Black Gate

Auxiliary: London 2039 by Jon Richter (TCK Publishing, May 1, 2020). Cover uncredited

Jon Richter’s new novel Auxiliary: London 2039 has been described as “a cyberpunk thriller featuring a noir detective” (by the Caffeinated Reviewer). But it was the heading on the back cover (“A good detective is never obsolete”) that really piqued my interest. Here’s an excerpt from the feature review by Roger Hyttinen at Roger Reviews.

It’s a dark combination of the detective noir, cyberpunk, and sci-fi genres. Our main character, Carl Dremmler, is the kind of detective you’d find in a 1940s noir story: he drinks too much, has a painful past, is a bit crass, and picks up strangers for sex (though he often has sex with his personal humanoid robot). I thought the author did a fantastic job of meshing the different genres, and they all worked seamlessly…

The setting for this dystopian thriller is more than a bit disconcerting and grim, taking place in the near future where machines pretty much run the world… Detective Dremmler is called to the scene of a grisly crime. A young man has allegedly murdered his girlfriend by crushing her skull with his cybernetically-controlled prosthetic arm… However, the distraught man protests that the arm, whose chip is controlled by TIM, acted on its own accord and that the man couldn’t stop it… As Dremmler and his partner begin investigating deeper, he soon begins to suspect that there’s a lot more going on here than what he first thought and the case then morphs into something else entirely….

The story was fascinating though certainly dark, creepy, and profoundly unsettling. This book captivated me from beginning to end as the twists started to pile up. I thought this was a blood-chilling roller-coaster ride of a novel that’s both provocative and shocking. Compelling, dark, and intense, this story of technology gone wrong kept me guessing until the end and took me places I very much didn’t expect.

Jon Richter is the author of two horror collections and two crime novels, Deadly Burial and Never Rest. Auxiliary: London 2039 is his science fiction debut. It was published by TCK Publishing on May 1, 2020. It is 223 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $2.99 in digital formats.

Read all our coverage of the best new SF and fantasy here.

“Entanglement,” one of the more fascinating concepts underpinning quantum theory, tells us that particles may be inextricably linked — never truly behaving independently, no matter how far apart they are. It’s a powerful idea that, of course, has powerful parallels in the non-quantum world of human relationships, which makes it irresistible to science fiction writers.

Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, has assembled an enticing new anthology that invites ten of the best writers in the field to explore the idea: James Patrick Kelly, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nancy Kress, Rich Larson, Ken Liu, Sam J. Miller, Annalee Newitz, Suzanne Palmer, Cadwell Turnbull, Nick Wolven, and Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu). Entanglements also includes art by Tatiana Plakhova, and a number of non-fiction pieces. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly says “Readers will be captivated.” Here’s a sample from the Science review by Esha Mathew.

The world-building in this compilation is frequently full and often insidiously terrifying, particularly in those stories that use the familiar as breadcrumbs to lure the reader in. The very first tale, “Invisible People” by Nancy Kress, begins with a mundane morning routine and carefully layers in a story about two parents reeling from an unsanctioned genetic experiment on their child. In “Don’t Mind Me,” Suzanne Palmer uses the shuffle between high school classes as a foundation on which to build a story about how one generation uses technology to enshrine its biases and inflict them on the next…. It is chilling how entirely possible many of the fictional futures seem….

This volume balances darker-themed stories with those in which technology and people collide in uplifting and charming ways. In Mary Robinette Kowal’s “A Little Wisdom,” for example, a museum curator, aided by her robotic therapy dog–cum–medical provider, finds the courage within herself to inspire courage in others and save the day. Meanwhile, in Cadwell Turnbull’s “Mediation,” a scientist reeling from a terrible loss finally accepts her personal AI’s assistance to start the healing process. And in arguably the cheekiest tale in this compilation, “The Monogamy Hormone,” Annalee Newitz tells of a woman who ingests synthetic vole hormones to choose between two lovers, delivering a classic tale of relationship woes with a bioengineered twist…

The 10 very different thought experiments presented in this volume make for a fun ride, revealing that human relationships will continue to be as complicated and affirming in the future as they are today. I would recommend the Netflix approach to this highly readable collection: Binge it in one go, preferably with a friend.

Here’s the complete table of contents.

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Titan Books, April 2020. Cover design by Julia Lloyd.

I tell myself that I showcase horror novels all year round, but it’s not really true. Sure, I do a little. But as the evenings grow colder, and leaves start to turn, and night comes sooner every day, and October creeps closer… we inch towards Halloween, the natural season for creepy books of all kinds. And I find myself writing about them more often (and with more gusto).

Here’s one that came out in April: Bone Harvest, the newest from James Brogden. We covered his previous novels, Hekla’s Children (2017) and The Hollow Tree (2018), both from Titan Books. His latest is the creepy tale of a woman who battles both a sinister cult, and steadily worsening dementia, which Publishers Weekly calls a “dark, transfixing supernatural thriller… Brogden breathes new life into a classic horror setup…. electric, masterfully weaving together dark humor and suspense.” Here’s an excerpt from the feature review at Horror Hothouse.

It’s our opinion that James Brogden is the greatest living writer of folk horror in the UK… we think his latest novel Bone Harvest is the best yet…. Dennie spends much of her time on her allotment. Only the allotment holds a dark secret because its the place where Dennie helped her neighbour Sarah to hide her abusive husband’s corpse. Now twelve years after Sarah died in prison three strangers take on Sarah’s plot… things start to get weird after they invite the other plot holders to a pig roast. Plants bloom early, shadowy figures prowl the allotment at night and the people who ate the ‘pork’ seem miraculously revived as old ailments and disabilities vanish… To make things even stranger the ghost of Sarah starts to visit Dennie bringing dire warnings of things to come. What’s Dennie to do and with the onset of dementia who is going to believe her….

Brogden injects an intricately evolved ancient mythology into what on the face of it seems to be a normal mundane Midlands town populated with well developed and mostly ordinary people, but many of them harbor dreadful secrets… as the plot unwinds Brogden maintains an utterly compelling sense of foreboding and menace as Dennie seeks to find allies who she can trust to help combat the ancient evil that her new neighbours are about to unleash on her world. Compellingly fascinating we give Bone Harvest a 666/666.

Bone Harvest was published on April 7, 2020. It is 496 pages, priced at $14.95 in paperback and $7.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Julia Lloyd. See all our recent new Treasures here.

Cover by Matthew Jaffe

Word Horde, Ross E. Lockhart’s small press, has produced some knockout titles over the past few years, including Vermilion by Molly Tanzer, the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman by John Langan, and The Children of Old Leech, edited by Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele. Last month they released Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies, the big new collection by horror master John Langan. The Publishers Weekly review teased some of the stories within nicely.

Langan (The Fisherman) draws inspiration from Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, David Lynch and other masters of the strange and horrific to create an impressive collection of 21 tales as terrifying as they are mysterious. The exceptional title story finds two siblings investigating family secrets hidden away in their grandfather’s basement and stumbling on a horrific realization. “With Max Berry in the Nearer Precincts” offers a disturbing vision of the afterlife, while “Ymir” ventures into a Canadian mine with an eccentric billionaire and his female bodyguard. True Detective meets Stephen King’s It in “The Communion of Saints,” about a detective whose faith is tested when the Catholic saints are revealed to be other than they appear… This well-crafted collection will delight fans of dark, literary horror.

On his website Langan notes, “This is a big book, modeled after collections like King’s Skeleton Crew and Barker’s Books of Blood.” Here’s the complete table of contents.

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