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Future Treasures: The Mammoth Book of the Mummy, edited by Paula Guran

Future Treasures: The Mammoth Book of the Mummy, edited by Paula Guran

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the-mammoth-book-of-the-mummy-smallPaula Guran does interesting anthologies. She tends to focus on modern (21st Century) writers, which means she’s plowing a different field than all those vintage anthologies I love — and introducing me to a host of new writers.

Her newest is The Mammoth Book of the Mummy, containing 25 new and reprint tales “that explore, subvert, and reinvent the mummy mythos” from Joe R. Lansdale, Kage Baker, Paul Cornell, Terry Dowling, Karen Joy Fowler, John Langan, Helen Marshall, Keith Taylor, and many others. It arrives from Prime Books in trade paperback next month.

Human mummies, preserved by both accident and intent, have been found on every continent except Antarctica. These enigmatic remains of humanity have fascinated people for centuries. Shrouded in history they have acquired meaning and symbolism quite separate from their value as a source of historic knowledge, inspiring tales of reanimation, reincarnation, loves that outlive death, and curses that bring vengeance from the past.

As a figure of the supernatural the mummy has attained iconic status in the popular imagination. The Mammoth Book of the Mummy presents a collection of tales written for the twenty-first century ― including four brand-new stories ― that explore, subvert, and reinvent the mummy mythos. Some delve into the past, others explore alternative histories, and some bring mummies into our own world. Within these covers lie stories of revenge, romance, monsters, and mayhem, ranging freely across time periods, genres, and styles sure to please both mummy-lovers and those less wrapped up in mummy lore.

I published one Mummy story in Black Gate, Dan Brodribb’s hilarious “The Girl Who Feared Lightning” in BG 14 (“Nobody really talks about what mummies can and can’t do. They never really caught on like some monsters did. Poor branding.”) Here’ hoping Paula’s latest anthology will help mummies with that branding problem.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Vintage Treasures: Watership Down by Richard Adams

Vintage Treasures: Watership Down by Richard Adams

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watershipdown“I announce,” read the Times of London’s review in 1972, “with trembling pleasure, the appearance of a great story.”

This is not the typical language of a contemporary book review, but then the book in question, Watership Down, was not a typical book. It was and is a fantasy with wide crossover appeal, a mythic adventure with rabbits as the principal characters. That’s right, rabbits: those long-eared good-for-nothings whom we humans largely dismiss as being dumber than a box of rabbit-sized rocks.

Having read and adored the book in my early teens, I determined it was time to share it with my twelve-year-old son, who still craves his daily dose of bedtime story. And why not? I’d get to read a tale I had not revisited for more than thirty-five years, and I’d get to gauge my son’s reactions every step of the way.

To say he was impressed would be an understatement. As we approached the closing chapters, he wanted extra, before-bed reading time, but in the same breath kept exclaiming how he didn’t want to finish. “Are there more books about Hazel and Bigwig?” he asked. “Are there?”

Spoilers follow. If by some terrible chance you, gentle reader, have not read Watership Down for yourself, then please, close this page. Go do something else. Purchase a copy of Watership Down, for example. You can always return here once you’ve read to “The End.”

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New Treasures: The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch by Daniel Kraus

New Treasures: The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch by Daniel Kraus

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Daniel Kraus co-wrote Trollhunters with Guillermo del Toro, the basis for the Netflix animated series of the same name. He’s also the author of the horror novels Rotters and Scowler.

His latest project is a two-volume epic about an undead seventeen year old on a secret mission to assassinate Hitler. It began with The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch: At the Edge of Empire (October 2015), and concludes with The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch: Empire Decayed (October 2016).

Entertainment Weekly named the first volume one of the Top Ten Books of 2015, saying “Kraus’s globe-trotting dead kid is by turns cavalier, playful, and thoughtful, and his singular voice — a debonair turn-of-the-century murderer-turned-victim — is utterly riveting,” and Booklist called it “a giant-size epic [that] skillfully blends historical fiction, dark humor, and horror to push readers right to the brink.” There’s a definite YA feel to these books, although there’s also a macabre horror angle, so proceed with caution if you’re a little on the squeamish side.

Here’s the description for the first volume.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Casebooks & Nightmares

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Casebooks & Nightmares

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lovegrove_shadwellIn the early 1900’s, Maurice Leblanc had his French detective, Arsene Lupin, face off with Herlock Sholmes. I think you know who he’s battling – spelling disregarded. 1965’s A Study in Terror sent Holmes after Jack the Ripper on movie screens and in 1988, and Sax Rohmer biographer Clay Van Ash brought Holmes and Fu Manchu together in Ten Years Beyond Baker Street. Crossovers have become more and more popular over the years. James Lovegrove currently has Holmes interacting with the Cthulhu mythos.

I don’t do a lot of book reviews here at The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes because I generally don’t like to reveal spoilers. And it can be tough to talk about the strong points of a book without giving away key elements. But sometimes, especially with older books, that’s part of the price of the post. So, I’ll try to limit revelations in this one, but be warned: There be spoilers here!

Lovegrove, who has written several non-Holmes books, is part of Titan’s stable of new Holmes authors. Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows is the first of a trilogy, with Sherlock Holmes & The Miskatonic Monstrosities due out in Fall of 2017 and Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea Devils to wrap things up in November of 2018.

The basic premise of the book (yea, the trilogy) is that Watson made up the sixty stories in the Canon. He did so to cover up the real truth behind Holmes’ work. And that’s because the truth is too horrible to reveal. In a nutshell, Watson has written three journals, each covering events fifteen years apart, to try and get some of the darkness out of his soul.

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How Long Does it Take For Treasure to Become Vintage? The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

How Long Does it Take For Treasure to Become Vintage? The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

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There aren’t a lot of fantasy books that remind me of Christmas, but Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, the trilogy that launched his fiction-writing career, is definitely one example.

I think it’s because the opening novel, The Summer Tree, was published by McClelland & Stewart in late October 1984, and by Christmas it seemed everyone I knew was talking about it. In 1984 I turned 20 years old, and started my last year of undergrad studies at the University of Ottawa. The bookstore I hung out in every Saturday was The House of Speculative Fiction, run by Pat Caven and Rodger Turner, and by December Pat — with whom I had long chats about books every week — was enthusiastically sharing the buzz about the book. “I’m told it starts slow,” she said, “but once they cross over into the fantasy world, it really picks up.”

There was a lot of attention paid to Guy Gavriel Kay’s first fantasy novel in Ottawa. He was something of a local celebrity. He was Christopher Tolkien’s co-editor on The Silmarillion, which was published to worldwide acclaim when Kay was just 23 years old. Although he lived in Toronto, where he returned to law school in 1975, and certainly didn’t hang out in any circles we knew (“He writes in a salon,” Pat told me, shaking her head), he was still Canadian. And in those days, a Canadian fantasy writer was a genuine novelty… especially a very good one, which it quickly became obvious Kay was.

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Future Treasures: The Skill of Our Hands, Book 2 of The Incrementalists, by Steven Brust and Skyler White

Future Treasures: The Skill of Our Hands, Book 2 of The Incrementalists, by Steven Brust and Skyler White

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I missed The Incrementalists, the new novel from Steven Brust (the Vlad Taltos series) and Skyler White (In Dreams Begin) when it came out in hardcover from Tor in 2013. But folks who were more on the ball than I did not — such as John Scalzi (“Secret societies, immortality, murder mysteries and Las Vegas all in one book? Shut up and take my money”) and David Pitt at Booklist, who wrote:

A secret society has existed for millennia, operating under the surface of society. The Incrementalists are improving the world by making slight adjustments that make human existence a bit better than it might have been… But now they have a major problem on their hands. One of their own, who recently died, might have been murdered, and the woman who was given her memories paradoxically doesn’t seem to be able to remember her. Even worse, it looks like the dead woman has somehow manipulated the Incrementalists (or, to be more precise, Phil, who has loved her for centuries) into putting her memories into a very specific young woman for a very specific and quite troubling, possibly catastrophic, reason… cleverly constructed, populated with characters readers will enjoy hanging out with, and packed with twists and nifty surprises. If you have to call it something, call it genius at work.

The second volume, The Skill of Our Hands, arrives in hardcover from Tor on January 24th.

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Unearthly Desires in an Unruly World: Cornelia Funke’s Living Shadows

Unearthly Desires in an Unruly World: Cornelia Funke’s Living Shadows

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In Living Shadows, the second book in Cornelia Funke’s wondrous Mirrorworld trilogy (currently being repackaged and reissued in the US as the Reckless trilogy), death haunts every page. We follow Jacob Reckless, our protagonist, as he attempts to rid himself of the moth devouring his heart. Given to him by the Red Fairy whom he carelessly betrayed, it begins to fill his body with excruciating pain. He must find an ancient crossbow belonging to an infamous witch slayer and a willing volunteer to shoot him in the heart. An equally ancient spell cast on it enables a third shot to resurrect its victim. Unfortunately, someone else intends to keep it for himself, and when Jacob encounters his dauntless rival, the world as he knows it threatens to crush his bones.

Funke bakes a layer cake of darkness and unconditional love with a haunting fairy tale icing that keeps you embedded in the story. You fall in love with the characters and feel their deepest emotions. In particular, Jacob’s simmering romance with his eternal companion, Fox (whose real name you learn once again in this volume) ensnares you. The moments where it comes close to a boiling point make you remember why fairy tale romance has captivated readers since the first storytellers entertained their audiences.

Theirs being the central romance in the story differentiates the series from so many others in the YA genre. Love triangles enchant their biggest fans and ensure the longevity of a series, but there comes a time when devoted YA readers roll their eyes. Focusing on one relationship betwen two compelling characters who fear each other’s deaths more than their own allows your imagination the freedom to savor their journey. When villains get in the way of their love, it’s just as fun of a ride, if not more.

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New Treasures: Worst Contact, edited by Hank Davis

New Treasures: Worst Contact, edited by Hank Davis

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No one out there today is doing the work Hank Davis is doing — collecting vintage SF and fantasy into handsome mass market anthologies.

Yes, Paula Guran (Street Magicks, Weird Detectives) and Neil Clarke (Galactic Empires) are producing great reprint anthologies — but they both focus almost exclusively on 21st Century authors. Davis is the one serious editor left still plumbing the pulps and vintage SF magazines of the mid-20th Century, and putting authors like Murray Leinster, John W. Campbell, and Poul Anderson into mass market. His recent books (including Things From Outer Space and In Space No One Can Hear You Scream) include some of my very favorite recent anthologies.

While we’re on the topic (and since it’s, y’know, timely), I should also mention he’s also the only SF editor in recent days to do Christmas anthologies, like A Cosmic Christmas and A Cosmic Christmas 2 You.

His first anthology of 2016 was Worst Contact, a collection of tales of alien contact gone wrong. It contains two of my all-time favorite SF stories, Terry Bisson’s brilliant “They’re Made Out of Meat,” the story of an alien survey team that makes a profoudly disturbing discovery on the backwater planet Earth, and Fredric Brown’s chilling and powerful “Puppet Show,” in which the US Army is called in to greet a strange alien and his donkey walking out of the desert.

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Always Winter, Never Christmas?

Always Winter, Never Christmas?

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Just a short post this week, since I’m sure we all want to get back to our holiday celebrations.

And speaking of which, I’m sure that everyone who remembers The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as well as I do knows where today’s title comes from. The first time that Lucy finds herself in in Narnia, she meets Tumnus the faun, who tells her that because of the power of the White Queen, in Narnia it’s always winter, but never Christmas.

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New Treasures: Deadlands: Thunder Moon Rising by Jeffrey Mariotte

New Treasures: Deadlands: Thunder Moon Rising by Jeffrey Mariotte

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deadlands-thunder-moon-rising-smallAfter saying a few words about Laura Anne Gilman’s upcoming novel The Cold Eye — in which the devil runs a saloon on the American frontier, and sends a sixteen year old girl out to fight monsters for him — it got me hankering to seek out more weird westerns.

I didn’t have to look far. Tor Books and Pinnacle Entertainment (creator of the Deadlands RPG) have a promising weird western series on the go, set in the undead-haunted frontier of Deadlands. The latest installment, Thunder Moon Rising, was released in trade paperback in September. It was written by Jeffrey Mariotte, author of the horror novels River Runs Red and Cold Black Hearts.

Fear is abroad in the Deadlands as a string of brutal killings and cattle mutilations trouble a Western frontier town in the Arizona Territory, nestled in the forbidding shadow of the rugged Thunder Mountains. A mule train is massacred, homes and ranches are attacked, and men and women are stalked and butchered by bestial killers who seem to be neither human nor animal, meanwhile a ruthless land baron tries to buy up all the surrounding territory-and possibly bring about an apocalypse.

Once an officer in the Union Army, Tucker Bringloe is now a worthless drunk begging for free drinks at the corner saloon. When he’s roped into a posse searching for the nameless killers, Tuck must rediscover the man he once was if he’s to halt the bloodshed and stop occult forces from unleashing Hell on Earth… when the Thunder Moon rises.

We covered the previous volume in the series, Jonathan Maberry’s Ghostwalkers, last year.

Deadlands: Thunder Moon Rising was published by Tor Books on September 20, 2016. It is 397 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version.