Black Gate

On Tuesday I wrote about Dead Mann Running, the second volume of Stefan Petrucha’s zombie detective series. As I mentioned at the time, it wasn’t the only zombie detective novel I was going to cover this week. For those of you I’ve kept in suspense all week, I can finally reveal that Tim Waggoner’s The Nekropolis Archives is the second.

I was pretty busy manning the Black Gate booth at Worldcon two weeks ago, and didn’t have much time to venture forth and explore the rest of the cavernous dealers’ room. But when I learned that Angry Robot had a booth, I left Tina Jens and S. Hutson Blount in charge of my stack of magazines and went in search of it. Angry Robot has published some of the most exciting new SF and fantasy in the past two years, and best of all, they’ve been doing it in attractive and inexpensive paperbacks.

Their booth did not disappoint. Not only did I get to meet North American Sales Manager Michael R. Underwood, whose debut novel Geekomancy was a highlight of my Wiscon reading circuit, but — just as I expected — I discovered a fabulous array of exciting new fantasy titles. I was especially taken with their omnibus editions: fat, 900+page trade paperbacks collecting Andy Remic’s The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles, Aliette de Bodard’s three-volume Aztec Mystery series Obsidian and Blood, and Tim Waggoner’s The Nekropolis Archives.

Priced at just $15.99 each, all three are terrific bargains. But it was Tim Waggoner’s The Nekropolis Archives that drew my eye first:

Meet Matt Richter. Private Eye. Zombie.

His mean streets are the city of the dead, the shadowy realm known as Nekropolis. You’ve got to keep your head in Nekropolis. But when you’re a zombie attempting to battle the vampire lords, that’s not as easy as it seems…

This massive omnibus edition collects all three Matt Richter novels – Nekropolis, Dead Streets and Dark War – plus a swathe of short stories too.

Sounds like exactly what I’ve been looking for to cuddle up with under my blanket on windy autumn nights in Chicago. The Nekropolis Archives is $15.99 for a handsome 907-page trade paperback, or just $6.99 for the Kindle version. It was published by Angry Robot on April 24, 2012.

I can’t be the only one out there with a young teen daughter who likes to read.

I thought this would be easy. I’d give her a few books every month — books I treasured when I was her age, and carefully preserved for decades for just this moment — and she would retire in contentment to her reading nook, only popping out from time to time to comment on what a great Dad I am. Piece of cake.

Didn’t exactly work out like that.

For one thing, she’s really not interested in books from 40 years ago. She wants to read the books her friends are reading. And guess what? They’re not reading A Wrinkle in Time or Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators either. They’re reading The Hunger Games and Twilight and the Fallen novels and Vampire Academy and.. and…

And that’s the other thing. These kids read a lot. A few books a month? More like a few books a day. They’re voracious, and by the time I’ve ordered the book her friends are all taking about, they’re forgotten it and moved on. Forget being a great Dad… I’m left scrambling just so I don’t look like a clueless parent who’s perpetually “totally last week.”

Fortunately, I have people. People who work for publishing companies, and send me advance proofs. Of books that aren’t even out yet. Take that, bratty thirteen-year-old mean girls. I can still compete for my daughter’s attention by leaving these lying around.

She pretends not to be interested, but then picks one up. What’s this? she sez. Oh, that? The Scorpions of Zahir — just something some Manhattan publishers sent over. You wouldn’t be interested. Won’t even be on sale for another month or so. It’s about a girl in Morocco trying to keep a sacred city from being buried forever, or something. Your friends probably won’t be talking about it for weeks.

I know. I’m a bad person, but I’m desperate. And it works. Soon she’s curled up in her reading nook. She doesn’t come out to tell me I’m a great father or anything, but once she does ask where “Morocco” is. I show her on the map. We almost make eye contact for a moment, before she goes back to reading.

I get a quick hug the next morning. The book is tucked into her bag as she heads off to school. I’ll need to have a new book by the end of the day, but I’ll worry about that later.

Heaven help me when she turns sixteen. But this morning I’m a cool Dad again. Treasure the small victories.

I ran into Stephen Jones when he and his wife Mandy Slater swung by the Black Gate booth at Worldcon last week. I’ve known Mandy for nearly 30 years, since we were both involved in Ottawa fandom in the early 80s, but Stephen I first met in the early days of running the SF Site. I was an entrepreneur trying to get a website dedicated to science fiction and fantasy off the ground at the dawn of the World Wide Web (1996), and Stephen was a young editor publishing some of the most exciting anthologies in the field, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Dark Voices, Fantasy Tales, H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, and many others.

Fifteen years later, I’m a grumpy small press magazine publisher, and Stephen Jones is still publishing some of the most exciting anthologies in the field. The 23rd volume (23rd!!) of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror will be released on Oct 23, and this week, A Book of Horrors, one of the most anticipated anthologies of the year, goes on sale here in the US. It includes all-new stories from Stephen King, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ramsey Campbell, and many others:

Many of us grew up on The Pan Book of Horror Stories and its later incarnations, Dark Voices and Dark Terrors (The Gollancz Book of Horror), which won the World Fantasy Award, the Horror Critics’ Guild Award and the British Fantasy Award, but for a decade or more there has been no non-themed anthology of original horror fiction published in the mainstream. Now that horror has returned to the bookshelves, it is time for a regular anthology of brand-new fiction by the best and brightest in the field, both the Big Names and the most talented newcomers.

A Book of Horrors is 429 pages in trade paperback. It is published by St. Martin’s Griffin, priced at $15.99 print and $9.99 for the digital edition. You can see more details, including the complete list of contributors, here.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

I’m keeping my promise to spend a few days focusing on paperback arrivals in my New Treasures column. It’s easy to do, as there’s been plenty to grab my attention recently.

Case in point: Dead Mann Running by Stefan Petrucha, sequel to Dead Mann Walking. David Wellington, author of Monster Island, called it “Fast-paced zombie noir with a melancholy bite, a sure antidote for the blandness of traditional zombie fare.”

It kills me that there’s such a thing as “traditional zombie fare” these days. As a kid growing up on monster movies, there was no such thing as “traditional zombie fare.” Zombie fare was all gourmet, let me tell you. Anyway, I’m intrigued by the “zombie noir” blurb, and the book description, narrated by dead detective Hessius Mann:

Just because a bullet has your name on it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t duck…

Either I’m stubborn or it’s rigor mortis, but being dead didn’t stop me from being a detective. But it’s tough out there for a zombie. These days the life-challenged have to register and take monthly tests to prove our emotional stability. See, if we get too low, we go feral. And I’ve been feeling down lately myself.

So when a severed arm – yeah, just the arm – leaves a mysterious briefcase in my office, my assistant Misty thinks figuring out where it came from will keep me on track. But this job goes deeper and darker than I imagined.

Turns out the people after the briefcase know more about my past life than I can remember, and even more about what I’ve become.

Believe it or not, this is not the only zombie detective novel I plan to cover this week (maybe David Wellington was on to something after all). But you’ll have to wait until later in the week to hear about the second one.

Dead Mann Running was published by Roc on September 4. It is 339 pages in paperback or digital format for $7.99. You can read a free excerpt here.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

I haven’t paid much attention to paperbacks in my New Treasures column. Which is odd, considering paperbacks are actually my preferred format. I think it’s just force of habit — I try to talk about the arrivals that look the most interesting and important, and I think my eye just gravitates towards the hardcovers and trade paperbacks each week.

Several very intriguing paperback originals have arrived in the past few weeks and I’m going to try and rectify that mistake by highlighting them, starting with Kari Sperring’s The Grass King’s Concubine. Sperring made a splash with her first novel Living With Ghosts — a finalist for the Crawford Award, a Tiptree Award Honor Book, Locus Recommended First Novel, and the winner of the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. With her second novel she returns to the same world with a brand new tale set several hundred years later:

It began with Marcallen, a man bringing human knoledge into WorldBelow — where no mortal had been… And though Marcellan never meant to cause harm, his theories undermined the immortal Grass King’s magic, the power that gave life and plenty to all the Domains of WorldBelow. That disaster was compounded by a spell of stone and blood cast in WorldAbove by exiled shapeshifter twins, once favorites of the Grass King…

Generations later, Aude, born to wealth yet driven always by her childhood vision of a strange Shining Place, seeks to understand her family’s past, where their wealth came from, and why they and all who live in the Silver City want for nothing, while the people who live in the industrial Brass City have nothing at all.

Jehan, a soldier serving in the Brass City, also questions the inequities between the wealthy and those who work for them. When the two find each other on the troubled streets, their destinies are linked. Together, they flee the cities in search of the origins of Aude’s family. All they find is a devastated land, and when Aude is snatched away to WorldBelow by the Grass King’s last remaining supporters, the Cadre, Jehan has no choice but to follow, aided and impeded by the twins. While Jehan travels through hostile lands and battles terrifying guardians, Aude must survive as a prisoner of the Cadre, who believe that she is the solution to restoring WorldBelow — even at the cost of her own life…

The Grass King’s Concubine was released by DAW Books on August 7. It is 481 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the print and digital editions.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.