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New Treasures: Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

New Treasures: Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

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anno-dracula-bloody-red-baronOkay, technically, this is both a Vintage Treasure and a New Treasure. It’s a brand spanking new edition of a novel that came out nearly two decades ago, in 1995.

But what a novel. The sequel to Anno Dracula, one of the most acclaimed vampire novels of the 90s — an alternate history in which Count Dracula has killed Van Helsing, married Queen Victoria, imposed a police state and launched a terrifying new era of British vampire domination — The Bloody Red Baron picks up the story a few years later, at the dawn of World War I:

It is 1918 and Graf von Dracula is commander-in-chief of the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The war of the great powers in Europe is also a war between the living and the undead. Caught up in the conflict, Charles Beauregard, an old enemy of Dracula, his protégé Edwin Winthrop, and intrepid vampire reporter Kate Reed go head-to-head with the lethal vampire flying machine that is the Bloody Red Baron…

One of the most fascinating aspects of Anno Dracula was the adroit manner in which Newman drew from real and fictional historical characters for virtually his entire cast — including Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Lestrade, Allan Quatermain, Billy the Kid, Orson Welles, Oscar Wilde, Fu Manchu, The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Carmilla, Doctor Moreau, Kurt Barlow (Salem’s Lot), Carnacki, Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows), Daniel Dravot (The Man Who Would Be King), Count Orlok (Nosferatu) and even Carl Kolchak (The Night Stalker).

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Vintage Treasures: The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner

Vintage Treasures: The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner

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the-startling-worlds-of-henry-kuttner2I have fun with these Vintage Treasure pieces. For one thing, they’re a great excuse to shine some light on interesting items that cross my path.

Take Henry Kuttner’s paperback collection, The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner. Published in 1987, nearly 20 years after his death, it’s unusual in several respects. For one thing, it includes only novellas. And all originated from a single source: the long-dead pulp magazine Startling Stories.

I think this is a neat idea. The best writers of the pulp era — and Kuttner certainly qualifies — have seen most of their short fiction studiously reprinted. In fact, we’ve covered four generous collections of Kuttner’s pulp fiction just in the last few years: the weird-menace collection Terror in the House, the first volume in The Early Kuttner series; Thunder in the Void, gathering his early space operas; Detour to Otherness, the massive retrospective of his collaborative work with C.L. Moore; and none other than the distinguished James Enge reviewed his Gallagher stories for us, collected in Robots Have No Tails.

But short novels, 40,000-word epics printed in a single pulp issue, rarely (if ever) get reprinted. They’re too long for most collections, and generally too short for a standalone novel, so most of them have slipped through the pages of history. The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner rescues three such wonders and puts them under one cover.

But that’s not even the most interesting thing about The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner. Since all three novels appeared in a single source, this isn’t just a collection of Kuttner’s work. It’s an anthology that celebrates Startling Stories. Just as most collections give us insight into the recurring themes in an author’s work, this book offers us a  generous sampling of the kind of fiction that appeared in that grand old pulp.

The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner collects The Portal in the Picture (originally published in 1949), Valley of the Flame (1946), and The Dark World (1946). It’s one of the most intriguing collections I’ve come across in the past year. At press time, there are 23 used copies available on Amazon.com, ranging in price from $2.25 to $9.99.

New Treasures: Blaggard’s Moon, by George Bryan Polivka

New Treasures: Blaggard’s Moon, by George Bryan Polivka

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blaggards-moonI don’t know much about George Bryan Polivka, to be honest. But I know he writes books I want to read.

I first discovered him while doing research for my most recent article on remaindered fantasy at Amazon.com. Two novels in his pirate-y Trophy Chase Trilogy were heavily discounted, so I figured that was worth a look. In the process, I discovered this standalone fantasy tale and decided to take a chance. It arrived this week.

“This is the story of the great battle between the pirates of the world and the band of merciless men who would purge us from the seas and make the name Hell’s Gatemen a source of terror to us all.”

Thus begins the tale told by Ham Drumbone, a pirate storyteller with a gift for dramatic detail. It is recalled by Smith Delaney as he awaits a gruesome death at the hands of ancient beasts called mermonkeys, who are eager to devour his bones. In the process of remembering, this simple pirate ponders, in his always earnest and often whimsical way, the mysteries of true hearts wronged, noble love gone awry, dark deeds done for the sake of gold, and the sacrifices made for love.

For Ham’s story is about Damrick Fellows, the great pirate hunter, who works his way ever closer to the great pirate king, Conch Imbry, only to find his focus blurred by his love for the pirate’s woman, Jenta Stillmithers. In the end, Delaney must come face-to-face with himself, with his choices, with the power of love, and with a God who promises him both a hell richly earned and a grace given where none is deserved. A swashbuckling fantasy story for all ages from Emmy Award-winning author George Bryan Polivka.

A little research reveals Polivka won his Emmy in 1986 for writing his documentary A Hard Road to Glory, on the racial prejudice faced by African American athletes. It also reveals he writes primarily Christian fantasy, which ought to make an interesting slant on a pirate novel.

I also ordered The Legend of the Firefish and The Battle for Vast Dominion, two novels in Trophy Chase Trilogy which are still available at discount prices on Amazon, which also feature pirates, epic sea battles, magic, and plenty of buckles that swash. Not sure which I’ll dip into first, but I’ll report back here as I learn more.

New Treasures: Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau

New Treasures: Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau

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sherlock-holmes-the-army-of-dr-moreau2We see a lot of exciting, original fantasy every week here at the roof-top headquarters of Black Gate magazine. It’s good to see the genre is still filled with invention, and hot new writers throwing out new ideas like sparks off a forge.

But I’m not always in the mood for the new. Sometimes what I want is a fresh take on some of my old favorites. That’s why I enjoy Cthulhu fiction, for example, and William Patrick Maynard’s excellent Sax Rohmer articles and novels.

And that’s why I was very intrigued by Guy Adams’s Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau, a potent literary mash-up that combines H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. Guy Adams is the author of the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Breath of God, as well as The Case Notes of Sherlock Holmes and the horror novels The World House and Restoration. He’s also written several Torchwood novels, and a number of tie-ins to the TV series Life on Mars. Here’s the description:

Following the trail of several corpses seemingly killed by wild animals, Holmes and Watson stumble upon the experiments of Dr. Moreau. Through vivisection and crude genetic engineering, Moreau is creating animal hybrids, in an attempt to prove the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin.

In his laboratory, hidden among the opium dens of Rotherhithe, Moreau is building an army of “beast men.” Tired of having his work ignored — or reviled — by the British scientific community, Moreau is willing to make the world pay attention using his creatures as a force to gain control of the government.

Any book that combines hidden laboratories, genetic engineering, Sherlock Holmes, and a plot to take over the world gets my attention.

Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau was released on August 7 by Titan Books. It is 290 pages in trade paperback, priced at $12.95, or just $7.99 for the Kindle version. You can read the first two chapters here.

James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons Arrives

James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons Arrives

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a-guile-of-dragonsThe official on-sale date isn’t until August 24, but I’ve now received multiple reports that James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons has arrived in stores. It’s also available for purchase online. We can’t postpone the party any longer.

James Enge’s first published story “Turn Up This Crooked Way” — the tale that introduced Morlock the Maker to the world — was in Black Gate 8. Morlock appeared in virtually every issue of Black Gate for the next five years; his last appearance was the novella “Destroyer” in BG 14.

James’ first Morlock novel, Blood of Ambrose, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2010. It was followed by This Crooked Way, which collected a dozen short stories, including all six published in Black Gate, and The Wolf Age. A Guile of Dragons is the fourth in the series, and the first new Morlock book in almost two years. As we reported back in February, it is Morlock’s origin story:

Before history began, the dwarves of Thrymhaiam fought against the dragons as the Longest War raged in the deep roads beneath the Northhold. Now the dragons have returned, allied with the dead kings of Cor and backed by the masked gods of Fate and Chaos.

The dwarves are cut off from the Graith of Guardians in the south. Their defenders are taken prisoner or corrupted by dragonspells. The weight of guarding the Northhold now rests on the crooked shoulders of a traitor’s son, Morlock syr Theorn (also called Ambrosius).

But his wounded mind has learned a dark secret in the hidden ways under the mountains. Regin and Fafnir were brothers, and the Longest War can never be over…

The gorgeous cover is by Steve Stone. Click on the image at right to see the complete wrap-around image in HD.

A Guile of Dragons is 320 pages in trade paperback, published by Pyr Books. It is $17.95, and has an official on-sale date of August 24. But if you find it for sale and whisk it home before then, we won’t tell anyone.

A Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore Score

A Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore Score

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coverthelongships_norstedtsBrick and mortar bookstores are as rare as hen’s teeth these days, it seems, and that’s a shame. I enjoy the instantaneous convenience and enormous selection of Amazon and Abebooks, but there’s something about musty old bookstores that online shopping cannot replace. The tactile sensation of picking up books, the joy of utterly unexpected finds, and the atmosphere of a shop devoted to reading and book-selling, are experiences that online delivery mechanisms cannot replicate.

Yesterday, I found a wonderful bookstore that reminded me of the unique advantages and pleasures of the real over the virtual: Mansfield’s Books and More in Tilton, New Hampshire. Tilton is a town I had driven through numerous times without a cause to stop, outside of filling a gas tank and the like. But yesterday, while playing chauffer on a back-to-school shopping trip with my wife and kids, I caught a glimpse of a storefront window in Tilton Center that I had previously overlooked. In a brief glance I took in a display of hardcover books in the front window and a few cartons of paperbacks placed outside with a sign indicating a sidewalk sale. My attention piqued, I managed to free myself from the clutches of clothes and shoe shopping with little difficulty and quickly backtracked to Mansfield’s.

Mansfield’s occupies what appears to be a former office building. The main room has a fireplace in one wall with a few overstuffed chairs. A narrow hallway at the back opens up on the left and right to six rooms that were presumably individual offices at one time. Most of these smaller rooms were still hung with old, ornate doors with frosted glass panes and other such details, though one clearly served as a small kitchen at one point, complete with a sink. Each room—the main room in the front and the half-dozen at the back—was overflowing, floor to ceiling, with used books, as well as a scattering of other items (the “More” refers to some old movie posters, knick knacks, and used DVDs and CDs).

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New Treasures: The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart

New Treasures: The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart

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book-of-cthulhuIt’s been a few good years for Cthulhu fans, with a number of high-profile, acclaimed anthologies offering brand new tales of everyone’s favorite genocidal cosmic entity, including Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound (2009), Darrell Schweitzer’s Cthulhu’s Reign (2010), S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings of Cthulhu (2010), and Future Lovecraft (2011) edited by Paula R. Stiles and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, among others.

However, if you’re new to the Cthulhu mythos, or just want to sample the best Lovecraftian horror of the last eight decades, your options are a little more limited. Paula Guran’s New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (2011) offers an excellent cross-section of fiction from the last decade, with short stories by Neil Gaiman, John Langan, China Miéville, Michael Shea, Charles Stross, and many others. At 528 pages, it’s a veritable feast of modern cosmic horror, but since the oldest story dates from the year 2000, it doesn’t really count as a true survey of the very finest Cthulhu fiction.

That title, I think, goes to Ross E. Lockhart’s The Book of Cthulhu. It includes some of the most famous Cthulhu stories of all time, including T.E.D. Klein’s “Black Man With a Horn” (1980), Brian McNaughton’s “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999), and fiction by Charles R. Saunders, Ramsey Campbell, Bruce Sterling, Laird Barron, Kage Baker, Thomas Ligotti, Gene Wolfe, and many others.

Although Lockhart draws heavily from modern writers, there’s surprisingly little overlap with Guran’s volume — a scant four stories. You could probably get away with getting both, in fact. I’m glad I did.

Ross E. Lockhart is the managing editor of Night Shade Books. A second volume, The Book of Cthulhu 2 — reprinting stories by Fritz Leiber, Neil Gaiman, Laird Barron, Michael Chabon, and many others — is scheduled for release in October.

The Book of Cthulhu is 530 pages in a handsome trade paperback, with cover art by Obrotowy. It was released in August, 2011 by Night Shade Books, with a cover price of $15.99.

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Uses of Terrible Comic Adaptations

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Uses of Terrible Comic Adaptations

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taran-wanderer21“Usually the combat scenes are the part I understand best,” said my student. “In this one, I have no idea what’s going on. There’s a wounded character at the end of the scene, and I have no idea how he even got near the fighting.”

We’d made our way to the end of Lloyd Alexander’s Taran Wanderer, the fourth volume in the classic 1960’s YA fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain. My student and I had sojourned in Prydain for most of a year. The prospect of seeing Taran come into his full powers at last in The High King was so exhilarating that the kid had rushed through the last several chapters of Taran Wanderer and confused himself thoroughly.

I could have assigned the usual remedy — write one page per chapter, explaining who did what to whom and why, flagging anything that’s still confusing — but I had just read Ralph Fletcher’s Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices. Fletcher devotes a chapter to the ways it can help students, especially male students in his experience, to draw illustrations and diagrams alongside their writing. Apparently English teachers in high schools and middle schools are trained to discourage such drawings, on the assumption that they’re a distraction from learning how to write.

“Write me a comic,” I said.

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Vintage Treasures: Eleanor Arnason’s The Sword Smith

Vintage Treasures: Eleanor Arnason’s The Sword Smith

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the-sword-smith2I first became acquainted with Eleanor Arnason through her powerful science fiction novels, including To the Resurrection Station (1986), Ring of Swords (1993), and especially A Woman of the Iron People (1991), the novel which won both the first Tiptree Award and the Mythopoeic Award in 1992.

But Arnason has a fine rep as a fantasy author as well. Her Daughter of the Bear King (1987) — the tale of a Minneapolis housewife who finds herself in a strange world where she’s hailed as a long-awaited hero, a true bear and shape-changer called to fight a creeping evil — was her second fantasy novel. Her first, and her first published novel, was The Sword Smith (1978).

The Sword Smith is an odd book in many ways. In begins in media res, with our heroes Limper, a lame smith, and his companion, the young dragon Nargri, in full flight from the King of Eshgorin, who has put a price on their heads. The reasons for all this are gradually revealed in a book that’s more travelogue than tightly-plotted heroic fantasy, with the two companions having a variety of adventures, meeting new companions, getting captured (more than once), and getting in and out of sticky situations. That’s our two heroes on the cover, making a sword (click for bigger version).

The Sword Smith is sometimes described as “low fantasy” (as opposed to high fantasy), chiefly because of the lack of plot. But it’s also praised for its originality; world building; and themes of individual freedom in the face of tyranny, the value of artistic aspirations, and prejudice.

It took me a while to track down a copy, but I finally found one last week. I think this has more to do with the publisher — a tiny outfit called Condor Publishing, who as far as I know published virtually no other fantasy novels — than any lack of quality. For whatever reason, copies are scare, and the book has never been reprinted.

The Sword Smith is 208 pages in paperback. It was published in 1978 by Condor Publishing, with a wraparound cover by A. Echevarria, and had an original cover price of $1.95.

Mindjammer Press Publishes Sarah Newton’s Mindjammer

Mindjammer Press Publishes Sarah Newton’s Mindjammer

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mindjammer2I first encountered Sarah Newton in 2010, when Howard Andrew Jones mentioned how impressed he was with Mindjammer, a far future transhuman space opera setting she wrote for the Starblazer Adventures RPG. I picked up a copy of her massive Legends of Anglerre fantasy roleplaying game on the strength of his rec and wasn’t disappointed. It was a gorgeous and inventive game based on the popular FATE system and we reviewed it in detail in Black Gate 15. I was especially impressed with Sarah’s crisp prose and attention to detail.

We don’t let talent like that get away if we can help it, so we recruited Sarah as a BG contributor last year. Her detailed appreciation of a classic urban setting, Pavis – Gateway to Adventure: The Classic RPG City is Back! (parts One and Two) was one of the most popular gaming articles we’ve published on the website this year.

Now Sarah has published her first novel, Mindjammer, through the brand new Mindjammer Press. Mindjammer Press, a new roleplaying and fiction imprint, has announced plans to publish both the Mindjammer roleplaying game and a new line of associated fiction. Their publication schedule includes the upcoming second edition core book, Mindjammer: The Expansionary Era — with vastly expanded content, new and detailed background material, and all new artwork — in spring 2013. It will be followed by the Solenine campaign pack, based on the setting for the first novel, a new and revamped Black Zone campaign, and the second novel in the Mindjammer series, Transcendence. Here’s the description for the first novel:

IT IS THE SECOND AGE OF SPACE… In the seventeenth millennium, the New Commonality of Humankind is expanding, using newly-discovered faster-than-light travel to rediscover lost worlds colonised in the distant past. It’s a time of turmoil, of clashing cultures, as civilisations shudder and collapse before the might of a benevolent empire ten millennia old.

In the Solenine Cluster, things are going from bad to worse, as hyper-advanced technologies destabilise a world in chaos. Thaddeus Clay and his SCI Force special ops team are on the trail of the Transmigration Heresy. What they find is something beyond even their imagining – something which could tear the whole Commonality apart…

Mindjammer is receiving a lot of positive press from readers both inside and outside the gaming industry. Here’s what Stargazer’s World said about it:

What I also enjoyed tremendously was that Mindjammer is a science fiction story that really deserves the name. The technology described sounds plausible and the Commonality era feels “real.” And even though Mindjammer is highly entertaining it also makes the reader ponder a couple of philosophical questions like what makes us human and is there a way to cheat death? In my opinion good SF should not only entertain but make us ask questions. Mindjammer does that all the time…

Mindjammer is a very exiting and intelligently-written novel that should be on the reading list of every SF fan!

Mindjammer is available now in Kindle format for $3.99 and in print for $15.95, both from Amazon. Check it out.