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Richard Kadrey Talks with Black Gate About Dead Set

Richard Kadrey Talks with Black Gate About Dead Set

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Richard Kadrey author photoRichard Kadrey is the kinda guy you see at the all night diner who looks like a degenerate even when he’s sitting there eating a burger. Dark hair. Dark glasses. Dark tattoos. Except the knuckle ink, that’s white. He’s the kinda guy that when he looks up from his coffee and smiles at you, you can’t tell if that grin means he’s going to steal your car on the way out or say hello.

Either way, he’s ridiculously charming and… cool. Like James Dean, Nick Cave, Wild One, cool. You can tell, lookin’ at the rough bastard that he’s got good stories. Like maybe he was a teenage werewolf or used to live with a burlesque troupe in Berlin or he and Tom Waits went on benders in adult theaters in New Orleans — but before you get the nerve to say hey, he picks up his yellow legal pad, tosses the waitress a tip and he’s off into the night.

Now take all that nonchalant badassery and put it on the page because Richard Kadrey’s books are as hella cool as he is.*

Kadrey’s upcoming young adult novel, Dead Set, is about Zoe, a high school kid dealing with the loss of her dad. Zoe and her mom moved to the city. Money’s tight, the insurance company isn’t paying, and starting over sucks for both of them. While her mom non-stop job searches, Zoe is left mostly alone to deal with her grief.

Zoe stumbles on a record store that might be the answer to her problems. The records sold therein don’t hold music in the grooves… they hold souls – including Zoe’s dad… and it’s only a short jaunt from the shop to the underworld.

…

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “Vestments of Pestilence” by John C. Hocking

Black Gate Online Fiction: “Vestments of Pestilence” by John C. Hocking

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John C Hocking-smallJohn C. Hocking returns to the pages of Black Gate after too long an absence, with another exciting tale of the Archivist and his friend Lucella.

Sevron Glauco turned with a swirl of his fine cloak, and we followed him out of guard tower 47 into the nighted city of Frekore, wondering where we were going and what a daughter of the Royal House wanted with two such as us.

“She’s broken house arrest in defiance of the King,” I said softly.

“Yes,” said Lucella, sounding unaccountably cheerful, “which makes us her accomplices in treason.”

“Gods and demons,” I swore. “What is it with you?”

Sherwood Smith at SF Site had this to say about “A River Through Darkness and Light,” the fourth Archivist tale, when it appeared in Black Gate 15:

Lucella, a tough warrior woman, and the first-person narrator Archivist, have history together, as they travel in search of a hidden stash of ancient scrolls, accompanied by a scholar and an old soldier. Unfortunately, they are chased by bandits bent on vengeance… and then there’s the demon…

I think of Hocking’s stories as characteristic of Black Gate: a strong blend of the old sword and sorcery action and mood, but with modern attention to character development, especially of the women… this story is a promising opening to the issue.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Michael Shea, Ryan Harvey, Peadar Ó Guilín, Dave Gross, Vaughn Heppner, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others, is here.

“Vestments of Pestilence” is a complete 10,000-word novelette of sword & sorcery. It is offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in August

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in August

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Lonesome Wyatt-smallThe top article on the Black Gate blog last month was Patty Templeton’s interview with enigmatic author/musician Lonesome Wyatt, guitarist and vocalist for the gothic country music band Those Poor Bastards, and author of the pulp horror novel The Terrible Tale of Edgar Switchblade.

Second on the list was our look at the first volume in the Classics of Science Fiction line, The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, followed by Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s massive roundtable interview with the editors of four Year’s Best volumes: Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran, Rich Horton and Gardner Dozois.

Roundtable interviews seem to be popular this month. Next on the list was Garrett Calcaterra’s hard look at the life of a fantasy midlister, a conversation with authors M. Todd Gallowglas, Patrick Hester, Wendy N. Wagner, and David B. Coe. Rounding out the Top Five for the month was Nick Ozment’s look at the eldritch work of H.P. Lovecraft.

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in August were:

  1. An Interview with Lonesome Wyatt of Those Poor Bastards
  2. Vintage Treasures: The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum
  3. Finding the Best: An Interview with Year’s Best Editors Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran, Rich Horton and Gardner Dozois
  4. Gallowglass, Hester, Wagner, Coe: Four Authors Sound Off on the Writing Life of a Midlister
  5. So You’re a Horror fan and You’ve Never Read…
  6. L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Gardner Fox and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D
  7. Weird of Oz Conjures up Some Other Horrors
  8. When Ideas Collide
  9. More Than Whodunit: The Science Fiction Mystery
  10. The Exploding World of Castles and Crusades

     

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The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in August

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in August

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The Black Fire Concerto-smallThere’s a few new faces on the Top Fiction list this month.

Mark Rigney’s “The Keystone,” third and final chapter of his epic fantasy series The Tales of Gemen, broke into the Top Five. Tangent Online called it “Masterfully told… The tension never stops, starting with nightmares, followed by chases across half the world… Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop.” Both of the previous chapters made the list as well, including the opener “The Trade,” which Tangent Online called “Marvelous!” and “The Find,” which it described as “Reminiscent of the old sword & sorcery classics… A must read.”

Also making the Top Five for the first time was our excerpt from Mike Allen’s new dark fantasy The Black Fire Concerto, which Tanith Lee called “A prize for the multitude of fans who relish strong Grand Guignol with their sword and sorcery.” And Vaughn Heppner had two of his Tales of Lod in the Top 10:  “The Serpent of Thep” and “The Pit Slave.”

Also making the list were exciting stories by Howard Andrew Jones, Joe Bonadonna, E.E. Knight, Paul Abbamondi, Martha Wells, Aaron Bradford Starr,  David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, Ryan Harvey, Judith Berman, Robert Rhodes, Emily Mah, John R. Fultz, and Jamie McEwan.

If you haven’t sampled the adventure fantasy stories offered through our new Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. Every week, we present an original short story or novella from the best writers in the industry, all completely free. Here are the Top Twenty most-read stories in August:

  1. An excerpt from The Bones of the Old Ones, by Howard Andrew Jones
  2. “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
  3. “The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
  4. “The Keystone,” Part III of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney
  5. An excerpt from The Black Fire Concerto, by Mike Allen
  6. “The Serpent of Thep,” by Vaughn Heppner
  7. “So Go the Seasons,” by Paul Abbamondi
  8. “The Pit Slave,” by Vaughn Heppner
  9. The Death of the Necromancer, a complete novel by Martha Wells
  10. “The Find,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney

     

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Black Gate Speaks with G. Winston Hyatt of Primeval: A Journal of the Uncanny

Black Gate Speaks with G. Winston Hyatt of Primeval: A Journal of the Uncanny

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Primeval A Journal of the Uncanny, Issue 1G. Winston Hyatt is a busy man. He agreed to talk to Black Gate only if we could come to one of his many work places. We nodded vigorously at the black carrier pigeon that had brought the message and asked it when and where. It returned ten minutes thereafter with directions from the good man Hyatt, saying to meet him outside of a certain window outside of a certain brownstone on a lonely street at 12:12 in the a.m. We were to have a lantern – candle or gas, it did not matter – just not a flashlight. Any fool with a smart phone could accidentally mimic a flashlight signal, and yes, dear readers, we had to learn a long high sign that included a mighty number of flourishes, turns and flashes. As all Black Gate staff members are well versed in flourishing, turning, and flashing windows at night, this was not a problem.

When G. Winston Hyatt was satisfied that we were who we were, a rope ladder was dropped from the ledge of the thick-curtained window and Black Gate was afforded entry into a certain museum. This museum is unknown to the general public, as it contains nefarious, occult objects with high opinions of themselves that would not do well being constantly selfied in front of by tweens and stickied up by jam-fingered toddlers.

It was amongst this collection of the unnatural and fantastic that G. Winston Hyatt led Black Gate to two chairs, a small table, and two coffee mugs to talk about his latest project, Primeval: A Journal of the Uncanny.

Primeval being a semiannual journal of the eerie and exceptional, searching to examine “…the convergence of contemporary anxiety and ancient impulse. Each issue feature[ing] fiction and essays exploring horror, the macabre, and that which should not be – yet is.” Issue #1 features work by Harlan Ellison and Laird Baron, plus an interview with Jack Ketchum.*

That’s right, comrades, we have found for you a new horror publication in both print and digital formats.

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New Treasures: Cold Copper by Devon Monk

New Treasures: Cold Copper by Devon Monk

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Cold Copper-smallOne of the best things about editing the print version of Black Gate was discovering great new writers.

Everyone who reads discovers new writers, of course. But I’m talking about finding major new talents while they’re just getting started — still unpublished, or with just a handful of sales under their belts. Trust me, there’s nothing like finding a story that really dazzles you, after long hours slogging through the submissions slush pile. The joy of discovery doesn’t stop after you proudly showcase their work, either. No, you hold your breath, anxious to see what these incredibly talented writers will do next. Where their careers will take them and what wonders they’ll accomplish.

That’s what it was like to publish Devon Monk. I plucked her story, “Stichery,” out of the submission pile in 2000 for Black Gate 2. It was hardly her first sale — she’d sold around a dozen previous stories, to places like Amazing Stories and Talebones — although her name was unfamiliar to me. But the story really impressed me and I knew immediately this was an author who was going places. Her career took off from there; “Stichery” was reprinted in David Hartwell’s Year’s Best Fantasy 2 and many more stories followed. The first novel in her 9-volume Allie Beckstrom urban fantasy series, Magic to the Bone, appeared in 2008, and in 2011 she kicked off a brand new series set in a steam age America where men, monsters, machines, and magic battle for supremacy: Age of Steam. It opened with Dead Iron; Tin Swift followed a year later, and now at last we have the third volume, Cold Copper.

Bounty hunter and lycanthrope Cedar Hunt vowed to track down all seven pieces of the Holder — a strange device capable of deadly destruction. And, accompanied by witch Mae Lindson and the capricious Madder brothers, he sets out to do just that. But the crew is forced to take refuge in the frontier town of Des Moines, Iowa, when a glacial storm stops them in their tracks. The town, under mayor Killian Vosbrough, is ruled with an iron fist — and plagued by the steely Strange, creatures that pour through the streets like the unshuttered wind.

But Cedar soon learns that Vosbrough is mining cold copper for the cataclysmic generators he’s manufacturing deep beneath Des Moines, bringing the search for the Holder to a halt. Chipping through ice, snow, and bone-chilling bewitchment to expose a dangerous plot, Cedar must stop Vosbrough and his scheme to rule the land and sky….

Cold Copper was published by Roc Books on July 2. It is 400 pages, priced at $15 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

Black Gate Online Fiction: “Tsathoggua” by Michael Shea

Black Gate Online Fiction: “Tsathoggua” by Michael Shea

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Michael Shea-smallMichael Shea, one of the most acclaimed sword & sorcery and horror writers working today, brings us a chilling novelette of Lovecraftian horror.

Maureen had fallen asleep in her barcalounger, snug in quilts with the clicker at hand and Muffin curled on her lap. It was Muffin’s gentle movements in her lap that awakened her. She had a vague sensation of small, light forms dispersing across her thighs…

Her wakening was hazy and slow, for she’d had one of her nice pills before she and Muffin settled down. She raised her head, so comfy and heavy. Yes, there he was in her lap, his adorable little muzzle thrust up inquiringly towards Maureen’s face, and his little fawn-colored flanks so fluffy. But…

Maureen hoisted herself a little higher. Muffin blinked calmly back at her. But Muffy had no legs. No legs at all. Muffin was only his head, his fat fluffy little torso, and his tail. He looked perfectly sleek, like he’d never had legs… !

Maureen was utterly, albeit groggily, astonished.

And just then she felt a delicate movement across the slipper on her right foot.

Michael Shea is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of A Quest for Simbilis, The Color Out Of Time, Nifft the Lean, In Yana, The Extra, and the new Assault on Sunrise, among other novels. His collections include Polyphemus (1987), The Autopsy and Other Tales (2008), and Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (2010).

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Ryan Harvey, Peadar Ó Guilín, Dave Gross, Mike Allen, Vaughn Heppner, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others, is here.

“Tsathoggua” is a complete 12,000-word novelette of weird horror. It is offered at no cost.

Warning: This story involves mature themes. Reader discretion is advised.

Read the complete story here.

The Revelations of Zang: Now In Print

The Revelations of Zang: Now In Print

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The Revelations of Zang-small

THE REVELATIONS OF ZANG: Twelve Tales of the Continent is finally available in print format from Fantastic Books. 

The e-book version (from 01 Publishing) has been out for several months, but now readers have their choice of an electronic or good-ol’ paper-and-ink book.

Both versions are now on sale at Amazon.com.

For more info on the collection, see the previous Black Gate posts HERE and HERE.

“A Fun Story That Reminded Me of Conan”: Tangent Online on “Stand at Dubun-Geb”

“A Fun Story That Reminded Me of Conan”: Tangent Online on “Stand at Dubun-Geb”

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Ryan Harvey-smallLouis West at Tangent Online reviews Ryan Harvey’s newest Ahn-Tarqa tale, published here on September 15th:

Ryan Harvey’s “Stand at Duben-Geb” tells of a fantasy world with ancient Shaper magic, domesticated hadrosaurs and a clan of Mongol-like nomadic peoples desperately trying to survive the genocidal attacks of a rival clan. Holed up in a cleft in the steep Duben-Geb mountains in the middle of drenching rains, what’s left of Clan Molghiz squabbles among themselves as their talahn leader lies dying…

A landslide uncovers an ancient colossus, a forty-foot soulless, dead metal giant. But Khasar’s years with a magic-wielder have given him a sensitivity to the Arts and the craft that could perhaps reawaken this creature… A fun story that reminded me a bit of the old Conan tales.

“Stand at Dubun-Geb” is the second Ahn-Tarqa tale published here, following “The Sorrowless Thief,” an exciting  science-fantasy tale packed with “magically tamed dinosaur beasts… [and] a lot of intrigue.” (Tangent Online).

Ryan Harvey won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2011 for his Ahn-Tarqa story, “An Acolyte of Black Spires.” Ahn-Tarqa is also the setting for his e-book novelette, “Farewell to Tyrn,” and his upcoming novel, Turn over the Moon.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Peadar Ó Guilín, Dave Gross, Mike Allen, Vaughn Heppner, Mark Rigney, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others, is here.

“Stand at Dubun-Geb” is a complete 5,500-word short story of heroic fantasy. Read the complete story here.

Wrath-Bearing Tree by James Enge

Wrath-Bearing Tree by James Enge

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The first time I saw a James Enge novel on the shelf of my local bookstore, I broke into a little dance of jubilation. I’d been reading Enge’s short stories about Morlock the Maker in the pages of Black Gate — this was when BG had literal paper pages — and it was news to me that Enge had made the leap from short fiction to novels.

The blurbs on Enge’s books all say some variation on this theme: you will find no other character in fantasy literature, or maybe in literature generally, who is like Morlock the Maker. He’s a traumatized combat veteran who’s still one of his world’s great ass-kickers, yet he’s also an enthusiastically geeky mad scientist. He’s a cynic who will risk all he has to protect innocence where he finds it. He’s wickedly funny, in fewer words of dialogue than should really be possible. Read around in Morlock’s world a while, and you feel pretty soon like you know him, but you can never guess what he’ll do next. A Morlock novel! Could anything be better?

Over the next few years, Enge followed Blood of Ambrose with This Crooked Way and The Wolf Age, and it turned out the one thing better than a Morlock novel was a whole trilogy of Morlock novels.

I loved the cranky old Morlock, the character whose curmudgeonliness sometimes verged on becoming a superpower, so I am still getting used to Enge’s new Tournament of Shadows trilogy about Morlock’s origin story, which began with A Guile of Dragons and now continues with Wrath-Bearing Tree. As a young man, our hero is every bit as odd, unpredictable, noble, hilarious, tragic, clear-eyed, and difficult as his future self, but he hasn’t yet put the damage on and become the ugly old man we loved in the short stories that became This Crooked Way.

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