Black Gate

David Neil Lee wrote about “the most terrifying of all labor-saving devices” in Chainsaws: A History; his first novel was Commander Zero. With The Midnight Games, he offers us something very interesting indeed: a young adult novel of an adventurous lad in southern Ontario who stumbles on a cult trying to summon the Great Old Ones to Earth in the unused stadium near his home.

In the hardscrabble east end of Hamilton Ontario, young Nate Silva has grown up with the reassuring racket of football games from nearby Ivor Wynne Stadium. But now strange noises and music boom from the stadium late at night, and the air throbs with the chanting of excited crowds. When Nate sneaks into one of these “midnight games,” he is thrown headlong into a movement spearheaded by the secret Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods, who are summoning to Earth the monstrous Great Old Ones who ruled the planet long ago.

In this thrilling young adult novel, David Neil Lee captures the “Cthulhu Mythos” of horror author H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), and unleashes it in gritty, post-industrial Hamilton. Pitted against the worshippers of the mind-bending extraterrestrial Yog-Sothoth, Nate finds unexpected allies as he is pursued by savage alien creatures, the murderous Hounds of Tindalos, and the desperate minions of the Great Old Ones.

This is precisely what the world needs: an action-packed Young Adult Cthulhu Mythos novel. You know it’s true.

The Midnight Games was published by Wolsak and Wynn on October 27, 2015. It is 200 pages, priced at $12 in paperback. Learn more at David Neil Lee’s website.

Matthew Hughes’ novels include the To Hell and Back trilogy (Damned Busters, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay), Gullible’s Travels, The Other, and his Tales of Henghis Hapthorn (Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Hespira). He also writes crime fiction as Matt Hughes, and media tie-in novels as Hugh Matthews.

I’ve been extremely impressed with his short fiction, which has been collected in The Gist Hunter and Other Stories (2005), The Meaning of Luff (2013), and Tales of Henghis Hapthorn (2013). His newest self-published collection, Devil or Angel and Other Stories, is subtitled “Old-Style Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales.” It includes 16 stories that originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and a smattering of anthologies. One story, “Ant Lion,” appears here for the first time. Hughes is one of the best short fiction writers working in fantasy today, especially if you’re a fan of the classic space-opera style of Jack Vance.

Devil or Angel and Other Stories was self-published by Matthew Hughes on July 30, 2015. It is 264 pages, priced at $12.99 in paperback and $3.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Bradley W. Schenck.

Christopher Buehlman’s debut novel Those Across the River (2011) was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and Charlaine Harris called it “one of the best first novels I’ve ever read.” He followed up with Between Two Fires (2012), the tale of a disgraced knight coming face-to-face with apocalyptic horror in 1348, and The Necromancer’s House (2013), the story of a modern sorcerer on the run from a monster straight out of Russian folklore.

His newest novel, The Lesser Dead, was published in hardcover in 2014, and released in trade paperback late last year. It was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel, and won the American Library Association’s Best Horror Novel of the Year award. It’s the story of a secret colony of vampires in New York City who find themselves being preyed on by something far darker than themselves….

New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live. And die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody — he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city’s sidewalks.

The subways are his playground and his highway, shuttling him throughout Manhattan to bleed the unsuspecting in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park or in the backseats of Checker cabs, or even those in their own apartments who are too hypnotized by sitcoms to notice him opening their windows. It’s almost too easy.

Until one night he sees them hunting on his beloved subway. The children with the merry eyes. Vampires, like him…or not like him. Whatever they are, whatever their appearance means, the undead in the tunnels of Manhattan are not as safe as they once were.

And neither are the rest of us.

The Lesser Dead was published by Berkley on October 6, 2015. It is 368 pages, priced at $16, or $11.99 for the digital edition.

The Library of America has made a fine business of publishing archival quality omnibus editions of the most important novels of the 20th Century. We’ve covered several here recently, including:

A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, edited by Peter Straub

They’ve also published omnibus editions of Kurt Vonnegut, Dashiell Hammett, Philip K. Dick, Ross Macdonald, David Goodis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. I received several review copies in the mail from Library of America recently, including one of their Elmore Leonard collections. It’s been years since I’ve read anything by Leonard, but then again, it’s been a long time since I’ve held something as enticing as these collections. If you’re looking to put together an impressive genre library, this is the place to start.

Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1970s was published on August 28, 2014. It contains Fifty-Two Pickup, Swag, Unknown Man, and The Switch; it is 809 pages, priced at $35 in hardcover. Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1980s was published on September 1, 2015. It contains City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, and Freaky Deaky; it is 1024 pages, priced at $37.50 in hardcover. There are no digital editions.

Do you remember when vampires were terrifying creatures of the night? Not moody boyfriends who sparkled in sunlight, or lovers who assisted their tough private investigator girlfriends in a series of encounters with deadly yet also strangely sexy werewolves and other paranormal beasts?

I sure do. And so does Christopher Golden, editor of the new anthology Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror, which gathers tales of terror in which vampires are figures of overwhelming terror once more. It includes brand new stories from Charlaine Harris, Scott Smith, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Michael Kortya, Kelley Armstrong, Brian Keene, David Wellington, Seanan McGuire, and Tim Lebbon. This is old-school vampire fiction, for fans who wouldn’t have it any other way.

Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror was published by Gallery Books on October 6, 2015. It is 544 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $13.99 for the digital edition. Click on the images above for larger versions of the front and back covers.