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New Treasures: Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors, edited by Doug Murano and Michael Bailey

New Treasures: Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors, edited by Doug Murano and Michael Bailey

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Miscreations Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors-small Miscreations Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors-back-small

Cover by M. Fersner/HagCult

Oh my goodness, this looks like fun. Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors is a brand new anthology from Doug Murano and Michael Bailey, and the small press Written Backwards. It’s packed with original fiction from many of the most important writers in horror today, including Michael Wehunt, Brian Hodge, Josh Malerman, Ramsey Campbell, Victor LaValle, Laird Barron, Scott Edelman, Lucy A. Snyder, Usman T. Malik, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Theodora Goss, and many others. It also has interior art by the talented cover artist M. Fersner (HagCult). Here’s a snippet from Sadie Hartmann’s feature review at Cemetery Dance.

Miscreations, by award-winning editors Doug Murano and Michael Bailey, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that anthologies are well worth any amount of effort, money, blood, sweat, and tears…. I’ve been dying to read something from both Lisa Morton and Lucy A. Snyder; their stories blew me away. Morton’s is this strange story of a woman who sets her mind on creating a man from her own body. The results were both humorous and upsetting. Snyder’s is a brutal account of a sex worker encountering some kind of… monstrosity. It was really quite disarming and disturbing. Of course, I loved it.

I must make mention of the amazing work some of my long-time favorites did for this anthology. Nadia Bulkin captured my imagination and my heart with her mechanical giant. Josh Malerman did the same with his werewolves. I adored “You Are my Neighbor” by Max Booth III, once again confirming Max as one of the most consistently solid writers in the genre right now… I can’t forget to say that Alma Katsu’s foreword and the interior illustrations by M. Fersner (hagcult) assist in making all the moving parts of this anthology feel like one, cohesive… beast. Monster. Miscreation.

Here’s the complete table of contents.

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Future Treasures: Cursed, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane

Future Treasures: Cursed, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane

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Cursed An Anthology-small

You lot know how much I love anthologies by now. Titan Books has been home base for several excellent anthologies over the past few years, including Christopher Golden’s Dark Cities, Mark Morris’s New Fears, and three volumes of John Joseph Adams’ Wastelands. They also published Wonderland, an anthology of tales inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane.

O’Regan and Kane return next month with Cursed, a collection of new and reprint fantasy tales dealing with curses of all shapes and sizes, with original tales by M.R. Carey, Tim Lebbon, Margo Lanagan, Alison Littlewood, Angela Slatter, Lilith Saintcrow, Jen Williams, and others, and reprints by Neil Gaiman, Karen Joy Fowler, Christopher Golden, Charlie Jane Anders, Michael Marshall Smith, Christopher Fowler, and others. Here’s an excerpt from the Publishers Weekly review.

Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Black Fairy’s Curse” is a dreamy, disorienting rendition of “Sleeping Beauty”; Neil Gaiman’s lovely, tragic “Troll Bridge” draws from “Three Billy Goats Gruff”; and Angela Slatter’s standout “New Wine” is a truly chilling modernization of “Bluebeard.” While most of these stories transpose fairy tale elements into contemporary England, Lilith Saintcrow conjures a fully realized fantasy world with “Hanza and Ghana.”… These stories are by turns eerie, grotesque, and delightful, ranging in tone from the broadly humorous fantasy of Charlie Jane Anders’s “Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie” to the visceral body horror of James Brogden’s “Skin.” Readers won’t have to be Brothers Grimm fans to appreciate this dark mélange.

Cursed will be published by Titan Books on March 3, 2020. It is 384 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 in digital formats. The cover artist is uncredited. See all the details at the Titan website, and see all our coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy and science fiction here.

SFWA Announces the 2019 Nebula Award Nominations

SFWA Announces the 2019 Nebula Award Nominations

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The Ten Thousand Doors of January-small Gods of Jade and Shadow-small Gideon the Ninth-small

It’s nearly the end of February. And that means that the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) has finally put an end to all that suspense, and announced the nominees for the 2019 Nebula Awards, one of the most prestigious awards our industry has to offer.

This year’s nominees are:

Novel

Marque of Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)
A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (Tor)
Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher)
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
A Song for a New Day, Sarah Pinsker (Berkley)

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New Treasures: The Life Below by Alexandra Monir

New Treasures: The Life Below by Alexandra Monir

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Jacket design by Erin Fitzsimmons and Molly Fehr; art by Getty Images and Shutterstock

I first noticed Alexandra Monir when Jessica Brody described her supernatural romance Suspicion as “If Alfred Hitchcock had directed Downton Abbey,” which is the kind of thing that gets my attention. Monir is an Iranian-American who’s published multiple novels for young adults, including The Girl in the Picture and Timeless. Her current series is near-future SF; it began with The Final Six, the story of teen astronauts o a dying Earth competing for a trip to Europa. The sequel The Life Below arrived this week; Kirkus calls it “Fast-paced and plot-driven, the novel decidedly veers into science fiction horror territory with plenty of scares.” Also the kind of thing that gets my attention. Here’s the publisher’s description.

It was hard enough for Naomi to leave Leo, a fellow Final Six contestant, behind on a dying Earth. Now she doesn’t know who to trust.

The International Space Training Camp continues to dodge every question about its past failed mission, and Naomi is suspicious that not everything is as it seems on her own mission to Europa. With just one shot at Jupiter’s moon, Naomi is determined to find out if there is dangerous alien life on Europa before she and her crew get there.

Leo, back on Earth, has been working with renegade scientist Dr. Greta Wagner, who promises to fly him to space where he can dock with Naomi’s ship. And if Wagner’s hypothesis is right, it isn’t a possibility of coming in contact with extraterrestrial life on Europa — it’s a definite, and it’s up to Leo to find and warn Naomi and the crew.

With questions piling up, everything gets more dangerous the closer that the mission gets to Europa. A storm threatens to interfere with Leo’s takeoff, a deadly entity makes itself known to the Final Six, and all questions the ISTC has been avoiding about the previous mission get answered in a terrifying way.

If the dream was to establish a new world for humans on Europa…the Final Six are about to enter a nightmare.

The Life Below was published by HarperTeen on February 18, 2020. It is 311 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover, $10.99 in digital formats. Read an excerpt from The FInal Six at HappyEverAfter.com, and see all our recent New Treasures here.

Rogue Blades Presents: Out There in the Wilds with Robert E. Howard

Rogue Blades Presents: Out There in the Wilds with Robert E. Howard

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Howard changed my lifePublisher Rogue Blades Foundation recently announced the upcoming release of the book Robert E. Howard Changed My Life. Below is an excerpt from author Joe R. Lansdale’s essay for the book.

You can feel so lonely, out there in the wilds.

Oh, I had my parents’ support. They were great. But it isn’t quite the same. I wanted to know other writers, meet an editor or publisher. As for an agent, I thought they worked for the CIA.

I knew this, though.

I loved books, and I wanted to write them, and I had figured out when I saw names on comic books, Bob Kane and Gardner Fox, that real people came up with this stuff, but I was told, by someone who didn’t know his butt from a hole in the ground, that everyone who wrote comics, or novels, or stories, lived in New York or Los Angeles.

I had never been to either.

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Good News in Three Acts

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Good News in Three Acts

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Act I — A Year In Review

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly punches well above its weight in the Tangent Online 2019 Recommended Reading List with SEVEN stories. Don’t want to search through their list? I got ya!

“Then, Stars” by Michael Meyerhofer (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #41, 8/19)
“Echo of the Siren” by Richard Zwicker (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #42, 11/19)
“A Stone’s Throw” by Howard Andrew Jones, (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #40, 5/19)
“Trail of Ashes” by Caleb Williams (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #40, 5/19)
“The Song of Black Mountain” by Darrell Schweitzer (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #40, 5/19)
“Demons from the Deep” by Adrian Cole (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #40, 5/19)
“The Gatekeeper” by Marlane Quade Cook (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #39, 2/19)

Now, some of you with good memories may be saying to yourself “Well sure, Simmons, #40 was the special 10-year anniversary issue. You brought in big guns and it is no surprise that the likes of Howard Andrew Jones, or Darrell Schweitzer, or Adrian Cole should end up on the recommended list.” First off, you’re welcome. Secondly, hats off to Caleb Williams who not only stood in that august company, but stood out!

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Goth Chick News Reviews: The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

Goth Chick News Reviews: The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

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The Sun Down Motel-smallEver since Psycho, there has been something distinctly creepy about motels. You know the ones. Originally built along highways as a respite for weary cross-country travelers, the name literally comes from “motor hotel.” They were usually long, one-story building consisting of side-by-side rooms with doors that opened out into the parking lot, enabling guests of the time to sleep pretty much beside their beloved vehicles.

They’ve also been the location for a whole lot of up-to-no-good. Besides being the preferred location for extramarital shenanigans, they’ve been the site of murders (Psycho, Vacancy and Motel Hell), serious mental breakdowns (Identity and Insane) and all manner of general badness (Bad Times at the El Royale).

These days you can still find motels, though for the most part they look like perfect location shots for any one of the aforementioned films. And with some rare exceptions, any one you come across isn’t going to be a preferred place to spend the night.

Which is why my latest listen from Audible.com has made me late for my day job, three days running. I cannot audibly ‘put it down.’

The Sun Down Motel, written by Simone St. James (Broken Girls) and performed on the audio book by Brittany Pressley and Kirsten Potter, is set both in 1982 and 2017. It tells the story of Viv, who disappears from her night job at The Sun Down in 1982 after doing a bit of poking around in some local, unsolved murders. In 2017 her niece Carly follows in her footsteps, to see if she can uncover what happened to her.

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When Six Americans Defeat an Invading Army: Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column

When Six Americans Defeat an Invading Army: Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column

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SixthColumn1stEd

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein. First Edition:
Gnome Press, 1949. Cover by Edd Cartier

Sixth Column
by Robert A. Heinlein (Gnome Press, 1949, 256 pages, $2.50 in hardcover; serialized earlier in Astounding Science Fiction, January-March 1941)

Sixth Column was the earliest novel-length work by Robert A. Heinlein, though it was serialized in Astounding magazine (Jan, Feb, and March 1941, under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald) and not published in book form until 1949, by which time three or four other Heinlein novels had been published as books (Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Beyond This Horizon (1948), Space Cadet (1948), and perhaps Red Planet, also 1949).

First published in hardcover by Gnome Press under the magazine title Sixth Column (adding the subtitle “A Science Fiction Novel of Strange Intrigue”) it was reprinted for many years in paperback by Signet under the blander title The Day After Tomorrow (a 7th printing with a Gene Szafran cover is shown below, along with the 2012 Baen edition I’ve read for this review). The book isn’t long; 174 pages in the Baen edition, 144 with Signet’s tinier print.

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Stories That Work: “Log Entry” by Kevin J. Anderson, and “Sweetly the Dragon Dreams” by David Farland

Stories That Work: “Log Entry” by Kevin J. Anderson, and “Sweetly the Dragon Dreams” by David Farland

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The War of the Worlds 1953 poster-small When Worlds Collide poster-small This Island Earth poster-small

Space-based science fiction drew me into reading hard when I started. The fact that my dad was an aeronautical engineer who worked at Martin Marietta, designing the first rockets in America’s space program, probably helped. Copies of Sky and Telescope were scattered about the house, and Dad’s amateur astronomy often became a part of dinner conversation. He ground his own mirror for a reflecting telescope he built and mounted in the backyard, and several times he invited my class at the elementary school over for hot chocolate and star gazing.

Tom Corbett, Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet, and E.E. Doc Smith’s Skylark of Space started my fascination with space travel. When I was young I thought “space fiction” and “science fiction” were interchangeable terms. Hooray for Buck Rogers and Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide, and, especially, This Island Earth.

However, science fiction contains way more than space-based stories even as it continues to tell them in film in Star Wars, The Expanse, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, and others.

Still, what is a reader to do when looking for short, space-based science fiction? Analog almost always features a space story or two, as do the other major magazines. But what if you want to mainline the stuff? What if you just want to strap into a ship and blast to the stars?

What if you want to feed your inner twelve-year-old space jockey?

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Untangling Twisted Timelines: Now Then and Everywhen by Rysa Walker

Untangling Twisted Timelines: Now Then and Everywhen by Rysa Walker

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Now Then and Everywhen
By Rysa Walker
47North (528 pages, $14.95 paperback/$4.99 digital, April 1, 2020)

I’m a sucker for a good time travel story, so when the opportunity came up to read an advance copy of Now Then and Everywhen I jumped (sadly just to my couch, not to a different timeline). I haven’t read Rysa Walker’s earlier CHRONOS novels, so I had zero expectations or previous knowledge of the universe. Now Then and Everywhen will entice readers that have read Ms. Walker’s earlier work, as this novel explains CHRONOS origins, but you don’t need to be familiar with the previous books in the series as this one examines CHRONOS through a new historical lens.

We begin in the year 2136 with Madison Grace, a grad student in Maryland who discovers a small disk that lights up at her touch buried in her grandmother’s overgrown garden. Suddenly she finds herself off the coast of what turns out to be 1906 Florida. She makes the jump back to her own time and begins to research the strange ties that her family seems to have to the time travel organization called CHRONOS. More than a century later, in 2304, Tyson Reyes is researching the civil rights movement. He’s a historian working for CHRONOS and he’s undercover in 1965, working to understand the intricacies of a historical moment.

Tyson and Madi notice odd occurrences as they begin to cross each other’s timelines. Then, a massive time shift drastically changes both of their home timelines. Millions of lives have been erased and historical moments like the assassination of Dr. King have changed. The two time travelers believe it to be the fault of the other… until they meet and realize there are other, darker forces at play. The two team up to set things straight.

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