New Treasures – Page 170

New Treasures: Spectrum 20, edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner

Thursday, January 2, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Christmas is pretty hectic at our house, and has been for about 18 years. Ever since we started sharing it with children.

Our kids try to sit still and open their presents. They do. But after they’ve torn open a few, they can’t sit around in a calm circle in the living room any longer. Nope, nope. They tear off to shoot each other with their new Nerf guns or play Arkham Origins on the Xbox or read Atomic Robo or otherwise enjoy their gifts. Leaving my wife and I to sit and stare at each other, in the middle of a big pile of wrapping paper.

Which is a long-winded explanation for why it takes anywhere from a week to ten days to open gifts in the O’Neill-Dechene household. Which is why I didn’t get around to opening Alice’s gift, a copy of the hardcover edition of Spectrum 20, until last night.

If the cover (at left) looks familiar to Black Gate readers, it should. The piece, “The Lover’s Quarrel,” by Donato Giancola, is another view of the warrior woman featured on the cover of Black Gate 15. She’s even wearing the same outfit and belt, and has the same hair beads. Her sword is no longer broken, but I think we can be reasonably confident that she has just wrapped up business satisfactorily.

Alice gave me a copy of the first volume of Spectrum in 1994 and I’ve gotten one every Christmas, on and off, for the past twenty years. Every holiday season, I spend a leisurely hour or two in my big green chair, enjoying the best science fiction and fantasy art of the year.

The Spectrum Annual, as it’s known, is a showcase for the Spectrum Awards, which celebrate the best fantastic art from around the globe. Every year, a five-member jury team selects the winners of the Gold and Silver awards and the artwork that will be included in the next volume. The Spectrum Awards are perhaps the most prestigious artistic accolade our industry has to offer and the annual volume is without doubt the best annual collection of genre art on the market.

…

New Treasures: Night of Demons by Tony Richards

Monday, December 30, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I don’t tend to report much on horror in my New Treasures column. Not that I haven’t anything against horror, but I have enough trouble just keeping up with all the intriguing new fantasy crossing my desk.

But there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in modern horror, and you deserve to know about it. So I try to sneak one in from time to time. Like Tony Richards’s intriguing Night of Demons, his latest novel set in a Massachusetts town that can’t be located on any map… and which people forget as soon as they leave.

Centuries ago, the Salem witches founded the village of Raine’s Landing, then cloaked it in magic to hide it from sight. Many of their descendants still practice the supernatural arts — and no one who lives here can ever leave. Now evil has breached its boundaries once again…

A serial killer with a corrupt and twisted soul, Cornelius Hanlon has freely entered Raine’s Landing, undeterred by the ancient magical safeguards. And when he chooses the town’s oldest adept as his first victim, the maniac inadvertently gains possession of a powerful “gift” more terrible than anything he could have sadistically dreamed.

Ex-town cop Ross Devries and his Harley-riding sometime-partner, Cassandra Mallory, have no supernatural abilities. But they are the last line of defense in this village of secrets and shadows — facing a psychopath who now wields the power to bend the living and the dead to his will.

Night of Demons is the sequel to Dark Rain, published in 2008. A third Raine’s Landing novel, Speak of the Devil, was just released this month. Richards is also the author of Our Lady of The Shadows (2011) and the collection Shadows And Other Tales (2010).

Night of Demons was published by Avon EOS in October, 2009. It is 390 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the print and digital editions. I bought my paperback on Amazon, on sale for just $3.20 — copies are still available at the discount price.

See all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

New Treasures: Weird Fiction Review 3

Saturday, December 28, 2013 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

Two years ago I reported on the first issue of S. T. Joshi’s new magazine devoted to the study of weird and supernatural fiction, Weird Fiction Review (not to be confused with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s new online journal, also called Weird Fiction Review. Go figure.)

I recently stumbled across a pic of the third issue of Joshi’s WFR (at left), and it made me laugh out loud. I had to order a copy, and it arrived this week.

There’s lots to enjoy with the massive, 232-page issue. The front and back covers (see both here) are tributes to Mad magazine and the timeless artwork of Don Martin. Inside there are seven original stories from Michael Cisco, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr, and others.

There’s also a host of intriguing articles. Darrell Schweitzer looks at Lovecraft’s influence on one of the most important pulp SF stories ever written, “Who Goes There?”, in “John W. Campbell’s Lovecraftian Tale,” and Bradley H. Sinor presents a previously-unpublished interview from 1994, in “Excellence Demanded, Whiners Piss Off: The Last Interview of Karl Edward Wagner” (which picks up several of the themes in Wagner’s letter to editor Robert A. Collins published in Fantasy 55.)

There’s also a 16-page gallery of art by Jason Zerrillo, the latest installment of John Pelan’s column Forgotten Masters of the Weird Tale, a survey of the year in horror and gothic novels from Daniel Olson, a look at the classic 1966 kaiju film War of the Gargantuas (which author Stuart Galbraith IV calls “kind of a monster movie Nirvana, a film that delivers on the promise of its ingenious title in an orgy of gargantua vs gargantua action” — pic here), and lots more.

Weird Fiction Review 3 was edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Centipede Press on March 19, 2013. The issue contains fiction, poetry, and reviews on high quality paper with lots of color. It is 232 pages, priced at $25 for the sewn trade paperback. It’s a high quality package throughout. It’s limited to 500 copies, and is currently on sale for $20 from the publisher. Get more detail and order copies at Centipede Press.

The Series Series: The Shadow’s Heir by K.J. Taylor

Friday, December 27, 2013 Sarah Avery Comments 3 comments

This book is not the first volume in a new series, no matter what its cover says. It’s marketed as the first volume in a new trilogy, The Risen Sun, that happens to be in the same setting as The Fallen Moon, but with every page I read, I felt the lack of resonances that the author clearly intended and expected for readers who had already read her first three books.

The Shadow’s Heir was good enough that I may someday backtrack to Taylor’s debut, The Dark Griffin. Of course, since this is really the fourth volume in the series, it has enough spoilers about the first three volumes that I’ll need to wait years for my memory of this book to fade. The review quotes about those earlier volumes promise “twisty plots,” and they won’t be twisty for me until I forget nearly everything I just read.

If the book were bad, I’d just shrug and move on. As it is, I’m annoyed on the author’s behalf at the marketing folks at Ace. (This is, of course, an injudicious thing to admit, because I would give my eyeteeth to sell my trunk manuscript to Ace. Not that they’d want my eyeteeth. Imagine the slushpile horror story!) I would love to understand the marketing decision better, because it seems to me that telling people The Shadow’s Heir is a good entry point to Taylor’s fictional world might sell copies in the short run, but would surely turn readers off in the long run.

This book holds the payoff for several plotlines I could have been deeply invested in, had I read them from the beginning. Instead, I was keenly aware at every payoff point of how hollow the big scenes felt to me in comparison to structurally similar scenes in other series.

How on earth am I going to talk in any detail about the virtues and peculiarities of The Shadow’s Heir while avoiding spoilers about three previous volumes I haven’t read? Well, here goes.

…

New Treasures: The Yard by Alex Grecian

Thursday, December 26, 2013 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I’m always disciplined when I visit a bookstore. I go in, get what I came for, and leave. I look neither left nor right. Get in, get out, that’s my motto.

You’re right. I’m totally lying. I’m lucky if I even remember why I came to the bookstore by the time I get to the cash register. My arms are usually full, I have a dazed expression, and I’m no longer sure exactly where I am. Thank God the folks behind the counter recognize me by now. It saves a lot of time and embarrassment.

I usually stick to the SF and fantasy sections, but every once in a while something irresistible will cross my path. Something like The Yard, the start of a new gas-lamp mystery series by Alex Glexian, author of the popular Image comic Proof. A first glance The Yard doesn’t seem to include any of the gonzo steampunk action or bizarre characters of Proof — or indeed, anything overtly supernatural — but I find it very appealing nonetheless.

1889, London. Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror is finally over, but a new one is just beginning.

Victorian London — a violent cesspool of squalid depravity. Only twelve detectives — The Murder Squad — are expected to solve the thousands of crimes committed here each month. Formed after the Metropolitan Police’s spectacular failure in capturing Jack the Ripper, the Murder Squad suffers the brunt of public contempt. But no one can anticipate the brutal murder of one of their own…

A Scotland Yard Inspector has been found stuffed in a black steamer trunk at Euston Square Station, his eyes and mouth sewn shut. When Walter Day, the squad’s new hire, is assigned to the case, he finds a strange ally in Dr. Bernard Kingsley, the Yard’s first forensic pathologist. Their grim conclusion: this was not just a random, bizarre murder but in all probability, the first of twelve. Because the squad itself it being targeted and the devious killer shows no signs of stopping before completing his grim duty. But Inspector Day has one more surprise, something even more shocking than the crimes: the killer’s motive.

This is the author’s first novel. Grecian has already penned one sequel in what’s now being called the Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad series: The Black Country, released in hardcover in May of this year. The Yard was published in April 2013 by Berkley. It is 422 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

New Treasures: Tales From Rugosa Coven by Sarah Avery

Monday, December 23, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Unless you’ve ever been a submissions reader, I don’t think you can truly appreciate what it was like to discover Sarah Avery in the slush pile.

The story in question was “The War of the Wheat Berry Year,” a slender and deceptively simple fantasy in which The Traitor of Imlen finds she must face her old instructor on the battlefield at last. After a long day reading amateur tales about unicorns, knights slaying dragons, and teenage girls with vampire boyfriends, it was a revelation — packed with a rich and fascinating back story, subtle characterizations and, like all the best fantasy, the tantalizing sense that you were being given the briefest window into a wider tale.

I bought “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” for Black Gate 15, where it won acclaim from Keith West at Adventures Fantastic and other sites. And believe me, I kept a weather eye out for future work from Sarah.

So I was delighted when my copy of Tales From Rugosa Coven arrived last week. Rugosa Coven shows off Sarah’s talents with a collection of three linked novellas of contemporary fantasy focusing on a coven of modern witches living on the Jersey Shore. If you’re eager to find the next big name in fantasy, do yourself a favor and order a copy today.

Catch a glimpse of a New Jersey even weirder than the one you think you know, as a covenful of very modern Wiccans wrestle challenges both supernatural and mundane — and, occasionally, each other.

The personal injury attorney who chose kitchen-witchery over his family’s five-generation lineage of old school ceremonial magic would like to miss his dead parents, only now that they’re dead they won’t leave him alone. The professional fortuneteller stands out at forty paces, with her profusion of silver amulets glittering over her Goth wardrobe, but nobody has guessed her secret sorrow, especially not the covenmates who see her as their wacky comic relief. And the resident skeptic, a reluctant Pagan if ever there was one, will have to eat her words if her coven sister’s new boyfriend really does turn out to be from Atlantis.

The Jersey Shore’s half-hidden community of Witches, Druids, and latter-day Vikings must circle together against all challenges. It’s a good thing they’re as resilient as the wild rugosa roses that hold together the dunes.

Tales From Rugosa Coven was published by Dark Quest on December 21, 2013. It is 341 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback.

New Treasures: Hidden Things by Doyce Testerman

Saturday, December 21, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

There are plenty of ways to select a new novel to read. Cover art, of course. Recommendation from friends. Plot description. Here, let’s try an experiment. I’ll tell you some things about Hidden Things by Doyce Testerman, and you tell me when you want to read it. Here’s the description:

Watch out for the hidden things… That’s the last thing Calliope Jenkins’s best friend says to her before ending a two a.m. phone call from Iowa, where he’s working a case she knows little about. Seven hours later, she gets a visit from the police. Josh has been found dead, and foul play is suspected. Calliope is stunned. Especially since Josh left a message on her phone an hour after his body was found.

Spurred by grief and suspicion, Calli heads to Iowa herself, accompanied by a stranger who claims to know something about what happened to Josh and who can — maybe — help her get him back. But the road home is not quite the straight shot she imagined…

Okay, I’m intrigued. And the cover is okay. Still, I don’t know about you, but I’m not sold yet. Let’s look at some of the blurbs. Here’s The Blue Blazes author Chuck Wendig:

Testerman tells a story of a secret world that is sad, sweet, funny, and more than a little twisted. This world of wizened wizard-men and demon clowns will lure you into the shadows, and once you meet the characters who live in those dark, strange places, you’ll never want to leave…

Hmm. Wizard-men and demon clowns? Definitely getting closer. But for me, it was this quote from Maureen Johnson that sealed the deal:

Hidden Things reveals the America I want to believe in — dragons on highways, trolls in the hills, motels that lead to new dimensions. I’ll never look at a rest stop the same way again.

Yup, that did it. Dragons, trolls, and motels to new dimensions? I ordered my copy last month. Hidden Things was published by Harper Voyager in August 2012. It is 327 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $10.99 for the digital edition. See all of our recent New Treasures here.

New Treasures: Spirits From Beyond

Wednesday, December 18, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I don’t think I’ve given Simon R. Green a fair shake. The man is so prolific, with so many popular series, that he’s almost ubiquitous on book store shelves. I tend to overlook him when I scan the racks for new releases every week — my eyes are trained to ignore him, the same way they ignore the shelves dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and Jim Butcher.

But being prolific certainly isn’t a crime, and neither is being popular. Being open to new things sometimes means trying that familiar midlist author you’ve ignored for too long. So last week I picked up a copy of the fourth and latest novel in his Ghost Finders series. After all, anyone who names his supernatural think tank the Carnacki Institute has got to be worth a look…

Meet the operatives of the Carnacki Institute — JC Chance: the team leader, brave, charming, and almost unbearably arrogant; Melody Chambers: the science geek who keeps the antisupernatural equipment running; and Happy Jack Palmer: the terminally gloomy telepath. Their mission: Do Something About Ghosts. Lay them to rest, send them packing, or just kick their nasty ectoplasmic arses…

Their latest assignment takes JC and the team to a small country village, site of a famously haunted inn. At first, JC thinks that the spirits in the King’s Arms are more the stuff of urban legend than anything that needs the Ghost Finders’ expertise. Then one story rings true: the tale of a traveler trapped by an unusual thunderstorm who retired to her room for the night — and vanished.

Trapped by an unusual thunderstorm — like the one that begins raging outside shortly after they arrive… As the team investigates, they are forced, one by one, to face some hard truths about themselves, their relationships, and the haunting itself — truths that may push Happy Jack over the edge into the madness that he has always feared…

Green is also the author of the Deathstalker space opera (8 novels), Hawk and Fisher (7 novels), The Forest Kingdom (4 novels), The Secret History series (7 novels so far), and Nightside (12 novels), among several others. I told you he was prolific. The Ghost Finder books take place in the same universe as his Nightside, Secret History, and other assorted novels, with frequent references to some shared characters, places and events. I bet keeping tabs on all that continuity drives him nuts.

The Ghost Finders of the Carnacki Institute tackle the paranormal with some gusto (their motto is “We don’t take any sh*t from the Hereafter.”) This looks like a fun Friday-night series, and I’m looking forward to digging into it.

Spirits From Beyond was published in September 2013 by Ace Books. It is 298 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.

New Treasures: The House of R’lyeh: Five Scenarios Based on Tales by H.P. Lovecraft

Monday, December 16, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I feel like I’m in the middle of H.P. Lovecraft week.

On Sunday I talked extensively about Lovecraft, a propos of his inclusion in the latest round of Advanced Readings in D&D. This morning I invoked his name while discussing Robert Bloch’s Nightmares collection. Now here we are again, with the latest collection on adventures for one of my favorite role-playing games, Call of Cthulhu, based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

I bought my first CoC adventure — the classic Shadows of Yog-Sothoth — over 30 years ago (yes, I’m aware that’s longer than most of you have been alive. Shut up), and the most recent, Cthulhu By Gaslight, last April. I haven’t played CoC in years (decades, probably), but the adventures are marvelously inventive and always a pleasure to read for a veteran game master like me. But The House of R’lyeh has extra appeal for Lovecraft fans of all kinds, not just CoC players, I think: it draws directly from five of the Master’s short stories. I’m looking forward to digging in and seeing how successful it is.

The House of R’lyeh contains five Call of Cthulhu scenarios that follow or expand upon events in five of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories: “Pickman’s Model,” “The Haunter of the Dark,” “The Hound,” “Arthur Jermyn,” and “The Nameless City.” Set in Boston, Providence, the British Isles, continental Europe, and the Middle East, none of the scenarios need be played at set dates or in a set order, but they could be run in the order presented to form a loose campaign using optional link between scenarios to draw investigators from one to the other.

Alternatively, the scenarios may be used to supplement classic Call of Cthulhu campaigns such as The Shadows of Yog-Sothoth which suggests that its component scenarios should be interspersed with others.

…

Read More Read More

Experience the Joy of the Pulps With The Incredible Pulps

Sunday, December 15, 2013 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

We’ve been chatting a lot about pulp fantasy recently — for example, in our recent explorations of Appendix N, Unknown magazine, escaping our genre’s pulp roots, forgotten pulp villains, Clark Ashton Smith’s Martian pulp fiction, and much more.

I occasionally get asked what I mean by “pulp.” It’s not the most intuitive term, I’ll grant you that, especially for younger readers. For them, if it means anything it usually conjures up images of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and perhaps vague echoes of noir detective stories.

“Pulp fiction” means the fast-paced genre stories written for the popular magazines of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, and modern fiction written in conscious emulation of that style. The most popular of the pulp magazines, including Argosy, Adventure, All-Story Weekly, and Detective Story, had reliable circulations in the hundreds of thousands. They cost a quarter or less, and were printed on cheap (pulp) paper, frequently with ragged, untrimmed edges.

The pulps are still discussed and collected today for a number of reasons. Several of the most important writers of the 20th century — including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, H.P. Lovecraft, Ralph Milne Farley, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Louis L’Amour, and Harold Lamb — got their start in the pulps. They featured some of the most famous heroes of the early 20th Century, including Doc Savage, The Shadow, Conan, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, Zorro, and many others.

But the best fiction from the pulps has been reprinted many times and — unless you’re Howard Andrew Jones, Stephen Haffner, or John C. Hocking, on the trail of an obscure or neglected author — you rarely dig through pulps for the fiction any more. No, there’s really only one reason most of us still collect pulps. And that’s the fabulous covers and artwork.

…

Black Gate

Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Browsed by
Category: New Treasures