Black Gate

It’s Thanksgiving here in the United States.  One of the better holidays ever invented, even if you’re a displaced Canadian like me.

In addition to eating, putting the finishing touches on BG 14, eating, writing my editorial, and eating, I’ll be stealing a few hours for leisure reading. Thanksgiving weekend usually involves at least a little travel (this year we’re celebrating in Madison, Wisconsin, three hours from our home in St. Charles, IL), so anything too long is out.  I need something I can finish in short bursts, in between sequential naps in a big green recliner.

Fortunately, a perfectly apropos choice landed on my doorstep last month, compliments of the Library of America. Peter Straub’s two-volume American Fantastic Tales, subtitled Terror and the Uncanny, is one of those genre-defining collections, a banquet of spooky fall reading that will likely last me months. And just like Thanksgiving, it’s unapologetically American in focus.

As we’ve already established, I’m a sucker for big retrospective collections.  This one reminds me of a favorite from my childhood, Anthony Boucher’s seminal two-volume A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. Gathering numerous tales of vintage SF and even a few complete novels (including Alfred Bester’s The Stars Our Destination and A.E. Van Vogt’s The Weapons Shops of Isher), it captivated me for weeks in the summer of 1977, most of which I spent reading in the trailer in our back yard. 

Straub doesn’t include any novels among his selections.  But like Boucher’s classic, American Fantastic Tales is huge — nearly 1,5oo pages of fiction, carefully selected to showcase the best horror tales in American history, from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Joe Hill, Kelly Link, and Michael Chabon.

Volume One, From Poe to the Pulps, features Herman Melville, Robert W. Chambers, Edith Wharton, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch and many others.  Volume Two, From the 1940s to Now, includes John Cheever, Charles Beaumont, Vladimir Nabokov, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, John Crowley, Stephen King, Steven Millhauser, and over a dozen more.

While I sometimes wished for a few more editorial notes on the selections, overall I’m very impressed.   I’m sure this collection (also available in a handsome boxed set from Amazon) will be on more than a few Christmas wish lists.

I hope you find suitable treasures of your own to snuggle down with this weekend. Happy Thanksgiving, Black Gate readers.

Though I had unrealistic high hopes for the remake of The Prisoner, if only because of the presence of Ian McKellan, early returns are not good,other than noting that Ian McKellan is the only redeeming value.

Sigh. I guess the success of Battlestar Galactica and perhaps also the Star Trek reboot resulted in unwarranted optimism about remakes, as the track record remains mostly abysmal, with the exceptions proving the rule. And the exceptions usually have the advantage of source material in sore need of improvement.

On a more positive note, I just finished Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City I’ve only read a few reviews, and then only just skimmed them, which can be the only explanation why I haven’t seen anyone draw the obvious line between Philip Dick and this novel. Besides the overall Dickian theme of “just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me,” one example of Lethem’s riffs on Dick is the protagonist’s highly publicized relationship with his astronaut fiancée, trapped in orbit by Chinese mines, whose love letters try to make the best of both their situations. I’m assuming it is not coincidental that in Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, the character Walt Dangerfield is also stuck in permanent orbit around the earth, and whose daily broadcasts inspire his devoted listeners to carry on in the aftermath of catastrophe. Somewhere, there’s a master’s thesis in picking out all the Dickian parables in Lethem’s wonderful novel.

You might have to be a bit of a geek to appreciate this (and would you be reading this if your weren’t?). Highly recommended.

I just turned the game reviews over to John O’Neill. It’s the last section — save for the Knights of the Dinner Table art — that was needed to complete the upcoming issue, most of which John already has set up for the printer.

You may have noticed lately that all the game reviews are favorable. It’s not that we don’t find bad modules, it’s that we like to devote our rather limited space to describing goodies we think our readers would enjoy.

This time we’ve got a big review for Paizo’s impressive Pathfinder Role-Playing game core rulebook. The indefatigable Andrew Zimmerman Jones (no relation despite certain name similarities) dug in deep and then took the rules for a spin with several Paizo modules.

Vincent Darlage’s excellent Ruins of Hyboria was covered in detail by the EvilDM himself, Jeff Mejia, and I enlisted Vincent to write up some reviews of several Goodman Games products. Though not really a Dungeons and Dragons fan, he was quite taken with Blackdirge’s Dungeon Denizens, as well as the Cortex system from Margaret Weiss games.

New reviewer Robert Rowe took a long look at the Mongoose Games new Judge Dredd hardback.

I’m an unrepentant Traveller fan, so I was delighted to find much to like in the new Mongoose Traveller releases Aslan and Tripwire.  As sword-and-sorcery is my favorite genre, my heart was won by Legends of Steel. .

It’s a big issue, and I think you’ll like our broadselection of product reviews, among them info on an innovative science fiction game, Far Avalon, from one of my favorite game writers, and Shard, a nifty game Andrew stumbled across at Gen Con this year.

Perhaps the biggest surprise to me was a boardgame I’d been sent. I foolishly put off reviewing it until the last possible moment, never dreaming how much fun it would be to run with the family. I tested out the game with HeroScape’s new wave 9 products (I especially liked the Mohican Indians that came in two of the four expansion packets) with my good friend bthepilot and two young gamers I found loitering in my living room, and all four of us were converted. I’ll explain why inside the issue. I hope to cover HeroScape’s wave 10 products and their new Dungeons & Dragons playset in an upcoming issue. Be warned — I’ll probably do my best to convert all of you into players.

All of these products and more will be reviewed in depth in the upcoming issue of Black Gate, available in December. See you there!

–Howard Andrew Jones