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The Poison Apple: A Cosplayer’s Best Friend, Interview with Photographer Bruce Heinsius

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Josephine Chang as Silk I wanted to preface that when I first met Bruce, we were both working as Still Photographers in Hollywood, and he was on Power Rangers, which has made a comeback with a new feature film after twenty-five years or so. BH: I worked on the television show the first season shooting everything from action on the set to special shoots for calendars, trading cards, video box covers and magazines. You and I have been out of…

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Cthulhu in Metallica

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That Cthulhu is a cultural force is a truth self evident to the readers of this blog, as evidenced by his numerous movies, RPGs and plush dolls. But his ubiquitousness can still surprise when he appears in unexpected media. The most recent creative force to sing (literally) Cthulhu’s praises: Metallica. Metallica’s recent album Hardwired… to Self Destruct dropped November 18, and I was surprised to find one of their songs directly singing about great Cthulhu, and what exactly his rising…

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You Live in Pellucidar: The Weird Inner World of Cyrus Teed and the Koreshan Unity

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When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote At the Earth’s Core (1914) and Pellucidar (1915), he brought to a summit the previous century’s passion to explore the fantastic possibilities of what lies below the crust of the Earth. Numerous Victorian scientific romances arose from these theories about the interior of the planet. It’s only natural that once you state, “The world is round,” you follow up with, “Yeah, but what’s inside it?” A man named Cyrus R. Teed provided perhaps the strangest…

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The Poison Apple: An Interview with T.J. Glenn

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TJ doubling The Toxic Avenger (photo by Robert Griffith) The Poison Apple is a new semi-regular Black Gate column. Interviewer Elizabeth Crowens will be talking with atypical authors with unusual backgrounds or passions in the speculative fiction arena, and sharing their stories here. The first “victim” to take a bite out of the Poison Apple is Teel James Glenn, known to most as T.J. Glenn, winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Best Author of the Year, Epic eBook award finalist, P&E…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in May

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Black Gate had 1.16 million page views in May, slightly more than our monthly average last year. We’ve gotten used to significant traffic increases year after year, so it’s actually something of a relief to have traffic stabilize for a bit. Nonetheless, we’re grateful to you, our readers, for all the time you spend with us each month, and we hope we keep things interesting for you. How did we keep things interesting last month? Our top story for May was Black Gate‘s second Hugo…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in April

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Good to see Star Trek is still enormously popular with our readers. The most widely read post at Black Gate last month was William I. Lengeman III’s review of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the latest installment in his ongoing Star Trek Re-Watch (his review of ST III was #2 last month). Or maybe we’re just old. The most popular category last month was Vintage Treasures (that’s my favorite too!) When I get old enough, my eyesight will fade enough that I can’t…

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New Treasures: Broken Hero by Jonathan Wood

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Horror and comedy are a tough mix — but it can be a great combo when done right. Jonathan Wood seems to have the touch… his debut novel No Hero, the first book in the Arthur Wallace series, was called “a funny, dark, rip-roaring adventure with a lot of heart” by Publisher’s Weekly, and listed as one of the 20 best paranormal fantasies of the past decade by Barnesandnoble.com. Starburst called the third installment, Anti-Hero, “A gripping tale of dark comedic horror.”…

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In the Trenches: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Straight Silver

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The world of Aexe Cardinal has been largely separated from galactic civilization for several centuries. Their technology is roughly on the level of ours around the time of the First World War — which is significant, because for almost half a century, the dominant nations of the planet have been in a deadlock with the Chaos-tainted Republic of Shadik. Their war is fought between lines of trenches across an ancient, toxic no man’s land. In all the ways that matter,…

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What Old Futures Can Tell Us About Worldbuilding

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I was taking a look at Stand by for Mars!, the first of the classic 1950s Tom Corbett Space Cadet Adventures, and this passage stood out like a sore thumb: Speaking into an audioscriber, a machine that transmitted his spoken words into typescript, he repeated the names of the candidates as they passed. And later …he picked up the audioscriber microphone and recorded a brief message. Removing the threadlike tape from the machine, he returned to the house and left…

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Game Review: Dead of Winter from Plaid Hat Games

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Color me rotting-flesh green and call me thunderstruck. I believe I’ve been playing the best board game in my thirty years of dice rolling this week: the Plaid Hat Games survival horror magnificence that is Dead of Winter. Ron Burgundy “That’s No Lie” seal of approval. I know I often write here with tongue probing my cheek, but this time I’m undeadly serious. Maybe it was just the subject matter, or how dark the game can get as desperation builds,…

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