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Saucer Country

Saucer Country

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Saucer-Country-smallRead this book. Go to your nearest comic shop and pick up the trade paperback collection. Don’t know where your nearest comic shop is located? Go to the Comic Shop Locator, type in your zip code and find out. Is it just easier to order a copy online and have it delivered to your home? Then go to IDW Publishing and order a copy. You can even order a digital copy if you don’t want to wait for delivery.

Why do you need to read this book? Because this comic book is about what’s going on right now.

The story begins with Arcadia Alvarado, governor of New Mexico and Presidential candidate. It’s a story about a woman running for President. It’s a story about the daughter of Mexican immigrants. It’s also a story about a woman who was abducted by aliens. So, yeah, this is a comic book (written in 2012, by the way) that deals with the possibility of a woman running for President as the candidate of a major political party. It’s also a comic book about a Presidential campaign where immigration reform is a key issue. It’s also a comic book about a Presidential campaign mired in conspiracy theories that leave people uncertain about what to believe. But that’s not what’s going on right now. That’s what went on in 2016.

Arcadia Alvarado was forcibly removed from her car by strangers. She was stripped naked and had a foreign object inserted in her anus. She was told afterwards that no one would believe her story if she said what happened and even if someone did believe her, there was nothing anyone could do about it. Either way, if she tells anyone about what happened, she believes that her career will be over.

Saucer Country is a story about rape. It’s about a group of powerful individuals who routinely abuse people and suffer no consequences for their actions. It’s about victims too afraid to speak out until one woman finds the courage to name her abusers. And it’s about the friends, family, and co-workers who urge her to stay quiet for her own good. If none of that sounds hauntingly familiar, you haven’t been paying attention to current events.

Saucer Country is more relevant today than when it was originally written. Find a copy and see for yourself.

Michael Penkas is an infrequent contributor to Black Gate. His mystery novel, Mistress Bunny and the Cancelled Client, is available in lots of different places. He maintains a website that you should check out.

Mage: The Hero Denied #4

Mage: The Hero Denied #4

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Mage-4-smallA short review this month simply because there’s not so much to unpack here. The Umbra Sprite, the Gracklethorns, Kevin’s wife, and Kevin’s children are all absent from this issue. Meaning that it’s just Kevin and some monster lady that we’ve never seen before (and will probably never see again).

Really, this issue is meant to tie us back to themes from Hero Discovered and Hero Defined, so if you haven’t read those titles first, none of it will make any sense to you. The Queen of the Unending Dead tells Kevin that he’s the reincarnation (or avatar) of Gilgamesh, which is something broached in Hero Defined. She also tells him that the Lord of the Hunt has a claim on his soul, which is something already suggested in Hero Discovered. Then he fights an army of zombies. Then he kills the Queen of the Unending Dead with an exploding park bench. Then he falls off a cliff. Then he gets in an argument with an ATM.

Honestly, after five issues in (I’m counting issue #0), I get why some people might start pulling out of this series. Comics are expensive, we’re in almost twenty dollars deep here, and we really haven’t gotten that much of a story yet. Yeah, Matt Wagner’s art is always crisp and vibrant, no matter what he’s drawing. But Kevin pretty much wandered away from everyone else in the plot to have a fight with yet another monster and hasn’t learned anything that he didn’t already know from the first two volumes of this series. I get that, from the title of the series, he’s not going to win this one, but it feels weird that we’ve got an antagonist who’s still making the same mistakes after all these years, partially invalidating the value of his supposed lessons in previous books.

Of course, I’m sticking around to the bitter end on this one. But if the rest of you want to save your money and come back at the end for the collected edition, I totally understand.

Mage #4 is available in print at all decent comic shops, as are back issues to volumes one and two of the series. If you prefer getting your comics digitally, then check out Mage: The Hero Discovered, Mage: The Hero Defined, and all the latest issues of Mage: The Hero Denied at Comixology.

Michael Penkas has been a fan of Matt Wagner for longer than some of you have been alive. He’s written a dominatrix detective mystery novel, Mistress Bunny and the Cancelled Client, as well as dozens of ghost stories. He occasionally maintains a website and regularly participates at various reading events throughout Chicago.

A Mashup Between 2001 and The Walking Dead: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

A Mashup Between 2001 and The Walking Dead: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

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Illuminae Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff-small

When you crack open the cover of Illuminae (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), the first thing you read is a memo to Executive Director Frobisher written by someone with a ghost ID. The memo explains that the rest of the book contains public documents exposing a secret corporate war. You don’t know who Executive Director Frobisher is. You also don’t know who’s using the ghost ID. But you will by the last page of the book, and this information will make you want to start re-reading the novel all over again.

But for now, all you’ve read is the memo. Turning the page, you encounter an interview filed with the United Terran Navy between an anonymous staffer and sarcastic teenager Kady Grant. Yes, Kady has a bad attitude. No, Kady isn’t a team player. But you’ll roar with laughter as she figuratively pies the interviewer in the face time and time again when he asks questions about her escape from the violent invasion of her planet. You’d be unwise to underestimate her. She might be short, but she’s good with computers.

Interspersed with Kady’s interview is another with Ezra Mason, the guy she broke up with the morning of the invasion. (At one point, Kady explains to her interviewer, she and Ezra were dodging explosions and ground troops when he says to her: “You picked a hell of a day to dump me, Kades.”)

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Savage Pellucidar

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Savage Pellucidar

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savage-pellucidar-canaveral-press-edition-coverHave we already arrived at the end of Pellucidar? It feels like I started examining this Edgar Rice Burroughs series only a few months ago — but it’s been almost a year since I drilled down to visit At the Earth’s Core. A year may have passed for me, but thirty has passed for Burroughs, and counting the time until the last unpublished novella was collected in Savage Pellucidar, the gap widens to fifty years. If you read At the Earth’s Core in the pulps as an enthusiastic thirteen-year-old, you’d be close to retirement age by the time you could buy the last book and have a complete Pellucidar set.

Wait, what am I talking about? This is Pellucidar. Time is meaningless here! I started writing this article series yesterday — or maybe a century ago, and the books were all published either over a span of one year or five hundred years. It’s all the same under the perpetual noonday sun.

Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic … Pellucidar. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer — including a certain Lord Greystoke. The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 1914 and 1963.

Today’s Installment: Savage Pellucidar (1963)

Previous Installments: At the Earth’s Core (1914), Pellucidar (1915), Tanar of Pellucidar (1929), Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929–30), Back to the Stone Age (1937), Land of Terror (1944)

The Backstory

I’ve told this tale before with Escape on Venus and Llana of Gathol, the sister works of Savage Pellucidar, but once more won’t hurt. At the start of the 1940s, Edgar Rice Burroughs experimented writing novels in three of his settings — Mars, Venus, and Pellucidar — as sets of four linked novellas. Each novella was capable of standing on its own but could later fit together with the other three for book publication. The idea may have been the suggestion of Cyril Ralph Rothmund, business manager for ERB Inc., who first wrote a letter to the editor of Ziff-Davis Magazines with the format proposal. It was an experiment of necessity, since the pulps were turning away from serializations as more of the weekly magazines dropped to monthly publication. Burroughs approached the three books as a round-robin, changing from one setting to the next to finish all the novellas.

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A Tale from the Archonate: A Wizard’s Henchman by Matthew Hughes

A Tale from the Archonate: A Wizard’s Henchman by Matthew Hughes

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a-wizard-s-henchman-hardcover-by-matthew-hughes-[3]-3997-pI hate Matthew Hughes’ book, A Wizard’s Henchman (2016). Not for the wonderfully complicated cosmogony of its universe; not for the ease with which it slips between dark humor and nightmarish horror; not for its uber-compentent, sympathetic hero, Kaslo. No, I hate it because, although it’s the first volume in a new series, it turns out it’s also a culmination of sorts for Hughes’ long-running Archonate series, and I didn’t know that going in. I had no idea until well into AWH that it serves as a major hinge point in his fictional universe, where one type of reality is supplanted by an entirely different one. Now, if I limit myself to the expoits of master discriminator Henghis Hapthorn, I have three novels and a collection of short stories to read. If I don’t limit myself, there’s another ten books to add to the list.

Obviously, I don’t hate A Wizard’s Henchman. In fact, I love it — for all the reasons I mention above and more. Many comparisons have been made between Hughes and Jack Vance, even by Hughes himself (where he describes the Archonate’s explicitly Vance-inspired origins). On the surface, it’s easy to see similarities in the two authors’ works: a love of rarely-used words; sly humor; non-stop inventiveness harnessed to creating oddball societies ruled by idiosyncratic rules and rulers; etc. Hughes, though, is no mere mimic. Like Michael Shea and Neal Barrett Jr., Hughes clearly carries a torch for Vance, but it does not outshine his own talent, originality, and powerful instincts as a creator of captivating stories and great originality.

Up until now, most of the Archonate stories have occurred in Earth’s stellar arm among thousands of settled worlds, collectively called the Spray. Apparently, (SOMETHING I WOULD HAVE KNOWN IF I’D READ ANY OF THE OTHER BOOKS FIRST) one of the central conceits in the series is that magic is staging a universal comeback, at which point it will completely replace cause-and-effect empiricism. Hughes created the sci-fi version of the Archonate as the last age before that of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. (As a side note, let me say that if you haven’t read them you should be ashamed. Buy them now and read them tonight). In Vance’s books, old Sol is a fading crimson orb illuminating an Earth that’s a long way down the path toward extinction, and where more magic has been forgotten than is even remembered anymore. A Wizard’s Henchman is about the days following the transition of the Universe to a place where sympathetic magic rules everything and the laws of physics have lost much of their sway.

Like a James Bond movie, AWH opens with a mini-adventure. Erm Kaslo, a licensed confidential operative, has arrived on the world of Cheddle to enforce an arrest warrant for Binnie Varshun for defrauding Diomedo Obron. As soon as he meets the local police chief, Kaslo is knocked out, then wakes up in a prison camp. In the aftermath of his escape, Kaslo starts to learn that certain people, his employer, Obron, among them, believe the Universe was once run by magic and is about to be again.

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Self-published Book Review: At Yomi’s Gate by John Meszaros

Self-published Book Review: At Yomi’s Gate by John Meszaros

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I’m always looking for more books to review. If you have any, send them my way.

yomi coverJohn Meszaros’s novel, At Yomi’s Gate, is a story about medieval Japan, in which every legend, myth, and religious belief are not only true, but play an active role in the story. Central to the story is the fire god Kagu-tsuchi. Lord Kotoheisei has trapped him in the Batsu-no-Kaji, from which he releases him only to wreak havoc on his enemies. Kagu-tsuchi is a mindless engine of destruction, destroying everything in his vicinity unless he can be controlled. This is not his story. Instead, it is the story of the Batsu-no-Kaji, a young woman named Sakura.

On Lord Kotoheisei’s first attempt to use his weapon, he loses control of Kagu-tsuchi. Ikuko, the priestess whose job it is to keep the fire god contained, escapes with Sakura, and Lord Kotoheisei is furious. He sends his nephew Fumito out to find his Batsu-no-Kaji and bring her back, on threat of murdering his family one-by-one. Fumito is no warrior, but an artist who uses illustrated scrolls to tell stories. Both he and Lord Kotoheisei know that the ink he uses is enchanted with the fire god’s magic, and will no doubt draw the Batsu-no-Kaji to him.

Fumito has no illusions about the kind of man his uncle is, and when he finds Sakura and Ikuko, he decides that he is willing to sacrifice his family to save thousands from Kagu-tsuchi’s fire. However, in their attempt to free Sakura of Kagu-tsuchi, they instead transfer Kagu-tsuchi’s magic into her. Bursting with her newfound power, Sakura decides she will rescue Fumito’s family and get her revenge on Lord Kotoheisei. The attack does not go as planned, however, and Fumito barely escapes Kotoheisei’s palace with his one surviving relative, his sister Yoko. Before the story is through, Ikuko, Sakura, Yoko, and Fumito will face ghosts and demons, gods and oni, and travel to the underworld of Yomi itself in order to defeat the forces trying to control Sakura’s fire.

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Thick As Thieves by Ken Lizzi

Thick As Thieves by Ken Lizzi

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CaptureSwords & sorcery and hard-boiled crime stories share significant crossover in themes, characterization, and worldview. Both tend to have solitary heroes possessed of highly personal codes of behavior, flourish on the margins of civilization (be it the steppes of Turan or Poisonville), and over all, equal parts world-weariness and cynicism is de rigueur. Ken Lizzi’s newest novel, Thick As Thieves, amps up the comparison by being a hard-boiled swords & sorcery heist story.

Thick As Thieves’ opening echoes one of roleplaying’s hoariest tropes, by introducing all its primary characters during a fight, if not in a tavern, just outside one in the frontier city of Kalapo. Brick is a giant slab of a man, a veteran of the Merchant’s War, and given to bouts of berserk fury in battle. In dire need of work, he took up the post of bouncer at The Chipped Mug, a less-than-reputable tavern noted for its vinegary wine and its owner, Shib. Shib is Haptha, a non-human race derisively called Sharks for the dorsal ridge that runs atop their skulls. The Haptha are a race of capitalist empiricists who launched and won the war against the human Clackmat Confederacy and Leyvan Hierocracy to force them to give up their mercantilist ways. Glum Arent, an ever-present fixture in the bar, is by trade a poet, but makes most of his living writing letters for the illiterate, penning panegyrics for priests and politicians, and acting as general informant for those same clients.

A wagon wheel on one of Haptha Trader Vawn’s wagons breaks outside The Chipped Mug. While repairs commence, Vawn and one of his bodyguards, Dahlia, a relatively rare Leyvan swordswoman, enter the tavern. Outside, members of Kalapo’s Cartage and Drayage Guild take offense at the trader’s team fixing the wagon themselves. A fight ensues. When the guildsmen attempt to attack Vawn inside the tavern, Brick makes it clear he will brook no trouble, then proves it when his warning is rejected.

“Get the f–k out of the way, freak.” The leading red tunic reached out and prodded Brick — rather scornfully, Brick thought — in the midsection with the tip of his cudgel.

“Don’t,” said Brick. He felt the advance hints of the Fury, a faint haze of red specks at the edge of his vision. The jab with the club was insulting. And the tavern, and the safety of the people within was his responsibility. His job. He tried to keep the anger at bay, though not in great earnest. He recognized the dangers of surrendering to rage, but he liked the Fury. It was what made him a good soldier. It was what had allowed him to ignore fear — not dismiss it, not conquer it, but ignore it. It was what let him tear gaps in enemy positions, be the tip of a human wedge driving into a shield wall. He recognized the disadvantages in civilian life. Slipping the leash from impulse control could be a problem outside a war zone. So, he kept the Fury tightly reined in. But he missed it. And if this punk ass guildsman jabbed him again…

The punk ass guildsman jabbed him again.

The Fury descended like a curtain of crimson sparks. Pent up frustration spewed from Brick like wine from a punctured goatskin bag. He batted aside the cudgel and grabbed the wrist, yanking the man towards him. Brick squeezed and twisted, hearing tendons pop and little bones grind together. At the same time, his other hand shot forward and gripped the guildsman below the armpit of his red tunic. Brick lifted the man, continuing to twist and pull on the wrist. The guildsman screamed as first elbow then shoulder dislocated.

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October Is Hammer Country: The Gorgon (1964)

October Is Hammer Country: The Gorgon (1964)

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gorgon-1964-posterI love October, but it brings with it a major annoyance from popular movie websites: a deluge of click-bait lists with titles such as “10 Best Horror Films for Halloween,” “10 Best Underrated Horror Films,” and “10 Best Horror Films We Market Researched from Other 10 Best Horror Films Lists.” They’re tedious, show no deep thought about the genre or the season, and feature the same set of obvious picks. Plus, I have never seen one of these Top Halloween Movie lists include The Gorgon. Therefore, they all bear false witness.

The Gorgon is Halloween movie perfection, and ranks with the 1958 Dracula as the Hammer film most fit for the ghoul season. It’s Gothic, has a classic — albeit unusual — monster, features a small European village beneath a beetling haunted castle, and stars both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Plenty of Hammer films contain these elements. But what makes The Gorgon stand out for October is how much the dry, crisp, windy sensation of autumn blows through it. You can feel the arid wind each time it slams open a window or door. Dead leaves are strewn everywhere. The moon hides behind ever-scudding clouds. And there’s a sough on the breeze that sounds like a woman in the distance singing eerily (with electric organ accompaniment). It’s one of the studio’s most sumptuously beautiful productions and fulfills director Terence Fisher’s aim to craft his horror films in the model of dark fairy tales.

It’s also simply a fantastic movie with complex characters and psychology to make its designs mean something. Director Terence Fisher, the production team, and the insanely talented cast all outdid themselves on this one. The Gorgon doesn’t have the name recognition of a Dracula or a Frankenstein film, but it deserves to be better known — because I for one can’t imagine October going by without watching it.

Hammer moved rapidly through the classic movie monster catalog once they settled into Gothic horror, and by 1964 they were interested in finding new monsters. J. Llewellyn Devine came up with the idea of using a Greek mythological creature, the snake-headed Gorgon. He invented a new one called Megaera, the only survivor of the original three Gorgon sisters. (In the Perseus myth, the Gorgons are named Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale.) John Gilling, one of Hammer’s prolific directors, turned Devine’s treatment into a script, with uncredited rewrites from Anthony Hinds. Gilling wanted to direct the script himself, and was contemptuous of Hinds’s change and the final results. I understand his anger — but I disagree with his assessment of the movie.

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October Short Story Roundup

October Short Story Roundup

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GdM13_500x375Things were a little thin on the ground for swords & sorcery this past month. Only  Grimdark Magazine crossed my radar this month with new tales of adventure, and three out of three in the latter publication weren’t S&S.

Grimdark Magazine #13 is packed with three stories and the usual spate of interviews, reviews, and commentaries on the subject of grimdark. If anyone will ever convince me that grimdark is a real, definable sub-genre and not just a marketing ploy, it will be the magazine’s editor, Adrian Collins. His choice of stories and non-fiction is solid and consistently presents grimdark as something far more than just gory rape and murder. In his magazine, there’s room for much subtlety and nuance.

The non-fiction is the usual magazine mix of good and poor. Though I disagreed with much of what he said, I enjoyed the interview with Nicholas Eames, author of Kings of the Wyld. Deborah A. Wolf has a fun article titled “How to Land a Rockstar Agent in Ten Excruciating Steps.”

Normally, I don’t write much about magazine’s non-fiction, but article in particular needs to be pointed out. In “Barbarians or Philosophers?,” Matthew Cropley and Victoria Bridgland make an argument that grimdark readers are a more discerning group than those who prefer more traditional fantasy. It’s more complex than that, drawing on things said by authors, as well as psychological studies, but that’s its general conclusion.

In the debate between those who love grimdark, and those who hate it, there is, I’ll concede, some evidence for either side. For those who claim that grimdark fans read because they enjoy the thrill that comes with depictions of violence, there’s some research, as noted above, to back this up. However, there seems to be much more recent evidence that supports grimdark fans gaining a deep fulfillment and enhanced personal well-being by engaging with grimdark fantasy. The dark and violent aspects of grimdark help it reflect the human condition in all its complex glory, whereas heroic fantasy is limited to an idealized portrayal of good and evil. Lack of material rewards and the unfairness and violence of grimdark worlds mirror our own, and help us see that the true rewards in life are increased wisdom and understanding of the nature of reality. Grimdark fans like the sub-genre because its anti-heroes share their high regard for justice and righteous vengeance, and that disposition means that the violence common to grimdark doesn’t detract from deep engagement with exploration of humanity, in all its glorious shades of grey.

I could spend an entire post unpacking the various claims made in that statement, but I’ll skip it that today. Suffice it to say, I disagree with most of what they say. Much of what passes for “increased wisdom and understanding of the nature of reality” is no more than easy cynicism and affected world-weariness. The only time I find humanity reduced to “shades of grey” is when I deliberately choose to filter out all the other colors of the spectrum.

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Mage: The Hero Denied #3

Mage: The Hero Denied #3

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Mage 3And so the story starts moving, just as the reviews and Internet buzz for this series begins to die down. Seriously, I’ve noticed how promotion for comic books tends to really ramp up with issue 1, but fades almost immediately afterward, as if no one might be tempted to pick up issue 3 if they hadn’t already read issues 1 and 2. Generally, by the time the last issue of a series shows up, the attitude among a lot of comic fans is “Oh, are they still publishing that thing?”

So you probably didn’t hear that issue #3 of The Hero Denied came out on Wednesday, but it did and it was good. Of course, some readers have probably been put off by the slow pacing of this story. For example, the first four pages are just Kevin talking to his son, Hugo, about the nature of magic while they walk around a car and then get inside it. And it turns out that my earlier theory was correct and these attacks are taking place in a parallel world just beside the “real world.” And while Kevin insists that his abilities aren’t hereditary, the fact that Hugo is able to slip into this parallel world would suggest otherwise.

The next six pages concern two Gracklethorn sisters, Aleksi and Sasha, visiting a mission in search of the Fisher King. As established in the very first Mage series, the Fisher King can assume any shape, but that shape will always appear crippled. I get that this is supposed to show how ruthlessly they’re pursuing their quarry, but it still seemed a bit implausible that these creatures were able to murder two people in a mission in the noisiest, sloppiest manner possible without anyone else noticing. On the other hand, Matt Wagner does a nice understated job of demonstrating Sasha’s powers of persuasion.

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