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New Treasures: The Devil’s Only Friend by Dan Wells

New Treasures: The Devil’s Only Friend by Dan Wells

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The Devil's Only Friend-smallDan Wells’ novel, I Am Not A Serial Killer, featuring monster-killing teenage sociopath John Cleaver, was the first novel in a trilogy. It was followed by Mr. Monster (2010) and I Don’t Want To Kill You (2011). Wells became a New York Times bestseller with Ruins, the third novel in his YA Partials series. Now he returns to the John Cleaver series with the first novel in a brand new trilogy, The Devil’s Only Friend.

John Wayne Cleaver hunts demons: they’ve killed his neighbors, his family, and the girl he loves, but in the end he’s always won. Now he works for a secret government kill team, using his gift to hunt and kill as many monsters as he can…

…but the monsters have noticed, and the quiet game of cat and mouse is about to erupt into a full scale supernatural war.

John doesn’t want the life he’s stuck with. He doesn’t want the FBI bossing him around, he doesn’t want his only friend imprisoned in a mental ward, and he doesn’t want to face the terrifying cannibal who calls himself The Hunter. John doesn’t want to kill people. But as the song says, you can’t always get what you want. John has learned that the hard way; his clothes have the stains to prove it.

When John again faces evil, he’ll know what he has to do.

I’m not the only reader in my house, and I have to admit I wasn’t the one who discovered The Devil’s Only Friend. My daughter brought it home from the bookstore on Saturday, and has been glued to it ever since. Maybe I’ll get her to do a review.

The Devil’s Only Friend was published simultaneously in hardcover and trade paperback by Tor Books on June 16, 2015. It is 304 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, $14.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital version.

The Omnibus Volumes of Murray Leinster

The Omnibus Volumes of Murray Leinster

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Med Ship-small Planets of Adventure-small A Logic Named Joe-small

Last week, in my article on The Omnibus Volumes of James H. Schmitz, I noted how Eric Flint edited seven omnibus volumes collecting the science fiction of James H. Schmitz, starting in 2000. Those books were successful enough that Eric expanded his project to include other great SF and fantasy writers of the mid-20th Century.

And boy, did he expand it. By the time he was done, Baen had published volumes dedicated to A. E. Van Vogt, Michael Shea, Howard L. Myers, Keith Laumer, Randall Garrett, Christopher Anvil, Cordwainer Smith, Lois McMaster Bujold, A. Bertam Chandler, P.C. Hogdell, Andre Norton, and many others. Today I want to look at the three volumes dedicated to Murray Leinster, “The Dean of Science Fiction,” whose work I think still has enormous appeal even today.

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Vintage Treasures: The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories

Vintage Treasures: The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories

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The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories-small The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories-back-small

The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories is one of the oldest paperbacks I own. It is, in fact, one of the oldest fantasy paperbacks produced in the United States. It was published in 1941, just two years after Pocket Books released the first paperbacks in 1939, revolutionizing the American publishing industry. And like a lot of old things, it’s a little strange and doesn’t do things in a familiar way.

For one thing, as it was one of the first paperback anthologies ever produced, apparently no one thought the name of the editor was important. Some folks assume it was W. L. Parker, who wrote the intro, and others assume W. Bob Holland, but no one is really sure.

Also, it’s called The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories not because it contains The Haunted Hotel (by Wilkie Collins) and twenty-five more stories about ghosts, but because it’s actually a mash-up of two previously published books: the novel The Haunted Hotel (by Wilkie Collins), and Twenty-Five Ghost Stories. So naturally, the page numbering re-starts halfway through the book. In the early days of paperbacks, publishers were trying all kinds of wacky things. Except original titles, apparently. Because, hey, let’s not go crazy.

And another thing. Have a look at the strange back cover (click for a bigger image). Today, we think of the back cover as, you know, a great place to tell prospective buyers a little about the book in their hands. In 1941, you mostly told readers what the hell a paperback book was. You imparted critical information, like “opaque paper,” “delightful flexibility in handling,” and “stained on all three sides with fast book dyes.” It’s easy to mock the primitive publishers of 1941 today, but let’s face it — if they hadn’t sold their early readers on paperbacks, you and I would be reading books exclusively in hardcover and clay tablets.

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Future Treasures: The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

Future Treasures: The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

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The House-of-Shattered-Wings-smallI’ve been a fan of Aliette de Bodard since the publication of her Aztec mystery novels, collected in Obsidian & Blood, so I was thrilled to have the chance to meet her at the Nebulas last month. She is articulate, funny, and absolutely charming in person, and I’m very excited about her upcoming fantasy novel, The House of Shattered Wings, to be published by Roc next month.

Aliette has won the Nebula Award (twice), the Locus Award, and the 2010 British Science Fiction Award, and has been nominated multiple times for the Hugo. The House of Shattered Wings is set in a devastated Paris ruled by fallen angels, and tells a tale of the War in Heaven, divine power and deep conspiracy…

In the late twentieth century, the streets of Paris are lined with haunted ruins, the aftermath of a Great War between arcane powers. The Grand Magasins have been reduced to piles of debris, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and rubble and the remnants of the spells that tore the city apart. But those that survived still retain their irrepressible appetite for novelty and distraction, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over France’s once grand capital.

Once the most powerful and formidable, House Silverspires now lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls.

Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen angel; an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction; and a resentful young man wielding spells of unknown origin. They may be Silverspires’ salvation — or the architects of its last, irreversible fall. And if Silverspires falls, so may the city itself.

The House of Shattered Wings will be published by Roc on August 18, 2015. It is 402 pages, priced at $26.95 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The cover art is uncredited.

New Treasures: Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher

New Treasures: Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher

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Beyond Redemption-smallWe all love to see new novels by our favorite writers. But this industry also warmly embraces new authors, especially when they bring something fresh and new. The latest hot buzz I’m hearing is for Canadian author Michael R. Fletcher, who’s just released his second novel, Beyond Redemption, the first in a gritty new series set in a world where delusion becomes reality… and the fulfillment of humanity’s desires may well prove to be its undoing.

When belief defines reality, those with the strongest convictions — the crazy, the obsessive, the delusional — have the power to shape the world. And someone is just mad enough to believe he can create a god . . .

Violent and dark, the world is filled with the Geistrekranken — men and women whose delusions manifest. Sustained by their own belief — and the beliefs of those around them — they can manipulate their surroundings. For the High Priest Konig, that means creating order out of the chaos in his city-state, leading his believers to focus on one thing: helping a young man, Morgen, ascend to become a god. A god they can control.

Trouble is, there are many who would see a god in their thrall, including the High Priest’s own doppelgangers, a Slaver no one can resist, and three slaves led by possibly the only sane man left. As these forces converge on the boy, there’s one more obstacle: time is running out. Because as the delusions become more powerful, the also become harder to control. The fate of the Geistrekranken is to inevitably find oneself in the Afterdeath. The question, then, is:

Who will rule there?

According to Fletcher’s bio, the next two novels in the Manifest Delusions series, The All Consuming and The Mirror’s Truth, are already complete, and are currently being edited for release.

Beyond Redemption was published by Harper Voyager on June 16, 2015. It is 512 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $10.99 for the digital version.

The Deep Structures of Dreams: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84

The Deep Structures of Dreams: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84

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1Q84The first two books of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 were published in Japan in 2009, with the third following in 2010. Plans for a one-volume English edition were soon underway, with the first two books translated by Jay Rubin and the third, due to time pressures, by J. Philip Gabriel. The complete English edition, running over 900 pages despite the editing-out of some extended recap passages in the third book, appeared in 2011.

And many American reviewers were disappointed, with some baffled by what they perceived as the book’s surrealism, and others complaining that not much seemed to happen in all those pages. Personally, I was engaged with the book’s dreamlike character. I find the sensibility not far from a lot of Japanese fantasy — consider the startling images produced by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro) or even Osamu Tezuka (Metropolis, Astro Boy). That’s not to say that they’re of a piece with Murakami any more than Walt Disney and Jack Kirby are of a piece with, say, Jonathan Lethem; but if a culture has a hand in shaping the art produced by artists from that culture, then perhaps culture also shapes the way the fantastic is used within art, whether in the choice of images or in the way those images are interrogated. Which is to say that the use of fantasy is part of the tension between tradition and the individual talent.

Certainly 1Q84 is not a realist novel, and the characters don’t operate along realist lines. Throw away realist preconceptions, though, and there’s a consistency to their behaviour and to the strange worlds in which they find themselves. In fact, I find there’s a kind of familiarity at the core of the book, a concern with archetypal patterns enunciated by Joseph Campbell, by Jung, and especially by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. This only becomes clear about halfway through the whole work, which may explain the confusion of some readers. Much of the rest of the novel is dedicated to character analysis and flashbacks, which build an elliptical series of connections. In all it’s a kind of hero’s journey told in a restrained, neutral voice that delves deep into personal histories to uncover a Lynchian mix of strangeness and darkness. And the whole thing resolves with a rightness that suggests, to me, that Murakami’s found the psychologically correct way through his world of 1Q84.

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Vintage Treasures: The Green Girl by Jack Williamson

Vintage Treasures: The Green Girl by Jack Williamson

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The Green Girl-smallJack Williamson is a science fiction legend. He won the Hugo and Nebula award for his novella “The Ultimate Earth,” published in Analog in 2000, when he was 92 years old. He kept right on writing until 2006, when he died at the age of 98.

Of course, Jack Williamson first made a name for himself in the pulp era, when he was right at the top of the field, with novels like Golden Blood (1933), The Legion of Space (1934), The Cometeers (1936) and One Against the Legion (1939). That’s right, Williamson was a popular writer for more than seven decades. Sales records fall all the time in this fast-moving business…. but that one is likely to stay for a very long time.

Williamson is also highly collectible, especially his early paperback appearances. In my Vintage Treasures posts it’s routine for me to highlight highly desirable paperbacks from the 50s, 60s, and 70s that can be purchased for $5-$6, or less than the price of a modern paperback. (That’s what “highly desirable” means in the vintage paperback biz. Paperbacks that aren’t highly desirable usually sell for under $1.)

Not so with Williamson. His first book, The Green Girl, is one of the most collectible paperbacks in the field, with copies routinely selling on eBay from $25 – $150.

Of course, much of that has to with the eye-catching cover, painted by prolific pulp artist Ray Johnson. The novel was out of print for over 60 years (another reason for its collectibility), but that cover has spawned thousands of posters and t-shirts. Click on the image at left for a bigger version.

The Green Girl was originally published in two parts in Amazing Stories in March and April, 1930, and reprinted in 1950 as Avon Fantasy Novel #2, under editor Don Wollheim. While Williamson had had many popular appearances in the magazines by this point, this was his first solo appearance in book form.

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Every Kind of Story, All At Once: Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Every Kind of Story, All At Once: Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

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The Enchantress of FlorenceIn some ways Salman Rushdie’s 2008 novel The Enchantress of Florence feels like a classic pulp fantasy entertainment. A bit less than a hundred years ago you could find a lot of pulp set in India, central Asia, and the Middle East: Harold Lamb recounting colourful histories of the great Mongol conquerors and Timur-Leng; Fritz Leiber imagining a pair of sword-wielding comrades he’d later recast as heroes of no-when; Arthur D. Howden Smith telling of the adventures of the Grey Maiden, the first sword made of iron; Talbot Mundy presenting theosophy-inflected occult sagas; Robert E. Howard, perhaps inspired by Lamb, writing grim war tales of battles against Genghis Khan and his great general Subotai. It’s interesting that when Michael Chabon tried his hand at a pulp-style adventure novel, he set it in Khazaria.

Naturally there are an awful lot of differences between The Enchantress of Florence and the pulp tales. Rushdie’s prose is more baroque even than Leiber’s. The structure of the book’s vastly more intricate, a narrative maze of stories and stories-within-stories. And, of course, The Enchantress of Florence is written as it were from the east looking west, rather than the reverse.

Still: it is a story set in a time of swordsmanship and adventure — the late sixteenth century, to be precise — and it glories in the lurid and the larger-than-life. It’s a tale of emperors and kings and generals, of subtle enchantresses and the brutality of war. It’s a book fascinated by what used to be called romance, by action and magic. And if its style and structure are more elaborate than anything in the pulps, that’s a sign that Rushdie’s book is actually even more charged with storytelling energy: with humour and grotesques and sex and politics and death and all kinds of things, one following fast upon another.

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Patrick Rothfuss Confirms Bidding War For The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss Confirms Bidding War For The Name of the Wind

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The Name of the Wind-smallThe Hollywood Reporter is reporting that several major Hollywood studios are in a high-priced bidding war for Patrick Rothfuss’s debut fantasy The Name of the Wind. Perhaps most interesting, the publication notes that, while the book has been around for eight years, the recent frenzy was likely triggered by the upcoming third novel, The Doors of Stone, which presumably provides the series with adequate franchise potential for studios looking to replicate the runaway success of Game of Thrones.

Warner Bros., MGM and Lionsgate are among a group of studios locked in a heated bidding war for Patrick Rothfuss’ mega-best-selling fantasy novel The Name of the Wind, book one in The Kingkiller Chronicle series.

Nearly every studio — also including Fox and Universal — is interested in the book, and the pool of suitors is expected to expand. The Name of the Wind centers on Kvothe, a magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen. But unlike most literary bidding wars, The Name of the Wind will see top brass from each studio descend on Comic-Con in San Diego this week to court Rothfuss…

Like George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, another fantasy series of books that sat idle for years before generating Hollywood interest, The Name of the Wind has been around for nearly a decade. The book was published by DAW in March 2007 and spawned a second book, The Wise Man’s Fear, in 2011. A third book, tentatively titled The Doors of Stone, is expected in 2016, and likely sparked the renewed interest in The Kingkiller Chronicle. The fact that the series is seen as having enormous franchise potential [has] stoked the frenzy.

Rothfuss previously optioned the series to New Regency Prods, who were developing it for 20th Century Fox Television, but the option recently lapsed and the rights reverted to the author. Rothfuss confirmed the news on his Facebook page (in a post that’s generated over 1,000 comments in 9 hours), saying “So. Yeah. Here’s some news.”

Read the complete article here.

Future Treasures: Bonesy by Mark Rigney

Future Treasures: Bonesy by Mark Rigney

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Bonesy Mark Rigney

Mark Rigney’s Renner & Quist novels — The Skates, Sleeping Bear, and Check-Out Time — feature the unlikely team of Unitarian Reverend Renner and retired investigator Dale Quist, who solve thorny and twisted occult mysteries. The first three novels have been widely praised. As William Patrick Maynard wrote in his review of Check-Out Time:

Rigney builds his fiction around his characters’ faith (or their lack thereof) in the supernatural and preternatural. The series is thought-provoking as much as it is entertaining…

Funny, moving, enlightening, entertaining – Mark Rigney’s Renner & Quist series is in a class of its own. The recommendations come no stronger. Do not pass this up.

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