Black Gate

And so we continue our celebration of the latest crop of fabulous new paperbacks from Angry Robot.

Angry Robot is rapidly becoming one of my favorite publishers. Sure, we highlight a lot of great independent publishers here — folks like Haffner Press, Night Shade, Prime Books, Paizo, Pyr, Orbit, Titan, Solaris, and many others — but most of them concentrate on hardcovers and trade paperbacks, where profit margins are much higher. The low-margin mass market paperback is a much riskier proposition these days, especially when you’re taking a risk on new writers without an established audience.

But we still love paperbacks here at Black Gate. We love the way they’re packaged, and even the way they smell. And we especially love publishers willing to take chances on new writers. And those paperback publishers willing to take chances on gonzo, edgy, hugely original ideas from daring new writers… we just want to take them home and snuggle them. And make them a warm batch of chocolate chip cookies.

The Blue Blazes is the third Chuck Wendig novel from Angry Robot. They’ve also published Blackbirds and Mockingbird, as well as the upcoming The Cormorant. But it was The Blue Blazes that really grabbed my attention last time I was at Barnes & Noble. Sure, the marketing text on the back was intriguing:

Meet Mookie Pearl. Criminal underworld? He runs in it. Supernatural underworld? He hunts in it. Nothing stops Mookie when he’s on the job. But when his daughter takes up arms and opposes him, something’s gotta give…

But it was the blurb from Empire State author Adam Christopher that really sealed the deal:

The Blue Blazes is exactly my kind of supernatural mob crime novel: dark and visceral, with an everyman hero to root for and Lovecraftian god-horror to keep you awake at night… this is the good stuff, right here.

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I admit I can be a little lazy when putting together these New Treasures articles. For one thing, my scanner gave up the ghost months ago and I can’t be bothered to walk aallll the way down the hall to use Alice’s. It’s usually easier to search for an image online. I’ll spend 20 minutes searching every nook and cranny of the web, trying to save the six minutes it takes to do a scan. Go figure.

Sometimes, though, the search is fruitless — as was the case with The Grim Company, the first novel from Bioware game designer Luke Scull. There were versions of the cover out there — lots of them. But most appeared to be early versions of the final cover I was holding in my hot little hands, courtesy of the publicity department of Roc Books.  Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Goodreads — all of them were showing the same cover. Sure, it’s very similar to the final cover, but there were subtle differences (the actual final cover is here — see if you can spot them all).

Well, I don’t have a whole lot of scruples as an entertainment blogger, but that’s one of them. At Black Gate, we try to show you the real cover. Hurray for us. So I had to troop all the way down to Alice’s office, interrupt her game of solitaire, and take six minutes to scan the cover. It’s shown at right, in all its glory (click for a bigger version). You’re welcome.

The Gods are dead. The Magelord Salazar and his magically enhanced troops, the Augmentors, crush any dissent they find in the minds of the populace. On the other side of the Broken Sea, the White Lady plots the liberation of Dorminia, with her spymistresses, the Pale Women. Demons and abominations plague the Highlands.

The world is desperately in need of heroes. But what they get instead are a ragtag band of old warriors, a crippled Halfmage, two orphans and an oddly capable manservant: the Grim Company.

The Grim Company (the opening volume in a series also titled The Grim Company) was released by Roc Books on September 3. It is 389 pages, priced at $26.95 for the hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital version.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

I caught Alex Bledsoe reading from Wisp of a Thing at a small Chicago convention earlier this year, and was immediately riveted. Seriously, if you get the chance, ask Alex to come to your house and read the first chapter. Or just stop him when you run into him at the mall, and impose on him to read a few pages. You won’t regret it (though you may have to buy him lunch).

The first volume in the series, The Hum and the Shiver — which gets my vote for best book title of 2011 — was named one of the Best Fiction Books of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews. The second, Wisp of a Thing, takes us back to the isolated hollows of the Smoky Mountains for another spooky tale of music and very old magic.

Touched by a very public tragedy, musician Rob Quillen comes to Cloud County, Tennessee, in search of a song that might ease his aching heart. All he knows of the mysterious and reclusive Tufa is what he has read on the internet: they are an enigmatic clan of swarthy, black-haired mountain people whose historical roots are lost in myth and controversy. Some people say that when the first white settlers came to the Appalachians centuries ago, they found the Tufa already there. Others hint that Tufa blood brings special gifts.

Rob finds both music and mystery in the mountains. Close-lipped locals guard their secrets, even as Rob gets caught up in a subtle power struggle he can’t begin to comprehend. A vacationing wife goes missing, raising suspicions of foul play, and a strange feral girl runs wild in the woods, howling in the night like a lost spirit.

Change is coming to Cloud County, and only the night wind knows what part Rob will play when the last leaf falls from the Widow’s Tree… and a timeless curse must be broken at last.

Alex’s article on the Appalachian fantasy of Manly Wade Wellman, “How I Discovered Silver John,” appeared at Tor.com back in March. He is the author of the Eddie LaCrosse novels The Sword-Edged Blonde, Dark Jenny, Wake of the Bloody Angel and Burn Me Deadly.

Wisp of a Thing was published by Tor Books on June 18. It is 349 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version.

Man, this book is right up my alley. More than that, this book has backed up my alley, unpacked, and moved into my house.

The book in question is Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations, a fat anthology of modern fantasy reprints (nothing older than 2004) edited by Paula Guran, focusing on the new generation of occult detectives and paranormal investigators.

We love occult detectives at Black Gate — witness all the recent attention to the classics of the genre, including Josh Reynolds’s encyclopedic Nightmare Men series, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki The Ghost Finder, the short fiction of Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman’s Complete John Thunstone and Silver John stories, and many, many others.

But it never occurred to me that people were still writing the stuff, despite the resurgence in urban fantasy over the last decade. This is why Paula Guran is a genius. She never lost sight of the thread connecting the pulp classics and the work being done in the same mold today by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, Joe R. Lansdale, Carrie Vaughn, P.N. Elrod, Bradley Denton, Tanya Huff, Jonathan Maberry, Patricia Briggs, Faith Hunter, and many others. Here’s an excerpt from her excellent introduction:

Ghosts appear to Harry Escott in Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Pot of Tulips,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of November 1855… In 1859 Escott appeared again (in O’Brien’s “What Was It? A Mystery,” also published in Harper’s) and is attacked by a supernatural entity that is, itself, the mystery.

The occult detective had been born. Also known as psychic detectives or ghost hunters, they were more often portrayed as scientists or learned doctors than as true detectives. Rather than dealing with human crimes, these investigators were involved in cases dealing with ghosts, malevolent spirits, arcane curses, demons, monsters, and other supernatural events and entities… A number of these sleuths made appearances in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction.

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