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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