Black Gate

Pantheon isn’t known for publishing horror or fantasy… so when they do, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice. Their latest release, by the author of The Natural Order of Things, is a deliciously dark novel about an idyllic Midwestern college town that turns out to be a nexus of horror.

For years Normandy Falls has been haunted by its strange history and the aggrieved spirits said to roam its graveyards. Despite warnings, Edmund Campion is determined to go there and pursue an advanced degree in literature. At first things proceed wonderfully, but Edmund soon learns he isn’t immune to the impersonal trappings of fate: his girlfriend Morgan Fey smashes his heart, his advisor Professor Martin Kingsley crushes him with frivolous assignments, and his dead end job begins to take a toll on his physical and mental health.

One night he stumbles upon the body of Emily Ryan, a proud and unapologetic “townie,” drowned in her family pool. Was it suicide, Edmund wonders, or murder? In the days following the tragedy, Emily’s husband Charlie, crippled by self-loathing and ultimately frozen with fear, attempts to flee his disastrous life and sends their twin daughters to stay with the Kingsleys. Possessed with an unnamed, preternatural power, the twins know the professor seduced their mother and may have had a hand in her death. With their piercing stares, the girls fill Martin with the remorse and dread he so desperately tries to hide from his wife.

Elsewhere, a low-level criminal named The Gonk takes over a remote cottage, complete with a burial ground and moonshine still, and devises plans for both; Xavier D’Avignon, the eccentric chef of a failing French restaurant, supplies customers with a hallucinogenic cocktail he makes in his kitchen; and Colette Collins, an elderly local artist of the surreal and psychedelic, attends a New Year’s Eve retrospective that is destined to set the whole town on fire.

The Captive Condition will be published by Pantheon on July 7, 2015. It is 265 pages, priced at $24 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition.

Author Megan Lindholm began a new career, under the name Robin Hobb, with the publication of Assassin’s Apprentice (1995), the first book in The Farseer trilogy. Robin Hobb quickly became a bestselling writer, and she continued the tale of FitzChivalry Farseer and his enigmatic friend the Fool in The Tawny Man trilogy (2001-2003). 

Last year she launched a new trilogy, Fitz and the Fool, with Fool’s Assassin, and in August the tale continues with the next installment, Fool’s Quest, in which Fitz discovers devastating secrets and dark conspiracies that cast a dark shadow over the history of Fitz and his world.

Long ago, Fitz and the Fool changed the world, bringing back the magic of dragons and securing both the Farseer succession and the stability of the kingdom. Or so they thought. But now the Fool is near death, maimed by mysterious pale-skinned figures whose plans for world domination hinge upon the powers the Fool may share with Fitz’s own daughter.

Distracted by the Fool’s perilous health, and swept up against his will in the intrigues of the royal court, Fitz lets down his guard… and in a horrible instant, his world is undone and his beloved daughter stolen away by those who would use her as they had once sought to use the Fool — as a weapon.

But FitzChivalry Farseer is not without weapons of his own. An ancient magic still lives in his veins. And though he may have let his skills as royal assassin diminish over the years, such things, once learned, are not so easily forgotten. Now enemies and friends alike are about to learn that nothing is more dangerous than a man who has nothing left to lose.

Fool’s Quest will be published by Del Rey on August 11, 2015. It is 768 pages, priced at $28 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital edition.