Browsed by
Category: Books

Goth Chick News: Zombies Take Over Indiana – Could We Tell?

Goth Chick News: Zombies Take Over Indiana – Could We Tell?

Comments 11 comments

image002Okay, that was mean.

I’ll save that snark for when Scott Kenemore writes Zombie, Toronto.

Anyway, in case you don’t remember him, Kenemore is the comic genius behind Z.E.O., A Zombie Guide for Getting A(Head) in Business as well as nine other zombie-related works of fine literature.

We met him appropriately enough, at Chicago’s Walker Stalker Con back in March, where he gave us a little inside scoop on his latest in a series of stories which explores the impact of a zombie apocalypse on a state-by-state basis.  So far, Kenemore has already documented his home state of Illinois (mayor is eaten by zombies on live TV; corrupt aldermen try to seize power – typical day in Chicago), and our nearby neighbors in Ohio (college professor becomes a zombie after a car accident, loses his friends while trying to solve the mystery of his own “death”). Now Kenemore turns his attention to the Hoosiers in his latest work, Zombie, Indiana.

The trouble begins when Governor Hank Burleson’s daughter mysteriously disappears on a field trip.  Through machinations of fate, he teams up with Indianapolis PD Special Sergeant James Nolan and high-schooler Kesha Washington to find her.  What he doesn’t know is that each harbors a terrible secret.  As the trio’s mission quickly evolves from search and rescue to a quest to redeem the very soul of Indiana, each on will wonder: can they find Burleson’s daughter before ending up on the dinner menu?

I’ve only just dug into this tasty tale, but Kenemore weaves tension (and some fairly heinous zombie violence) with the right amount of humor and adds just enough satire about the local folks to make this a highly entertaining read thus far.

Zombie, Indiana will be unleashed on humanity on May 6th.  Until then, check out Kenemore’s Zombie Blog. And remember – you’ve been warned.

What do you think would happen if zombies invaded your hometown?  What about your place of employment?  Come on, the material is probably endless.  Post a comment or drop a line to sue@blackgate.com.

Vintage Treasures: Dervish Daughter by Sheri S. Tepper

Vintage Treasures: Dervish Daughter by Sheri S. Tepper

Comments 3 comments

Dervish Daughter-smallI need to read more Sheri S. Tepper.

I tend to think of her primarily as a science fiction writer, probably because I first encountered her with her groundbreaking The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) and the major SF novel that followed, Grass (1989), a Hugo and Locus Awards nominee. But she wrote a great deal of highly acclaimed fantasy in the 80s and 90s, and it’s high time I acquainted myself with it.

A few weeks back, I purchased a set of four Tepper fantasy novels on eBay, all originally published in 1985-86 (and they look great, too — just look). Last night, I grabbed one to bring with me on a business trip. I chose Dervish Daughter because it had a floating ghost skull on the cover and this criterion has rarely steered me wrong in the past.

So now I’m sitting on the 24th floor of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, with what I just discovered is the second volume in the Jinian trilogy, itself the third series in a trilogy of trilogies called The True Game. Not that the Tor paperback bothered to tell me this. In fact, Tor doesn’t tell me much about the book at all. There’s not much of a plot description on the back, just this kooky poem.

Egg in the hollow — Hatching to follow
Lovers come calling — Bitter tears falling
Bright the sun burning — Night will come turning
New powers arise in the Land… Players beware!

I’m guessing free verse on the back of paperbacks was a short-lived marketing trend in the mid-80s. Anyway, I’m a little frustrated — as I imagine casual paperback buyers in 1986 were frustrated, when they discovered this is the second (eighth?) novel in a series. Over the last few decades, Tor has gotten better at letting buyers know books are part of a series. (They aren’t big on marketing through poetry anymore, either.)

…

Read More Read More

Tales From Windy City Pulp and Paper

Tales From Windy City Pulp and Paper

Comments 13 comments

The Weapon Shops of IsherThis coming weekend, Friday April 25th through Sunday April 27th, is Doug Ellis’s magnificent celebration of all things pulp, the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Convention here in Chicago, in nearby Lombard, Illinois.

Windy City is one of my favorite local cons. I’ve written about it before, and in fact I’ve been attending the show for around 10 years. 2012 was perhaps the most successful show in some years, considering I returned with a fabulous assortment of mint-condition fantasy and science fiction paperbacks from the collection of Martin H. Greenberg. See the article and photos from that show in my 2012 post, “Thank You, Martin H. Greenberg (and Doug Ellis).”

The show has been growing steadily over the years. Doug and his cohorts have added a film program, an Art Show, panels, an auction, readings, and more programming, but the real draw continues to be the massive Dealer’s Room, a wall-to-wall market crammed with pulps, paperbacks, rare DVDs, posters, artwork, comics, and much more.

I jotted down a few notes last year, and promised myself I’d write them up before the 2014 convention, to let folks who may be on the fence about attending (or those sad and lonely souls who, like me, just enjoy reading far-off convention reports), know what they’re missing.

In 2013, the list of Dealers was the longest I’ve ever seen, boasting some 80 vendors. They had to add more space, and it took even longer to walk the floor. Doug reported that he sold more tables than at any previous convention, and in record time.

If there’s a drawback to the show, it’s that the Dealer’s room closes at 5:00 pm. That made it impossible for me to make it there after work on Friday. My weekly D&D game with my kids kept me tied up until after 3:00 pm Saturday, which meant that by the time I made the show on Saturday, I had less than half an hour to walk the floor before it closed.

I put the time to good use. After a few years, you tend to find a few favorite sellers and I searched them out immediately.

…

Read More Read More

In A Land Before Atlantis and Mu: The House of Cthulhu by Brian Lumley

In A Land Before Atlantis and Mu: The House of Cthulhu by Brian Lumley

Comments 5 comments

oie_214202658YPxSzMI imagine that when most people hear the name Brian Lumley, they think of his vast Necroscope series. You know — the books with the malformed skulls on the covers. If your memory is a little longer, you might think of his August Derleth-influenced contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos series, featuring the supernatural sleuth Titus Crow. And in case you didn’t know, he’s also a prolific writer of really great horror short stories. Even if I didn’t love the stories in his collections, Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi and Beneath the Moors and Darker Places, I’d still love them for their titles.

While I did know about all those books and stories, what I didn’t know was that he’d written a whole series of swords & sorcery tales set in Earth’s earliest days on the primeval continent Theem’hdra. I had read a story in Andrew Offutt’s anthology, Swords Against Darkness IV, called “Cryptically Yours,” but hadn’t realized it was part of a much longer series of adventurous stories of wizards and warriors.

Recently, I learned from from Paul McNamee that Subterranean Press was making a lot of Lumley e-books available at $2.99 a volume. I immediately bought three story collections: Haggopian and Other Stories, The Taint and Other Novellas, and No Sharks in the Med. I’ve dipped into all three already and recommend them all.

My buying spree led me to check out Lumley’s website, which led me to something called The House of Cthulhu: Tales of the Primal Land (2010). I learned it was the first of three collections of adventures from the dawn of time. While Tor Books wasn’t selling it as cheaply as the Subterranean collections, I still hit the buy-button. Within minutes, I was traveling back into the deep ages of the world to the Primal Land, encountering giant slug-gods, sorcerers striving for immortality, amoral barbarians, and old Cthulhu himself.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Shores of Space by Richard Matheson

Vintage Treasures: The Shores of Space by Richard Matheson

Comments 2 comments

The Shores of Space-smallI’ve told you about a few really excellent single author collections recently, including Eric Frank Russell’s Men, Martians, and Machines, Michael Shea’s Polyphemus, and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and Others. As long as I’m on a roll, I figure I should continue in the same vein. So this week, I want to talk about Richard Matheson’s 1957 collection The Shores of Space.

Matheson is rightly revered by both SF and horror fans as a genius, especially at short length. He passed away in June, at the age of 87, and was productive right up to the end — with new novels (Other Kingdoms, 2011, and Generations, 2012), collections (Bakteria and Other Improbable Tales, 2011), and even a new movie (Real Steel, staring Hugh Jackman, based on his short story “Steel” from the May 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.) That’s damned impressive… the closer I get to 55, the harder I find it just to summon the energy to change channels.

The Shores of Space was Matheson’s second collection (after his groundbreaking Born of Man and Woman, 1954) and it proved very successful, with half a dozen reprintings and new editions over the next 20 years. The last one was in 1979, with an intriguing (and rather purple) cover by Murray Tinkelman. But overall, I prefer the 1969 Bantam paperback (shown at right), with a defiant spaceman standing on a harsh alien landscape, ready to shake his fist at the first person who suggests he put pants on. You show ’em, naked spaceman.

Here’s the back cover copy (it helps if you imagine Rod Serling reading it in a slow, urgent monotone).

A Shattering Journey into the Supernatural

Thirteen extraordinary stories that explore the slippery edge of madness — and beyond — into a chilling nightmare of bizarre and unexplainable occurrences… into a world where unspeakable horror becomes normal — where murky darkness from space works on the minds of men — in a time when creatures of dreadful, unearthy powers can control human beings… and humans create beings beyond their control. Weird fantasy and eerie imagination inspire stories of unforgettable force and unpredictable conclusions!

There’s some pretty good stuff in The Shores of Space. It includes, among many other fine tales, the short story “Steel” that was the basis for Real Steel.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Forever Watch by David Ramirez

New Treasures: The Forever Watch by David Ramirez

Comments 0 Comment

The Forever Watch-smallThomas Dunne Books has produced some of the most exciting and original fantasy of the past few years and they’ve done it by taking chances on new and upcoming authors — including David Wong’s John Dies at the End, Jonathan L. Howard’s Johannes Cabal novels, Paula Brackston’s The Winter Witch,  John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Old Dreams Die, Alaya Johnson’s Wicked City, Seth Patrick’s Reviver, Scott Oden’s The Lion of Cairo, and of course Howard Andrew Jones’s The Bones of the Old Ones.

That’s a pretty darn good track record. But they don’t appear to be slowing down in 2014. Their first novel to cross my desk in 2014 is David Ramirez’s The Forever Watch, a far-future science fantasy mystery that looks very intriguing indeed.

All that is left of humanity is on a thousand-year journey to a new planet aboard one ship, The Noah, which is also carrying a dangerous serial killer…

As a City Planner on the Noah, Hana Dempsey is a gifted psychic, economist, hacker and bureaucrat and is considered “mission critical.” She is non-replaceable, important, essential, but after serving her mandatory Breeding Duty, the impregnation and birthing that all women are obligated to undergo, her life loses purpose as she privately mourns the child she will never be permitted to know.

When Policeman Leonard Barrens enlists her and her hacking skills in the unofficial investigation of his mentor’s violent death, Dempsey finds herself increasingly captivated by both the case and Barrens himself. According to Information Security, the missing man has simply “Retired,” nothing unusual. Together they follow the trail left by the mutilated remains. Their investigation takes them through lost dataspaces and deep into the uninhabited regions of the ship, where they discover that the answer may not be as simple as a serial killer after all.

What they do with that answer will determine the fate of all humanity in David Ramirez’s thrilling page turner.

The Forever Watch will be published tomorrow by Thomas Dunne books. It is 326 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

2014 Hugo Award Nominees Announced

2014 Hugo Award Nominees Announced

Comments 6 comments

The nominees for the 2014 Hugo Awards have been announced by LonCon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, and let’s not mince words: it’s a wacky ballot.

What’s so wacky about it? Well, to start with, the novel category includes The Wheel of Time. That’s right, the complete series. Which means that 2013 novels likes Parasite by Mira Grant and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie will be up against one of the great phenomena in publishing history, a series spanning more than 20 years with combined sales of 44 million (to put that in perspective, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which includes A Game of Thrones, has sold a paltry 24 million copies). Not exactly sure how that happened, but I wouldn’t want to be one of the other novel nominees this year.

There are additional surprises. Analog magazine, effectively shut out of Hugo nominations for many years, has surged back into the limelight with two nominations (both for Brad Torgersen), and the traditionally strong Asimov’s SF and F&SF both come away empty-handed. Some folks are laying the credit (or blame) for that on an organized campaign of bloc voting by nominee Larry Correia, which successfully placed as many as seven nominees on the ballot… but really, every year someone gets accused of bloc voting and it’s tough to blame someone for having enthusiastic fans.

It’s a triumph for Tor.com, with no less than four short fiction nods — more than all the print magazines combined. And the highly regarded Clarkesworld, which led the pack for short fiction nominations last year, didn’t make the ballot at all.

There are lots of people to congratulate, including several Black Gate contributors on the list, but I’d like to give a special shout-out to Scott Taylor, who acquired Dan Wells’s The Butcher of Khardov while he was an editor at Privateer Press. While I’d have to do some research to confirm it, I believe this is the first piece of licensed fiction to be nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella. Congrats on helping to make history, Scott!

The nominees for the 2014 Hugo Awards are:

Best Novel

Warbound, Larry Correia (Baen)
Parasite, Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Wheel of Time (complete series), Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit)
Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross (Ace)

…

Read More Read More

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Playing the Game With the Master Blackmailer

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Playing the Game With the Master Blackmailer

Comments 6 comments

Milverton_SP1Far more than with any other character, Sherlock Holmes has been treated as if he had really lived. It’s not just that people believe in the character as they read the story. That’s usually the case in good fiction.

But there are hundreds of books that treat Holmes and Watson as if they were alive. Speculation about Holmes abounds. No other character’s life is explored in such detail, expounded upon and speculated about.

This treating Holmes (and Watson) as if he were a real person is called, ‘Playing the Game.’ And there’s no shortage of Holmes fans that have done it in new stories and scholarly writings about the great detective. An example of my own follows.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is one of my favorites stories of the sixty that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes.

If you haven’t read it before, I strongly suggest you do so before reading the rest of this post. It won’t take you very long. The fifty-six short stories are quick reads.

Milverton is a master blackmailer. No one is better at it. Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that Milverton is the worst man in London. For someone who seemingly knew about every type of depravity and ruffian in the city, that is quite a statement.

…

Read More Read More

The Best One-Sentence Reviews of Edmond Hamilton: The Winner of The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four

The Best One-Sentence Reviews of Edmond Hamilton: The Winner of The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four

Comments 2 comments

The Collected Edmond Hamilton Volume Four-smallLast month, we invited Black Gate readers to send us a one-sentence review of their favorite Edmond Hamilton novel or short story.

In return, we offered to award a copy of the long-awaited fourth volume of The Collected Edmond Hamilton from Haffner Press to one lucky winner. The winner was randomly drawn from the list of all qualified entrants.

Before we announce the winner, let’s have a look at some of the entries. We can’t reprint all of them, but we can hit the highlights. (But fret not — all qualifying entries received before April 20 were included in the drawing.)

We left the choice of what novel or story to review up to you and we weren’t too surprised to find the most popular topic was Edmond Hamilton’s The Star Kings series. Robert James Parker kicked things off with this review:

John Gordon, suffering from an existential crisis, agrees to travel through time and space to the far future where he gets caught up in a sweeping space opera full of cosmic space battles, beautiful princesses, and bizarre monsters.

Andy Sheets gets bonus points for a completely à propos Alan Rickman reference.

How can you not be enticed by a story about an out of step WWII veteran getting mind-swapped into the body of a prince 200,000 years in the future, hooking up with a foxy future princess, and battling The League of Dark Worlds, lead by a guy who should totally be played by Alan Rickman in the movie, with a super-weapon called the Disruptor, all tightly packed into a fast-moving novel not even 200 pages long?!

…

Read More Read More

Open to Chance

Open to Chance

Comments 1 comment

Book sale posterLeaving the dark brick stairwells of the Lucien L’Allier métro last Sunday morning at 10, we found the rain was holding off: something not to be expected. Forecasts called for meteorological chaos in Montréal over the following days. Up to 24 degrees celsius, down to 2, thunderstorms, snow. But that was in the future. For the moment, Grace and I were looking for books to hold us through those unsettled days and more.

Not that we were lacking for books to read, truly. But the point of a used-book sale isn’t just to buy a title you could (if you don’t mind cheating) get from Amazon or Abebooks. It’s to find something you didn’t know you want, or something you never thought you’d find, at a price you can’t believe; to get a chance at something that happens to come around just at that moment. To be in the right place at the right time.

It had already been a busy weekend. I’d been to two book sales over the previous two days, with my girlfriend Grace joining me at the last one. I’d found some nice titles (Carter’s Nights at the Circus, the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic, Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, many more), but nothing too surprising. Both those sales were the most recent iteration of annual events, so we knew what to expect of them going in. The one we were approaching now, at the Hotel Espresso on Rue Guy, was more of a mystery. MonSFFA, the Montréal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, was holding what they promised would be a massive sale of sf and fantasy books. The books came from a fan who had to liquidate his collection and officially the sale started at 1; but I’d seen an appeal on Facebook for volunteers to come in early to help set up in exchange for first crack at the stock, so Grace and I had decided to lend a hand. We had no idea what kind of collection this was or what we’d find.

…

Read More Read More