New Treasures – Page 135

New Treasures: Black Gods Kiss by Lavie Tidhar

Sunday, July 26, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Lavie Tidhar has made a heck of a big name for himself in a very short period of time. His novel Osama won the World Fantasy Award, and his “Guns & Sorcery” novella Gorel & The Pot Bellied God won the British Fantasy Award. His novel The Violent Century was called “A masterpiece” by both the Independent and Library Journal. And his second short story collection, Black Gods Kiss, has just been nominated for the British Fantasy Award.

Black Gods Kiss is set in the same world as Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God. Theaker’s Quarterly called it “Classic heroic fantasy,” and Locus called it “One of the most flamboyantly entertaining collections of the year… almost the pure essence of pulp – violent, action-packed, paced like a runaway freight train, politically incorrect and socially unredeemable.” Originally published as a limited edition hardcover in the UK, it is now available in digital format.

His name was Gorel of Goliris and he was a gunslinger and an addict, touched by the Black Kiss. Gorel wanted nothing more than to return to his home, the greatest empire the World had ever known, from which he was banished by sorcery as a child. But wherever he went, trouble doggedly followed, and death preceded his steps.. . In Black Gods Kiss Lavie Tidhar returns to the vivid world of his 2012 British Fantasy Award winning novella, Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God. It collects 5 long adventures set before and after the events of Pot-Bellied God, and includes a brand-new novella, “Kur-a-Len.” In these pages you will find thrilling tales of guns and sorcery, filled with ghosts, mercenaries, necromancers and gods – not to mention sex, and death!

Black Gods Kiss was published in a limited edition hardcover by PS Publishing in October 2014. It was released in digital format by the Jabberwocky Literary Agency on April 30, 2015. It is 174 pages, priced at $35 in hardcover and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Pedro Marques.

New Treasures: Storm and Steel by Jon Sprunk

Friday, July 24, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Storm and Steel, the long-awaited sequel to Blood and Iron, was published last month by Pyr. In her feature review of the first volume, Sarah Avery wrote:

Of all the wild re-envisionings of the Crusades I’ve seen lately, Jon Sprunk’s Blood and Iron may be the wildest. His alternate-universe Europeans are recognizably European, but the opposing culture they face is that of a Babylonian Empire that never fell. And why has this Babylon-by-another-name persisted for thousands of years, so powerful that only its own internal strife can shake it? Because its royals actually have the supernatural powers and demi-god ancestry that the ruling class of our world’s Fertile Crescent claimed…

Jon Sprunk’s book takes the prize for strange worldbuilding. The Akeshian Empire is approximately what the Akkadian Empire might have looked like, had each of its major cities lasted as long and urbanized as complexly as Rome did. When monotheism comes to Akeshia, it arrives as a local heresy run amok, rather than as a foreign faith attracting converts. Akeshia’s gods are not kind gods; its semi-divine ruling caste are not nice people. However, when our hero comes to understand them from something closer to their own perspective, he finds much to admire and many people worth trying to save from the civil war that is beginning to take shape around him…

Blood and Iron is overall a strong book, full of powerful imagery and a vivid sense of place, with intriguing historical what-ifs and a sense of moral urgency to match its sense of moral complexity.

Jon Sprunk is also the author of the popular Shadow Saga (Shadow’s Son, Shadow’s Lure, Shadow’s Master), and expectations are running high for the second volume of his new trilogy, The Book of the Black Earth.

Storm and Steel was published by Pyr on June 2, 2015. It is 479 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Jason Chan. Learn more at Pyr Books or read our exclusive excerpt of the first novel here.

New Treasures: A Confederacy of Horrors by James Robert Smith

Wednesday, July 22, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

When I returned from the World Fantasy Convention in November, I wrote a series of articles about what it was like to wander one of the finest Dealer’s Room in the country. One of those highlighted the marvelous Hippocampus Press, publishers of Simon Strantzas’s Burnt Black Suns, Clint Smith’s Ghouljaw and Other Stories, John Langan’s The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, and many other fine titles. However, one of their most intriguing books wasn’t released until after the convention: James Robert Smith’s A Confederacy of Horrors. Smith is the author of The Flock, The Living End, and The New Ecology of Death, and his debut collection, released in January, features creatures from the depths of space, vampires, occult horrors, and stranger things.

In recent years, James Robert Smith has emerged as a distinctive new voice in contemporary weird fiction. Melding a smoothly flowing prose style, powerful horrific conceptions, and a keen sense of character and locale, Smith has written dozens of stories that expand the boundaries of the weird tale and take it into new and dynamic directions.

This first collection of his short fiction displays the many virtues of his work. Several of his tales are set in the South, a region he knows well through long residence. Whether it be the alienated youths in “Toke Ghost,” the ruthless plutocrat of “Moving,” or the comic terror of “The Reliable Vacuum Company,” Smith depicts a South where the lush, kudzu-choked landscape breeds horrors both earthly and unearthly.

Monsters from the depths of space are the focus of “On the First Day,” while rats of a more than usual malignancy are featured in “Dope.” “Translator” tells of mysteries emerging out of World War II, while in “Love and Magick” a man battles occult creatures with magic of his own. The ecological horrors of “Symptom” are matched by the existential horror of “Wet.” The end of the world appears imminent in “One of Those Days,” and a vampire of an unusual sort stalks through the pages of “Just a Gigolo.”

With this collection, James Robert Smith presents a rich and diverse smorgasbord of weirdness and terror that will delight his many devotees and bring new ones into his fold.

A Confederacy of Horrors was published by Hippocampus Press on January 15, 2015. It is 236 pages, priced at $20 in trade paperback, and $6 for the digital version. The cover is by Pete von Sholly.

The Omnibus Volumes of Andre Norton, Part One

Tuesday, July 21, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

If you’re like me, you enjoy vintage science fiction and fantasy, and tracking down old paperbacks to add to your collection. But nothing beats the convenience of having those fragile old books available in a modern reprint. Unless it’s having multiple books in a single omnibus volume, under a great new cover, for the price of a single paperback. When that happens, we like to make some noise about it here — especially when the books involved are true classics of the genre.

That’s why we end up talking about Baen so much. Last week it was the trio of Baen’s Murray Leinster omnibus volumes; before that it was their seven volumes featuring James H. Schmitz. Today, I’d like to take a look at three of the many omnibus volumes collecting some of the best work of Andre Norton, published by Baen last decade.

First up is Darkness and Dawn, which collects perhaps the first Andre Norton book I ever laid eyes on, in my elementary school library in Kentville, Nova Scotia: Daybreak—2250 A.D.

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Future Treasures: Covenant of Muirwood by Jeff Wheeler

Monday, July 20, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jeff Wheeler’s Muirwood trilogy is one of the success stories of self-publishing. All three volumes were released in 2011, and they did so well they were picked up by 47North, Amazon’s new fantasy and SF publishing arm, and republished in handsome new editions in January 2013.

Those of you who hate waiting for the next installment of your favorite fantasy series are in luck. It looks like 47North will release the entire sequel trilogy, Covenant of Muirwood, in a tight schedule over the next three months: The Banished of Muirwood on August 15, followed by The Ciphers of Muirwood (September 15), and The Void of Muirwood (October 27, 2015). The sequels tell a standalone story, and need no knowledge of the earlier trilogy.

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New Treasures: The Chart of Tomorrows by Chris Willrich

Monday, July 20, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Back in May I published a brief head’s up about the latest Gaunt & Bone novel, The Chart of Tomorrows. I finally have a copy in my hot little hands, and I’m impatient to start reading it.

Chris Willrich’s “The Lions of Karthagar,” set in the world of Gaunt and Bone, appeared in the last issue of Black Gate. The first novels featuring the two heroes, The Scroll of Years (2013) and The Silk Map (2014), were both published by Pyr. In this third installment, the two find their plans to retire interrupted when their son becomes the chosen vessel of a powerful spirit…

The poet Persimmon Gaunt and the thief Imago Bone had sought only to retire from adventuring and start a family, but they never reckoned on their baby becoming the chosen vessel of the mystical energies of a distant Eastern land. With their son Innocence hunted by various factions hoping to use him as a tool, they kept him safe at the cost of trapping him in a pocket dimension of accelerated time.

Now free, the thirteen-year-old Innocence has rejected his parents and his “destiny” and has made dangerous friends in a barbaric Western land of dragon-prowed ships and rugged fjords. Desperately, Gaunt and Bone seek to track him down, along with their companion Snow Pine and her daughter A-Girl-Is-A-Joy, who was once trapped with Innocence too.

But as the nomadic Karvaks and their war-balloons strike west, and a troll-king spins his webs, and Joy is herself chosen by the spirit of the very land Innocence has fled to, Gaunt and Bone find themselves at the heart of a vast struggle — and their own son is emerging from that conflict as a force of evil. To save him and everything they know, they turn to a dangerous magical book, The Chart of Tomorrows, that reveals pathways through time. Upon the treacherous seas of history, Gaunt and Bone must face the darkness in each other’s pasts, in order to rescue their future.

The Chart of Tomorrows was published by Pyr Books on July 7, 2015. It is 541 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Kerem Beyit.

July 2015 Lightspeed Magazine Now on Sale

Sunday, July 19, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Lightspeed has some intriguing new fiction this month, from Carrie Vaughn, Andrea Hairston, and Taiyo Fujii (translated by Jim Hubbert). But they also have four top-notch reprints, including a Hugo nominee from Tony Daniel (“Life on the Moon”), a Detective Inspector Chen story from Liz Williams (“Adventures in the Ghost Trade,” a 2000 British Science Fiction Award Nominee), and classic stories from Mary Robinette Kowal and William Alexander.

Lightspeed publishes fantasy and SF, both new fiction and reprints. Here’s the complete fiction contents of the July issue.

Fantasy

“Adventures in the Ghost Trade” by Liz Williams (from Interzone #154, April 2000)
“Saltwater Railroad” by Andrea Hairston
“Ana’s Tag” by William Alexander (from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, #23, November 2008; available 7/28)

Science Fiction

“Crazy Rhythm” by Carrie Vaughn
“Life on the Moon” by Tony Daniel (from Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1995)
“The Consciousness Problem” by Mary Robinette Kowal (from Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2009; available 7/21)
“Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” by Taiyo Fuji. Translated by Jim Hubbert. (available 7/28)

Readers of the eBook version also get a reprint of the novella “Dapple,” by Eleanor Arnason, and two novel excerpts: Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman, and Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand.

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New Treasures: The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones

Friday, July 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

True, I’m a little late to the party with The String Diaries. It was originally published in hardcover last July, and came out in trade paperback in January. But I just stumbled on a copy last week, and it seems too promising not to share with you. The New York Daily News called Stephen Lloyd Jones’s debut horror novel “terrifying, and deliciously so… A sophisticated horror story that induces elemental terror,” and from what I’ve read so far, that seems accurate.

A family is hunted by a centuries-old monster: a man with a relentless obsession who can take on any identity.

The String Diaries opens with Hannah frantically driving through the night — her daughter asleep in the back, her husband bleeding out in the seat beside her. In the trunk of the car rests a cache of diaries dating back 200 years, tied and retied with strings through generations. The diaries carry the rules for survival that have been handed down from mother to daughter since the 19th century. But how can Hannah escape an enemy with the ability to look and sound like the people she loves?

Stephen Lloyd Jones’s debut novel is a sweeping thriller that extends from the present day, to Oxford in the 1970s, to Hungary at the turn of the 19th century, all tracing back to a man from an ancient royal family with a consuming passion — a boy who can change his shape, insert himself into the intimate lives of his victims, and destroy them.

If Hannah fails to end the chase now, her daughter is next in line. Only Hannah can decide how much she is willing to sacrifice to finally put a centuries-old curse to rest.

The trade paperback edition includes an 11-page preview of the sequel, Written in the Blood, released in hardcover in May. I’m not familiar with Mulholland Books, but I certainly should be — I notice they also publish Joe R. Lansdale, Dan Simmons, Lauren Beukes, and many others. The String Diaries was published by Mulholland Books on January 6, 2015. It is 420 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover design is by Keith Hayes.

New Treasures: The Devil’s Only Friend by Dan Wells

Wednesday, July 15, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Dan Wells’ novel, I Am Not A Serial Killer, featuring monster-killing teenage sociopath John Cleaver, was the first novel in a trilogy. It was followed by Mr. Monster (2010) and I Don’t Want To Kill You (2011). Wells became a New York Times bestseller with Ruins, the third novel in his YA Partials series. Now he returns to the John Cleaver series with the first novel in a brand new trilogy, The Devil’s Only Friend.

John Wayne Cleaver hunts demons: they’ve killed his neighbors, his family, and the girl he loves, but in the end he’s always won. Now he works for a secret government kill team, using his gift to hunt and kill as many monsters as he can…

…but the monsters have noticed, and the quiet game of cat and mouse is about to erupt into a full scale supernatural war.

John doesn’t want the life he’s stuck with. He doesn’t want the FBI bossing him around, he doesn’t want his only friend imprisoned in a mental ward, and he doesn’t want to face the terrifying cannibal who calls himself The Hunter. John doesn’t want to kill people. But as the song says, you can’t always get what you want. John has learned that the hard way; his clothes have the stains to prove it.

When John again faces evil, he’ll know what he has to do.

I’m not the only reader in my house, and I have to admit I wasn’t the one who discovered The Devil’s Only Friend. My daughter brought it home from the bookstore on Saturday, and has been glued to it ever since. Maybe I’ll get her to do a review.

The Devil’s Only Friend was published simultaneously in hardcover and trade paperback by Tor Books on June 16, 2015. It is 304 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, $14.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital version.

New Treasures: Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher

Monday, July 13, 2015 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

We all love to see new novels by our favorite writers. But this industry also warmly embraces new authors, especially when they bring something fresh and new. The latest hot buzz I’m hearing is for Canadian author Michael R. Fletcher, who’s just released his second novel, Beyond Redemption, the first in a gritty new series set in a world where delusion becomes reality… and the fulfillment of humanity’s desires may well prove to be its undoing.

When belief defines reality, those with the strongest convictions — the crazy, the obsessive, the delusional — have the power to shape the world. And someone is just mad enough to believe he can create a god . . .

Violent and dark, the world is filled with the Geistrekranken — men and women whose delusions manifest. Sustained by their own belief — and the beliefs of those around them — they can manipulate their surroundings. For the High Priest Konig, that means creating order out of the chaos in his city-state, leading his believers to focus on one thing: helping a young man, Morgen, ascend to become a god. A god they can control.

Trouble is, there are many who would see a god in their thrall, including the High Priest’s own doppelgangers, a Slaver no one can resist, and three slaves led by possibly the only sane man left. As these forces converge on the boy, there’s one more obstacle: time is running out. Because as the delusions become more powerful, the also become harder to control. The fate of the Geistrekranken is to inevitably find oneself in the Afterdeath. The question, then, is:

Who will rule there?

According to Fletcher’s bio, the next two novels in the Manifest Delusions series, The All Consuming and The Mirror’s Truth, are already complete, and are currently being edited for release.

Beyond Redemption was published by Harper Voyager on June 16, 2015. It is 512 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $10.99 for the digital version.

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