Black Gate

Scott Thomas is an Emmy-nominated writer whose short stories have appeared in multiple genre magazines. His collections include Urn and Willow, Midnight in New England, and Quill and Candle. His work also appeared alongside his brother Jeffrey (Punktown) Thomas in Punktown: Shades of Grey. Kill Creek won Inkshares’ 2016 Launch Pad Competition. It has been called “a slow-burn, skin-crawling haunted house novel with a terrifying premise” (HorrorTalk).

At the end of a dark prairie road, nearly forgotten in the Kansas countryside, is the Finch House. For years it has remained empty, overgrown, abandoned. Soon the door will be opened for the first time in decades. But something is waiting, lurking in the shadows, anxious to meet its new guests…

When best-selling horror author Sam McGarver is invited to spend Halloween night in one of the country’s most infamous haunted houses, he reluctantly agrees. At least he won’t be alone; joining him are three other masters of the macabre, writers who have helped shape modern horror. But what begins as a simple publicity stunt will become a fight for survival. The entity they have awakened will follow them, torment them, threatening to make them a part of the bloody legacy of Kill Creek.

Kill Creek was published by Inkshares on October 31, 2017. It is 416 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $8.99 for the digital edition. The cover design is by M.S. Corley.

I’ve been seeing the name Ursula Pflug pop up more and more in the last few years — in magazines like Lightspeed and Strange Horizons, and prestigious anthologies like David Hartwell’s Northern Suns and Postscripts. Matthew David Surridge reviewed her first short story collection After the Fires for us back in 2012, saying:

I don’t remember where I first came across Ursula Pflug’s name… From what I’d heard, she was a Canadian writer of literary fantasy, which was enough for me to take a chance on the book… Overall, these are quiet tales, surreal, dreamlike, and often elliptical… Still, there’s a clarity to the stories. Though filled with loss and despair, they often conclude with hope: they seem parables about seeking healing or wholeness, fables of fitting into place…

The stories are ultimately memorable, fascinating, because of the precision of language, and because the language briefly gets across the radical instability of fiction: in worlds constructed only of language, not of physics, anything can happen… It’s a distinctive element of a brief and strange collection. After the Fires is fascinating work, haunting and unfamiliar.

On her website she describes her latest, Mountain, as “a near-future cli-apocalypse YA thing.” It’s a novella published by Inanna Publications on June 20, 2017. It is 98 pages, priced at $19.95 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Val Fullard.

Now here’s an interesting artifact. Steal the Stars is a new novel by Nat Cassidy, based on Mac Rogers’s podcast from Tor Labs. The entire project sounds interesting, but let’s start with the podcast.

Steal the Stars is the story of Dakota Prentiss and Matt Salem, two government employees guarding the biggest secret in the world: a crashed UFO. Despite being forbidden to fraternize, Dak and Matt fall in love and decide to escape to a better life on the wings of an incredibly dangerous plan: they’re going to steal the alien body they’ve been guarding and sell the secret of its existence.

Start listening to the new dramatic podcast from Mac Rogers, award-winning writer of The Message and LifeAfter. You don’t want to miss this 14-episode noir science fiction thriller, voiced by a full cast of experienced film, theater, and voice actors.

You can listen to the whole thing at Tor Labs, Tor’s new division devoted to “Bold experiments. Podcast theatre. New ways to experience fantastic fiction.” Or if you’re old-school like me and print is more your thing, you can buy Nat Cassidy’s book. Steal the Stars was published by Tor Books on November 7, 2017. It is 416 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Peter Lutjen.

When a book loudly proclaims “International Bestseller” on the cover, that’s usually code for “Translated from French,” or some equally strange language. A little digging on the copyright page of The Witches of New York reveals that it was, indeed, originally published in a foreign land in 2016… in this case, Canada. Well, that means I can be reasonably sure the author has at least been to New York. You can see why this kind of literary detective work is so important.

Ami McKay lives in Nova Scotia (the greatest land on Earth), and her debut novel The Birth House was a # 1 bestseller in Canada. Her second, The Virgin Cure, was inspired by her great- great grandmother, Dr. Sarah Fonda Mackintosh, a female doctor in nineteenth century New York. McKay was born and raised in Indiana, which is actually farther from New York than Nova Scotia. But we won’t hold that against her.

Publishers Weekly calls The Witches of New York “Wonderful… a sidelong glance at misogyny through a veil of witches, ghosts, and other mystical entities in 1880 New York.” And The Globe and Mail says “Society types straight out of Edith Wharton pursue spiritualism for fun… but McKay widens her scope with grimier episodes… She has a nose for the Dickensian.” It is a Buzzfeed Best Gift Book of the Year.

The Witches of New York was published by Harper Perennial on July 11, 2017. It is 560 pages, priced at $15.99 in paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Stephen MacKey. Read an excerpt here.