Browsed by
Category: Books

New Treasures: Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher

New Treasures: Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher

Comments 5 comments

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

Comments 0 Comment

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.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Green Girl by Jack Williamson

Vintage Treasures: The Green Girl by Jack Williamson

Comments 0 Comment

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.

…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 2 comments

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.

…

Read More Read More

Patrick Rothfuss Confirms Bidding War For The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss Confirms Bidding War For The Name of the Wind

Comments 9 comments

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

Comments 0 Comment

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.

…

Read More Read More

The Collections of Tanith Lee

The Collections of Tanith Lee

Comments 4 comments
Cyrion-small Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer-small Tamastara-small

We’re continuing with our look at the extraordinary 40-year career of Tanith Lee, who passed away on May 24th. So far we’ve covered 13 of her novels; today I’d like to look at her equally dazzling short story career.

Lee published well over 300 short stories during her long career, an amazing accomplishment. Her first three major collections were all published by her long-time publisher DAW, starting with the sword-and-sorcery collection Cyrion in 1982.

Cyrion (Sept 1982, 304 pages, $2.95, cover by Ken Kelly)
Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (January 1983, 208 pages, $2.50, cover by Michael Whelan)
Tamastara, or The Indian Nights (March 1984, 174 pages, $2.95, cover by Don Maitz)

A lot has been said about Cyrion over the years, but I think perhaps James Lecky, on his blog Tales from the Computerbank, said it best in his 2009 review.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015 Edition, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015 Edition, edited by Paula Guran

Comments 0 Comment

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015-smallI’m a big fan of dark fantasy, and there’s a lot of terrific work going on in the field right now. Dale Bailey, Laird Barron, Gemma Files, Maria Dahvana Headley, John Langan, Ken Liu, Usman T. Malik, Helen Marshall, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar… these folks and many others are writing excellent fiction.

The real challenge, of course, is finding it. All of the writers above published top-notch stories last year, but you’d have to have access to a top-notch library to get even half of it. A lot of the very best fiction from last year appeared in small print run magazines (like Dark Discoveries, Sirenia Digest, Jamais Vu, SQ Mag and Lackington’s), premiere anthologies (such as Dead Man’s Hand, Letters to Lovecraft, Fearful Symmetries, Monstrous Affections, and Nightmare Carnival), and small press collections (like Burnt Black Suns, Here with the Shadows, and Black Gods Kiss).

What you really need is an astute editor with impeccable taste who can read through all that material (and a great deal more) for you, and collect the very best, so you can settle back in your favorite recliner with a cool beverage and enjoy the finest dark fantasy and horror from the top practitioners in the field in a single fat anthology, every single year.

You see where this is going, don’t you.

Paula Guran and Prime Books have released the sixth volume in their excellent The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, which collects stories from all of the writers mentioned above, and a great deal more. It is one of three Best of the Year volumes from Prime (the others are Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the brand new The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas, also edited by Paula Guran).

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited by Ray Bradbury

Vintage Treasures: Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited by Ray Bradbury

Comments 2 comments

Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow Bantam 1952

Ray Bradbury is known primarily as a writer, and as one of the most gifted fantasists of the 20th Century. But in his 70+-year career, he also edited a handful of anthologies. The first of these, Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, originally published as a Bantam Giant paperback original in 1952, was also the most popular, with multiple reprintings and editions over the next two decades.

Most SF and fantasy anthologies in the forties and fifties drew heavily from pulp sources. Bradbury’s approach was very different. His fat, 306-page anthology collected classic and contemporary fantasies originally published in The New Yorker, Charm magazine, Harper’s magazine, and other more literary sources, and included such writers as John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, E. B. White, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Shower of Stones by Zachary Jernigan

Future Treasures: Shower of Stones by Zachary Jernigan

Comments 0 Comment

Shower of Stones-smallZachary Jernigan’s first novel of Jeroun, No Return, was released in 2013, and widely praised. Staffer’s Book Review called it “The most daring debut novel of 2013,” and Elizabeth Hand said, “It has the sweep of Frank Herbert’s Dune and the intoxicatingly strange grandeur of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun… One of the most impressive debuts of recent years.”

The long-awaited concluding novel in the two-book series, Shower of Stones, will be published by Night Shade this month, and it returns to the harsh world of Jeroun, which pits men against gods and swords against civilization-destroying magic.

At the moment of his greatest victory, before a crowd of thousands, the warrior Vedas Tezul renounced his faith, calling for revolt against the god Adrash, imploring mankind to unite in this struggle.

Good intentions count for nothing. In the three months since his sacrilegious pronouncement, the world has not changed for the better. In fact, it is now on the verge of dying. The Needle hangs broken in orbit above Jeroun, each of its massive iron spheres poised to fall and blanket the planet’s surface in dust. Long-held truces between Adrashi and Anadrashi break apart as panic spreads.

With no allegiance to either side, the disgraced soldier Churls walks into the divided city of Danoor with a simple plan: murder the monster named Fesuy Amendja, and retrieve from captivity the only two individuals that still matter to her — Vedas Tezul, and the constructed man Berun. The simple plan goes awry, as simple plans do, and in the process Churls and her companions are introduced to one of the world’s deepest secrets: A madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, offering the most tempting lie of all… Hope.

Shower of Stones will be published by Night Shade Books on July 14, 2015. It is 238 pages, priced at $26.99 in both hardcover and digital formats. The cover is by Alvin Epps. Read more here.