Black Gate

I’m a big fan of dark fantasy, and there’s a lot of terrific work going on in the field right now. Dale Bailey, Laird Barron, Gemma Files, Maria Dahvana Headley, John Langan, Ken Liu, Usman T. Malik, Helen Marshall, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar… these folks and many others are writing excellent fiction.

The real challenge, of course, is finding it. All of the writers above published top-notch stories last year, but you’d have to have access to a top-notch library to get even half of it. A lot of the very best fiction from last year appeared in small print run magazines (like Dark Discoveries, Sirenia Digest, Jamais Vu, SQ Mag and Lackington’s), premiere anthologies (such as Dead Man’s Hand, Letters to Lovecraft, Fearful Symmetries, Monstrous Affections, and Nightmare Carnival), and small press collections (like Burnt Black Suns, Here with the Shadows, and Black Gods Kiss).

What you really need is an astute editor with impeccable taste who can read through all that material (and a great deal more) for you, and collect the very best, so you can settle back in your favorite recliner with a cool beverage and enjoy the finest dark fantasy and horror from the top practitioners in the field in a single fat anthology, every single year.

You see where this is going, don’t you.

Paula Guran and Prime Books have released the sixth volume in their excellent The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, which collects stories from all of the writers mentioned above, and a great deal more. It is one of three Best of the Year volumes from Prime (the others are Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the brand new The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas, also edited by Paula Guran).

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Lev AC Rosen is the author of All Men of Genius and the just-released Woundabout. But it’s his second novel, Depth, the tale of a private investigator whose routine surveillance case leads her to an impossible treasure in post-apocalyptic flooded New York City, that really grabbed my attention this year. Here’s what Lev said on his blog about the genesis of the novel:

I have a longstanding love of noir (I’ve even taught classes on it), and this book is near and dear to my heart. It’s a classic hardboiled noir… that happens to take place in NYC after global warming has melted the ice caps. New York is now a city of building tops, boats and bridges. It’s very far away from the conservative US mainland, and it operates differently.

Living in New York now, especially living in the financial district, I have a few things around me all the time; one is the constant… I don’t know what the word is. The financial district used to be this fantastic historical area – my building is over 100 years old. But there are so many new highrises going up, shiny, sleek looking condos. The moody vibe of 1930s and 40s NYC used to be, I think, most accessible in my neighborhood (when I moved in almost a decade ago). Now it feels fake, too modern, too rich. The grit is gone. I knew if I were going to write a noir, I’d have to bring that grit back somehow.

The other thing down here, of course, is the water. Even before Sandy, there were these great nights where I would be out walking and this heavy fog would come off the water and it would smell like the ocean and the dark would be silvery. And then, of course, Sandy hit – the day after my wedding – and my apartment got a moat. I got to see the first inklings of a New York with rivers instead of streets.

Both those things are what helped shape this. I wanted a noir that felt like the old Bogart and Bacall movies, but without being historical. So I went to the future – possibly not even that far – and I’m really proud of what I came up with.

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Back in March I read The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the 1950s, edited by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, and it reminded me what an astute observer of the field Barry Malzberg is. I mean, sure, most of us observe the genre. Malzberg has studied it, with a passion and understanding that only a handful will ever approach.

He’s also a very prolific writer, and his non-fiction books The Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium were both nominated for the Hugo Award. Sadly, much of his best work is currently out of print, so I was delighted to see his short comic masterpiece Underlay brought back in print by Stark House Press this month.

Harry the Flat is dead and buried in the backstretch of Aqueduct Raceway. This is causing the Mob no end of trouble on the betting side, so Harry’s oldest and dearest friend — now carrying on with Harry’s widow, Gertrude nee Hawkins, in Harry’s absence, and in debt to the Mob $1,500 — is persuaded to dig him up after the eighth race. Tony Winner, low level mob boss, is very specific on this point, and to that end has had a time bomb surgically implanted in our hero’s thigh to impress upon him the urgency of this matter.

So on this fateful day, off he goes to the Aqueduct in Queens, New York, with a cello case stuffed with a pick and a shovel, prepared to dig up the dubious remains of Harry the Flat so the Mob’s control of horserace betting is no longer compromised. His mind is filled with thoughts of Harry, of Gertrude, of his ex-wife, and all the schemes and plans and bets that led to this moment. It will be a long day for our hero. He has a lot to learn about horse racing.

Underlay was published by Stark House Press on July 1, 2015. It is 146 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback. There is no digital edition.

Matthew David Surridge called Felix Gilman “one of the strongest new novelists in fantasy fiction today.” Over the past eight years Gilman has been gradually making a name for himself, with popular steampunk novels like Thunderer, Gears of the City, and the duology The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City. For his latest, The Revolutions, now available in paperback from Tor, Gilman has written a sweeping stand-alone tale of Victorian science fiction, arcane exploration, and planetary romance.

In 1893, young journalist Arthur Shaw is at work in the British Museum Reading Room when the Great Storm hits London, wreaking unprecedented damage. In its aftermath, Arthur’s newspaper closes, owing him money, and all his debts come due at once. His fiancé Josephine takes a job as a stenographer for some of the fashionable spiritualist and occult societies of fin de siècle London society. At one of her meetings, Arthur is given a job lead for what seems to be accounting work, but at a salary many times what any clerk could expect. The work is long and peculiar, as the workers spend all day performing unnerving calculations that make them hallucinate or even go mad, but the money is compelling.

Things are beginning to look up when the perils of dabbling in the esoteric suddenly come to a head: A war breaks out between competing magical societies. Josephine joins one of them for a hazardous occult exploration-an experiment which threatens to leave her stranded at the outer limits of consciousness, among the celestial spheres.

Arthur won’t give up his great love so easily, and hunts for a way to save her, as Josephine fights for survival… somewhere in the vicinity of Mars.

The Revolutions was published in hardcover by Tor Books on April 1, 2014, and reprinted in trade paperback on April 7, 2015. It is 416 pages, priced at $16.99, or $9.99 for the digital edition.

Lavie Tidhar’s last 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 published in the UK last year, and was called a masterpiece by both the Independent (UK) and Library Journal — and “Watchmen on crack” by io9.

An unusual amount of praise for a superhero novel. Earlier this year The Violent Century was released here in the US, and we finally have a chance to see what all the fuss is about.

They never meant to be heroes.

For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart.

But there must always be an account… and the past has a habit of catching up to the present. Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism — a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields — to answer one last, impossible question:

What makes a hero?

We last covered Lavie Tidhar with a look at the omnibus edition of his steampunk trilogy The Bookman Histories from Angry Robot.

The Violent Century was published by Thomas Dunne Books on February 24, 2015. It is 362 pages. priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Ervin Serrano. The US edition contains an exclusive Author Q&A, and a brand new short story, “Aftermaths,” set some time after the end of the novel.

Nick Cutter is the pseudonym for Craig Davidson, author of Sarah Court and Cataract City. Davidson explains the Cutter identity was created at his agent’s suggestion, to help readers differentiate between Davidson’s more serious output, and “the gore-spattered nightmares” of Nick Cutter. The Troop, his debut novel under the name Cutter, was one of the most acclaimed horror novels of last year. It won the Jame Herbert Award for Horror Writing, and Stephen King said “The Troop scared the hell out of me, and I couldn’t put it down. This is old-school horror at its best.”

Cutter’s new novel The Acolyte appeared from ChiZine last month, and it’s even more interesting to me than The Troop. A police procedural set in a religious dystopia where the police are responsible for eradicating heretical religious faiths, it follows acolyte Jonah Murtag as he unravels the truth behind a mysterious string of urban bombings.

Jonah Murtag is an Acolyte on the New Bethlehem police force. His job: eradicate all heretical religious faiths, their practitioners, and artefacts. Murtag’s got problems — one of his partners is a zealot, and he’s in love with the other one. Trouble at work, trouble at home. Murtag realizes that you can rob a citizenry of almost anything, but you can’t take away its faith.

When a string of bombings paralyzes the city, religious fanatics are initially suspected, but startling clues point to a far more ominous perpetrator. If Murtag doesn’t get things sorted out, the Divine Council will dispatch The Quints, aka: Heaven’s Own Bagmen. The clock is ticking towards doomsday for the Chosen of New Bethlehem.

And Jonah Murtag’s got another problem. The biggest and most worrisome…

Jonah isn’t a believer anymore.

The Acolyte was published by ChiZine Publications on May 19, 2015. It is 301 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Erik Mohr. I got my copy at the Nebula Awards weekend here in Chicago in early June. See our recent survey of the impressive ChiZine catalog here.