Black Gate – Page 208 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume One edited by Paula Guran and The Best Horror of the Year Volume Twelve edited by Ellen Datlow

Sunday, October 18, 2020 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror Volume One-small

The Best Horror of the Year Volume Twelve-small

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume One (Pyr) and The Best Horror of the Year Volume Twelve
(Night Shade Books). Both published October 20, 2020. Covers by unknown and Reiko Murakami

The pandemic has shaken up publishing schedules, including the usual batch of Year’s Best anthologies. (The 2020 edition of Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy didn’t have a publication date until last week; it now looks like it will appear Dec. 8 from Prime Books.) But as we near the end of the year we’re seeing a much more crowded release schedule — and in fact on Tuesday of this week two of the most anticipated anthologies of the year will be released on the same day: Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume One from Pyr, and The Best Horror of the Year Volume Twelve, edited by Ellen Datlow, from Night Shade Books.

Paula published ten volumes of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror with Prime Books; we covered the last in November of 2019. This year she’s switched to Pyr, who published the annual Nebula Awards Showcase for many years. The 2020 volume looks especially appetizing, wth 25 stories and over 400 pages. Authors include Theodora Goss, Maria Dahvana Headley, Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Sarah Pinsker, Angela Slatter, Rivers Solomon, and many more. Here’s the complete table of contents.

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Survive in a Post Apocalyptic World: Posthuman Saga by Mighty Boards

Saturday, October 17, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Posthuman Saga by Mighty Boards

I miss walking the crowded aisles at Gen Con. In fact, these days I wonder if we’ll ever see something like the vast Exhibit Hall of Gen Con ever again. Hundreds and hundreds of vendors proudly displaying wares, and tens of thousands of eager gamers, all crammed into a vast indoor space bigger than a football stadium. And I do mean crammed — sometimes those narrow aisles were so packed you could barely move.

Just the thought of that makes my skin crawl these days. Talk about a potential pandemic superspreader event. You could take out an entire generation of gamers in 72 hours. Yiiiii.

Like all major social gatherings this year, Gen Con 2020 was canceled. But that’s okay. Truth be told, I’m still processing the hundreds of photos I took as I wandered the Hall in awe the year before. The impossibly large Gen Con Exhibit Hall is something every gamer should experience at least once, if only to get a sense of the vast scale and enormous creative energy in our hobby. It’s been fourteen months, and I’m still a little overwhelmed by the experience.

I’ve slowly been processing it all by writing about the games that most impressed me, like Alien: The Roleplaying Game, The City of Kings, Escape the Dark Castle, and Heroes of Land, Air & Sea. And now we come at last to one of the most visually impressive titles on my list, Posthuman Saga by Mighty Boards, which throws players into a beautifully designed and adventure-filled post apocalyptic world.

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Weird Tales Deep Read: May 1923

Saturday, October 17, 2020 Comments 0 Comment

Cover by William Heitman

This time we’re considering another early Weird Tales, the third issue, May 1923. This was one of the oversized bed-sheet sized issues and contained 21 stories by 22 authors. Astonishingly, fourteen of these authors were one and done, with no additional published stories in the sf/fan field. Another two have two stories listed at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

The two most significant authors in this issue are Vincent Starrett, a long-time newspaper man who produced several out of genre books and a single slim collection of fantasy stories published by Arkham House in 1965. The other is Edward Bulwar-Lytton (yes, of a “dark and stormy night” fame), represented by a reprint that is more of a curiosity than anything else.

The other author worth commenting is Culpeper Chunn (a byline that screams pseudonym), whose real name was Seymour Cunningham Chunn (1889-1927). His two stories in Weird Tales are his only listed genre works, but if you google his name you’ll find repeated offers for his book Plotting the Short Story (it’s in public domain, so naturally it’s currently available in countless editions, even on Amazon) so he must have some kind of track record, somewhere. But that’s not why he gets a mention here. The protagonist of “The Whispering Thing,” co-authored by Laurie McClintock (who otherwise has left no trace in the written record), is Jules Peret, a French-born ex-policeman and current consulting detective, “a small, effeminate man with delicate features, small hands and feet,” given to uttering extravagant oaths. Sound familiar? The first Jules de Granden story appeared in Weird Tales in 1925. I have no explanation for this extraordinary coincidence.

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Rogue Blades presents: “Deep in the Land of Ice and Snow”

Friday, October 16, 2020 Ty Johnston Comments 0 Comment

My short story “Deep in the Land of Ice and Snow” originally appeared in the collection The Return of the Sword: An Anthology of Heroic Adventure by Rogue Blades Entertainment. Enjoy.

The wolves were too many. Belgad knew that as he soon as he spotted the beasts. There were nearly a score of them, and if that were not bad enough, the creatures were huge, each nearly the size of a riding pony. What was worse, the wolves were quiet and had managed to surround him without his spying them sooner.

No, this was no ordinary pack. They had appeared from nowhere, and they had no qualms about scaling the side of a mountain for their human prey.

Belgad forced himself to climb higher, the bitter cold winds whipping at his long yellow hair. His fingers, the tips protruding from rags he had used to swaddle them, gripped the edge of another boulder and lifted him with the help of solid placement from his fur-lined boots.

On top of the boulder, Belgad found a flat spot and sat there, letting the cold air fill his tired lungs. His body needed rest after days of hiking dense forests and climbing steep hills, but he would not close his eyes; the wolves were drawing nearer, below and above. It would only be a matter of time before they would pounce.

After what felt like hours to the big man wrapped in furs, one of the wolves, the largest, began to creep its way along a narrow path toward him.

Belgad watched the animal with anticipation, knowing soon he would be in battle.

Eventually the wolf was below Belgad, just out of reach of the man’s legs hanging off the side of his stone seat.

“Will you eat me today, wolf?” the large man said to the animal.

The wolf’s only reply was uplifted ears and a tilted head.

“I think not,” Belgad said, drawing in his legs and pushing off them so he was standing on the boulder.

The wolf blinked, and that was when Belgad took notice of its eyes. The animal had eyes the shade of morning blue ice.

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Fantasia Extra: Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin

Friday, October 16, 2020 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

For my last Fantasia post of 2020, I’m again going back to cover something I was too fatigued to get to in a previous year. In 2017 publisher Spectacular Optical put out Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, a collection of essays by women scholars. The book launched at Fantasia and I asked for a pdf, then was too wiped out after the festival and for some time beyond to write a review. Although the book’s currently sold out, I’m reflecting on it now for three reasons. The first is simply because I dislike yielding to fatigue permanently. The second is that I think it’s worth writing a bit about Rollin, who I had not heard of in 2017, who does not seem to have been previously mentioned on this web site, and whose films of the fantastic are (to judge by this book) worth covering here. The third is to consider more generally the experience of reading about film, especially films one has not seen.

Let me start with Lost Girls. Edited by Samm Deighan, it’s 437 pages long, with a foreward, 16 essays, and an afterword. The tone’s academic but still accessible to a general audience — there are references and lists of works cited, and a general interest in placing Rollin within a broader cultural and intellectual context, but the essays tend to avoid the intricately theoretical and recondite. The book’s lavishly illustrated, with stills from Rollin’s films sometimes sharing a page with text they’re illustrating, and at other times assembled into two-page spreads.

Given the nature of Rollin’s work, there’s a lot of blood and nudity in the pictures. From this book and what I’ve read elsewhere I gather that while Rollin made low-budget films across a number of genres he’s best known for a cycle of movies in the 70s that combined horror, erotica, and arthouse surrealism. Ostensible exploitation films had their genre conventions undermined by ambiguity and mythopoeic imagery. Women were leads, heroes and villains and both in one; thus the idea of a book about Rollin by women, examining a male filmmaker whose work was ostensibly gazing upon often-nude young women but who also gave those characters unusual agency and range.

The essays in Lost Girls are generally respectful of Rollin. The book moves in a roughly chronological arc across his career, perhaps focussing especially on his early vampire films: Le viol du vampire (The Rape of the Vampire, 1968), La vampire nue (The Nude Vampire, 1970), Le frisson des vampires (The Shiver of the Vampires, 1971), and Requiem pour un vampire (Requiem For A Vampire, 1971). Recurring imagery in Rollin’s films is considered, as are his influences from the serial form, and fable-like or fairy-tale characteristics of his stories.

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New Treasures: Dead Man in a Ditch by Luke Arnold

Friday, October 16, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The Last Smile in Sunder City and Dead Man in a Ditch by Luke Arnold (Orbit, 2020). Covers by Emily Courdelle

Luke Arnold is an Australian actor and star of the pirate saga Black Sails. He played Silver John, a younger version of Long John Silver, the antagonist of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and one of the greatest characters in English literature.

Arnold is also an author, and earlier this year his fantasy debut The Last Smile in Sunder City (Orbit, February 2020) was selected by io9 as one of the SF & fantasy titles You Need to Know About. Kirkus gave it a warm review, saying:

The debut novel from Australian actor Arnold is a fusion of paranormal fantasy and mystery set in a world where magic has been effectively destroyed by humans, forcing the supernatural population to live a radically diminished existence. Fetch Phillips is a “Man for Hire,” which is another way of saying the down-on-his-luck, hard-drinking former Soldier–turned-detective will do just about anything to pay the bills. When a principal from a cross-species school enlists him to find a missing professor — a 300-year-old Vampire named Edmund Rye — Phillips quickly agrees. Without magic, the Vampires — and all other supernatural beings — are slowly dying. So how difficult could it be to find a withered bloodsucker who is so weak he can hardly move around?… The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and Dashiell Hammett.

Orbit promised the second volume would arrive in the Fall, and low and behold Dead Man in a Ditch arrived right on time last month. Here’s an excerpt from Annie Deo’s enthusiastic review at Nerd Daily.

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Goth Chick News: Revisiting Hemlock Grove for Halloween

Thursday, October 15, 2020 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy (FSG Originals, April 16, 2013)

When Netflix first premiered Hemlock Grove back in April 2013, it was originally aimed at an audience of teenage horror fans. The cast was ridiculously good-looking, twenty-somethings playing high schoolers living in an insanely quaint and beautiful New England town. It might have been The Addams Family meets 90210, or at the time, a darker alternative to the anxiety-ridden vampires du jour of the Twilight series.

What we got instead, at least in Season 1, was an intricate and blood-soaked modern retelling of pretty much every classic monster imaginable. Hemlock Grove is a tale well worth you visiting (or revisiting) this Halloween season.

An American horror/thriller from executive producer Eli Roth (Grindhouse and Hostel) and developed by Brian McGreevy and Lee Shipman, Hemlock Grove is based on McGreevy’s 2012 novel of the same name. It examines the strange happenings in a fictional town in Pennsylvania where a teenage girl is brutally murdered, sparking a hunt for her killer. Roman Godfrey, heir to the town’s wealthy Godfrey family, befriends the town’s newcomer and gypsy outcast, Peter Rumancek and the two work together to shed light on the case while also concealing their own dark secrets.

I managed to find Hemlock Grove’s one and only red band trailer which should make you at least a little curious to check it out.

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Fantasia Extra: 1BR

Thursday, October 15, 2020 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

1BR Last year I almost reviewed a movie at Fantasia called 1BR. But exhaustion got to me as the festival wore on, and I passed on the film. I’m never happy about having to compromise with fatigue, though, and since 1BR recently came to Netflix — where for a while it was among their 10 most-streamed movies, at one point even reaching the top 5 — I decided to rectify last year’s omission and take a look at it now.

Written and directed by David Marmor, his first feature film, it follows Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom), a young woman who feels estranged from her father (Alan Blumenfeld). Working in Los Angeles as a temp with aspirations to become a costume designer, she finds her first apartment as the film opens. Though the plumbing makes strange noises, her neighbours seem nice and Sarah befriends an old former actress named Edie (Susan Davis) while being drawn to the handsome Brian (Giles Matthey). But creepy one-eyed Lester (Clayton Hoff) keeps trying to push a weird old book about community. And Sarah’s got a secret: she moved in with her cat, Giles, even though building manager Jerry (Taylor Nichols) told her there were no pets allowed.

In fact things are worse than Sarah imagines. It turns out the book about community’s a bible for the apartment block — and that all the residents are part of a cult-like group prepared to force Sarah to join them. Acts of physical and psychological torture follow. Sarah is broken down and slowly builds herself back up, and it all builds remorselessly to a powerfully symbolic final shot.

The movie works because it pays so much attention to Sarah’s character, as well as the people around her. Bloom brings out Sarah’s flaws as well as her strengths. She is thoughtless enough to sneak the cat into a pet-free building without thinking about other people’s allergies. And she is weak-willed, unformed in certain ways as the film starts. The story has a strong subtext investigating her feelings about her father and unconscious search for replacement father figures; it’s a horror-thriller as bildungsroman, building to an overtly Freudian choice with an icepick.

The movie’s tone and visuals bring this out quite nicely. The film’s drenched with warm sunlight in its exterior shots, presenting a kind of warmth that echoes the self-image of the residents of the apartment block. Interiors of Sarah’s apartment emphasise bare white walls and wooden floors, the unyielding emptiness of unfurnished rooms. There’s a lovely moment early on as Sarah tries to sleep in her new apartment, which I think captures the dislocation of the experience of the first night in a new home. Conversely, later in the film all the homier scenes become unreal, as the rules and philosophy of the community become more detailed. The imagery of the building interiors ironically underscore the extreme rejection of the outer world and the unreality of the residents’ world-view, the willed aversion to external fact they push on Sarah.

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Life, Death, and Different Kinds of Men: Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon

Thursday, October 15, 2020 Mark R. Kelly Comments 5 comments

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys; First Edition: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1960.
Cover art Richard Powers. (Click to enlarge)

Rogue Moon
by Algis Budrys
Fawcett Gold Medal (176 pages, $0.35 paperback, 1960)
Cover art Richard Powers

Algis Budry’s 1960 novel Rogue Moon is an unusual book. It’s relatively short, even for SF novels of its era. It’s heavily character focused. And while it deals with a fascinating mystery concerning an alien artifact, on the Moon, it’s also about the bureaucracy behind the scientists and engineers, and as much about how different kinds of men react differently to the challenges of life and the inevitability of death. The story also features two women, who use analogous means to get what they want.

There are two central science fictional premises. First, humans deal with a kind of alien strangeness that cannot be comprehended, and which in this case is usually deadly. Second is the consideration of the implications of a matter transmission device, an idea treated casually in most SF (especially in Star Trek), but that raises profound concerns about matters of the “soul” or, setting that notion aside, the consequences of simple duplication. (James Blish, to his credit as transcriber of Star Trek episodes, took on this question in his one original Trek novel, Spock Must Die! (1970).)

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Stellar Empires and Space Pirates: Blackwood & Virtue by Bennett R. Coles

Wednesday, October 14, 2020 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Winds of Marque Blackwood & Virtue-small

Dark Star Rising Blackwood & Virtue-small

Winds of Marque 2019 first edition (left, cover by Damonza) and 2020 re-release (middle, artist uncredited),
and the sequel Dark Star Rising (2020, uncredited). Published by Harper Voyager

Winds of Marque, the first volume in Bennett R. Coles’ Blackwood & Virtue space fantasy series, got my attention last year. Maybe it was the dynamite cover by Damonza, with the gorgeous orbital imagery — the four-masted deep space schooner and crossed swords — but I don’t know. I think I just have a soft spot for space pirate tales.

The book got fine notices. Publishers Weekly called it a “mix of retro and future naval adventures… Science fiction fans of the Hornblower or Aubrey/Maturin sailing sagas will likely thrill,” and Kirkus raved:

With solar sails hoisted and war with the Sectoids imminent, Imperial Navy Subcmdr. Liam Blackwood, enigmatic quartermaster Amelia Virtue, and the crew of the HMSS Daring must stop space pirates from disrupting human supply lines in the outer sectors in the first book in a new series…. the jaunty pace is unwavering and enjoyable… Traditional science fiction lovers may get distracted looking for more space tech, but lovers of classic high-seas adventures and those who enjoy genre-bending SF will find this swashbuckling space adventure a worthy read.

But a funny thing happened before the arrival of the second volume. Harper Voyager jettisoned the original cover for the June mass market reissue of Winds of Marque, replacing it with a much more staid portrait of second-in-command Liam Blackwood, looking pensive and square-jawed on deck. Dark Star Rising, when it arrived in September, featured a matching rendition of plucky quartermaster Amelia Virtue (the second half of “Blackwood & Virtue”) in an action pose. Now the books look a lot more like seafaring romances, and not space opera adventures.

Well, perhaps that’s the intention. I’m still deciding if I’ll pick up the second volume. Let me know what you think in the comments.