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Vintage Treasures: Gaslight Tales of Terror, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Vintage Treasures: Gaslight Tales of Terror, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

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Gaslight Tales of Terror-smallI don’t know much about British ghost story writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes. According to his entry at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, he produced ten novels and two dozen short story collections between 1959 and 2001, the year he died. That’s a heck of a lot of ghost stories.

I did know he was a prolific and important anthologist. He took over The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories from editor Robert Aickman with number nine in 1973, bringing the series to 20 volumes before it ended in 1984, and he edited six volumes of the Armada Monster Book between 1975 and 1981. He also produced five standalone horror anthologies with Fontana, including Cornish Tales of Terror (1970), Scottish Tales of Terror (1972), Welsh Tales of Terror (1973), and Tales of Terror from Outer Space (1975).

The last in the series was Gaslight Tales of Terror (1976), a marvelous mix of original and classic spooky tales. Here’s R., from his introduction:

Here are fourteen Gaslight Tales of Terror, including one or two oil lamps and a few guttering candles. With one exception all the stories have either a Victorian or Edwardian background… But although — if newspaper reports are to be believed — ghosts and other horrors have not been exorcised by the advent of space travel and colour television, one feels they were more at home during the reign of Queen Victoria. And I do mean at home: in pea-souper fogs, on gloomy streets where the lamp-lighter with his long pole trudged wearily from post to post, and a potential Jack the Ripper lurked in dark alleyways.

Eight tales are original to this volume, including contributions from J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Roger Malisson, Dorothy K. Haynes, Rosemary Timperley, and a vampire tale from Chetwynd-Hayes himself.

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The Series Series: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

The Series Series: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

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The Bone Season-smallRead this book. Just read it. Ignore the reviews that call Samantha Shannon the next J.K. Rowling, or call the series that opens with The Bone Season the next Hunger Games. Most importantly, ignore the jacket copy, which spoils a big reveal that is best appreciated in a state of shocked astonishment alongside the protagonist’s own. For that matter, I give you leave to ignore everything about this review I am writing right now except the first sentence, which I am not abashed about reiterating: Read this book.

You’re still here? Okay, that’s cool, too.

If all the comparisons in the mainstream reviews are off the mark — and the ones I find bandied about online all are — then what is The Bone Season?

It’s the book you would get if Philip K. Dick decided to write about the wild Victorian occult scene that flourished under Madame Blavatsky, blossomed again in the time of W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, lingering until it faded with its evenstar, Dion Fortune. That is, if Philip K. Dick decided to take all that supernatural grandiosity, and steampunk adaptations of Victoriana,  and turn them on their heads by transposing them into a dystopian near-future historical moment that feels intermittently like  hard SF with its what-ifs scrambled.

It’s Minority Report meets Oliver Twist in the secret séance parlor of Martha Wells’s The Death of the Necromancer. Sez me. But the readers of Cosmopolitan don’t speak geek, so instead Cosmo conjures the ghost of J.K. Rowling, because hey, the blasted ruins of Oxford being repurposed as a prison camp for deliberately starved clairvoyants is a setting so reminiscent of Hogwarts. Oh, well. I’m sure someday I’ll write a review that far off the mark, too. (But not this day.)

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New Treasures: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler

New Treasures: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler

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The Vampire Archive-smallLast week I wrote a brief piece on Otto Penzler’s marvelous The Big Book of Adventure Stories, and I’ve been having so much fun with it that I decided to look at some of his other door-stopper genre anthologies. So here we are this week with The Vampire Archives, one of the best collections of vampire stories I’ve ever encountered.

What makes it so great? It’s over 1,000 pages of the finest vampire fiction ever written, old and new, in a beautiful and inexpensive package. This is the only volume you need to bring yourself up to speed on vampire lit of the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries — no small claim.

It includes the classics you’d expect, like John Keats’ 1820 poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber — as well as many that you might not, like Ambrose Bierce’s 1891 tale “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” an excerpt from Lord Byron’s poem “The Giaour,” “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Lovely Lady” by D. H. Lawrence, and even a Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” by Arthur Conan Doyle.

There’s a generous selection of fiction from the pulps, including “Stragella” by Hugh B. Cave, “Revelations in Black” by Carl Jacobi, “When It Was Moonlight” by Manly Wade Wellman, and Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne tale “The End of the Story.”

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The Return of Rick Steele

The Return of Rick Steele

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Yesterday MenRickSteele-LostCityofAzgara-250Last year was my introduction to author Dick Enos and his Rick Steele adventure series. I suspect this year will be the one where both author and character make real headway among fans of New Pulp.

The fourth Rick Steele adventure, The Yesterday Men, was just published. If you’ve read the first three titles in the series, then you know Enos loves to confound reader expectations by delivering widely varying pulp adventures from alien invasion to the preternatural to lost civilization adventures. The Yesterday Men is both more of the same and something completely different. Rick Steele, for those unfamiliar with the character, is a hard-nosed Korean War veteran turned test pilot who somehow can’t avoid dragging himself and his supporting cast into adventures. Rick is a likable, but imperfect hero.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: The Supernaturals: A Ghost Story

Goth Chick News Reviews: The Supernaturals: A Ghost Story

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image002The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is not only an American horror classic, but is one of my favorite scary tales of all time, largely due to the fact Ms. Jackson relies on the psychological scare rather than in-your-face gore.

Flying brain matter and buckets of blood can occasionally be well-constructed story elements — for instance, Charlaine Harris does a fine job with her Southern Vampire Mysteries series, though her stories are on the lighthearted side. However mixing hardcore horror with an over-the-top amount of visceral matter is like pairing fishnet stockings with a leather mini skirt.

One or the other alone is stylish; but put them together and they’ll get your attention for all the wrong, cheesy reasons.

Unfortunately, with CGI taking realism in film to a new, stomach-turning level, the horror genre in all its manifestations has upped the gross-out factor. Which is why I was rather excited when Amazon suggested David L. Golemon’s 2011 Halloween release The Supernaturals to me as a “you-might-also-like,” when I recently purchased a new hard-bound copy of Hill House.

Golemon is best known for his Event Group Thriller series — which admittedly I have shied away from as potentially too X-Files-esque (there’s just no copying some things). But The Supernaturals was a departure from Golemon’s usual fare, and the back story caught my attention.

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Observations: The Return of the King Movie

Observations: The Return of the King Movie

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The Return of the King poster-smallHey, folks. Today I’m wrapping up my series about The Lord of the Rings movies with the third installment: The Return of the King (following The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers).

The third film begins with Gollum’s origin tale, telling how he came to be, well, Gollum. Smeagol and his friend Deagol are fishing when Deagol falls in the river and accidentally discovers the One Ring. Smeagol kills Deagol for it and afterward is exiled, forced to live a miserable existence under the Misty Mountains. The main point of this scene is to show us (again) the Ring’s power to inspire intense desire in anyone who sees it.

We then move to Frodo, gazing at the Ring while Sam sleeps. The desire is obvious in his eyes, a reminder that the Ring is taking control. Gollum wakes them to get moving. In a cute exchange that reveals he’s the only remaining optimist in the group, Sam is rationing their food so they have enough for the journey back home.

Aragorn and company (now with Gandalf, King Theoden, and Eomer) ride to Isengard. Merry and Pippin are there to greet them, being silly with the pipeweed. In previous viewings, I missed that this mini-scene is important because it marks the starting place for the two young hobbits, smoking and feasting and drinking. They will never be this naïve and carefree again.

I also love how Treebeard greets Gandalf as “young master Gandalf,” like he’s a little kid. My grandfather used to greet me the same way (without the ‘Gandalf,’ obviously) and it still makes me smile.

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Vintage Treasures: Shardik by Richard Adams

Vintage Treasures: Shardik by Richard Adams

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Shardik-smallI’m frequently asked what my favorite fantasy novel is. I don’t have a standard answer — some days it’s The Lord of the Rings, some days Bridge of Birds. If I can get away with it, I sometime say Lord of Light, although that’s secretly science fiction (shhh).

But as the years go by, more and frequently I find myself saying Watership Down, by Richard Adams.

Watership Down is a brilliant book — wholly original, uniquely English in both setting and viewpoint, and possessed of the most exciting and satisfying climax I’ve ever read (go Bigwig, you magnificent Owsla, you.) But it’s far from Adam’s only fantasy novel — or even his only worldwide fantasy bestseller. He also wrote The Plague Dogs, the tale of two dogs on the run from a secretive testing facility in Britain; Traveller, a retelling of the American Civil War through the eyes of Robert E. Lee’s favorite horse; the massive Maia, the story of a sex slave in a fantasy empire; and his short story collection Tales from Watership Down.

And in 1974, only two years after Watership Down, he produced perhaps his most ambitious novel, the epic fantasy Shardik, which The Wall Street Journal said “Grips with suspense, haunts with mystery… not to be read once but to be reread as loved books are.”

Shardik struck a chord with readers after it appeared. Fantasy fans expected another animal fantasy, but perhaps weren’t expecting the depth of world-building and political intrigue in Adams’ Beklan Empire, or his powerful antagonist, the giant god-bear Shardik.

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At the Intersection of Merritt and Howard

At the Intersection of Merritt and Howard

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merrittI’m a big proponent of taking note of literary anniversaries, particularly of the birthdays of authors of whom I am fond. January is chock full of such birthdays – J.R.R. Tolkien on January 3; Clark Ashton Smith on January 13; Edgar Allan Poe on January 19. Had my weekly blog slot fallen on one of those dates, I almost certainly would have taken the time to commemorate their births, since they’ve all exercised an unshakeable influence over my imagination.

As it happened, though, my slot this week didn’t fall on the birthdays of any writer of my acquaintance. Instead, it fell between the birthdays of two scribes whose memories I hold dear. Yesterday was the birthday of Abraham Merritt and tomorrow is that of Robert E. Howard. Over the years, I’ve written multiple celebrations of these men and their contributions, both to the world of letters and to my own life. I think this only just, given how much enjoyment Merritt and Howard have offered to me, despite being decades in the grave before my own birth (indeed, both died before the births of my parents). And so I shall continue my practice this year.

The difficulty, though, is in finding something new to say about these men that I have not said before. That’s a tall order and, whenever this time of year rolls around, I worry that I’ll simply repeat things I’ve said many times before. Perhaps that’s not an unworthy anxiety, especially since truths does not become less true if they are repeated often.  The truth is that Merritt and Howard have each, in their way, made me the man I am today and it’s difficult to conceive of a version of myself that had not discovered and devoured their works.

Just as true, though, is the fact that I first made their acquaintance thanks to Dungeons & Dragons – and it’s on this foundation that I shall build this year’s commemoration of these two titans of fantasy.

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Gonji: The Deathwind Trilogy by T. C. Rypel

Gonji: The Deathwind Trilogy by T. C. Rypel

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oie_1919231MrGw3CJVDrift back in time to the eighties when swords & sorcery was preparing to die, at least as a force in fantasy publishing. Where once Andrew Offutt and Lin Carter as well as Robert E. Howard packed the shelves of your local B. Dalton, they were about to be crowded out by the rise of the Tolkien clones. Exciting authors like Charles R. Saunders who were leading S&S down new paths would see their heroic fiction production curtailed by sales numbers that didn’t meet publishers’ expectations.

Today, technological advancements have paved the way for the return of ancient adventurers. The internet has allowed old and new fans to find each other and connect with writers to create a camaraderie of creators and consumers. Quality print-on-demand publishing, e-books, and small presses using those tools have led to the resurrection of several heroes, including Saunders’ own Imaro and Dossouye. Another of those revived heroes is T. C. Rypel’s Gonji, a half-Japanese, half-Scandinavian warrior first introuduced thirty years ago, wandering the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains in search of a mysterious force known as the Deathwind.

When T. C. Rypel delivered his first novel to Zebra Books back in the early eighties it was over thirteen-hundred pages long. While that’s nothing peculiar these days, back then it was seen as unprecedented and Zebra’s response was to break it up into three distinct books. Rypel’s titles for the resultant three volumes were Red Blade from the East, The Soul Within the Steel, and Deathwind of Vedun. Zebra decided to take Rypel’s third title and reassign it to the first book, then re-title the last two Samurai Steel and Samurai Conflict. Their changes provide a hint of what the publisher had in store for the books.

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New Treasures: Bone Dance by Emma Bull

New Treasures: Bone Dance by Emma Bull

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Bone Dance Emma Bull-smallI’m not all that familiar with the fantasy of the 90s. That’s the decade I graduated, got a job, got married, had three kids… and my leisure reading time fell to zero. Things got better after the year 2000 as life settled back into a routine, but when I look back at the major publishing events of that decade, things are still kinda fuzzy.

Fortunately, I’m not the only person working at Black Gate. In fact, I’m surrounded by annoying young people who first discovered fantasy in the 90s, and devoured everything on the shelves. I can’t walk to the water cooler without overhearing them go on and on about the books that first turned them into fantasy fans. And the more I listen, the more I realize that they’re talking about Emma Bull.

Emma Bull is not a prolific writer. Her first novel War for the Oaks made a huge splash in 1987; it was followed by Falcon (1989), Bone Dance (1991), Finder (1994), The Princess and the Lord of Night (1994), Freedom and Necessity (1997, co-written with Steven Brust) and Territory (2007). I finally decided it was time to find out how someone can win over an entire generation with half a dozen fantasy novels, and figured I’d start with Bone Dance.

Sparrow’s my name. Trader. Deal-maker. Hustler, some call me. I work the Night Fair circuit, buying and selling pre-nuke videos from the world before. I know how to get a high price, especially on Big Bang collectibles. But the hottest ticket of all is information on the Horsemen — the mind-control weapons that tilted the balance in the war between the Americas. That’s the prize I’m after.

But it seems I’m having trouble controlling my own mind. The Horsemen are coming.

Bone Dance was nominated for a ridiculous number of awards — the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, and even the Philip K. Dick Award. It was originally published in paperback by Ace in May, 1991, with a typical 80s art by Jean Pierre Targete, who looked like he was trying to paint Corey Hart on the cover. It was reprinted in a handsome trade paperback edition by Tor/Orb Books on July 7, 2009, and this cover has much more of a YA feel — and a new subtitle: “Fantasy for Technophiles.” Bone Dance is 317 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback, or $7.99 for the digital edition. I bought a discounted trade edition at Amazon for just $6.40 — copies are still available if you act fast.