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Goth Chick News: New (Creepy) Fiction – A Cold Season

Goth Chick News: New (Creepy) Fiction – A Cold Season

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A Cold Season-smallPersonally, I find discovering a new voice in the horror fiction space is like Christmas in July – or in this case, Halloween in September. And the warm, gooey candy corn is all the sweeter when that scary new voice is a woman’s.

So it was with particular relish that I unwrapped an early copy of A Cold Season by British newcomer Alison Littlewood. Littlewood has been a literary presence for some time, with short stories selected for The Best Horror of the Year and Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies, as well as The Best British Fantasy 2013, but A Cold Season is her freshman novel and it has already received a very favorable welcome across the pond.

Littlewood tells us the story of the newly widowed Cass and her son Ben as they attempt to escape their grief by moving to the highlands of Darnshaw: a picture-perfect village from Cass’ youth that is not, of course, what it seems. As the snow covers the moors, Ben grows increasingly hostile and a series of strange occurrences begin to disturb Cass. Soon, the two are completely isolated from the outside world by the weather and Cass is forced to confront Darnshaw’s dark secrets, marooned in a sea of snow and with terrifying results.

I applaud Littlewood, who excels at driving home a feeling of discomfort, whether in subtle and early hints at the paranormal or in mundane things such as a lack of Internet access. Creaks and bumps in the semi-isolated apartment building Cass finds herself in are handled as masterfully as the lingering, deceitful, and unnerving sneers from the locals.

And while I do not regret the hours I spent with A Cold Season, it has some of the typical stumbles of a first novel. Cass becomes isolated almost from the start, when the snow comes and cuts off the village even before she and her son are settled. The villagers are immediately odd and Ben begins to act hostile as soon as he returns home from his first day at school.

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New Treasures: The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz

New Treasures: The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz

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The Revelations of Zang-smallWe published three stories from John R. Fultz’s baroque and fascinating sword & sorcery Zang Cycle in the print version of Black Gate: “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine,” featuring the famous thief Taizo and his daring heist in spider-haunted Ghoth (BG 12); “Return of the Quill,” in which Artifice’s long-simmering plan to bring revolution to the city of Narr finally unfolds (BG 13); and the prequel story “The Vintages of Dream” (BG 15). Next, John took us back in time to Artifice’s first year as a member of the travelling Glimmer Faire in “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” which appeared as part of the Black Gate Online Fiction line here in January.

Those four tales triggered an intense interest among our readers, and over the years John returned to Zang many times. He elaborated on the evolution of the saga in a recent post here on the BG blog:

Once Upon a Time in Zang… a fugitive author and a devious cutthroat began a revolt against the nine Sorcerer Kings whose power displaced the gods themselves. Like the revolt, which began in far-flung places, the Zang Cycle of stories would grow slowly and cover a lot of ground…

It all started with “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill,” in the pages of Weird Tales #340 (2006). The cover of that issue featured a horde of the faceless warlocks known as Vizarchs, who drag Artifice the Quill away in the story’s opening scene, a scene painted by the talented Les Edwards.

The story was a turning point for me: The fulfillment of a long-standing dream (getting published in Weird Tales) and the introduction of two characters I would return to many times: Artifice the Quill and Taizo the Thief.

I wrote eleven more Zang Tales and moved the series to the welcoming pages of Black Gate, where it flourished for many issues.

Now, seven years after the first story appeared in Weird Tales, the complete Zang Cycle has been collected in a new volume, The Revelations of Zang: Twelve Tales of the Continent, released by 01Publishing this summer.

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An Introduction to King of Chaos

An Introduction to King of Chaos

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Pathfinder Tales King of Chaos-smallWhen I began writing Queen of Thorns, my favorite secondary characters were the bleachling gnome Fimbulthicket and the elven Calistrian inquisitor Kemeili. Before long, however, the elven paladin Oparal grew closest to my heart.

That proved problematic because I was revealing her character through the eyes of my flawed protagonists, Radovan and Varian, each of whom has his own tilted worldview when it comes to elves, paladins, women, or all three. Thus, by the end of the novel I feared Oparal had earned less sympathy from the readers, who had seen her only from the outside, than she had from me, who knew the secrets of her heart.

Thus, as I was finishing revisions on the novel and editor James Sutter and I discussed where the boys might travel next, I added a scene showing that Oparal would leave Kyonin to join the Silver Crusade against the demons of the Worldwound, knowing full well the boys would soon join her. It was time, I decided, to tell part of the story from her point of view.

Elsewhere, you can read about how hard it was to find Varian’s voice after establishing Radovan’s first, in the novella “Hell’s Pawns.” It was slightly less difficult to come up with the “voice” of Arnisant the Ustalavic wolf hound in “Master of Devils.” Finding Oparal’s voice took me several tries, and I probably rewrote this first chapter four or five times before feeling I’d found it and having the courage to move on to the rest of her chapters.

I hope you will find it a voice equal to those of “the boys,” and by the end of the novel, I like to think we’ve seen Oparal from the inside as well as from the outside.

Read the first chapter of King of Chaos right here at Black Gate, and try an exclusive excerpt of Queen of Thorns here.

To order the novels, visit paizo.com.

Cosmic Horror and Gritty Noir: A Review of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

Cosmic Horror and Gritty Noir: A Review of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

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The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All-smallThe Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
By Laird Barron
Night Shade Books (280 pages, $26.99, September 3, 2013)

After having its delivery date pushed back multiple times, Laird Barron’s The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All has finally arrived.

This highly anticipated book marks Barron’s third collection of short stories (and fourth book), following both of his Shirley Jackson Award-winning collections The Imago Sequence and Occultation, as well as his 2012 debut novel, The Croning. As with his prior volumes, this one continues to meet, and exceed, the bar of contemporary horror stories, showing that Barron is still one of the leading horror voices of today.

Let me emphasize that this collection is in keeping with what I, and many others, have come to love and expect from Barron: a great combination of cosmic horror feel — which many associate with the early pulp writer H. P. Lovecraft — as well as Barron’s own gritty noir-like style. I’ll not retread this well-known ground. Rather, in this review I want to emphasize some other merits of this book, which I believe are represented in Barron’s other works as well.

First, I don’t know if this is new, or perhaps I just missed it in his earlier stories, but I noticed some great humor, especially in character dialogue.

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New Treasures: Weird Detectives, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: Weird Detectives, edited by Paula Guran

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Weird Detectives-smallMan, this book is right up my alley. More than that, this book has backed up my alley, unpacked, and moved into my house.

The book in question is Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations, a fat anthology of modern fantasy reprints (nothing older than 2004) edited by Paula Guran, focusing on the new generation of occult detectives and paranormal investigators.

We love occult detectives at Black Gate — witness all the recent attention to the classics of the genre, including Josh Reynolds’s encyclopedic Nightmare Men series, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki The Ghost Finder, the short fiction of Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman’s Complete John Thunstone and Silver John stories, and many, many others.

But it never occurred to me that people were still writing the stuff, despite the resurgence in urban fantasy over the last decade. This is why Paula Guran is a genius. She never lost sight of the thread connecting the pulp classics and the work being done in the same mold today by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, Joe R. Lansdale, Carrie Vaughn, P.N. Elrod, Bradley Denton, Tanya Huff, Jonathan Maberry, Patricia Briggs, Faith Hunter, and many others. Here’s an excerpt from her excellent introduction:

Ghosts appear to Harry Escott in Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Pot of Tulips,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of November 1855… In 1859 Escott appeared again (in O’Brien’s “What Was It? A Mystery,” also published in Harper’s) and is attacked by a supernatural entity that is, itself, the mystery.

The occult detective had been born. Also known as psychic detectives or ghost hunters, they were more often portrayed as scientists or learned doctors than as true detectives. Rather than dealing with human crimes, these investigators were involved in cases dealing with ghosts, malevolent spirits, arcane curses, demons, monsters, and other supernatural events and entities… A number of these sleuths made appearances in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction.

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Adventures in Horrific Fantasy Literature?

Adventures in Horrific Fantasy Literature?

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fanlgTwo weeks back, my Black Gate post took a stab at identifying a handful of the most hair-raising, spine-tingling short fiction ever written (in Vintage Scares). The more I looked at the stories that I (and others) came up with, the more excited I became about them. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm only served to underscore a curious fact that I have not always been ready to claim: I have become both a consumer and a writer of horror fiction.

That’s not something I would ever have expected. My version of horror, my “elevator speech definition,” would for years have centered on the gross-out work of Clive Barker (Hellraiser) and the voyeuristic nastiness of the movies I saw growing up: A Nightmare On Elm Street, Evil Dead 2, and Friday the 13th. Horror to me meant attractive but stupid teenagers getting slaughtered and it was strictly low-brow. Not worthy of serious consideration.

Never mind that I’d already read Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle and a fair amount of Poe. By the time I’d been thoroughly eddicated by college, I’d relegated horror to a very distant cultural bayou. It was, at best, the literary equivalent of junk food.

But then a funny thing happened. I bought a copy of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 14th Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. As with all of those (sadly now defunct) collections, fantasy and horror were presented back-to-back and face-to-face, bumped up against one another as inescapably close kissing cousins. Confronted by the likes of Susanna Clarke, Esther M. Friesner, Ian Rodwell & Steve Duffy, Tanith Lee, and Kelly Link, it was time to re-evaluate.

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The 2013 Hugo Award Winners

The 2013 Hugo Award Winners

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The Emperor's Soul-smallThe 2013 Hugo Awards were given out last night at LoneStarCon3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, Texas.

The complete list of winners follows.

BEST NOVEL

Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)

BEST NOVELLA

The Emperor’s Soul, Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon)

BEST NOVELETTE

“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity)

BEST SHORT STORY

“Mono no Aware,” Ken Liu (The Future Is Japanese)

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Chapter Eight Changes Everything: Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle

Chapter Eight Changes Everything: Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle

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The SandcastleYou never know when you’ll find something fantastical to write about.

A little while ago, I started an ongoing project of reading through the novels of Iris Murdoch. This came out of an appreciation of A.S. Byatt’s fiction, which led to me reading her study of Murdoch’s early novel, Degrees of Freedom. That book in turn led me to start in on Murdoch. I loved her first novel, Under the Net, which is something like what might have happened if P.G. Wodehouse had written a philosophical social realist novel. The next book, The Flight From the Enchanter, was well-written but sprawling and felt overly symbolically-determined. So I started on the third novel, 1957’s The Sandcastle, unsure of what I’d find.

It’s set in a town not far from London and deals with an extramarital affair between Bill Mor (known throughout the book as Mor), a teacher at St. Bride’s school for boys, and a young painter named Rain Carter, who comes to the school to paint a portrait of the school’s former headmaster, Demoyte, a longstanding friend of Mor’s. For the first seven chapters, the book unfolds much as you’d expect from a mimetic novel. The background of Mor and his family and his school is sketched in; his political ambitions are described; the implicit conflict with his strong-willed wife Nan is set up; the personality of Rain is implied; a set of accidents throw Mor and Rain into close proximity. The prose is direct, even simple, and on the whole without ornament.

Then we get to chapter eight and everything changes.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos by Dave Gross

Black Gate Online Fiction: Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos by Dave Gross

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Pathfinder Tales King of Chaos-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer an exclusive first look at the latest Pathfinder Tales novel by Dave Gross, the acclaimed author of Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, and Queen of Thorns.

After a century of imprisonment, demons have broken free of the wardstones surrounding the Worldwound. As fiends flood south into civilized lands, Count Varian Jeggare and his hellspawn bodyguard Radovan must search through the ruins of a fallen nation for the blasphemous text that opened the gate to the Abyss in the first place-and which might hold the key to closing it. In order to succeed, however, the heroes will need to join forces with pious crusaders, barbaric local warriors, and even one of the legendary god callers. It’s a race against time as the companions fight their way across a broken land, facing off against fiends, monsters, and a vampire intent on becoming the god of blood-but will unearthing the dangerous book save the world, or destroy it completely? From best-selling author Dave Gross comes a new adventure set against the backdrop of the Wrath of the Righteous Adventure Path in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Dave Gross is the former editor of Dragon, Star Wars Insider, and Amazing Stories. His adventures of Radovan and Count Jeggare include the Pathfinder Tales novels Prince of Wolves and Master of Devils, as well as many novellas and short stories available at Paizo.com. His last novel for Paizo was the acclaimed Queen of Thorns.

We previously reviewed the Pathfinder Tales novels Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter, Master of Devils by Dave Gross, and Howard Andrew Jones’s Plague of Shadows, and introduced you to BG Contributing Editor Bill Ward’s Pathfinder Tales story “The Box, and “The Walkers from the Crypt” by Howard Andrew Jones. We recently covered the game releases Ultimate Campaign, Fey Revisited, and Chronicles of the Righteous.

Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos is published by Paizo Publishing and is part of their Pathfinder Tales Subscription. It is a 400-page mass market paperback available for $9.99 ($6.99 ePub and PDF). “The Watchtower,” the complete first chapter of King of Chaos, is presented here at Black Gate.

Read Chapter One of King of Chaos here.

Vintage Treasures: The Shapes of Midnight by Joseph Payne Brennan

Vintage Treasures: The Shapes of Midnight by Joseph Payne Brennan

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The Shapes of Midnight-smallJoseph Payne Brennan isn’t discussed much these days. He died over twenty years ago, in 1990, the same year his last book was released, The Adventures of Lucius Leffing, the fourth volume featuring his Carnacki-like occult detective.

Brennan wrote only two novels. But he is mostly remembered for his classic horror stories, published in Weird Tales, Whispers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and over 200 horror anthologies. His most famous story, “Slime,” featuring a sinister new form of protoplasmic life which emerges from the ocean, was originally published in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales and has been reprinted more than fifty times. It has influenced countless horror stories ever since, from the Steve McQueen film The Blob (which Brennan successfully sued for copyright infringement) to Stephen King’s famous short story, “The Raft,” which also features a horrific killer protoplasm in a lake.

Brennan’s imagination wasn’t limited to primordial monsters, however. One of his most acclaimed short stories, “Canavan’s Back Yard,” imagines an overgrown lot so twisted and mazelike that most who venture into it never return.

Brennan isn’t someone I discovered in the magazines. In fact, up until this week, I was pretty sure I’d never read anything by him at all. He’s been mentioned a few times here on the Black Gate blog, most recently in Douglas Draa’s review of Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural, and in the discussion surrounding Robert E. Howard’s The People of the Black Circle.

But I’d been curious about his 1980 paperback collection, The Shapes of Midnight, containing both “Slime” and “Canavan’s Back Yard,” and my interest was heightened by the comments Doug Draa made on my People of the Black Circle article. So I became determined to get a copy, and in June I finally succeeded.

It’s a slender volume, just 176 pages, containing a dozen stories. The enthusiastic introduction is by a young horror writer who burst on the scene just six years earlier, with a successful horror novel titled Carrie. Here’s what Stephen King had to say about Joseph Payne Brennan, taken from his introduction to The Shapes of Midnight.

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