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The blog posts of Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones and Editor John O’Neill

DMR Books is Open to Submissions

DMR Books is Open to Submissions

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DMR Books

I had lunch with the hard-working Dave Ritzlin yesterday, the mastermind behind DMR Books, and he casually mentioned that they are now open to submissions. This is great news for any aspiring writers out there who produce fantasy, horror, and adventure fiction in the tradition of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and other classic writers of the pulp era. Instead of trying to summarize exactly what Dave’s looking for, here he is in his own words.

Heroic fantasy adventure fiction of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre. Rather than give a detailed explanation of what that means, I’ll just say that if you’re familiar with the books we’ve published, as well as the titles on the following list, you’ll have a good idea of what we want.

What are you waiting for? Start your writing adventure here.

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Unbound Worlds on the Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of October 2018

Unbound Worlds on the Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of October 2018

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Astounding John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction-small The Dream Gatherer-small The Monster Baru Cormorant-small

Happy Halloween everyone!

Later tonight, as you’re curled up in your favorite chair munching Halloween candy, you’ll remember that today is also the last day of the month, and you’ll wonder what exciting new releases you overlooked. (Trust me. It’ll happen.) I mean, I get it. There are so many great new books being published these days that it’s impossible to keep track.

Impossible without very special resources, that is. Resources like Matt Staggs at Unbound Worlds, who’s curated an impressive list of 45 (yes, 45) new novels, collections, photobooks, anthologies, and nonfiction books representing the very best in science fiction, fantasy, horror and the unclassifiable. Here’s some of his best selections.

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee (Dey Street Books, 544 pages, $28.99 hardcover/$15.99 digital, October 23, 2018)

Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers — John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard — who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world.

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Mark Morris on the New Fears Anthologies

Mark Morris on the New Fears Anthologies

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New Fears cover-small New Fears 2-small


I was pretty excited by Mark Morris’ New Fears last year. It was a terrific horror anthology, with brand new stories by Alison Littlewood, Angela Slatter, Nina Allan, Chaz Brenchley, Ramsey Campbell, Adam Nevill, Muriel Gray, Kathryn Ptacek, Christopher Golden, and many others.

I kept an eye out for the second one in the series, and it arrived right on schedule from Titan Books last month. New Fears 2 looks even better, with 21 stories by the most acclaimed writers in the genre, including Priya Sharma, Robert Shearman, Gemma Files, Tim Lebbon, Brian Hodge, V. H. Leslie, Brian Evenson, Steve Rasnic Tem, Aliya Whiteley, John Langan, Paul Tremblay, and many others.

But anthology series are a tough sell in today’s market, as we’ve talked about here a few times (see “Is the Original SF and Fantasy Paperback Anthology Series Dead?” for some extensive discussion on the topic) So I was dismayed, but not too surprised, to see a public plea from Morris last week for support for his new series.

On Sunday New Fears picked up the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. The reviews for the book have been overwhelmingly positive, with a couple of reviewers even saying that it’s the best horror anthology they’ve read for years… And as with New Fears, the reviews for New Fears 2 have been phenomenally good.

But…

Despite all these accolades, New Fears simply hasn’t sold enough copies for Titan, at this time, to recommission the series… However if sales pick up, and the first two volumes earn out their advances, then there’s a possibility they make pick the series up again at a later date.

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A Treasure Trove of Classic British Horror: Darkness Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper

A Treasure Trove of Classic British Horror: Darkness Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper

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I first saw the three volumes of Darkness Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basic Copper at Greg Ketter’s booth at Windy City seven years ago. It was a gorgeous set of hardcovers, with magnificent wraparound Stephen Fabian artwork, and it drew my eye immediately.

It was prohibitively expensive, however — nearly $200 for the set, if I remember correctly. Two hundred bucks buys a lot of vintage paperbacks. I put them back on the shelf with a sigh, and headed for the back of the room, where the cheap paperbacks were piled high on countless tables.

Darkness Mist & Shadow was published by Drugstore Indian Press, a division of PS Publishing in the UK, which means it wasn’t widely distributed here in the US. I’ve always been curious about Basil Copper’s fiction… not curious enough to part with $200 on an impulse purchase, but still. Bob Byrne is a fan of his Solar Pons tales (also available from PS Publishing), and Bob has good taste, so that heightened my curiosity.

I’m not always in the mood for classic British horror, but when October rolls around, with its long evenings, hot chocolate, and a cat that insists on climbing into my lap at seven o’clock and staying there, immobile, until midnight, I’m much more receptive. The promise of a virtual library of short stories and novellas — painstakingly gathered from such hard-to-find sources as the Dark Terrors anthology series, the Pan Book of Horror Stories, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and long out-of-print Arkham House volumes — gets a lot more appealing. So when PS reissued the books in beautiful trade paperback editions, priced at just £9.99 each ($17 from most US sellers), it was simply too hard to resist. I paid $45 for the complete set, and I’m very happy I did.

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A Cherished Contributor, and Hard to be Friends With: Michael Moorcock on Thomas M. Disch

A Cherished Contributor, and Hard to be Friends With: Michael Moorcock on Thomas M. Disch

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Last month I wrote a brief feature on Thomas M. Disch and his 1968 dystopian SF novel Camp Concentration. Michael Moorcock, who serialized the novel in four issues of his magazine New Worlds (July -October, 1967), contacted me to share his own memories, and challenge my portrayal of Tom as “a tragic figure.”

Tom was a close friend. Sometimes hard to be friends with. He was given to depression and to taking offence over imagined insults. In spite of this, I and his other close friends loved him and I still wonder if I could have done more for him, as does Linda. She says that she loved being with us and never laughed so much as when we were together, so I don’t see him as a tragic figure. After Charlie died he became lonely and bitter on occasions but several substantial friends did all they could for him.

I serialised Camp Concentration in New Worlds and was flattered when he said he would not have aspired to make it as good as it was if he hadn’t known it was appearing there. He brought each episode in every month and I was increasingly grateful to have such a fine novel to run in the first of our large size issues. With Ballard, he was my most valued contributor. Camp Concentration was illustrated by our mutual friend, the fine artist Pamela Zoline. He brought John Clute and John Sladek into our circle and the 60s and 70s were wonderful thanks in considerable part to our mutual friendships. Politically, we rarely agreed, but we had so much fun together. I miss him terribly.

“Charlie” was Disch’s partner of three decades, poet Charles Naylor, who died in 2005. I asked Michael for permission to reprint his comments here, and he graciously granted it, and shared some additional memories of Disch.

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Talking to Ghosts: Keri Arthur’s Outcast Trilogy

Talking to Ghosts: Keri Arthur’s Outcast Trilogy

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Keri Arthur City of Light-small Keri Arthur Winter Halo-small Keri Arthur The Black Tide-small

I quit reading urban fantasy and paranormal romance sometime around 2008, when you couldn’t browse bookshelves without being blinded by a sea of leather-clad heroines wielding crossbows. I mean, I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as much as the next person, but man. That show has a lot to answer for.

Now that it’s safe to shop again, I’m kinda curious about those books that survived the mass extinction of urban fantasy. I pull them off the shelves at Barnes & Noble and say, “What are you doing here?” They’re like the rebel pilots that survived the attack on the Death Star. They can hold reunions in a phone booth.

Like any publishing boom-and-bust cycle, it’s only the best that endures. So I was naturally intrigued to find Keri Arthur’s City of Light at B&N earlier this year. Arthur is the author of the Souls of Fire, Dark Angels, and the New York Times bestselling Riley Jenson, Guardian series. She’s written more than forty books, and won Romantic Times‘ Career Achievement Award for urban fantasy. City of Light is the opening novel in the Outcast trilogy, a post apocalyptic tale set a century after a devastating war tears a hole in reality, and the last remnants of humanity cling to life in brightly-lit cities that shield them from terrifying spectres. It’s a promising blend of SF and paranormal horror (even if it does have a crossbow on the cover), and has sort of a Resident Evil vibe, with a superhumanly powerful heroine who faces off against both undead nasties and an evil pharmaceutical company whose experiments on adults and children bring unexpected horrors.

City of Light won plenty of acclaim, with Library Journal praising it for “An intriguing world and a marvelous heroine who speaks to ghosts,” and The Speculative Herald calling it “Exciting and well written… a remarkable mix of intrigue and action.” The first two books in the series were published in paperback by Signet, but it didn’t do well enough for them to pick up the third volume, so Arthur self published it in the US in December of last year.

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New Treasures: The Fantastic Four: Behold… Galactus! by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Byrne and John Buscema

New Treasures: The Fantastic Four: Behold… Galactus! by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Byrne and John Buscema

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Fantastic Four Behold Galactus 2

Just how big is the monster-sized Fantastic Four: Behold… Galactus! from Marvel Comics?

HUGE. Several comparison shots have popped up (including Charles R Rutledge’s side-by-side with a Robert Parker hardcover), but my favorite is the one above, borrowed from Bobby Nash’s Patreon page, which shows the book alongside a regulation-size graphic novel. Behold… Galactus! is an impressive 13.5 x 21.2 inches; big enough to double as a kitchen table.

Any way you slice it, this book is a beast. Its massive 312 pages contain virtually all of the early tales of Galactus from Fantastic Four, including Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s beloved 60s classic “The Coming of Galactus” (from Fantastic Four #48-50) and its sequel “When Calls Galactus” (FF #74-77), plus the Lee-Buscema tale “Galactus Unleashed” (FF #120-123), and John Byrne’s 80s take on the Big G, from FF #242-244 (which includes the famous free-for-all “Everyone Versus Galactus,” from FF 243.)

Monster format aside, these classic stories still make terrific reading, especially the Lee-Kirby tales. The Fantastic Four remains my favorite Marvel Comic, and this book will help you understand why. It was published by Marvel on September 11, 2018. It is 312 pages, priced at $50 in hardcover and $24.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Alex Ross. See all our recent Comics coverage here.

Douglas Draa’s What October Brings is a Lovecraftian Celebration of Halloween

Douglas Draa’s What October Brings is a Lovecraftian Celebration of Halloween

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What October Brings-smallHalloween and Lovecraft. Two great things that belong together. And Weirdbook editor Douglas Draa is the man to make it happen.

His new anthology What October Brings is a handsome collection of original stories by Adrian Cole, Storm Constantine, Tim Curran, Cody Goodfellow, Nancy Holder, Brian M. Sammons, John Shirley, Lucy A. Snyder, Chet Williamson, Black Gate writer Darrell Schweitzer, and many others — all packaged under a gorgeous cover by Italian artist Daniele Serra.

It’s from UK publisher Celaeno Press, a new name to me, but they clearly do good work. Here’s the description.

Halloween, a time for laughing children in white bedsheets and superhero costumes. A time for chocolate candy, and pumpkins, and Trick-or-Treat.

… a time for dark things everywhere to slink out of the shadows and into our lives, reminding those unlucky few that our charades of Halloween cannot erase the centuries of history and pain behind the facade…

What October Brings celebrates the dark traditions of the autumn rituals, of Halloween and Samhain, in homage to the uniquely fascinating fiction of HP Lovecraft. Masters of the short story offer you a “once in a lifetime” Trick-or-Treat experience…

…perhaps your last!

This is a sizable anthology packed with long stories. Over half are 18+ pages, and one, Lucy A. Snyder’s “Cosmic Cola,” is a generous 30 pages. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of September 2018

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of September 2018

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The Hidden Sun by Jaine Fenn-small Rosewater by Tade Thompson-small Salvation by Peter F Hamilton-small

Geez, it’s the last day of the month already. I’m used to failing at my ambitious monthly reading plans, but at least I usually try. This month has been so busy that I haven’t even been able to keep track of all the great books I missed, much less crack any of them open.

September still has a few hours left, and I’m going to use that time to educate myself. And the best resource for that are book blogs like The Verge, Unbound Worlds, Kirkus Reviews, and especially the excellent Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, which has gradually become my go-to source for the best new releases. This month Jeff Somers does his usual top-notch job, pointing me to 26 tantalizing titles I might have otherwise overlooked. Here’s the best of them.

The Hidden Sun by Jaine Fenn (Angry Robot, 448 pages, $12.99 trade paperback/$8.99 digital, September 4)

Fenn is as known for her short fiction as she is for her Hidden Empire novel series — and for her tendency to take stories in unexpected directions, whether on the micro-scale in short stories or the macro-scale of novels. [In] Hidden Sun Fenn kicks off an all new series set in a universe of shadowlands and bright alien skylands. Rhia Harlyn is a well-born woman in the shadowland Shen, struggling against old-fashioned sexism as she pursues scientific knowledge. She gets a tragic opportunity to use his skill for research and discovery after her brother vanishes. She sets off to the skylands to seek the truth behind his disappearance and finds herself caught between a rebel and a cult leader on an alluring, dangerous world.

Jaine Fenn won the British Science Fiction for her short fiction. She’s the author of the 5-volume Hidden Empire series, published in the UK by Gollancz, which does not yet have a US publisher. The Hidden Sun is the first volume of a 2-part series titled Shadowlands; the sequel, Broken Shadow, will be released on April 4. This is her first US release; if it does well, I hope that means we get to see a lot more of her.

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Vintage Treasures: 5 Galaxy Short Novels, edited by H.L. Gold

Vintage Treasures: 5 Galaxy Short Novels, edited by H.L. Gold

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Cover by Edward Valigursky

I love novellas. They’re the perfect length for idling away those long fall evenings. I miss them in the online magazines I read today, virtually all of which have a submission cap somewhere around 10,000 words (the exception is Neil Clarke’s Clarkesworld, which recently began accepting stories up to 16,000 words. Way to go, Neil!)

It was Matthew Wuertz’s Saturday review of the April 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, including Fred Pohl’s classic “The Midas Plague,” that reminded me just how many great novellas appeared in those old print magazines. Matt’s piece made me want to read the story all over again. In fact, it made me wish there was an easy way to sample Galaxy’s  novellas. Galaxy editor H.L. Gold had an appetite for meaty SF epics, and his authors took ready advantage of that market. Gold showcased dozens of top-notch writers at novella length in the early days of the magazine, and it would be great to have easy access to those hard-to-find tales.

Yeah, that was dumb. As I was sorting paperbacks this morning it finally occurred to me that what I was wishing for already existed. Gold produced nearly a dozen mass market anthologies during his eleven years as Galaxy‘s editor, including six volumes of the Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction. He knew what his readers wanted, and he paid special attention to longer fiction, with Galaxy Science Fiction Omnibus (1955), The World That Couldn’t Be and 8 Other Novelets From Galaxy (1959), Bodyguard and Four Other Short Novels from Galaxy (1960), Mind Partner and 8 Other Novelets from Galaxy (1961), and especially 5 Galaxy Short Novels, which appeared in 1958.

5 Galaxy Short Novels reprints stories by Theodore Sturgeon, Damon Knight, James E. Gunn, J. T. McIntosh, and F. L. Wallace. Even today, it makes a great introduction to the magazine.

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