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Reading for a Good Cause: 32 White Horses on a Vermillion Hill edited by Duane Pesice

Reading for a Good Cause: 32 White Horses on a Vermillion Hill edited by Duane Pesice

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I’ve heard from several readers about a new charity anthology benefiting horror writer Christopher Ropes, 32 White Horses on a Vermillion Hill. Most recently Robert Adam Gilmour wrote, saying:

There are no shortage of writers going through difficult times and I imagine you might get quite a number of emails for funding them but this involves two anthologies and some writers you are familiar with. His situation is horrifying enough that it has stuck in my head and I just wanted to see if you’d feature it on Black Gate.

I’m informed about a lot of worthy fundraising efforts every year, but Robert is right — this one is of particular interest, as it involves dozens of writers of keen interest to Black Gate readers. Editor Duane Pesice has assembled two volumes of 32 White Horses on a Vermillion Hill, both of which contain 32 stories & poems generously donated from members of the weird fiction & horror communities, including Jonathan Maberry, Michael Wehunt, Ashley Dioses, K.A. Opperman, Marguerite Reed, Jon Padgett, Douglas Draa, John Linwood Grant, Jeffrey Thomas, Jason A. Wyckoff, Frank Coffman, and many others. All the profits from the books go towards helping Christopher cover the costs of some long-needed dental work (see the Go-Fund-Me page here).

Christopher’s work has been published in Vastarien (Grimscribe Press), Nightscript (Chthonic Matter), Ravenwood Quarterly (Electric Pentacle Press), and other fine publications, and it’s clear he has a lot of friends in the industry. If you’re active in fandom or on social media, you doubtless encounter calls for help on a regular basis. But I’ve never seen one quite like this. Pesice has assembled two anthologies that would look impressive under any circumstances. Copies are available at Amazon and directly from Planet X Publications. If you’re going to read some horror this month, why not read for a good cause?

New Treasures: A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, Book Two of The Risen Kingdoms by Curtis Craddock

New Treasures: A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, Book Two of The Risen Kingdoms by Curtis Craddock

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An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors-small A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery-small

Curtis Craddock’s 2017 fantasy An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, the opening novel in the Risen Kingdoms series, received starred reviews from both Booklist and Kirkus Reviews, no mean feat. Here’s a snippet from Kirkus:

This debut fantasy is set in the Risen Kingdoms, where countries float in the air and people take airships from place to place, princes battle for a throne, and dashing musketeers defend feisty princesses.

In other hands, this would be a swashbuckling gaslamp romp, but author Craddock chooses to go darker. His princess, Isabelle des Zephyrs, cousin of His Imperial Majesty Leon XIV of L’Empire Céleste, is feared for her deformed hand and abused by her father and brother for failing to possess their family’s saint-given magic, the ability to drain the life from others with the bloodshadow. Her only refuges are her trusty protector, the musketeer Jean-Claude, and her secret work as a scientist and mathematician, pursuits forbidden to women on pain of death. Saintly lines are supposed to remain pure, so Princess Isabelle can’t understand why the younger prince of Aragoth, who bears his own royal family’s gift of traveling through mirrors, would wish to marry her; nevertheless, she welcomes the opportunity for a new life… The skulduggery is pleasurably complex, the emotional stakes feel convincing, and the reasonably happy ending feels earned. And while Jean-Claude’s doggedness in protecting Isabelle is admirable, Isabelle is decidedly and enjoyably not a damsel in need of rescue.

Charles Stross calls it a “gaslight fantasy in the tradition of Alexander Dumas,” and admittedly that’s the quote that got my attention. The second book in the series, A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, arrived last week, offering more tales of “adventure full of palace intrigue, mysterious ancient mechanisms, and aerial sailing ships!” (David D. Levine). Here’s the description.

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Gender Boundaries Crumble in YA: The XY by Virginia Bergin

Gender Boundaries Crumble in YA: The XY by Virginia Bergin

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Cover of Virginia Bergin's THE XY
Cover of Virginia Bergin’s THE XY

River drives her horse and cart through the woods as night falls. But when she sees a body lying in the middle of the road, her first emotion isn’t fear. It’s surprise.

The body doesn’t look like any she’s ever seen. It’s clearly human, but it has no breasts. There’s hair on its face, and a strange lumpiness rises between its legs.

It’s an XY. A male.

River has never encountered an XY before. Boys and men all live in hermetically sealed Sanctuaries where they won’t contract a lethal virus. The rest of the planet has been given over to women, who are immune. Any boy or man who leaves one of the Sanctuaries dies within 24 hours.

When River rouses the XY to consciousness, he attacks her, steals her knife, threatens to kill her, and eats her food without permission. River has never encountered anyone who would behave so badly before.

The XY – his name is Mason – says he’s been on the run in women’s country for five days. But only now does he fall ill. Losing his faculties, he releases her once again.

Watching him writhe on the road, River knows this male creature – this boy named Mason – is going to die. He knows it, too. He said as much to her.

She knows the humane thing to do. Her community’s code requires her to put him out of his misery. She’s given mercy to injured animals before.

But she just can’t bring herself to draw her blade across his neck. He’s a human being.

It takes three hours, but she carts Mason back to her village. The appearance of the first XY to survive the virus for more than a day reveals rifts in this community of women. Some race to heal him. Others want him to die. Caught in the middle, River finds herself lying for the first time in her life. Everything in her safe existence starts to unravel.

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Adventure in One of the Most Famous Locales in Fantasy: The City of Brass by S. A Chakraborty

Adventure in One of the Most Famous Locales in Fantasy: The City of Brass by S. A Chakraborty

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The fabled City of Brass, magical home to djinni and efreet, is the setting for but a single tale from The Arabian Nights, but it has nonetheless loomed large in readers hearts and minds through the centuries. For D&D players of course it has a special significance, as it features prominently in the history of the game (including on the famous cover of Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide). But no modern writer has laid claim to it as passionately and as effectively as S. A Chakraborty, with her bestselling debut novel The City of Brass, named one of the Best Books of 2017 by Library Journal, Vulture, The Verge, and SYFYWire.

Some of you may recall Brandon Crilly’s enthusiastic review of The City of Brass at Black Gate. Here’s the highlights.

Chakraborty creates a world that’s nuanced and detailed. It has exactly the vivid freshness we continue to need in the fantasy genre, as a balance for the variations on the same Eurocentric worldviews that are still widely common…. But the novel is much more than its world – at the end of the day, my interest is always characters. Our two main protagonists, Cairo street urchin Nahri and immortal warrior Dara, are great counterparts; they’re equally passionate and protective, but in different ways, and both are seeking to find their place in the world… The City of Brass is excellent. It’s rare that I find a fantasy novel that’s so vividly detailed.

Last week the sequel The Kingdom of Copper, the second novel in what’s now being called The Daevabad Trilogy, arrived in hardcover from Harper Voyager. Here’s the description.

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Future Treasures: Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

Future Treasures: Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

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Chicago is being crushed by record-breaking cold this week. Trains aren’t running, the post office isn’t delivering mail, and I haven’t gone to work for two days.

But it’s a great time to cuddle under blankets with a good book. What kind of book do you read when it’s bone-chillingly cold outside? A bone-chilling book, of course. Micah Dean Hicks’ horror debut Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, “set in the creepiest screwed-up town since ’Salem’s Lot” (Sci Fi Magazine), looks like a perfect pick. It arrives in hardcover next Tuesday. Here’s the description.

Swine Hill was full of the dead. Their ghosts were thickest near the abandoned downtown, where so many of the town’s hopes had died generation by generation. They lingered in the places that mattered to them, and people avoided those streets, locked those doors, stopped going into those rooms… They could hurt you. Worse, they could change you.

Jane is haunted. Since she was a child, she has carried a ghost girl that feeds on the secrets and fears of everyone around her, whispering to Jane what they are thinking and feeling, even when she doesn’t want to know. Henry, Jane’s brother, is ridden by a genius ghost that forces him to build strange and dangerous machines. Their mother is possessed by a lonely spirit that burns anyone she touches. In Swine Hill, a place of defeat and depletion, there are more dead than living.

When new arrivals begin scoring precious jobs at the last factory in town, both the living and the dead are furious. This insult on the end of a long economic decline sparks a conflagration. Buffeted by rage on all sides, Jane must find a way to save her haunted family and escape the town before it kills them.

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones will be published by John Joseph Adams Books on February 5, 2019. It is 298 pages, priced at $24 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Chris Thornley. See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming fantasy here.

Read an Excerpt from Howard Andrew Jones’ Upcoming For the Killing of Kings at Tor.com

Read an Excerpt from Howard Andrew Jones’ Upcoming For the Killing of Kings at Tor.com

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For the Killing of Kings Andrew Jones

Howard Andrew Jones upcoming novel For the Killing of Kings is the finest thing he has ever written — and considering his previous books include the modern fantasy classics The Desert of Souls and The Bones of the Old Ones, that’s saying a great deal. It is the opening volume The Ring-Sworn Trilogy, and one of the major fantasy releases of the year. I had a chance to blurb the hardcover release from St. Martin’s Press, and did so enthusiastically. Here’s what I said:

For The Killing of Kings is a white knuckle murder mystery brilliantly set in a Zelazny-esque fantasy landscape. It has everything ― enchanted blades, magic rings, edge-of-your seat sword fights, Game of Thrones-scale battles, ancient legends… It is the finest fantasy novel I have read in years.

The Tor.com excerpt features one of my favorite scenes, as Kyrkenall and Elenai approach a strange tower and find it defended by a mysterious ring of obelisks… and something far more sinister. Read the complete chapter here.

If you find yourself captivated by the excerpt, you won’t have long to wait. For the Killing of Kings will be published by St. Martin’s Press in three weeks, on February 19, 2019. It is 368 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover artist is uncredited. In addition to the exclusive Tor.com excerpt, you can also read the first chapter at the Macmillan website here, and keep up with the latest news at Howard’s website here.

New Treasures: Breach by W.L. Goodwater

New Treasures: Breach by W.L. Goodwater

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Breach W L Goodwater-smallFantasy comes in all shapes and sizes. I enjoy epic fantasy (like The Lord of the Rings), sword & sorcery, horror, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, dark fantasy, weird westerns, and virtually everything in between. But more and more these days I find myself drawn to work that truly strikes out into new territory.

W.L. Goodwater’s debut novel Breach is a great example. It was published late last year by Ace, and is described as the opening novel in a new Cold War fantasy series, in which the Berlin Wall is made entirely of magic. When a breach unexpectedly appears, spies from both sides descend on the city as  World War III looms ever closer.

I discovered Breach almost wholly by accident, as I browsed the shelves at B&N a few weeks ago. I knew nothing about it, and the cover didn’t particularly grab me. But the brief blurb on the back cover did, pretty much immediately. As modern fantasy goes, this is about as original as it gets. This is the kind of book that kicks off a whole new sub-genre. Alternate history political thriller fantasy? Cold War apocalypse fantasy? Whatever; I’m on board. Here’s the blurb that grabbed my attention.

AFTER THE WAR, THE WALL BROUGHT AN UNEASY PEACE.

When Soviet magicians conjured an arcane wall to blockade occupied Berlin, the world was outraged but let it stand for the sake of peace. Now, after ten years of fighting with spies instead of spells, the CIA has discovered the unthinkable…

THE WALL IS FAILING.

While refugees and soldiers mass along the border, operatives from East and West converge on the most dangerous city in the world to either stop the crisis, or take advantage of it.

Karen, a young magician with the American Office of Magical Research and Deployment, is sent to investigate the breach in the Wall and determine if it can be fixed. Instead, she discovers that the truth is elusive in this divided city — and that even magic itself has its own agenda.

THE TRUTH OF THE WALL IS ABOUT TO BE REVEALED.

Breach was published by Ace on November 6, 2018. It is 336 pages, priced at $16 in paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Pete Garceau. See all our recent New Treasures here.

Dreams More Perfect Than Your Own: J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories, Volumes One & Two

Dreams More Perfect Than Your Own: J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories, Volumes One & Two

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In the world of science fiction, J.G. Ballard is a Big Deal.

His early work includes the novels The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), and High-Rise (1975), and the seminal collection Vermilion Sands (1971). Outside science fiction, Ballard is also a Big Deal. His 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, loosely based on his experiences as a child in Shanghai during Japanese occupation, was described by The Guardian as “the best British novel about the Second World War” and filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale. His influence on modern literature has been powerful enough that “Ballardian” has become a common term, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity…” He died in 2009.

Ballard’s short fiction, virtually all of it SF, is some of the most vital and studied science fiction of the 20th Century. His stories “Souvenir” (1965) and “Myths of the Near Future” (1983) were nominated for the Nebula Award, and his collections — including Passport to Eternity (1963), The Terminal Beach (1964), Vermilion Sands (1971) and Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971) — are very highly regarded. In 2006 Harper Perennial published J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories in two thick volumes in the UK; they were reprinted in 2014 by Fourth Estate with an introduction by Adam Thirlwell. There aren’t a lot of writers for whom it pays to read their complete short work; Ballard I think is the exception.

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Embers to Ashes: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

Embers to Ashes: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

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Maybe it’s just the times we live in, but I increasingly find myself drawn to narratives of defeat: Confederate military memoirs, histories of the Decline and Fall of This and That, accounts of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow or Custer’s Last Stand. I suppose that’s why this summer, forty years after I blew it off when it was assigned in one of my first college classes, I finally got around to reading Earth Abides.

George R. Stewart’s 1949 post-apocalyptic novel is one of the most famous one-offs in the history of science fiction; it won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951, and in all the decades since, the book has rarely been out of print.

Stewart was primarily an English professor and historian and an only occasional novelist. In his first specialty he wrote books on English verse technique and composition; in the latter his most well-known works are a history of the Donner party, Ordeal by Hunger (1936), and a finely detailed, minute-by-minute account of the climax of the battle of Gettysburg, Pickett’s Charge (1959). Storm (1941) and Fire (1948), two novels Stewart wrote before his sole foray into science fiction, show his concern with large, impersonal forces and their effects on the enduring land and the ephemeral creatures that inhabit it. His most famous book takes that scientific detachment and interest in process many steps further, to powerful effect.

Earth Abides tells the story of Isherwood Smith, a young college student who lives in Berkeley, California. When the book begins, Ish is camping in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, doing the fieldwork necessary for his graduate thesis, The Ecology of the Black Creek Area, intended to be an investigation of “the relationships, past and present, of men and plants and animals” in the region. The thesis will never be written, though Ish will spend the rest of his life wrestling with fundamental questions regarding the connections between human beings and the natural world they so briefly occupy.

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Future Treasures: Never Die by Rob J. Hayes

Future Treasures: Never Die by Rob J. Hayes

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Best Fantasy Books.com‘s Top 25 Best Indie Fantasy Books is a very handy list if you’re interested in discovering new fantasy talent. It originally appeared in 2016, and has been updated at least once, in November 2017. Buried deep in the article the (anonymous) author notes that

I found Mark Lawrence’s (you know, author of The Broken Empire series) Great Self Published Fantasy Blog Off contest immensely helpful for helping to point me in the direction of some of the stand out picks.

Okay, I didn’t know Mark had a self-publishing contest, but what a cool idea. The SPFBO has apparently been running for several years now, and has showcased several intriguing writers. For example, Rob J. Hayes won in 2017 for Where Loyalties Lie.

What’s so intriguing about Hayes? For one thing, except for one book from Ragnarok Publications, he’s exclusively self published, and his backlist is lengthy and impressive, including the Best Laid Plans series, The Ties that Bind trilogy, It Takes a Thief to Catch a Sunrise (2016) and City of Kings (2018). And next week his newest self-published effort Never Die arrives, the tale of five undead heroes re-animated by an eight-year-old Necromancer to take on an evil emperor. Here’s a snippet from Michael Gruneir’s review at Fantasy Book Review.

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