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Year: 2018

New Treasures: The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri

New Treasures: The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri

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The Book of Hidden Things-smallFrancesco Dimitri has published multiple fantasy novels in Italian. His nonfiction includes To Read Aloud and the upcoming That Sense of Wonder, both written in English. The Book of Hidden Things is his debut English novel; it’s described as “a story about the nature of mystery itself,” which I admit I find a little intriguing. Kirkus Reviews raved in a starred review, saying,

In lesser hands, this blend of detective story, organized crime thriller, and supernatural investigation would feel like a grab bag of plot devices, but Dimitri has created a thrilling spectacle that also manages to point poignantly at the way the landscapes we grow up in shape us in ways even beyond our understanding. A deeply felt look at the idea of home, clothed as a popcornworthy page-turner.

Here’s the description.

From “one of the most significant figures of the last generation of fantasy,” comes Francesco Dimitri’s debut novel in English, an enthralling and seductive fantasy following four old friends and the secrets they keep.

Four old school friends have a pact: to meet up every year in the small town in Puglia they grew up in. Art, the charismatic leader of the group and creator of the pact, insists that the agreement must remain unshakable and enduring. But this year, he never shows up.

A visit to his house increases the friends’ worry; Art is farming marijuana. In Southern Italy doing that kind of thing can be very dangerous. They can’t go to the Carabinieri so must make enquiries of their own. This is how they come across the rumours about Art; bizarre and unbelievable rumours that he miraculously cured the local mafia boss’s daughter of terminal leukaemia. And among the chaos of his house, they find a document written by Art, The Book of Hidden Things, that promises to reveal dark secrets and wonders beyond anything previously known.

Francesco Dimitri’s first novel written in English, following his career as one of the most significant fantasy writers in Italy, will entrance fans of Elena Ferrante, Neil Gaiman and Donna Tartt. Set in the beguiling and seductive landscape of Southern Italy, this story is about friendship and landscape, love and betrayal; above all it is about the nature of mystery itself.

The Book of Hidden Things was published by Titan Books on July 3, 2018. It is 384 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Titan’s talented Julia Lloyd. Read an excerpt at Tor.com.

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox

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Gat_DetectiveDragnet_BallardOne of the authors that I’ve ‘discovered’ while working on A (Black) Gat in the Hand is W.T. Ballard. I had read a story here and there in various anthologies, but nothing stuck with me. I knew he was a Black Masker and had been successful as a writer of westerns. But I’ve just read a couple stories of his Hollywood ‘fixer,’ Bill Lennox and I was sold!

Ballard, who wandered out west when the Depression hit, had been trying to sell to the New York pulps with minimal success. He saw a Detective Dragnet Magazine with one of his stories in a store window (December, 1930). As he walked away, a man called out his name: it was Harry Warner, who he had known a little back in Cleveland, where the family had been making movie trailers for local organizations.  Warner asked what Ballard was doing in Hollywood. A bit embarrassed, the latter exaggerated a bit, bought that magazine and gave it to Warner, saying he was a freelance writer.

Warner and his brothers had just taken over First National Studios, and impressed with Ballard, Harry W. hired him as a screenwriter at a good salary. That gig lasted eight months until Ballard made a crack about Warner, not knowing the man was standing behind him. Fired!

Ballard was picked up by Columbia Pictures, who hired him to produce B-films for $10,000 each. To hit that target, Ballard had to write the script, direct and produce, and even move scenery for shoots. He endured this exhausting assignment for six months – but the two studio jobs gave him an invaluable inside knowledge of the industry.

In 1931, Ballard was struggling, trying to write and sell to Detective Story Magazine, which favored Agatha Christie/Mary Roberts Rinehart types of mysteries. At his uncle’s house (where he was living), he heard a radio ad for The Maltese Falcon, a movie starring Ricardo Cortez (Bogart hit gold in the third adaptation). He went to see the movie. As Ballard said in an excellent interview conducted by Stephen Mertz. “Hammett’s ear for words sounded the way I thought criminals and detectives should talk. It rang true, the way I wanted mine to do.”

The radio ad had mentioned Black Mask, which Ballard was unfamiliar with. After the movie he went around the corner, bought the latest issue and read it on the streetcar ride home. He was hooked.

Ballard didn’t want to write about the typical newspaper reporter. His friend Jim Lawson worked at Universal Studios and was often called on to get stars out of trouble. Ballard liked the idea, knowing he had the studio experience to write realistically.  Using the phone book to help with names, that very night, around midnight, he started writing. About five in the morning, he had a 10,000-word story featuring Bill Lennox. He mailed the manuscript off and went to bed.

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Birthday Reviews: C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Remorseful”

Birthday Reviews: C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Remorseful”

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Cover by Richard Powers
Cover by Richard Powers

C.M. (Cyril M.) Kornbluth was born on July 23, 1923 and died on March 21, 1958.

Kornbluth died relatively young, but his work and memory have been kept alive. His short story “The Meeting,” finished by his frequent collaborator Frederik Pohl, earned them a Hugo Award in 1973 and he was nominated for four solo Hugo Awards prior to his death. His novelette “The Little Black Bag” won a Retro Hugo in 2001. In 1986, his novel The Syndic was inducted into the Prometheus Award Hall of Fame. His 1951 short story “The Marching Morons” is still considered a touchstone of science fiction

Frederik Pohl bought “The Remorseful” for Star Science Fiction No. 2, which was published in December 1953. The story also appeared in New Worlds Science Fiction #29 in November 1954. The story was included in Kornbluth’s posthumous collection The Marching Morons and Other Famous Science Fiction Stories. In 1976, it was translated into German for publication in Titan 1, edited by Pohl and Wolfgang Jeschke. The story showed up again in The Best of C.M. Kornbluth, and Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg included it in 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories. It was finally included in the NESFA Press collection His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by Timothy Szczesuil.

Kornbluth relates two stories in “The Remorseful.” The first tells of a man who walks across a barren Earth after an apocalypse has depopulated the planet. The other tells about an alien invasion of the solar system, focusing less on their activities and more on their alien nature as a sort of hive organism which can drop portions of itself off to explore/invade the outer planets and learn about the outposts mankind has set up.

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Amazon Selects the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (So Far)

Amazon Selects the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (So Far)

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The Only Harmless Great Thing-small Artificial Condition The Murderbot Diaries-small The-Robots-of-Gotham-medium

Amazon has selected the Best Books of 2018 (so far) in a dozen different categories, including Mysteries & Thrillers, Comics & Graphic Novels, Literature and Fiction… and, of course, Science Fiction & Fantasy. The list includes several titles we’ve covered recently at Black Gate, including

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
Fire Dance by Ilana C. Myer
Before Mars by Emma Newman
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

and others. Best of all, it showcases a pair of Black Gate writers: Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition, the second installment of her wildly popular Murderbot series from Tor.com, and Todd McAulty’s breakout debut novel The Robots of Gotham. Check out all the details here.

Vintage Treasures: The Bridge of Lost Desire by Samuel R. Delany

Vintage Treasures: The Bridge of Lost Desire by Samuel R. Delany

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The Bridge of Lost Desire-back-small The Bridge of Lost Desire-small

Samuel R. Delany is one of the greatest science fiction writers alive today. He got his start when his wife Marilyn Hacker became an assistant editor at Ace Books under Donald A. Wollheim, and helped him publish his first novel The Jewels of Aptor as an Ace Double in 1962, when he was just 20 years old. Since then he’s won virtually every award our field has to offer, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. In 2013 the Science Fiction Writers of America named him a SFWA Grand Master.

I’ve steadfastly collected the various paperback editions of Delaney’s books over the years, including his classics The Einstein Intersection (1967), Nova (1968), Dhalgren (1975), and Triton (1976). I believed (rather reasonably, I thought) that I had all of his major work. So earlier this year I was more than a little surprised to stumble on one I never knew existed: The Bridge of Lost Desire, a 1988 collection of three fantasy novellas from St. Martin’s Press.

The Bridge of Lost Desire is the fourth and last volume in Delany’s Nevèrÿon fantasy series. Unlike his science fiction novels, the Nevèrÿon books were never particularly popular, and have been out of print for over two decades. The first three were published as paperback originals by Bantam Books between 1979-85, with gorgeous covers by the fantasy artist Rowena. The Bridge of Lost Desire was first published as an Arbor House hardcover, and reprinted in what I can only assume was a poorly distributed mass market paperback edition by St. Martin’s Press in 1988.

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Birthday Reviews: Dean McLaughlin’s “The Permanent Implosion”

Birthday Reviews: Dean McLaughlin’s “The Permanent Implosion”

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Cover by John Schoenherr
Cover by John Schoenherr

Dean McLaughlin was born on July 22, 1931.

McLaughlin’s career began in 1951 and his most recent story, “Tenbrook of Mars,” appeared in Analog in 2008 and won the next year’s Analog Readers Poll. His 1968 novella “Hawk Among the Sparrows” was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Award, losing to Robert Silverberg’s “Nightwings” and Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonrider,” respectively.

“The Permanent Implosion” originally appeared in the February 1964 issue of Analog Science Fact & Science Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. It was reprinted in 1966 in the anthology Analog 4 and was the cover story of the 1970 anthology The Permanent Explosion: Science Fiction Edited by John W. Campbell. McLaughlin included the story in his only collection, Hawk Among the Sparrows: Three Science Fiction Novellas, published in 1976. Stanley Schmidt chose the story for Analog: The Best of Science Fiction in 1985.

“The Permanent Implosion” is a puzzle story in which Mick Candido must try to resolve a problem that has been dropped in his lap. Candido runs a successful well capping company, called in to extinguish oil fires and make sure the wells are covered. He is drawn into a different sort of situation when the government calls upon him for help in capping a different sort of well, one for which Candido’s team doesn’t have any experience, but neither does anyone else.

Outside of Denver, a hole had opened between our world and the vacuum of space. The hole is sucking our atmosphere in an attempt to equalize the pressure on both sides; the eventual result will be an Earth with an atmosphere so tenuous that life is impossible. Candido and his team, with the government’s guidance; get to work.

The story is an exploration of patience and failure. The initial solution for which Candido’s team was called in fails to stop the leak, but he remains with the team, helping them implement other potential solutions, all of which fail. As the team becomes more and more despondent of ever finding a solution, Candido begins to look at the problem from a different point of view, eventually coming up with a solution which will also serve to make his fortune.

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Shameless Confession: I Enjoyed Rampage to a Ridiculous Extent

Shameless Confession: I Enjoyed Rampage to a Ridiculous Extent

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rampage-2018-japanese-poster-1

Giant monsters are a part of my extended family. They’ve been around since I was a kid, and even if I didn’t see much of them during my years at college, they’d always come back into my life to provide support and wellness. Yeah, some are not that great and maybe I’d rather visit with them again, but the best of them will always be there for me.

Rampage is now a favorite second cousin. It’s no classic Godzilla flick (a godfather figure) or King Kong (a beloved sibling), but I look forward to hanging out with it at the next family gathering, ‘cuz it’s a real cut-up. And since Rampage arrived on home video and VOD platforms this week, I can now kick back with it whenever I need a pick-me-up.

And no one is as surprised at this new addition to my kaiju family as me. When 2018 started, I pegged my giant monster hopes on Pacific Rim: Uprising. The first Pacific Rim was a blast, and even if this sequel lacked the guiding hand of Guillermo del Toro, it still had the strong support of the original’s world-building. Rampage, an adaptation of a video game — rarely a positive sign — from the director of the dreadful San Andreas, didn’t have such promise. Dwayne Johnson was adding his welcome presence, but Dwayne Johnson was also in San Andreas and ended up helping that not a bit. I held out shaky hope that Rampage might be “okay” and looked forward to Pacific Rim: Uprising.

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Birthday Reviews: Valerie J. Freireich’s “Vashti and God”

Birthday Reviews: Valerie J. Freireich’s “Vashti and God”

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Cover by Mel Odom
Cover by Mel Odom

Valerie J. Freireich was born on July 21, 1952.

Freireich has written four novels in her Harmony of Worlds series, beginning with the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award-nominated Becoming Human. Her short story “Sensations of the Mind” was a quarterly winner of the Writers of the Future Award in 1991.

She wrote “Vashti and God” for Susan Shwartz and Martin H. Greenberg for the anthology Sisters in Fantasy 2. Published in 1996, the story has never been reprinted.

In the Biblical book of Esther, Queen Vashti only appears in seven verses of the first chapter and is mentioned in two verses of the second chapter. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, her character is something of a tabula rasa. Vashti’s refusal to appear before King Ahasuerus has led to her being adopted by some as a feminist icon. In “Vashti and God,” Valerie J. Freireich fleshes out Vashti’s story and motivations in support of a more feminist interpretation.

The story is told mostly in flashback after Vashti has been removed as the queen and made a maid in the Great King’s household, where Esther now sits in her place. The flashbacks detail the seven days of feasting that lead up to Vashti’s demotion. During that time, as Vashti realizes more and more that the woman are segregated and unimportant to their husbands, she also begins to hear a voice spurring her to take action and she demands that her husband invite the women to join their husbands on the last day of the feast. When he commands her attendance, and only her attendance, she refuses to come, leading to her punishment and replacement.

However, the voice, which she attributed to the Persian god Ahuramazda, wasn’t done with her and begins to tell her to support Esther’s own dealings with the Great King. Although Vashti complies with the god’s request, she also comes to realize that the commands weren’t coming from Ahuramazda, nor were they for the benefit of women, Vashti, or the Great King, but rather they were the commands of Esther’s god and all she could do was warn her ex-husband that he should not try to interfere with Esther’s god’s plans if he wanted to thrive.

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Fantasia 2018, Day 3, Part 2: Boiled Angels: The Trial Of Mike Diana

Fantasia 2018, Day 3, Part 2: Boiled Angels: The Trial Of Mike Diana

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Boiled AngelsAfter my first two films last Saturday, I left the large Hall Theatre to see a documentary in the 150-plus-seat De Sève Theatre across the street. The documentary was called Boiled Angels, and it presented the case of zinester and comics creator Mike Diana, whose transgressive work led to him being arrested and put on trial in Florida in the 1990s. I’d followed Diana’s plight at the time through reports in The Comics Journal, and was intrigued to learn more about it now. But if I personally was interested in the film as a look at comics history, I was surprised to find that much of the rest of the crowd was drawn by the chance to see new work by horror director Frank Henenlotter, creator of works like Bad Biology, Frankenhooker, Brain Damage, and Basket Case.

Boiled Angels is his third documentary, and boasts interviews with comics luminaries like Neil Gaiman, Steve Bissette (Taboo, Tyrant, art on Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run), Peter Kuper (The System, World War 3 Illustrated), and Peter Bagge (Hate). It’s narrated by Jello Biafra, and does a strong job in tracking down and interviewing people who were involved with Diana’s case nearly twenty-five years ago. We see and hear from Diana’s parents, from the prosecutors, from journalists, even from one of the women who protested Diana at the courtroom. They speak to an off-camera interviewer we don’t hear; we also see Diana himself, describing his background and life. Diana’s comics are dramatised by a live reading by the creator, the camera focussing on the panels as Diana reads out the dialogue. Other segments of the film, particularly early on, give background on things like the history of horror comics, underground comics, and early-90s zine culture. And there are clips of talk shows and news shows dealing with Diana’s case.

There’s not much debate over what actually happened to Diana. In the early 1990s, when he was in his early and mid 20s, he sold a few hundred copies of his obscure comics zine Boiled Angel through the mail. The content of the zine was brought to the attention of the Florida authorities (although there’s a minor dispute about how). Diana had written and drawn comics filled with horror, rape, mutilation, and various kinds of unpleasantness; seemingly as many kinds of unpleasantness as he could think of. For doing so, he was arrested, tried, and found guilty of obscenity. He was fined and put on probation. Drawing comics would potentially violate his probation and cause him to be thrown in jail. And he was subject to warrantless searches to ensure he was not in fact drawing. In other words: the legal authorities forbade an American artist from making art.

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