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Future Treasures: The Midnight Front by David Mack

Future Treasures: The Midnight Front by David Mack

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The Midnight Front-smallDavid Mack has built his rep chiefly on Star Trek novels, such as the Star Trek: Vanguard series, and the new Star Trek Discovery tie-in novel Desperate Hours (which Derek Kunsken reviewed for us here).

His latest is a World War II-era adventure in which an American soldier finds himself up against Nazi sorcerers. Kirkus Reviews calls it “Propulsive… Equal parts brimstone and gunpowder… an entertaining scenario that wouldn’t be out of place in a video game or a spirited match of Dungeons & Dragons.”

The Midnight Front is the opening novel in the Dark Arts series; it arrives simultaneously in hardcover and trade paperback from Tor in January. It will be followed by The Iron Codex, set in the 1950s; and Shadow Commission, set in the ’60s.

On the eve of World War Two, Nazi sorcerers come gunning for Cade but kill his family instead. His one path of vengeance is to become an apprentice of The Midnight Front ― the Allies’ top-secret magickal warfare program ― and become a sorcerer himself.

Unsure who will kill him first ― his allies, his enemies, or the demons he has to use to wield magick ― Cade fights his way through occupied Europe and enemy lines. But he learns too late the true price of revenge will be more terrible than just the loss of his soul ― and there’s no task harder than doing good with a power born of ultimate evil.

The Midnight Front will be published by Tor Books on January 30, 2018. It is 464 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover, $15.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Larry Rostant. Read an excerpt at Tor.com.

See all of our coverage of the best upcoming fantasy here.

Vintage Treasures: Neverness by David Zindell

Vintage Treasures: Neverness by David Zindell

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David Zindell was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1986. His space opera trilogy A Requiem for Homo Sapiens (The Broken God, The Wild, and War in Heaven) received plenty of attention in the mid-90s, including a Clarke Award nomination for the opening novel. He also produced a six-book fantasy series, the EA Cycle, but it was not as well received, and only three volumes were ever released in the US.

Much of his reputation today, in fact, comes from his debut novel Neverness, which won instant and wide acclaim. Edward Bryant called it a “Feat of universe crafting [that] propels him instantly into the big leagues with the likes of Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin.” Kirkus Reviews said “Zindell succeeds brilliantly… in his convincing portrayal of what a super-intelligent being might be like…. Vastly promising work.” And on the basis of this single novel, Gene Wolfe proclaimed Zindell “One of the finest talents to appear since Kim Stanley Robinson and William Gibson — perhaps the finest.”

Zindell has not published a book in the US since The Silver Sword in 2007. His literary career has prospered far better in the UK, however, and his most recent novel, The Idiot Gods, was released across the pond by HarperVoyager in July 2017. It does not yet have a US release date.

Neverness was published by Bantam Spectra in July 1989. It is 552 pages, priced at $4.95. It was reprinted multiple times in the UK by Grafton and HarperCollins, but only once in the US, in a self-published edition in 2015. The wraparound cover of the Spectra version is by Don Dixon.

New Treasures: Weave a Circle Round by Kari Maaren

New Treasures: Weave a Circle Round by Kari Maaren

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We’re hurtling towards the end of the year, that time when Best of the Year lists are upon us. I try to cram in as many recommended reads as I can before the calendar turns over, at which time I inevitably give up in defeat, clear off my To Be Read pile, and start the year off with a fresh slate. Needless to say, I’m forced to be a lot more selective in my reading choices in the hectic weeks of December than I am the rest of the year. New releases usually suffer the most as I try to get caught up on the books everyone has been talking about.

But Kari Maaren’s Weave a Circle Round, published last week by Tor, has bucked that trend, and currently rests atop my To Be Read pile. Publishers Weekly calls it “Dazzling… an ambitious, intricate, joyful coming-of-age tale,” and Elizabeth Haydon says ” It rings many of the same chimes as The Phantom Tollbooth and A Wrinkle in Time, with a few notes charmingly reminiscent of Monty Python.” That’s exactly what I need right now.

Kari Maaren is a webcomic artist and writer; her previous publication was West of Bathurst, a complete 710-page collection of the webcomic which ran between 2006 and 2014. Weave a Circle Round is her debut novel. It was published by Tor Books on November 28, 2017. It is 367 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The striking cover was designed by Jamie Stafford-Hill. Read the complete first chapter here., and see all of our recent New Treasures here.

Self-published Book Review: Dark Healer by Harry Leighton

Self-published Book Review: Dark Healer by Harry Leighton

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There won’t be a review next month, due to the holidays, and most likely the month after that, since I’ll be reading for Mysterion, which will be opening to submissions in January. However, I’ll be happy to accept new book review submissions to review once I’m back.

Dark_Healer_Amazon_coverDark Healer by Harry Leighton is one of those novels about which I felt conflicted afterward. I really enjoyed the story, and thought it worked well at drawing me in and keeping me reading. But there were significant weaknesses in the prose that interfered with my enjoyment.  I’ll get to that, but first, let’s talk about the story.

Marlen, the titular Dark Healer, is a skilled surgeon and also a mage, mixing magic with the common healing arts in order to make his patients better. Better being the key word here—he can improve eyesight, enable quicker healing, make them stronger, even add extra arms.  He’s a regular medieval Mengele, but way more successful. When bounty hunters Jonas and Alia begin tracking him, it’s because he’s begun buying people at illegal slave auctions, specifically the sick and disabled. Some he makes well so that they can serve him, others he uses as spare parts.

Jonas has a history with Marlen. At one point, they were friends, but they had a falling out right at the beginning of Marlen’s turn to a darker path. Now, living with regret for his own actions during that desperate time, Jonas is determined to make things right by hunting Marlen down. His apprentice Alia doesn’t have a personal stake, but she’s utterly devoted to her mentor and father-figure, Jonas.

Daeholf, Trimas, and Zedek are on the run. Trimas is an exiled ex-General, Daeholf a former military scout and saboteur who had a falling out with his commanders, and Zedek is an elf, hated and feared everywhere in the Empire. Their goal is to keep their heads down and survive. But when they find that Daeholf’s cousin has gone missing, and discovered a farm where the farmers are the harvest, they are also set on the trail of the healer Marlen.

When the two groups team up to take down Marlen, they find themselves embroiled in an incipient civil war, and at its core, the monsters Marlen’s created.

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Witches, Privateers, and Enchanted Blades: Tales of the Thieftaker by D. B. Jackson

Witches, Privateers, and Enchanted Blades: Tales of the Thieftaker by D. B. Jackson

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“Night of Two Moons,” the most popular story in Black Gate 4, was my introduction to the work of David B. Coe. Over the past two decades he’s produced eight novels in the same setting, the Forelands Universe (five in the Winds of the Forelands series, plus the Blood of the Southlands trilogy), and I’ve followed them avidly. His prior work included the LonTobyn Chronicle trilogy; more recently he’s turned his attention to contemporary fantasy with the Case Files of Justis Fearsson (Spell Blind, His Father’s Eyes, and Shadow’s Blade), featuring a magic-using private detective who faces off against dark sorcerers in Phoenix, Arizona. Starting in 2015 David became a semi-regular blogger for us; the most recent article in his Books and Craft series was World Building and the Importance of Setting.

In addition to that prodigious output, under the name ‘D. B. Jackson’ David’s also written four novels in the popular Thieftaker Chronicles, a historical urban fantasy series set in pre-Revolutionary Boston. The books have been widely acclaimed, and Kirkus Reviews calls them “Splendid… with [a] contemporary gumshoe-noir tone… An unusual series of great promise.” I’m very excited to see the next release, Tales of the Thieftaker, is a collection of new and previously published short stories — featuring a pre-dawn fire in colonial Boston, a young witch who harbors a terrible secret, a magick-laden blade, and the true story of the bloody mutiny aboard the privateering ship Ruby Blade.

Tales of the Thieftaker will be published by Lore Seekers Press on December 18, 2017. It is 275 pages, priced at $17.95 in trade paperback and $4.99 for he digital edition. The cover is by Chris McGrath. Read David’s interview (as D.B. Jackson) with his main character Ethan Kaille, the Thieftaker, in a funny and very insightful post here at Black Gate.

Vintage Treasures: The American Fantasy Tradition edited by Brian M. Thomsen

Vintage Treasures: The American Fantasy Tradition edited by Brian M. Thomsen

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The American Fantasy Tradition Brian M Thomsen-small

Brian Thomsen’s first anthology was Halflings, Hobbits, Warrows & Weefolk: A Collection of Tales of Heroes Short in Stature, a 1991 Questar paperback co-edited with Baird Searles. He followed that with more than a dozen more over the next 20 years — including The Reel Stuff (1998), Oceans of Magic (2001), and Masters of Fantasy (2004) — most co-edited with Martin H. Greenberg. He was the Senior Editor of SF and Fantasy at Warner Books and then Director of Books and Periodicals at TSR, where he wrote several Forgotten Realms novels, including Once Around the Realms (1995) and The Mage in the Iron Mask (1996).

He eventually became a Consulting Editor at Tor, where he produced in my opinion the most significant book of his career, and indeed one of the most important fantasy anthologies of the 90s: The American Fantasy Tradition, a massive 600-page hardcover surveying two centuries of American fantasy, containing stories by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Edith Wharton, Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, Charles Beaumont, Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, R. A. Lafferty, Alan Dean Foster, Shirley Jackson, Avram Davidson, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Karl Edward Wagner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, and many others.

The American Fantasy Tradition is one of the finest survey anthologies of Western fantasy ever assembled, and it would serve as a splendid textbook for any introductory course to modern fantasy. It stands with David Hartwell’s The Dark Descent, Gardner Dozois’s Modern Classics of Fantasy, and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s The Weird as one of the essential texts of the fantasy canon.

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New Treasures: What the Hell Did I Just Read by David Wong

New Treasures: What the Hell Did I Just Read by David Wong

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Jason Pargin is the Executive Editor of the comedy site Cracked.com. Under the name David Wong he’s published three novels, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (2016) and the bestselling series John Dies at the End (2009) and This Book Is Full of Spiders (2012). Connor Gormley called the first John Dies novel “Ghostbusters With More Swearing and Fewer Crappy Sequels” in his 2014 Black Gate review; the book became a feature film starring Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown in 2012. What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror is the third installment, it was released in hardcover last month. If you’re looking for a novel of cosmic horror and black humor, this is your ticket.

It’s the story “They” don’t want you to read. Though, to be fair, “They” are probably right about this one. To quote the Bible, “Learning the truth can be like loosening a necktie, only to realize it was the only thing keeping your head attached.” No, don’t put the book back on the shelf — it is now your duty to purchase it to prevent others from reading it. Yes, it works with e-books, too, I don’t have time to explain how.

While investigating a fairly straightforward case of a shape-shifting interdimensional child predator, Dave, John and Amy realized there might actually be something weird going on. Together, they navigate a diabolically convoluted maze of illusions, lies, and their own incompetence in an attempt to uncover a terrible truth they — like you — would be better off not knowing.

Your first impulse will be to think that a story this gruesome — and, to be frank, stupid — cannot possibly be true. That is precisely the reaction “They” are hoping for.

What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror was published by St. Martin’s Press on October 3, 2017. It is 373 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

Future Treasures: Year One by Nora Roberts

Future Treasures: Year One by Nora Roberts

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Year One Nora Roberts-smallNora Roberts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 novels. I want to repeat that for emphasis. Two. Hundred. Novels. That’s not even including the many she’s written under the pen name J. D. Robb, like the bestselling In Death series. Last year she placed #7 on Forbes list of Highest-Paid Authors (beating GRRM by 5 slots.) She has over 500 million books in print.

How can anything produced by a word factory like that be worth reading? Folks I trust tell me they really enjoy her novels and, let’s face it, many of the pulp writers I adore churned out books in similar volume. It sounds to me like she’s worth a try, and her upcoming post-apocalyptic fantasy Year One might be the place to start.

It began on New Year’s Eve.

The sickness came on suddenly, and spread quickly. The fear spread even faster. Within weeks, everything people counted on began to fail them. The electrical grid sputtered; law and government collapsed ― and more than half of the world’s population was decimated.

Where there had been order, there was now chaos. And as the power of science and technology receded, magick rose up in its place. Some of it is good, like the witchcraft worked by Lana Bingham, practicing in the loft apartment she shares with her lover, Max. Some of it is unimaginably evil, and it can lurk anywhere, around a corner, in fetid tunnels beneath the river ― or in the ones you know and love the most.

As word spreads that neither the immune nor the gifted are safe from the authorities who patrol the ravaged streets, and with nothing left to count on but each other, Lana and Max make their way out of a wrecked New York City. At the same time, other travelers are heading west too, into a new frontier. Chuck, a tech genius trying to hack his way through a world gone offline. Arlys, a journalist who has lost her audience but uses pen and paper to record the truth. Fred, her young colleague, possessed of burgeoning abilities and an optimism that seems out of place in this bleak landscape. And Rachel and Jonah, a resourceful doctor and a paramedic who fend off despair with their determination to keep a young mother and three infants in their care alive.

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In 500 Words or Less: Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird, edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski

In 500 Words or Less: Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird, edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski

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Ride the Star Wind
Edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski
Broken Eye Books (445 pages, $39.99 hardcover/$19.99 paperback, February 2016)

When Scott Gable at Broken Eye Books offered me a review copy of Ride the Star Wind, an anthology that combines space opera with Lovecraftian weirdness, I told him straight up that I’m not really a fan of the Elder Gods, the Great Ones, and the rest. I get why Lovecraft’s shadow is so long (sort of) but honestly his writing never appealed to me, and I think his work is adapted too much, and usually badly. (I make one exception with Jonathan Maberry’s Kill Switch, which is awesome.)

That said… and work with me here, since I’m not supposed to curse… but @#$% this is a great anthology. I mean, after how much I enjoyed Never Now Always by Desirina Boskovich (also a Broken Eye title) I wasn’t really worried, but the stories in here hooked me way more than I expected.

Some are a little too weird for me, I’ll admit, but those are few and far between. If you’re into weird (unlike me) there’s material here for you, particularly Bogi Takács “A Subordinate Set of Principles,” which involves deadly creatures that are literally referred to by square and triangle symbols in the text because they’re impossible to describe. I’m going to have to reread that one.

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John DeNardo on the Best SF and Fantasy in November

John DeNardo on the Best SF and Fantasy in November

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Jade City Fonda Lee-small Ironclads Adrian Tchaikovsky-small The Overneath Peter S Beagle-small

I do a lot of work sifting though all the science fiction and fantasy releases every month to select those few that are worth highlighting. Sometimes it seems that I could save myself a lot of time if I just listened more to John DeNardo.

Over at Kirkus Reviews, John selects the most interesting new releases to showcase in his column, including new books by Rachel Neumeier, Tim Pratt, Mira Grant, Richard Baker, Brandon Sanderson, James Van Pelt, and many others. Here’s a few of the highlights.

Jade City by Fonda Lee (Orbit, 512 pages, $26, November 7)

What do you get when you set The Godfather in an Asia-inspired city and add some magic and kung fu? You get Jade City, set on the island of Kekon, where Jade is the lifeblood of society, a precious commodity that that is mined, traded, stolen, and a motivation for murder. The Kaul family have used it to enhance their magical abilities while becoming the dominant force on the island. They care about nothing other than protecting their own power and those within their family. But now it’s a new generation and when a powerful new drug allows anyone to wield the power of jade, the war between the Kaul family and their rivals explodes into violence.

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