Some mysteries leave no fingerprints or footprints — only shadows, strange colors, and the dead. As Dorgo the Dowser investigates necromancers, demons, and a zombie plague, he discovers that darkness comes in many shades.

Book 1: Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser blessed our bookshelves in 2011 (winning the 2017 Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy). The protagonist wields a dowsing rod to sense otherworldly signatures, but this is no Harry Potter wand trickery. Bonadonna’s style is more in line with Michael Shea and Fritz Leiber, and his Mad Shadows tackles supernatural mysteries. In television terms, this would appeal to fans of The X-Files , Supernatural, or Grimm. The author has been a blogger and regular guest at Black Gate forever, and his love for cinema shines through his work. We at Black Gate have already tracked Dorgo’s adventures across three volumes, so we provide a tour guide here to showcase the series.

Hark, Mad Shadows Book Four: All the Colors of Darkness(MS4) is released! Available now (link). In short, readers do not need to read the first three to enjoy it. Bonadonna continues his episodic “Crime and Sorcery” (a.k.a. ” Gothic Noir”) in splendid fashion. In Books, 1,2, and 4 all the chapters are stand-alone while amplifying the tales in their respective volumes (Book 3 is a standout epic novel). The subtitle “All the Colors of Darkness” evokes H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” (1927 cosmic horror short story about a mysterious meteorite that crashes on a remote farm and slowly destroys all surrounding life and sanity). Indeed, there are meteorites of alchemical (demonic?) origin that are highlighted in MS4. There are three intertwining stories, and you’ll experience thievery, necromancy, ectoplasmic portraiture, and vampiric zombies. Along with Drogo, he’ll be helped with several hybrid creatures and cyclops. As usual, he is motivated to set things right (and make enough money to eat).

In addition to the tour guide, this Dark Muse News post provides excerpts from MS4 to lure in readers, and for the lore-seekers, we have links to our key Black Gate archive, including interviews of, and articles, from the author.

Mad Shadows #4: All the Colors of Darkness Blurb

Two years following the Battle for Echo Gate, Dorgo returns home to Valdar, hoping to start a new life. But Life has other plans for him. After his near-death experience at the Well of Tears, having suffered the wounds, horrors and trauma of war, he is a changed man. As he struggles with a growing sense of melancholia, he finds himself caught up in the hunt for a necromancer using trained zombies to steal Dragon Eye diamonds, the rarest and most valuable jewels in the world. Then, after a portrait and landscape artist is found horribly murdered, Dorgo is called upon to find the shaman and destroy the demon he unleashed — a demon using polychromatic ectoplasm to murder all the painters in Valdar.

Finally, Dorgo and his companions embark upon a treasure hunt to locate three chests of meteoric crystals believed to possess magical properties. But things turn dark when they decide to help two grieving fathers in a distant barony called the Court of the Crimson King, where they encounter two new breeds of the Undead unlike anything they have ever known. Dorgo must come to grips with the fact that he’s no longer the man he used to be in order to save the baron’s people from a plague of ghastly death and unholy resurrection… and the mysterious crystals are the key to it all.

Gothic Noir that straddles Heroic Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery fiction, Mad Shadows Book Four: All the Colors of Darkness, is filled with action, adventure, human drama, romance and tragedy, and a cast of unforgettable characters.

His dowsing rod can sense what mortal eyes cannot: the residue of magic, the presence of demons, and intangible truths. For Dorgo the Dowser, every supernatural crime leaves a trail — and every trail leads somewhere darker.

Who is Dorgo? What is Gothic Noir?

New readers may be asking some general questions: Who is this Dorgo character anyway? What is dowsing? And what the heck genre is this? Joe Bonadonna captured the essence of his style and Dorgo character in a 2011 Black Gate post: Dorgo the Dowser and Me. You know an author is genuinely inspired when they are passionate about developing a character for over a decade. Let’s answer some of the general questions with excerpts from his post.

Dorgo the Dowser is “a sort of private eye set in the 14th century of my alternate world. It is pulp-fiction, old-school sword and sorcery with a film noir twist.”

One of the reasons Dorgo is known as the Dowser is because he’s a sort of private investigator, searching for clues and answers like someone searching for water with a dowsing rod. The other reason for his epithet is that he actually uses a special kind of dowsing rod in his line of work. There are all kinds of dowsing tools, and each has its own special use or ‘power.’ I even think that dowsing rods may be the inspiration for what we call ‘magic wands.’

But Dorgo’s dowsing rod is not used as a magic wand, (re: Harry Potter), nor can it be used as an offensive weapon. What the Dowser’s Y-shaped yew branch allows him to do is investigate crimes where the use of magic has been involved. With it, he can detect the ectoplasmic residue of any supernatural presence or demonic entity and sense the vestiges of sorcerous power used in the commission of a crime.

While the tales of Dorgo the Dowser are definitely grounded in sword and sorcery, I like to call them gothic noir. They’re filled with dark, macabre humor — gallows humor. All my influences are in these stories: Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Willis O’Brien, and Ray Harryhausen. There’s even a touch of H.P. Lovecraft in my creation of the Nine Realms of Otherworlds that compose the Echoverse of alternate dimensions, one of which is the realm of demons and supernatural entities.

We grilled Joe Bonadonna in 2022 (or did we grill Dorgo?). Learn more about his writing style in: Making Weird Fiction Fun: Grilling Dorgo the Dowser!

EXCERPTS from Mad Shadows Book Four: All the Colors of Darkness

Okay, so now you know a bit about Dorgo. Here’s an offering of what to expect in his chronicles.

Fun, Weird Melee

Yozinda and I tried to kick the ladder over, but the gólemai had too strong a hold on it. The creature climbing the ladder was near to the top when Yozinda took hold of her battle axe. When the golem’s head rose high enough for it to peak over the edge of the loft, she swung her axe and beheaded the monster. The homunculus toppled from the ladder while its head crashed to the floor and broke apart like a shattered vase. But then a strange thing occurred: the neck stump of the golem grew a new head. The six smaller homunculi turned and started toward me. Meanwhile, the golem that was climbing the ladder kept on climbing, Yozinda kept lopping off its head and the body kept on growing a new one.

Intense Negotiations

He removed the tarp from the easel, upon which a large painting had been propped: Khitan Lujeel’s thirteenth and final masterpiece: the Rainbow Demon, in all its kaleidoscopic and malevolent splendor. Set against a yellow background of dazzling sunlight, the creature stood inside a rainbow archway, tentacles raised and curled like a pair of cobras ready to strike. And there, at the top left-hand corner, scrawled Lujeel’s barely legible signature.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Positively terrifying.”

“After creating all those paintings of ghosts and ghouls and vampires, Khitan was afraid to paint what I wanted. Can you imagine that? It took a bit of coercion on my part to convince him to paint and to paint fast.” He tapped the hilt of his dagger. “Needless to say, the old paint-slinger finally conceded to my demands. He did a nice job, too.”

“And then you killed him.” I wondered which knife he had used to murder Khitan Lujeel, the one he carried or the one sitting on the desk back in my office.

“I had to. A pity, though. He was an excellent painter.”

“What happened to Sabian?”

“No one cares about him. He’s out of the picture, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

The paradox was… I knew he was lying, but he was also telling the truth. “What about Tulara? I thought you loved her. Yet you killed her father and then moved in on her.”

Using the Dowsing Rods

I gasped for air when the jolt from the dowsing rod shot through my veins like a bolt of lightning. Closing my eyes, I saw rivers of black blood, heard the horrified screams of the living, the agonized cries of the dying, and the moaning of the reanimated dead. A miasma of evil magic hung in the air like a tangible, deathly pall. I sensed something cold and reptilian, too, something that made me go numb all over, as if I had fallen under the spell of a vampire. The smell of rot and decay was nauseating, filling me with a sense of overwhelming darkness and despair. So overcome by it all, I forgot to breathe and felt myself starting to collapse.

Weird creatures abound

“Save us!” pleaded another, her white hair mangy and wispy. There were five of them: two women, two men and a young boy. They were almost as thin as skeletons. Although mottled with faint, orange blotches, their skin was white as ice and so translucent you could see their greenish veins. Their faces were somewhat stretched into a sort of serpentine snout, and their eyes blazed with pinkish light, staring at us without blinking. They had the smell of death and the grave about them, too. Splotches and sores on parts of their bodies showed the beginnings of rot and decay. Four of them wore clothes made of simple homespun but were all torn and dirty. The woman with long and stringy blonde hair wore an elegant, white burial gown. Unlike the others, her face looked a bit more human…

They shuffled toward us, moving slowly, some with great difficulty. These wights were filthy, reeking of rotting flesh, all covered in maggots and oozing, open sores. Their white and orange-mottled flesh hung in tatters, their fingers were curled into claws and their eyes were dull and filmy, without a glimmer of intelligence. Sharp but rotten teeth clicked and clacked in anticipation of eating living flesh. As with the revenants that had ambushed us in the clearing, there was a kind of serpentine cast about their faces, which were almost snout-like in appearance. They didn’t speak beyond their guttural moans and groans, either. But they did possess the same two fangs and sharp-pointed, tubular tongues of the Undead we had encountered earlier.

Afterword Notes (insights directly from Joe Bonadonna)

The music of my youth has often played a part in my writing. Thus, the “chapter titles” are taken from the songs: Black Juju, by Alice Cooper; Rainbow Demon, by Uriah Heep; and In the Court of the Crimson King, by King Crimson. Each song has been of great inspiration to me. If you’ve read this far, then you know that zombies played a huge role in two of the tales in this book. For Black Juju, I played with the traditional, Haitian type of zombie, which I call the rakhana, and I was inspired by such films as I Walked with a Zombie and White Zombie. While my short novel, In the Court of the Crimson King, is not an actual horror story featuring zombies and vampires, I did strive to do something a little bit different with them. Thus, I played upon a connection between zombies and vampires, a connection due to both being of the Undead…

I would also be truly remiss if I neglected to mention both the late director, George Romero, as well as The Walking Dead, as inspirations for what I hope I achieved here. I hope you’ve enjoyed what I tried to do this time around . . . something a bit different. Those of you who are familiar with my work know that I always plant a few “easter eggs” in my stories and pay homage to my musical, literary and cinematic inspirations. I do this through my use of character and place names, whether reworked or not, and by nicking a line of dialogue or verse, here and there. For me, it’s all part of the fun of storytelling.

I hope you enjoyed this final volume of Mad Shadows and the saga of Dorgo the Dowser. Thank you.

MAD SHADOW SERIES – Tour Guide

Book 1: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser (2011) – winner of the 2017 Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy

This establishes Dorgo’s career in Valdar as he takes on cases involving sentient shadows, vengeful vampires, malevolent puppets, and a criminal underworld where souls are always up for sale . William Patrick Maynard reviewed it on Black Gate in 2012: The Coming of Dorgo the Dowser.

The six stories in Mad Shadows offer a mixture of traditional sword & sorcery necromancers and demons as well as werewolves, vampires, witches, and bizarre half-human mutations that H. P. Lovecraft would happily embrace. Dorgo, in some ways, seems like a hybrid of Conan and Robert E. Howard’s Puritan adventurer, Solomon Kane. Like many great western heroes, Dorgo is the wanderer as eternal loner, destined never to make ties or put down roots. Feared for his otherness, he ultimately wins the respect of the survivors once he has rooted out the supernatural evil at work. Dorgo is a knight errant as much as Philip Marlowe and once his work is done, he moves on for the next outpost just over the horizon in need of his aid.

Book 2: Dorgo the Dowser and the Order of the Serpent (2017)

In this installment, Dorgo falls in love with a witch, battles hellish demons to destroy a dangerous artifact called the Book of Echoes , and directly confronts the leader of a dark cult known as the Order of the Serpent to save a young girl from sinister sorcery . Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed it for Black Gate in 2017: Mad Shadows II: Dorgo the Dowser and The Order of the Serpent by Joe Bonadonna

Dorgo Mikawber was raised in an orphanage, served in the army, and now makes his living as a magical investigator and finder of lost people. Last time out Dorgo’s adventures took him all over the continent of Aerlothia on the world of Tanyime. This time around his wanderings are more limited, starting in the countryside just beyond his home city, Valdar.

MS II is a fix-up. It’s made up of three separate tales, each linked to the other, weaving a larger story of Dorgo’s fight against the mysterious Order of the Serpent and its leader, Ophidious Garłoo.

Also, we hosted an excerpt from the book: Black Gate Online Fiction: An Excerpt from Mad Shadows II — Dorgo the Dowser and The Order of the Serpent

Book 3: The Heroes of Echo Gate (2021)

An epic gothic noir adventure that pulls Dorgo away from his usual city beats. He embarks on a perilous journey of self-discovery alongside an unforgettable cast of characters, handling grander threats while maintaining the series’ signature dark grit. The Alchemist Sethelin Burg (Easter Egg call out) reviewed it for Black Gate in 2021: Fun, Fresh Fantasy: Mad Shadows: The Heroes of Echo Gate by Joe Bonadonna

As the cover implies, we have our beloved weird-fiction investigator & mercenary Dorgo (the guy front and center on the cover with the dowsing rod and sword) defending the titular portal with a band of friends (most of whom could have stared in a Ray Harryhausen movie. For the young readers take note that Harryhausen was the “Frank Frazetta” of cinema who gave life to the fantastical creatures before computer graphics were invented). There are three acts that follow the classic purposes: setup, rising tension, and an epic battle. The climax consumes a full third of the book and resonates with all the grandeur of defending Tolkien’s Helm’s Deep. The city of Soolaflan, on the island of Thavarar, is the fortress and it is situated around Echo Gate. Demons from across time want access to it. The portals across the world of Tanyime (and even across time and space) echo those from C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine Cycle and even Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar Saga.…

The first two books are episodic weird-mystery with Dorgo taking the spotlight. The adventures are more “Crime & Sorcery” than “Sword & Sorcery.” Dorgo is not an official constable or justice keeper, but he is a hired layman with investigative skills and a magical dowsing rod. Bonadonna brands his Dorgo tales “Gothic Noir” which is fitting. Despite the weirdness of Valdar city and the threatening necromancy that abounds, we know Dorgo will survive and resolve any case as surely as Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser did.

Heroes of Echo Gate is simply more epic than the first two. First, the structure abandons the episodic set of stories for one epic tale. Secondly, the point of view (although maintaining a focus on Dorgo) pans back to feature a party of 6-8 heroes. Also, at 318pages, it is larger than the first two (at 270 and 233 pages). With these changes, combined with the prevalence of non-human creatures and some engagement of royalty, Heroes of Echo Gate fits a high-fantasy mold.

Books 1-3

In 2021, Andrew Paul Weston reviewed all three books at a high level: Mad Shadows: Andrew Paul Weston reviews the series

Book 4: All the Colors of Darkness (2026)

You are here! The conclusion to the quartet has Dorgo hunting bizarre supernatural threats, including zombie diamond thieves, a mutant strain of vampires, and a demon that attacks with multi-colored ectoplasm.

Joe Bonadonna

Joe Bonadonna is the author of the heroic fantasies Mad Shadows — Book One: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser (winner of the 2017 Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy); Mad Shadows — Book Two: The Order of the Serpent; Mad Shadows — Book Three: The Heroes of Echo Gate; the space opera, and now Mad Shadows Book Four: All the Colors of Darkness. Three Against the Stars and its sequel, the sword and planet space adventure, The MechMen of Canis-9; and the sword & sorcery pirate novel, Waters of Darkness, in collaboration with David C. Smith. With co-writer Erika M Szabo, he penned Three Ghosts in a Black Pumpkin (winner of the 2017 Golden Books Judge’s Choice Award for Children’s Fantasy), and its sequel, The Power of the Sapphire Wand.

He also has stories appearing in: Azieran: Artifacts and Relics; Savage Realms Monthly (March 2022); Griots 2: Sisters of the Spear; Heroika I: Dragon Eaters; Poets in Hell; Doctors in Hell; Pirates in Hell; Lovers in Hell; Mystics in Hell; Liars in Hell; Sinbad: The New Voyages, Volume 4; Unbreakable Ink; Poetry for Peace; the shared-world anthology Sha’Daa: Toys, in collaboration with author Shebat Legion; and with David C. Smith for the shared-universe anthology, The Lost Empire of Sol.

In addition to his fiction, Joe has written numerous articles, book reviews and author interviews for Black Gate online magazine.

 

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Sethlein Burg – Alchemist in Mad Shadows 4

S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor at Blackgate.com, regularly reviewing books, interviewing authors on ‘Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction’, and running Dark Muse News. He has taken lead roles organizing the Gen Con Writers’ Symposium (2021-2023) and the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group; he even interned for Tales from the Magician’s Skull magazine and is an Assistant Editor for Battleborn magazine. As for crafting stories, he has contributed eight entries across Perseid Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series, and has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies. He independently publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction®; short stories of these have appeared in Whetstone and Swords & Sorcery online magazine, Rogues In the House Podcast’s A Book of Blades (Vol. I and Vol. II), DMR’s Terra Incognita, Tales From the Magician’s Skull, Savage Realms Magazine, and Michael Stackpole’s S&S Chain Story 2 Project.