Black Gate

I somehow managed to overlook Ian Tregillis’s debut novel, Bitter Seeds, and that situation might not have changed if I hadn’t accidentally stumbled into his reading at the World Science Fiction convention.

In front of a packed audience, Ian spun a tale of Nazi supermen, the warlocks of Britain, and a desperate battle to prevent the twisted psychics of Germany from winning World War II in a supernatural alternate history. I heard less than a minute of his summary of the second novel, but it was more than enough to grab my attention. I got my hands on the first volume, just released in paperback, as soon as I could.

It’s 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in between.

Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.

When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities — a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present — Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.

Alan Furst meets Alan Moore in the opening of an epic of supernatural alternate history, Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis is a tale of a twentieth century like ours and also profoundly different.

Bitter Seeds was published by Tor Books on April 24, 2012. It is 467 pages for $7.99 in both paperback and digital format. The Coldest War, the sequel and second volume in what’s now being called The Milkweed Triptych, was published in hardcover on July 17, 2012.

See all of our recent New Treasures selections here.

Some time, I dunno, about four years ago, I saw the cover for The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith online, and I knew I had to have it.

Maybe it was the cool cover. Maybe it was the Gene Wolfe cover blurb. I can’t say. But I wanted it. Real bad.

Of course, it wasn’t published yet. So I had to wait. I added it to my Amazon cart, where it sat. For months. The publication date changed a few times, and then Amazon slapped it with one of those “Currently Unavailable” warnings that are code for “We have no clue when it’s going to ship, dude.”

So I reluctantly took it out of my cart. But I still kept an eye out in bookstores. For years. It was a long, lonely vigil, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus. Exactly like that, now that I think about it.

There were false reports from time to time. Private sellers listed it on Amazon, but when I queried them they admitted it was “available for pre-order.” Bastards. Our own Brian Murphy, usually rock-solid reliable, even wrote a detailed review in July of 2010, the poor deluded fool. It’s sad what deadline pressure can do, I know. When I have to, I make up books to review too, I’m not throwing stones.

Then today I saw it listed for sale by the Book of the Month club. Yes, the Book of the Month club. That’s just weird. They don’t sell books that don’t exist, usually.

So I dug a little further. I discovered, to my astonishment, that Amazon.com had it listed. So did Barnes & Noble. Apparently it came out in 2010.

Excuse me? 2010?? How the hell did it get past me? I had, like, a dragnet the size of Rhode Island out for this book. I’m usually pretty plugged in to the publishing industry. Really. I’m connected, man. It hurts that this book managed to get past me. For two years.

I blame the publisher, because they’re small and I can pick on them. Prime Books, you owe me an apology. And maybe a cinnamon danish.

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I’m a sucker for anthropomorphic fantasy. You know, stories that feature animals with human speech and personalities. Some of the best fantasy ever created has been in this fine tradition.

Watership Down. Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge. The Secret of Nimh. The Wind in the Willows. The Redwall books. The Lion King. Ratatouille. 101 Dalmatians. Joyce Maxner and William Joyce’s Nicholas Cricket.

Is there anything new in anthropomorphic fantasy? Anything that doesn’t come from Disney and Pixar, anyway? Yes there is. Exhibit A: the debut novel from Howard L. Anderson, about which Mary Doria Russell says: “If Larry McMurtry had written Wind in the Willows, he might have come up with something almost as wonderful and moving… This is a novel that defies analysis and summaries.”

Having escaped from Australia’s Adelaide Zoo, an orphaned platypus named Albert embarks on a journey through the outback in search of “Old Australia,” a rumored land of liberty, promise, and peace. What he will find there, however, away from the safe confinement of his enclosure for the first time since his earliest memories, proves to be a good deal more than he anticipated.

Alone in the outback, with an empty soft drink bottle as his sole possession, Albert stumbles upon pyromaniacal wombat Jack, and together they spend a night drinking and gambling in Ponsby Station, a rough-and-tumble mining town. Accused of burning down the local mercantile, the duo flees into menacing dingo territory and quickly go their separate ways — Albert to pursue his destiny in the wastelands, Jack to reconcile his past.

Encountering a motley assortment of characters along the way — a pair of invariably drunk bandicoots, a militia of kangaroos, hordes of the mercurial dingoes, and a former prize-fighting Tasmanian devil — our unlikely hero will discover a strength and skill for survival he never suspected he possessed.

Any reading experience featuring a Tasmanian devil, drunk bandicoots, and a “pyromaniacal wombat” gets my immediate attention. Albert of Adelaide was published in July by Twelve/Hachette Book Group. It is 223 pages for $24.99 in hardcover, or $12.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our featured New Treasures here.