Black Gate

The tireless John DeNardo is back with another list, this time looking at the Can’t-Miss SF and Fantasy titles in March (and he should know). Here’s a few of his recommendations.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson:

In the not-too-distant future, New York City’s streets are submerged underwater due to climate change, making every street a canal, every building an island unto itself. Intrigue abounds in the Met Life tower, now converted into a co-op, and the target of a buyout from a shadowy corporation desperate enough to sabotage the building’s infrastructure… Robinson weaves a tapestry of interconnected personal narratives that is captivating for its portrayal of humankind.

New York 2140 was published by Orbit on March 14, 2017. It is 624 pages, priced at $28 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition.

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James Brogden is an Australian horror writer with three novels to his credit, The Narrows, Tourmaline, The Realt, plus the collection Evocations. His latest is a modern-day dark fantasy about a teacher who has four students go missing on the same day… and the horror that begins when one of them returns alone.

Tim Lebbon calls it “Brilliant… full of great twists and beautifully drawn characters,” and Kirkus Reviews says it’s “genuinely scary… a wonderfully odd mix of dark Bronze Age fantasy and modern-day thriller, and it works.” Booklist gave it high praise indeed, saying

The engrossing plot features steadily intensifying dread… a fast-paced and terrifying ride as everyone tries to solve two mysteries, one modern and one ancient… a horror novel and a standout thriller that can hold its own against the best in either genre.

Hekla’s Children was published by Titan Books on March 7, 2017. It is 400 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Julia Lloyd (click the images to embiggen). Read a brief excerpt at Dread Central.

T.E. Grau’s short horror fiction has appeared in The Children of Old Leech, The Dark Rites of Cthulhu, Dark Fusions – Where Monsters Lurk!, World War Cthulhu, and other fine anthologies and magazines. His other books include Triptych: Three Cosmic Tales, The Lost Aklo Stories, and The Nameless Dark, which was nominated for a 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Single-Author Collection. His novella I Am The River will be published later this year by Lethe Press.

I’ve been wanting to sample his fiction for a while, and his brand new novella They Don’t Come Home Anymore seems like the way to do it. On his blog, Grau describes it this way.

They Don’t Come Home Anymore [is] a story that might, at first blush, seem like a slight departure from my previous work, as it centers on a teenage girl, and is very much a tale of obsession, loneliness, and a search for meaning, acceptance, and love in a world (and sub world) that waits, cruel and threatening, just behind the facade. It’s also about vampires, but not the garden variety sort you’d expect in a mass market/network television teenage vamp story, but something that cleaves closer to the natural world, and how our planet once was, and might still be in certain darkened corners. I can’t really say more, other than to invite you to pick up the book when it’s available, and tell me what you think it’s about, underneath, beyond that first impression.

They Don’t Come Home Anymore was published by This Is Horror on November 28, 2016. It is 104 pages, priced at $10.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Candice Tripp.

Michael Shea was one of the most distinguished and loved figures in the field of speculative fiction. He twice won The World Fantasy Award, and his work also received nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, August Derleth and International Horror Guild awards. Ranging from wildly baroque dark fantasy to cosmic horror and grimly humorous parodies of contemporary “reality” culture, his writing conveys the sense of wonder and awe that imaginative readers crave and appreciate, and one can develop an insatiable appetite for his work.

But since Shea’s unexpected passing in 2014, many of us have been unable to slake that. That is, until the recent release of And Death Shall Have No Dominion: A Tribute to Michael Shea, which among many other things, contains three previously unpublished works of his fiction.

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