Black Gate

Dreamers in Hell (Heroes in Hell, Volume 15)
Created by Janet Morris, edited by Janet and Chris Morris, and written “with the diabolical assistance of their damnedest writers.”
Perseid Press (478 pages, June 13, 2013, $23.95 in trade paperback)

It is a place of swords and spears, revolvers and automatic weapons, sorcery and science, catapults and cannon, bows and arrows, computers and demons. It is a place where there is no Hope for the damned, merely the suggestion of it.

Welcome to Hell, where Perdition rules. Whether a soul believes in Hell or not, Hell believes in damnation of the mortal soul. Anyone can end up in Hell, no matter what religion, no matter what faith. You may not believe in Hell, but Hell believes in you.

In Hell, all things are possible. In Hell, many of the damned believe they have been wrongly sent there, while others accept their fate and try to make the best of a bad situation. In Hell’s Mortuary, the Undertaker giveth and taketh away, revives and reassigns the damned — again and again — so they can continue their dance with the Devil. Yes, welcome to Hell — where rogues and heroes and fools quest for a way out, and Satan plots to storm the Gates of Heaven.

Ah, but wait… the powers that be in Heaven have decided that Hell has become too comfortable. Infernity is in trouble. El Diablo is lying down on the job.

Heaven has sent Erra, Babylonian god of plague and mayhem, and his 7 Sibitti (his Auditors, his Enforcers, his personified weapons), to further punish the innocent as well as the guilty, and they do so with great glee. They are Hell’s judge, jury, and executioners. Satan can’t even run Hell the way he wants to run it. Paradise mocks him. Will Erra replace Satan? Make things worse for everyone in all levels and versions of Hell — past, present and future?

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Dawnthief (Chronicles of the Raven 1)
By James Barclay
Pyr (403 pages, $17 September 22, 2009)

Balia, the setting of Dawnthief, isn’t a very nice place, not at all. Rape, murder, betrayal, lust, and just plain old human cruelty, yep it’s all here by the bucket-load. But as interesting as the world is, it can’t even compare to the people who populate it.

Dawnthief follows a group of mercenaries called ‘The Raven’ as they are employed by one of the four magic colleges, Xetesk, to find Dawnthief, a spell apparently designed to end the world and the only thing capable of destroying the ‘wytch lords’: all powerful beings bent on destroying the world, who for no particular reason, have decided to wake up again, and, for no particular reason, destroy the world.

Needless to say, our intrepid adventurers set out to stop them, accompanied all the while by Denser, a mage from Xetesk, sent to oversee the operation, cast Dawnthief and cause a lot of trouble for The Raven. Now in order to do what they want to do, they must find four catalysts, which are basically the things needed to cast a spell. These are located across Balia and must be found if they are to have any chance of success.

The plot is the book’s weakest point; it all feels a bit clichéd, a bit tired and, to be frank, a bit boring. The catalysts serve only to ferry the team from one battle to the next, all they do is give the group an excuse to move from point A to point B and set up the next fight, or puzzle.

It’s not exactly original either, is it? Just another “save the world from the dark lord” story, another Lord of the Rings mimic; tried and true, but contrived and unoriginal. I mean come on, care a little bit.

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The Mist-Torn Witches
by Barb Hendee
Roc (336 pages, mass market first edition May 7, 2013, $7.99)

The Mist-Torn Witches isn’t exactly the novel I wanted, but it fits into a category of novel I’d like to see more of. It’s modest in the best senses of the word: Focused on a handful of characters, limited to a single setting (a prince’s castle), and with a tightly focused plot, centered around a magically-enhanced murder investigation. It also manages to be relatively light in pacing and tone, something I’d like to see more of in a market seemingly saturated with the gruesome, grim, and gut-splattered.

Orphaned sisters Celine and Amelie are a likable pair. Celine was trained my her mother as an apothecary, but makes most of her income by pretending to have inherited her mother’s powers as a seer and distributing invented fortunes, while Amelie is an armed-and-dangerous tomboy who serves as the duo’s muscle. They’re forced to flee their rural home when Celine, for the first time, has a truly prophetic vision. Unfortunately for her, that vision is of local ruler Sub-Prince Damek murdering his betrothed after the wedding, which drives Celine to warn the girl away from marrying him.  Celine and Amelie are forced to seek refuge with Damek’s younger brother, Anton, and his brave guard captain, Jaromir.

Anton is a just ruler, and his people are happy, but not all is well within the walls of his castle. Young women are being murdered under mysterious circumstances, their bodies turning up as withered husks. Anton offers the sisters a deal: Use Celine’s newfound powers of true prophecy to find the killer and they’ll be rewarded with an apothecary shop inside his walls. Fail, and they’ll be turned out to make their way alone, vulnerable to the wrath of Sub-Prince Damek.

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Back in November of last year, I offered to review self-published books for the Black Gate blog. As I said when I started:

Nowadays, it’s really easy to self-publish a book. However, it’s very, very hard to stand out in the crowd. For every author who breaks through, there are hundreds out there who do not. While many of these self-published books are deservedly unknown, I believe that there are self-published books out there that deserve more attention than they’re receiving, and I’d like to help them get it. So I’m offering to review one self-published fantasy book each month. Considering that there are hundreds or thousands published every day, I’m sure that this won’t even scratch the surface. So in order to help me find out which books I should be reviewing, and to give you the best opportunity to sell yourself, I’m going to set up a submission system.

Now that I’ve been doing these reviews for half a year, I thought that now would be a good time to look back and think about my approach. That and I was slow selecting a book to review last month.

When I first hung up a shingle offering to do reviews for Black Gate, I had a quite a few review requests, and it was a challenge just doing the minimum due diligence on them all. My technique consisted of reading the blurb, and if I thought that sounded interesting, reading the writing sample I requested. If I thought it was promising from that point, I’d mark it as a possibility. However, I didn’t request a copy of the book until I’d gone through all the requests, which gave me a chance to ask for the book I thought looked most promising.

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As regular readers of Black Gate are fully aware, the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons has had a huge influence upon post-1970s fantasy writers and fans. A case in point, Tor.com is currently delivering a series of posts exploring Gary Gygax’s (the original creator of Dungeons and Dragons) suggested readings in Appendix N of the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide (the first two are here and here). The authors in this list are the usual suspects in fantasy literature: Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, etc. But one author that Gygax includes, that may be a surprise to some, is the horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft.

However, veteran fantasy and other genre fans will likely see no incongruence here. For example, as a 13-year old intently reading the original Dungeons and Dragons book Deities and Demigods, I found the Cthulhu mythos section, based on Lovecraft’s horror fiction, to be just as inspiring for fantasy role-playing as the Greek and Norse mythos sections. I believe many others will agree that Lovecraftian horror has been a part of the sundry smorgasbord of fantasy for some time.

As veteran genre fans also well know, Lovecraft has spawned a cadre of authors who can be clearly identified as “Lovecraftian.” Such authors, in my opinion, fall into two broad and general groups. One group imitates Lovecraft by using the same sorts of tropes that he did: forbidden eldritch books, gibbous moons, tentacled monsters, mad cultists, etc. The second group writes more in the mood of Lovecraft, giving a general sense of nihilistic dread, sometimes called “cosmic horror.” I personally favor the latter group though there are some fine examples of the first.

Laird Barron is a fairly new horror writer who fits the squarely into the latter Lovecraftian group. His short story collections The Imago Sequence and Occultation are both often heralded as must-haves for horror fans, receiving the 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson awards, respectively. Barron’s stories range from eerie to the utterly terrifying, presenting a universe that gives small peeks into entities and realities that are at best indifferent to Earth and humanity’s fragile existence and sanity.

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