Search Results for: Tale Two Covers

Evil Space Plants, Lecherous Dragons, and the Mysteries of the Vampire: Weird Tales 364 Arrives

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Weird Tales #364. Cover by Lynne Hansen What’s this? Can it be? Two issues of Weird Tales magazine published in a single year? That hasn’t happened since (hastily checks notes) 2012! There are other changes afoot as well, not just this insanely overambitious publication schedule. Marvin Kaye, who took over as editor in 2012 with issue 360 and managed just four issue in the last nine years, is no longer on the masthead. Replacing him as editor is Jonathan Maberry,…

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Witches, Menacing Forests, & the True Meaning of Fairy Tales: A Tale Dark & Grimm by Adam Gidwitz

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Covers by Dan Santat The Christmas break is usually a bit of a reading vacation for me, a chance to catch up on the year’s big reads. Of course, I don’t always want to read big, important books while I’m on vacation. Sometimes (usually), I just want something fun. That’s how I ended up reading Adam Gidwitz’s A Tale Dark & Grimm yesterday, the first book in his dark retelling of favorite kid’s stories. The series was published nearly a…

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A Tale of Horrific First Contact: The Sentience Trilogy by Terry A. Adams

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Covers by James Gurney, Richard Hescox, and Stephan Martiniere Every time an author completes a trilogy, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters. Given how long some big fantasy trilogies take to wrap up, we’ve learned patience over the years. Even so, we rarely have have to wait 27 years, as dedicated fans did for Terry A. Adams popular Sentience trilogy. It opened with Sentience, Adams’ debut novel, which made quite a splash in 1986.  It was…

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Weird Tales Deep Read: July 1936

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Margaret Brundage for Red Nails We return to the golden age of Weird Tales to consider the eleven stories in the July 1936 issue. This time around we’re dealing with many familiar authors, led by the triumvirate of C. L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, one H. P. Lovecraft short of perfection. The big three present classic tales from their popular fantasy series (Northwest Smith, Zothique, Conan). The other familiar names deliver more of a mixed bag,…

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Recomplicated Realities: Philip K. Dick’s Eye In the Sky and Two Others

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Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick; First Edition: Ace, 1957. Cover art likely Ed Valigursky. (Click to enlarge) Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick Ace (255 pages, $.35, paperback, 1957) Cover art (likely) Ed Valigursky Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick Ace (188 pages, $.35, paperback, 1955) Cover art unidentified Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick Lippincott (221 pages, $3.50, paperback, 1959) Cover art Arthur Hawkins I confess I’ve never warmed to Philip K….

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Gorgeous Celtic Imagery in a Haunting Fairy Tale: The Warrior Bards Novels by Juliet Marillier

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The Harp of Kings and A Dance With Fate. Ace Books, September 2019 and September 2020. Covers by Mélanie Delon and unknown. I discovered Juliet Marillier’s Blackthorn & Grim Celtic fantasy trilogy last year. How I missed the whole series for years I dunno, but was very glad to find them when I did. So I was excited to see a sequel series featuring a new generation arrive in 2020, opening with The Harp of Kings, which Andrew Liptak at Polygon selected…

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Weird Tales Deep Read: June, 1923

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Cover by Heitman for “Murders in the Rue Morgue” June 1923 was the magazine’s fourth issue, and it was still clearly a magazine in search of itself. There are very few authors who had a major impact on the magazine appeared in this issue. The most notable name, of course, is Edgar Allen Poe with a reprint of one of his most famous tales (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”) and, secondarily, Otis Adelbert Kline, with a story largely forgotten today, but…

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These Two Books Are Not the Same: John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes and Out of the Deeps

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The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham; First Edition: Michael Joseph, 1953 Cover art uncredited The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham Michael Joseph (288 pages, 10/6, hardcover, 1953) Cover art uncredited Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham Ballantine (182 pages, $2.00, hardcover, 1953) Cover by Richard Powers John Wyndham was an English author, popular for five or six major novels published in the 1950s and 1960s, among numerous other books. The first of his famous novels was The Day of…

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New Treasures: Murder Ballads and Other Horrific Tales by John Horner Jacobs

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Covers by Jeffrey Alan Love John Horner Jacobs’s new collection Murder Ballads and Other Horrific Tales has arrived from JournalStone, and my, my. It looks very handsome on my bookshelf right next to A Lush and Seething Hell, his 2019 collection of two novellas of cosmic horror. Yes indeed. The fabulous covers are by Jeffrey Alan Love, and they do look very sharp side by side. Murder Ballads collects 10 tales of weird horror, and has been called “masterful… marvelously eerie”…

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Witches, Thieves, and Dead Queens: Tales From the Magician’s Skull #4, edited by Howard Andrew Jones

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Cover by Doug Kovacs My copy of Tales From the Magician’s Skull #4 arrived today, and it is a beautiful thing. Jam-packed with brand new tales of heroic fantasy from its finest modern practitioners, it is a joy to hold. Edited by Black Gate‘s very own Howard Andrew Jones, Tales #4 is filled with names that will be very familiar to BG readers, including James Enge, John C. Hocking, Ryan Harvey, James Stoddard, C. L. Werner, and Milton Davis ….

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