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Category: Series Fantasy

New Treasures: Dr Potter’s Medicine Show by Eric Scott Fischl

New Treasures: Dr Potter’s Medicine Show by Eric Scott Fischl

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Dr Potter's Medicine Show-small Dr Potter's Medicine Show-back-small

The mass market original seems almost like a dying art form these days. But not for Angry Robot, for whom it’s their bread and butter. They find talented writers and package their works in attractive, sharply-designed, inexpensive paperbacks. I heartily approve.

Dr Potter’s Medicine Show, by Eric Scott Fischl, is the latest Angry Robot paperback to grab my attention. It’s an historical dark fantasy that John Shirley calls “A powerful alchemical elixir concocted of post Civil War historical fiction, dark fantasy, and Felliniesque flavoring.” On his website, Fischl recently announced that the next book in the series, The Trials of Solomon Parker, will be released in November 2017, also from Angry Robot.

Dr Potter’s Medicine Show was published by Angry Robot on February 2, 2017. It is 346 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Steven Meyer-Rassow. Read the first three chapters at the Angry Robot website.

Where The Road meets Mad Max: Peter Newman’s The Vagrant Trilogy

Where The Road meets Mad Max: Peter Newman’s The Vagrant Trilogy

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The Vagrant Peter Newman-small The Malice Peter Newman-small The Seven Peter Newman-small

In his SF Signal review Nick Sharps called Peter Newman’s The Vagrant “Dark Dystopian Fantasy at Its Very Best,” saying:

The premise of The Vagrant is simple enough. Accompanied by a baby and a goat, a nameless mute must cross demon-infested wastelands to deliver a magical sword to the Shining City, last bastion of hope. The mute is hunted by multiple factions and it is difficult to distinguish friend from foe in the ruins of a world tainted by evil… Beneath the grit and grime of The Vagrant there is no shortage of beauty. It’s part fantasy and part science fiction. There are demons and knights but the demons enhance their followers with necrotech and the knights ride floating castles and caterpillar tanks. All of the shiny technology of the past has fallen to rust and disuse in the wake of the demonic incursion. The taint of the demons brings mutation and famine. The Vagrant has a sort of The Road meets Mad Max meets The Children of Men vibe…

It wouldn’t feel appropriate to classify The Vagrant as grimdark fantasy. The elements of the subgenre are all present: the setting is dystopian, life is harsh and brief, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are few and far between. Newman’s demons and the change they affect on the world and its inhabitants remind me of the forces of Chaos from Warhammer 40,000 — the very property that inspired the term grimdark. The Vagrant is bleak, depressive, and violent and yet… The Vagrant surpassed all my expectations.

The sequel, The Malice, finally arrived in trade paperback from Harper Voyager this week, and the third and final book, The Seven, is scheduled to appear in October.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak

Black Gate Online Fiction: Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak

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Black City Demon-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak, published by Pyr Books in trade paperback on March 14. Richard A. Knaak is the New York Times bestselling author of some three dozen novels, including The Sin War trilogy for Diablo and the Legend of Huma for Dragonlance.

A chill wind rose up. I tightened the collar of my overcoat and looked around. Diocles’s presence had left me with no more desire to be here. Besides, I had an appointment farther on the North Side — a young couple called the Nilssons who continually heard footsteps on the upper floor of the old house they rented. They thought it was the ghost of the first owner, who’d hung herself after her husband perished in the Great Fire.

I knew better. It wasn’t a ghost. If they’d seen my ad, seen the offerings of Nick Medea, investigator and debunker of the supernatural, then they had a far worse problem than ghosts. They had one of the Wyld lurking around their home.

There was plenty of time to reach my clients, since the appointment was set — for more than theatrical reasons — at midnight. It wasn’t hard to convince anyone who needed my services that I needed to come at the witching hour. They’d be desperate for any help at this point, no doubt having exhausted the usual charlatans.

“There was a visitor to Saint Michael’s this evening,” Diocles muttered.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, John Fultz, Jon Sprunk, Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, E.E. Knight, Vaughn Heppner,  Howard Andrew Jones, David Evan Harris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, and many others, is here.

We covered the first volume in the series, Black City Saint, here, and Richard’s newest Pathfinder Tales novel, Reaper’s Eye, here. Richard’s last article for Black Gate was “Tommy Guns, Prohibition, and…. Magic?”

Black City Demon will published March 14, 2017 by Pyr Books. It is 363 pages, priced at $17.50 in trade paperback and $2.99 for the digital edition.

Read an exclusive excerpt from Black City Demon here.

Dead Gods, Buried Histories, and a Protean City: Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Divine Cities Trilogy

Dead Gods, Buried Histories, and a Protean City: Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Divine Cities Trilogy

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City of Stairs-small City of Blades-small City of Miracles-small

I love it when the final book in a terrific trilogy finally arrives. (Wait a minute… are you sure it’s a trilogy? How can you tell? Sure, they all look like trilogies, until that pesky fourth book shows up. Better start over.) I love it when the third book in a terrific series finally arrives, and wraps things up satisfactorily… at least until the fourth book appears, maybe.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs (2014), the opening novel in The Divine Cities, was nominated for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and GoodReads Choice Award, and came in second for the Locus Award. But what got my attention was BG writer Peadar Ó Guilín calling it “The best fantasy I’ve read so far this year. Great stuff,” and a reviewer at Tor.com who described it as “an atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city.” Volume II, City of Blades, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim, and that built up anticipation for the third volume nicely.

City of Miracles is now scheduled to arrive in trade paperback from Broadway Books in early May. On his blog Bennett calls it “the final installment of The Divine Cities series, starring everyone’s favorite Dreyling murder machine, Sigrud. It’s readable as a standalone, just like the other books, but it’s highly recommended that you read the previous ones first.” Final installment. Uh huh. Let’s see how long that promise that holds up when this thing is optioned as the next big Netflix series.

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Future Treasures: Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods by Tania del Rio and Will Staehle

Future Treasures: Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods by Tania del Rio and Will Staehle

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Back in September I wrote a brief piece on Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye, the opening book in a new middle grade series written by Tania Del Rio and illustrated by Will Staehle. I’d been seeing glowing coverage of the book and had decided to order it, and as I said in the piece, “I can make up my mind on Staehle’s artwork right now — and I think it’s fantastic.”

So I was very pleased to see a new entry in the series, Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods, on the schedule for March 21, 2017. The books follow the adventures of twelve-year-old Warren, a kid who looks like he escaped from an Edward Gorey cartoon. Warren is the sole surviving heir to a grand (but rapidly decaying) old hotel, and his exploits see him mixed up with a terrific cast of supporting characters who live on or near the grounds of the rambling hotel, including monsters, witches, a ghostly girl who creeps around the hedge maze, and his twisted Aunt Annaconda and her evil sisters.

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The End of the Matter: Viriconium Nights by M. John Harrison

The End of the Matter: Viriconium Nights by M. John Harrison

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Viriconium Nights-smallThe three novels of the Viriconium sequence, The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings,  and In Viriconium, are not the entirety of M. John Harrison’s intricate, multi-faceted portrayal of the titular city. A fourth book, Viriconium Nights (1984), collects seven stories written between 1971 and 1983. Each is strange, some bordering on the inpenetrable, but all attempt to shine lights onto new aspects of the larger story.

As he did with each succeeding novel, Harrison twists, recasts, and reweaves characters, thematic melodies, and locations first found in The Pastel City.  Sometimes, as with that book’s ostensible hero, tegeus-Cromis, things seem to be exactly as they were before. Other times, particularly with the city of Viriconium itself, they are changed considerably. Its very name becomes mutable, one time being Uriconium, another just Vriko. This reminds us of one of Harrison’s central ideas: that there is no real “there” to Viriconium; it is just a bundle of words painted on a page at its creator’s discretion.

Viriconium Nights commences with “The Lamia & Lord Cromis.” tegeus-Cromis is in search of the lamia, a beast which has slain numerous members of his family. Though he appears to have accepted the same will happen to him, still he sets out accompanied by the wonderfully named Dissolution Khan and the dwarf gladiator, Morgante. The hunt ends in a morass of complications, death, and unclarity.

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Feeding the Forest with Memory: Mythago Wood and Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock

Feeding the Forest with Memory: Mythago Wood and Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock

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Lavondyss Robert Holdstock-smallThere are a few novels I will return two over and over. García Marquéz’ One Hundred Years of Solitude is one. Dan Symmons’ Hyperion is another. I’ve been back to R. Scott Baker’s Prince of Nothing series a few times.

But my pile is shrinking. I’ve grown as a reader and can’t read Dune anymore, and I haven’t tried to go back to Tolkein in probably a decade. But one truly haunting work is Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood and Lavondyss. The novels won the World Fantasy Award in 1985 and the BSFA Award in 1988 respectively, if my dates aren’t off.

The two novels center on three families who live around Ryhope Wood, which is one of the last ancient, undisturbed forests in England, meaning that its roots and its ghosts are truly ancient. Now, there are lots of people who evoke deep time in their writing. Tolkein obviously. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Steven Erikson.

But reading Holdstock is to viscerally experience layers of deep, Jungian time. The wood is haunted not by ghosts of the past per se; it is haunted by the ancient memories of ghosts that each person carries within them, all the legends, remembered in story and forgotten.

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Future Treasures: Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

Future Treasures: Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

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Too Like the Lightning-small Seven Surrenders-small The WIll to Battle-small

Ada Palmer’s debut Too Like the Lightning was one of the most acclaimed SF novels of last year. The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog selected it as one of the Best Novels of 2016, and Rich Horton included it in his 2017 Hugo Nomination list, saying:

A fairly seamless mixture of SF and Fantasy… Too Like the Lightning is set several centuries in the future, in a world divided into “Hives,” cooperative family-like organizations with different strengths. The narrator is Mycroft Canner, who, we slowly learn, is a criminal… but who is also quite engaging, and an important mentor to an amazing child who can bring inanimate things to life. This novel introduces a conflict – a threat to the world’s balance of power – and also intricately sketches the complex background of this future, and introduces a ton of neat characters. Then it stops, which is its main weakness – it is but half a novel. The sequel (Seven Surrenders) is due in March 2017.

Seven Surrenders, the second novel in what’s now being called the Terra Ignota series, arrives in hardcover next week from Tor Books. It is 400 pages. The Will to Battle, the third book in the series, is scheduled to be published December 5, 2017. It is 368 pages. Both books will be priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. Read the first four chapters of Too Like the Lightning at Tor.com, and the first two chapters of Seven Surrenders here.

Earth, Air, Fire and Water: The Elemental Blessings Series by Sharon Shinn

Earth, Air, Fire and Water: The Elemental Blessings Series by Sharon Shinn

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Troubled Waters Sharon Shinn-small Royal Airs Sharon Shinn-small Jeweled Fire Sharon Shinn-small Unquiet Land Sharon Shinn-small

I’ve been friends with Sharon Shinn ever since we co-hosted a writing workshop at Capricon here in Chicago some years ago. Turns out that’s a great way to bond: giving grueling assignments to aspiring writers while grading their efforts with a cruel eye. Try it some time!

Something else you should try is Sharon’s Elemental Blessings series, which just wrapped up with the fourth volume, Unquiet Land, which arrived in hardcover in November. C.S.E. Cooney, in her report on Royal Airs, described it as follows.

The Elemental Blessings series… take place in the Kingdom of Chialto. It’s an exciting time in this secondary world, with “smoker cars” taking over for horse-drawn carriages, the blushing dawn of flying machines, alliances forming and falling apart with realms across the mountains and seas, the delicate balance of power between the regent, the primes of the Five Houses, and the heirs to the throne.

All of this and magic too!

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New Treasures: Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames

New Treasures: Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames

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Kings of the Wyld-smallA few weeks ago I spotted an intriguing trade paperback in the New Arrivals section at Barnes and Noble. But I didn’t buy it (I’m making an effort to reduce all those impulse purchases, thank you) and, by the time I got home, I’d completely forgotten the title. I spent a fruitless hour online, paging through New Release sections at multiple online sources, before I gave up. Fortunately, it was waiting for me when I returned to B&N a week later, and I bought it immediately. The moral of this terrifying story? Buy good books when you find them, damn it.

That new guiding principle served me well this week when I stumbled on Nicholas Eames’ debut fantasy novel Kings of the Wyld, which grabbed me immediately with its central conceit: an aging mercenary attempts to get the band back together for one final mission. Corrina Lawson at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog gives it two hearty thumbs up.

Kings of the Wyld… manages to be a comedy, an adventure tale, a consideration on growing older, and a sendup of fantasy conventions, all at the same time. It also has heart. In short: it rocks.

The heart comes in the form of our protagonist, Clay “Slowhand” Cooper, the moral center of the mercenary group known as the Kings of the Wyld. Or, well, “formerly known as,” because Clay is retired, working a boring job as a city guard…. It’s inevitable Clay would answer his old friend Gabriel’s call to get the band back together to tackle one more seemingly impossible task: rescuing Gabriel’s grown daughter from a city under siege. Accompanying Clay is his trusty shield, Blackheart, made from the wood of a sentient tree Clay killed. The first half of the book is a trip across the fantasy kingdom as Clay and Gabriel attempt to put their band, Saga, back together. Not so easy, especially as Gabriel first must liberate his magic sword from his ex-wife and her new husband…

The setting Eames builds around these characters made me wish this story existed in graphic novel form. There’s the Wyld Forest, teeming with treacherous inhabitants; and an amazing action sequence in a floating arena, where the group finally gets it mojo back; a pursuit via magical airship; a tense chase sequence across an ice bridge; and, of course, the inevitably epic finale. Did I mention the fight with the dragon? It isn’t really an epic fantasy until the dragon shows up.

Read Corrina’s complete review here.

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