Black Gate

Paula Guran edits The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror every year, and her most recent anthology was Blood Sisters, packed full of vampire stories by women. So it’s good to see her deliver something outside the horror genre… or, perhaps, it’s good to see her keen eye for dark fantasy brought to bear on a subgenre that’s usually associated with The Little Mermaid. 

In Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, Paula has assembled a wide range of fiction by Tanith Lee, Peter S. Beagle, Samuel R. Delany, Neil Gaiman, Delia Sherman, Gene Wolfe, and others. Here’s a brief snippet from her introduction:

Powerful and incomprehensible, the oceans were thought to be the home of many monstrous creatures — sea serpents and dragons; the Norse Kraken, Greek Charybdis, Japanese Isonade, Biblical Leviathan. Rivers have monsters, too, like the Yacumama of the Amazon River or the malevolent zin, who live in the Niger River. As for lakes, even if you’ve never heard of the Welsh afanc, you know the Scottish Loch Ness monster.

The waters of the world were also believed to contain mythological creatures whose behaviors were as inconstant as our feelings about the mysteries of the deep. As Jane Yolen has said, “It is the allure of the beautiful, unattainable, mysterious Other. In every culture in every clime, there are stories of such creatures in the oceans, rivers, ponds, wells. Water is such a mutable, magical substance itself, the human imagination simply cannot believe it’s not peopled as the earth is. We want there to be such underwater civilizations and — not finding them — we invent them and then turn around and believe in our own invention.”

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Although the release date is Wednesday, S.M. Stirling’s new anthology of stories in the Emberverse is now for sale on Amazon.

You can purchase it here.

ALL-NEW STORIES OF THE EMBERVERSE
by S.M. Stirling, Harry Turtledove, Walter Jon Williams, John Birmingham, John Barnes, Jane Lindskold, and more…

“[A] vivid portrait of a world gone insane,”* S. M. Stirling’s New York Times bestselling Novels of the Change have depicted a vivid, utterly persuasive, and absorbingly unpredictable postapocalyptic wasteland in which all modern technology has been left in ashes, forcing humankind to rebuild an unknowable new world in the wake of unimaginable — and deliberate — chaos.

Now, in this startling new anthology, S. M. Stirling invites the most fertile minds in science fiction to join him in expanding his rich Emberverse canvas. Here are inventive new perspectives on the cultures, the survivors, and the battles arising across the years and across the globe following the Change.

In his all-new story Hot Night at the Hopping Toad, Stirling returns to his own continuing saga of the High Kingdom of Montival. In the accompanying stories are fortune seekers, voyagers, and dangers — from the ruins of Sydney to the Republic of Fargo and Northern Alberta to Venetian and Greek galleys clashing in the Mediterranean.

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Tracy Knight’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Werewolves, The UFO Files, Masques V, and Whitley Strieber’s Aliens. His first novel, The Astonished Eye, was published as a limited edition hardcover by PS Publishing in 2002, and garnered high praise. Horror World called it “an uncanny blend of mystery, science fiction, fantasy and horror,” and William Thompson at SF Site said “some time has passed since I last read a novel with so much thought and ability condensed into a single slim and conceptually compressed novel.”

Now Stark House has reprinted the novel in paperback for the first time, with the original introduction by Philip José Farmer, and a new intro from Tracy Knight.

Ben Savitch, reporter for The Astonished Eye — America’s famous tabloid journal — finds himself in Elderton, Illinois, the town where he was born. After years of chasing fame, this is the last place he expected to be searching for the elusive exclusive that would put his name on the map. But a UFO landing has been reported in the area, and Savitch intends to be the one to track it down.

However, a strange kind of magic is at work in Elderton. Savitch soon meets Almo Parrish, the last surviving Munchkin (or is he?), Chandler Quinn, builder of just about anything (including a TV hero!) and Vida Proust, who seems to be dead (only no one wants to tell her). They all have something to teach Savitch about being human, if only he will take the time to listen — before it’s too late. Tracy Knight takes the story of one man’s search for his identity and blends it into a tale of fantasy, mystery and science fiction, with all the charm of a modern American fable.

The Astonished Eye was published by Stark House Press on September 29, 2014. It is 194 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback. The book design is by Mark Shepard.

I like knowing the premise of a book before I start reading it. I think that’s fairly normal. But what happens when knowing the premise is a spoiler, and the publisher won’t tell you?

That seems to be the case with the trade paperback reprint of M.R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts, which I found on the New Releases table at Barnes and Noble last Saturday. The front and back cover reveal almost nothing about the book, beyond calling it “The Most Original Thriller You Will Read This Year,” and this cryptic text on the back:

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class.

When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite. But they don’t laugh.

Instead of a plot synopsis, the book is plastered with blurbs… lots and lots of them. Joss Whedon says “So surprising, so warm and yet so chilling… as fresh as it is terrifying.” Vogue calls it “Haunting, heart-breaking,” Marie Claire says it’s “Tense and fast-paced with a heartwarming tenderness,” and Reader’s Guide gushes with “Propulsive, imaginative.”

Wait a minute. Vogue? Marie Claire? Last time I picked up something Marie Claire called “heartwarming,” I ended up reading Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t want that to happen again.

A little investigation (I have sources) reveals that The Girl With All the Gifts is, in fact, a genre novel. It’s (mild spoiler!) some kind of future dystopia. Revealing more than that would be telling, but suffice to say that I’m very intrigued indeed.

This is M.R. Carey’s first novel. The Girl With All the Gifts was published by Orbit Books on April 28. It is 435 pages, priced at $15 in trade paperback.