Goth Chick News: The Stoker Awards Are Back, And I Need One

Goth Chick News: The Stoker Awards Are Back, And I Need One

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Gather round friends – as we’re all still stuck at home, we can at least take consolation in the idea that writers all over the world continue to have plenty of time to create stories with which to entertain us. And as always, the end of January gifts us with the most awesome reading/watching list of the year: the annual preliminary ballot list for the coolest award ever.

The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Several members of the HWA, including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse such writing awards, fearing it would incite competitiveness rather than friendly admiration. The HWA therefore went to great lengths to avoid mean-spirited competition by specifically seeking out new or overlooked writers and works, and officially issuing awards not based on “best of the year” criteria but for “superior achievement,” which allows for ties.

Which is lovely and all, but I believe I would not be above doing something mean-spirited — if not downright evil — to get my hands on the award itself; a haunted house whose front door opens to reveal the category and winner.

This week the HWA announced the preliminary ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Awards. And whatever you do, do not call these folks nominees (yet). Only works that appear on the Stoker Award’s “Final Ballot,” to be formally announced on February 23, may be called nominees.

Therefore, the preliminary ballot achievers are…

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Nerd Daily on 48 Fantasy & Sci-Fi Book Releases To Look Out For In 2021

Nerd Daily on 48 Fantasy & Sci-Fi Book Releases To Look Out For In 2021

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2020 was pretty hard on publishing. But 2021 seems to be a year of recovering — and fast recovery at that. Over at Nerd Daily Elise Dumpleton has compiled 48 Fantasy & Sci-Fi Book Releases To Look Out For In 2021, and it’s a pretty spectacular list. Here’s a few of the highlights.

Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley (Solaris, 336 pages, $24.99 hardcover/$8.99 digital, March 16, 2021)

Drink down the brew and dream of a better Earth.

Skyward Inn, within the high walls of the Western Protectorate, is a place of safety, where people come together to tell stories of the time before the war with Qita.

But safety from what? Qita surrendered without complaint when Earth invaded; Innkeepers Jem and Isley, veterans from either side, have regrets but few scars.

Their peace is disturbed when a visitor known to Isley comes to the Inn asking for help, bringing reminders of an unnerving past and triggering an uncertain future.

Did humanity really win the war?

Aliya Whiteley is the author of The Arrival of Missives (2018) and The Beauty, a dystopian horror filled with cosmic weirdness, strange fungi, and terrifying tales told around post-apocalyptic campfires, which we covered back in 2018.

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Dark Orbits

Dark Orbits

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Space vampires!

Barbarian babes!

Psychedelic murder!

Dark Orbits is an animated science fiction series brimming with so many ideas that a rift had to be opened to another universe just to make room for them all. The only thing more amazing than the fact that this whole series is apparently produced by one person is the number of Youtube views it’s garnered. And by that I mean … way too few. Seriously, the first episode, Arrival, hasn’t even broken the 1,000 mark. The number of subscribers hasn’t even broken the 500 mark.

And this is absolutely the sort of show I’ve wanted to see for years. There are shades of Aeon Flux, Ralph Bakshi, and 1981’s Heavy Metal in every episode. What’s it about? Like Aeon Flux, the series is largely dialogue-free, leaving the viewer to work out exactly what’s going on. But basically, a rift in spacetime has been opened near an alien planet. Ships drawing too close to the rift encounter … strangeness. Meanwhile, inhabitants on the planet’s surface have to deal with all of these bizarre visitors.

Like Heavy Metal, there are several different stories and each episode focuses on either the spaceship crew sent to investigate the rift, the primitive pseudo-Amazon tribes on the planet’s surface, or what appear to be several different alien vampire cults vying for hosts. After ten episodes, there are hints of how the stories are connected, making it a series that rewards repeat viewing.

As for the animation, I have trouble believing that this series was done by one person, since the quality is consistently high. The animation style lends itself to action-focused storylines with bizarre alien creatures. Nothing is meant to look realistic and the plot, music, and animation come together to give the whole thing a dreamy, trippy vibe.

If you just want a taste, check out the promo trailer. The whole series (ten episodes at the time of this article) can be viewed back to back in less than an hour’s time. While it’s free on Youtube, you can also support the creator through Patreon. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Hammer Horror Historicals!

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Hammer Horror Historicals!

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Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960)

Hammer Films was a London studio founded in 1934, but it didn’t really make much of a mark until the mid-Fifties, when they hit their stride with a revival of the Gothic horror genre. With dependable leads in Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and (later) Oliver Reed, they just about owned the horror category from 1955 through 1965 but were successful enough to branch out into other genres as well, including historical swashbucklers, all with that distinctive Hammer look and feel. Let’s take a look at how they did with outlaw rogues, pirates, cavaliers, and roundheads. Batten down the hatches, it’s Christopher Lee in an eyepatch, swabs!

Sword of Sherwood Forest

Rating: ****
Origin: U.K., 1960
Director: Terence Fisher
Source: Columbia Pictures DVD

For a low-budget movie made by a small studio just establishing its style — the U.K.’s Hammer Films — this is quite good. The marquee draw is Richard Greene as Robin Hood, coming off his four-season star turn in the same role on the popular Adventures of… TV show; at the time, starring in a feature film, even a modest one, carried far more prestige than even a hit television series, so in some ways this movie is the capstone of Greene’s career. However, this is a standalone Robin Hood movie whose story is unconnected with the show, and none of the other TV cast members appear in it — which is a bit of a shame, because their replacements in the corresponding parts aren’t always better. There’s one conspicuous exception: Hammer stalwart Peter Cushing plays the Sheriff of Nottingham, and his cold, blue stare brings a menace to the role never seen in the TV show. Indeed, the tone of this production is two shades darker than that of the series, grimmer and with higher stakes.

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New Treasures: Legends of Eerie-on-sea by Thomas Taylor

New Treasures: Legends of Eerie-on-sea by Thomas Taylor

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Malamander and Gargantis by Thomas Taylor (Walker Books, 2019-21). Cover art by George Ermos

Sometimes it seems all my best book purchases are impulse buys. Last summer, while browsing the shelves at Barnes in Noble, I came across Malamander, the opening novel in a new middle-grade fantasy series by Thomas Taylor titled Legends of Eerie-on-sea. I was sold less than halfway though the book description on the back.

Nobody visits Eerie-on-Sea in the winter. Especially not when darkness falls and the wind howls around Maw Rocks and the wreck of the battleship Leviathan, where even now some swear they have seen the unctuous Malamander creep…

It’s winter in the town of Eerie-on-Sea, where the mist is thick and the salt spray is rattling the windows of the Grand Nautilus Hotel. Inside, young Herbert Lemon, Lost and Founder for the hotel, has an unexpected visitor. It seems that Violet Parma, a fearless girl around his age, lost her parents at the hotel when she was a baby, and she’s sure that the nervous Herbert is the only person who can help her find them. The trouble is, Violet is being pursued at that moment by a strange hook-handed man. And the town legend of the Malamander — a part-fish, part-human monster whose egg is said to make dreams come true — is rearing its scaly head. As various townspeople, some good-hearted, some nefarious, reveal themselves to be monster hunters on the sly, can Herbert and Violet elude them and discover what happened to Violet’s kin? This lighthearted, fantastical mystery, featuring black-and-white spot illustrations, kicks off a trilogy of fantasies set in the seaside town.

The sequel, Gargantis, was published in hardcover last year, and will be released in paperback in April. Here’s the complete details.

Malamander (290 pages, $7.99 paperback/$0.99 digital, May 2, 2019) — cover by George Ermos, illustrations by Tom Booth
Gargantis (352 pages, $7.99 paperback/$16.99 digital, April 6, 2021) — cover by George Ermos, illustrations by Tom Booth

The series in published by Walker Books in the US. See all our coverage New Releases here.

Alien Eggs, a Diligent Salesman, and a Robot Psychiatrist: Three Stories by Idris Seabright

Alien Eggs, a Diligent Salesman, and a Robot Psychiatrist: Three Stories by Idris Seabright

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The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1952. Cover art by Chesley Bonestell

For my next look at older stories which I think are both good, and worth looking at closely, I’m covering three stories by one “Idris Seabright.” “Who she?” you might ask, or even “Who he?,” as the currently most famous Idris in the world is a man. “Idris Seabright” was a pseudonym used by the SF writer Margaret St. Clair for about 20 stories, all in the ‘50s. The “Seabright” name was used almost exclusively for stories published in F&SF – the single exception is one of her most famous stories, “Short in the Chest,” which appeared in Fantastic Universe. (The ISFDB credits a curious Seabright outlier, a story published in Spanish only, very late in St. Clair’s life, in 1991. I feel this must be a translation of an earlier Seabright story though I’m not sure which one. The story is called “La Estrana Tienda,” which means “The Strange Store” or perhaps “The Mysterious Shop.”)

Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995) was one of the more noticeable early women writers of SF, but somehow her profile was a bit lower than those of C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and Andre Norton. I guess I’d say that those writers did just a bit more, and were just a bit better (taken as a whole) than her, but it does seem that she’s not quite as well remembered as perhaps she deserves. One contributing factor is probably, however, that many of her best and most interesting stories were as by “Idris Seabright.” In addition, those of her novels I’ve read were less successful than her short fiction. Her career in SF stretched from 1946 to 1981. Her husband, Eric St. Clair, was also a writer (of children’s books), and the two became Wiccans more or less when the Wiccan movement started.

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Betrayals, Assassins, and the Voices of the Dead: The Reborn Empire by Devin Madson

Betrayals, Assassins, and the Voices of the Dead: The Reborn Empire by Devin Madson

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Cover art by Nico Delort

Orbit Books has impressed me with its editorial acumen over the past half-decade. Last year it acquired Devin Madson’s self published fantasy We Ride the Storm, the tale of a war-torn empire crumbling in the face of a growing number of enemies. Kirkus called it “The first in a bold new series… A slow-building tale of court intrigue that picks up lots of steam on its way to a shocking finish,” saying:

Miko is a princess of Kisia, an empire left in fragments following the recent coup that cost her father his life and saw her stepfather take the Crimson Throne. Rah hails from the loosely associated clans of Levanti — horse riders without kings who resist fighting others’ wars. Cassandra makes her living in sex and murder and moves through the world with another woman’s voice in her head. They do not know one another, but their lives will soon become hopelessly entangled… Although Madson takes her time putting the critical pieces into play, the betrayal that dooms the Kisian nobility to ruin sets off narrative fireworks, exposing the questionable motives of three nations’ leaders in a seemingly unending struggle for dominance.

The sequel, We Lie with Death, arrived in trade paperback earlier this month, and has been well received. Publishers Weekly says “The story moves at breakneck speed… this immersive, action-packed fantasy is sure to please.” Here’s the full details.

We Ride the Storm (Orbit Books, 474 pages, $15.99 in trade paperback/$4.99 digital, June 23, 2020) – cover by Nico Delort
We Lie with Death (Orbit Books, 576 pages, $17.99 in trade paperback/$9.99 digital, January 12, 2021) – cover by Nico Delort

The final volume in The Reborn Empire series, We Cry for Blood, will be released next year. See all our coverage of the best new series fantasy here.

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: 2020 Stay at Home – Days 18 and 19

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: 2020 Stay at Home – Days 18 and 19

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So, last year, as the Pandemic settled in like an unwanted relative who just came for a week and is still tying up the bathroom, I did  a series of posts for the FB Page of the Nero Wolfe fan club, The Wolfe Pack. I speculated on what Stay at Home would be like for Archie, living in the Brownstone with Nero Wolfe, Fritz Brenner, and Theodore Hortsmann. I have already reposted days one through fifteen. Here are days eighteen (April 8) and nineteen (April 9). It helps if you read the series in order, so I’ve included links to the earlier entries. I enjoy channeling Archie more than any other writing which I do.

DAY EIGHTEEN – 2020 Stay at Home

After lunch, I suggested that Fritz prepare some food for Doc Vollmer. I suspected he was volunteering at a local hospital, in addition to treating panicked patients in his practice. I felt a bit guilty, realizing I hadn’t checked on how he was doing at all. Fritz agreed we should feed him. Inviting a doctor over to dinner during a Pandemic was a terrible idea, of course. So Fritz planned a dinner that I could take down and leave on their porch. Helen Gillard had gotten married, and Julia Fellson was now his secretary and assistant. I told Fritz to make enough for both of them. I’m sure she could use a nice meal as well.

I called Julia later and found out that the doctor would be home around nine o’clock, if he didn’t get stuck at the hospital, which was often the case. She said that he was still healthy, but clearly running out of energy. Lately, she had gotten insistent he come home and get some rest, since he began seeing patients at 8 AM there in the brownstone. I thanked her and gave Fritz the update.

About 8:45, I called Vollmer’s office and got Julia. She was just closing up shop. He’d gotten home earlier than usual, but patients had shown up. I told her not to leave and that she was about to get a present on her doorstep. A picnic basket of Fritz’s food, with a bottle of wine and a note, was ready to go. He only lives a half a block away, so I was there in a shake. Julia was watching from the bay window in the front. I waved, showed her the basket, put it on the stoop, and blew her a kiss. She laughed and cried. I couldn’t imagine the daily strain she was under. I started walking back and heard the door open. I turned and she waved and said, “Thank you Archie, you’re a dear. And so are Fritz and Nero Wolfe.”

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God, Darkness, & Wonder: An Interview with Byron Leavitt

God, Darkness, & Wonder: An Interview with Byron Leavitt

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Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction

It is not intuitive to seek beauty in art deemed grotesque/weird, but most authors who produce horror/fantasy actually are usually (a) serious about their craft, and (b) driven by strange muses.  These interviews engage contemporary authors & artists on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Recent guests on Black Gate have included Darrell Schweitzer, Sebastian Jones,  Charles Gramlich, Anna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg. This one features Byron Leavitt, novelist and game-author for Diemension Games. 

Byron Leavitt is also the author of the bizarre children’s novel The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle (To Say Nothing of the Demon) and the non-fiction book Of Hope and Cancer: One Man’s Story of God, Darkness, and Wonder, as well as the story content for the board game Deep Madness and its accompanying book Shattered Seas (recently reviewed on BlackGate). Byron is currently working on the storybooks for the forthcoming Deep Madness prequel Dawn of Madness, a story-driven horror experience in a board game.

“Darkness. Light. Wonder. Beauty. God. Tentacles. Those who know me best would say that pretty well sums me up.” – Byron Leavitt

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Step into a World of RuneQuest Adventure with The Smoking Ruin and The Pegasus Plateau

Step into a World of RuneQuest Adventure with The Smoking Ruin and The Pegasus Plateau

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Cover art by Andrey Fetisov

Maybe it’s because I’ve only recently started paying close attention, but it seems to me that the RuneQuest RPG has been experiencing something of a renaissance since returning to the fold at Chaosium. Certainly there’s been a flurry of attention-grabbing new releases anyway, including the epic and original Red Cow campaign, the tale of a small clan’s desperate battle for freedom against the oppressive Lunar Empire, a tribe of werewolves, and even darker threats; the Rough Guide to Glamour, a compilation of long out-of-print articles on Lunar magic and colorful personalities; and of course the gorgeous new hardbound rulebooks.

But the drumbeat of new releases has not slowed, and I recently acquired two adventure anthologies that make excellent resources for any RPG fan: The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories, a collection of three long ready-to-play adventures, and The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories, containing seven shorter adventure scenarios.

Both are essential purchases for serious RuneQuest players. The first focuses on an area in Dragon Pass known as the South Wilds, and includes the full-length scenario “The Smoking Ruin,” in which the players tread the haunted streets of an ancient city in search of a lost artifact. The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories contains seven fast-run adventures set in ghoul-haunted catacombs, mystic ruins, the deserts of Prax, and the rocky pinnacle of the Pegasus Plateau. Both books are gorgeously designed and well written; here’s a peek at the lovely interiors.

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