Goth Chick News: Traveling the Road of Bones

Goth Chick News: Traveling the Road of Bones

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Road of Bones by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s Press, January 25, 2022). Cover artist unknown

I have recently been entertained by a Facebook group called View from My Window. People from around the world post pictures of just that; the view they see outside their windows. The fascinating bit is seeing postings from people in the farthest-flung corners of the globe, including Siberia. I didn’t know much about Siberia before, other than Russian dissidents being banished there, but seeing the pictures made me do a little research. I now know that Siberia is home to 33.7 million people, but that number is a little rough since there is no single precise definition of Siberia’s territorial borders. That population occupies 5 million square miles, so my concept of “sparsely populated” is mostly true. And boy is it cold. The average temperature in January −13 °F (no wind chill factored in) and warmest temps averaging around 50 °F.

So why am I telling you this and what does it have to do with horror?

Because my recent fascination with Siberia coincides nicely with a recent horror release from St. Martin’s Press, titled Road of Bones by Christopher Golden.

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Now Streaming: Sliding Doors

Now Streaming: Sliding Doors

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Sliding Doors
Sliding Doors

Although the 1998 romantic comedy Sliding Doors starring Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hannah, John Lynch, and Jeanne Tripplehorn may not immediately spring to mind as a science fiction film, it is one of the two micro-alternate history films that can be used to really explore the concept of alternate history on the personal level, the other being the 1946 Christmas Classic It’s a Wonderful Life.

Both films focus their attention on how things would have been different if things had worked out differently. In George Bailey’s case, Clarence shows him what Bedford Falls would have been like if he had never been born. Sliding Doors explores two alternatives for Paltrow’s Helen.

The film opens with Helen (Paltrow) heading into her public relations office for a normal day.  When she arrives and learns that she has been fired on trumped up charges, she heads back home.  The film shows her both catching her train and missing the train by moments, setting into motion the branching timelines for Helen’s life.

In the world in which she catches her train, she meets James (Hannah) who tries to jolly her out of her funk. He fails and she returns to her apartment to discover that her boyfriend, Gerry (Lynch) is having an affair with Lydia (Tripplehorn).  Fleeing the apartment, she eventually finds herself staying with her friend Anna (Zara Turner) and bumping into James again in a local restaurant.  Over the next several weeks, she and James become friends, and possibly more, and he encourages her to open her own public relations firm.

In the world in which she misses her train, Helen decides to take a cab home and finds herself on the wrong end of a mugging.  Stopping off at the hospital, by the time she gets him, all evidence of Gerry’s affair is long gone.  While Gerry continues to struggle with his novel, Helen begins working two jobs to try to make ends meet. Gerry continues his affair and also gaslights Helen whenever she begins to question him about things.

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Support Bernie Mireault’s The Jam Non Starter Campaign

Support Bernie Mireault’s The Jam Non Starter Campaign

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I’ve been following Bernie Mireault since his career began in Montreal in the mid-80s with the quirky and hilarious comic MacKenzie Queen, which he wrote and drew. When the chance came to recruit him to draw for Black Gate a decade later I jumped at it, and he soon became one of our most valuable and prolific contributors. His art appeared in virtually every issue — starting with our very first, when he illustrated Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion story “The Dreamthief’s Daughter.”

These days Bernie is best known as the creator of The Jam, aka Gordon Kirby, a normal guy whose unorthodox hobby (patrolling rooftops in costume, on the hunt for evildoers) has unexpected consequences. His adventures have been published by the top publishers in the industry. This year Bernie joined with Nat Gertler’s About Comics imprint to release a brand new Jam comic, The Jam Super-Cool Color-Injected Turbo Adventure From Hell issue 2, financed by an independent cloud-funding effort, The Jam Non Starter Campaign. Here’s what Bernie told me when I asked about it:

The Jam non-starter campaign is meant to be a humorous imitation of a Kickstarter thing except the book is already done and ready to order through the aboutcomics.com portal. Also available is a recent Jam-related graphic novel and by the end of January, a trade paperback collection of the first five issues from the original fourteen issue series. I’m thrilled to be back in print, even on a small scale.

I’m very excited to see The Jam return to print. Check out the promo video above, have a look at the campaign here — and help one of the most creative comic artists in the industry return his legendary creation to print. The world will thank you.

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The New Zu Review

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The New Zu Review

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Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (Hong Kong, 1983)

The worldwide success of the Star Wars movies, followed by that of Conan the Barbarian, opened the funding floodgates for fantasy films, not just in Hollywood and Europe, but in Asia as well. Of course, Asian cinema had a tradition of making movies of fables and horror stories dating back to the silent era, but the new, hot trend out of Hollywood was combining such themes with heavy special effects support. Filmmakers in Japan, Hong Kong, and even Indonesia were eager to follow that trend, and though they had solid experience with practical effects and models, building the capacity to add sophisticated animation would take time and investment. But Asian filmmakers had no shortage of wild visual ideas to portray with the new special effects, as we’ll see from the early examples below.

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New Treasures: City of Iron and Dust by J.P. Oakes

New Treasures: City of Iron and Dust by J.P. Oakes

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City of Iron and Dust (Titan Books, July 2021). Cover by Shutterstock/Julia Lloyd

I don’t know much about J.P. Oakes. He lives on Long Island, City of Iron and Dust was his first (and so far only) novel, and he keeps a low profile.

But I know that the moment I read the back of City of Iron and Dust I wanted to buy it. It’s the tale of a goblin princess, the aftermath of a terrible war, an old soldier plotting a revolution, and The Iron City, a “singular dark fantasy creation that breathes with menace and decay.” (Paul Jessup, author of The Silence That Binds.)

Paul Di Filippo calls it “a grim’n’gritty yet often blackly humorous political-coup-cum-caper novel… [a] lusty, brutal, philosophical excursion.” Here’s an excerpt from his entertaining review at Locus Online.

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Twilight: 2000 Reflections

Twilight: 2000 Reflections

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For Black Gate, I spent much of 2021 re-visiting Twilight: 2000‘s first edition adventures and sourcebooks. Twilight: 2000, published by GDW in the mid 1980s, absorbed into its setting much of the worries and fears of the late Cold War — but turned it into a game. The Soviet Union and China begin a war that eventually brings in the rest of the world. While the war is starts out as conventional, the temptation to use tactical nuclear weapons cannot be held back. The world inches across into nuclear Armageddon.

While Twilight: 2000 was not unique in suggesting a nuclear apocalypse, it did have a compelling twist that differentiated it from things like Mad Max or By Dawn’s Early Light: it happens in the immediate aftermath. Armageddon is happening — society is breaking down. National governments like the US or USSR exercise very little control. Environmental devastation is in the early stages. Yet people continue to live. Some even continue to fight the war. Most try to simply survive.

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What I’ve Been Watching: (A BritBox) December 2021

What I’ve Been Watching: (A BritBox) December 2021

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One of these five doesn’t make it out of the pilot. Cast changes began early!

During my hiatus from Black Gate, I watched a lot of shows, and some movies. And I grabbed a BritBox subscription, so today, we’re going across the pond. I might drop a minor item here and there, but these reviews are mostly spoiler-free.

DEATH IN PARADISE

I had just finished season four of this enjoyable British police show on Netflix, back when the newly-created BritBox snatched this – and many other shows – away. I recently got a ‘two months for $2’ deal through Prime, and lo and behold, I had access to this show again. Season 10 wrapped up in February of 2021, and it just started season eleven last week, over on the BBC. I was pleased when a Christmas episode dropped just a few weeks ago. With a BIG surprise!

The basic premise is that Scotland Yard assigns a DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) to duty on the island of Saint Marie (pronounced ‘San Marie’), located in the Lesser Antilles. Saint Marie was turned over to the British by the French roughly forty years before the show starts. So, it still has a French-Caribbean culture.

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An Anthology for Anthologists: Continuum by Roger Elwood

An Anthology for Anthologists: Continuum by Roger Elwood

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Continuum 1-4 (Berkley Medallion paperback editions, 1975-76). Covers by Vincent Di Fate

The accolade “anthologist” is not easily obtained. One can only imagine the effort spent splicing different elements into a cohesive anthology that sits well, and with a theme that attracts buyers.

Roger Elwood (1943-2007) most definitely earned that title, having put together 64 mostly science fiction anthologies between 1964 and 1980. Like many of his peers, he was also an author who published a small number of fiction novels and short stories, not to mention editing the short-lived Odyssey magazine (1976).

This article is not a celebration of Mr. Elwood’s career, though. I want to look at an intriguing oddity from the the past century, a 4-volume anthology series he edited titled Continuum.

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Vintage Treasures: Tales of Robin Hood by Clayton Emery

Vintage Treasures: Tales of Robin Hood by Clayton Emery

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Tales of Robin Hood (Baen, 1988). Cover by Larry Elmore

I’m a sucker for Robin Hood stories, and that’s probably why I bought Clayton Emery’s Tales of Robin Hood in 1988. Well, that and the fact that I thought it was an anthology. It’s actually a novel, a magical take on the legend of Sherwood Forest, with witches, demon boars, black-robed monks, and a Robin “attacked on all sides by sorcery and sword.”

Clayton Emery had a steady career as a TSR author in the late 90s, producing a series of Forgotten Realms books including the Netheril Trilogy (1996-98) and the third novel in the Lost Empires series, Star of Cursrah (1999), plus six Magic: The Gathering titles, including the Legends Cycle (2001-2). Tales of Robin Hood was originally published as a paperback by Baen and pretty much vanished without a trace, until iUniverse reprinted it in 2002 under the title Robin Hood and the Beasts of Sherwood. It caught on with modern readers in the new incarnation, and was warmly reviewed by a new generation of readers.

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A Philosophical Policeman: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

A Philosophical Policeman: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

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Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left—sanity.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), by G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, is a wondrous amalgam of thriller, mystery, boys’ adventure, and Christian allegory wrapped in a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of a cabal of anarchists plotting to blow things up. Gabriel Syme is a poet who fears the world is destined for destruction under a wave of moral relativism and nihilism. He is recruited to a special anti-anarchist unit of the British police by a mysterious figure who remains hidden in the shadows. …

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