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Category: Series Fantasy

Goblins, Demons, Zombies and Fights Aplenty: A Review of The Blue Blazes

Goblins, Demons, Zombies and Fights Aplenty: A Review of The Blue Blazes

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The Blue Blazes-smallIn this quickly changing Internet-obsessed publishing market, Chuck Wendig has shown himself to be a successful and versatile writer as a game designer, a screenwriter, and as a novelist as well. He is also known for some helpful books on how to be a better writer. The man also knows what makes a good author website!

Besides his many authorial talents, I first heard about Wendig from buzz concerning his Miriam Black series and their cool covers from Angry Robot. Unfortunately, I haven’t read any of those yet. You know how it is with that “to read” pile or compiled list at Goodreads.com.

But then I saw the following blurb from Adam Christopher concerning a new upcoming book from Wendig:

The Blue Blazes is exactly my kind of supernatural mob crime novel: dark and visceral, with an everyman hero to root for and Lovecraftian god-horror to keep you awake at night… this is the good stuff, right here.

Noir-ishness and Lovecratian horror? Sold! I immediately bought my first Wendig novel and began to devour The Blue Blazes upon receiving.

This book centers upon the character Mookie Pearl, a big-fisted lug who works for a crime syndicate in modern day (or possibly near future) New York City. Mookie is not a regular wiseguy though. He mainly works in the Underworld — no, not the usual euphemism for organized crime. Mookie works in the Underworld: a place crawling with the undead and monsters, some of which have come in contact with the regular world, though often staying down in the tunnels and caves below New York.

Though Mookie is built like a tank, he also has access to a special underworld drug called “blue blazes” — a blue powder that, when rubbed on one’s temples, turns you into something of a superhuman. Given Mookie’s build, it seems to turn him into a non-green version of The Incredible Hulk.

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New Treasures: Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute by Jonathan L. Howard

New Treasures: Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute by Jonathan L. Howard

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Johannes Cabal The Fear InstituteI still remember the first Jonathan L. Howard story I ever read. It was buried in the slush pile and I’d almost given up reading submissions for the evening, but told myself I’d try one more before heading to bed.

Turned out to be a good decision. The story, about a young thief named Kyth hired to penetrate a deadly tomb, was filled with surprises — not least of which was the amiable lich who congratulated Kyth when she reached the heart of his lair. It was titled “The Beautiful Corridor,” and I was happy to purchase it for Black Gate 13 — and its sequel, “The Shuttered Temple,” for BG 15.

Jonathan’s first novel was the highly regarded Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (2009), followed by Johannes Cabal the Detective (2010). Now at last the third volume has arrived and it promises a fresh serving of twisted comic fantasy, as the intrepid and resourceful Johannes Cabal plans an expedition into the Dreamlands.

Beyond the wall of sleep lie the Dreamlands, a whole world formed by dreams, but not a dream itself. For countless millennia, it has been explored only by those with a certain detachment from the mundane realities of our own world, its strange seas navigated, and its vast mountains climbed by philosophers, and mystics, and poets.

Well, those halcyon days are over, beatniks.

Johannes Cabal is coming.

Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, is employed by the mysterious Fear Institute to lead an expedition into the Dreamlands, an expedition whose goal is nothing less than to hunt and destroy the dread Phobic Animus, the font of terrors, the very source of all the world’s fear. They will enter exotic lands where magic is common and monsters abound, see wonders, and suffer dreadful hardships. Cabal will encounter witches, vile abominations, and far too many zebras.

And, when they finally come close to their goal, Cabal will have to face his own nightmares, but for a man who communes easily with devils and the dead, surely there is nothing left to fear.

Jonathan’s most recent novel was Katya’s World, the first book of The Russalka Chronicles. Read Jonathan’s article on writing the Johannes Cabel series and his interview with John Joseph Adams.

Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute was published by Thomas Dunne Books on October 1st. It is 334 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 in digital format.

Inspiration and Emulation, Tolkien and Gygax

Inspiration and Emulation, Tolkien and Gygax

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Ballantine The Return of the King-smallTo say that I have an abiding interest in the relationship between tabletop roleplaying games and the literary inspirations of their creators is something of an understatement.

Notice, though, that I said “inspirations” rather than another word that frequently gets bandied about when discussing the relationship between literature and RPGs – emulation. I can’t recall precisely when I first heard the term “emulation” used in the context of roleplaying games, but I’d be surprised if it were before the late 1980s. That’s about a decade after I entered the hobby, so my memory is admittedly fuzzy and I could well be mistaken. On the other hand, I heard the term “inspiration” a great deal, most notably in (you knew this was coming!) Gary Gygax’s 1979 Appendix N and the “Inspirational Source Material” found in the 1981 Tom Moldvay-edited edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Back in those days, game creators often talked about the books whose characters, plots, and ideas had fired their imaginations to such a degree that they decided to create a RPG that drew on them; they still do.

“Emulation” is something different. It’s one thing, I believe, to create a fantasy roleplaying game inspired by, say, Robert E. Howard’s stories of Conan the Cimmerian, but an entirely different thing to create a roleplaying game intended to emulate the adventures of Conan. Emulation implies a degree of fidelity to its literary sources (at least thematically), as well as some means – whether rules or advice – to ensure that experience of playing the game imitates that source material. An example of what I’m talking about that comes immediately to mind is Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu RPG. While its rules do not explicitly talk about emulation, they do include game mechanics for the loss of sanity that results from encounters with blasphemous tomes and eldritch horrors. The creator of a game that’s merely inspired by some literary source is under no such obligations. After all, inspiration can take many forms, many of which do not include aping one’s sources of inspiration.

I mention all of this as a prologue to a large, more contentious discussion, namely the place of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien in the creation of Dungeons & Dragons.

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The Roots of Early Love Go Deep: Five Stories Which Affected Me Deeply in My Early Teens

The Roots of Early Love Go Deep: Five Stories Which Affected Me Deeply in My Early Teens

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Sinner Sara Douglass-smallOne of the many minor consequences of having a child – in my case, anyway – is the extent to which you suddenly become nostalgic for the stories of your youth.

As such, and even though my shelves are overflowing with new and as-yet unread books, my thoughts keep straying to stories I loved in my early teens. And not just novels, but games, films, and TV shows, too. Revisiting these narratives as an adult, however, can be something of a mixed blessing: for every thrill experienced on finding that a particular story touches me just as deeply now as then, there’s often a corresponding moment of disappointment on identifying a hitherto unnoticed, winceworthy problem.

Even so, there’s an important difference between acknowledging that the things we love – and particularly the things we first loved as teens and children – are flawed, and throwing them out entirely. We cannot wholly excise our passions without removing something vital of ourselves; instead, we must learn to live with them.

What follows here, then, in no particular order, is a slightly different list to the sort of thing I might usually compile: five stories which affected me deeply in my early teens and which continue to influence me now, sometimes without my even consciously realizing it. The roots of our early loves go deep and even though I haven’t explored some of these stories in years, as I go about revisiting them, I’m consistently amazed to find echoes of them, not only in my own work, but in my expectations for the works of others.

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New Treasures: Dying is My Business by Nicholas Kaufmann

New Treasures: Dying is My Business by Nicholas Kaufmann

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Dying is my Business-smallI love these Chris McGrath covers. He does terrific character portraits and unique things with light. His characters perpetually seem spotlighted by a fog-drenched glow and no artist today makes his heroes more stylish. Just check out his gorgeous covers for Ken Scholes’s Canticle or Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead (or see a more complete gallery at his website.)

Art directors choose artists primarily for two reasons: to create an eye-catching cover and to subconsciously remind buyers of other successful series they’ve enjoyed. McGrath is the cover artist for Jim Butcher’s bestselling Dresden Files, as well as Seanan McGuire’s October Daye novels, Kelly Gay’s Charlie Madigan books, Warren Hammond’s KOP novels, D. B. Jackson’s Thieftaker Chronicles, and many other well-loved series.

I think McGrath was an excellent choice for Nicholas Kaufmann’s dark urban fantasy, Dying Is My Business, the tale of a badass hero facing down the forces of darkness in modern-day Brooklyn.

Given his line of work in the employ of a psychotic Brooklyn crime boss, Trent finds himself on the wrong end of too many bullets. Yet each time he’s killed, he wakes a few minutes later completely healed of his wounds but with no memory of his past identity. What’s worse, each time he cheats death someone else dies in his place.

Sent to steal an antique box from some squatters in an abandoned warehouse near the West Side Highway, Trent soon finds himself stumbling into an age-old struggle between the forces of good and evil, revealing a secret world where dangerous magic turns people into inhuman monstrosities, where impossible creatures hide in plain sight, and where the line between the living and the dead is never quite clear. And when the mysterious box is opened, he discovers he has only twenty-four hours to save New York City from certain destruction.

Nicholas Kaufmann is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of General Slocum’s Gold and Chasing the Dragon. This is his second novel.

Dying is my Business was published by St. Martin’s Griffin on October 8. It is 369 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

The Series Series: Mage’s Blood by David Hair

The Series Series: Mage’s Blood by David Hair

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Sprawl is my favorite virtue of the novel. Not just this novel, Mage’s Blood, but novels generally, in all their varied glories. I may be the only person on Earth who is not at all perturbed by the ever-increasing length of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books and I was probably the only reader of Harry Potter who wished J.K. Rowling had made her last volume about fifty pages longer, though this is not the time to say why. Sprawl may be a virtue in novels, but in blog posts, not so much. I picked up David Hair’s first volume of the new Moontide Quartet series because it promised a large ensemble cast arrayed in a family saga big enough to keep all those characters busy for years. The word “Quartet” in the title helps, too, with its suggestion that the author knows where he is going with the series. And if the first volume is anything to go by, I think he probably does.

The world of Mage’s Blood is a sort of fever dream of Europe and its Near East, if the Mediterranean and Black Seas were impassably vast and the Bosphorus were hundreds of miles wide. East is east and west is west, and the twain meet only for two years out of twelve, when the moon–which in this world is close enough to Earth to fill a third of the sky–causes a localized low tide. The greatest feat of magic and engineering in history, the Leviathan Bridge, rises from the waves during the Moontide. For centuries, the Moontide was a time of trade, cultural exchange, and celebration, but the last two cycles of the Leviathan Bridge’s rise have brought catastrophic war to the southern continent. Depending on whose mind the story inhabits, the war is about religious struggle between continents or class struggle within the aggressing empire or secret conspiracies among mage lineages for control of the world.

For the main characters, clustered into three main plotlines, the stakes are of course far more intimate than that.

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God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell

God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell

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God Stalk P. C. Hodgell-smallOut of the haunted north comes Jame the Kencyr to Rathilien’s greatest city, Tai-Tastigon. From the hills above, the city appears strangely dark and silent. She arrives at its gates with large gaps in her memory and cat claws instead of fingernails. She’s carrying a pack full of strange artifacts, including a ring still on its owner’s finger… and she’s been bitten by a zombie. Wary, but in desperate need of a place to heal, Jame enters the city. So begins God Stalk, the first book in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath series and one of my absolute, bar none, don’t-bother-me-if-you-see-me-reading-it, favorite fantasy novels.

When this book first came out in paperback in 1983, my friend Carl bought it at the original NYC Forbidden Planet on 13th Street. Raving about it, he tossed it to me. Then I passed it to someone else. By the time it finished its circuit through the rest of my friends and back to its original owner, its cover was bent, stained, and more than a little torn. I’ve gone through several copies myself over the years, having lost or upgraded it multiple times. When I reread it this past week, I was excited that I enjoyed it as much as, if not more than, I had in the past. I’m so grateful Carl gave me this book thirty years ago. P.C. Hodgell seems so far below the general fantasy radar, I don’t know if I would have ever heard of her at all, which is pretty darn shameful.

The Kencyr are a group of three races sworn to the service of the Three-Faced God and bound together by him to fight Perimal Darkness, a warping force of chaos and evil sweeping over the planes of existence. The rulers of the Kencyr are the human-looking High Born, of which Jame is one. The warriors and artisans are the Kendar, still human-looking but larger and longer-lived. Finally, there are the giant catlike Arrin-Ken, the judges.

As Jame remembers bits and pieces of her missing life, an eons-old struggle against the Darkness is revealed to the reader. The Kencyr fled to Rathilien three thousand years ago after betrayal at the highest level almost led to their extinction. Jame may have an important place in the war and among her people, though every answer leads to another question, some not answered until much later in the series.

The history of the Kencyr and their endless war are really only the background for God Stalk. This novel centers on Jame’s adventures during a year in Tai-Tastigon. From the night of her arrival during the Feast of the Dead Gods, her residency in the great city is one of constant action and intrigue.  She has entanglements with bandits, thieves, innkeepers, and deities. It’s a dangerous place, but also enticing.

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Support The Great Way, an Epic Fantasy Trilogy by Harry Connolly

Support The Great Way, an Epic Fantasy Trilogy by Harry Connolly

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The Great Way Harry ConnollyWe try not to pimp too many Kickstarter projects here on the BG blog. We know you’re probably as tired of hearing about them as we are. But today, we’re making an exception for Harry Connolly.

Why? Because he’s awesome.

Harry’s first fiction sale, “The Whoremaster of Pald,” originally appeared in Black Gate 2, and quickly became one of the most popular stories we’ve ever published. It was also the first tale we presented online in its entirety, and that experiment was so successful it helped launch the entire Black Gate Online Fiction line. Harry returned to the decadent city of Pald in BG3 with “Another Man’s Burden,” and his brilliant tale of a civilization on the brink of extinction, “Soldiers of a Dying God,” appeared in Black Gate 10. We couldn’t keep him to ourselves forever, and Harry’s first three novels — Child of Fire, Game of Cages, and Circle of Enemies, together comprising the Twenty Palaces trilogy — were published by Del Rey between 2009 and 2011.

Harry wasn’t won over by Kickstarter right away, pointing out the platform is a fantastic resource but not right for every project in his January 2013 column “Let me tell you about my ambitions, and why they don’t include Kickstarter (right now).” He’s apparently come around, however: on September 19, he kicked off a campaign to fund the completion of The Great Way, an epic fantasy trilogy about a supernatural invasion that destroys an empire.

The first draft of The Great Way is already complete, and weighs in at a whopping 300,000 words. Harry has made Chapter One of the first volume, The Way into Chaos, available on his blog. Cover artist Christian McGrath has agreed to do the cover art for all three books as a stretch goal, if the campaign reaches $34,000.

That’s a pretty safe bet; as of this writing, it stands at $33,300 (well past its original $10,000 goal), and shows no signs of slowing down. The Kickstarter ends on Oct 19th, so there’s still time to back it and ensure that you get copies of an exciting new fantasy trilogy from one of the best new writers in the genre. Check it out here.

Sword & Sorcery for the Girl Who Wants to be Conan: Gaie Sebold’s Babylon Steel

Sword & Sorcery for the Girl Who Wants to be Conan: Gaie Sebold’s Babylon Steel

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Babylon Steel-smallI can’t keep up with all the fabulous fiction rolling off the assembly lines of the great factories of modern publishing (I can just barely stay on top of the story-a-week we publish here at Black Gate, truth be told). It’s amazing… I spend all day – and most of the night – reading and writing about this genre, and still can’t encompass it all. Either we live in amazing times, or being hopelessly clueless is just an intrinsic part of my nature.

Eh. Probably a little of both.

Fortunately, there are other bloggers out there to help me out. Liz Bourke’s “Sleeps With Monsters” column at Tor.com helped me out this week, by pointing me to Gaie Sebold’s debut fantasy novel, Babylon Steel.

Now, anyone can miss a novel or two, but I have no excuse for not being on top of this one. For one thing, Solaris has been putting out terrific fantasy recently, and obviously deserves more attention; for another, I’ve had my eye on Gaie Sebold ever since I bought her brilliant and funny “A Touch of Crystal” (co-written with fellow Brit Martin Owton), the tale of a shopkeeper who discovers some of the goods in her New Age shop are actually magical, for Black Gate 9. Here’s Liz:

Gaie Sebold’s Babylon Steel (Solaris, 2011) is a remarkably entertaining debut. It’s as though someone took the best bits of Robert E. Howard and the fantasy noir city of Simon R. Green’s Hawk and Fisher novels, threw in some more Cool S**t ™, and reimagined them through a lens that foregrounded female perspectives. This is sword-and-sorcery pulp wish fulfillment for the kind of girl who wanted to be Conan… And that? That makes one of the most awesome things I’ve read this year…

Sebold evokes mood and atmosphere — and character — very well. And the climactic BOOM LIKE THAT is an earned one.

An excellently entertaining book. Give me more like this. MORE I TELL YOU.

Babylon Steel was nominated in two categories for the Gemmell Awards: The Morningstar (best newcomer) and the Legend (best novel). It came out so long ago now that there’s already a sequel (dang! I really am clueless). Dangerous Gifts appeared in January of this year.

Babylon Steel was published in December 2011 by Solaris. It is 544 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition.

Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

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oie_6554332ckBTZkt Daughter of the Bright Moon (1979) by Lynn Abbey has been sitting on my swords & sorcery to-be-read pile for a long time. One of the main goals I set for myself when I started blogging was to read all the classic era S&S I could. Not only does DotBM date from S&S’s golden age in the 1970s, its hero, Rifkind, is one of the earlier sword-swinging women. This was a book that demanded a look.

Even with all that going for it, I didn’t get to it until last week. Every now and then, I felt like it was staring at me, admonishing me for not having read it already. I mean, I’ve known about it since I read a fun write-up on Rifkind in the Giants in the Earth column in Dragon Magazine #57 and my dad actually had a copy in the attic.

I even started it last year, but stopped after a chapter or two. I don’t know why… I liked it, but maybe something shiny caught my eye.

Warrior women characters have been around forever. There are the myths of the Amazons and the valkyrie. In real life, of course, there was Joan of Arc.

Jirel of Joiry was the first swordswoman to star in her own stories. C. L. Moore created her kick-ass French noblewoman in 1934, but for decades after that you really had to dig to find fighting women as the lead protagonists.

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