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Author: John ONeill

The Funny and Frightening Tale of the Supernatural Demise of London: Magicals Anonymous by Kate Griffin

The Funny and Frightening Tale of the Supernatural Demise of London: Magicals Anonymous by Kate Griffin

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Stray Souls Kate Griffin-small The Glass God Kate Griffin-small

Catherine Webb is an extraordinary young writer. Under her own name she’s published several popular YA novels, including four novels in the Carnegie Medal-nominated Horatio Lyle mystery series, featuring a scientist and occasional sleuth in Victorian London. She writes science fiction under the name Claire North, including the Campbell Award-winning The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) and the World Fantasy Award nominee The Sudden Appearance of Hope (2016), among many others. And under the name Kate Griffin she writes fantasy for adults.

It’s her Kate Griffin novels that interest me most — especially her Magicals Anonymous novels about an apprentice shaman (and Community Support Officer for the Magically Inclined) in London. SciFi Now said the opening volume Stray Souls (2012) “Flawlessly balances horror and humor to… pull off a funny yet frightening read about the supernatural-induced demise of London.”

So far there has only been one sequel, The Glass God (2013), but I’m hopeful there will be more. Here’s the descriptions for both novels.

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Future Treasures: Barbary Station by R. E. Stearns

Future Treasures: Barbary Station by R. E. Stearns

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Barbary Station-smallPirates, space stations, and a killer A.I… these are the promising ingredients in R. E. Stearns’ debut SF novel Barbary Station, in which two engineers hijack a spaceship to join a band of space pirates — only to discover the pirates are hiding from a malevolent AI. To join the pirate crew, they first have to prove themselves by outwitting the AI… how hard can that be? Barbary Station arrives in hardcover from Saga Press on Halloween.

Adda and Iridian are newly minted engineers, but aren’t able to find any work in a solar system ruined by economic collapse after an interplanetary war. Desperate for employment, they hijack a colony ship and plan to join a famed pirate crew living in luxury at Barbary Station, an abandoned shipbreaking station in deep space.

But when they arrive there, nothing is as expected. The pirates aren’t living in luxury — they’re hiding in a makeshift base welded onto the station’s exterior hull. The artificial intelligence controlling the station’s security system has gone mad, trying to kill all station residents and shooting down any ship that attempts to leave — so there’s no way out.

Adda and Iridian have one chance to earn a place on the pirate crew: destroy the artificial intelligence. The last engineer who went up against the AI met an untimely end, and the pirates are taking bets on how the newcomers will die. But Adda and Iridian plan to beat the odds.

There’s a glorious future in piracy… if only they can survive long enough.

Barbary Station will be published by Saga Press on October 31, 2017. It is 448 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital edition.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming SF ans Fantasy here.

The Expedition Into the Black Reservoir: A Dungeon Adventure at Greyhawk Castle by Gary Gygax

The Expedition Into the Black Reservoir: A Dungeon Adventure at Greyhawk Castle by Gary Gygax

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The Expedition Into the Black Resevoir Gary Gygax

The early days of D&D have been chronicled many times, in Shannon Appelcline’s excellent Designers and Dragons books, Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination, David Kushner and Koren Shadmi’s Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D, and a rapidly growing corpus of gaming history texts. When an era you lived through in your teens now has its own shelf in the history section, you’re getting old.

Still, there are plenty of unchronicled tidbits of gaming history out there, and I stumbled on one this weekend. In 1974 Gary Gygax, strapped for marketing cash for his just-released adventure game Dungeons and Dragons, agreed to contribute two articles to issue 12 of El Conquistador, a Chicago small press magazine devoted to play-by-mail Diplomacy leagues and general wargaming, in exchange for a full-page D&D ad. The first article was “Postal Brotherhood,” a short piece on play-by-mail gaming, a pastime that was already dying (and was fully dead less than two decades later).

The second was vastly more interesting: a four-page story that’s believed to be the first Greyhawk tale ever published.

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Check out the Table of Contents for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume Four, edited by Helen Marshall and Michael Kelly

Check out the Table of Contents for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume Four, edited by Helen Marshall and Michael Kelly

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The Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 4-small The Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 4-back-small

It’s always a delight when The Year’s Best Weird Fiction arrives, as I consistently find it one of the most eclectic and eye-opening of the Year’s Best volumes. All of them introduce me to new writers and fiction venues, but I don’t think any do it with the same regularity as Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

The series is edited by a different guest editor every year; Canadian author Helen Marshall is at the reins for 2017. The series editor is Undertow’s distinguished publisher, Michael Kelly. This year’s volume includes stories from Jeffrey Ford, Dale Bailey, Usman T. Malik, Sam J. Miller, Sarah Tolmie, Indrapramit Das, and many others. It arrived in trade paperback from Undertow Publications earlier this month.

And while we’re talking about the book, I have to say a few words about Alex Andreev’s fantastically creepy cover, which may be my favorite cover art of 2017. I’ve seen it multiple times, but didn’t notice anything particularly unsettling about it until I tracked down a high-res version for this article. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Click the image above left to view a high-resolution version, and see what I mean. Warning: not for the squeamish. (Which in this case definitely includes me. Brrrr.)

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New Treasures: Blackwater: The Complete Saga by Michael McDowell

New Treasures: Blackwater: The Complete Saga by Michael McDowell

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Blackwater The Complete Saga-back-small Blackwater The Complete Saga-small

Last year author Nathan Ballingrud dashed off a brief Facebook post about Michael McDowell’s 6-volume Blackwater series, originally published in paperback by Avon in 1983. Nathan said, in part:

I’m in the midst of reading Blackwater, by Michael McDowell. It is, you might say, as if The Shadow over Innsmouth was written as a generational family saga set in rural Alabama. It is strange, funny, warm, and frightening, and a true pleasure to read.

That triggered a lengthy quest for the books, which I chronicled here. I was never able to track down all six volumes, although I did manage to locate the Science Fiction omnibus collection of the first three. So I was very pleased to hear that the industrious folks at Valancourt Books have published a massive one-volume edition of the entire series. It was released in hardcover and trade paperback earlier this month; both editions feature a full wraparound cover by MS Corley.

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The October Fantasy Magazine Rack

The October Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Apex Magazine October 2017-small Beneath Ceaseless Skies October 12 2017-small Black Static September October 2017-small Clarkesworld October 2017-small
Grimdark Magazine 13-small Lackington's Summer 2017-small MAGAZINE OF HORROR 36-small Shimmer September 2017-small

One thing I cherish about the zines in this genre is their endless diversity. We have gritty SF and fantasy (Grimdark magazine), literary adventure fantasy (Beneath Ceaseless Skies), Canadian speculative fiction (Lackington’s), contemporary horror (Black Static), pulp replicas (Magazine of Horror #36), and much, much more.  Best of all, we have writers capable of crossing all those boundaries — such as the amazing Natalia Theodoridou, who appears in no less than three magazines this month (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and Shimmer). Here are the magazines that grabbed my attention in October (links will bring you to magazine websites).

Apex Magazine — Issue #101, with new fiction from Dennis Danvers, Lavie Tidhar, Annie Neugebauer, and others
Beneath Ceaseless Skies — Natalia Theodoridou, Emily B. Cataneo, plus a podcast and a reprint by Samantha Murray
Black Static — with creepy tales by Carole Johnstone, Tim Lees, Ray Cluley, and Stephen Hargadon
Clarkesworld — new fiction from Jack Skillingstead, Natalia Theodoridou, Xia Jia, Genevieve Valentine, and others
Grimdark — fresh fiction from Richard A. Knaak, S. Andrew Swann, David M. Hoenig
Lackington’s — “Diseases” Issue, with stories by Evelyn Deshane, Nin Harris, Dayna K. Smith, Adrian Simmons, and Kat Weave
Magazine of Horror #33 — a reprint of the classic magazine from 1970, with fiction by Clark Ashton Smith, Paul Ernst, Arthur Styron, Rachel Cosgrove Payes, Robert E. Howard, and others
Shimmer — great new stuff from Sonya Taaffe, Brian Holguin, Maria Haskins, and the ubiquitous Natalia Theodoridou

Click any of the thumbnail images above for bigger images. Our late September Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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Future Treasures: The Art of the Pulps edited by Douglas Ellis, Ed Hulse and Robert Weinberg

Future Treasures: The Art of the Pulps edited by Douglas Ellis, Ed Hulse and Robert Weinberg

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The Art of the Pulps Doug Ellis-small

Ed Hulse, editor and co-founder of pulp zine Blood ‘n Thunder, collector extraordinaire Robert Weinberg, and collector (and Black Gate blogger) Doug Ellis have teamed up to produce what may be my most anticipated book of 2017: The Art of the Pulps, a gorgeous 240-page celebration of the magazines that gave birth to the heart and soul of modern Pop Culture. Miss this book at your peril.

Experts in the ten major Pulp genres, from action Pulps to spicy Pulps and more, chart for the first time the complete history of Pulp magazines — the stories and their writers, the graphics and their artists, and, of course, the publishers, their market, and readers.

Each chapter in the book, which is illustrated with more than 400 examples of the best Pulp graphics (many from the editors’ collections — among the world’s largest) is organized in a clear and accessible way, starting with an introductory overview of the genre, followed by a selection of the best covers and interior graphics, organized chronologically through the chapter. All images are fully captioned (many are in essence “nutshell” histories in themselves). Two special features in each chapter focus on topics of particular interest (such as extended profiles of Daisy Bacon, Pulp author and editor of Love Story, the hugely successful romance Pulp, and of Harry Steeger, co-founder of Popular Publications in 1930 and originator of the “Shudder Pulp” genre).

With an overall introduction on “The Birth of the Pulps” by Doug Ellis, and with two additional chapters focusing on the great Pulp writers and the great Pulp artists, The Art of the Pulps covers every aspect of this fascinating genre; it is the first definitive visual history of the Pulps.

F. Paul Wilson provides the Foreword. The Art of the Pulps will be published by IDW Publishing on October 24, 2017. It is 240 pages, priced at $49.99 in hardcover. There is no digital edition.

Battlefield Looters in the Kingdom of the Dead: The Corpse-Rat King Novels by Lee Battersby

Battlefield Looters in the Kingdom of the Dead: The Corpse-Rat King Novels by Lee Battersby

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The-Corpse-Rat-King-small The Marching Dead-small

I bought Lee Battersby’s debut novel The Corpse-Rat King back in 2013, mostly because it had skeletal warriors on the cover. As a child raised on Ray Harryhausen movies, that was pretty much irresistible.

I totally missed the sequel, The Marching Dead, released in March 2013. I corrected that mistake last month, and settled in with the book last night. In this installment professional battlefield looters Marius dos Hellespont and his apprentice Gerd, together with Gerd’s not-dead-enough Granny, journey across the continent to solve the riddle of why the dead have stopped dying, and to return them to the afterlife where they belong. Both books were paperback originals from Angry Robot with covers by Nick Castle; here’s the publishing deets.

The Corpse-Rat King (416 pages, $7.99 paperback/$1.99 digital, August 28, 2012)
The Marching Dead (411 pages, $7.99 paperback/$2.99 digital, March 26, 2013)

Battersby’s most recent book is the YA fantasy Magrit, published last year by Walker Books. He’s also produced one collection, Through Soft Air (Prime Books, 2006).

Support an Exciting New Magazine of Sword & Sorcery: Tales From the Magician’s Skull

Support an Exciting New Magazine of Sword & Sorcery: Tales From the Magician’s Skull

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Tales from the Magician's Skull-small

Here’s the best news I’ve heard all month: Goodman Games, publisher of the excellent Dungeon Crawl Classics line of old-school RPG adventures, has launched a brand new magazine of Sword & Sorcery, Tales From the Magician’s Skull. The editor chosen to helm this groundbreaking project? None other than our very own Howard Andrew Jones. Here’s Howard with the scoop.

A gong shivers…
The mists part to reveal a grisly object lying upon a mound of rubble, a browned and ancient head with one glowing, malefic eye…
It speaks, in a voice of cold command: “Silence, mortal dogs! It is time now for
TALES FROM THE MAGICIAN’S SKULL!
Goodman Games [has launched] the Kickstarter for the exciting new sword-and-sorcery magazine inspired by Appendix N. I am mightily pleased to be the magazine’s editor, and I’ve had a blast assembling it with Joseph Goodman. We’ve been working together for almost a year, and I’ve got to tell you that the result is GLORIOUS. Just check out that Jim Pavalec cover.

The first issue, with stories by James Enge, John C. Hocking, Chris Willrich, Howard Andrew Jones, C.L. Werner and others, truly is a knockout. The Kickstarter funded in less than 24 hours, and continues to gather momentum. Make a pledge, and make sure you get your copy of the the first issue of what’s sure to be one of the most important magazine launches of the decade. And check back here this week for a 3-way interview with publisher Joseph Goodman, Howard Andrew Jones, and the grinning skull itself!

New Treasures: Zero Repeat Forever by G. S. Prendergast

New Treasures: Zero Repeat Forever by G. S. Prendergast

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Zero Repeat Forever-smallThe flood of YA fantasy that washes up at the foot of my big green chair every week is starting to all sound alike. The covers look alike too, all these big fonts on stark, sculptured backgrounds.

It was the strikingly different cover to Zero Repeat Forever that first drew my attention. Enigmatic and beautiful, it stood out from all the other YA books I’ve seen this month. In fact, it doesn’t look like any book I’ve ever seen. The title, nearly as enigmatic as the cover, intrigued me too, and I flipped it open to read the inside jacket flap with real curiosity. It’s the tale of the end of the world, an invasion of deadly creatures… and a sixteen year old girl who doesn’t intend to take things lying down. I like it already.

He has no voice or name, only a rank, Eighth. He doesn’t know the details of the mission, only the directives that hum in his mind.
Dart the humans. Leave them where they fall.
His job is to protect his Offside. Let her do the shooting.
Until a human kills her…

Sixteen-year-old Raven is at summer camp when the terrifying armored Nahx invade. Isolated in the wilderness, Raven and her fellow campers can only stay put. Await rescue. Raven doesn’t like feeling helpless, but what choice does she have?

Then a Nahx kills her boyfriend.

Thrown together in a violent, unfamiliar world, Eighth and Raven should feel only hate and fear. But when Raven is injured, and Eighth deserts his unit, their survival comes to depend on trusting each other…

G. S. Prendergast is the Canadian author of two novels in verse, Audacious and Capricious. This is her first prose novel.

Zero Repeat Forever was published by Simon & Schuster on August 29, 2017. It is 487 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition. The marvelous cover was designed by Lizzy Bromley. Read an excerpt at Hypable.