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Quatro-Decadal Review: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1989, edited by Edward Ferman

Quatro-Decadal Review: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1989, edited by Edward Ferman

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
November 1989. Cover by Bryn Barnard

I thought that Asimov’s was going to rule the 1988 roost, but MoF&SF gives it a run for its money.

The issue jumps straight into the fiction!

Fiction — “Icicle Music” by Michael Bishop

A story told in time jumps, starting on Christmas Eve 1957. Danny Pitts, living with his mother in a small boxy house near the waste dump — is up early, and finds his wished-for shotgun that his single mom must have saved for over the year. His father is a bum, out of the picture for a couple of years. Then Danny hears a strange sound, like icicles breaking and the pawing of something on the roof. Then a man comes down the chimney,

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Noir, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Bang!, edited by Andrew Hook

Noir, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Bang!, edited by Andrew Hook

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Bang!: An Anthology of Modern Noir Fiction (Head Shot Press, March 1, 2023)

For reasons I don’t quite understand I love horror fiction but I hate horror movies.

By contrast, I love noir films but I don’t particularly like noir fiction. 

Yet, this anthology of noir stories has made me change my mind.

I’m not saying that I liked all the stories (that would be statistically impossible, even with horror anthologies) but certainly I was pleasantly surprised by my own response to several of the dark tales featured here.

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Might For Right: The Once and Future King, pt1 by T.H.White

Might For Right: The Once and Future King, pt1 by T.H.White

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I have been thinking,” said Arthur, “about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. I think they should be done because you ought to do them.

King Arthur, p. 239 The Once and Future King

I first read English author T.H. White’s The Once and Future King when I was seventeen, fresh from seeing the movie Camelot (1967) for the first time (the musical Camelot, by Lerner and Lowe was based on parts of White’s novel). The tale of Arthur Pendragon, by turns both comic and tragic, told in a thoroughly anachronistic and post-modern way, reached me as few other books had. The story of Arthur’s education and effort to create a better world and his ultimate failure and downfall broke my heart. I absolutely loved the book and used it as the basis for my AP English exam essay instead of any of the books I’d read in class (I aced the test). More than any other Arthurian book or movie, White’s book forms my image of Arthur’s doomed noble reign.

I know I reread the book once during college or grad school, but that was over thirty years ago and my memories are dim. To say I approached The Once and Future King last month with some trepidation is an understatement. There’s been more than one greatly admired book I’ve revisited only to find out that whatever affection I held for it had flown. I did not want that to happen here. Nonetheless, spurred again by watching Camelot recently, I was determined to read the book. Having finished the first two parts of the novel, I am happy to find that not only do I still love the book, I’m impressed more than ever by its power and White’s artistry. Note: To convey the latter point, I’ll be quoting the book generously.

The Once and Future King is really four books; The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Witch in the Wood, later retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), and The Candle in the Wind (1958). The first three were all published as standalone novels, the fourth only as part of the unified four-book collection. A fifth part, The Book of Merlyn (1977), was written in 1941 but wasn’t published until long after White’s death in 1964. For today, I’m going to write on the first two parts.
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Step into the Shadowdark … you might like it

Step into the Shadowdark … you might like it

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For those who don’t know about the Open Game License “incident” from earlier this year, it’s too complicated to lay out in an introduction, so go look it up, then come back to this article.

Crazy, right? Despite Wizards of the Coast walking back a lot of what they were going to do, players and game designers alike are giving serious thought into whether or not they want to continue playing with this game system. While many are sticking with 5th Edition (5E) Dungeons & Dragons, others are looking into something completely different, including games that simulate the 1st Edition rules (known as Old School Renaissance or OSR). Which puts Kelsey Dionne at Arcane Library in the perfect time to release her long-awaited Shadowdark game, since it combines the fan-favorite elements of 5E and OSR games.

While it might seem like Shadowdark was rushed into production to capitalize on this sudden interest in alternative game systems, the truth is that it’s been several years in development. After the OGL crisis, Kelsey Dionne had to re-work some of the mechanics so that Shadowdark didn’t resemble Dungeons & Dragons too closely, but this just results in the game now looking more like her own unique thing (a similar situation is occurring with Gavin Norman’s also long-awaited Dolmenwood game). There are still the usual 6 character traits, armor class, and hit points. But complicated encumbrance rules are now replaced by a simple gear slot mechanic (you can carry as many items as your Strength score). The magic system looks like the traditional Vancian system used in every version of Dungeons & Dragons, but now it’s limited by a spell mishap table (similar to what you find in Dungeon Crawl Classics). Darkvision has been completely eliminated as an option for player characters, making those torches far more important and the threat of losing your light source far more intense (since ALL monsters can see in the dark). …

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Haunted Trucks, Ghostly Theaters, and Creepy Picnics: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Haunted Trucks, Ghostly Theaters, and Creepy Picnics: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII (DAW, November 1984). Cover by Vicente Segrelles

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII was the twelfth volume in the DAW Year’s Best Horror series and the fifth edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). The book was copyrighted and printed in 1984. After nine covers by Michael Whelan, we have a new cover artist, the Spanish artist Vicente Segrelles (1940–). I think this is a frightening cover and less fantastic than those that Whelan often did. I had this by my bed one night and actually turned the book over because the lich-woman in the mirror was sort of creeping me out. That’s pretty good horror art!

But an even bigger artistic change is that this is the first DAW Year’s Best Horror without the famous yellow DAW spine and the famous DAW yellow tag on the cover; though the DAW “number” is still ongoing, this one being 603. This major aesthetic switch came about for all of DAW’s titles in late 1984. I assume that the DAW powers-that-be thought after about twelve years a change was needed. Maybe, but it does sadly mark the end of an era in paperback publishing. Nevertheless, the cover font of The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII is still similar to previous volumes, keeping it artistically in a line to some degree.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

Goth Chick News Reviews: Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

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Ghost Eaters (Quirk Books, September 20, 2022)

Author Clay McLeod Chapman only recently teamed up with Quirk Books, one of my all time favorite sources of strange and unusual stories. For that reason alone he should have been on my radar, not to mention that he is a prolific writer of comics, short stories and several other novels, most of the creepy variety. No, I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I made Chapman’s acquaintance via a suggestion from Amazon, whose algorithms, I must now grudgingly admit, know me pretty well.

In searching for some fun reading material to see me through a mind-numbing four-day business trip bracketed by an even more mind-numbing 9 hour round trip flight, Amazon served me up Ghost Eaters: A Novel as something I might like. Described by Esquire magazine as “Trainspotting meets Requiem For A Dream, rewritten as an avant-garde horror movie soundtracked by Nine Inch Nails,” it was a no-brainer that I was going to load this one on my tablet. However, I also hedged my bets by loading several other e-books by more familiar writers just in case this story couldn’t hold me.

Let me just tell you now, I needn’t have bothered.

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Galactic Real Estate, Revolutions, and an Uplifted Moose: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

Galactic Real Estate, Revolutions, and an Uplifted Moose: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

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The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (Tor Books, January 31, 2023)

On the one hand, The Terraformers is full of great characters, solid science, and socio-political conflict, with enough action to move things along and keep you turning pages to the end. On the other, it’s not actually about terraforming and it’s told in 3 novellas set hundreds of years apart with only a few characters able to provide links between them.

The Terraformers opens when Environmental Rescue Team Ranger Destry is out in the terraformed forest with her faithful steed, the uplifted moose named Whistle. Destry and Whistle come across a human doing all sorts of disgusting paleolithic things, burning wood, killing small game, defecating on the land, and generally upsetting the ecological balance of Sask-E. It’s taken 10,000 years for Sask-E to be made habitable, and it’s Destry’s job to make sure it stays that way.

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Nerve Gas, Neighborhood Witches, and Forbidden Forests:The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series XI, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Nerve Gas, Neighborhood Witches, and Forbidden Forests:The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series XI, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series XI (DAW, November 1983). Cover by Michael Whelan

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XI was the fourth volume in this series edited by horror author and editor Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). It was copyrighted and printed in 1983 and was the eleventh volume in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories. (We’re half way through the 22-year series!)

Michael Whelan’s (1950–) artwork appears for a ninth time in a row. Whelan’s horror art is always creepy, and quite varied. This, however, was one of my least favorite Whelan covers. It seems more like a throwback to a 1970s-era paperback. But it’s probably right up your alley though if you’re a Paperbacks from Hell type of fan. It was re-used as the cover of the Underwood Miller hardcover omnibus Horrorstory: Volume Four, which collected Series X, XI, and XII of The Year’s Best Horror Stories.

Of the seventeen different authors that make up The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XI, all were male but two. Ten were American authors, six were British, and there was one Canadian, Donald Tyson. Seven stories came from fanzines, six from professional magazines, and four from books. Though Wagner continues to show that he is a widely read man, more than a few of these stories came from the pages of the T. E. D. Klein-edited Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine and Stuart David Schiff’s famous Whispers fanzine.

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Horror Pervades the UK: Terror Tales Of The West Country, Edited by Paul Finch

Horror Pervades the UK: Terror Tales Of The West Country, Edited by Paul Finch

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Terror Tales Of The West Country (Telos Publishing, October 31, 2022). Cover by Neil Williams

This is volume 14 in the successful ongoing series Terror Tales, a bunch of anthologies collecting horror short stories set every time in a different area of the United Kingdom. Which, all in all, appears to be a really spooky place where dark and supernatural events occur all the time.

For the present  book editor Paul Finch (an excellent horror writer himself) has chosen the West Country as a setting for fifteen tales of terror penned by as many dark fiction authors. Each story is preceded by an historical recalling of disturbing and sometimes violent horrific events which took place in the past in the various parts of the West Country. 

Truth be told the long, vivid introductions by Finch are sometimes even more interesting and engrossing than the subsequent pieces of fiction.

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In 500 Words or Less: End of 2022 Round-Up!

In 500 Words or Less: End of 2022 Round-Up!

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The Bone Shard Emperor, Finish, and The Kaiju Preservation Society (Orbit, Portfolio, and Tor Books)

Oh man, what a year, people. I won’t bore you with the details, but you already got a glimpse of my debut novel Catalyst, and there was additional coolness on top of that. See my bio below for the title of my first games writing publication, and some of the recent spots for my short fiction.

We’re here to talk books, though, and I’ll freely admit that I didn’t read quite as much in this back half of 2022, for reasons of being busy and sometimes very stressed. Because I figured out quickly that I was going through a period of “less reading, more Steam” I was choosy with what I read. The silver lining of which was that the books I stuck with turned out to be excellent, and I’m excited to share them below with you.

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