Chris Braak Reviews Shadow’s Lure

Chris Braak Reviews Shadow’s Lure

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sprunk-shadows-lureShadow’s Lure
Jon Sprunk
Pyr (387 pp, $17.00, Paperback, June 2011)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

Shadow’s Lure, by Jon Sprunk, is the continuing story of Caim the Knife, formerly an assassin, then briefly a supernaturally-empowered assassin, now a supernaturally-empowered vagabond. After helping Empress Josphine (“Josey” to her friends) secure the throne of Nimea away from that empire’s totalitarian church, Caim has gone north into barbarous Eregoth, to find out more about his long-lost family, and discover the secret origin of his heritage. While in Eregoth, Caim runs afoul of a duke under the sway of an evil sorceress, and finds himself embroiled in a rebellion against them. Meanwhile, the newly-crowned Empress has to fight off an assassination attempt and a conspiracy to snatch that hard-won throne away.

As with his first book, Shadow’s Son, Sprunk reveals a strong command of the sort of scene-by-scene, action pacing necessary for good, tense battle scenes, and Shadow’s Lure definitely delivers those. The fights are fast and dramatic, primarily because Sprunk doesn’t short-change the stakes; people are in danger, and people die, and there is no sense of Sprunk “coddling” anyone, or letting the reader get off easy by keeping your favorites alive. War is a dirty business, and Shadow’s Lure, for the most part, meets it head on.

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The Best of Modern Arabian Fantasy, Part I: Howard Andrew Jones and The Desert of Souls

The Best of Modern Arabian Fantasy, Part I: Howard Andrew Jones and The Desert of Souls

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howard-picThe Middle East has produced some world famous mythology and is fertile ground to base a fantasy novel, as more and more authors are discovering. Over the next several posts I will be exploring this modern day trend and interviewing many of the authors who are mining the lore and culture of the Middle East, and specifically the Arabian Middle East for their work.

My first interviewee is Howard Andrew Jones who sets his novel, The Desert of Souls, in the 8th Century, when the Abbasid caliphate was a center of trade, culture, and learning. In the following interview, I’ve asked Howard what drew him to this particular cultural milieu and how he went about doing the research necessary to create characters and compose their adventures.

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New Pulp Fiction for Our New Hard Times

New Pulp Fiction for Our New Hard Times

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the-pulpsPulp fiction is back — in print, online, in ebooks, and on iPads. Tough guys, tough women, tough prose, action and more action, blood and thunder, heroes and villains presented unapologetically as heroes and villains.

And why not? Why not have as much blood and thunder as we can handle right now, given that the last time we saw this much imaginative raw prose in the hands of readers, we were in the hard times of the early 1930s?

Fans of the original old, tough, wild pulp stories have always been here, collecting the magazines when they found them at garage sales or at science fiction conventions. But after the heyday of these magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, popular fiction in the 1950s and 1960s changed and moved on to paperbacks and digest zines and television shows.

By then, though, pulp had lost some of its edge. In the postwar boom, it became less than it had been, in the same way that the antics of rough early vaudeville, for example, changed as the routines moved to radio and then to early television and then to sitcoms.

The early 1970s saw a boom in nostalgia for the real stuff from the 1920s and 1930s — just in time for the very serious recession then. That’s when you found remaindered copies everywhere of Tony Goodstone’s big old coffee table book The Pulps, still the best introduction to the popular fiction of hard times and war time. Tons of great stories were brought back, and Bette Midler’s Songs for the New Depression sold right alongside paperback reprints of the Shadow and Doc Savage and Max Brand.

We’re back there now. We’re in the Lesser Depression, as Paul Krugman has identified it. And just as in the hard times of the early 1970s and the very hard times of the early 1930s, pulp fiction is here to fulfill its commitment to giving us outlandish, big top entertainment.

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Clarkesworld #67

Clarkesworld #67

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cw_67_300The April  issue of Clarkesworld is currently online. Featured fiction: “Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” by Tom Crosshill, “Draftyhouse” by Erik Amundsen and “The Womb Factory” by Gary Kloster.  Non fiction by Brian Francis Slattery, Jeremy L.C. Jones and Danile Baker.  The cover art is by Steve Goad.

All of this is available online for free; there’s even an audio podcast version of the Crosshill story read by Kate Baker. However, nothing is really free. The magazine is supported by “Clarkesworld Citizens” who donate $10 or more. There’s also a Kindle edition.

We last covered Clarkesworld with issue #66.

The Borribles

The Borribles

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The Borribles, Ace Fantasy, 1984The Borribles
Michael de Larrabeiti
Tor (214 pp, $6.99, July 2005)

While on patrol one night in London’s Battersea Park, Knocker and his buddy Lightfinger discover a Rumble trespassing on their home turf. The two Borribles quickly capture the Rumble and then —

Wait. What’s a Borrible? What’s a Rumble?

Borribles, in Michael de Larrabeiti’s razor-sharp novel, are “feral Peter Pans,” to cadge a phrase from the New York Times, pointy-eared children who never grow up:

Normal kids are turned into Borribles very slowly, almost without being aware of it; but one day they wake up and there it is. It doesn’t matter where they come from as long as they’ve had what is called a bad start. A child disappears and the word goes round that he was ‘unmanageable’; the chances are he’s off managing by himself. Sometimes it’s given out that a kid down the street has been put into care: the truth is that he’s been Borribled and is caring for himself someplace.

They are urchins gone elf, living in loose neighborhood tribes, squatting in abandoned buildings and shoplifting their food; they have no leaders or laws beyond a collection of proverbs (“Don’t get caught”), which they frequently cite in their arguments. Borribles are anarchist lawyers, “outcasts, but unlike most outcasts they enjoy themselves and wouldn’t be anything else.”

Their sworn enemies are the Rumbles, intelligent rodents resembling “a giant rat, a huge mole or a deformed rabbit” that walk on hind legs and even drive cars. The Rumbles dwell in a massive (and very posh) underground bunker in Rumbledom; a native Londoner might better recognize the area as Wimbledon Common. They’re also parodies of The Wombles, a series of children’s books, TV shows, and films which I’ve never read or seen.

The discovery of a Rumble rooting around in their territory incites suspicion of a Rumble invasion of Battersea and beyond. A Borrible council is quickly called, whereupon it’s decided each of the Borrible tribes of London will furnish a warrior to participate in the Great Rumble Hunt. The goal of this expedition: to infiltrate Rumbledom and assassinate the eight members of the Rumble High Command, thereby decapitating Rumble society. And, so that the Rumbles may have a sporting chance, the Borribles release the Rumble prisoner with a message for the High Command, explaining the entire plan.

Thus ends Chapter One.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw – Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw – Part Two

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yellow-claw-jackettantor1Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw was originally serialized in five installments in Lippincott’s from February through June 1915. The serial was subsequently published in book form later that same year by Methuen Press in the UK and McBride & Nast in the US. The novel chooses to divide the story into four sections. This week, we examine the second part.

Rohmer shifts gears unexpectedly by focusing Part Two of the novel on Soames, the Leroux butler who skipped out when Inspector Dunbar arrived at his employer’s home to investigate a murder. We learn Luke Soames fled because of his chequered past (he was dismissed by his previous employer for theft) that led him to falling prey to the sinister Mr. Gianapolis who arranged for Soames’ employment in the Leroux household. Soames is aware that Mr. Gianapolis works for a mysterious Mr. King who has some secret connection to Mrs. Leroux, but for awhile Soames is content to question little and perform the few curious extra duties that Gianapolis requests of him.

When Soames learns of a dead woman in his employer’s home and the arrival of Inspector Dunbar, he panics and flees fearing his criminal past will be uncovered by the detective. Coming to his senses, he contacts Gianapolis. The Greek takes him into Mr. King’s household and tells him he will find other employment for him, but warns him that if he fails them again, he will be handed over as an accessory to murder. Soames recognizes the fact that Gianapolis has complete control over him for without Gianapolis and the mysterious Mr. King who employs him, he would be a ruined man.

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An Ode to the Berkley Medallion Conans

An Ode to the Berkley Medallion Conans

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... in all their tattered glory
... in all their tattered glory

Karl Edward Wagner was and remains the most qualified individual to weigh in on the issue of Conan stories penned by someone other than Robert E. Howard, given that he wrote arguably the best pastiche of them all (The Road of Kings). So it behooves us to listen to what he had to say in the foreward to the Berkley Medallion Edition of Conan: The Hour of the Dragon (August 1977):

I have written Howard pastiches myself, so I can speak both as a reader and an author: Every author leaves his personal mark on whatever he writes; the only man who could write a Robert E. Howard story was Robert E. Howard. Read Howard pastiches as you will — but don’t let anyone kid you that you’re reading Robert E. Howard. It is far more than a matter of imitating adjective usage or analyzing comma-splices. It is a matter of spirit.

While Howard fans these days are spoiled by the Del Reys, prior to 1977 you could not buy a collection of the Conan stories without editorial emendations or the presence of pastiches. Both the widely printed Lancer/Ace collections of the 1960s and 70s and the rarer Gnome Press editions from the 1950s were marred by editorial changes and additional non-Howard material. That all changed with the Berkley Medallion Editions, published by the arrangement of the late, great, Glenn Lord (1931-2011), and edited by legendary horror and swords and sorcery author Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994). These consist of three books in an aborted series that was supposed to run longer and include all 21 of Howard’s original stories. They include The Hour of the Dragon, The People of the Black Circle, and Red Nails. To prepare the Berkley Medallion Edition manuscript Wagner made photocopies directly from the pages of Weird Tales, correcting only obvious typographical errors.

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Amazon.com Announces Pre-Orders for J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy

Amazon.com Announces Pre-Orders for J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy

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rowling1Amazon.com has announced that J.K. Rowling’s next novel, The Casual Vacancy, will be available September 27.

From the description it’s not immediately clear if the book has an fantastic elements at all, and in fact it may be a straight-up literary thriller:

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town’s council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations? Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.

The Casual Vacancy will be published in hardcover for $35 by Little, Brown and Company on September 27, 2012. No details on page length are available, and the publisher has not yet released the cover art.

Complete details on Amazon.com here.

Goth Chick News: Vampire Novel of the Century? I’ll Be the Judge of That

Goth Chick News: Vampire Novel of the Century? I’ll Be the Judge of That

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interview-with-vampireLast week, beloved editor and big cheese John O’Neill told you about the 2011 Bram Stoker Award winners which included what I consider a travesty of justice perpetuated on the vampire-genre-loving community by the Horror Writers Association (HWA).

In January the HWA, an international association of writers, publishing professionals, and supporters of horror literature, in conjunction with the Bram Stoker Family Estate and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, announced the nominees for the one-time-only, Bram Stoker Vampire Novel of the Century Award.  The Award was to mark the centenary of the death in 1912 of Abraham (Bram) Stoker, the author of Dracula.

A jury composed of writers and scholars selected, from a field of more than 35 preliminary nominees, the six vampire novels that they believe had the greatest impact on the horror genre since publication of Dracula in 1897.

Eligible works must have been first published between 1912 and 2011, and published in or translated into English.

Beyond this, the criteria for consideration seem a tad vague, but from the descriptions of the six finalists described by the HWA, here are the other points considered.

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Rich Horton and Sean Wallace explore War and Space

Rich Horton and Sean Wallace explore War and Space

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warandspace1Rich Horton has been a Contributing Editor for Black Gate since…. you know, I’m not even sure I remember. When we were in Kindergarten, maybe.  Or possibly since that drunken weekend when we assembled Goth Chick in our old laboratory. Good times, good times.

There was a day when I thought Rich and I would conquer science fiction together. We were two freelance journalists telling it like it is. When Tor started printing books with ink made in Singapore sweat shops, we blew the lid off the whole thing. Sleep didn’t matter, friendships didn’t matter. Only the truth mattered. And hot babes. Babes were on us like… like… well, not really. But anyway, we were unstoppable. The world was ours for the taking. At least, that part of the world that didn’t include women.

Then Rich met Sean Wallace, and Sean offered him something I never could: an actual wage. Rich dropped me like a hot potato for a career as one of the hottest anthologists in the field, and never looked back. Last time I saw him he was driving a Lamborghini Diablo and talking to J.K. Rowling on his cell.

I confronted Sean on the front steps of the Prime Books skyscraper in ’06. I was in a snarling rage, and threatened his life. He punched me in the nose and made me cry.  Then he bought me a hot chocolate and a bus ticket back to Chicago, and that was that.

That was nearly a dozen acclaimed anthologies ago, including three volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, my favorite of the annual survey anthologies. Now Rich and Sean have teamed up for War and Space: Recent Combat, a reprint anthology collecting some of the best tales of space warfare from the last few decades, including “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359” by Ken MacLeod, “Art of War” by Nancy Kress, and “The Political Officer” by Charles Coleman Finlay. This isn’t your typical military SF collection however, as Sean makes clear in a question to a reader in the comments section of his blog:

Will you still like it even if it’s not, well, in the vein of Baen military sf? I have to admit that we went a bit broader with this, and while we love it a lot, I just hope people aren’t expecting something a bit more militaristic?

Coming from a guy with a mean right hook, that sounds great to me.  War and Space will be released on May 2 by Prime Books. It is $15.95 for 384 pages in trade paperback.