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New Treasures: The Society of Blood by Mark Morris

New Treasures: The Society of Blood by Mark Morris

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The Wolves of London-small The Society of Blood-small The Wraiths of War-small

I first heard of Mark Morris in 1989 with the publication of his first novel Toady (called The Horror Club in its heavily abridged US edition). I tried to scare up a copy through mail-order bookseller Mark V. Ziesing (because that’s the way you ordered books in the late 80s), but it had already become a hot property, and Mark wasn’t able to get one for me. Sudden scarcity and rapid price appreciation was the way of things in genre collecting in the late 80s; it kept things interesting. I never did track down a copy of Toady, but ever since I’ve kept an eye on Mark Morris.

Morris has written over a dozen novels since, including Stitch (1991), The Immaculate (1993), Longbarrow (1997), It Sustains (2013) and Horror Hospital (2014), in addition to nine Doctor Who novels and audio plays (see his complete back catalog on his website). His latest is the Obsidian Heart trilogy from Titan Books, the tale of reformed ex-con Alex Locke, whose attempt to steal a strange artifact from an old man ends with him on the run from the Wolves of London, a team of unearthly assassins. Sarah Pinborough says, “Mark Morris not only crosses genre boundaries, but creates an entirely new territory in the landscape of dark fiction. Part crime novel, part fantasy, part science fiction – entirely engrossing.” The complete series is:

The Wolves of London (400 pages, $14.95, October 7, 2014)
The Society of Blood (297 pages, $14.95, October 13, 2015)
The Wraiths of War (400 pages, $14.95, October 11, 2016)

Each volume in the series has been released in October; the second, The Society of Blood, three months ago. The last is due later this year.

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A Crossover Too Far

A Crossover Too Far

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Combined-ForcesBulldog_Drummond_1st_edition_cover,_1920A. J. Smithers is a respected author of fiction and non-fiction titles with a special dedication to the Clubland fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan, and H. C. “Sapper” McNeile. His 1983 novel, Combined Forces was subtitled Being the Latter-Day Adventures of Richard Hannay, “Bulldog” Drummond, and Berry and Co. Clubland literary scholar Richard Usborne praised the book and Smithers’ willingness to expose the dark sides of its characters’ lives. Wold Newtonians sometimes seek out this rare work because of the literary crossover within its pages. I approached the book first as a Bulldog Drummond completist and secondly as a fan of Richard Hannay.

While most people know of The Thirty-Nine Steps thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated film version, they are unaware of how different the character of Richard Hannay is in John Buchan’s fiction. Most are unaware that Hannay appeared in a total of seven spy thriller novels by Buchan published between 1915 and 1940. Unlike many long-running series, Buchan chose to have Hannay age in real time and grow as a person as he marries and settles down and even retires. Buchan’s approach appears to have influenced some of Gerald Fairlie’s modifications to Hugh Drummond’s character and life as he continued the series after Sapper’s death.

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Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Pirate’s Prophecy by Chris A. Jackson

Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Pirate’s Prophecy by Chris A. Jackson

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Pirate's Honor-small Pirate's Promise-small Pirate's Prophecy-small

For the past three years Chris A. Jackson, author of The Warcaster Chronicles, has been writing an ambitious fantasy saga for the Pathfinder Tales line, featuring pirate captain Torius Vin and his snake-bodied naga navigator Celeste, who forsake pirating to chase slave galleys and set the prisoners free. According to his bio, Jackson is a marine biologist who, with his wife Anne, has lived on a 45-foot sailboat since 2009, cruising the Caribbean and writing full time. Sounds like an ideal lifestyle to write pirate sagas to me.

The series began in 2013 with Pirate’s Promise, and the third volume, Pirate’s Prophecy, will be released next week from Tor.

Pirate’s Honor (400 pages, $9.99, $6.99 in digital format, May 14, 2013)
Pirate’s Promise (400 pages, $14.99, $6.99 in digital format, January 6, 2015) — cover by Michael Ivan
Pirates Prophecy (357 pages, 14.99, $9.99 in digital format, February 2, 2016) — cover by Remko Troost

The first two were published by Paizo; Pirates Prophecy is the first in the series to be published by Tor Books.

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You May Be A Writer

You May Be A Writer

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MeredithDo you enjoy planning? When you want to give a party, do you start making lists? Thinking about the menu? Who to invite? When there’s a trip coming up, are there lists? Are you usually the first one packed? Or have you at least given considerable thought to your packing?

Is organizing an event almost more fun than the event itself? Then you may be a writer.

Do you think planning’s for squares? Do you decide at 6:00 pm to have a party and let people know via Twitter? Are you rushing through the airport at the last minute with your passport in one hand and a pair of (mismatched) socks in the other?

Are you all about the spontaneity? Seizing the moment? Then you may be a writer.

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Book Pairings: Sorcerer to the Crown and My Beautiful Enemy

Book Pairings: Sorcerer to the Crown and My Beautiful Enemy

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BGsorcerer-to-the-crownYou know, way back when, I had such MASTERFUL IDEAS for this ongoing Book Pairings blog. I had A List. It was great.

Unfortunately, I texted it to John O’Neill Once Upon a Hallowed Age, and then promptly forgot all about it. Sneaking back up to the idea now, I realize that I read all those books Oh So Very Long Ago, and I’d have to read them all over again in order to do the pairings properly.

Not that it would be a bad thing…

BGQueenVictoriaI’d gotten off to a pretty good start with my first book pairing, which compared Ancillary Justice and Cordelia’s Honor, and my second, when I stood an anthology called Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells side by side with Sharon Shinn’s Royal Airs.

They were BRILLIANT! And long. And then I sort of… pooped out.

I dunno. I got busy. New job. Crowdfunded for/put together a couple of EPs. Short story collection came out. Where did 2015 GO anyway?

But recently, I read this BEAUTIFUL book– and it reminded me of this OTHER great book, and I just had to write about them.

You know they’re good when you HAVE to write about ’em, right?

Okay! Okay! Since all y’all at Black Gate love your Sword and Sorcery, OH HEAVENS TO MURGATROID, have I got a pairing for you!

One of each. One Sword. One Sorcery. Full of WOMEN! And WIT! And SUBVERSIVE WORLD VIEWS! And, oh, yes — LE ROMANCE, MES PETITES!!!

Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho. And My Beautiful Enemy, by Sherry Thomas.

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Goth Chick News: Tim Burton’s Used Napkins… Yes, Please

Goth Chick News: Tim Burton’s Used Napkins… Yes, Please

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Things-You-Think-About-in-a-Bar-The-Napkin-Art-of-Tim-Burton-small

When I got hold of this news, I was about to type “pinch me!” But then I realized that phraseology would not end well here.

Suffice to say, this is at the “epic” end of the coolness scale.

On Tuesday, Steeles Publishing announced their new title, The Napkin Art of Tim Burton; Things You Think About in a Bar. Which is literally what the title claims. The book is a collection of doodles Tim Burton has done on napkins… in bars.

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The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Dark Descent and The World Treasury of Science Fiction

The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Dark Descent and The World Treasury of Science Fiction

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The Dark Descent-small The World Treasury of Science Fiction-small

We lost David Hartwell on January 20th. This is our second article in a series that looks back at one of the most productive careers in our industry.

Last time we looked at two of David’s earliest anthologies, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, released in 1988 and 1989. Here I want examine two more monumental anthologies he produced in the late 80s, both seminal to the field: The Dark Descent (October 1987) and The World Treasury of Science Fiction (January 1989).

The Dark Descent, subtitled The Evolution of Horror, is one of the most important horror anthologies ever published. Weighing in at a massive 1104 pages, it’s one of the most detailed and insightful surveys of horror fiction we have. Showcasing 56 of the best horror stories ever written, it traces the development of modern horror from the classic work Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, Charles Dickens and H. P. Lovecraft, all the way to Shirley Jackson, Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, and Stephen King. The Dark Decent won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology.

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The Series Series: Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

The Series Series: Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

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The Shards of Heaven-small[This review may contain trace amounts of David Bowie.]

The jacket copy for Michael Livingtson’s Shards of Heaven sounded promising. I asked for the ARC immediately, and bounced with joy when I found it in my mailbox. Alas, the press release tucked into the book described it as Dan Brown meets Indiana Jones.

Who am I to say Dan Brown is unreadable? Clearly millions of people find him otherwise. To me, though, Brown’s sentences and paragraphs are so relentlessly clunky, ugly, and boring, I am unable to care what happens to any of Brown’s characters. My one attempt to read The Da Vinci Code found me fighting the urge to throw the book across the room, several times on every page.

So the press release made me fear for the well-being of Michael Livingston’s novel. I also feared for my own domestic tranquility: Now that I have children, my household’s penalty for throwing books is a five-minute time-out.

Which was I to believe? The blockbuster-bluster elevator pitch, or the cover copy?

[A]s civil war rages from Rome to Alexandria, and vast armies and navies battle for supremacy, a secret conflict may truly shape the course of history: two sons of Caesar have set out on a ruthless quest to find and control the Shards of Heaven, legendary artifacts said to possess the very power of the gods — or of the one God. Caught up in these cataclysmic events, and the hunt for the Shards, are a pair of exiled Roman legionnaires, a Greek librarian of uncertain loyalties, assassins, spies, slaves . . . and the ten-year-old daughter of Cleopatra herself.

Shards of Heaven has so many of the things Black Gate readers love — epic sweep, battle and brawl, ancient secrets, women one underestimates at one’s peril, and world-shaking magic. Michael Livingston has some nice writing chops. The secret history clearly has a mountain of real historical research to give it depth. How can such a book go wrong?

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New Treasures: Kurt Vonnegut: Novels 1987-1997

New Treasures: Kurt Vonnegut: Novels 1987-1997

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Kurt Vonnegut Novels 1987 - 1997-smallThe Library of America,  a publisher with a fine reputation as a nonprofit cultural institution, has done three previous omnibus volumes of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction, collecting a dozen novels and many stories published between 1950 and 1985. The fourth and final volume, published earlier this month, gathers his last three completed novels into one archival quality hardcover.

Here are the final three novels of the visionary master who defined a generation. Bluebeard (1987) is the colorful history of a phenomenally gifted realist painter who, in the 1950s, betrayed his artistic vision for commercial success. Now, at seventy-one, he writes his memoirs and plots his revenge on the worldly forces that conspired to corrupt his talent. In Hocus Pocus (1990), a freewheeling prison memoir by a Vietnam vet and disgraced academic, Vonnegut brings his indelible voice to a range of still-burning issues — free speech, racism, environmental calamity, deindustrialization, and globalization. Timequake (1997), the author’s last completed novel, is part science fiction yarn (starring perennial protagonist Kilgore Trout), part diary of the mid-1990s (starring the author himself). The result is a perfect fusion of Vonnegut’s two signature genres, the satirical fantasy and the personal essay, and a literary magician’s fond farewell to his readers and his craft. Rounded out with a selection of short nonfiction pieces intimately related to these three works, this volume presents the final word from the artist who the San Francisco Chronicle, reviewing Timequake, called an “old warrior who will not accept the dehumanizing of politics, the blunting of conscience, and the glibness of the late-twentieth-century Western world.”

Kurt Vonnegut: Novels 1987-1997 was published by Library of America on January 19, 2016. It is 754 pages, priced at $35 in hardcover. There is no digital edition. Our previous coverage of Library of America includes:

The Library of America Publishes Elmore Leonard
A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, edited by Peter Straub

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

When Morocco Really Was Adventurous: Reading Lords of the Atlas

When Morocco Really Was Adventurous: Reading Lords of the Atlas

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9780330024365-uk-300For people who have never been there, Morocco conjures up images of decadent ports, imposing casbahs, mysterious medinas, and mountains filled with bandits. It’s a mystique the tour companies like to perpetuate for this modern and rapidly changing country.

I feel like a bit of a cheat tagging my series of Morocco posts as “adventure travel,” but I’m a blogger and that tag brings in the hits. While Morocco is safe and easy to travel in, it wasn’t so long ago that the mystique was the reality. A classic study of this freebooting era is Gavin Maxwell’s Lords of the Atlas.

Researched in the 1950s, it looks at the twilight era of the old Morocco. The book opens with a slave unlocking the gate to an aging, all-but-abandoned Casbah in the remote Atlas Mountains. This man was one of the last retainers of the Glaoui family, which for two generations grew an empire in Morocco’s rugged mountains, became pashas of important cities, and even played kingmaker.

Maxwell has an eye for lurid detail, especially beheadings. You can feel the writer’s enthusiasm when he speaks of how, just a little over a century ago, the city gates of Morocco would be festooned with the heads of criminals and traitors. The heads had been preserved in salt, a job reserved for the Jews. The Jewish quarter even earned the name mellah, Arabic for “salt.” Even well salted, the heads would eventually rot and fall down into the crowd below, once almost hitting a delegation from England.

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