Black Gate

Here at the end of the month, I’ve been amusing myself by comparing the books selected by each of the major genre sites for their monthly lists:

August’s Must-Read Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror (John DeNardo, Kirkus Reviews) — 19 books
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of August (Jeff Somers, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog) — 25 books
The Best Comics & Graphic Novels of August (Ross Johnson, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog) — 29 comics and graphic novels
14 SF, Fantasy, and Horror Books for August (Andrew Liptak, The Verge) — 14 books

Andrew Liptak at The Verge, for example, seems to really dig white covers.

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Over at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jeff Somers has compiled his own list of the top 25 science fiction and fantasy releases for the month. His list includes titles by Stephen Baxter, N.K. Jemisin, Jeff Noon, V.M. Escalada, Daniel H. Wilson, Victor Milán, Cassandra Khaw, Stina Leicht, Beth Cato, and many others. Here’s a sample.

Starfire: A Red Peace, by Spencer Ellsworth (August 22, Tor.com Publishing — Paperback)

Sometimes you want to read a space opera that makes no apologies about the “opera” part, and this is it: Spencer Ellsworth’s debut novella goes big and refuses to go home as it tells the story of a galactic civil war fought between an all-powerful empire and a Resistance force seeking a long-lost artifact that will help it shift the balance of power in the universe. Did we mention that there are giant space bugs, sun-sized spiders, and entire planets populated by cyborgs? Well then.

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Summer is drawing to a close and, as always, my ambitious summer reading plan is in tatters. The problem isn’t so much lack of disciple (I mean, any more than usual) as it is that great new books keep showing up every week. What’s the point of a meticulously organized plan when I end up behaving like a kid in a candy store every damn summer?

Well, the good news is that great new books keep showing up every week. We’ll have to leave it to someone vastly more organized than I to catalog them. As usual, that task falls to John DeNardo. He’s surveyed the best books of August in his regular column at Kirkus Reviews. Here’s the highlights.

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Elle Cosimano is the author of Holding Smoke and the Nearly Boswell Mysteries (Nearly Gone, Nearly Found). Her latest is a thriller that Kirkus Reviews calls “A dark mixture of mystery, history, romance, and fantasy.” It’s available now in hardcover from Hyperion.

Tori Burns and her family left D.C. for claustrophobic Chaptico, Maryland, after suddenly inheriting a house under mysterious circumstances. That inheritance puts her at odds with the entire town, especially Jesse Slaughter and his family — it’s their generations-old land the Burns have “stolen.” As the suspicious looks and muttered accusations of her neighbors build, so does the pressure inside her, and Tori returns to the pattern of self-harm that landed her in a hospital back in D.C. It all comes to a head one night when, to Tori’s shock, she witnesses a young man claw his way out of a grave under the gnarled oak in her new backyard.

Nathaniel Bishop may not understand what brought him back, but it’s clear to Tori that he hates the Slaughters for what they did to him centuries ago. Wary yet drawn to him by a shared sense of loss, she gives him shelter. But in the wake of his arrival comes a string of troubling events — including the disappearance of Jesse Slaughter’s cousin — that seem to point back to Nathaniel.

As Tori digs for the truth — and slowly begins to fall for Nathaniel — she uncovers something much darker in the tangled branches of the Slaughter family tree. In order to break the curse that binds Nathaniel there and discover the true nature of her inheritance, Tori must unravel the Slaughter family’s oldest and most guarded secrets. But the Slaughters want to keep them buried at any cost.

The Suffering Tree was published by Hyperion on June 13, 2017. It is 357 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Justine Howlett.

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Jeffrey Thomas is best known for nearly a dozen novels, collections, and shared world anthologies set in the city of Punktown, a crime-ridden metropolis on the colony world Oasis, a city of aliens, mutations, private detectives, and sentient machines. His Punktown novels include Deadstock (2007) and Blue War (2008), and his most recent collection was Ghosts of Punktown, published by Dark Regions Press in 2016. Punktown is also the setting for the last publication from Miskatonic River Press, a Kickstarter-funded setting book for Call of Cthulhu that is very late but still appears to be (fingers crossed) in the pipeline (the latest updates from May and July seem upbeat).

Thomas’ recent short fiction has appeared in Interzone, World War Cthulhu, The Children of Old Leech, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Weird Fiction Review, and many other fine places. His latest book, Haunted Worlds, collects some of his most recent fiction, including the Lovecraftian tale “The Temple of Ugghiutu,” two stories set in Punktown, and several previously unpublished stories. The foreword is by Ian Rogers.

Haunted Worlds was published by Hippocampus Press on August 1, 2017. It is 248 pages, priced at $20 in trade paperback. There is no digital edition. The cover art and frontispiece are by Kim Bo Yung. Get complete details and order copies at the Hippocampus website.