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New Treasures: The Monster’s Corner

New Treasures: The Monster’s Corner

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monstersMonsters!

I have a weakness for monsters.  And who doesn’t, really? I have a theory that sword & sorcery readers all loved monster movies as a kid. We talk about a fondness for the literature of the rugged individual, but secretly we just want to read about monsters.

But enough about me.  The topic at hand is monsters.  And the book at hand, compliments of today’s mail and the publicity department at St. Martin’s Press, is The Monster’s Corner, an anthology of all-new stories edited by Christopher Golden.

All new monster stories, I hasten to point out. 19 tales of classic and original creepy-crawlies, all told from the point of view of the monster. Here’s the marketing blurb:

Demons and goblins, dark gods and aliens, creatures of myth and legend, lurkers in darkness and beasts in human clothing… these are the subjects of The Monster’s Corner, an anthology of never-before published stories assembled by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Christopher Golden.

With contributions by Lauren Groff, Chelsea Cain, Simon R. Green, Sharyn McCrumb, Kelley Armstrong, David Liss, Kevin J. Anderson, Jonathan Maberry, and many others, this is the ultimate anthology on the dark heart of a monster.

I like it. I also like the author line-up: a fine mix of names I admire — including David Moody, Tananarive Due, Michael Marshall Smith, Gary A. Bruanbeck, and the marvelous Tom Piccirilli — and a terrific sampling of up-and-coming novelists whose work I have not yet tried. A great way to survey the horror field while enjoying some fine monster fiction, I think.

Christopher Golden’s previous anthology for St. Martin’s Press was The New Dead, which I quite enjoyed (when my teenage sons finally let me have it back, anyway). The Monster’s Corner is 389 pages in trade paperback, with a cover price of $14.99. The official on-sale date is Sept. 27.

Little Lulu Volume 25: The Burglar-Proof Clubhouse and Other Stories

Little Lulu Volume 25: The Burglar-Proof Clubhouse and Other Stories

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little-luluDuring my heyday as a young comic collector — from maybe 1973-1977 — I primarily chased Marvel titles, with the occasional DC offering like Legion of Super-Heroes, and a smattering of Charlton comics such as Blue Beetle. Like most ten-year-old collectors I scorned kid’s comics, of course.

At least in public. Behind closed doors, I loved virtually all comics, and read whatever I could get my hands on: Archie, Uncle Scrooge, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and even Little Lulu, which featured the comparatively tame adventures of Lulu Moppet and her neighborhood friends as they hunt for wild turkeys in the local woods, solve the mystery of a missing tea cup, and go to school.

I only recently discovered that Dark Horse Comics has reprinted over a decade’s worth of Little Lulu in 29 volumes (!!), many of them in full color. A pretty staggering feat of cultural scholarship, sure, but I have to admit my initial reaction was “Who the hell wants to read that much Little Lulu?”

Me, as it turns out.

Just as I did roughly 40 years ago, I slipped a copy of Little Lulu into a stack of larger comics when I thought no one was looking.  Back then it would go between Amazing Spider-man and Grimm’s Ghost Stories, just before I marched up to the drug store counter with my stack of quarters.  Last week, I quietly added it to my Amazon cart between Hellboy, Volume 1 and Marvel’s collected Son of Hulk, when my kids were in the other room. Listen — no matter how old you are, the scorn of children is a terrible thing.

As soon as that package arrived, it wasn’t Hellboy or Son of Hulk I opened first. It wasn’t even Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, Volume 7, and that baby had storm troopers on the cover. No. It was Little Lulu.

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New Treasures: Fraser Ronald’s Sword Noir

New Treasures: Fraser Ronald’s Sword Noir

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forsimplecoinFraser Ronald is an author who will be familiar to readers of Black Gate 15. His story “A Pound of Dead Flesh” is a terrific sword-and-sorcery action piece, featuring two legionnaires who become involved in a plot to cheat a necromancer — a plot that very quickly goes very wrong.

Two of the hallmarks of Fraser’s writing are his gift for worldbuilding, and his clear love of sophisticated action tales in the noir genre. Both of these have served him well in his next projects: For Simple Coin, a collection of four tales of “Sword Noir,” and a compact, complete role-playing game called simply Sword Noir:

Hardboiled sword & sorcery – it’s Conan seeking for the Maltese Falcon, it’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in The Big Sleep, set in Lankhmar, it’s hardboiled crime fiction in the worlds of sword & sorcery.

Inspired by mashing up the novels and stories of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Robert E Howard, and Fritz Leiber, Sword Noir: A Role-Playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery is a new RPG from Sword’s Edge Publishing. In it, characters’ morals are shifting at best and absent at worst. The atmosphere is dark and hope is frail or completely absent. Violence is deadly and fast. Trust is the most valued of commodities – life is the cheapest. Grim leaders weave labyrinthine plots which entangle innocents. Magic exists and can be powerful, but it takes extreme dedication to learn, extorts a horrible price, and is slow to conjure.

Now is the time for your characters to walk down mean streets, drenched in rain, hidden in fog, and unravel mysteries, murders, and villainy.

sword-noirSword Noir is available today from Sword’s Edge Publishing or RPGNow in PDF format for just $4.99, and in print for $10.73. It is a 6″ x 9″ softcover book with black & white interiors — including maps — running 104 pages.

For Simple Coin is 90 pages, and collects three short stories which originally appeared in AtFantasy, Forgotten Worlds, and On Spec, as well as one story original to this collection.  These tales perfectly illustrate the appealing mix of dark fantasy and noir detective fiction that Fraser has perfected.

If you’re a fan of the hard-boiled fantasy of Alex’s Bledsoe’s Eddie LaCrosse novels or Glen Cook’s Garrett, P.I., you’ll want to check these out.

For Simple Coin is $1.99 in PDF, or $6.99 for the print version.  It is available through RPGNow. Cover art is by Paul Slinger.

Anchorwick

Anchorwick

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AnchorwickAnchorwick
Jeffrey E. Barlough
Gresham & Doyle (387 pages, $14.95, October 2008)

Of all the books I’ve reviewed for Black Gate, the one that sticks in my head is Jeffrey Barlough’s Strange Cargo, which I reviewed way back in 2005 for BG #8. Grumpus that I am, of course I dinged it. I still stand by the review years later, though I feel some guilt about it too. Barlough is such a wonderful yet unappreciated fantasist that to judge him on that single novel is like measuring Hemingway by To Have or Have Not or Kerouac by The Subterraneans. Frankly, Strange Cargo isn’t even a bad book; it’s simply a novel where the author’s ambition exceeded the page count and so shortcuts were taken. Literary ambition is hardly a crime and Barlough is, nevertheless, a talent I invite everyone to sample.

With his first three books OOP, Barlough’s fifth, Anchorwick, makes a fine initiation for newcomers (younger versions of the protagonists from Barlough’s debut, Dark Sleeper, appear here in supporting roles). His alternate 20th century, called the Western Lights, has a sophisticated backstory that’s easier to link to than for me to explain, but I’ll try: in a world where the Ice Age never ended, a cataclysm has reduced humanity to a slip of English civilization along North America’s western coastline. It’s neither steampunk nor weird western; the technology is early 19th century. It’s kinda-sorta gaslamp fantasy, except there doesn’t seem to be any natural gas. Barlough’s creation is best described as a Victorian Dying Earth — gothic and claustrophobic yet confronted by its inhabitants with upper lips held stiff.

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New Treasures: Who Killed Science Fiction? by Earl Kemp

New Treasures: Who Killed Science Fiction? by Earl Kemp

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who-killed-science-fictionIn 1960, only 34 years after the launch of Amazing Stories, the first true science fiction magazine, fan Earl Kemp mailed a set of questions to 108 SF writers, editors, artists and fans. 71 responded, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Hugo Gernsback, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Silverberg, John W. Campbell, Horace Gold, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and many others. The questions were:

1) Do you feel that magazine science fiction is dead?
2) Do you feel that any single person, action, incident, etc., is responsible for the present situation? If not, what is responsible?
3) What can we do to correct it?
4) Should we look to the original paperback as a point of salvation?
5) What additional remarks, pertinent to the study, would you like to contribute?

Kemp published the results in his one-shot fanzine SaFari Annual #1 in 1960. Only 125 copies were printed, and it instantly became a collector’s item. A candid dialog on the flaws and fate of the genre between most of its brightest lights, Who Killed Science Fiction? achieved near-legendary status in the SF community, and SaFari Annual #1 won a Hugo Award in 1961 based on that sole issue.

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New Treasures: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London

New Treasures: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London

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rivers-of-londonOne of the great things about Amazon.com is that there are so many ways to browse. Which is rather ironic, considering that 10 years ago that’s the precise reason I confidently gave for why online booksellers would never replace local bookshops: you couldn’t browse.

Yeah, well. I was wrong.  You can browse.  And how. Last week I stumbled across a few hard-to-find British hardcovers in the Science Fiction & Fantasy section of their Bargain Department, and on a hunch I did a search for all titles from Gollancz, the prolific UK SF & fantasy publisher. I sorted by price and bam, I had a handy list of great bargain Gollancz books.

One that grabbed my attention immediately was Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London, in hardcover for just $14.56:

My name is Peter Grant and until January I was just probationary constable in that mighty army for justice known to all right-thinking people as the Metropolitan Police Service (as the Filth to everybody else). My only concerns in life were how to avoid a transfer to the Case Progression Unit – we do paperwork so real coppers don’t have to – and finding a way to climb into the panties of the outrageously perky WPC Leslie May. Then one night, in pursuance of a murder inquiry, I tried to take a witness statement from someone who was dead but disturbingly voluable, and that brought me to the attention of Inspector Nightingale, the last wizard in England.

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New Treasures: Col Buchanan’s Farlander

New Treasures: Col Buchanan’s Farlander

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farlanderAfter weeks of late nights working on Black Gate 15 layout, I’m ready to relax in my big green chair with something substantial.  The latest big-budget fantasy from Tor looks like it might just fit the bill.

For fifty years the Holy Empire of Mann, an empire and religion born from a nihilistic urban cult, has been conquering nation after nation. Their leader, Holy Matriarch Sasheen, ruthlessly maintains control through her Diplomats, priests trained as subtle predators. The Mercian Free Ports are the only confederacy yet to fall… For ten years now, the city has been besieged by the Imperial Fourth Army. It is only a matter of time before it falls.

Ash is a member of a sect known as Rōshun, assassins who offer protection through the threat of vendetta… Forced by his ailing health to take on an apprentice, he chooses Nico, a young man living in the besieged city of Bar-Khos, whose own father is long gone, a deserter of his family. At the time, Nico is hungry, desperate, and alone in a city that finds itself teetering on the brink.

When the Holy Matriarch’s son murders a woman under the protection of the Rōshun, he forces the sect to seek his life in retribution. As Ash and his young apprentice set out to fulfill the vendetta, their journey takes them into the heart of the conflict between the Empire and the Free Ports — into bloodshed and death.

I don’t usually go for books with assassins as main characters.  Maybe I’m just in a dark mood. Maybe the unusual cover intrigues me, with an African American assassin posed before a decaying urban setting (“African American” really doesn’t apply in a setting that includes neither Africa nor America, and which was created by an Irishman.  But “black assassin” signifies the wrong thing altogether.) And the airship doesn’t hurt.

Farlander is the first novel in The Heart of the World.  It is available in hardcover from Tor for $24.99.

New Treasures: Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan

New Treasures: Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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engineerOriginal science fiction and fantasy anthologies have had a tough time of it over the past few years, with some of the most promising and rewarding series — including Lou Ander’s excellent Fast Foward, and George Mann’s ambitious and highly readable Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and Solaris Book of New Fantasy — being discontinued.

One of the best of the new anthologists is Jonathan Strahan, whose acclaimed Eclipse series returns this May with Volume 4.  While we wait, Strahan treats us to a terrific standalone volume of original short stories:

The universe shifts and changes: suddenly you understand, you get it, and are filled with a sense of wonder. That moment of understanding drives the greatest science-fiction stories and lies at the heart of Engineering Infinity. Whether it’s coming up hard against the speed of light and, with it, the enormity of the universe, realising that terraforming a distant world is harder and more dangerous than you’d ever thought, or simply realizing that a hitchhiker on a starship consumes fuel and oxygen with tragic results, it’s hard science-fiction where sense of wonder is most often found and where science-fiction’s true heart lies.

This exciting and innovative science-fiction anthology collects together stories by some of the biggest names in the field including Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross and Greg Bear.

Engineering Infinity was published in paperback by Solaris for just $7.99; my copy arrived in early January.

As a raging blizzard  turns St. Charles, Illinois into a winter wonderland around me, this is the book I choose to cuddle down with for the evening.  Check it out when you get a chance.

New Treasures: Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40K: Horus Rising on Audio CD

New Treasures: Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40K: Horus Rising on Audio CD

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horus-cdI have a 3-hour commute to my job in Champaign, Illinois, and I exhausted the excellent Dark Adventure Radio Theatre adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s major works months ago. What’s a bored commuter to do?

Rejoice when the latest Black Library Audio CD arrives, that’s what. I thoroughly enjoyed Nick Kyme’s Thunder From Fenris — a tale of desperate battles against a zombie plague (and worse) on a frozen planet — last year, and have been looking forward to the next release. Nothing helps the miles (and miles) of cornfields of  Illinois slip by like a fast-paced tale set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, lemme tell you.

As entertaining as it was, Fenris was only 70 minutes, and it fit on a single CD. This week’s mail brought the much more imposing Horus Rising: a 6-hour, 5 CD audio extravaganza adapting one of the central works in the Warhammer 40K canon – the tale of the epic betrayal of the immortal Emperor by his Warmaster, Horus:

It is the 31st millennium. Under the benevolent leadership of the Immortal Emperor, the Imperium of Man has stretched out across the galaxy. It is a golden age of discovery and conquest. But now, on the eve of victory, the Emperor leaves the front lines, entrusting the great crusade to his favourite son, Horus. Promoted to Warmaster, can the idealistic Horus carry out the Emperor’s grand plan, or will this promotion sow the seeds of heresy amongst his brothers? Horus Rising is the first chapter in the epic tale of the Horus Heresy, a galactic civil war that threatened to bring about the extinction of humanity.

Abridged from the best selling novel by Dan Abnett and read by award winning star of stage and screen Martyn Eliis, Horus Rising comes to life in this almost 6 hour reading.

Six hours!  Just long enough to occupy me all the way to work, and back.  Champaign, here I come!

New Treasures: Too Many Curses by A. Lee Martinez

New Treasures: Too Many Curses by A. Lee Martinez

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too-many-cursesI have the week off between Christmas and New Year’s. Much of will be spent laying out Black Gate 15, to be sure, as well as catching up on my towering e-mail backlog.

But if you can’t recline in the glow of the Christmas tree and read at least one new book, it hardly counts as a vacation, does it? Santa brought me several great titles this year, but the one I’ve got my eye on at the moment is the latest novel by A. Lee Martinez: Too Many Curses. Martinez is the author of The Automatic Detective, Gil’s All Fright Diner, and A Nameless Witch, and his newest promises to continue in the same light-hearted vein as those:

The wizard Margle the Horrendous takes special pride in never killing his enemies. Instead, he transforms them into various accursed forms and locks them away in his castle. His halls are filled with his collection of fallen heroes and defeated villains, along with a few ordinary folk who were just unfortunate enough to draw Margle’s attention.

It’s Nessy’s duty to tend this castle. It’s a lot of work, but she manages, taking pride in housekeeping talents that keep the castle from collapsing into chaos. But when Margle suddenly dies, everything begins to unravel. Nessy finds herself surrounded by monsters, curses, a door that should never be opened, and one very deadly dark wizardess.

Happy Holidays to all Black Gate readers out there, and here’s hoping that your loved ones found a way to express their affection for you in the form of a great book.