Black Gate Short Fiction Reviews
It’s always nice to see an old standby come roaring back into the fiction arena. Almost three years after The Third Alternative vanished from newsstands the popular magazine has returned, sporting a new look, new focus, and even a new title: Black Static. Does it measure up to what came before?
Black Gate reviewer David Soyka delves into the first two issues and finds a lot to like. Highlights include work from authors like M. K. Hobson, Lisa Tuttle, Steve Utley, Scott Nicholson, and of course old TTA veterans such as columnist Christopher Fowler and book reviewer Peter Tennant.
To start off the new year, Black Gate‘s Robert Rhodes reviews the first volume in a new trilogy of novels penned by a fresh voice on the fantasy scene, Wisconsin’s Patrick Rothfuss. This story was seven years in the making, and it shows. Click inside to discover how Rothfuss’ world of fantasy and magic differs in intriguing ways from the work of past masters like Lewis, Tolkien, and Rowling.
Black Gate‘s David Soyka examines two new offerings from Apex SF & Horror Digest and Subterranean Magazine, in the process delineating the modern boundaries of horror. In tales by notables with names like Shepard, Creasey, Tuttle, Priest, Bisson, Tidhar, and Ford, there’s a wide swath cut between subtle creeping dread and rank gratuitous gore. Which is more effective in a literary sense? Or as pure visceral terror? Come inside to find out…if you dare.
This week Black Gate turns its attention to the comics medium, as reviewer D. K. Latta investigates the latest earth-shattering miniseries to be presented in novel form by DC Comics. Is this outburst of existential mayhem (written by Greg Cox) truly something new, or does it follow in the timeworn footsteps of Crisis on Infinite Earths and its prodigious progeny of universe-altering storylines? D. K. has the answers inside.