I’ve been waiting for the sequel to R.S. Belcher’s Brotherhood of the Wheel since the book first appeared in 2016, and next week my wait is finally over. Expectations for King of the Road, the second book in the series, are high. In a starred review Publishers Weekly said, Belcher’s masterful storytelling and worldbuilding make for a gripping and consistently surprising follow-up to Brotherhood of the Wheel. Long-haul trucker Jimmie Aussapile; his squire, Hector “Heck” Sinclair; and Louisiana State Police…
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R.S. Belcher’s Golgotha series is one of the more popular Weird Westerns on the market. Booklist called the opening volume “nothing short of fantastic… a setting so sharp you can feel the dust in your mouth,” and San Francisco Book Review summed it up as “a whirlwind of shootouts, assassins, cults, zombies, magic, attractive ladies, dubious morals, and demonic possession.” Belcher kicked off a new series set in a seedy occult underworld with Nightwise in 2015. RT Book Reviews called it “brilliant……
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Cover by Stephen Fabian Intro 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 my strange muses. This interview series engages contemporary authors & artists on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Previously we cornered weird fantasy authors like John Fultz, Janeen Webb, Aliya Whiteley, and Richard Lee Byers. Today we hear from the legendary author and editor…
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And so we near the end of our months-long march through the ten books of Glen Cook’s groundbreaking Black Company series. While best remembered as one of the first military fantasy series, one important takeaway is that it’s not that at all. Yes, the Black Company, the last Free Company of Khatovar, is the main “character” of the books, but the tale told is filled with so much more than just war. War is always on the horizon, just a chapter or two…
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I wrote a post here at Black Gate about Nauglamir, the necklace of the dwarves. Personally, I would love to see that tale as a separate novella (note to self: I’ve written Doyle and Stout – do not take on Tolkien…). Today’s essay is about another item: a magic sword named Anglachel. It is really a minor element of the book, but the story of it weaves in and out of many other parts. That’s one of the true wonders…
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By Joe Bonadonna This is an excerpt from the novel Mad Shadows II — Dorgo the Dowser and The Order of the Serpent by Joe Bonadonna, presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Joe Bonadonna, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2017 by Joe Bonadonna. I guess a little introduction is in order. Since the 2011 publication of Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, a…
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About twenty years ago, I bought John Clute and John Grant’s The Encylopedia of Fantasy. I wasn’t reading much standard fantasy at the time, having abandoned it for science fiction and crime stories. As I pored over the Encyclopedia’s entries, several authors I’d never read caught my attention, enough so that I went out and bought books by them. That was I how I came to read Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry and Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy. While…
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I recently looked at a couple of issues of Fantastic with a Brak the Barbarian serial by John Jakes, and here’s another pair with a Brak serial. Indeed, this was Jakes’ first SF/Fantasy novel, and his second Brak story. The editorials cover first, Freeman Dyson’s ideas about using gravity as an energy source (for transportation), and second, the notion of having astronauts use crayons in orbit. The covers are by Alex Schomburg (November) and Paul E. Wenzel (December), in neither…
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For those of you who searched for the right way to describe your feelings for that certain special someone on February 14, Robert E. Howard might have been be a good source. After all, he was a wizard with words. And he did have a novel approach when it came to romance. As Bob Howard explains to Novalyne Price Ellis in her book One Who Walked Alone: [M]en made a terrible mistake when they called their best girls their rose or…
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Swan Song By Robert McCammon Pocket Books (956 pages, $4.95, June 1987) Cover by Rowena Morrill Post-apocalypse tales are a rising star these days. Mad Max: Fury Road is rightfully acknowledged as a high-water mark for action films. Most recently the release of Bethseda’s Fallout 4 has anyone who calls himself a gamer holed up for power-armored adventure in the American wasteland. Whether the apocalypses are caused by nuclear blasts, hordes of the undead, or simply climate change, they consistently…
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