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Win a Copy of Sarah Avery’s The Imlen Brat

Win a Copy of Sarah Avery’s The Imlen Brat

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In early October I received a bundle from Sarah Avery. Inside were several copies of her beautiful new novella The Imlen Brat — a story I’d dearly wanted to publish in Black Gate, but was unable to before the print version of the magazine died.

It was enormously satisfying to finally see this book out in the world, and to hold a copy in my hands. And what a book! The gorgeous cover by Kate Baylay, and the delightful design and back cover blurb by Rich Horton, almost made it worth the wait (almost). And on top of it all, the dedication page touched my cold publisher’s heart.

To the whole Black Gate crew — writers, readers, artists, editors, all of you. You will always be this story’s first home.

Tucked in with the bundle was a note from Sarah, who generously offered two additional copies as to give away to Black Gate‘s readers. And that’s exactly what we’re here to do today.

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New Treasures: The Gates of Hell by Michael Livingston

New Treasures: The Gates of Hell by Michael Livingston

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the-gates-of-hell-michael-livingston-smallMichael Livingston’s stories for Black Gate made him a favorite among our readers, so I was looking forward to seeing how the wider world would react to him with the publication of his first novel, The Shards of Heaven, a historical fantasy that reveals the hidden magic behind the history we know. I was not disappointed. Library Journal called it “Top-noth,” and bestselling writer Bernard Cornwell called it “A brilliant debut.” And Sam Reader at the B&N SF Blog gave it this rave review:

The Shards of Heaven is breathtaking in scope. With the first volume of a planned series intertwining Roman history and myth with Judeo-Christian mythology, Michael Livingston has created something truly epic… He uses real events and characters as the backbone for a truly inventive epic fantasy like novel, a massive undertaking that launches a tremendously ambitious series.

The Gates of Hell is second volume in the series; it’s available in hardcover from Tor on Tuesday.

Alexandria has fallen, and with it the great kingdom of Egypt. Cleopatra is dead. Her children are paraded through the streets in chains wrought of their mother’s golden treasures, and within a year all but one of them will be dead. Only her young daughter, Cleopatra Selene, survives to continue her quest for vengeance against Rome and its emperor, Augustus Caesar.

To show his strength, Augustus Caesar will go to war against the Cantabrians in northern Spain, and it isn’t long before he calls on Juba of Numidia, his adopted half-brother and the man whom Selene has been made to marry — but whom she has grown to love. The young couple journey to the Cantabrian frontier, where they learn that Caesar wants Juba so he can use the Trident of Poseidon to destroy his enemies. Perfidy and treachery abound. Juba’s love of Selene will cost him dearly in the epic fight, and the choices made may change the very fabric of the known world.

Michael Livingston’s most recent blog post for us was his 2015 article on the challenges of writing longer fiction.

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Sarah Avery on “The War of the Wheat Berry Year”

Sarah Avery on “The War of the Wheat Berry Year”

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Sarah Avery’s story “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” first appeared in the Black Gate 15, our last print issue. Since then, Sarah has had a stellar career — winning the 2015 Mythopoeic Award for her novel Tales from Rugosa Coven, editing an anthology with David Sklar, and successfully Kickstarting The Imlen Brat, a novella featuring the heroine of “War of the Wheat Berry Year,” when she was a child adopted into a perilous royal court. Now Great Jones Street has reprinted a revised version of “The War of the Wheat Berry Year.” Here’s Sarah.

In 2003, I wrote a fantasy short story about.. a turncoat. I gave her many of the attributes we see so often — an army of followers who are Other to her, a homeland with blatant unresolved injustices, an offstage villain who is suitably repellent. But I gave her a few other things, too, that the usual turncoats don’t have.

She faces someone she loves on the battlefield. Someone she owes, who has done her lifesaving kindnesses she can never forget or repay. He’s angry, and his anger has its reasons. Quite apart from her betrayal of their nation, she has betrayed him, humiliated him, endangered him, put him in the position of having to make choices he finds unbearable. Worst of all, she has put him in the position of having to kill her or to die trying…

A few years later, “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” was my first professional sale. I sold the story to John O’Neill at Black Gate  —  he put me through three rounds of revisions for clarity, and I’ll always be grateful for his patience. In 2009, when the magazine was about to transition from print to online publication, my story appeared in the last print issue. Some things about the first published version of the story hold up pretty well, well enough that Great Jones Street picked it up for reprint this year.

Read Sarah’s complete article on the reasons for her revisions, “Conscientious Turncoats, Or Why I Stopped the Virtual Presses on “The War of the Wheat Berry Year,” at Great Jones Street.

October 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

October 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

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lightspeed-october-2016-smallJeremiah Tolbert has had a pretty impressive short fiction career — in the last few years he’s been published in Asimov’s SF, Giganotosaurus, Interzone, the sword & sorcery Cthulhu anthology Swords Vs Cthulhu, and other fine places. Some of you will also remember his very fine story in Black Gate 15, “Groob’s Stupid Grubs.” His latest tale for Lightspeed is “The Cavern of the Screaming Eye,” a futuristic role-playing tale which he describes thusly:

The first in the Dungeonspace sequence of stories, “Cavern” involves the story of a boy struggling with the legacy of his dead brother, a great d-space crawler lost to one of the most deadly dungeon anomalies the City has ever seen – The Black Hole.

His mother will kill him if he takes up d-space adventuring – she can’t bear to lose another son to the high-risk world of dungeon crawling. But an addiction to the thrill of adventure might just be in his blood, and now he find himself embroiled in the new kid’s dungeoneering schemes. Will they survive… the Cavern of the Screaming Eyes?

Here’s Charles Payseur’s summary from Quick Sip Reviews.

This story imagines a future fantasy world where young people can enter into d-space, a sort of dungeon-crawling game, only one where the stakes are life and death. The main character, Ivan, has recently lost his brother to the game, a brother who was a hero to many but a terror to Ivan. His home life a mess, Ivan is surprised when a new kid at his school offers friendship and, more than that, an opportunity to get involved in dungeon delving… This also feels like the start or something larger, because the story introduces many things that don’t exactly pay off. But it does create the sense of a larger world and a larger mystery which Ivan is just discovering, that will undoubtedly have huge implications for him, his family, and his new friends. It’s an entertaining piece and light but with a lifting optimism and fun that makes it a pleasant read and a fine story!

Read Charles’ complete review of the October issue here.

This month editor John Joseph Adams offers us original fantasy by Jeremiah Tolbert and Kat Howard, and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard and Will Kaufman, plus original science fiction by Stephen S. Power and Mary Anne Mohanraj, along with SF reprints by Karen Joy Fowler and Fran Wilde.

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Black Gate’s Closet: Gourdgeous Pumpkin Clothes

Black Gate’s Closet: Gourdgeous Pumpkin Clothes

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Hear ye, hear ye, THE GREAT PUMPKIN COMETH!

To please the Orange Overlord it is requested that you stock yer wardrobe in her minions.

Worried that you don’t have enough Halloweenery to gladden the Frightening Foreman? Panic not, inhabitants of the Hocus Pocus. Here be a starter list of gourd garb to grab goodwill.

  1. For those of you that wish Flashdance was just a wee bit more autumnal:

flashdance-pumpkin-shirt

Get your shoulder shimmy on, here.

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Peadar and The Call: Behind the Scenes

Peadar and The Call: Behind the Scenes

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the-call-peadar-oguilin-smallA few weeks ago I read, nay, inhaled Peadar O’Guilin’s The Call. Peadar and I are friends and fans of each other’s work, but I went into this one not having a clue about what it was. I knew the manuscript was YA, and had elements of horror.

What I discovered was a novel absolutely deserving of the hype it has received — a dystopian YA story about a fractured society, with heroic teenaged protagonists who are realistic AND don’t whine. There are moments of chilling otherworldly horror owing to the frequent presence of the fae folk, the force behind the terrible situation facing these Irish children. And there’s excellent pacing and characterization, and growth…

But this isn’t a review, it’s an interview. After devouring the novel I naturally had questions about how it was composed, and since I knew Peadar I asked him if I could take those questions and his answers public. I did my best to avoid spoilers, although there might be mild ones ahead.

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Future Treasures: The Fall of the House of Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard

Future Treasures: The Fall of the House of Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard

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the-fall-of-the-house-of-cabal-smallJonathan is a marvelously talented fantasy author. We published two of his stories featuring Kyth the Taker, the cunning and resourceful thief whose commissions somehow always involve her in sorcerous intrigue: “The Beautiful Corridor,” (Black Gate 13) and its sequel, “The Shuttered Temple” (BG 15).

His most recent novel was Carter & Lovecraft (October 2015). He published his first novel, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, in 2009; his newest novel The Fall of the House of Cabal is the fifth to feature gentleman necromancer Johannes Cabal and his comrades, including his vampiric brother, Horst. It arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne Books at the end of the month.

Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, has come into possession of a vital clue that may lead him to his ultimate goal: a cure for death. The path is vague, however, and certainly treacherous as it takes him into strange territories that, quite literally, no one has ever seen before. The task is too dangerous to venture upon alone, so he must seek assistance, comrades for the coming travails.

So assisted ― ably and otherwise ― by his vampiric brother, Horst, and by the kindly accompaniment of a criminologist and a devil, he will encounter ruins and diableries, mystery and murder, the depths of the lowest pit and a city of horrors. London, to be exact.

Yet even though Cabal has risked such peril believing he understands the dangers he faces, he is still underestimating them. He is walking into a trap of such arcane complexity that even the one who drew him there has no idea of its true terrors. As the snare closes slowly and subtly around them, it may be that there will be no survivors at all.

We’ve covered most of Jonathan’s recent releases here at Black Gate — including his article on writing the Johannes Cabal series, “Some Little Infamy.”

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A Secret Conflict During the Civil War: The House Divided Series by Sean McLachlan

A Secret Conflict During the Civil War: The House Divided Series by Sean McLachlan

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Sean McLachlan, our Wednesday afternoon blogger, is primarily known around our offices as the guy with the enviable travel budget. His recent travelogues have taken him to Roman ruins in Spain, Wallingord Castle in England, a volcanic island in the Canary Islands, the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, a writing retreat in Tangier, Morocco, and even more exotic places.

But Sean is also a prolific author. A former archaeologist, he is now a full-time writer who specializes in history, travel, and fiction. He won the 2013 Society of American Travel Writers Award for his Iraq reportage, and his historical fantasy novella “The Quintessence of Absence” appeared in Black Gate. He currently has several series on the go, including Toxic World, a post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure, and the Trench Raiders action series set in World War One. And his contemporary thriller, The Last Hotel Room, will be released later this month.

But my current favorite is his Civil War horror series House Divided, which so far consists of two novels: A Fine Likeness and The River of Desperation. Here’s what Sean told me when I asked him about the origin of the series.

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Last Chance to Get a Free Copy of Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith

Last Chance to Get a Free Copy of Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith

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Mysterion-smallTwo weeks ago we told you that Enigmatic Mirror Press was offering free review copies of the new anthology Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith in digital format to Black Gate readers, in return for honest reviews (e.g., at Amazon, Goodreads, etc.) There’s still time to get in on the offer, but you have to act fast.

What is Mysterion? It’s a groundbreaking anthology of Christian fantasy, edited by Black Gate author Donald Crankshaw (“A Phoenix in Darkness“) and his wife Kristin Janz. It will be released this week, and contains original fiction from Beth Cato, Pauline J. Alama, Stephen Case, David Tallerman, and many others. Here’s the description:

The Christian faith is filled with mystery, from the Trinity and the Incarnation to the smaller mysteries found in some of the strange and unexplained passages of the Bible: Behemoth and Leviathan, nephilim and seraphim, heroes and giants and more. There is no reason for fiction engaging with Christianity to be more tidy and theologically precise than the faith itself.

Here you will find challenging fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories that wrestle with tough questions and refuse to provide easy answers or censored depictions of a broken world, characters whose deeds are as obscene as their words and people who meet bad ends — sometimes deserved and sometimes not. But there are also hope, grace, and redemption, though even they can burn like fire.

Join us as we rediscover the mysteries of the Christian faith.

If you’re willing to read the book and provide a review, just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “Mysterion,” and we’ll forward it along to the publisher. But we must receive your request before the publication date.

Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith will be published by Enigmatic Mirror Press on August 31, 2016. It is 324 pages, priced at $9.99 in digital format. See the complete Table of Contents here.

Black Gate Receives an Alfie Award from George R.R. Martin

Black Gate Receives an Alfie Award from George R.R. Martin

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George RR Martin and John O’Neill

Yesterday, while I was walking through the crowded halls of Worldcon in the Kansas City Convention Center, I was given an invitation to the Hugo Losers party, courtesy of the party’s distinguished host, George RR Martin. I was quite flattered, as Black Gate was not even up for a Hugo (we declined the nomination, as we did last year, to make room for another nominee on the ballot), but didn’t think much more about it.

The Hugo Losers party is the hottest ticket of the convention, as I soon discovered. George personally hands out the Alfie Awards to those Hugo losers whom he feels (quite rightly, I think) were unjustly robbed of an award by slate shenanigans. And this year he spared no expense to do it in style, renting out the Midland Theater, hiring a band, and plying hundreds of guests with fabulous food and drink. The Awards themselves are gorgeous, constructed of vintage hood ornaments, in honor of the design inspiration for the first Hugo Awards.

George funds and hosts the awards, but the Alfie’s are in truth a fan award… the winners are determined by the results of the Hugo voting. But after the first few were awarded, George announced that the Alfie committee had the right to give out special awards. And as the sole member of the committee, he’d decided to give a special award this year to recognize one publication “for integrity” in declining a Hugo nomination two years in a row. Without further ado, George announced the award was to be given to Black Gate, and I was called to the stage to accept it.

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