Black Gate

Yeah, I know I’m late to the party with this one. Stories, the high-profile original anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, was released over two years ago — back in June of 2010.

But I have a good excuse. Despite the incredibly awesome cover by Tom Gauld, after my first glace at the table of contents, I dismissed Stories as a mainstream anthology.

I mean, come on. Walter Mosley, Jodi Picolut, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanne Harris, Lawrence Block, Roddy Doyle, and Chuck Palahniuk? You’d have made the same mistake.

Eventually, I picked up enough on the buzz around this book to realize that its claim to being a “groundbreaking anthology that reinvigorates, expands, and redefines the limits of imaginative fiction” wasn’t just hyperbole. Many of the stories, including Neil Gaiman’s “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” and Elizabeth Hand’s “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon,” began showing up on genre best-of-the-year lists.

I finally decided it was time to take another look. It didn’t hurt that by then the hardcover was being offered at a bargain price at Amazon.com for 60% off (still in stock if you act fast).

Stories is by no means a straight-up fantasy anthology. But it includes some terrific fantasy fiction by some of the genre’s biggest names, including Richard Adams, Michael Swanwick, Michael Moorcock, Peter Straub, Gene Wolfe, Tim Powers, Joe Hill, Michael Marshall Smith, and Joe R. Lansdale.

And I think you’ll be surprised by the contributions of the writers I mentioned above — who aren’t known for writing fantasy — as well.

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The true value of anthologies, of course, is you get to sample a variety of authors under a single cover. And the true value of great anthologies is that you get to sample a variety of great authors under a single cover.

Epic: Legends of Fantasy looks like a great anthology. It’s a fantasy buffet featuring some of the most acclaimed writers working in the field today, including Patrick Rothfuss, George R. R. Martin, Tad Williams, Michael Moorcock, Mary Robinette Kowal, and N. K. Jemisin, to name just a few. Here’s the complete TOC:

“Homecoming” by Robin Hobb
“The Word of Unbinding” by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The Burning Man” by Tad Williams
“As the Wheel Turns” by Aliette de Bodard
“The Alchemist” by Paolo Bacigalupi
“Sandmagic” by Orson Scott Card
“The Road to Levinshir” by Patrick Rothfuss
“Rysn” by Brandon Sanderson
“While the Gods Laugh” by Michael Moorcock
“Mother of All Russiya” by Melanie Rawn
“Riding the Shore of the River of Death” by Kate Elliott
“The Bound Man” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“The Narcomancer” by N. K. Jemisin
“Strife Lingers in Memory” by Carrie Vaughn
“The Mad Apprentice” by Trudi Canavan
“Otherling” by Juliet Marillier
“The Mystery Knight” by George R. R. Martin

This is a reprint anthology, but don’t let that dissuade you. Adams has done a marvelous job assembling epic fantasy from the last five decades, and tracking down even a fraction of these stories would cost you far more than this anthology. Paolo Bacigalupi’s novella, “The Alchemist,” for example, was previously available only as a limited-edition hardcover from Subterranean Press. “The Road to Levinshir” by Patrick Rothfuss is from Volume 18 of the Writers of the Future anthology, long out of print. Michael Moorcock’s Elric tale, “While the Gods Laugh,” originally published in Science Fantasy #49 (October 1961), is probably the most-reprinted tale of the lot, but trust me — you’ll be glad it’s here.

Epic: Legends of Fantasy was published on October 5th by Tachyon Publications. It is 624 pages in trade paperback for $17.95 ($9.99 for the digital version). Complete details at the Tachyon website.

I’m a big fan of Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire film based on the John Ajvide Lindqvist novel. Creepy, creepy stuff, and any film that can have you cheering for the vampire while simultaneously being 100% faithful to traditional vampire lore gets my vote.

Let the Right One In was re-made for English audiences as Let Me In in 2010, staring Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass). Lindqvist’s original novel was given the same title for its English trade paperback release the same year. His latest is Harbor, and it sounds very intriguing indeed.

With Harbor, a stunning and chilling masterpiece, Lindqvist firmly cements his place as the heir apparent to Stephen King.

One ordinary winter afternoon on a snowy island, Anders and Cecilia take their six-year-old daughter Maja across the ice to visit the lighthouse in the middle of the frozen channel. While they are exploring the lighthouse, Maja disappears – either into thin air or under thin ice — leaving not even a footprint in the snow.

Two years later, Anders, a broken man, moves back to his family’s abandoned home on the island. He soon realizes that Maja’s disappearance is only one of many strange occurrences, and that his fellow islanders, including his own grandmother, know a lot more than they’re telling. As he digs deeper, Anders begins to unearth a dark and deadly secret at the heart of this small, seemingly placid town.

As he did with Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead, John Ajvide Lindqvist serves up a blockbuster cocktail of high-tension suspense in a narrative that barely pauses for breath.

I don’t cover a lot of horror with my New Treasures column, mostly because I don’t get the chance to read as much as I used to. But I plan to make an exception for this one.

Harbor was released by St. Martin’s Griffin in September; it is 528 pages. It is $15.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition.

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

I don’t know about you, but as Halloween approaches I’m seeing a lot more horror movies, books, and graphic novels cross my path.

As Goth Chick loves to point out, it is the Season. And if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to overlook some of its more intriguing titles, especially from the small press. Fortunately, Black Gate has you covered.

Dark Regions Press specializes in horror and dark fiction, and have published hundreds of authors such as Bentley Little, Rick Hautala, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, Jeffrey Thomas, Charlee Jacob, Tim Waggoner, and many more. This Tuesday, October 23rd, they are publishing Crooked House by Bram Stoker Award winning author Joe McKinney:

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point.

Those words were true when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote them in 1851, and they were true in 1933, when a fire burned half of Crook House to the ground, taking James Crook’s wife and two sons with it. A disgraced bootlegger and former pro baseball player, James Crook returned from prison to find his house, and his life, a pile of cinders. Broken and insane, he rebuilt Crook House, putting his pain and loneliness into every timber.

But Hawthorne’s words are still true today, and nobody knows that better than Dr. Robert Bell, who has just moved into Crook House as part of his hiring package from a small Texas college. He soon discovers that Crook House is more than just a new beginning for himself and Sarah and their daughter Angela. For the Bell family, Crook House is a place where the past still lives, and its horrors waiting for the next drowning man.

With Crooked House, Joe McKinney brings you a chilling novel in the vein of The Shining by Stephen King, a haunted house tale that will stay with you long after the final page is turned.

Joe McKinney is the author of Flesh Eaters, Dead City, Mutated, and more. Crooked House will be available as a leather-bound deluxe lettered hardcover and as a signed and numbered limited hardcover. Find complete details and order information at Dark Regions.

Melanie Rawn’s first novel, 1988’s Dragon Prince, was an immediate success. Twenty-four years later, it’s still in print — on something like its 50th printing — and so are both of its sequels. If that’s not an auspicious debut, I don’t know what is.

Rawn certainly didn’t rest with the Dragon Prince trilogy. From 1991-94, she published the Dragon Star trilogy; in 1996 the collaborative novel The Golden Key (with Kate Elliott and Jennifer Roberson); and 1994 and 1997 saw the release of the first two novels of the Exiles trilogy. Rawn practically had her own shelf on every bookstore in North America — nine fat fantasy novels, all still in print.

And then… nothing. Her last publication of the 90s was a short story in A Magic-Lover’s Treasury of the Fantastic in 1998. The Captal’s Tower, the final novel in the Exiles trilogy, has been listed as “forthcoming” since 1997.

She emerged from nearly a decade of silence in 2006, breaking away from epic fantasy with Spellbinder, a modern urban fantasy of the territorial disputes and sex lives of Manhattan witches. In a note in that book, Rawn spoke of battling clinical depression and the need to move on to other projects to help her recovery. The sequel Fire Raiser arrived in 2009.

Last year she returned to epic fantasy for the first time in nearly 15 years with The Diviner, a prequel to The Golden Key:

The only survivor of royal treachery that eliminates his entire family, Azzad al-Ma’aliq flees to the desert and dedicates himself to vengeance. With the help of the Shagara, a nomadic tribe of powerful magicians, he will finally be able to take his revenge — but at what cost?

The Diviner was released in paperback by DAW books on August 7th. It is 438 pages, and priced at $7.99 for both the digital and print versions.