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Vintage Treasures: The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

Vintage Treasures: The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

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To Your Scattered Bodies Go Berkley 1971-small To Your Scattered Bodies Go Berkley 1971-back-small

When I was a wee lad discovering science fiction for the first time, I eagerly read and enjoyed all the most famous SF series. Dune, Foundation, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Amber — and Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld saga.

The first volume, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, won the 1972 Hugo Award, and it’s not hard to see why. The premise, that every human who ever lived wakes up one morning on the shores of a great river, was thoroughly original, and Farmer built on it brilliantly, crafting a science fiction novel peopled with famous historical figures, including Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Hermann Göring, a fictionalized version of Farmer himself (“Peter Jairus Frigate”), and especially the famed explorer Richard Francis Burton, who sets out to solve the mystery of this strange world.

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New Treasures: Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt

New Treasures: Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt

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Greener Pastures Michael Wehunt-small

Michael Wehunt’s short fiction has appeared in Innsmouth Magazine, Shadows & Tall Trees, Cemetery Dance, The Dark, Shock Totem, and Strange Aeons. His first collection, Greener Pastures, was published last month from Shock Totem Publications, and has already received a lot of positive attention. He’s a fast rising star in horror and weird fiction, and well worth checking out. This may sound strange to everyone else, but I was playing with the digital preview on Amazon, and was delighted to find full-page ads for half a dozen back issues of Shock Totem, a magazine I’ve never read but clearly should, in the back. Things like that make me happy.

From the round-robin, found-footage nightmare of “October Film Haunt: Under the House” to the jazz-soaked “The Devil Under the Maison Blue,” selected for both The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and Year’s Best Weird Fiction, these beautifully crafted, emotionally resonant stories speak of the unknown encroaching upon the familiar, the inscrutable power of grief and desire, and the thinness between all our layers. Where nature rubs against small towns, in mountains and woods and bedrooms, here is strangeness seen through a poet’s eye.

They say there are always greener pastures. These stories consider the cost of that promise.

Greener Pastures was published by Shock Totem Publications on March 29, 2016. It is 238 pages, priced at $13.99 in trade paperback and $3.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Michael Bukowski.

Faren Miller Reviews The Brotherhood of the Wheel at Locus Online

Faren Miller Reviews The Brotherhood of the Wheel at Locus Online

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The Brotherhood of the Wheel-smallIn my previous article on R. S. Belcher’s The Brotherhood of the Wheel, I called it “the opening volume in a new urban fantasy about a mysterious society of truckers.” Faren Miller over at Locus Online can do much better than a one-sentence description — and she does, with an enthusiastic review.

Though Tor calls R.S. Belcher’s The Brotherhood of the Wheel an ‘‘urban fantasy,’’ it also describes the novel as set on ‘‘the haunted byways and truck stops of the US Interstate Highway System.’’ Roads – both real and metaphorical – are crucial to this dark fantasy, focusing and expanding the power of magics that range from the latest trends in ghosts and weird critters discussed on bad-ass websites, to entities transplanted to the New World from pre-Christian Europe and points beyond.

We begin with big rig truck driver Jimmie Aussapile, one of what proves to be a won­derfully miscellaneous bunch of people who oppose the forces of evil in tense scenes that gradually reveal connections between events in towns, suburbs, and cities of the Midwest and the South: Illinois, Kansas, Tennessee, Louisiana. Appearing near the mid-point of Belcher’s previous novel Nightwise, Jimmie, his tractor trailer, and a passing mention of the Brotherhood prompted Belcher’s literary agent to urge him to write more about them, as noted in the Acknowledgements here. I’m delighted that he followed her suggestion, in his own devious way. He has a masterful ability to move between assorted viewpoint characters in multiple plotlines kept separate long enough to become distinct: just hinting at links that may strengthen, but don’t become full alliances until hard action with shared danger breaks down the barriers between them.

The Brotherhood of the Wheel was published by Tor Books on March 1, 2016. It is 384 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. See Faren’s complete review here

Future Treasures: Strangely Beautiful by Leanna Renee Hieber

Future Treasures: Strangely Beautiful by Leanna Renee Hieber

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Strangely Beautiful Leanna Renee Hieber-smallLeanna Renee Hieber is the author of the Magic Most Foul trilogy, The Eterna Files, and its sequel Eterna and Omega.

Her early novels The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker and The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker were originally published in paperback by Leisure Books in 2009 and 2010, and they’re now getting harder to find. Fortunately, Tor has bundled both critically acclaimed novels into a single volume, bringing them back into print in a handsome new revised edition. It will be available in trade paperback at the end of the month.

Miss Persephone Parker ― known as Percy ― is different, with her lustrous, snow-white hair, pearlescent pale skin, and uncanny ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Seeking to continue her education, Percy has come to Queen Victoria’s London, to the Athens Academy. What she will learn there will change her life forever.

Athens Academy is the citadel of The Guard, an ancient order that battles the forces of evil. The Victorian Guard, led by professor Alexi Rychman, is incomplete. They cannot defeat Jack the Ripper ― who is more than the serial killer he appears to be ― or the greater monster his appearance heralds.

Percy’s lifelong habit of concealment combined with Alexi’s fevered search for the Guard’s missing seventh nearly prove disastrous as ancient Greek myths begin playing out in modern, gaslit, Victorian London. Percy and her new friends and allies must overcome their preconceptions about each other and their own histories before they can set the world to rights.

These two books were followed by two more in the same series: The Perilous Prophecy of Guard and Goddess (2011) and Miss Violet & the Great War (2012). No word yet on whether Tor plans to reprint them as well.

Strangely Beautiful will be published by Tor on April 26, 2016. It is 544 pages, priced at $20.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. I don’t know who did the cover, but I know I like it.

Goth Chick News: Future Treasures – My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

Goth Chick News: Future Treasures – My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

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My Best Friend's Exorcism-smallQuirk Books, publishers and seekers of all things awesome, more than live up to their self-proclamation.

They have been my personal source of quirky awesomeness since I was first introduced to them in 2013 via The Resurrectionist, a quintessentially odd bit of literature indeed. Following this came a litany of titles, all of which were so decidedly strange, so that I could not help but assign all Quirk publications a place of honor on the shelves of Goth Chick News.

It follows that in order to be the source of peculiar books Quirk must court very unusual authors, who by design, must be up to the task of…well… being quirky. This was made clear when I sought out the publisher’s booth at this year’s C2E2 event in Chicago, where I inquired whether or not The Resurrectionist would ever be followed by second book. I was informed the author had not submitted anything quite “strange enough” to date, but they would keep me informed.

I really do love these people.

What I was given instead was the first two works by an author who was currently living up to Quirk’s standards of “odd”; Mr. Grady Hendrix — Horrorstör, (a horror novel which takes place in an Ikea-like establishment and is documented inside an Ikea-like catalog for lack of a better description), and My Best Friend’s Exorcism.

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A Newly Completed Series: Heart of Dread by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston

A Newly Completed Series: Heart of Dread by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston

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Heart of Dread Frozen-small Heart of Dread Stolen-small Heart of Dread Golden-small

The husband-and-wife team of Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston have some enviable successes under their belt, including the 8-volume Blue Blood series and the Witches of East End novels, which were adapted for the Lifetime network. On her own, de la Cruz is also the author of The Au Pairs series, Angels on Sunset Boulevard, Girl Stays in the Picture, and many others. Michael Johnston is no slouch on his own either — he just sold his epic fantasy series to Tor, and the opening volume appears next year.

Their coauthored YA trilogy Heart of Dread opened with Frozen (2013), set in an imaginatively conceived post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, frozen under the ice. The thought of another dystopian YA series puts me to sleep, but Frozen caught my attention. Check out the intriguing jacket copy and see if you agree.

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Vintage Trash: I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA by Ted Mark

Vintage Trash: I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA by Ted Mark

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i-was-a-teeny-bopper-for-the-cia-movie-poster-9999-1020429335Many, many years ago I worked at a used bookstore called Bookmans in Tucson. Everybody from Arizona knows Bookmans. They have several stores around the state and they’re all as big as supermarkets, filled with used books, music, and games. Most books are half cover price, and employees got a 50% discount. Sometimes the manager would be like, “You did a good job today, Sean, take a book.”

I realized that I would never get another opportunity like that in my life and took full advantage. My library exploded with books on every topic imaginable. I also learned the joy of collecting vintage paperbacks, with the added joy of getting them for next to nothing.

So when I came across Ted Mark’s I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA I just had to get it. I’d never heard of the title or author before (I wasn’t about to forget that title!) and figured this would be something I’d never see again. I was right, I’ve never seen that book again, and now, 20 years later, I finally got around to reading it.

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Ancient Murders and Eerie Late-Night Funerals: The House by the Churchyard by Sheridan Le Fanu

Ancient Murders and Eerie Late-Night Funerals: The House by the Churchyard by Sheridan Le Fanu

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The House by the Churchyard-small The House by the Churchyard-back-small

It’s been a while since I’ve carved money out of my monthly Amazon budget to order a few more splendidly creepy titles from Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural line — or, as we like to call them, TOMAToS. I always have a few on my wishlist (they’re marvelously inexpensive), and in my last order I made room for Sheridan Le Fanu’s famous 1863 novel The House by the Churchyard.

The Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu was the author of Carmilla (1872), one of the earliest vampire novels, as well as the gothic classic Uncle Silas (1864), and the collection In a Glass Darkly (1872). He’s often called the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century, and M. R. James described him as “absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.” The House by the Churchyard is considered one of his finest works, and indeed, one of the greatest gothic horror novels of the era.

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Vintage Treasures: Journeys of the Catechist by Alan Dean Foster

Vintage Treasures: Journeys of the Catechist by Alan Dean Foster

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Carnivores of Light and Darkness-small Into the Thinking Kingdoms-small A Triumph of Souls-small

I don’t think Alan Dean Foster gets the respect he deserves. He’s an enormously gifted and prolific author who’s produced some of the most ambitious and successful series on the market, including the seventeen novels in the Pip & Flinx series (which my son read and re-read, awaiting each new volume anxiously), the 13 books of the Humanx Commonwealth, beginning with Nor Crystal Tears (1982), the 8 volumes of the Spellsinger saga, and many others. (My personal favorite Alan Dean Foster novel is probably Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (1978), one of his three Star Wars novels, but don’t hold that against me.)

For those of you looking for something maybe a little less ambitious and a little more manageable, Foster has also written several fine standalone trilogies, including Icerigger, The Founding of the Commonwealth, The Damned, and The Tipping Point. Perhaps his most highly regarded fantasy trilogy is Journeys of the Catechist, comprised of three novels published between 1998-2000 by Warner Aspect, all with covers by the great Keith Parkinson.

Carnivores of Light and Darkness (344 pages, $23 hardcover/$6.50 paperback, June 1998)
Into the Thinking Kingdoms (376 pages, $23 hardcover/$6.50 paperback, April 1999)
A Triumph of Souls (406 pages, $24.96 hardcover/$6.99 paperback, March 2000)

I was surprised and pleased to find a blurb on the back of my paperback editions from Todd Richmond at SF Site, who published a review of Into the Thinking Kingdoms back in 1999. I don’t think I’ll ever really get over how cool it is to discover blurbs I published on popular SF and fantasy books.

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Book Pairings: Who Fears Death & Jeweled Fire

Book Pairings: Who Fears Death & Jeweled Fire

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Who Fears Death-smallIn May 2015, I was at the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading in New York City when Nicole Kornher-Stace and Wesley Chu were featured; they were brilliant. Read their books.

But I’m not here to talk about them.

I’m here to talk about eavesdropping.

(Well, I’m here to talk about some books I read, but I’m gonna preface it by talking about eavesdropping.)

So, at KGB last May, I happened to be sitting at a table with an Agent and an Editor.

The Editor, she says to the Agent, “I really want to read fantasy novels with strong female friendships. WHY DON’T YOU SEND ME SOME?”

And the Agent, she sighs. “I’m trying. I’m trying.”

I found this conversation:

1.) SUPER REASSURING!!! I WRITE THOSE KINDS OF BOOKS! SOMEDAY AGENTS AND EDITORS WILL LOVE ME TOO!

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