Browsed by
Author: Jackson Kuhl

At the Mountains of Merchandise

At the Mountains of Merchandise

Comments 6 comments

Legends of Cthulhu

Three forty-something toy-industry veterans have formed their own company, Warpo, dedicated to creating retro action figures. Their first product line? The Legends of Cthulhu series, featuring Spawn of Cthulhu, Cultist, Deep One, and Professor figures:

We always felt that Lovecraft’s worlds were deserving of their own action figure line and what better time period than the late 70’s / early 80’s when his work first began its modern-day resurgence … The result is our interpretation of what a major toy company in that era would have done with these characters and how a creative team of the period would have translated H.P. Lovecraft’s stories into a mass-market children’s toy property.

In keeping with the early 80s ethos, Warpo hired Eddy Mosqueda, who worked on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Masters of the Universe, for the figure sculpts. For the blister-pack art, they engaged the talents of Ken Kelly, who painted some of the most incredible art ever to adorn a backing card; just check out the packaging he did for Micronauts and the Dungeons & Dragons toy lines.

…

Read More Read More

Cataclysms, Ghosts and Monsters: An Interview With Jeffrey E. Barlough

Cataclysms, Ghosts and Monsters: An Interview With Jeffrey E. Barlough

Comments 6 comments

what-i-found-at-hoole-smallThere’s nothing out there on the shelves like Jeffrey Barlough’s Western Lights novels. The series — called such because “the sole place on earth where lights still shine at night is in the west” — is a bouillabaisse of mystery, ghost story, and post-apocalyptic gaslamp fantasy. His seventh and most recent book, What I Found at Hoole, was published in November.

Dr. Barlough, who moonlights as a veterinary physician, kindly spoke to me about the world-building of the Western Lights, his latest project, and which Ice Age animal he’d most like to meet in a dark alley.

An Interview with Jeffrey E. Barlough

Conducted and transcribed by Jackson Kuhl, January 2013

Black Gate: The world of the Western Lights is technically an alternate history — the last glaciation never ended and British civilization has colonized North America’s western coast — and yet the timeline is so divergent — an environmental cataclysm, ghosts and monsters from mythology — that it might as well be a secondary world fantasy. Where did the disparate ideas for the Western Lights come from? What inspired you to write the first book, Dark Sleeper?

Barlough: Dark Sleeper resulted from combining three different projects I was working on at the time. One was a sci-fi story set in Ice Age California, another was a relatively straight-forward “Dickensian” mystery, and the third was a tale of the supernatural concerning an immortal Etruscan who turns up in 1920s Santa Barbara! At one point, I realized that combining these various elements into a single storyline might produce something unique. The backstory of the series was filled in by extrapolation from these differing components. My interest in Victorian fiction and paleontology dates from my childhood, while the Ice Age setting in particular was inspired by my time as a volunteer excavator at the famed Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

…

Read More Read More

Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter

Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter

Comments 1 comment

Horror on the Orient ExpressChaosium is conducting a Kickstarter to update and re-release their legendary 1991 campaign, Horror on the Orient Express, for the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

Set in 1920s Europe (the new edition will include rules for the 1890s too), the campaign arrives in London with a bizarre murder mystery, then runs to Paris and along the route of the Orient Express to a very terminal conclusion in Constantinople. Its storyline, centering on a bloodthirsty artifact, induces trainspotting-like fanaticism among many previous passengers, with original copies selling for hundreds on eBay. There’s even a soundtrack!

Pledge perks include T-shirts, tote bags, bumper stickers, and other freight. Donate $60 or more to receive a hardcopy of the finished product.

If you want to climb aboard but worry you’ve missed your connection, don’t — this high-speed rail already surpassed its goal of $20,000 six times over. Next stop: at $125,000, Chaosium will commission an anthology of Express-inspired fiction, featuring contributors such as Elaine Cunningham, Ken Hite, and James Sutter.

Years ago I embarked on a play-by-post HotOE campaign and made it as far as Lausanne before the Keeper was derailed by personal commitments. My character was an American mob accountant who had skipped to Europe after embezzling from his employers, and the Keeper strongly suggested the vengeful bootleggers would appear somewhere down the line. Of course, he didn’t say when they would attempt to punch my ticket, which added a whole new layer of paranoia to a seriously creepy game. Fun times!

Frank Chadwick’s A Prince of Mars

Frank Chadwick’s A Prince of Mars

Comments 2 comments

A Prince of Mars by Frank ChadwickA Prince of Mars (Amazon | B&N)
Frank Chadwick
Untreed Reads Publishing (137 pages, $2.51, February 2012)

For me the greatest benefit of the e-book revolution is low expectations coupled with low prices. For 99¢ or $4.99 or anyplace in-between, I can take a chance on an unfamiliar author and download a novel or collection onto my Android, then read a few pages whenever I have a lost moment — usually while waiting somewhere for somebody. I’ve pulled a few stinkers, but then again I’ve also spent more on bad cups of coffee too. And, occasionally, there’s that casino-win kick when I unexpectedly discover a polished thrill-ride like A Prince of Mars.

Space: 1889, first published in 1988 as an RPG/miniatures wargame, is a mash-up of H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon and Burroughs’ Barsoom and Amtor novels. The setting is an alternate history in which space flight was pioneered in the late nineteenth century. With its emphasis on Her Majesty’s presence on Mars, the result is the British Raj transplanted to the canals and deserts of a dying world, alongside flying ships made from Martian liftwood, the setting’s answer to cavorite. I suspect the focus on Great Game political machinations and aerial skirmishes appealed more to the wargamer than the hack-and-loot dungeon delver, allowing Space: 1889 to persevere to the modern day through its small but dedicated audience. Well — that and the fact Frank Chadwick, as both writer and publisher, maintained the rights to his creation and therefore didn’t allow it to drown in the industry quicksands of neglect, copyrights, and petty feuding, which is so often the case.

…

Read More Read More

Steampunk Spotlight: Cherie Priest’s Ganymede

Steampunk Spotlight: Cherie Priest’s Ganymede

Comments 2 comments

Ganymede by Cherie PriestGanymede (Amazon | B&N)
Cherie Priest
Tor (350 pp., $14.99, October 2011)
Reviewed by Jackson Kuhl

On the eve of the fall and subsequent occupation of New Orleans by the Union in 1862, lawyer and amateur engineer Horace L. Hunley, along with his two investment partners, scuttled their submarine Pioneer in a canal to prevent its seizure by the Federals. They may, or may not, have likewise scuttled a second submarine near Lake Pontchartrain; there are no records for this sub and its design departs from Hunley’s other efforts. The trio fled to Mobile, Alabama, to build another sub, which sank, and yet another, the H.L. Hunley, which drowned its namesake, then successfully torpedoed the Union blockade ship Housatonic before itself swamping in Charleston Harbor during its return.

In the alternate history of Cherie Priest’s latest Clockwork Century novel, Hunley and his partners constructed a fifth submersible, the titular Ganymede, which sank near New Orleans. The Civil War has stretched into the late nineteenth-century and the city is occupied by the Confederate-allied Republic of Texas. Now a team of pro-Union guerrillas has recovered Ganymede and, hopeful the machine can end the war in the Union’s favor, intends to transport it down the Mississippi River — past the Texians searching for it — to a waiting U.S. battleship in the Gulf. All of this is orchestrated by freedom fighter Josephine Early, a black whorehouse madam and Union agent. With no one experienced enough to pilot the sub, Early hires airship captain Andan Cly (who also happens to be her ex-lover, natch) to “fly” Ganymede under the river and the Texians’ noses to the rendezvous.

Priest has cooked together espionage, a rich setting, intriguing characters, and a plot that could have been stolen from Alistair Maclean. It’s a great gumbo — providing you ignore there’s not an ounce of suspense to be tasted. Spoilers ahoy!

…

Read More Read More

Angry Robot’s Door Is Open

Angry Robot’s Door Is Open

Comments 1 comment

Whistle for your post owl, conjure your djinn, geas an itinerant minstrel or passer-by into delivering your parcel: genre publisher Angry Robot is accepting unagented manuscripts for the next two weeks. And they’re interested in classic fantasy only.

What we’re not looking for:

Anything other than classic fantasy – swords, magic, kingdoms, castles. You might describe it as high fantasy, epic, magical, low, classic, medieval, or whatever. If you’ve written an urban fantasy or supernatural modern day chiller, that’s great, but not what we’re wanting this time around. … If it has castles, kingdoms, magic, swords, dragons, you’re on the right track.

The mystical portal will remain unlocked from April 16-30. Alas, this doesn’t help me but maybe it helps you. Just be sure to remember your old chum Jackson when you’re writing the Acknowledgments page.

The Borribles

The Borribles

Comments 1 comment

The Borribles, Ace Fantasy, 1984The Borribles
Michael de Larrabeiti
Tor (214 pp, $6.99, July 2005)

While on patrol one night in London’s Battersea Park, Knocker and his buddy Lightfinger discover a Rumble trespassing on their home turf. The two Borribles quickly capture the Rumble and then —

Wait. What’s a Borrible? What’s a Rumble?

Borribles, in Michael de Larrabeiti’s razor-sharp novel, are “feral Peter Pans,” to cadge a phrase from the New York Times, pointy-eared children who never grow up:

Normal kids are turned into Borribles very slowly, almost without being aware of it; but one day they wake up and there it is. It doesn’t matter where they come from as long as they’ve had what is called a bad start. A child disappears and the word goes round that he was ‘unmanageable’; the chances are he’s off managing by himself. Sometimes it’s given out that a kid down the street has been put into care: the truth is that he’s been Borribled and is caring for himself someplace.

They are urchins gone elf, living in loose neighborhood tribes, squatting in abandoned buildings and shoplifting their food; they have no leaders or laws beyond a collection of proverbs (“Don’t get caught”), which they frequently cite in their arguments. Borribles are anarchist lawyers, “outcasts, but unlike most outcasts they enjoy themselves and wouldn’t be anything else.”

Their sworn enemies are the Rumbles, intelligent rodents resembling “a giant rat, a huge mole or a deformed rabbit” that walk on hind legs and even drive cars. The Rumbles dwell in a massive (and very posh) underground bunker in Rumbledom; a native Londoner might better recognize the area as Wimbledon Common. They’re also parodies of The Wombles, a series of children’s books, TV shows, and films which I’ve never read or seen.

The discovery of a Rumble rooting around in their territory incites suspicion of a Rumble invasion of Battersea and beyond. A Borrible council is quickly called, whereupon it’s decided each of the Borrible tribes of London will furnish a warrior to participate in the Great Rumble Hunt. The goal of this expedition: to infiltrate Rumbledom and assassinate the eight members of the Rumble High Command, thereby decapitating Rumble society. And, so that the Rumbles may have a sporting chance, the Borribles release the Rumble prisoner with a message for the High Command, explaining the entire plan.

Thus ends Chapter One.

…

Read More Read More

io9 on Seven Princes

io9 on Seven Princes

Comments 6 comments

seven-princesNihilism got you down? Can’t stomach yet another scene of rape and torture? Need a break from learning your eleventeenth language and living abroad? If so, then io9 has the prescription for your burning fever:

These days, fantasy novels seem to be all about realism. Or at least, semi-realism. … So it’s a pleasure to read an unabashed over-the-top fantasy epic like John R. Fultz’s Seven Princes, in which totally batshit stuff happens every few pages and the wonders aren’t rationed at all. Fultz writes at a frenetic pace, as if worried he’ll run out of pages before he throws in all the cool stuff he’s thought up. It’s kind of amazing.

…

What Seven Princes does have to offer, though, is breakneck pacing and nonstop insanity. Every few pages, foxes are turning into naked ladies or giants are going off to talk to the mermaid queen, or a long-lost race of blue giants is randomly discovered, or evil dark spirits are destroying entire kingdoms. It’s epic with a capital EPIC.

And judging by the majority of comments, vitamin Fultz is the tonic lots of folks are craving.

On Stranger Tides

On Stranger Tides

Comments 6 comments

Cover for the 1988 Ace MMPB.Extolling the virtues of Tim Powers to this audience is probably preaching to the choir, but if you haven’t yet read On Stranger Tides, get thee to Amazon. It was the first Powers I ever read. It’s still my favorite.

The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, neither based nor inspired but rather “suggested by the novel by Tim Powers,” is so-so. It has a clumsy first act, full of cameos and nudge-nudge references to the original film; and the leaden action and fighting choreography is wound into slow-motion by the editing. The biggest problem is POV: the story shouldn’t have had Jack as the main character but rather should have, like Curse of the Black Pearl, focused on the straight man (here, the missionary Philip) whose path intersects with Sparrow’s. That said, it’s not as bad as some of the reviews say. I found the mermaid sequence in Whitecap Bay delightful and I’ll gladly pay $9 to watch Geoffrey Rush channel Robert Newton (or to listen to Penelope Cruz’s accent) anytime. The film’s biggest stars are actually the percussive guitars of Rodrigo Y Gabriela who, along with Hans Zimmer, give the score a Spanish Main emotion missing from the previous installments.

If only the filmmakers had adapted Powers whole cloth! In the 1987 novel, 18th-century puppeteer John Chandagnac — or Jack Shandy, as he becomes known — accidentally falls in with pirates and thereby enters a heretofore unknown world of sorcery and West African animism. The buccaneers of the Caribbean, it turns out, are magicians who can manipulate spirits. Blackbeard himself is a master warlock, but having become infested with vodun loas, must seek out the Fountain of Youth to banish them; he keeps them at bay by drinking gunpowder and burning slow matches in his hair. And he’s not even the main antagonist. Shandy must meanwhile race to save his love from a horrific plot involving zombies and body swapping.

…

Read More Read More

Anchorwick

Anchorwick

Comments 9 comments

AnchorwickAnchorwick
Jeffrey E. Barlough
Gresham & Doyle (387 pages, $14.95, October 2008)

Of all the books I’ve reviewed for Black Gate, the one that sticks in my head is Jeffrey Barlough’s Strange Cargo, which I reviewed way back in 2005 for BG #8. Grumpus that I am, of course I dinged it. I still stand by the review years later, though I feel some guilt about it too. Barlough is such a wonderful yet unappreciated fantasist that to judge him on that single novel is like measuring Hemingway by To Have or Have Not or Kerouac by The Subterraneans. Frankly, Strange Cargo isn’t even a bad book; it’s simply a novel where the author’s ambition exceeded the page count and so shortcuts were taken. Literary ambition is hardly a crime and Barlough is, nevertheless, a talent I invite everyone to sample.

With his first three books OOP, Barlough’s fifth, Anchorwick, makes a fine initiation for newcomers (younger versions of the protagonists from Barlough’s debut, Dark Sleeper, appear here in supporting roles). His alternate 20th century, called the Western Lights, has a sophisticated backstory that’s easier to link to than for me to explain, but I’ll try: in a world where the Ice Age never ended, a cataclysm has reduced humanity to a slip of English civilization along North America’s western coastline. It’s neither steampunk nor weird western; the technology is early 19th century. It’s kinda-sorta gaslamp fantasy, except there doesn’t seem to be any natural gas. Barlough’s creation is best described as a Victorian Dying Earth — gothic and claustrophobic yet confronted by its inhabitants with upper lips held stiff.

…

Read More Read More