Black Gate

I heard a surprising amount of advance praise for Peter V. Brett’s first novel, The Warded Man. Contributors to Black Gate — and trust me, there’s no more discerning or harder-working readers out there — were abuzz about it long before it arrived in the US in 2009.

His second novel, The Desert Spear (March 2010), became an international bestseller — a feat George R.R. Martin accomplished only with his seventh. Anticipation for Peter’s third novel has been extremely high, and it finally arrives in bookstores tomorrow.

On the night of the new moon, the demons rise in force, seeking the deaths of two men, both of whom have the potential to become the fabled Deliverer, the man prophesied to reunite the scattered remnants of humanity in a final push to destroy the demon corelings once and for all.

Arlen Bales was once an ordinary man, but now he has become something more — the Warded Man, tattooed with eldritch wards so powerful they make him a match for any demon… Ahmann Jardir has forged the warlike desert tribes of Krasia into a demon-killing army and proclaimed himself Shar’Dama Ka, the Deliverer.

Once Arlen and Jardir were as close as brothers. Now they are the bitterest of rivals. As humanity’s enemies rise, the only two men capable of defeating them are divided against each other by the most deadly demons of all — those lurking in the human heart.

I brought home an early copy on Saturday, and it’s already been read once in the last 24 hours. When you have a family of fantasy fans, the most popular titles tend to vanish. I need to get the details down while I can still lay hands on it.

The Daylight War, Book Three of The Demon Cycle, will be released by Del Rey on February 12, 2013. It is 641 pages in hardcover, priced at $28 ($12.99 for the digital edition). Two more novels remain in the five-book series: The Skull Throne and The Core.

Dan Simmons wrote two of my favorite horror novels, Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night, and the audio version of his novel, The Terror, kept me riveted for many weeks during the long winter commute between Champaign and St. Charles last year. When Simmons talks horror, I listen.

Children of the Night was originally published in 1992, when Communist states were collapsing all across Europe and the airwaves were filled with stories of the desperate last days of Communist dictators. Romania, home to the classic fears of Transylvania, became synonymous with horror of a very different kind when western film crews entered bleak Romanian orphanages to expose the cruelty and neglect there. In Children of the Night, Simmons married modern horror and a far more ancient terror:

In a desolate orphanage in post-Communist Romania, a desperately ill infant is given the wrong blood transfusion — and flourishes rather than dies. For immunologist Kate Neuman, the infant’s immune system may hold the key to cure cancer and AIDS. Kate adopts the baby and takes him home to the States. But baby Joshua holds a link to an ancient clan and their legendary leader — Vlad Tşepeş, the original Dracula – whose agents kidnap the child. Against impossible odds and vicious enemies– both human and vampire – Kate and her ally, Father Mike O’Rourke, steal into Romania to get her baby back.

Children of the Night was published on December 11, 2012 by St. Martin’s Griffin. It is 464 pages in trade paperback, priced at $15.99 ($9.99 for the digital edition), and this edition features a brand new introduction by the author.

You can see all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

I talked about genre mash-ups Monday in my post on The Last Policeman. There’s an obvious one I forgot: hard-boiled detective zombie novels.

Not sure how I spaced on that one. Three titles I’ve covered as New Treasures in the last few months alone have been undead crime novels: Stefan Petrucha’s Dead Mann Running, Tim Waggoner’s The Nekropolis Archives, and Chris F. Holm’s Dead Harvest. As trends go, this one is a little more welcome than most, at least for me. Necromancers and tough-talking private eyes… what can I say, they go together.

The latest entrant into this crowded sub-sub-genre, Stephen Blackmoore’s Dead Things, sounds like it will fit in nicely:

Necromancer is such an ugly word, but it’s a title Eric Carter is stuck with.

He sees ghosts, talks to the dead. He’s turned it into a lucrative career putting troublesome spirits to rest, sometimes taking on even more dangerous things. For a fee, of course. When he left LA fifteen years ago, he thought he’d never go back. Too many bad memories. Too many people trying to kill him.

But now his sister’s been brutally murdered and Carter wants to find out why. Was it the gangster looking to settle a score? The ghost of a mage he killed the night he left town? Maybe it’s the patron saint of violent death herself, Santa Muerte, who’s taken an unusually keen interest in him. Carter’s going to find out who did it, and he’s going to make them pay.

As long as they don’t kill him first.

Dead Things will be published by DAW Books on Feb 5, 2013. It is 295 pages, and priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.