Black Gate

Where the Veil Is Thin, an anthology of original stories where humans run afoul of faeire-like creatures (or sometimes, faeries run afoul of humans), is a project of my heart, and I’m so pleased that it began to show up on bookshelves—at least, virtual ones—earlier this month! It is a project that was years in the making.

And it almost didn’t happen.

Back in 2017, the publisher of the company now folded into Outland Entertainment approached me with an idea. He and his wife loved fairy stories, he said; what would I think about doing an anthology of original stories based on the Seelie and Unseelie courts? I liked the idea, but I wanted to go one better; I didn’t want to limit our tales to the Celtic tradition of Seelie and Unseelie. What would an anthology look like if it reached into different parts of the world, with stories from authors who wouldn’t just retell tales from a European tradition? I was excited about the idea of pairing tales that could feature fox spirits or boo hags with the types of stories and fairies I was more familiar with.

I didn’t want to do it alone, so I reached out the Cerece Rennie Murphy, whose work I had deeply admired on the website Narazu. The mission of Narazu is to bring the best of Indie Sci-Fi to a wider audience, and to celebrate the cool works that indie writers and artists are creating. Cerece was interested in the idea, and we started hashing out plans.

And then the publishing company where we’d started the idea fell apart. It closed its doors in November 2017.

After some maneuvering, Outland Entertainment decided to keep moving forward on the anthology, and Cerece agreed to stick with the project. We started reaching out to authors, some that Cerece knew, some I had worked with before on other projects, some recommended to us by other contributors. We planned to line up the writers and have all their stories completed by July 2018, when we would launch the anthology.

The best plans, however, were a bit ambitious. Outland Entertainment already had two anthologies slotted for 2018, and because we were a new company at putting together anthologies and fulfilling their Kickstarters — not to mention completing some projects that the previous publisher had left unfinished — we had no idea we’d bitten off more than we could chew. Eventually, Outland released two really fantastic anthologies from those 2018 Kickstarters, which I was excited to help edit, but it took a long time.

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Joe Bonadonna’s 2011 sword and sorcery collection Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser won the 2017 Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy. In his BG review William Patrick Maynard wrote:

Joe Bonadonna describes his fiction as ‘Gothic Noir’ and it is entirely appropriate… The six stories in Mad Shadows offer a mixture of traditional sword & sorcery necromancers and demons as well as werewolves, vampires, witches, and bizarre half-human mutations that H. P. Lovecraft would happily embrace.

Pulp Hero Press reissued Mad Shadows last December, in a revised second edition with a new cover, new maps, revised text, and an expanded Afterword. Now they’ve given the same treatment to the sequel, Dorgo the Dowser and the Order of the Serpent. Here’s a brief snippet from Fletcher Vredenburgh’s terrific review of the original 2017 release.

I totally dig these stories and especially the world Bonadonna’s created. Tanyime is rife with magic and magical beings. Minotaurs serve as guards, a cyclops runs a gambling den, and an old satyr is one of Dorgo’s best friends. Bonadonna’s too skilled a storyteller to let his setting become overwhelmed by the possible cutesiness of it all, instead, creating a good, hardboiled world with room in it for justice…. Aside from his deep understanding of S&S and hardboiled fiction, Bonadonna knows how to write a hero… [Dorgo] is an honest-to-goodness hero looking to do the right thing,

Read a generous excerpt from Dorgo the Dowser and the Order of the Serpent right here at Black Gate.

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Cover designed by Laura Givens

Steven H Silver is one of Black Gate‘s most prolific contributors. He produced many reviews for the print magazines, sold me the terrific short story “The Cremator’s Tale” back in 2013, and has written an astonishing 471 articles for the blog.

Steven’s many accomplishments don’t end with Black Gate, however. He’s an acclaimed editor, co-editing three DAW anthologies with Martin H. Greenberg (Wondrous Beginnings, Magical Beginnings, and Horrible Beginnings), and the two volume Selected Stories of Lester del Rey for NESFA Press. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace (June 2019), co-edited with Joshua Palmatier. From 2004-2012 he was the publisher and editor of ISFiC Press, and his annual fanzine Argentus has been nominated for the Hugo Award multiple times. In fact Steven has received 17 Hugo nominations over the years.

Last week Steven’s writing career entered an exciting new phase with the publication of his long-awaited debut novel After Hastings, a masterfully constructed alternate history from one of the field’s true experts. I asked Steven to say a few words about it for BG readers, and this is what he shared:

After Hastings is an exploration of a world in which King Harold of England successfully beats back the Norman Conquest but finds himself facing other enemies, both domestic and foreign, leading him to jump start the reformation four hundred years early.

After Hastings was published by Ring of Fire Press on July 10, 2020. It is 347 pages, priced at $15.99 in paperback and $5.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Laura Givens. Order copies here.

See all our coverage of recent releases by Black Gate staff here.