Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever

Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever

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Some of the science fiction and fantasy games up for bid at the Spring Games Plus auction (click for humungous version)
Some of the science fiction and fantasy games up for bid at the Spring Games Plus auction (click for supersize version).

Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL, is the finest games store in the Chicago area. Every spring and fall they hold a fabulous games auction.

Now, I don’t use that word lightly. I’ve been to some terrific games auctions in my time, starting with CanGames in Ottawa in the early 80s, then the friendly auctions at WinterWar in Champaign, IL where I was a grad student in the 90s.

And of course, for sheer quantity of items on offer, nothing beats the legendary GenCon auction, held over multiple days in Indianapolis every August.

But if you really, really want that rare gaming item, bidding against hundreds of hard core gaming fans from across the country at GenCon is a sure way to pay top dollar for it.

For real bargains, you need a small local auction. And I’ve never found one friendlier or more rewarding than the twice-a-year event at Games Plus, which is attended by perhaps a hundred gamers and collectors from the Chicago area.

It’s spread across four days and includes thousands of games of virtually every vintage and description, sorted into four categories. Occasionally I drop by Friday night for the Historical Games, especially when I’m on the hunt for hard-to-find Avalon Hill or SPI titles. But usually I save up for the main event: the Saturday Fantasy and Science Fiction auction, which starts at 10:00 a.m. and runs until early evening.

Knowing my lack of control in the past, my wife Alice gave me a strict budget this year. I was not to return home with more than $200 of auction loot. So you can imagine my measured apprehension when my winnings were totaled and the auctioneer handed me a bill for $1,667.75.

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The Other Dracula the Undead

The Other Dracula the Undead

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warrington-undeaddracula_the-un-dead1I belong firmly to the camp of Bram Stoker fan that approached Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula the Un-Dead with great anticipation and left disappointed. Well, actually appalled might be a more apt description of the reading experience. Had I not had my jaws wired shut at the time I read the book, I would have described myself as speechless. Severn House, a small press that has been kicking around for at least forty years when they took over Tom Stacey’s imprint, decided to capitalize on the attendant hoopla of a Stoker descendant co-writing a sequel to reprint an earlier literary sequel with very nearly the same title.

Freda Warrington’s Dracula the Undead was originally published to mark the centennial of Stoker’s classic original in 1997. I was aware of the book prior to its reprinting, but avoided it like the plague at the time believing incorrectly it was comparable to Elaine Bergstrom (aka Marie Kiraly)’s romanticized and anemic sequels, Mina and Blood to Blood. There is an element of romance found in Ms. Warrington’s book that does not ring true for the Stoker purist, but Warrington is a gifted British fantasy and horror author who accomplished something few writers can claim – she authored a sequel to a literary classic that doesn’t pale in comparison.

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PRIMORDIA: The Hardcover Arrives

PRIMORDIA: The Hardcover Arrives

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How about a nice graphic novel?

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here: The ultimate hardcover collected edition of PRIMORDIA, the “stone-age faerie tale” written by me and illustrated by the amazing Roel Wielinga.

The original series was released by Archaia in 2007, but the hardcover is the ultimate edition of the tale. It also includes tons of extras: a new wrap-around cover, a new short story by Yours Truly, new illustrations and sketches from Roel, a groovy pin-up gallery, my original PRIMORDIA ashcan, and other behind-the-scenes goodness, as well as an introduction by the great Kat Rocha (Titanium Rain).

Here’s an extensive preview from Archaia: http://www.archaia.com/archaia-titles/primordia/

The hardcover hit comic shops across America yesterday, but is available from Amazon for a cool 15 bucks:

http://www.amazon.com/Primordia-John-R-Fultz/dp/1932386262/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331856517&sr=8-1


The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie, a Review

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie, a Review

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the-heroes-joe-abercrombieThe Heroes
Joe Abercrombie
Orbit (559 pp., $14.99, trade paperback)
Reviewed by Brian Murphy

“Who cares who’s buried where?” muttered Craw, thinking about all the men he’d seen buried. “Once a man’s in the ground he’s just mud. Mud and stories. And the stories and the men don’t often have much in common.”

—Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes

Although it’s classified as fantasy, don’t be fooled: Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes is every inch a war story, knee deep in mud and blood, with the term “heroes” used in a rather ironic fashion. You won’t find any heroes here, just a bunch of men trying to live through another day on the battlefield.

It’s also bloody good. While it’s not at the level of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Killer Angels, and perhaps doesn’t quite stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the same shieldwall as Steven Pressfield’s brilliant Gates of Fire, The Heroes is certainly one of the best books of its kind. Chock full of vivid combat and the incredible stress and strain of war, with a cast of memorable if not particularly deep characters and enough twists to keep you guessing to the end, it’s a terrific read for those who enjoy the sights and sounds of combat on the printed page.

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Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes

Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes

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cinderella-jump-rope-rhymes1Cabinet des Fées presents Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes!

These are not the rhymes you jumped rope to as a child.

Erzebet YellowBoy announced on March 12th:

“Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes shows you what a childhood pastime looks like when you dial macabre up to eleven. If playground fun got married to the genetically engineered child of Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, their offspring would be Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes.

…In tribute to all of the animal friends and helpers without whom our fairy tale heroines and heros would themselves be lost, CdF has decided to fund animal charities with this publication. Fifty percent of all profits will be donated each quarter, beginning with the quarter starting April 1, 2012.

Our first batch of proceeds will be donated to HULA Animal Rescue: Home for Unwanted and Lost Animals. HULA is an independent UK charity with a non-​​destruction policy for every healthy animal, in service since 1972.

Our second batch of proceeds will be donated to the Oldies Club, and our third to Dolly’s Foundation. We’ll post more information about those two charities when their times comes. If you have any suggestions for the fourth quarter donations, please send them along!”

Edited by Francesca Forrest, illustrated by Adam Oehlers (for an interview with the illustrator, click here), this chapbook contains contributions from Francesca Forrest, Sonya Taaffe, Samantha Henderson, Erik Amundsen, Rose Lemberg, Nadia Bulkin, Julia Rios, and Kyle Davis.

Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes can be purchased at Amazon​.com, Amazon​.co​.uk and  The Book Depository as well as at other online sellers. Please support independent sellers if you can!

Goth Chick News: The Best of The Haunted Attractions Show

Goth Chick News: The Best of The Haunted Attractions Show

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Ernie
Ernie
“You brought back a what?”

“A shrunken head.”

“A shrunken head of what?”

“Umm…supposed to have been a person I guess.”

“And you’re happy about this acquisition?”

“More like ecstatic, actually.  I mean as souvenirs go…”

Sometimes the Black Gate staff still isn’t sure what I’m doing in their offices or whether they just left the front door unlocked once too often and I somehow just wandered in; left behind by a traveling midnight showing of  The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Still, when I returned from my St. Louis road trip, fresh from attending the 2012 Haunted Attractions Show, the curiosity was palatable and far be it from me to disappoint.

The 17th annual gathering of all things disturbing and their creators was a huge success, cram-packed with enough material to keep me in posts for several weeks to come.

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Keep up with the Black Gate Staff with the BG Staff tag

Keep up with the Black Gate Staff with the BG Staff tag

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bg-patty-claire
Two members of the Black Gate staff, having more fun than you.

How is it that we have so much fun here at Black Gate? How are we so well connected to the very heartbeat of modern fantasy? How is it that so many incredible and exciting people stop by every month, to guide you towards the literature, art and music that will change your life?

Don’t look at me. I have no idea either.  I just pay the bills, and shut down the parties when the police show up.

But you don’t need me to tell you. The talented and rambunctious staff of Black Gate magazine bare all their secrets right here each week. And to help you keep up, I’ve finally added a BG Staff tag to the Categories section of our navigation menu at left.

What’s a BG Staff tag? You’re not paying attention, are you? You just drop by once a week hoping Scott Taylor will post more pics of near-naked redheads. All right, look. See that narrow column on the left, with the Search box at the top? About halfway down the page is a CATEGORIES section. That’s how we sort the thousands of blogs posts we’ve done here at Black Gate. Now you can just click “Art of the Genre” and ogle all the art you want, without all those pesky posts about books and stuff. You’re welcome.

And right below that link is the new BG Staff tag. It collects about 250 articles from the last few years covering news, interviews, and embarrassing personal revelations from the people behind Black Gate, including the many authors, artists and editors who’ve contributed to our pages over the years. It’s your one-stop-shop to discover the latest books from Devon Monk, John R. Fultz, Martha Wells, James Enge, Jonathan L. Howard, Harry Connolly, Peadar Ó Guilín, C.S.E. Cooney, Shawn L. Johnson, Rich Horton, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others.

You’ll find all the news about Ryan Harvey’s Writers of the Future Award; Harry Connolly on making his first book trailer with a hot model; how Howard Andrew Jones introduced C.S.E. Cooney to C.L. Moore; Bud Webster’s advice on book selling; which Black Gate author reached #1 on Amazon sales list; which BG staffer interviewed his own daughter, and a road trip to clone a woolly mammoth.

All that plus numerous convention reports, book excerpts, reviews, award news, self-publishing advice, agent hunts, first novel sales, online comics, zeppelins, and sadly even a few obituaries. It’s the entire circle of life here at Black Gate. Enjoy.

Art of the Genre: Jean Giraud ‘Moebius’ 1938-2012

Art of the Genre: Jean Giraud ‘Moebius’ 1938-2012

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moebius-flightThis week I take on the sad task of doing the obituary piece for the passing of another great industry artist. I don’t think these things hit me quite as much when I simply read about the death of an artist until I started doing Art of the Genre, but now that I take the time to look back and speak about a career, it’s somehow even more of a loss.

To me, Jean Giraud was simply a man with a strange alias, Moebius. I didn’t know him well, or his work for that matter. He was a Frenchman, a comic guy, and the two didn’t run into my creative circle of artistic knowledge as well I they probably should have.

Still, Moebius was ever my enigma, and when I did my list of the Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years back in 2011, Moebius might not have made the final list but he did receive a healthy number of votes from all the industry insiders I polled. This fact wasn’t lost on me, but as time is ever crunched and fleeting I went about with other work and never got back to studying why it was that Moebius had placed so highly on knowledgeable people’s lists.

Today, as I write this, I’ve finally come to realize why. I may not have known Moebius in his personal art, but that isn’t to say I don’t know him in so much of the art I love. You see, Moebius, for all the wonderful things he did with his own hand, was perhaps better known for those he influenced with that work.

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Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Deserter on sale Today

Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Deserter on sale Today

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deserterIf you’re a long-time Black Gate reader you know the name Peadar Ó Guilín.

His first story for us was “The Mourning Trees” (Black Gate 5), followed by “Where Beauty Lies in Wait” (BG 11) and “The Evil Eater” (BG 13), which Shedrick Pittman-Hassett of Serial Distractions called “a lovely little bit of Lovecraftian horror that still haunts me to this day.”

Peadar’s first novel The Inferior was published to terrific reviews in 2008. School Library Journal called it

[An] epic story of survival, betrayal, and community… intriguing at every turn, The Inferior will hold readers from page to page, chapter to chapter, to the very end.

After nearly four years the sequel has finally arrived, and it promises to be everything we’ve waited for. Here’s the book description:

The humans are weak and vulnerable. Soon the beasts that share their stone-age world will kill and eat them. To save his tribe, Stopmouth must make his way to the Roof, the mysterious hi-tech world above the surface. But the Roof has its own problems. The nano technology that controls everything from the environment to the human body is collapsing. A virus has already destroyed the Upstairs, sending millions of refugees to seek shelter below. And now a rebellion against the Commission, organized by the fanatical Religious, is about to break.

Hunted by the Commission’s Elite Agents through the overcrowded, decaying city of the future, Stopmouth must succeed in a hunt of his own: to find the secret power hidden in the Roof’s computerized brain, and return to his people before it is too late.

The Deserter is on available today in hardcover, and in digital format for the Kindle and Nook. It is 448 pages, and published by David Fickling Books.

To promote it, Peadar has released Where Beauty Lies In Wait, a free e-book collecting a dozen of his short stories, including all three from Black Gate. It’s available in Kindle, ePub and PDF versions, and you can get it here.

Black Gate Interviews Nathan Long, Part One

Black Gate Interviews Nathan Long, Part One

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nathan-longNathan Long is a novelist best known for his work in the Warhammer universe, most notably for his Black Hearts series and Ulrika the Vampire series, as well as penning the new adventures of the classic Warhammer duo, Gotrek & Felix. Recently, Nathan’s Jane Carver of Waar has been released to some great reviews, and is getting a lot of attention in light of the recent big budget movie adaptation of the Burroughs novel that inspired it.

Welcome, Nathan, and thanks for sitting down with Black Gate to talk about your latest novel.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jane Carver of Waar is a Barsoomesque adventure for the modern reader, and something that treads the line between loving homage and knowing send-up of classic pulp SF. Tell us a bit about the book, and do you think readers need to be familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Barsoom, and other stories of that era to fully appreciate Jane Carver?

Jane Carver of Waar is what I used to call, before I knew any better, a “Sword and Raygun” adventure. Now I know I’m supposed to call it a Planetary Romance, but I still like mine better. It tells the story of Jane Carver, a hard-riding biker chick who gets herself on the wrong side of the law and ends up hiding in a cave that transports her to a world full of strange aliens with stranger customs. There she has a sequence of wild adventures while trying to help a not-very-heroic young alien noble rescue his kidnapped bride.

I really hope readers won’t need to be familiar with the Planetary Romance genre to enjoy the book. I did my best to make sure they wouldn’t, as that is one of my pet peeves. I dislike parodies and homages that require some knowledge of the thing being parodied. It is my belief that a book should stand on its own, even when commenting on another book or genre. A book should be a book first, thoroughly enjoyable by itself, and anything else the author wants to make it second.

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