Black Gate

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.

Here’s an uncomfortable admission: I’ve never read anything by Mercedes Lackey. I know that seems improbable, just statistically speaking — she’s written, by my count, somewhere around 100 fantasy novels. If you’re a fantasy fan, you’re bound to read one sooner or later.

I have no excuse. If it helps, I’m a Canadian, and the traditions and culture of your America are strange to me. But I’m coming up to speed.

There’s no better way to try a new author than when she launches a new series, and that’s exactly what Lackey has done this month with Crown of Vengeance, the first novel in The Dragon Prophecy, co-authored with James Mallory.

Mallory isn’t as well known as Mercedes Lackey, but he’s no slouch. He’s the author of the Merlin trilogy, based on the Sam Neill mini-series, and in collaboration with Lackey he’s written both the Eternal Flame trilogy — including the New York Times bestseller, The Phoenix Transformed — and the Obsidian trilogy. If you like trilogies, Mallory’s your guy.

Although the flap copy is a little coy about it, anybody who pays attention to Amazon reviews will learn that Crown is a prequel to both the Eternal Flame and Obsidian trilogies. Okay by me, I’m still trying to come up to speed here. Besides, the marketing copy included with the book tells me “No previous knowledge of Lackey and Mallory’s collaborations is necessary to enjoy this fast-paced, action packed novel.”

Between the Mercedes Lackey connection, marketing copy that includes the words “action packed,” and the late-stage melee on the cover, I’m pretty much sold. And I don’t even know what the book is about yet. I read the front jacket, and it said something about elves, demons, legends, astonishing magics, forces of Light, and the Endarkened. Got it. Bring on the archers and the leaping horses.

Crown of Vengeance was published by Tor Books on November 13. It is 605 pages in hardcover priced at $27.99, or $13.49 for the digital edition.

I rarely read introductory volumes of fantasy series these days. Truthfully, I don’t pay much attention to them. What I do pay attention to is the final volume, as that’s (usually) a sign it’s safe to sit down and enjoy a complete fantasy adventure. That’s why I was very pleased to see Legacy of Kings, the final volume of C.S. Friedman’s Magister Trilogy, arrive in paperback in September. It is the sequel to Feast of Souls and Wings of Wrath.

I’ve followed Friedman since she published her first novel, In Conquest Born, in 1986. She is the author of The Coldfire Trilogy, the Braxi/Azea duology (In Conquest Born, The Wilding), and the standalone novels The Madness Season and This Alien Shore. Kings was originally released in hardcover in August 2011; the captivating cover sequence for the trilogy is by John Jude Palencar.

The young peasant woman Kamala has proven strong and determined enough to claim the most powerful Magister sorcery for herself — but now the Magisters hunt her for killing one of their own. Her only hope of survival lies in the northern Protectorates, where spells are warped by a curse called the Wrath that even the Magisters fear. Originally intended to protect the lands of men from creatures known only as souleaters, the Wrath appears to be weakening — and the threat of this ancient enemy is once more falling across the land.

Legacy of Kings was published by DAW Books in September, 2012. It is 498 pages, and priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions.