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My Bookish Ways Interviews Howard Andrew Jones

My Bookish Ways Interviews Howard Andrew Jones

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Beyond the Pool of Stars-smallKristin Centorcelli, Editor in Chief at book blog My Bookish Ways, interviewed our Managing Editor this week about the release of his new Pathfinder Tales novel, Beyond the Pool of Stars. Here’s a snippet in which Howard talks about the Pathfinder setting.

Golarion is a rich and vibrant world, and part of why I was a fan of Paizo products long before I started working for them. It generally has a high medieval technological level, with magic intercalated into many aspects of various of the world’s cultures.

One of the reasons I set this book (and its sequel – more on that in a moment) down in tropical Sargava is that I wanted to take my readers to somewhere new. There are a lot of fantasy stories with elves and dwarves set in and around feudal societies with stone castles and mighty forests.

Mirian’s world is one of beaches and ships and the lap of waves, and the cool darkness of mysterious ocean depths. She doesn’t wear armor or carry a long sword, although she might carry a cutlass. She doesn’t contend with goblins or the fey, but with monsters of the deep and lizard folk, and even the prejudice of the colonial culture ruling her homeland. She’s of mixed race, but owing to her coloration the colonials see her as native.

Read the complete interview here, and see our previous coverage of Beyond the Pool of Stars here.

Pathfinder Tales: Beyond the Pool of Stars was published by Tor Books on October 6, 2015. It is 347 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Tyler Jacobson (see the complete wraparound art here). Read more at Howard’s website.

New Treasures: Ill-considered Expeditions, edited by Neil Baker

New Treasures: Ill-considered Expeditions, edited by Neil Baker

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Ill-considered Expeditions-smallNeil Baker’s Short Sharp Shocks anthologies have proven to be a great deal of fun. Neil has a flair for an inventive premise — and, as it turns out, a real eye for writing talent. The first, Amok!, focused on the modern boogeyman, and Stomping Grounds! featured monsters causing large-scale mayhem and misery. But I think Ill-considered Expeditions is his best idea yet. Here’s Neil, from his introduction:

The faithful reader (and I know there’s at least one of you) will be well aware that my anthology themes are a frightening echo of my childhood influences, and Ill-considered Expeditions is no exception. As a child of the 60s and 70s, my visual diet included Johnny Weissmuller’s brutal Tarzan films and Ron Ely’s slightly more child-friendly TV series. I delighted in the exploits of hapless colonials hacking their way through unforgiving jungles, catching spears in the gut and falling into all manner of native traps that invariably involved impalement, boiling or splitting in half. I must admit that my most favorite moments were when the team of intelligent mountain gorillas that usually showed up along the trial hurled rocks down onto the porters, forcing the intrepid explorers to not only reconsider their decision to forge on, but to carry their own luggage.

With modern day discoveries such as the giant crystal caverns of Chihuahua, or the primeval, subterranean caves found in Vietnam, our collective imaginations are running rampant; who knows what manner of beast or secret society lurks in the uncharted shadows? What treasures await the bold? More to the point, what horrible booby-traps and grisly fates await them?

Ill-considered Expeditions (Short Sharp Shocks, Volume 3) contains 16 all-new stories from Josh Reynolds, James Dorr, Steve Foreman, Ahmed A. Khan, and others. It was published by April Moon Books on August 28, 2015. It is 228 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paper and $3.49 for the digital version. The cover is by Neil Baker. Order directly from April Moon Books.

Announcing the Winners of Carter & Lovecraft

Announcing the Winners of Carter & Lovecraft

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Carter & Lovecraft-smallEarlier this month we invited Black Gate readers to enter to win one of two pre-release copies of Jonathan L. Howard’s new novel of Lovecraftian mystery, Carter & Lovecraft, on sale this month from Thomas Dunne Books. To enter, all you had to do was submit a one-sentence suggestion for the ideal Lovecraft team-up — and what dark horrors your dream team should investigate.

We don’t have room to present all the entries here, but we can offer up some of the better ones. The very first one we received was from Jeff Lowrey, with this remarkably concise suggestion:

Gilligan and Agent 99

The mind boggles. Next up is John T. Curtis, who reaches deep into pulp history for his suggestion:

Seabury Quinn’s character Jules de Grandin and Sax Rohmer’s character Moris Klaw should team up to investigate the disappearance of Harley Warren, as related in Lovecraft’s tale “The Statement of Randolph Carter.”

Sounds like an epic TV mini-series to me. John Burt suggests something a little more modern:

A Constantine – Lovecraft teamup, where they determine whether nicotine or depression is worse.

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The Blood of Martyrs: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Sabbat Martyr

The Blood of Martyrs: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Sabbat Martyr

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Sabbat Martyr-smallI mentioned last time that, out of the Gaunt’s Ghosts series thus far, I found Straight Silver the closest thing to a weak link. I have to give credit where credit is due, though: any novel that sets up a book like Sabbat Martyr is a novel I’m glad to have found.

The Ghosts novels seem to be roughly divisible into broad arcs. The first three books, retrospectively collected as The Founding, where an introduction to the broad cast of characters and a training ground for Abnett to find his groove as an author of military science fiction. The second arc, The Saint, began with Honor Guard, and finds its completion and climax in Sabbat Martyr. Sabbat Martyr picks up on the spiritual themes of Honor Guard, as well as key subplots from Guns of Tanith and Straight Silver, and loops them all together into a book that is easily the best Ghosts novel so far, and stands among the best books of its type I’ve read.

There’s a brief page at the beginning of each book, excerpted from a later Imperial history of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, that briefly gives us a big picture of how the overall war is going. Usually, these don’t have much direct relevance to the plot, and are mostly there for flavor. The one for Sabbat Martyr, though, informs us that the Crusade is overstretched, bogged down in an assault on the key fortress world Morlond, and vulnerable to counter-attacks along its flanks. Urlock Gaur, Chaos Archon, is engaged at the front, but his lieutenants are circling like sharks to exploit weakness in the Imperial position.

In short, the Crusade needs a miracle.

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Vintage Treasures: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick

Vintage Treasures: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick

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The Iron Dragon's Daughter-small The Iron Dragon's Daughter-trade The Iron Dragon's Daughter Fantasy Masterworks-small

Michael Swanwick’s third novel, Stations of the Tide (1991), was nominated for both the Hugo and Clarke Awards, and won the Nebula for Best Novel of the year. He followed it three years later with a very different book — a highly original fantasy in a bizarre, almost steampunkish setting, a place where elves use humans, trolls and dwarves as slave labor to construct the giant iron dragons used as war machines. When the children meet to plot the death of their supervisor, and a whispered voice leads young Jane to an old and broken junkyard dragon, she learns that escape is possible. But untold wonders and terrors both lie beyond the factory gates…

A human changeling child coming of age, in a world of violence and monsters, Jane toils unceasingly alongside trolls, dwarves, shifters and feys in the dank, stygian bowels of a steam dragon plant — helping to construct the massive black iron flying machines the elvan rulers use for waging war. Then one day, the cold, tantalizing voice of a rusting, discarded dragon speaks softly to Jane — whispering to her of freedom and vengeance… and the terrible wonders awaiting her far beyond the factory gates… Michael Swanwick ushers us into a remarkable realm of darkest fantasy, erotic dreams and industrial magicks — on a stunningly original and hair-raising ride toward the obliteration of another history and the end of all things.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter was nominated for both the Clarke and World Fantasy Awards, and placed second in Locus magazine’s annual poll for Best Fantasy Novel of the Year (behind Peter S. Beagle’s The Innkeeper’s Song). It had one sequel, The Dragons of Babel, released over a decade later in 2008. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter was published in hardcover by AvoNova in January 1994, with a cover by Dorian Vallejo (above left), reprinted in trade paperback by Avon in September 1997 with a cover by J. K. Potter (middle), and released as #42 in the Millennium Fantasy Masterworks series in 2004 (above right, cover by Steve Stone). It is currently out of print.

Kickstarting a Belated Black Gate Story: The Imlen Bastard

Kickstarting a Belated Black Gate Story: The Imlen Bastard

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"Aliosha Popovich" by Kate Baylay, from a collection of Russian Fairy Tales. Used by kind permission of the artist.
“Aliosha Popovich” by Kate Baylay, from a collection of Russian Fairy Tales. Used by kind permission of the artist.

Back in the age of print magazines, I made my first professional sale to a fellow named John O’Neill who published a gorgeous quarterly called Black Gate. We went through three deep revisions on that manuscript, a process we both enjoyed enough that, after I finally produced a version of “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” good enough for John to buy, he asked if I had anything else featuring that heroine. And I did. To our surprise, my novella “The Imlen Bastard” needed only a little polish to be ready for print. And so it took its place in the publication queue. Forthcoming from Black Gate, I said of it in my author bio all over the internet, for a few years.

Those years were hard on print magazines, and they weren’t much kinder to online fiction markets. “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” appeared in BG‘s last print issue. Ultimately, John stopped publishing fiction online before “The Imlen Bastard” could make its debut here.

But to me it’ll always be a Black Gate story.

So when I found an artist, Kate Baylay, whose work felt like my favorite old BG print covers — luscious, menacing, full of subtle story implications — I knew I’d found the right cover artist for “The Imlen Bastard.” Everything else I wanted to do with the self-publishing project that has grown up around the novella came together for me quickly after that. Best of all, Kate Baylay embraced the manuscript, and we’ve had so much fun going over the story together to find the most iconic moments for interior illustrations.

Then I enlisted superstar editor Betsy Mitchell — now retired from Del Rey after a career of editing people like Naomi Novik, Michael Chabon, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler — to give the novella an editorial boost. I figured, there’s a difference between standing as the longest piece in a magazine issue and standing alone as a book. I’m still kind of amazed that she took me on as a freelance client, when she’s in a position to work only on manuscripts she really enjoys. So that boded well.

At first, we all agreed that I’d launch a Kickstarter campaign over the summer, but then I got shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. I held off on self-publishing for a few months so I’d know whether to say Finalist or Winner in my promotional material. After the award, I needed to readjust my hubris levels — a story that’s done me the kindness of coming to me to be written deserves the best promotion I can give it, and now I had to work up more brazenness than ever before on my stories’ behalf. Brazenness is harder than it looks. This month, with the thank-you notes for the award all written and sent out, and a trophy to feature in my Kickstarter video, it was finally time.

I clicked on the launch button at noon. You can find the campaign here.

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Take a Peek at The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History

Take a Peek at The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History

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The Art of Horror

Stephen Jones’s The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History, a gorgeous full-cover coffee table book, was published by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books in hardcover on September 1, 2015. It’s a beautiful retrospective of horror in theater, cinema, pulps, paintings, book illustrations and comics, and it’s the kind of book you really need to see to fully appreciate.

I’ve collected a handful of full color images from the book to give you a small taste of the wonders that await you in this oversized, 260-page tome. Have a look below (click on the images for full-sized versions.)

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Future Treasures: Here & There by Joshua V. Scher

Future Treasures: Here & There by Joshua V. Scher

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Here & There Joshua V Scher-smallJoshua V. Scher is a successful playwright with multiple stage productions to his credit. His TV credits include the original pilot Jigsaw. His film I’m OK is in post-production, and his play The Footage was developed by Pressman Film.

His debut novel Here & There, to be released early next month by 47North, is an intriguing thriller that looks at the emerging science of teleportation… and a strange accident that tears a family apart.

It was supposed to be a simple proof of concept. The physics were sound. Over one hundred teleportation experiments had already been successfully performed…

Debate rages over whether the Reidier Test’s disastrous outcome resulted from human error, government conspiracy, or sabotage. No one has actual knowledge of the truth. But hidden from the public eye, there exists a government report commissioned from criminal psychologist Dr. Hilary Kahn, chronicling the events that took place.

Dr. Kahn disappeared without a trace.

Now her son Danny has unearthed and revealed the report, fueling controversy over the details of Reidier’s quest to reforge the fabric of reality and hold his family together. Exposed with little chance of finding his mother, Danny goes underground to investigate. But nothing can prepare him for what he discovers.

In this thrilling saga, a paradigm-shattering feat may alter humanity’s future as quantum entanglement and teleportation collide.

Here & There will be published by 47North on November 1, 2015. It is 661 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback, and $5.99 for the digital version.

New Treasures: The House by Christina Lauren

New Treasures: The House by Christina Lauren

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The House Christina Lauren-small“Christina Lauren” is the pseudonym for the famously successful writing team of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, who co-write both YA and adult fiction, and so far have produced an amazing eleven New York Times bestsellers, including Beautiful Bastard, Beautiful Stranger, and Dirty Rowdy Thing.

Their latest is the tale of a particularly nasty haunted house, one that seems determined to separate teens Delilah Blue and Gavin Timothy. Delilah was sent to boarding school seven years ago for beating up the bullies who attacked her friend Gavin. Now’s she back in Kansas and her reunion with Gavin has blossomed into romance. But their new relationship is threatened by a force uncomfortably close to home.

His shirt is black, jeans are black, and shaggy black hair falls into his eyes. And when Gavin looks up at Delilah, the dark eyes shadowed with bluish circles seem to flicker to life.

He lives in that house, the one at the edge of town. Spooky and maybe haunted. Something worse than haunted. And Gavin is trapped by its secrets.

Delilah and Gavin can’t resist each other. But staying together will exact a price beyond their imagining.

The House was published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers on October 6, 2015. It is 384 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover, and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Lizzy Bromley.

Sam Spade and the Pursuit of Empty Dreams

Sam Spade and the Pursuit of Empty Dreams

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NOTE: The following article was first published on February 21, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

First FalconFalcon pbkMuch of what has been written about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon focuses on the novel as groundbreaking in its realistic portrayal of detective work. More in-depth literary studies tend to focus on the significance of Hammett’s shift in protagonist from the incorruptible and nameless Continental Op of his earlier work to the jaded self-portrait of the author as Sam Spade. In my view, this transition is primarily noteworthy in that Hammett’s protagonist changed from an idealized conception of the man he might have become had he remained a Pinkerton Operative (the Continental Op is based on Hammett’s boss during his stint with the Pinkerton Agency) to a more self-reflective portrayal of a man mired in moral conflict. Hammett’s own moral crisis would color his fiction from this point until he resolved his dilemma and settled into a life alternating his celebrity status with reclusiveness – a life whose one constant was Hammett’s complete lack of creative output for his remaining 27 years.

Many have speculated why Hammett’s creativity dried up when he and his muse and mistress Lillian Hellman had settled comfortably into something approaching unwedded bliss as the Nick and Nora Charles of the real world. My own opinion has been that once freed of the conflict of whether or not to walk a path of integrity or give in to the encroaching corruption that constantly assailed his world, Hammett had nothing further to draw upon for inspiration. Resolution was tantamount to becoming a spent force and Hammett was finished as a writer. The fact that he realized this dilemma was inescapable lies at the heart of both The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key in their pursuit of empty dreams incapable of satisfying the characters whose lust is so great they are willing to die for or kill in their futile quests.

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