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Wolfmen in the Wild West: A Review of What Rough Beast by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge

Wolfmen in the Wild West: A Review of What Rough Beast by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge

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What Rough BeastWhat Rough Beast
James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge
Illustrations by Keith Minnion
White Noise Press
Signed and numbered hand-crafted Chapbook, 28 p., $17.00 ($15.00 plus $2.00 shipping)

Chapbooks have been around for a long time. For those who may be unfamiliar with them, they are short books usually consisting of a single story, although short collections are also common. They tend to focus on a particular work, or in the case of several stories, a particular writer.

The quality of chapbooks can vary. Before technology made it possible to produce professional level products, it was not uncommon to see chapbooks that were simply photocopies stapled together. These days, though, chapbooks can be works of art. Like the one we’re going to look at today. More on that in a bit.

Until recently, White Noise Press was not a publisher with which I was familiar. I was, however, familiar with the work of Moore and Rutledge, both collaboratively (here) as well as individually (here and here). These authors have a knowledge and love of the genre, and it shows in their work. Guys who are fans of Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman are all right in my book.

So when Charles contacted me not long ago inquiring if I would like a review copy of What Rough Beast, I thought about it for a while (1 while = 0.5 nanoseconds), then said yes.

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New Treasures: Cherry Bomb by Caitlin R. Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney

New Treasures: Cherry Bomb by Caitlin R. Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney

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Cherry Bomb Caitlin R Kiernan-smallCaitlin R. Kiernan has received a lot of attention for her recent horror novels, especially The Red Tree (2009) and The Drowning Girl (2012). Her Siobhan Quinn urban fantasy novels had an unusual genesis, as she explains in the Author’s Note to this volume:

My thanks to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, who urged me to do this after reading Chapter One of Blood Oranges, which I’d actually written on a lark, as a joke, a protest against what “paranormal romance” has done to the once respectable genre of urban fantasy. I honestly never intended to write a whole Quinn book, much less three.

Cherry Bomb is the third (and final?) volume in the series, following Blood Oranges (2013) and Red Delicious (2014). All three were published under Caitlin R. Kiernan’s pseudonym, Kathleen Tierney.

Here’s the back cover copy.

Meet Siobhan Quinn — Half vampire, half werewolf, and retired monster hunter. Or so she thought…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Best I’ve Ever Read…

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Best I’ve Ever Read…

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BoysLife_Cover

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out.

And so begins the best piece of writing I’ve come across.

In the seventies and the eighties, Robert R. McCammon was a successful horror author. Usher’s Passing (a sequel to Poe’s classic), Wolf’s Hour (World War II werewolf yarn) and Swan Song (post-apocalyptic epic) were among his excellent works. 1990’s Mine was a different kind of terror tale, as was 1992’s Gone South.

To oversimplify, McCammon wanted to move out of horror and into new genres. And he was told to forget it: to not mess with the formula (shades of Brian Wilson and Pet Sounds). So he wrote two historical novels that weren’t published, and he quit.

A decade later, that first historical book, Speaks the Nightbird finally saw the light of day in 2002 and has spawned seven sequels and one short story collection. The next book is under way. I read the first two and enjoyed them. But they grow continually darker and I quit after book three. Too much for me.

McCammon has written a few other novels and novellas, back in the horror genre. But he returned on his own terms, and not with a major publishing house.

Two thousand is a low estimate of how many books I’ve read, and the single finest piece of writing I’ve ever come across is in the introduction to his 1991’s Boy’s Life. Which isn’t really too surprising, because that is the finest book I’ve ever read; in any genre. It’s not a horror book: it’s a coming-of age tale. It’s a book about the magic of our youth. And what happens to that magic.

One of my favorite authors, Tony Hillerman, said that Fly on the Wall, was his attempt at writing The Great American Novel. He feels he came up short. He would know, though it’s in my Top Five Novels list. But I’m gonna say that Boy’s Life is McCammon’s Great American Novel. And it’s in the running for THE Great American novel You ask me for only one book to read (beyond the Bible), and I’m telling you Boy’s Life.

Here’s the rest of that snippet from the opening that has stayed with me for going on three decades:

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Who Should Be Writing the Cthulhu Mythos Today? Announcing the Winners of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Who Should Be Writing the Cthulhu Mythos Today? Announcing the Winners of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

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Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth-small2Three weeks ago we invited Black Gate readers to win a copy of the new Lovecraft-inspired anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, by suggesting who should be writing Lovecraftian horror today.

To make it challenging, all entries had to be a single sentence.

We received a near-record number of entries for this contest, too many to print here. But I’ve selected 20 of the more interesting, and reproduced them below.

Two winners were randomly drawn from a list of all qualified entries, and those two lucky readers will both receive a copy of Stephen Jones’s new horror anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, on sale now in trade paperback and digital formats from Titan Books.

First up is Jeffery Helms:

The writer I would most like to see write a Lovecraftian horror story today is Scott Snyder, whose comic work has elements of history, folklore, myths, and horror.

That’s certainly a fascinating choice. Scott Snyder’s work on American Vampire and Batman has garnered a lot of attention, and I’d like to see what he could do in Lovecraft’s back yard, too.

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Self-published Book Review: The Pirate Princess by Alice Rozen

Self-published Book Review: The Pirate Princess by Alice Rozen

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. I’ve run short on books that I’ve received in the past year, so anything new has a good chance of being reviewed.

Pirate_princessThis month’s self-published novel is The Pirate Princess by Alice Rozen. This is a children’s book, and a sequel to a previous book called Jinx, after the main character in both novels. Jinx MacAbre is a ten-year-old witch and the daughter of the demon Lilith. She sees herself as a sort of superhero, dishing out punishments to school bullies, though she seems to lack much in the way of self-awareness. It’s not really clear whether her curses — swelling someone’s tongue so that he can’t speak, or turning someone green — are permanent, but if so, they are disproportionate to the actual crimes of the bullies, who after all are kids who generally grow out of that phase. But a sense of proportion may be a bit much to expect of a ten-year-old, and disproportionate punishments are a standard trope of fairy stories, a genre into which this story fits quite comfortably (though at last count, there was only one actual fairy in the story).

Jinx’s real problem aren’t her schoolyard adventures, though. It’s that not only is she a witch, she was born on Halloween, and as such is a very important ingredient in a rite called for by Davy Jones, the demon who rules the dead of the sea. And Sirena Avery, the titular pirate princess who looks about the same age as Jinx but in reality is a 300 year-old undead sea captain, is on a mission to deliver Jinx to Davy Jones to repay the debt to Jones that gave her The Flying Dutchman and a crew of the most famous pirates swallowed by the sea, including Samuel Bellamy, Edward Teach (“Blackbeard”), and more. They’ve come to claim Jinx and send her to Davy Jones’s Locker. The appearance of Jinx’s identical twin, Felix, complicates matters, and soon Jinx has to rescue her friends and her twin from Davy Jones himself.

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Future Treasures: The Silence by Tim Lebbon

Future Treasures: The Silence by Tim Lebbon

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The Silence Tim Lebbon-smallTim Lebbon’s novels include the post-apocalyptic fantasy Echo City, and the dark fantasy Noreela series (Dusk, Fallen, The Island). He won the Bram Stoker Award in 2001 for his short story “Reconstructing Amy,” and Dusk won the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award for best novel of the year in 2007. He had a bestseller in 2007 for his novelization of 30 Days of Night.

His latest is an end-of-the-world thriller featuring a horror born deep in the heart of the Earth…

The End of our world. The beginning of another.

In the darkness of an underround cave system, blind creatures hunt by sound. Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed… swarming from their prison, the creatures thrive and destroy. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death. As the hordes lay waste to Europe, a girl watches to see if they will cross the sea. Deaf for many years, she knows how to live in silence; now, it is her family’s only chance of survival. To leave their home, to shun others, to find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?

We last covered Tim Lebbon with his 2014 novel Coldbrook.

The Silence will be published by Titan Books on April 14, 2015. It is 361 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

New Treasures: Cthulhu Lives!, edited by Salomé Jones

New Treasures: Cthulhu Lives!, edited by Salomé Jones

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Cthulhu Lives-smallI don’t know much about Ghostwood Books, but I know they produce attractive books. They have a small but intriguing back catalog, including the story cycle/anthology Red Phone Box, with contributions from Warren Ellis and Salomé Jones, and Marion Grace Woolley’s Iranian historical fantasy Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran.

Jones has assembled a diverse array of contributors for her new anthology Cthulhu Lives!, including Michael Grey, Tim Dedopulos, G. K. Lomax, and many others. There’s also an afterword by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi. Here’s the book description.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.”

At the time of his death in 1937, American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was virtually unknown. The power of his stories was too vast to contain, however. As the decades slipped by, his dark visions laid down roots in the collected imagination of mankind, and they grew strong. Now Cthulhu is a name known to many and, deep under the seas, Lovecraft’s greatest creation becomes restless…

This volume brings together seventeen masterful tales of cosmic horror inspired by Lovecraft’s work. In his fiction, humanity is a tiny, accidental drop of light and life in the vast darkness of an uncaring universe a darkness populated by vast, utterly alien horrors. Our continued survival relies upon our utter obscurity, something that every fresh scientific wonder threatens to shatter.

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The New York Times on Andrew J. Offutt

The New York Times on Andrew J. Offutt

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My Lord Barbarian-smallAndrew J. Offutt had a lengthy and successful career as a fantasy writer before his death on April 30, 2013 (which we reported on here.) He was one of the most popular writers in the Thieves World collective, with a trio of novels (Shadowspawn, Deathknight, and The Shadow of Sorcery), and his Conan pastiches, including Conan and the Sorcerer (1978) and Conan: The Sword of Skelos (1979), were highly regarded.

He also had an excellent reputation as an editor, in part due to his sword and sorcery anthology series Swords Against Darkness.

Offutt published fantasy under his own name, but the greater part of his output — chiefly early pornography — was written under a variety of pseudonyms. When he died he left his papers to his son Chris Offutt, who reports on his father’s unusual career in the Feb 5 issue of The New York Times Magazine, in an article titled “My Dad, the Pornographer.”

At 12, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus method — find it and land on it — using one finger on his left hand and two fingers on his right. Dad typed swiftly and with great passion. In this fashion, he eventually wrote and published more than 400 books. Two were science fiction and 24 were fantasy, written under his own name; the rest were pornography, using 17 pseudonyms… His primary pseudonym [was] John Cleve…

In the 1980s, John Cleve’s career culminated with a 19-book series for Playboy Press, the magazine’s foray into book publishing. The Spaceways series allowed him to blend porn with old-time “space opera,” reminiscent of the 1930s pulps, his favorite kind of science fiction. Dad’s modern twist included aliens who possessed the genitalia of both genders. Galactic crafts welcomed the species as part of their crews, because they were unencumbered with the sexual repression of humans and could service men and women alike. The books were popular, in part, because of their campiness, repeating characters and entwined stories — narrative tropes that later became standard on television.

Read the complete article here.

Vintage Treasures: Starshine by Theodore Sturgeon

Vintage Treasures: Starshine by Theodore Sturgeon

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Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid-small Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid 2-small Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid 3-small

For this installment of Vintage Treasures, we’re going to set the Wayback Machine for that far distant era of American publishing, when it wasn’t at all unusual for a midlist science fiction writer to publish a paperback collection clocking in at a slender 174 pages… and have it go through nearly a dozen printings in as many years. Ah, for the days when the American public had a greater appetite for short stories!

Starshine was Sturgeon’s thirteenth collection (thirteen short story collections! It boggles the mind). It included three novelettes and three short stories, spanning just over two decades of his career: 1940 to 1961. I’ve captured the covers of all the paperback editions in this article — if you’re an old-timer like me, maybe one of them will jog your memory.

The first edition of Starshine was the December 1966 Pyramid paperback (above left, cover by Jack Gaughan.) It was back in print less than two years later, in March 1969, with a new cover by Gaughan again (above middle). Why it needed a new cover, I dunno – I much prefer the original one.

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New Treasures: The Emerald Spire Superdungeon

New Treasures: The Emerald Spire Superdungeon

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The Emerald Spire-smallI’ve been playing AD&D with my kids and their friend Will a few days a month (yes, that’s first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It’s the only version I know how to play. Plus, used copies of the rules are still cheap.)

As I mentioned in my 2013 article, I’ve been gradually running them through Gygax’s classic adventure modules, and setting them on the Outdoor Survival map, just as Gygax used to do. Right now we’re in the middle of G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, which is just as much fun as I remember it.

I mention this because they’ll soon be done with Gygax’s Against the Giants adventure modules, and I’ve been on the hunt for another epic adventure to involve them in. These days it’s superdungeons that get all the good press, and I can understand why. Nothing gets players excited like a truly epic adventure they can sink their teeth into.

I’ve been extremely impressed with the Pathfinder adventures I’ve purchased in the past — including the massive 420-page Rise of the Runelords, a gargantuan hardcover collection of the first six Adventure Path modules — so when I heard Paizo was releasing a standalone supermodule, I thought it would be worth checking out.

The Emerald Spire Superdungeon (yes, Superdungeon is part of the actual title — how cool is that?) was released last summer, and it’s as ambitious and as gigantic as I could have hoped. The dungeon spans a whopping 16 levels, designed by superstars like Ed Greenwood, Frank Mentzer, Michael Stackpole, Lisa Stevens, Sean K. Reynolds, and many others.

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