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Goth Chick News: The Woman in Black Gets Back Up In Your Face

Goth Chick News: The Woman in Black Gets Back Up In Your Face

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image006When we first told you about it, the seriously creepy novel The Woman in Black by Susan Hill had already been a long-running play in London’s West End, a made-for-TV movie in the UK, and barely a rumor from Hammer Films about a theatrical remake starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter); which turned out to be true after all. The WiB with Radcliffe in the lead role hit theaters in February, 2012.

Almost immediately, Hammer Films made the announcement of its intent to pursue a sequel – which was kind of a no-brainer considering they grossed $112 million globally on a $17 million investment.

Love it or not, the old girl made bank.

The first film saw Radcliffe as lawyer Arthur Kipps, who travels to Eel Marsh House on an assignment, only to discover the house belonging to his client is haunted by the ghost of a woman who is determined to find someone and something she lost.

The film was Hammer all the way, intending to shock and in many scenes being quite successful. The atmosphere is moody and brings to mind the old Roger Corman movies based on Edgar Allan Poe stories. The movie version won’t go down as a personal favorite, mainly because the play was just so darn awesome.  Still, it’s worth a look if you haven’t seen it.

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The Hunt is On: Werewolf Game Review and Kickstarter Alert

The Hunt is On: Werewolf Game Review and Kickstarter Alert

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One Night Ultimate Werewolf cards
One Night Ultimate Werewolf cards

You’re just a villager, going about your daily villager-related business. What could possibly go wrong?

How about there being a werewolf secretly hiding in your village?

Ultimate Werewolf Deluxe Edition (Amazon)

That’s the premise of the popular game Ultimate Werewolf, designed by Ted Alspach and published by Bezier Games. There are two teams: villagers and werewolves. You get on a team by being randomly dealt cards at the beginning of the game. Everyone sleeps through the “night” and a moderator tells the werewolves to open their eyes. So the werewolves all know who each other are. Then the moderator has everyone open their eyes and wake up for the “day” … and the town debates who to kill. There’s a vote, and whoever gets the most votes dies. Then the village sleeps again, and the next day they vote on another person to kill.

Will the village kill a werewolf, or will the werewolves fool the villagers into killing an innocent? This continues until either all werewolves are dead, or enough villagers have been killed that they no longer outnumber the werewolves.

But the village can contain more than merely run-of-the-mill villagers. The Seer, for example, is able to point at one player during the night and be told by the moderator if that player is a werewolf. The Tanner hates his life and wants to die, so he wins if he can get you to kill him. (Screaming “I’m a werewolf!” is not usually a winning strategy for this role. You’ve got to be a little more subtle.)

The current edition of the game produced by Bezier games is actually Ultimate Werewolf Deluxe Edition, which contains dozens of extra roles beyond villagers. In total, the Deluxe Edition can support play with a group of up to 75 players … which is a bit extreme, even for an avid gamer like me, but makes for a great party game, and you can create a set of cards tailored toward the comfort level of the group, to avoid overloading those who might be intimidated by the idea of so many different roles.

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New Treasures: Hawk by Steven Brust

New Treasures: Hawk by Steven Brust

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Hawk Steven Brust-smallI was surprised and delighted to receive a new book in the Vlad Taltos series from Steven Brust in the mail last week.

Hawk is the 14th novel in the adventure fantasy series that began with Jhereg (reviewed by Fletcher Vredenburgh here) way back in 1983. A total of 19 are planned; the last one was Tiassa (2011), and the next is Vallista. If you’re a newcomer to the series, I highly recommend The Book of Jhereg, a paperback omnibus collection of the first three novels (Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla), which has been in print from Ace for over 15 years.

Vlad Taltos was an oppressed and underprivileged Easterner — that is, a human — living in Adrilankha, capital of the Dragaeran Empire. Life was hard. Worse, it was irritating. Then Vlad made a great discovery: Dragaerans would pay him to kill other Draegarans. Win-win!

The years of Vlad’s career as a crime boss and top assassin were cut short by a revolution, a divorce, and an attack of conscience (not necessarily in that order). In the midst of all that, he broke with the Jhereg, the Dragaeran house of organized crime. He’s been a marked man ever since. The Jhereg want to kill him. The Jhereg would love to kill him.

So Vlad’s been avoiding Adrilankha as much as possible. That hasn’t worked out too well. His life is there: his ex-wife Cawti, his son, and all his friends. One of those friends is his former assistant Kragar, who’s taken over Vlad’s old territory and criminal operations. Vlad will need Kragar’s help if he’s going to return to Adrilankha and deal with this mess.

It won’t be easy, and it certainly won’t be simple. Because there are no messes like the ones you make yourself.

Hawk was published by Tor Books on October 7. It is 320 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover ($11.99 for the digital edition). The cover is by Stephen Hickman. Read an excerpt at Tor.com.

Vintage Treasures: Orbit 3, edited by Damon Knight

Vintage Treasures: Orbit 3, edited by Damon Knight

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Orbit 3 Damon Knight-smallI enjoy reading vintage anthologies for pretty much the same reason I enjoy reading modern anthologies: they’re a great way to discover terrific new writers. Or in this case, terrific old writers.

Plus, they’re cheap. In any decent used bookstore, you can usually find at least one or two old SF anthologies priced less than a buck. (If you’re not sure what a “used book store” is, exactly, never mind. It’s even easier to find cheap anthologies on eBay, if that helps you.)

I admit I haven’t tried very many of Damon Knight’s Orbit volumes. But after making my way through most of the major SF anthologies of last century — The Hugo Winners, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Before the Golden Age, Dangerous Visions, the Carr and Wollheim’s Year’s Best volumes — I think I’m ready to branch out a bit.

While Orbit routinely showcased some of the finest science fiction and fantasy writers of the 20th Century — including folks like Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty, Philip Jose Farmer, and Knight’s wife, Kate Wilhelm — it also had something of a reputation for being on the cutting edge of the controversial New Wave. It wasn’t at all unusual to find readers loudly deriding the sometimes plotless, experimental fiction within, or criticizing fiction they disliked in letters columns around the industry as “too much like that Orbit stuff.”

Nonetheless, the series was quite popular. It ran for 21 volumes (not including a huge Best of Orbit collection) from 1966 to 1976, and helped cement’s Knight’s reputation as one of the best editors in the field. He took a lot of chances with Orbit, both in the fiction he chose and the authors he championed, but over and over again it seemed to pay off. While most editors worked hard to attract big names, Knight seemed to think nothing of having three quarters (or more) of his table of contents staffed entirely with newcomers. It must have made it difficult to attract buyers, but it certainly kept the series constantly fresh.

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Art of the Genre: Robotech Anime, RPG, Novels, Comics, Toys, Video Games, and Soundtrack, oh my!

Art of the Genre: Robotech Anime, RPG, Novels, Comics, Toys, Video Games, and Soundtrack, oh my!

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Anyone up for some light reading?
Anyone up for some light reading?

I don’t know if I’ve ever really admitted this before, and I actually had to go back to a Black Gate post from two years ago to check, but I’m pretty much a Robotech junkie. Of all the crazy geek culture stuff I’m involved in, there is no licensed universe I care more for than Robotech [sorry Star Wars, it’s true].

It began, as most things did for me, in the 1980s, on VHS. I managed to get the entire series off a weekday comic block from a television station broadcasting out of Terre Haute, Indiana. At the time, it was like a drug, and I personally pored over those scratchy recorded episodes (that I’d captured at 7 AM for a year) so many times that the tapes finally corrupted. I even carried them around with me when I could, and I remember this time I took my collection, complete with commercial breaks, down to my grandparents’ house for Christmas and convinced my two cousins, Jeff a year younger and Greg, two years younger, to watch Macross with me.

Greg, always game for my little geeky desires because he looked up to me, stayed true to the course as the episodes ticked by into the wee hours of the morning, but Jeff, always the mathematical pragmatist (and now very wealthy and successful, go figure), decided he’d had enough by 1 AM. Bowing out, he went off to the rear of the house to sleep and Greg and I trudged on. Ten minutes later, Jeff reappeared, sat down glumly with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and never said a word, but finished out the series with us.

THAT is the power of Robotech! Even for a young man, soon to be actuary, and later high stakes financial guru, he just couldn’t blow off the end of Macross without knowing what happened between Rick, Lisa, and Minmei.

I mean, even my wife, who hates anime, hates fantasy, hates science fiction, hates… well, let’s just say her middle name should be ‘hate’, actually watched every episode of Macross just last year with my son and I! Is that even possible? Sure, she might have rolled her eyes on occasion as she looked up from her Mac while shopping online, but damnit, I’m still counting it!

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Collect the Complete Faber & Faber Editions of Robert Aickman’s Classic Ghost Stories

Collect the Complete Faber & Faber Editions of Robert Aickman’s Classic Ghost Stories

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The Unsettled Dust Robert Aickman-small The Wine Dark Sea Robert Aickman-small Cold Hand in Mine Robert Aickman-small

About a month ago, I reported (with some delight) on my acquisition of Robert Aickman’s Dark Entries, a reprint collection of the author’s ghost stories from British publisher Faber and Faber.

I was so pleased to get it — and the book was just so damn gorgeous — that it wasn’t long before I started hunting down Faber and Faber’s other Aickman reprints: The Unsettled Dust, The Wine Dark Sea, and Cold Hand in Mine. All three are collections, gathering the author’s short stories and novellas.

Aickman has long been recognized as one of the finest horror writers in the field. He received the World Fantasy Award in 1975 for his short story, “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal,” originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and reprinted in Cold Hand in Mine. In 1981, the same year he died, he was awarded the British Fantasy Award for “The Stains,” which originally appeared in New Terrors, and was eventually reprinted in The Unsettled Dust.

The covers of the new Faber and Faber editions are by Tim McDonagh, and they are absolutely stellar (click the images above for bigger versions). I love them all, but perhaps my favorite is The Unsettled Dust, with its subtle portrayal of two children taking a late-night shortcut across a spooky English landscape. McDonagh’s hyper-detailed, almost comic book style fits the subject matter beautifully; he captures the brooding menace of Aickman’s “strange stories” better than any artist I’ve ever seen.

All four books are currently in print in trade paperback, priced at £7.99 – £8.99, or around 8 bucks each for the digital editions. The print editions are not directly available in the US; I ordered them from an overseas book vendor through Amazon for between $8 – $9 each, plus shipping.

Clarkesworld 97 now on Sale

Clarkesworld 97 now on Sale

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Clarkesworld 97-smallYou know, we don’t pay enough attention to Clarkesworld.

Clarkesworld, founded by Neil Clarke and edited by Sean Wallace, is one of the genre’s pioneering online magazines — and also one of its most successful. It has been published monthly for over eight years, since October 2006. Each issue is packed with fiction, interviews, and articles, and the cover art — like this month’s gorgeously gonzo piece from Sandeep Karunakaran — is consistently excellent. (Click the image at right for the full-size version.)

Clarkesworld is a three-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, and stories from the magazine have been nominated (and won) countless awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Stoker Awards. In 2013, for example, Clarkesworld received more Hugo nominations for short fiction than all the leading print magazines (Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) combined.

If you’re not fond of reading online magazines, Clarkesworld also makes its fiction available in ebook editions, audio podcasts, print issues, and in an annual print and ebook anthology. How convenient can you get?

Issue 97 contains four new stories from E. Catherine Tobler, Maria Dahvana Headley, Helena Bell, and Rahul Kanakia, as well as reprints from K. J. Parker and Alexander C. Irvine. Non-Fiction this issues comes from Brian Francis Slattery and Daniel Abraham, plus an editorial by Neil Clarke and an interview with Robert Reed by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro.

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Red Queen, White Queen by Henry Treece

Red Queen, White Queen by Henry Treece

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Red Queen White Queen Henry Treece-smallThe setting for Henry Treece’s Red Queen, White Queen (1958) is Britain in 60 AD during the bloody uprising of Queen Boudicca of the Iceni against the Romans. RQWQ is the third book in his Celtic Tetralogy. I reviewed the fourth book, The Great Captains, his down-to-earth vision of King Arthur, last year. The other two volumes are The Golden Strangers, about the Copper Age settlement of Britain, and The Dark Island, set during Caractacus’s war against Rome.

Gemellus Ennius, a young Roman junior officer, has been transferred to Britain after five years’ service in Germany, arriving just after the onset of Boudicca’s revolt. Already she has burned the towns of Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium, killing over seventy thousand Romans and allied Britons.

When her husband died, he left his kingdom to Boudicca as well as to the emperor, in contravention of Roman laws. Not only did Rome refuse to recognize the will, but it sent soldiers to beat her and rape her daughters. Then the moneylenders called in the tremendous debts her husband had incurred and enslaved the Iceni. Boudicca became a ferocious creature forged by the cruel hands of Rome.

… Boudicca strode towards them a couple of paces and stood, her legs wide apart, staring down at them, from the wooden dais by the altar.

A short brown frieze jacket laced with thongs held her heavy breasts. From waist to ankle her legs were encased in tight-fitting trousers of deer hide. Her feet were bare and rather large. Gemellus noted that they were very red and calloused, not like the dainty feet of the Lady Lavinia, for example.

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The Man in My Toilet Came From China for a Buck

The Man in My Toilet Came From China for a Buck

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photo 1-7I may have just succeeded in posting the most incongruous title in Black Gate online history, but it does make perfect sense: read on, and I will present a mystery of the Orient, an enigma from eBay, a conundrum on the commode!

As you can see over on the right side of your screen, a tiny man peeps out from under the lid of my toilet’s holding tank asking “Hello?”

In my nine years of eBay hunting, I have come across many strange things: shrunken heads, souls for sale, magic spells (guaranteed to work). I have chronicled some of those finds here at Black Gate. But this one caught my eye, not because of the rather run-of-the-mill object, but the price.

When he arrived in my mailbox, a sticky decal neatly folded into a small, padded manila envelope, I found myself asking very much the same thing: “Hello?” as in “Hello, what have we here?” Even though I had, indeed, ordered him, I was still somewhat baffled that he should arrive at all.

The reason for my bewilderment is that he was shipped from China; he cost 89 cents; shipping was FREE.

I couldn’t tell you what I was searching for when this came up, but there it was. The item was listed as follows:

Toilet Monster Hello Bathroom Decal Funny Creative Vinyl Sticker Wall Art Funny.

And if you know me, you know there are some key trigger words in that there spray of language that would grab my attention.

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Danger: Here There Be Dragons (and Clever Children!)

Danger: Here There Be Dragons (and Clever Children!)

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paperbagPossibly the most rambunctious children’s author out there is Robert Munsch, whose characters drive bus loads of pigs to school, vanish beneath layers of permanent markers, and scream in the bath with sufficient volume to summon the police.

All of his (uniformly excellent) picture books employ elements of fantasy, but only once, to my knowledge, did he and his regular collaborator, illustrator Michael Martchenko, depart entirely our real and rational world long enough to include that nemesis of humanity: the green-scaled, fire-breathing dragon.

Yes, it’s The Paper Bag Princess, one of the best kids’ books I know, rife with hilarious prose, ebullient artwork, and the pluckiest heroine this side of Dorothy Gale. Who says girls can’t have adventures?

The plot is a model of efficiency. Princess Elizabeth lives in a castle, and she’s got riches and a boyfriend, Roland, whom she expects to marry. Curly blonde Roland sports a crown and a tennis racket, and just to be sure we get the idea, Martchenko adds a butterfly cloud of hearts around Elizabeth’s smitten head.

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