wished to could create characters, gain points by attending panels, book launches, getting autographs, etc, and then, with sufficient points, challenge monsters.

There were four tracks of panels, plus two extra tracks that covered readings, interviews, agent pitches, etc. The panels themselves covered topics as diverse as building a reading list to cultural barriers to translation, to Earth as a terraforming project, to superhero TV, to Lovecraft and Race – you know what? Check the website and go over the schedule yourself. I defy you to find an hour where there wasn’t something you would have liked to attend.

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Goth Chick News: What’s Not to Love About Love Stories (To Die For)?

Goth Chick News: What’s Not to Love About Love Stories (To Die For)?

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love-stories-to-die-for-2-smallIf you’ve hung around Goth Chick News for a while, then you know the special place I hold in my little black heart for the master of horror comics, Dirk Manning.

We first introduced you to Mr. Manning way back in 2011, courtesy of his nationwide tour promoting Nightmare World, his horror comic series.

As someone who spent a significant amount of my childhood reading contraband horror stories by flashlight under the covers, Manning’s work struck a chord with his vintage-look illustrations and old-school storylines.

So it’s no surprise that his art is displayed prominently on the bookshelves in the underground offices of Goth Chick News. Nor is it probably a shocker that due to his genre of choice (not to mention the black top hat), he’s become a personal favorite as well.

So when I had a chance to hug my goth-boy honey at this year’s Chicago Comic Con, he was anxious to tell me (us) about his latest venture.

Several years ago Manning published an online series of five 22-page full-length stories, each a different genre, each illustrated by a different artist or art team, and each one revolving around the combined themes of love and death.

That series was called Love Stories (To Die For) and according to Manning it remains one of his proudest moments as a writer.

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Mixing Hardboiled Film Noir and Magic: Cast a Deadly Spell

Mixing Hardboiled Film Noir and Magic: Cast a Deadly Spell

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Cast a Deadly Spell stars Fred Ward, Julianne Moore, and David Warner
Director: Martin Campbell; Writer: Joseph Dougherty
HBO 1991. 1 hours 36 minutes

Philip Lovecraft (Fred Ward) is a hardboiled Los Angeles private eye who is hired by Amos Hackshaw (David Warner) to find the Necronomicon, a book which contains the knowledge to destroy the world when the stars line up at midnight in two days. It was stolen from Hackshaw by his ex-chauffer, Larry Willis (Lee Tergesen).

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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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