Black Gate

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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Cover by Mike Davis (click to embiggen)

Undertow Publications commands my attention these days. Editor Michael Kelly has a truly keen eye for fiction, and he’s published some of the most acclaimed short story collections of Weird Horror in the last decade, including Simon Strantzas’s Nothing is Everything, V. H. Leslie’s Skein and Bone, and Kay Chronister’s Thin Places. On Tuesday he adds another to that impressive list, grotesquerie by Richard Gavin.

Gavin is the author of five previous collections, including Omens (Mythos Books, 2007), At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press, 2012), and Sylvan Dread: Tales of Pastoral Darkness (Three Hands Press, 2016). Ramsey Campbell said, “Richard Gavin’s tales are genuinely evocative of the strange and alien,” and Publishers Weekly reviewed grotesquerie warmly last month, saying:

The 16 dark tales in this collection from Gavin (Sylvan Dread) are distinctive and macabre… The strongest — including “Neithernor,” in which a man stumbles upon his cousin’s uncanny art show at a strange gallery; “Scold’s Bridle: A Cruelty,” about a mask used as a torture device; and “Three Knocks on a Buried Door,” about a man who discovers an elaborate residence occupied by a mysterious being just beneath his apartment building — are richly articulated nightmares that will delight horror fans… the heady, transportive atmosphere of many of these stories… will put readers in mind of both classic weird fiction and the supernatural mysteries of the 1970s. Dedicated weird fiction readers will find this worth a look.

grotesquerie will be published by Undertow Publications on September 1, 2020. It is 292 pages, priced at $17.99 in paperback and $5.99 in digital formats. The hypnotic cover is by Mike Davis. Order copies directly from Undertow.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Cover design by Julia Lloyd

Thank God for review copies. I purchase a lot of books, but truth be told, I tend to buy in a pretty predictable band. Space opera, weird westerns, short story collections, some epic fantasy… when I crack open my wallet, that’s usually not the time I step out of my comfort zone. But I don’t control the flow of review copies into the Black Gate offices, and frequently I get one I might not have given a second glance on a bookstore shelf — but which is well worth a closer look all the same.

Tim Major’s new novel is a perfect example. A small-town supernatural thriller in the vein of The Wicker Man and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Hope Island “is a deliciously creepy mystery. Tim Major knows how to wield the weird” (D. K. Fields). Here’s an excerpt from Elloise Hopkins’ feature review at The British Fantasy Society.

Nina Scaife, TV producer, English-woman, recently abandoned wife and mother of one, has arrived in Maine and is trying to work out how to break the news to her daughter and her husband’s parents that he has not only left them but has another family, another wife and other children, elsewhere. It never seems the right time to break the news to Laurie. Each time she tries, it seems someone is intent on interrupting her.

Breaking the news and visiting Cat’s Ear Cottage would mark a new start in Nina’s life, now she knows the truth. But on the way to Hope Island the strange occurrences begin. Nina swerves to avoid a child in the road, follows her, but finds nothing. As the week goes on, and as she encounters more of the island’s few residents, the unspoken hangs over Nina and the tension swells. There is a threat in the air and much as Nina tries to avoid it, she is slowly drawn into the island’s terrible secrets.

From the moment it starts, Hope Island carries in its narrative a continuous sense that something awful is about to happen… Major cleverly explores the impact of aural disturbance on body and mind through a sinister thriller that unveils deliciously slowly through to its climax… What we have here is supernatural speculative fiction set against the backdrop of an island with a secretive and segregated community. We have the local pub and an artists’ colony, a summer school and little else, but it is enough to cleverly convey Nina’s loneliness and struggles as an outsider upon arrival and her slow but sure realisation that something on the island is very wrong and the danger to she and her daughter may be very real.

Tim Major is the author of Snakeskins (Titan 2019) and the collection And The House Lights Dim (Luna Press, July 2019). Hope Island was published by Titan Books on March 31, 2020. It is 381 pages, priced at $14.95 in paperback and $7.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Julia Lloyd. Read an excerpt at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Kate Elliott is the pseudonym of writer Alis A. Rasmussen. As Rasmussen she published The Labyrinth Gate (1988) and The Highroad Trilogy science fiction novels (1990).

Those books didn’t meet with a lot of commercial success however, and in 1992 Rasmussen rebooted her career, switching genres, changing publishers, and launching an epic fantasy series under the name Kate Elliot.

It worked. Kate Elliot’s first novel Jaren (DAW, 1992) was a success, spawning three sequels, and the follow-up series Crown of Stars (DAW, 7 volumes, 1997-2006) proved even more popular. Kate Elliott has had a long and fruitful career as a fantasy writer over the past 28 years, with a number of top-selling series, including Crossroads, the Spiritwalker Trilogy, and the Court of Fives novels.

Her latest book, Unconquerable Sun, is a departure from epic fantasy and a return to her science fiction roots. It’s been widely acclaimed, with a trifecta of starred reviews from Booklist (“A candidate for instant re-reading”), Publishers Weekly (“highly entertaining… will have readers clamoring for more”), and Kirkus Reviews (“A maelstrom of palace intrigue, interstellar back-stabbing, devious plots, treachery, blistering action, ferocious confrontations ― and a heroine for the ages.”) Here’s an excerpt from that rave review at Kirkus.

Clash of empires: an action-packed yarn loosely based on historical precedent, the sort of flawlessly plotted, high-tension science fiction Elliott’s been threatening to write for some time.

The story precipitates us into a kind of modernized Chinese-flavored Alexandrian Macedonia, with a partially collapsed “beacon” network allowing instantaneous interstellar travel, commerce, and war…. Under queen-marshal Eirene, the matriarchal Republic of Chaonia has expelled the Yele and Phene occupiers. Eirene, unaccountably, grudges her daughter and heir, Princess Sun, a word of praise, no matter how stellar Sun’s achievements. Sun’s Companions are aides drawn from her relatives and the scions of powerful nobles… Sun must survive constant threats to her life and freedom while conducting battles, making plans, exposing traitors, controlling her wayward impulses, and asking the questions everybody else shrinks from… The upshot is a maelstrom of palace intrigue, interstellar back-stabbing, devious plots, treachery, blistering action, ferocious confrontations — and a heroine for the ages, tough, resourceful, loyal, intelligent, honorable, courageous, and utterly indomitable.

Enthralling, edge-of-your-seat stuff hurtling along at warp speed. Grab!

Read the complete review here.

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Just some of the Tor.com releases that have accumulated in the Black Gate reference library since 2015

Arrgh. I can’t keep up with all the cool stuff coming from Tor.com.

You think it’d be easy. These are short little novellas, quick reads. I love novellas, and got all excited when they launched back in 2015, covered the first 33 releases in detail as they arrived, and watched in satisfaction as they started getting Hugos and Nebula nominations — and then virtually sweeping the nominations in the Novella category, year after year. And the books kept coming, and piling up on my desk, and then on the office tables at Black Gate‘s rooftop headquarters, and then spilling onto the floor….

Okay. I’m just one guy, I can’t keep up with the tireless dynamo that is Tor.com Publishing. But I’m not giving up. In the last few months alone, they’ve released brand new books by Jeffrey Ford, Alex Irvine, Carrie Vaughn (two!), Zen Cho, Emily Tesh, Eddie Robson — plus a new Murderbot novel by Martha Wells, and a New York Times bestseller by Tamsyn Muir. My readers deserve to know about it all, damnit.

So I’m in triage mode. Tor.com has been releasing a book a week for the past few months, and I can’t cover them all. But I can hit the highlights. So let’s take a look at three of their most interesting releases from the past few months.

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