Black Gate

In her review for NPR, Black Gate blogger Amal El-Mohtar raves about Seth Dickinson’s debut fantasy novel from Tor, the tale of a young woman from a conquered people who tries to transform a vast empire from within:

To read The Traitor Baru Cormorant is to sink inexorably into a book that should not be anywhere near as absorbing as it is — to realize that the white-knuckled grip with which you hold it was provoked by several consecutive pages of loans, taxes and commodity trading. It seems impossible that the economics of a fantasy world should be so viscerally riveting, but they are, and it’s incredible: You think you’re on solid ground right up until you feel that ground closing around your throat.

Literally breathtaking… Baru Cormorant as a character is magnificent. I found it impossible not to root for her even amid horrors of her making, to grieve with her and for her at various points, to clench my fists in her defense and in desperate need for her to stay whole. There is so much to admire and so much to mourn throughout the building tragedy of this novel… A crucial, necessary book ― a book that looks unflinchingly into the self-replicating virus of empire, asks the hardest questions, and dares to answer them.

Read the complete review here. We first covered the book here.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant was published by Tor Books on September 15, 2015. It is 400 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Sam Weber. Read an excerpt at Tor.com.

I think there’s something about October that drives publishers to repackage classic horror tales for a new generation.

Earlier this week we looked at Leslie S. Klinger’s new anthology In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, which collects tales published between 1816-1914; today it’s D. Thin’s handsome new book from New York Review Book Classics, Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird, published on October 6th. It collects tales from roughly the same era, 1833-1927, all with the theme of the cosmically weird.

“The true weird tale has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. An atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; a hint of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” —H. P. Lovecraft

This collection features some of the greatest masters of extreme terror, among them Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, and Henry James, and includes such classic works as Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” and of course Lovecraft’s own weird and hideous “The Colour Out of Space.”

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

Neil Baker’s Short Sharp Shocks anthologies have proven to be a great deal of fun. Neil has a flair for an inventive premise — and, as it turns out, a real eye for writing talent. The first, Amok!, focused on the modern boogeyman, and Stomping Grounds! featured monsters causing large-scale mayhem and misery. But I think Ill-considered Expeditions is his best idea yet. Here’s Neil, from his introduction:

The faithful reader (and I know there’s at least one of you) will be well aware that my anthology themes are a frightening echo of my childhood influences, and Ill-considered Expeditions is no exception. As a child of the 60s and 70s, my visual diet included Johnny Weissmuller’s brutal Tarzan films and Ron Ely’s slightly more child-friendly TV series. I delighted in the exploits of hapless colonials hacking their way through unforgiving jungles, catching spears in the gut and falling into all manner of native traps that invariably involved impalement, boiling or splitting in half. I must admit that my most favorite moments were when the team of intelligent mountain gorillas that usually showed up along the trial hurled rocks down onto the porters, forcing the intrepid explorers to not only reconsider their decision to forge on, but to carry their own luggage.

With modern day discoveries such as the giant crystal caverns of Chihuahua, or the primeval, subterranean caves found in Vietnam, our collective imaginations are running rampant; who knows what manner of beast or secret society lurks in the uncharted shadows? What treasures await the bold? More to the point, what horrible booby-traps and grisly fates await them?

Ill-considered Expeditions (Short Sharp Shocks, Volume 3) contains 16 all-new stories from Josh Reynolds, James Dorr, Steve Foreman, Ahmed A. Khan, and others. It was published by April Moon Books on August 28, 2015. It is 228 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paper and $3.49 for the digital version. The cover is by Neil Baker. Order directly from April Moon Books.