Black Gate

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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