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Author: John ONeill

New Treasures: Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

New Treasures: Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

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Ron Rash is the author of Serena, a New York Times bestseller which was made into a Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper film with the same title in 2014. He’s also the author of The Cove and Above the Waterfall, and is a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize.

I was tipped off to his short story collection Something Rich and Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. Although the stories within are not genre fiction, there’s plenty here to reward readers of weird fiction. Entertainment Weekly said “This anthology of Rash’s earthy, often eerie short stories is like a forest you can get lost in for hours, small but affecting tales of poverty, addiction, pride, love, and despair threaded with life-altering acts of violence.” And NPR said “Rich and strange are two words that aptly apply to this book. I have two other words to continue with: Simply beautiful… some of the stories are so searing, it’s as if someone has taken a stick from a blazing fire and pressed it into your hand.”

Something Rich and Strange was published by Ecco on August 11, 2015. It is 448 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback, and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Jamie Heiden. Click the covers above for bigger versions.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 197 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 197 Now Available

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 197-smallIssue #197 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies features a sword & sorcery tale by Tony Pi and a fanciful animal fantasy by Kelly Stewart, two podcasts by Tony Pi, and a reprint by Tina Connolly. Nicky Magas at Tangent Online liked the Stewart, and had mixed feelings on the Pi:

Ao has a fairly unique ability in Tony Pi’s “The Sweetest Skill.” Although he appears to be naught but a candy maker, Ao’s family has a long symbiotic history with the zodiac spirit animals that grant him the ability to form magical constructs out of simple materials. But absolute loyalty to the spirits is required for such power, and the penalty for disobedience can be awful, as Ao well knows. So when the spirit of King Tiger shows up one night with a request to rescue a divine tigress in need, Ao is more than a little wary. On the other hand, he owes a debt of gratitude to the injured spirit and all debts must be paid, even if that means going up against the sorcery of the Ten Crows gang… “The Sweetest Skill” is a neatly packaged sword and sorcery story set in a broader narrative world. The characters, the setting, and the plot are all decently constructed, but lack a stylistic charm to be truly eye-popping…

Aril knows that you ought never invite Rabbits into the garden, in Kelly Stewart’s “Rabbit Grass.” There’s no getting rid of them or fixing the damage they do if you’re silly enough not to heed that bit of advice. All the same, there’s something about the little Rabbit Picket that Aril can’t ignore. And conversation never hurt anyone, did it?… But Picket won’t stop going on about the non-existent Rabbit Grass, and when he shows up at her window one night looking desperate and worried, Aril won’t rest until she’s aided her unlikely companion, even if it means venturing into the Rabbit warrens herself. Part Peter Rabbit and part Alice in Wonderland, “Rabbit Grass” is… a lovely pastoral fantasy.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Future Treasures: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Future Treasures: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt-smallLast year Dutch writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt won a Hugo Award for his story “The Day the World Turned Upside Down.” During my lengthy discussion with Tor editor Liz Gorinsky, who edited Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem (which won the Hugo for Best Novel last year), I learned that she was also editing Heuvelt’s first book to be published in English, the horror novel HEX.

Liz seems to have an unerring sense for foreign SF and fantasy that will appeal to an American audience. I trust her taste implicitly, and I find myself very intrigued by HEX. It was a bestselling novel in its original Dutch version; the English edition arrives in hardcover from Tor next week.

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

HEX will be published by Tor on April 26. It is 384 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. It was translated by Nancy Forest-Flier.

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in March

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in March

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The palace of Fasiladas-smallThe number one post at the Black Gate blog last month was Sean McLachlan’s report on the historically fascinating castles of Gondar, Ethiopia. Sean’s adventures in Ethiopia certainly captured the attention of our readers — he also had the #3 post, with his photo-essay on the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela.

Coming in at #2 was the fifth chapter in William I. Lengeman III’s ongoing Star Trek re-watch, on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. I’ve been re-watching the early Star Trek films myself the past few months, and been enjoying this series very much.

Rounding out the Top Five are our Vintage Treasures report on The Silistra Quartet — by one of the most popular writers among Black Gate’s readership, Janet Morris — and our look at Gardner’s Dozois recent controversial comments on the New Sword and Sorcery.

Classic writers captured the next three slots, including Bob Byrne’s report on the new Conan RPG, Rich Horton on Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Thomas Parker’s look at one of the most hotly debated writers of pulp SF: “Classically Awful or Awfully Classic: A.E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A.”

Howard Andrew Jones had the #9 slot with his review of the Second Edition of Victory Point Games’ popular Empires in America, and Drake author Peter McLean closed out the Top Ten with his thoughtful article on “Why We Shouldn’t Hunt The Trope To Extinction.”

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Read “The Great Detective” by Delia Sherman at Tor.com

Read “The Great Detective” by Delia Sherman at Tor.com

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The Great Detective Delia Sherman-smallDelia Sherman is the author of The Freedom Maze, which won the Andre Norton Award, the Prometheus Award, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature in 2012. She’s also the author of Through a Brazen Mirror (1988), The Porcelain Dove (1993, also a Mythopoeic winner), and The Fall of the Kings (2002, with Ellen Kushner).

“The Great Detective” is an alternate history Sherlockian SF tale available free online at Tor.com — right up Bob Byrne’s alley, now that I think about it.

When Sir Arthur Cwmlech’s home is robbed and the Illogic Engine – his prize invention – stolen, it is only natural that he and his clever assistant Miss Tacy Gof consult with another inventor, the great Mycroft Holmes, about who has taken it. But it is really Mr. Holmes’ Reasoning Machine who they are there to see, for it is only fitting for one automaton to opine on a matter concerning the fate of another of its kind. This charming story by award-winning fiction writer Delia Sherman is a delightful romp set within an a slightly altered version of one of our most beloved literary universes.

Patty Templeton interviewed Delia Sherman for Black Gate here, and C.S.E. Cooney reported on her Podcastle story “The Wizard’s Apprentice” here. She is also the editor of Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts; we reported on the latest issue here.

“The Great Detective” was posted at Tor.com on February 17. It was edited by Liz Gorinsky, and illustrated by Victo Ngai. It’s available here.

We last covered Tor.com with K. M. Ferebee’s dark fantasy “Tom, Thom.” For more free fiction, see our recent online magazine coverage.

Vintage Treasures: The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

Vintage Treasures: The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

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To Your Scattered Bodies Go Berkley 1971-small To Your Scattered Bodies Go Berkley 1971-back-small

When I was a wee lad discovering science fiction for the first time, I eagerly read and enjoyed all the most famous SF series. Dune, Foundation, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Amber — and Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld saga.

The first volume, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, won the 1972 Hugo Award, and it’s not hard to see why. The premise, that every human who ever lived wakes up one morning on the shores of a great river, was thoroughly original, and Farmer built on it brilliantly, crafting a science fiction novel peopled with famous historical figures, including Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Hermann Göring, a fictionalized version of Farmer himself (“Peter Jairus Frigate”), and especially the famed explorer Richard Francis Burton, who sets out to solve the mystery of this strange world.

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The Mid-April Magazine Rack

The Mid-April Magazine Rack

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This month we started our coverage of Mike Resnick’s bi-monthly magazine Galaxy’s Edge with the March/April 2016 issue, packed with intriguing stories by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Larry Hodges, and many others… including Kary English and Robert B. Finegold’s tale of an assassin dispatched to kill the latest incarnation of the Goddess of Kindness. Michelle Ristuccia reviews the story at Tangent Online.

In “Shattered Vessels” by Kary English and Robert B. Finegold, M. D., Shevirah’s purpose as an assassin falters when he falls in love with an incarnation of Chesed (Kindness). English and Finegold’s deftly woven kabbalist tale pits destiny against love through multiple reincarnations of the characters, spanning thousands of years. The narration brings these large themes down to a personal level so that readers will identify with the protagonist’s plight despite the large time-span. Readers do not need to be familiar with the Kabbalah to enjoy this story.

In his March Short Story Roundup, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviews the latest issues of Swords and Sorcery and GrimDark magazines — including a Dinosaur Lords story by Victor Milán, “Red Seas, Red Sails,” which “gives readers savage pirates, brave knights, and of course, a dinosaur. Specifically, a Pliosaurus funkei, a huge aquatic beast that GMD‘s editors knew would make a great cover.” For our vintage magazine readers, Rich Horton reviewed the February 1972 Analog and an anthology of tales from Science Fiction Adventures, Matthew Wuertz continues his issue-by-issue re-read of perhaps the greatest SF magazine of the 50s with the April 1953 issue of Galaxy, and Doug Ellis shared a remembrance of a 1936 party attended by H.P. Lovecraft.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our April Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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New Treasures: Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt

New Treasures: Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt

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Greener Pastures Michael Wehunt-small

Michael Wehunt’s short fiction has appeared in Innsmouth Magazine, Shadows & Tall Trees, Cemetery Dance, The Dark, Shock Totem, and Strange Aeons. His first collection, Greener Pastures, was published last month from Shock Totem Publications, and has already received a lot of positive attention. He’s a fast rising star in horror and weird fiction, and well worth checking out. This may sound strange to everyone else, but I was playing with the digital preview on Amazon, and was delighted to find full-page ads for half a dozen back issues of Shock Totem, a magazine I’ve never read but clearly should, in the back. Things like that make me happy.

From the round-robin, found-footage nightmare of “October Film Haunt: Under the House” to the jazz-soaked “The Devil Under the Maison Blue,” selected for both The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and Year’s Best Weird Fiction, these beautifully crafted, emotionally resonant stories speak of the unknown encroaching upon the familiar, the inscrutable power of grief and desire, and the thinness between all our layers. Where nature rubs against small towns, in mountains and woods and bedrooms, here is strangeness seen through a poet’s eye.

They say there are always greener pastures. These stories consider the cost of that promise.

Greener Pastures was published by Shock Totem Publications on March 29, 2016. It is 238 pages, priced at $13.99 in trade paperback and $3.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Michael Bukowski.

Faren Miller Reviews The Brotherhood of the Wheel at Locus Online

Faren Miller Reviews The Brotherhood of the Wheel at Locus Online

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The Brotherhood of the Wheel-smallIn my previous article on R. S. Belcher’s The Brotherhood of the Wheel, I called it “the opening volume in a new urban fantasy about a mysterious society of truckers.” Faren Miller over at Locus Online can do much better than a one-sentence description — and she does, with an enthusiastic review.

Though Tor calls R.S. Belcher’s The Brotherhood of the Wheel an ‘‘urban fantasy,’’ it also describes the novel as set on ‘‘the haunted byways and truck stops of the US Interstate Highway System.’’ Roads – both real and metaphorical – are crucial to this dark fantasy, focusing and expanding the power of magics that range from the latest trends in ghosts and weird critters discussed on bad-ass websites, to entities transplanted to the New World from pre-Christian Europe and points beyond.

We begin with big rig truck driver Jimmie Aussapile, one of what proves to be a won­derfully miscellaneous bunch of people who oppose the forces of evil in tense scenes that gradually reveal connections between events in towns, suburbs, and cities of the Midwest and the South: Illinois, Kansas, Tennessee, Louisiana. Appearing near the mid-point of Belcher’s previous novel Nightwise, Jimmie, his tractor trailer, and a passing mention of the Brotherhood prompted Belcher’s literary agent to urge him to write more about them, as noted in the Acknowledgements here. I’m delighted that he followed her suggestion, in his own devious way. He has a masterful ability to move between assorted viewpoint characters in multiple plotlines kept separate long enough to become distinct: just hinting at links that may strengthen, but don’t become full alliances until hard action with shared danger breaks down the barriers between them.

The Brotherhood of the Wheel was published by Tor Books on March 1, 2016. It is 384 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. See Faren’s complete review here

Future Treasures: Strangely Beautiful by Leanna Renee Hieber

Future Treasures: Strangely Beautiful by Leanna Renee Hieber

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Strangely Beautiful Leanna Renee Hieber-smallLeanna Renee Hieber is the author of the Magic Most Foul trilogy, The Eterna Files, and its sequel Eterna and Omega.

Her early novels The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker and The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker were originally published in paperback by Leisure Books in 2009 and 2010, and they’re now getting harder to find. Fortunately, Tor has bundled both critically acclaimed novels into a single volume, bringing them back into print in a handsome new revised edition. It will be available in trade paperback at the end of the month.

Miss Persephone Parker ― known as Percy ― is different, with her lustrous, snow-white hair, pearlescent pale skin, and uncanny ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Seeking to continue her education, Percy has come to Queen Victoria’s London, to the Athens Academy. What she will learn there will change her life forever.

Athens Academy is the citadel of The Guard, an ancient order that battles the forces of evil. The Victorian Guard, led by professor Alexi Rychman, is incomplete. They cannot defeat Jack the Ripper ― who is more than the serial killer he appears to be ― or the greater monster his appearance heralds.

Percy’s lifelong habit of concealment combined with Alexi’s fevered search for the Guard’s missing seventh nearly prove disastrous as ancient Greek myths begin playing out in modern, gaslit, Victorian London. Percy and her new friends and allies must overcome their preconceptions about each other and their own histories before they can set the world to rights.

These two books were followed by two more in the same series: The Perilous Prophecy of Guard and Goddess (2011) and Miss Violet & the Great War (2012). No word yet on whether Tor plans to reprint them as well.

Strangely Beautiful will be published by Tor on April 26, 2016. It is 544 pages, priced at $20.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. I don’t know who did the cover, but I know I like it.