Black Gate

Kat Howard’s debut fantasy novel Roses and Rot was a Locus Award nominee for Best First Novel, and a Publishers Weekly Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Novel of Summer 2016. Her latest is a standalone tale of a secret cabal of wizards in New York City, and a woman who wants to bring down the entire system from within. It arrives in hardcover from Saga Press in two weeks.

The Unseen World prides itself on remaining invisible as magicians walk the streets of New York City, rich and literally powerful.

Every twenty years, vying for power and standing during the Turning, the heads of magical houses would elect a champion, a family member or a magician-for-hire, and begin a series of duels.

But the Turning has come early, after thirteen years, and Ian Merlin, the heir to the most powerful house in the Unseen World has elected to become the champion of his father’s chief rival, House Prospero.

Enter Sydney: An unknown magician from a candidate house, an outsider easily dismissed amongst the established wealth and power of the Unseen World.

Acclaimed author Kat Howard has written a magical revenge thriller amidst the private world of New York City’s most influential citizens, who feed off each other in a hidden game of magical dominance.

What the Unseen World will soon learn is that Sydney is a formidable duelist with power that hasn’t been seen in decades, and she has a score to settle.

An Unkindness of Magicians will be published by Saga Press on September 26. It is 355 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Vault 49. Read Chapter One at Tor.com.

Allaigna’s Song: Overture
By JM Landels
Pulp Literature Press (288 pages, $17.99 paperback, $6.49 eBook, July 2017)

I’m a fan of the slow reveal in fiction, particularly if the writer provides just enough detail to intrigue you and increase the tension, but makes you wait to get a clearer picture about what’s going on. That’s part of the reason why Fringe is one of my all-time favorite shows. Building that tension and deciding what information to provide to the reader (or viewer) and when is very tricky; I’ve been told that some of my published stories have pulled it off, but I’ve written other pieces that totally buggered it up. And one thing I’ve never attempted is doing so with parallel narratives in a single work, where the connection isn’t clear at the outset and the tonal change is severe, since I’m always afraid that doing so will throw off my readers.

But in Allaigna’s Song: Overture, Jen Landels manages to avoid all of that, as she tells the story of child Allaigna and parallels it with two other narratives that, over time, are revealed to be the stories of her mother and grandmother. While the core is Allaigna’s discovery of her royal family’s true heritage and her capacity for magic, our real understanding of the world and the Game of Thrones-esque politics involving her family comes from these parallel narratives, since Allaigna is kept out of a lot of discussions and sometimes doesn’t understand or care about what’s really going on. The really neat thing is that when these parallel narratives first appear, there’s no indication about who we’re looking at or where the story has moved to – the first flashback to “Lauresa,” for example, occurs before we learn that Lauresa is Allaigna’s mother’s name – and there’s a shift in tense and narrative structure, which is really experimental and something I’ve never attempted. But Landels pulls it off, constructing a great slow reveal as details come to light.

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Karin Tidbeck’s first collection Jagannath brought rave reviews from China Mieville, Karen Joy Fowler, Elizabeth Hand, and others. Ursula K. Le Guin said, “I have never read anything like Jagannath… These are wonderful stories.”

Karin’s debut novel Amatka is likewise garnering a lot of attention. Weird Fiction Review calls it “Remarkable… weird fiction at its most inventive and self-questioning.” And Jeff VanderMeer says “Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka is a stunning, truly original exploration of the mysteries of reality and what it means to be human… a brilliant short story writer has been revealed as an even more brilliant novelist. One of my favorite reads of the past few years, an instant classic.”

Print copies of Jagannath are now almost impossible to find. Don’t make the same mistake of overlooking Amatka! It arrived in trade paperback from Vintage in June.

Welcome to Amatka…

where everyone has a role, language has strange properties, and nothing — not even the very fabric of reality — can be taken for granted.

Vanja Essre Two is sent to the wintry colony of Amatka on an assignment to collect intelligence for the government. Dissent is not tolerated in Amatka, nor is romantic love, but Vanja nonetheless falls for her housemate Nina, a true believer in the colony’s ways. But when Vanja is drawn into a resistance movement, she must choose between love and a revolution, which promises liberation at the cost of tearing the world as they know it apart.

Amatka was published by Vintage on June 27, 2017. It is 216 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. Read more at the author’s website.

Brad Abraham has written for film (Stonehenge Apocalypse), television (RoboCop: Prime Directive), comics (Mixtape), and genre magazines (Rue Morgue, Starburst). His first novel is Magicians Impossible, which Library Journal says reads like “Harry Potter meets James Bond,… this series launch by a screenwriter features ages-old spy rings of magic-wielding secret agents… a cinematic, fast-paced debut.” It arrives in hardcover next week from Thomas Dunne Books.

Twenty-something bartender Jason Bishop’s world is shattered when his estranged father commits suicide, but the greater shock comes when he learns his father was a secret agent in the employ of the Invisible Hand; an ancient society of spies wielding magic in a centuries-spanning war. Now the Golden Dawn―the shadowy cabal of witches and warlocks responsible for Daniel Bishop’s murder, and the death of Jason’s mother years before―have Jason in their sights. His survival will depend on mastering his own dormant magic abilities; provided he makes it through the training.

From New York, to Paris, to worlds between worlds, Jason’s journey through the realm of magic will be fraught with peril. But with enemies and allies on both sides of this war, whom can he trust? The Invisible Hand, who’ve been more of a family than his own family ever was? The Golden Dawn, who may know the secrets behind his mysterious lineage? For Jason Bishop, only one thing is for certain; the magic he has slowly been mastering is telling him not to trust anybody.

Magicians Impossible will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on September 12, 2017. It is 390 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Ervin Serrano. Read an excerpt here.

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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