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New Treasures: Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

New Treasures: Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

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Something Rich and Strange-small Something Rich and Strange-back-small

Ron Rash is the author of Serena, a New York Times bestseller which was made into a Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper film with the same title in 2014. He’s also the author of The Cove and Above the Waterfall, and is a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize.

I was tipped off to his short story collection Something Rich and Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. Although the stories within are not genre fiction, there’s plenty here to reward readers of weird fiction. Entertainment Weekly said “This anthology of Rash’s earthy, often eerie short stories is like a forest you can get lost in for hours, small but affecting tales of poverty, addiction, pride, love, and despair threaded with life-altering acts of violence.” And NPR said “Rich and strange are two words that aptly apply to this book. I have two other words to continue with: Simply beautiful… some of the stories are so searing, it’s as if someone has taken a stick from a blazing fire and pressed it into your hand.”

Something Rich and Strange was published by Ecco on August 11, 2015. It is 448 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback, and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Jamie Heiden. Click the covers above for bigger versions.

Future Treasures: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Future Treasures: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt-smallLast year Dutch writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt won a Hugo Award for his story “The Day the World Turned Upside Down.” During my lengthy discussion with Tor editor Liz Gorinsky, who edited Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem (which won the Hugo for Best Novel last year), I learned that she was also editing Heuvelt’s first book to be published in English, the horror novel HEX.

Liz seems to have an unerring sense for foreign SF and fantasy that will appeal to an American audience. I trust her taste implicitly, and I find myself very intrigued by HEX. It was a bestselling novel in its original Dutch version; the English edition arrives in hardcover from Tor next week.

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

HEX will be published by Tor on April 26. It is 384 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. It was translated by Nancy Forest-Flier.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Tony Hillerman

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Tony Hillerman

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My all-time favorite coffee table book
My all-time favorite coffee table book

Last week, I wrote about John Cleese’s Elementary, My Dear Watson. I’m struggling through my re-watch of his The Strange Case of The End of Civilization as We Know It (I thought it was bad on first viewing: nothing has changed my mind this time around), so that isn’t ready to go yet. So, here’s the first of several posts related to a Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster: the late Tony Hillerman.

“I was writing episodically because this short book stretched about three years from 1967 to 1970 from first paragraph to final revision – with progress frequently interrupted by periods of sanity – probably induced by fatigue and sleepiness. Most of my efforts at fiction were done after dinner when the kids were abed, papers were graded and the telephone wasn’t ringing.

Sometimes, in those dark hours, I would realize that the scene I finished was bad, the story wasn’t moving, the book would never be published, and I couldn’t afford wasting time I could be using to write nonfiction people would buy.

Then I would pull the paper from the typewriter (remember those?), put the manuscript back in the box, and the box on the shelf to sit for days, or some times a week, until job stress eased and the urge to tell the story returned.”

So did Tony Hillerman, decorated World War II combat veteran, former newspaper reporter and then-current university teacher, very slowly, write The Blessing Way. Hillerman is not a Navajo. He’s a Caucasian who grew up in a small Oklahoma village on land belonging to the Potawatomi tribe. He went to the local Indian school for first through eighth grade and from an early age had no prejudices against Indians. They were just kids, like him. It shaped the character that let him write about the Navajos in a realistic and sympathetic manner. They aren’t simply stereotypes in a mystery book.

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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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