Black Gate

Holy cats, it’s 2013 already. Happy New Year, all you Black Gate peeps.

And where did 2012 go? There’s 1,021 unanswered e-mail messages in my in-box, I’m late editing this week’s BG Online Fiction entry, and I’m not even sure how many unread review copies are stacked up by my big green chair. 2013 ain’t even 20 hours old, and I’m weeks behind already.

Ah, the heck with it. I have to keep up on the latest top-notch fiction, don’t I? Yes, I do. So tonight I’m curling up in my big green chair and starting 2013 off right: by reading Chris F. Holm’s first novel, an intriguing mix of dark fantasy and noir-dark crime: Dead Harvest.

Meet Sam Thornton, Collector of Souls.

Sam’s job is to collect the souls of the damned, and ensure their souls are dispatched to the appropriate destination.

But when he’s dispatched to collect the soul of a young woman he believes to be innocent of the horrific crime that’s doomed her to Hell, he says something no Collector has ever said before.

“No.”

The second book, The Wrong Goodbye, hit shelves in September. If we’re lucky, they could both eventually be re-released in a handsome and affordable 3-novel omnibus like Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian & Blood. But damn, I can’t wait that long.

Dead Harvest was published February 2012 by Angry Robot. It is 381 pages in paperback, priced at $7.99 ($5.99 for the digital edition).

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

I’ve been continually impressed with the growing fantasy and dark fantasy/horror catalog from Dave Mattingly’s BlackWyrm Publishing. They first appeared on my radar in 2008 with unapologetically straightforward adventure fantasy novels such as Jason Walters’s The Vast White and Trevis Powell’s Albrim’s Curse. Their cover art was excellent, their production values were solid, and they clearly knew what they were doing. Independent sword-and-sorcery publishers are thin on the ground these days, especially those willing to take a chance of new authors, and their arrival was much celebrated in our offices.

I met Dave for the first time at Worldcon in Chicago, and I was glad to finally be able to shake his hand. He had an impressive booth just around the corner from ours in the Dealer’s room, and I was stunned when I set eyes on the complete BlackWyrm catalog for the first time: dozens of new fantasy titles from a host of exciting new authors, spread out in an eye-catching panorama. Dave handed me a copy of their newest release, Jason S. Walters’s fiction collection An Unforgiving Land, and I took it home determined to steal enough time to read it.

I should have known that the mighty BlackWyrm Publishing empire would move faster than I could. Long before I could put the finishing touches on a review, Dave had added no less than seven new publications to his resume, including the epic fantasy Witches by Georgia L. Jones, Andrew Toy’s dark fantasy The Man in the Box — and Andrew Cooper’s novel of modern horror Burning the Middle Ground, which arrived in my mail box this week.

Burning the Middle Ground is a tale of religious conspiracy and supernatural mind control in small-town America. Journalist Ronald Glassner is determined to write a book on the McCullough Tragedy, which began the day Brian McCullough came home from school to discover that his ten-year-old sister Fran had murdered their parents. But the more time Ronald spends in the small town of Kenning, Georgia, the more the mystery deepens… until he finds himself caught up in a struggle between two very different churches. When the town’s pets begin to go berserk and mutilated corpses begin to appear, Ronald realizes he’s stumbled on the story of his life.

Burning the Middle Ground by L. Andrew Cooper was published in trade paperback by BlackWyrm Publishing on Nov 30, 2012. It is 330 pages, priced at $15.95. It’s only the latest in a terrific line of titles from an exciting new publisher — do yourself a favor and check them out.

I’ve had my eye on this collection for a while, but it was Matthew David Surridge’s fascinating four-part series on Joyce Carol Oates’s Gothic Quintet that finally nudged me over the edge. I ordered it last week, and have been enjoying it ever since.

To be honest, while I was prepared for a survey of American horror, my brief perusal of the contents before I laid down my money led me to believe it was slanted towards modern writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, and Stephen King. And while they’re all represented, the book doesn’t neglect the classics either.

They’re all here: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Herman Melville’s “The Tartarus of Maids,” Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Ambrose Bierce’s “That Damned Thing,” and many more.

How does it manage that? By being nicely huge: the trade paperback is 546 pages.

Something else I appreciate is the nice selection from modern authors who aren’t usually represented in horror anthologies: Paul Bowles’s “Allal,” Robert Coover’s “In Bed One Night,” E. L. Doctorow’s “The Waterworks,” Don DeLillo’s “Human Moments in World War III,” Raymond Carver’s “Little Things,” Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Temple,” and Steven Millhauser’s classic “In the Penny Arcade.”

And if that’s not enough for you, there’s also a varied selection from horror writers more associated with the genre, including Thomas Ligotti, Nancy Etchemendy, Bruce McAllister, Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg, Katherine Dunn, John Crowley, and Lisa Tuttle.

It’s not perfect — where are Fritz Leiber, Frank Belknap Long, Hugh Cave, or Dan Simmons? — but it’s damn close. American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, was published in trade paperback by Plume in December, 1996. It is $21 for 546 pages; there is no digital edition.