Black Gate

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.

I jotted a quick note on Marjorie Sandor’s The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows last spring. I finally bought a copy last week, and settled down with it this weekend.

As horror anthologies go, it has an even broader scope than I expected. Last year I described it as “a generous new collection of classic and new horror fiction from the four corners of the globe,” and that’s true, more or less. There’s stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann (Germany), Edgar Allan Poe (USA), Ambrose Bierce (USA), Guy de Maupassant (France), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Franz Kafka (Czech Republic), H. P. Lovecraft (The Outer Void), and others.

But in its 555 pages are also more contemporary tales by Kelly Link, Jonathan Carroll, Joan Aiken, Steven Millhauser, and many others. In her lengthy Los Angeles Review of Books review, Rachel Pastan writes:

Though containing fewer than three dozen pieces, The Uncanny Reader feels remarkably generous and comprehensive… [Sandor writes], “Every writer in this collection strips away the armor of familiar, overused language… they make us see and hear anew.” It is this conceit that makes room under one sprawling mansard roof for a horror story like Poe’s “Berenice,” in which a crazed lover disinters his beloved in order to rip her teeth out of her head… a surrealist story like Bruno Schultz’s “The Birds,” in which the narrator’s father turns the family home into an incubator for exotic eggs… and a fantastical story like Karen Russell’s “Haunting Olivia” in which two brothers use a pair of magic pink underwater goggles to hunt for their dead sister’s ghost…

Other standouts: Shirley Jackson’s energetic and urban “Paranoia”; Chris Adrian’s surprising suicide-on-Nantucket story, “The Black Square”; and Kelly Link’s haunted and haunting tale of domestic life, “Stone Animals,” [in which] a family moves out of an apartment in New York City and into a big house in the country… The unexpected and poignantly human way in which this house turns out to be haunted is one of Link’s great achievements.

Here’s the complete table of contents.

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Last week I ordered a copy of Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, published in a deluxe edition from Subterranean Press. I knew it was a big volume, but I didn’t realize just how massive until it arrived with a thud on my doorstep: 784 pages in hardcover, with a gorgeous warparound cover and interior artwork by Dominic Harman.

Subterranean Press is one of the most prolific small press publishers in the genre. I don’t often give them a lot of coverage here at Black Gate, mostly because they specialize in autographed limited edition hardcovers, targeted at the collectors market, which are out of my price range. But over the last two decades or so, as mainstream publishers have largely abandoned the single-author collection as commercially unviable, Subterranean founder and editor William Schafer has made a noble effort to pick up the slack, publishing nearly a hundred collections by Jack Vance, Joe R. Lansdale, Charles de Lint, George R. R. Martin, James P. Blaylock, Robert Silverberg, Robert McCammon, Tim Lebbon, Neal Barrett, Jr., Tad Williams, Charles Beaumont, K. J. Parker, Terry Dowling, Lewis Shiner, Greg Egan, and many, many others.

Subterranean Press’ collections clearly deserve a closer look, and I’ve decided to start with three of their most recent: Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, edited by Jonathan Strahan and William Schafer, The Best of Nancy Kress, and The Best of Gregory Benford, edited by the late David G. Hartwell. All three are monumental volumes, and all three are priced very affordably, especially if your shop around. (I paid $28.54 for a brand new copy of Beyond the Aquila Rift, which I purchased from a trusted third party seller on Amazon.)

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Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Spiderlight, published last month by Tor.com Publishing, is fast becoming one of the most talk-about books of the fall. What begins as a familiar tale of a small band of adventurers on an epic quest to defeat the Dark Lord quickly becomes something else entirely. The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog calls it “A master class in subverting our expectations to surprise, engage, and deliver a fantastic story,” And Django Wexler says, “If, like me, you’re a D&D fan who always wondered about the ethics of Detect Evil or what the orcs eat in Mordor, you will love this one.”

Tchaikovsky sounds like someone who’s fond of old-fashioned heroic fantasy — in particular, the trope of the Adventuring Party — and also someone who isn’t afraid of messing with the genre. So I was particularly interested in his August article at Tor.com “Five Books Featuring Adventuring Parties,” which begins:

My new book, Spiderlight, is something of a deconstruction of the fantasy adventuring party, as seen in plenty of post-Tolkien works, and as beloved of Dungeons & Dragons players everywhere. It’s not as common as you’d think in fiction — often the action is a single individual or a hero-and-sidekick pair, or something larger, like a military company. What I’m after here is an ensemble cast with a particular feel to it — that mix of clashing characters and different skillsets. Here are some of my favorites.

Yeah, that sounds good to me. One of his choices is a book that completely slipped past me: The Copper Promise by Jen Williams, published in July by Angry Robot.

When there’s a wizard and a warrior but the rogue gets a chance to shine.

Jen is one of the best new voices in UK fantasy, and it’s a testament to her writing skill that Wydrin, the “Copper Cat” and a proper fantasy rogue through and through, does not actually eclipse her companions Frith and Sebastian as they fight, trick and run their way through a world that has gone from run-of-the-mill dangerous to actively-being-set-on-fire-by-a-dragon dangerous thanks, chiefly, to their own poor life choices. “Let sleeping gods lie,” goes the tagline. No need to tell you how that one works out.

We previously discussed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novels The Tiger and the Wolf and Guns of the Dawn. Learn more about his Tor.com novella Spiderlight here.

Read Tchaikovsky’s complete article at Tor.com here.