Black Gate

Dan Simmons wrote two of my favorite horror novels, Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night, and the audio version of his novel, The Terror, kept me riveted for many weeks during the long winter commute between Champaign and St. Charles last year. When Simmons talks horror, I listen.

Children of the Night was originally published in 1992, when Communist states were collapsing all across Europe and the airwaves were filled with stories of the desperate last days of Communist dictators. Romania, home to the classic fears of Transylvania, became synonymous with horror of a very different kind when western film crews entered bleak Romanian orphanages to expose the cruelty and neglect there. In Children of the Night, Simmons married modern horror and a far more ancient terror:

In a desolate orphanage in post-Communist Romania, a desperately ill infant is given the wrong blood transfusion — and flourishes rather than dies. For immunologist Kate Neuman, the infant’s immune system may hold the key to cure cancer and AIDS. Kate adopts the baby and takes him home to the States. But baby Joshua holds a link to an ancient clan and their legendary leader — Vlad Tşepeş, the original Dracula – whose agents kidnap the child. Against impossible odds and vicious enemies– both human and vampire – Kate and her ally, Father Mike O’Rourke, steal into Romania to get her baby back.

Children of the Night was published on December 11, 2012 by St. Martin’s Griffin. It is 464 pages in trade paperback, priced at $15.99 ($9.99 for the digital edition), and this edition features a brand new introduction by the author.

You can see all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

I talked about genre mash-ups Monday in my post on The Last Policeman. There’s an obvious one I forgot: hard-boiled detective zombie novels.

Not sure how I spaced on that one. Three titles I’ve covered as New Treasures in the last few months alone have been undead crime novels: Stefan Petrucha’s Dead Mann Running, Tim Waggoner’s The Nekropolis Archives, and Chris F. Holm’s Dead Harvest. As trends go, this one is a little more welcome than most, at least for me. Necromancers and tough-talking private eyes… what can I say, they go together.

The latest entrant into this crowded sub-sub-genre, Stephen Blackmoore’s Dead Things, sounds like it will fit in nicely:

Necromancer is such an ugly word, but it’s a title Eric Carter is stuck with.

He sees ghosts, talks to the dead. He’s turned it into a lucrative career putting troublesome spirits to rest, sometimes taking on even more dangerous things. For a fee, of course. When he left LA fifteen years ago, he thought he’d never go back. Too many bad memories. Too many people trying to kill him.

But now his sister’s been brutally murdered and Carter wants to find out why. Was it the gangster looking to settle a score? The ghost of a mage he killed the night he left town? Maybe it’s the patron saint of violent death herself, Santa Muerte, who’s taken an unusually keen interest in him. Carter’s going to find out who did it, and he’s going to make them pay.

As long as they don’t kill him first.

Dead Things will be published by DAW Books on Feb 5, 2013. It is 295 pages, and priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.

I enjoy genre mash-ups.  When done right, they highlight the strengths of both genres, and that’s a hard thing to pull off. Think horror-comedies like Ghostbusters or Zombieland, or science fiction mysteries like Asimov’s I, Robot stories. Or zombie westerns like the Bloodlands novels, or Dead Reckoning.

Not every mash-up succeeds, of course. (Did anyone see Seeking A Friend For the End of the World, Steve Carell’s romantic comedy cum apocalypse movie from 2012? No? That’s what I thought.)

But sometimes a mash-up is so brilliant I have to buy it immediately  That’s what happened with The Last Policeman, a police procedural set in Earth’s last days.

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?

Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.

The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job — but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week — except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?

Now there’s an original use for an apocalyptic setting. Give me a impending extinction-level event and a relentless investigator too stubborn to give up, and you have my attention. I bought this book after reading the first two paragraphs of the plot summary, and for a jaded book purchaser like me, that’s saying something.

Ben H. Winters is a New York Times best-selling author and an Edgar Award nominee. His last novel was Bedbugs. The Last Policeman was published by Quirk Books in trade paperback July 2012. It is 316 pages and priced at $14.95 ($14.95 for the digital edition).