Black Gate

Science fiction can be as strange and imaginative as the best of fantasy… and that certainly seems to be the case with this slender little neo-noir thriller from French writer Serge Brussolo. While he’s published multiple bestsellers in France, this is his first novel to be translated into English. Check it out.

In The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, lucid dreamers called mediums dive into their dreams to retrieve ectoplasms — sticky blobs with curiously soothing properties that are the only form of art in the world. The more elaborate the dream, the better the ectoplasm.

David Sarella is a medium whose dream identity is a professional thief. With his beautiful accomplice Nadia, he breaks into jewelry stores and museums, lifts precious diamonds, and when he wakes, the loot turns into ectoplasms to be sold and displayed.

Only the dives require an extraordinary amount of physical effort, and as David ages, they become more difficult. His dream world — or is it the real world? — grows unstable. Any dive could be his last, forever tearing him away from Nadia and their high-octane, Bond-like adventures.

David decides to go down one final time, in the deepest, most extravagant dive ever attempted. But midway through, he begins to lose control, and the figures in the massive painting he’s trying to steal suddenly come to life… and start shooting.

The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome was translated by Edward Gauvin and published by Melville House on January 19, 2016. It is 196 pages, priced at $24.95 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Christopher King.

David Neil Lee wrote about “the most terrifying of all labor-saving devices” in Chainsaws: A History; his first novel was Commander Zero. With The Midnight Games, he offers us something very interesting indeed: a young adult novel of an adventurous lad in southern Ontario who stumbles on a cult trying to summon the Great Old Ones to Earth in the unused stadium near his home.

In the hardscrabble east end of Hamilton Ontario, young Nate Silva has grown up with the reassuring racket of football games from nearby Ivor Wynne Stadium. But now strange noises and music boom from the stadium late at night, and the air throbs with the chanting of excited crowds. When Nate sneaks into one of these “midnight games,” he is thrown headlong into a movement spearheaded by the secret Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods, who are summoning to Earth the monstrous Great Old Ones who ruled the planet long ago.

In this thrilling young adult novel, David Neil Lee captures the “Cthulhu Mythos” of horror author H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), and unleashes it in gritty, post-industrial Hamilton. Pitted against the worshippers of the mind-bending extraterrestrial Yog-Sothoth, Nate finds unexpected allies as he is pursued by savage alien creatures, the murderous Hounds of Tindalos, and the desperate minions of the Great Old Ones.

This is precisely what the world needs: an action-packed Young Adult Cthulhu Mythos novel. You know it’s true.

The Midnight Games was published by Wolsak and Wynn on October 27, 2015. It is 200 pages, priced at $12 in paperback. Learn more at David Neil Lee’s website.