It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here: The ultimate hardcover collected edition of PRIMORDIA, the “stone-age faerie tale” written by me and illustrated by the amazing Roel Wielinga.
The original series was released by Archaia in 2007, but the hardcover is the ultimate edition of the tale. It also includes tons of extras: a new wrap-around cover, a new short story by Yours Truly, new illustrations and sketches from Roel, a groovy pin-up gallery, my original PRIMORDIA ashcan, and other behind-the-scenes goodness, as well as an introduction by the great Kat Rocha (Titanium Rain).
“More like ecstatic, actually. I mean as souvenirs go…”
Sometimes the Black Gate staff still isn’t sure what I’m doing in their offices or whether they just left the front door unlocked once too often and I somehow just wandered in; left behind by a traveling midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Still, when I returned from my St. Louis road trip, fresh from attending the 2012 Haunted Attractions Show, the curiosity was palatable and far be it from me to disappoint.
The 17th annual gathering of all things disturbing and their creators was a huge success, cram-packed with enough material to keep me in posts for several weeks to come.
Two members of the Black Gate staff, having more fun than you.
How is it that we have so much fun here at Black Gate? How are we so well connected to the very heartbeat of modern fantasy? How is it that so many incredible and exciting people stop by every month, to guide you towards the literature, art and music that will change your life?
Don’t look at me. I have no idea either. I just pay the bills, and shut down the parties when the police show up.
But you don’t need me to tell you. The talented and rambunctious staff of Black Gate magazine bare all their secrets right here each week. And to help you keep up, I’ve finally added a BG Staff tag to the Categories section of our navigation menu at left.
What’s a BG Staff tag? You’re not paying attention, are you? You just drop by once a week hoping Scott Taylor will post more pics of near-naked redheads. All right, look. See that narrow column on the left, with the Search box at the top? About halfway down the page is a CATEGORIES section. That’s how we sort the thousands of blogs posts we’ve done here at Black Gate. Now you can just click “Art of the Genre” and ogle all the art you want, without all those pesky posts about books and stuff. You’re welcome.
And right below that link is the new BG Staff tag. It collects about 250 articles from the last few years covering news, interviews, and embarrassing personal revelations from the people behind Black Gate, including the many authors, artists and editors who’ve contributed to our pages over the years. It’s your one-stop-shop to discover the latest books from Devon Monk, John R. Fultz, Martha Wells, James Enge, Jonathan L. Howard, Harry Connolly, Peadar Ó Guilín, C.S.E. Cooney, Shawn L. Johnson, Rich Horton, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others.
All that plus numerous convention reports, book excerpts, reviews, award news, self-publishing advice, agent hunts, first novel sales, online comics, zeppelins, and sadly even a few obituaries. It’s the entire circle of life here at Black Gate. Enjoy.
If you’re a long-time Black Gate reader you know the name Peadar Ó Guilín.
His first story for us was “The Mourning Trees” (Black Gate 5), followed by “Where Beauty Lies in Wait” (BG 11) and “The Evil Eater” (BG 13), which Shedrick Pittman-Hassett of Serial Distractions called “a lovely little bit of Lovecraftian horror that still haunts me to this day.”
Peadar’s first novel The Inferior was published to terrific reviews in 2008. School Library Journal called it
[An] epic story of survival, betrayal, and community… intriguing at every turn, The Inferior will hold readers from page to page, chapter to chapter, to the very end.
After nearly four years the sequel has finally arrived, and it promises to be everything we’ve waited for. Here’s the book description:
The humans are weak and vulnerable. Soon the beasts that share their stone-age world will kill and eat them. To save his tribe, Stopmouth must make his way to the Roof, the mysterious hi-tech world above the surface. But the Roof has its own problems. The nano technology that controls everything from the environment to the human body is collapsing. A virus has already destroyed the Upstairs, sending millions of refugees to seek shelter below. And now a rebellion against the Commission, organized by the fanatical Religious, is about to break.
Hunted by the Commission’s Elite Agents through the overcrowded, decaying city of the future, Stopmouth must succeed in a hunt of his own: to find the secret power hidden in the Roof’s computerized brain, and return to his people before it is too late.
The Deserter is on available today in hardcover, and in digital format for the Kindle and Nook. It is 448 pages, and published by David Fickling Books.
To promote it, Peadar has released Where Beauty Lies In Wait, a free e-book collecting a dozen of his short stories, including all three from Black Gate. It’s available in Kindle, ePub and PDF versions, and you can get it here.
Allen Koszowski is almost supernaturally talented.
I first hired him more than a decade ago, when I was desperate to find an artist who could capture the eldritch horrors of Edmond Hamilton’s classic “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” a tale of ancient desert ruins and unlucky explorers from the August 1926 Weird Tales, which I reprinted in Black Gate 2. Allen’s work for Cemetery Dance, Whispers, and Weird Tales convinced me he was the guy.
He delivered three knockout pieces of art (see the first here). And the envelope they arrived in was stuffed with additional pieces which he offered for free. It was remarkably generous, and I was glad I was able to hire him again for Black Gate 3.
Since 2004 Allen has been publishing his own horror magazine, Allen K’s Inhuman Magazine. Every issue he assembles the top names in dark fantasy and horror, and he handles the art for each story personally.
The results have been consistently excellent, but with Issue 5 Allen has outdone himself. This issue Centipede Press has taken over production, and the magazine looks better than ever. To showcase other artists Allen has added a gallery, highlighting the Lovecraft Mythos work of Randy Broecker, Bob Eggleton, Jill Bauman, David Carson, and others, although Allen still handles the cover and interiors. Click on the image at left to get a closer look at his cover art for this issue.
This issue features fiction by Michael Shea, Darrell Schweitzer, Tim Curran, Tim Waggoner, James S. Dorr, Christopher M. Cervasco, John Pelan, and many others. The magazine is huge — 208 pages! — and copiously illustrated. It is perfect bound for the criminally low price of just $6.95, which makes it the single best buy you’ll hear about all week.
My thanks to my buddy Chris Cervasco for tipping me off that the magazine was available. Like many beautiful and precious things, copies can be hard to come by. I bought mine from the excellent online seller The Overlook Connection, who still have most issues in stock. There’s also ordering information on Allen’s website.
Support an excellent magazine, and discover a terrific source of quality dark fantasy. It’s a win-win. Buy your copy today!
One of the most acclaimed stories in Black Gate 15 was Fred Durbin’s “World’s End,” a terrific sword & sorcery piece featuring two young warrior heroines.
Since it appeared we’ve been looking forward to his new novel The Star Shard, and now the wait is over. His first novel for children takes place in a deliciously imaginative setting, a massive wagon city that rolls across a dangerous and magical land:
Twelve-year-old Cymbril is a slave on Thunder Rake, a gigantic wagon city that rolls from town to town carrying goods to be sold by its resident merchants. The Rake’s master purchases a new slave, a mysterious boy named Loric who is one of the magical Fey. Because he can see in the dark, Loric’s duty is to guide the Rake through the treacherous wilderness at night.Cymbril and Loric secretly join forces to plan their escape — soon the two friends thread their way through a series of increasing dangers, encountering an enchanted market and deadly monsters as their one chance for freedom draws nearer.
Frederic S. Durbin’s previous novel was Dragonfly, published in hardcover by Arkham House in 1999. If you have not heard him read one of his delightfully stories out loud, you are missing one of the great pleasures of the fantasy genre. You can read Patty Templeton’s Black Gate interview with Fred here.
The Star Shard was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is 320 pages in hardcover for $16.99. Look for it in better bookstores around the country.
Read an Excerpt from Shawn L. Johnson’s Oath of Six
We still get e-mail about “Two-Skins,” Shawn L. Johnson’s cover story for Black Gate 5. The tale of a brave and very resourceful young man dragged in chains to the Emperor’s gladiatorial games captured the hearts of many of our readers, and it was obvious the author was destined for great things.
Now we have the pleasure of seeing that promise unfold, with a generous excerpt from Shawn’s first novel, Oath of Six, the first in The Heart of Darkness series, and set in the same setting as “Two Skins.”
The second book in the series, Serpent Without Skin, was released early last year. But now you can get in on the ground floor on a dynamic new fantasy series from an exciting new author.
Atop a perilous, arctic mountain, a modern-day wizard leads the rest of his expedition to their doom. Magic has steadily ebbed from the earth for ages, decimating the creatures of legend, so he has gambled that the ancient hag residing here will know of a cure. She is insane, however, and her advice is treachery.
Soon afterward, David Tyler receives a desperate summons from his estranged mentor. The old wizard is wasting away, and fears he has been cursed by a former apprentice. The trail of the culprit leads the remaining apprentices through a haunted forest where a child has gone missing, and into the mythical underworld — the crossroad of all the myriad, dying worlds. There they face exiled shape-shifters and an insane goddess, in order to confront a childhood friend who has become both a traitor and a murderer.
Without further ado, we present the complete prologue to Oath of Six, currently available at Amazon.com for just 99 cents as a Kindle book. Enjoy!
When my associate and I created Sword’s Edge Publishing, we had a very limited goal – we were going to publish a collection of military adventures for modern d20, and then another series of adventures for d20 fantasy. In there, I intended to write a supplement for playing covert, special operations characters in modern d20 and my associate wanted the series of fantasy adventures to lead to a setting. We expected a relatively tight timeline and then we’d likely sit back, see what happened and maybe see about publishing other people’s stuff.
We did complete the Albenistan series, just that we were eight months late. The fantasy adventure series never saw fruition. We totally departed from our plan. How did it all go off the rails? Can you guess? Real life and project drift took its toll in that first year.
However, while we were not doing exactly what we had planned, we had found a niche. Our production schedule followed the generally favorable reviews our modern d20 products received, and it was this critical praise rather than sales that informed my plans for SEP.
And it was very quickly my plans that mattered, as my partner could invest less and less time in SEP, and when his dream job came through, he was gone. Long before that, I had become solely responsible for SEP and I was not then, and am not now a businessman.
I’m sure there were methods I could have used to help me decide our way forward. I did consider our sales numbers, but they were small. Critical reception and personal interest informed my decisions rather than business considerations.
Prince of Thorns (Book One of The Broken Empire)
Mark Lawrence
Ace (324 pp, $29.95, Hardcover August 2011)
Reviewed by David Soyka
This is pretty brutal. Relentlessly brutal, right from the opening paragraphs:
Ravens! Always the ravens. They settled in the gables of the church even before the injured became the dead. Even before Rike had finished taking fingers from hands, and rings from fingers. I leaned back against the gallows post and nodded to the birds, a dozen of them in a black line, wise-eyed and watching.
The town-square ran red. Blood in the gutters, bloom on the flagstones, blood in the fountain. The corpses posed as corpses do. Some comical, reaching for the sky with missing fingers, some peaceful, coiled about their wounds. Flies rose above the wounded as they struggled. This way and that, some blind, some sly, all betrayed by their buzzing entourage.
“Water! Water!” It’s always water with the dying. Strange, it’s killing that gives me thirst.
And this the ostensible hero talking in Prince of Thorns,the first in a (you guessed it) projected trilogy collectively called The Broken Empire. So, we’re clearly in anti-hero land, in the “shit and blood” sub genre of sword and sorcery that aims to rub your face in what rusty blades, poor sanitation and disease actually do to people living under medieval conditions, in stark contrast to high fantasy depictions of noble quests in which divinely provident good triumphs over corrupt and therefore ultimately doomed to fail evil.
When I resolved to publish the two novels in my Heart of Darkness series as eBooks, I figured I was all set. The books had already been edited and re-edited; I had the future plotlines mapped out in my head. That was everything, right?
Of course not. My wife — aka “Queen of Internet Research” — cautioned me, “Everything I’ve read says you need a great cover that really catches the eye.”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I’d always dreamed of being picked up by a major publishing house that had its own artists.
I mean, I like fantasy art as much as anyone, but I’m good with words, not pictures. I had no idea how to locate a good cover artist.
So I asked a friend of mine who is an artist to do it. He begged off, citing his current, non-artistic workload. Nor did any other personal connections pan out.
Ahead of me yet again, my wife told me about several options she’d read about on the internet. The most interesting was a contest where artists compete for the prize of being your cover artist. You are presented with several custom options and only pay if you accept one.
An intriguing concept, but I wanted to know more about my prospective artists. So my friend recommended deviantart.com. There, my wife and I posted a job description and waited, though not for long.
We still get e-mail about “
When I resolved to publish the two novels in my 