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The Series Series: Cursed by S.J. Harper

The Series Series: Cursed by S.J. Harper

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Cursed S.J. Harper-smallOnce in a while, I check in with the paranormal romance subgenre. Most times, I conclude I’m the wrong reader and move on. What makes the check-in worthwhile is that there are books out there like Laura Anne Gilman’s Heart of Briar (which I reviewed here), books that use the conventions of paranormal romance to do something surprising, something stranger or more complex than the usual spectacle of exogamy-as-extreme-sport.

Cursed, the first volume in S.J. Harper’s Fallen Siren series, promises a bit more strangeness and depth than the average paranormal romance does. Harper’s heroine is a Siren, and it turns out there’s more to the Sirens’ myth than we all remember from reading Homer in high school. According to several actual ancient sources, the Sirens were Persephone’s companions and for their failure to save Persephone from Hades, Demeter cursed them. The Ancient Greek and Roman versions of the story disagree about the precise nature of the curse, which is just the sort of wiggle room modern writers love.

Since S. J. Harper is the pen name for a team of established romance writers, their version of the Sirens’ curse is that, until the Sirens have rescued enough innocents from abduction to satisfy Demeter for the loss of her daughter, they cannot die no matter what they suffer and they can never know love without losing the beloved. Losing in the worst possible ways. Harper’s interpretation of Demeter is the winter goddess of the barren Earth, all wrath and vengeance. As when the mythic Demeter would have allowed all humanity to starve while she went on strike, this Demeter has no qualms about destroying innocent men to torment the fallen goddesses who love them.

Do you sense that it’s a problem when the villainous dea ex machina in reverse is more interesting than the protagonists who get most of the time on stage? Yes, that would be the mismatch between book and reader showing. Or it might be an actual weakness of the book, but I don’t have the right readerly dopamine receptors to get romance novels, so I can’t be sure how its merits would look to a reader who does.

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Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: Choice of the Deathless by Max Gladstone

Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: Choice of the Deathless by Max Gladstone

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Between keeping up with my usual webcomics, Marvel: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and several writing projects (one of them my own current work for Choice of Games), I haven’t had as much time to play games (or review them) as I’d like. But back in my December 20 post, I promised an upcoming review of Choice of the Deathless by Max Gladstone. Max is a writer friend of mine and I’m not shy about proclaiming my love for his Craft Sequence — of which Choice of the Deathless is a corollary. Since Max is currently a John W. Campbell nominee, and his Three Parts Dead just made Reddit’s list of under-read fantasy, I thought now would be a great time to spend some time on Choice of the Deathless — and mention his novels as well.

Choice of the Deathless, art by Ron Chan
Choice of the Deathless, art by Ron Chan

The world of the Craft Sequence is one in which human wizards — usually necromancers, most of whom wear pin striped suits and run corporations called Concerns — rose up against the gods in a huge war and won, leaving most of the gods dead. Lest you think this means the conceit of the world is all about the virtues of Progress over Faith, I assure you I don’t read the stories at all that way. Progress has its own failings, Faith has its strengths, and the stories told in Max’s books and game strike me as being about characters who try to find a way to reconcile the two to make the world a better place. Also: necromancers who are, effectively, lawyers, and fantasy novels that are also legal thrillers. Sometimes about ecoterrorism, corporate espionage, or just trying to find a good cup of coffee. What’s not to love?

Choice of the Deathless gives the player a chance to take part in that world of exciting corporate magic, beginning at the low rung of a Concern’s ladder with hopes of climbing all the way up to Partner. But while student loans, crappy apartments, and a lack of sleep all add flavor to the game, things really start to get interesting when the PC starts dealing with literal demons. In one case, the PC needs to keep demons from finding a contractual loophole that would allow them to gain an unlimited foothold in the human world. In another, an oppressed demon wants out of an abusive contract, without getting sent back to the demon lands. In a third, the PC must decide whether to advise a minor goddess to seek out her own lawyer or take her to court for everything she has. And the larger story arc gives PCs the chance to eventually become a skeletal, undead, master of magic — if they play their cards right.

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The Resurrection of Dr. Mabuse, Part Two

The Resurrection of Dr. Mabuse, Part Two

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etipomarMabuseLess than six months ago, I reviewed indie wunderkind Ansel Faraj’s 21st Century update of Dr. Mabuse. The Rondo-nominated film garnered more attention from genre fans for Faraj’s stunt casting of veterans of the 1960s Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows than it did for his faithful recreation of Expressionism in the digital age of indie filmmaking.

I won’t claim Faraj is the equal of Fritz Lang or that his Hollinsworth Productions offers the resources of UFA at its peak, but this is a young man who impresses in spite of the limitations of budget and time. There is a dreamlike quality to his work which is helped rather than hindered by the Spartan production values. One wonders just what he would be capable of rendering given studio backing.

Faraj’s latest production, Etiopomar, is the second half of his Dr. Mabuse reboot and deftly blends elements of Norbert Jacques’s original novel that Fritz Lang and his screenwriter wife Thea Von Harbou jettisoned from their 5-hour two-part adaptation of the book in 1922, while incorporating characters from Lang and Von Harbou’s Metropolis (1927). When one considers Lang’s silent masterpieces, the visionary Metropolis easily supersedes his Mabuse pictures. Metropolis is a stunning sci-fi epic that is still influential nearly 90 years on.

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April Short Story Roundup

April Short Story Roundup

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oie_124340bRDfwruIApril was a good month for swords & sorcery short fiction. Between Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, nine new stories and two poems were published. (I already reviewed two from BCS last month.) Also, a new online magazine, Fantasy Scroll, appeared, promising all sorts of good things. I’ll review the first issue next month.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #27‘s first of two stories, “Wolves,” is only the second English language story by Brazilian writer Cesar Alcazar. It continues the adventures of renegade Irish swordsman Anrath the Black Hound, whom he first introduced in “A Lonely Grave on the Hill” (HFQ #118).

One night, five brutal mercenaries find themselves together in a “desolate tavern” waiting for a mysterious employer to arrive. Alcazar’s cunning warrior and the nasty conclusion reminded me of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane stories. Considering his bio says he’s translated Karl Edward Wagner, Robert E. Howard, and George R. R. Martin into Portuguese, I’m not surprised.

The only flaws in the story are some iffy word choices which I attribute to Alcazar writing in English, not his first language. For example, we’re told a man “laid” his cup on a table, though it was clear that the cup was set down on its bottom. Those few minor details aside, this is a clever story.

The second, “The Best Intentions,” is Benjamin Darnell’s first published story. It starts as a somewhat humorous tale of Aidan, student of the apothecarist Edwin, sent out for magical ingredients. It becomes a darker, violent story as things start to go wrong for the young apprentince. It’s a laudable first effort with some thrilling bits, even if its setting is overfamiliar.

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Werewolves, Vampires, Zombies, Serial Killers, and the Horror of Mundane Lives: Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters

Werewolves, Vampires, Zombies, Serial Killers, and the Horror of Mundane Lives: Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters

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North American Lake Monsters-smallNathan Ballingrud’s short stories have been making the rounds for a while, with some of the most prestigious names in contemporary weird fiction and horror sounding his praises. Jeff VanderMeer calls Ballingrud “One of my favorite short fiction writers” and Laird Barron claims that Ballingrud’s debut horror collection “deserves a place of honor in the canon of the dark fantastic.” Thus I’ve had my eye on Ballingrud’s collection, North American Lake Monsters, since last summer when it first came out. I recently got my hands on it and it was definitely worth the wait.

Ballingrud’s fiction is an amalgamation of some of the best elements of current dark fiction. The stories of North American Lake Monsters are poetic and literary (think Kelly Link or Caitlin Kiernan), forbidding and nihilistic (think John Langan), very real and raw (think Nic Pizzolatto), while also scaring the bejesus out of you (think Laird Barron).

I’m not a big fan of some of the dark and weird fiction coming out nowadays. Though much of it takes its trajectory from cosmic horror, which I love, set by late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers like Robert W. Chambers, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, and most singularly that of H. P. Lovecraft, the stories of many current masters, such as Thomas Ligotti, tend to leave me more depressed than horrified. (Not necessarily a criticism, more of a personal bias.)

Though Ballingrud’s stories are similarly dark and depressing in many ways, his characterizations, his use of horror tropes, and his building of suspense are so good that I usually end one of his stories with more of a horrified thrill than just simple heavy-heartedness.

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A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

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oie_520266yr2OCRWhAfter several weeks spent among ghoulish haunts, a Cthulhu-haunted island, and nightmare dimensions, I thought a trip to ancient Britain — the sun-dappled forests of the High Weald and the rolling downs of the Vale of Kent — was needed. Yes, I’ve visited previously in reviews of Henry Treece’s The Great Captains and David Drake’s The Dragonlord, and Keith Taylor’s Bard (1981) is a return to post-Roman Britain in the days of Arthur and Saxon and Jutish invaders.

Bard is one of those books that my dad bought years ago and I never bothered to read. I didn’t know anything about it or its author, but I was done with my short-lived infatuation with Celtic fantasy. Nothing about it enticed me to pick it up… until I started blogging about swords & sorcery.

As I read articles and websites on heroic fiction, I quickly learned that Keith Taylor was an important voice in the field of Robert E. Howard scholarship and then I started seeing very good reviews of Bard. I remembered that a copy was tucked away in the attic so I went and retrieved it and I’m quite glad I did.

Bard is a fix-up of four previously published stories and one original tale about Felimid mac Fal of Eire, wielder of the magic sword, Kincaid, and player of the ancient harp, Golden Singer. Under the right circumstances, the harp allows him to cast spells and play songs to influence his audience. Blessed with talent, wit, and cunning, Felimid is able to enter the courts of ferocious Jutish warlords and survive encounters with monsters and sorcerers in haunted forests.

Though tied together by a pair of ongoing plots, Bard reads more like the scattered adventures of a peripatetic traveler than a novel. Despite its melancholic setting in a time of fading magic and invaders from across the sea, this book is tremendous fun. Felimid is a bold, lively character with a winning way, well worth any heroic fantasy reader’s time.

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Self Published Book Review: The Book of Thoth by Paul Leone

Self Published Book Review: The Book of Thoth by Paul Leone

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here.

Book_of_ThothConsidering my dislike of vampires, I seem to review a lot of books about them. Either vampires are hard to avoid or I just can’t help myself. Paul Leone’s The Book of Thoth is part of his Vatican Vampire Hunters series. As you might guess by the name of the series, Mr. Leone does not shy away from religious themes. Or vampires. In his series, vampires are literally demons escaped from Hell, occupying the bodies of the dead. This explains why they so hate and fear anything sacred, whether it be holy water, crucifixes, churches, or even the blood of the righteous.

Nicole van Wyck is an heiress who has no interest in going into the family business and who is rapidly losing interest in the clubs and parties all her friends are involved in. Her life is threatening to become the aimless drifting of so many of the rich and irresponsible. That is, until she friends meets her first vampire. Fortunately for her, the vampire is being tracked by a group of church-sponsored hunters, who chase it away with no one the wiser. Except for Nicole, who suspects that there’s more going on than the friends who are with her realize. When she does track down the hunters, they make her an offer to join them and Nicole concludes that if vampires are real, then fighting them is not optional.

Nicole is certainly not another vapid heiress. She works hard, whether tracking down a mystery or training to fight vampires. She also has a strong moral center, which comes through both in how readily she leaps into the fight and in how she is willing to argue against her own team when they cross the line. Nicole is certainly a capable heroine, but she and her fellow hunters are not facing run of the mill vampires, but a veritable count of Hell, Count d’Aubert, and his very dangerous minion, Alice. The demons in dead flesh are after the titular Book of Thoth, which holds the secrets of Satan himself. To do that, they must gather three keys to open up the book’s hiding place.

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The Series Series: Irenicon by Aidan Harte

The Series Series: Irenicon by Aidan Harte

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Irenicon by Aidan Harte-smallWelcome to Rasenna, a shining city-state turned failed state, where river spirits haunt the streets and mistake themselves for the citizens they’ve drowned. Rasenna’s people hide in their towers at night, and even by day fear the river their enemy wielded to cut their city in two. With the city’s legitimate ruling house reduced to one girl not yet of age, the closest thing it has to law is the twenty-year vendetta between the gang that rules north of the Irenicon and the gang that rules to its south. Both sides boast masters of a martial art perfectly organic to the world of this book, one that could arise in no other.

Can a city recover from two decades of grief, madness, and self-destruction? Can these people change in time to save themselves? They’d better, because the rival city of sorcerous Engineers that smashed them before may well do so again. The masters of Concord have striven to perfect their Wave technology. Any city they choose to strike now will be scoured from the soil of Etruria.

Meanwhile — what are the Concordians playing at? — the enemy sends Rasenna an Engineer to build a bridge over the hated river. It’s a bridge no Rasenneisi citizen wants. The Irenicon and its water spirits are not keen to be bridged, either.

Aidan Harte has been justly praised for his world-building in his debut novel. Irenicon is, almost, what we might get if Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities had lingered for a few hundred pages in one of its gem-perfect vignettes. Almost, except that Harte’s stunning gift for setting does not yet extend to dialogue, characterization, or prose style. Irenicon will not be a classic, but it is a fine, fun read.

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Something Unspeakable Has Come Home: 1972’s Deathdream Revisited

Something Unspeakable Has Come Home: 1972’s Deathdream Revisited

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Andy_at_the_Drive-In-smallOne of the most enduring tales in all horror literature is W.W. Jacobs’s classic 1902 shocker, “The Monkey’s Paw,” in which a father acquires a magic talisman (the paw) from a soldier home from service in India. The paw supposedly grants three wishes — wishes that of course come at a price. Not really believing that it will work, the father wishes for two hundred pounds to pay off his house. The next day, his son is killed (“caught in the machinery”) at the factory where he works and in compensation, the company presents the family with…two hundred pounds.

Some days later, after her boy has been buried, the grief-blinded mother realizes that they’ve only used one wish, and compels the appalled father to use the paw to wish their son alive again. A short time later, they hear a soft knocking at the door, knocking that quickly grows into a deafening fusillade as whatever it is that waits outside the bolted door furiously tries to gain entry. While the ecstatic mother fumbles with the bolt, the terrified father, imagining the mangled horror outside, uses the paw for one last wish. When the door finally swings open, there is nothing there — “The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.”

This powerful tale has been adapted many times over the decades, for stage and radio, for television and movies, and for comics, and it has additionally inspired many stories and films that are not direct adaptations; of these Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Semetary may be the most well known. Another example, not nearly as well known as it deserves, is the 1972 low-budget horror film, Deathdream.

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A World Mottled With Decay: The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

A World Mottled With Decay: The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

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oie_27162551H2hCeV1C

For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for the knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind a only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home.
— from “Meryphillia”

The late Brian McNaughton’s 1997 collection The Throne of Bones is a book I want to on one hand praise and with the other hold it away from myself with a pair of iron tongs. It contains some of the best writing I have ever read in fantasy; by turns tense, dark, grimly funny, and occasionally majestic. And it’s set in a vivid world, parts of which will haunt me for a long time.

On the other hand, many of the characters are by far the most despicable I’ve ever met and their actions among the vilest put to paper. Lots of the characters’ actions are motivated by sexual appetites that are many things — mostly disturbing — but never even remotely erotic. So if this review leaves you curious about McNaughton’s work, be warned: while it’s not sadistic or very frightening, it is strong stuff.

The Throne of Bones contains nine short stories and the novella, “Throne of Bones” itself composed of six intricately intertwined stories. They are set within and on the edges of an old empire slipping into decay: crumbling cities, clashing religious sects, and feuding noble clans. The rich and powerful lead lives of luxury, while the poor live in squalor. Between them a small middle class live in dual fear of the nobility and of falling into poverty.

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