Black Gate – Page 1145 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Before They Even Get to the Invented Languages

Wednesday, October 24, 2012 Sarah Avery Comments 2 comments

You know that classic vocabulary assignment, the one everybody’s done because it really works?

As you read a book, keep a running list of words you can’t define, and when you take a break from reading, look them all up and write your own sentences using them. That assignment. It’s still the wheel, so I still don’t reinvent it, but sometimes I get tempted.

Since I took up freelancing eight years ago, nearly all my students have been children of immigrants. The kids are so bright, so hardworking, nobody notices how narrow their vocabularies are until about 7th grade, when the amount and level of writing students have to do shoots up.

The kids’ grades plummet, their English teachers at school shrug, the parents panic, and suddenly I’ve got a new paying gig. The students prefer to read fantasy — I do, too, of course — so I give them the classic vocabulary assignment to apply to the fantasy novel of their choice.

Then this weird thing happens, a thing I haven’t yet figured out how to turn to good use.

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New Treasures: Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Wednesday, October 24, 2012 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

I’m a big fan of Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire film based on the John Ajvide Lindqvist novel. Creepy, creepy stuff, and any film that can have you cheering for the vampire while simultaneously being 100% faithful to traditional vampire lore gets my vote.

Let the Right One In was re-made for English audiences as Let Me In in 2010, staring Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass). Lindqvist’s original novel was given the same title for its English trade paperback release the same year. His latest is Harbor, and it sounds very intriguing indeed.

With Harbor, a stunning and chilling masterpiece, Lindqvist firmly cements his place as the heir apparent to Stephen King.

One ordinary winter afternoon on a snowy island, Anders and Cecilia take their six-year-old daughter Maja across the ice to visit the lighthouse in the middle of the frozen channel. While they are exploring the lighthouse, Maja disappears – either into thin air or under thin ice — leaving not even a footprint in the snow.

Two years later, Anders, a broken man, moves back to his family’s abandoned home on the island. He soon realizes that Maja’s disappearance is only one of many strange occurrences, and that his fellow islanders, including his own grandmother, know a lot more than they’re telling. As he digs deeper, Anders begins to unearth a dark and deadly secret at the heart of this small, seemingly placid town.

As he did with Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead, John Ajvide Lindqvist serves up a blockbuster cocktail of high-tension suspense in a narrative that barely pauses for breath.

I don’t cover a lot of horror with my New Treasures column, mostly because I don’t get the chance to read as much as I used to. But I plan to make an exception for this one.

Harbor was released by St. Martin’s Griffin in September; it is 528 pages. It is $15.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition.

You can see all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games, Part II

Tuesday, October 23, 2012 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

Some of the games I purchased at the Paris Fashion Week of Games. Click for bigger version.

Last Monday I talked a little bit about the Fall Games Auction at Games Plus in Mount Prospect, Illinois. I compared it to Paris Fashion Week because, much like a fashion show, it’s an opportunity to see everything new all in one place.

And not really in a leisurely, browsing-in-a-bookstore fashion, either. While you’re gawking at a fabulous fantasy game you never even knew existed, people all around you are bidding in a frenzy, intent on making sure you never see it again. On average, you get an 8 to 10-second glimpse at each treasure before it’s gone forever.

Unless you outbid all those other bastards, of course.

There’s a perfectly natural outcome to this mad situation. It’s known as “auction fever.” Don’t ask how I know this. (I refer you, without comment, to my March article on my last trip to Games Plus, “Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever.”)

In any event, I attended the Fall auction with much greater spousal oversight over my finances, and severely diminished resources. Still, I was able to come away with a host of treasures, and a lenghty list of exciting new science fiction and fantasy games to track down and investigate.

I’m not going to turn this into a catalog of new games I discovered over the span of five hours. For one thing, that would take a lot of pixels. Instead, I think I’ll focus on the most interesting items I brought home with me, and a few of the tantalizing ones that got away.

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Marvel Feature: Red Sonja 1

Tuesday, October 23, 2012 MichaelPenkas Comments 1 comment

There were a few bumps in the road to Red Sonja’s enduring success as a character/franchise. One of them is the rushed work on Marvel Feature 1, which was meant to be an audience test title. The rationale was that Sonja would appear in several issues of Marvel Feature and, if sales were good enough, would be awarded her own title.

But this really doesn’t read like an audition. It reads more like a fill-in issue. First of all, the story is only eight pages long. Red Sonja finds an ancient temple, mercy-kills a priest who’s been tortured, fights a pack of unarmed satyrs, and gets in one sword-fight. The artwork by Dick Giordano is good, but it’s not Barry Windsor-Smith or John Buscema (the two artists most strongly associated with the She-Devil up to this point). There’s none of the banter that she enjoyed with Conan and no hints of the character’s tragedy. The rest of the issue is a one-page text by Roy Thomas explaining the character’s background and a reprint of the story from Savage Sword of Conan 1 (now in color) where she killed a sultan after he forced her to take a bath.

Honestly, you don’t even get any of the monsters you see on the cover. No demons. No snakes. No skeletons in robes. And it’s a great cover, with Sonja in her trademark bikini, sword in one hand, dagger in the other. She’s even kicking a snake while slashing at the “hordes of Hell.” It’s only sleazed up a little with the cheesecake pose in the corner label (which gets changed on issue 2).

In short, it’s a decent story, but nothing that would show readers unfamiliar with the character why Red Sonja is more than just a female Conan.

(originally published November 1975, Marvel Comics) (reprinted January 2007 in Adventures of Red Sonja Volume 1, Dynamite Entertainment)

Next Week: It Gets Better

Win a Free Copy of A Magic Broken

Monday, October 22, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Last Monday, Black Gate blogger Theo Beale announced the publication of A Magic Broken, a new novella that marked his first foray into epic fantasy:

A Magic Broken is a tale of ruthlessness, courage and deceit. The novella tells the story of Captain Nicolas du Mere, an exile fleeing the death of his rebel lord, and Lodi, son of Dunmorin, a brave dwarf dedicated to rescuing his fellow dwarves from slavery. Their dangerous paths meet, but in a manner that is anything but predictable.

Theodore Beale is the author of Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy, which Howard Andrew Jones called “Entertaining… Beale should be applauded for trying to create a medieval fantasy that more accurately replicates historical reality than many of his peers” (Black Gate 14).

A Magic Broken is an appetizer to Theo’s forthcoming epic fantasy novel, A Throne of Bones. It is currently available for Kindle and Nook for just 99 cents.

Theo has graciously offered 25 copies of the digital version of A Magic Broken free to Black Gate readers willing to share their thoughts in a review on Amazon.com. If you’re interested, send an e-mail to the editor with the title “A Magic Broken” expressing your willingness to read it and write a review, and we’ll e-mail you your free copy.

No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. A maximum of 25 free copies will be awarded. Not valid where prohibited by law. I have no idea where giving away free books might be prohibited, but our lawyers make us say that. Winners responsible for all taxes. Eat your vegetables.

Update Wednesday, Oct 24: We have now passed the 25 response mark, and there are no additional copies to give away. Thanks for all your interest!

Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet, Part IV: My Heart Laid Bare

Monday, October 22, 2012 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

My Heart Laid Bare For the past three weeks, I’ve been looking at Joyce Carol Oates’s Gothic Quintet, in preparation for the publication of the fifth book in the sequence, The Accursed, set for next March. I started off with 1980’s Bellefleur, which I thought was brilliant. Then I looked at 1982’s A Bloodsmoor Romance, which I found interesting, but not up to the first book’s level, perhaps due to my unfamiliarity with the romance genre. Last week, I considered Mysteries of Winterthurn, from 1984, which impressed me quite a bit. Now, this week, I look at 1998’s My Heart Laid Bare.

It may be worth noting that while My Heart Laid Bare was published in 1998, it was written in 1984. Similarly, The Accursed, under its original title The Crosswicks Horror, was first completed in 1981. Both books were revised in the years since, and I wonder if that might help account for the fact that My Heart Laid Bare has a rather different feel than the other ‘Gothic’ books. Nothing evidently supernatural happens in it. It’s only nominally Gothic in atmosphere, and the narration’s relatively straightforward — it’s told in omniscient third-person, unlike Bloodsmoor or Winterthurn, and is stylistically more restrained than Bellefleur (which admittedly is not saying much). Still, it’s a wild, wide-ranging look at American life in the early part of the twentieth century, incorporating several self-consciously melodramatic touches. It fits in with its predecessors nicely, and overall serves to round off Oates’s Gothic sequence as we’ve had it so far.

The book follows grizzled con-man Abraham Licht and his sons and daughters, from 1909 through to the Great Depression. A prologue suggests that they’re the descendants of a scheming eighteenth-century servingwoman who impersonated her mistress, was caught and sent to America; at any event, the novel shows us the Lichts consistently changing identities, some of which are false and some of which become true. Besides Abraham, we have his three biological sons, his older boys Thurston and Harwood and his younger Darian; his two daughters, Millie and Esther; and his black adopted son, Elisha. Over the course of the book, the children leave and betray and (occasionally) return to Abraham, as Abraham himself plots for money, for power, and, perhaps most importantly to him, for another marriage.

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The Business of Writing: Joining the Community

Monday, October 22, 2012 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 9 comments

I spoke to some creative writing students at a local university last Friday and I tried to tell them something it took me a long time to understand: when you begin your writing career, you’re joining a community.

By writing career, I mean your first published work. In my case, I was first printed in a ‘zine titled Gauntlet. Before I submitted my story to the magazine, about the only thing I knew about Gauntlet was that it was open to heroic fiction and sword-and-sorcery. I was making a common mistake — I didn’t know the market.

It’s hard to know ALL the markets, especially when, in those bygone days of yore, to know about the magazine you had to buy an issue. (Most of those little magazines couldn’t be leafed through at local bookstores because they weren’t carried.) Today we submitters have it a little simpler because most magazines have web sites where fiction can be sampled. And, of course, an increasingly large number of magazines ARE e-zines.

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November Brings the Final Volume of Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch Series

Sunday, October 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Those of you who wait until a series is completed before picking up the first volume (especially if, like me, you wait until it arrives in paperback) will be glad to hear that DAW Books will be releasing Tad Williams’s Shadowheart, the fourth and final volume in his well-reviewed epic fantasy series Shadowmarch, in mass market paperback on November 6th:

Southmarch Castle is about to be caught between two implacable enemies, the ancient, immortal Qar and the insane god-king, the Autarch of Xis. Meanwhile, its two young defenders, Princess Briony and Prince Barrick, are both trapped far away from home and fighting for their lives.

And now, something is awakening underneath Southmarch Castle, something powerful and terrible that the world has not seen for thousands of years. Can Barrick and Briony, along with a tiny handful of allies, ordinary and extraordinary, find a way to save their world and prevent the rise of a terrible new age — an age of unending darkness?

I bought Williams’s first novel, the cat fantasy Tailchaser’s Song, in 1985, and have followed his career with interest ever since. His massive Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (starting with The Dragonbone Chair in 1988) catapulted him to the front ranks of epic fantasy writers, and the 4-volume Otherland series, beginning with City of Golden Shadow (1996) and ending with Sea of Silver Light (2001), proved he was as proficient with science fantasy.

The first novel in his latest series, Shadowmarch, was published in hardcover in 2004. Just as with Otherland, Shadowmarch was initially announced as a trilogy, but the third book became so large and unwieldy it was broken into two volumes. It’s been a long wait for the fourth and final installment, but epic fantasy fans are nothing if not patient.

Shadowheart will be released by DAW Books on November 6. It is 840 pages for $8.99 in paperback; the digital version is $9.99,

Black Gate Online Fiction: “A Phoenix in Darkness” by Donald S. Crankshaw

Sunday, October 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Young members of a secretive Order of wizards investigate a series of strange kidnappings, and discover a sinister and ancient conspiracy:

“Nathan, who do you think has the ability to turn a person into a puppet like that?” Aulus asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t think of anyone in the Order — ”

“Exactly. In the Order. What about outside the Order?”

Nathan looked at Aulus hard. “You’re not talking about a renegade Dominus, are you?”

“No, I’m not. I’m talking about a different society altogether.”

“But the only other society would be the Necromancers. We wiped them out centuries ago!” Nathan said.

“What if the Order is wrong about their fate?” Aulus stood up and began pacing in the tiny room. “What if there were more of them, and better hidden, than we thought? Nathan, that man today was dead and walking. He was undead, a Soulless.”

Nathan did not want to admit that the Necromancers might still be around. If they were, the world was a lot more dangerous than he wanted to believe. “But, Aulus, how have they remained hidden all these years? They would have died out years ago… unless you think they’ve finally discovered the secrets of immortality.”

“Who says they haven’t?”

Donald S. Crankshaw has published short stories in Daily Science Fiction, Aoife’s Kiss, and Coach’s Midnight Diner. He lives in Boston. Author photo by Kristin Janz.

You can see the complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Aaron Bradford Starr, Sean McLachlan, Harry Connolly, and Jason E. Thummel, here.

“A Phoenix in Darkness” is a complete 50,000-word short novel of dark fantasy offered free of charge. It will be published in three parts.

Read Part One of “A Phoenix in Darkness” here.

Dark Regions Press releases Crooked House by Joe McKinney

Sunday, October 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I don’t know about you, but as Halloween approaches I’m seeing a lot more horror movies, books, and graphic novels cross my path.

As Goth Chick loves to point out, it is the Season. And if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to overlook some of its more intriguing titles, especially from the small press. Fortunately, Black Gate has you covered.

Dark Regions Press specializes in horror and dark fiction, and have published hundreds of authors such as Bentley Little, Rick Hautala, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, Jeffrey Thomas, Charlee Jacob, Tim Waggoner, and many more. This Tuesday, October 23rd, they are publishing Crooked House by Bram Stoker Award winning author Joe McKinney:

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point.

Those words were true when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote them in 1851, and they were true in 1933, when a fire burned half of Crook House to the ground, taking James Crook’s wife and two sons with it. A disgraced bootlegger and former pro baseball player, James Crook returned from prison to find his house, and his life, a pile of cinders. Broken and insane, he rebuilt Crook House, putting his pain and loneliness into every timber.

But Hawthorne’s words are still true today, and nobody knows that better than Dr. Robert Bell, who has just moved into Crook House as part of his hiring package from a small Texas college. He soon discovers that Crook House is more than just a new beginning for himself and Sarah and their daughter Angela. For the Bell family, Crook House is a place where the past still lives, and its horrors waiting for the next drowning man.

With Crooked House, Joe McKinney brings you a chilling novel in the vein of The Shining by Stephen King, a haunted house tale that will stay with you long after the final page is turned.

Joe McKinney is the author of Flesh Eaters, Dead City, Mutated, and more. Crooked House will be available as a leather-bound deluxe lettered hardcover and as a signed and numbered limited hardcover. Find complete details and order information at Dark Regions.