A slash version of Charlies Angels: A review of Bitch Slap

A slash version of Charlies Angels: A review of Bitch Slap

Comments 6 comments

b-slap11Bitch Slap the (unrated) film relates to fantasy fiction how, you may ask?

The cast includes Lucy Lawless (Xena), Kevin Sorbo and Michael Hurst (Hercules).  Fictionmags chum and fantasy novelist Damien Broderick passed along the intelligence back in December ’08 that the husband of a friend of his had a hand in making the film. Don’t know if it ever made the theaters, but it’s now out on DVD.

The box art has the three generously proportioned leading ladies in costume: short spandex gold-lame dress/black skirt & fishnets/low-rise jeans, stage-center. Hey, what’s not to like going in? Most of the viewer reviews on Netflix and Blockbuster panned it. The remaining 10% seemed to really like it.

I confess I liked it. It’s intentionally trashy, but it seems we haven’t had a good trashy girl-fight film since Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill.

Australian Shakespearian actor Michael Hurst is Gage, a scumbag dealer in high-priced stolen goods who has acquired at least one item of interest to each of the three kick-ass babes who, early in the film, get very medieval on him.

…

Read More Read More

A review of The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce

A review of The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce

Comments 1 comment

reindeer1The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce
Magic Carpet Books (256 pages, $5.95, May 2000)

To begin with, I should tell you that I adore Meredith Ann Pierce’s writing. It has a sense of fairy tale about it, a simple yet otherworldly quality. I will happily read anything she’s written and recommend it to others.

Nevertheless, I have to say that The Woman Who Loved Reindeer might push some peoples buttons for reasons that have nothing to do with the high-quality prose.

Caribou is an isolated girl of thirteen or so, living away from her people because of her true dreams and possible magic. Then her sister-in-law unceremoniously gives her a baby to care for. Although Caribou resents the request — the sister-in-law admits that the baby isn’t her husband’s — an obscure impulse makes her accept the child. And then her life starts to get both richer and stranger.

The child — Caribou names him Reindeer — is not entirely human. When he’s still a baby, a golden reindeer nearly takes him away. As he grows, Caribou dreams of him as a reindeer calf and notices that he casts a reindeer’s reflection in the water. Also, he doesn’t entirely comprehend human emotion. He’s a trangl, a shapeshifter who turns into a reindeer, a being that Caribou’s culture fears as essentially untrustworthy — a view that’s not entirely unfounded, since Reindeer seems to have a limited capacity for empathy.

…

Read More Read More

Saints and Shrieks: Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris Fiction

Saints and Shrieks: Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris Fiction

Comments 4 comments

City of Saints and MadmenI don’t know what makes a novel great. Maybe every great book is great in its own way. I suspect, though, that a novel’s greatness resides most often either in its structure (not just its plot, but its balancing of themes and elements, its division into units like chapters, and its decision of what to describe and when) or its prose (its ability to make every word count, not only in depicting character and setting, not only in moving forward story, but in advancing the theme of the book, what it’s about, the idea that prompted the telling of the tale in the first place).

I suspect also that truly great novels fuse the two things, so that stylistic choices are an outgrowth of structure, while structural elements are visible in the voices the story uses. And all these things are always surprising the reader, even while making perfect sense.

Which brings me to Jeff VanderMeer, and his three novels of the fictional city of Ambergris: City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.

This is not a typical trilogy. The three books are very different from each other in both style and structure, although they do have some themes and characters in common. Chiefly, they have Ambergris in common.

Ambergris is a strange place, a baroque metropolis defined by wars between sprawling merchant houses, the orgiastic annual celebration of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, and a mostly-subterranean nonhuman race called Grey Caps. The city changes over the course of the books — its technology shifts, its social structure is altered — but then the way we see the city changes as well.

…

Read More Read More

One-Year subscription to Black Gate now available for $21.95

One-Year subscription to Black Gate now available for $21.95

Comments 0 Comment

black_gate_9-277We’ve just re-vamped our subscription page, and as part of the changes we’ve introduced a new two-issue (one year) subscription option for just $21.95.

Black Gate is published twice a year, and priced at $12.95/issue for 256-304 pages of the best in modern adventure fantasy ($15.95 for our jumbo-sized issues, such as Black Gate 1 and Black Gate 14). Now you can find out what everyone’s talking about for just $21.95 — delivered right to your door.  A two-year, 4-issue subscription is just $39.95.

What are people saying about Black Gate?  “I was poleaxed, banjaxed, gobsmacked and just plain overwhelmed.”  (Tangent Online)  See all the coverage of our latest issues here, and reviews of our first six issues here.

Got an e-reader? Try any current issue of Black Gate in PDF for just $4.95 — or four issues for only $17.95. Or add a PDF edition to your print subscription for just $2.95/issue.

And don’t forget our Back Issue Sale: any two issues for just $21.95, or any four for $39.95, plus shipping.  And yes, that includes our double-sized issues, both normally priced at $15.95.

We’re selling back issues only while supplies last — which won’t be much longer for many of our earliest editions.  We’re down to a few dozens copies of BG 3, BG 4, and BG 5, and we’ll be bringing the last of them to Dragon*con in two weeks, where we expect to exhaust our supply fairly quickly.  If you’re interested, better move quickly.

Black Gate 14 Sneak Peek: “Folie and Null” by Douglas Empringham

Black Gate 14 Sneak Peek: “Folie and Null” by Douglas Empringham

Comments 0 Comment

folie-and-null-277The ruined mansion seemed the perfect place to elude their pursuers… until they began to penetrate its secrets.

     “What unrelenting desolation!” remarked Folie. “Not a stem or leaf to be seen.”
     Soon they were poised on the lip of a depression in the rock landscape. In this hollow, some distance off to their left, was a mansion whose middle section had fallen in.
     “The lords of this demesne,” observed Folie wryly, “must receive their rent in gravel and scorpions.”
     “Can their hospitality be worse than that?” Rhing said, motioning toward the roiling darkness and webs of lightning filling the horizon to their right.

Douglas Empringham lives in San Bruno, California. Art by Kent Burles.

“Folie and Null” appears in Black Gate 14. You can read a more complete excerpt here. The complete Black Gate 14 Sneak Peek (Part I) is available here.

This wraps up Part I of our Sneak Peek. Over the next few weeks we’ll bring you Part II — excerpts from novellas from Pete Butler, James Enge, and Robert J Howe — and Part III, the non-fiction, including a look at Modern Reprints of Classic Fantasy by Rich Horton, and copious reviews.

Best American Fantasy comes to an End

Best American Fantasy comes to an End

Comments 3 comments

best-american-fantasy2aOver at Ecstatic Days, Jeff VanderMeer has announced that the annual anthology series he founded with Ann VanderMeer, Sean Wallace, and Matthew Cheney, Best American Fantasy, has wrapped up after three volumes.

The first, published in 2007 by Sean Wallace at Prime Books and edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, was an eclectic and delightful mixture of fantasy assembled from Zoetrope: All-Story, Analog, McSweeney’s, Zahir, Strange Horizons, The New Yorker and others sources, featuring nearly two dozen writers I’d never heard of. The second offered a slightly more familiar cast, including Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link, and Peter S. Beagle, but still cast a wide net to include fiction from Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Barrelhouse, Harpers, Mississippi Review, and many others.

With the third volume the series jumped to Victoria Blake’s Underland Press, and changed editor to Kevin Brockmeier (our review, by David Soyka, is here). It contained work from Stephen King, Lisa Goldstein, Peter S. Beagle, Jeffrey Ford, and others. Jeff reflects on the decision to end the series thusly:

The amicable move from Prime to Underland following the publication of BAF2 was meant to rejuvenate the series and to finally achieve stability for it. Unfortunately, this didn’t occur, for a variety of reasons. BAF did not having a wide margin for error. A cross-genre fantasy year’s best that focused not just on genre magazines but also on literary magazines, that required sympathy and generosity from both the mainstream and genre, as well as the right placement in the chains, was always going to be a difficult sell.

New series editor Larry Nolen has posted the short list of stories under consideration for the unpublished fourth volume here — including fiction from Richard Parks, Sean McMullen, and Catherynne M. Valente, and four stories from Clockwork Phoenix 2.

Whither the Bookstore?

Whither the Bookstore?

Comments 4 comments

bn_logo2Following up on John’s post (and subsequent discussion) concerning the predicament of Barnes and Noble, which seems to be getting a taste of its own medicine as e-books and online book buying may relegate the superstore concept as nostalgic as the local independent book dealer, is this article from The New York Times. What’s interesting is the prediction that despite the growing acceptance of reading on handheld screens and website ordering, surviving independent stores may still flourish because of their personalized service to niche customers.

thin21Makes sense. Every time I go into an independent bookstore, I feel compelled to buy something even if I already have to many books I haven’t read yet, much less that I could get the book cheaper online (or even at Barnes and Noble). One reason I like to support these guys is that there’s something very attractive about “non-chain store” shopping, where owners have put their own individual stamp on the presentation and perusal of their wares.

True, they may not be as deep stocked as B&N (or at least used to be).  But, funny how the books they do carry in the fiction section are almost exactly the kinds of things I’m interested in.

To give B&N its due, though, I always thought it conveyed more a sense of a traditional bookshop than its much more troubled competitor, Borders. (Gone into one lately?  It’s like Waldenbooks on steroids, meaning appealing to the lowest common denominator is even more depressing when it’s bloated with stationary and puzzles).  And the people who worked there do seem to be knowledgeable and enthusiastic about books, unlike some of the clueless clerks you might find in a mall record store (do they still have those?).

As for what will happen to the physical book once we’re all reading on our Kindles or iPads or inner eyelid digital display inlays, check out this article by Rob Walker, also from theTimes.  I particularly like the idea of using an old discarded book to house your Kindle. And that someone could actually sell it for $25.

See, all those books bending your bookshelves do have some future value.  Get ’em while you can.

Robert E. Howard: Anatomy of a Creative Crisis

Robert E. Howard: Anatomy of a Creative Crisis

Comments 3 comments

kull-a“Beyond the Sunrise” is the unofficial title afforded an unfinished Kull story that did not see print until over forty years after the author’s death. Its significance is due largely to the fact that it was the first of four widely differing attempts to continue the Kull series following the publication of both “The Shadow Kingdom” and “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” in Weird Tales in 1929.

Robert E. Howard starts the story off with a bored Kull sitting on his throne listening to a rather dull tale of the Valusian noblewoman, Lala-ah who has run off with her foreign lover leaving the nobleman she was promised to waiting at the altar. The barbarian king’s pride is piqued once he learns the foreigner insulted him behind his back. He then readily agrees to lead a posse to retrieve the noblewoman and restore his and his nation’s honor.

I was about as enthusiastic as Kull when I first started the story and thought the Atlantean was acting like a childish oaf for getting his nose out of joint just because a foreigner called him a sissy when he wasn’t around to defend himself.

…

Read More Read More

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Ten Things I Know Now…

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Ten Things I Know Now…

Comments 5 comments

Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
— William Faulkner

CHINA TOWN, NAGASAKI, JAPAN by June OkaBecause this series about riding about the dragon called Publishing is geared at writers just starting out writing fantasy stories and novels, I thought I’d pull together another list (I love lists!) that include all the helpful stuff I wish I’d known back in 1995, when I was just starting out.

Ten Things I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known When I First Started

YOUR FAVORITE STORY OR NOVEL THAT YOU’VE EVER WRITTEN SHOULD BE THE ONE YOU’RE WORKING ON RIGHT NOW.  Enthusiasm for your current project is priceless, in my opinion, and you should never rest on your laurels.  Always try to improve yourself as a writer, just like an athlete or musician always works to get better for the next big game or performance.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: The Woman in Black

Goth Chick News: The Woman in Black

Comments 2 comments

image0041Anyone who has been reading these entries with any regularity knows that the word “minimalist” will never be used in the same sentence with my name. I seem to be visually starved, needing to be perpetually surrounded by interesting if not strange things to look at. This can easily be proven by the fact I cohabitate with a voodoo doll collection and three German Shepherds.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to Halloween.

I mean, you’ve probably heard people comment on over-the-top Christmas decorations, but I doubt you’ve heard anything but awe-struck admiration for someone who’s gone nutty with their front yard zombie display.

Or maybe my neighbors are just trying to be nice.

In any case, it’s rather odd for me to tell you that one of my all-time-favorite books, which then made it to the top of my theater list — and will eventually, I hope,  make it to my top ten movie list — is anything but visually cluttered. Speaking at least for the book and the play, The Woman in Black derives its horror from its simplicity, and that’s really what a classic fright is about, isn’t it? It’s why no blood-splattered, psychopath training film like Saw or Hostel will ever be as scary as the scare that gets in your head.

Back in 1983, author Susan Hill wrote the tale of a young lawyer summoned to settle the affairs of the deceased Alice Drablow, who had lived on a remote English estate cut off from the mainland during high tide (sounds awesome so far, right?) As he pieces together Alice’s tragic life, the lawyer begins to uncover a tragic family secret and its horrifying guardian, the Woman in Black. It’s a premise just simple enough to make your skin crawl.

…

Read More Read More