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

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 winner, Best Thriller Novel, Best Steampunk Short, multiple finalist for Best Fantasy short stories, author of the bestselling Exceptionals series, the Maxi/Moxie series, the Dr. Shadows series, the Renfairies series, stunt double and fight choreographer, and more.

Crowens: T.J., you seem to be living the dream of what Oscar Wilde would call art imitating life, being pretty much an action fantasy character day in and day out — a cross between Errol Flynn and Qui-Gon Jinn with a touch of James Bond villain thrown in. What attracted you to this world?

T.J.: When I was a kid I wanted to write comic books, draw them and then play the character. Here I am fifty years later, and I’ve sort of done it. I’ve never been able to completely separate them. Sometimes I do full renderings of the rooms my characters live in. I always do physical portraits of them. Often I conceive a character visually and work backwards from there. I’m a better writer because I’m a fight choreographer; I’m a better fight choreographer because I’m an actor; I’m a better actor, because I’m a writer. It all morphs together for me.

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Grimdark Magazine 9 Now Available

Grimdark Magazine 9 Now Available

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grimdark-magazine-9-smallOver at Tangent Online, reviewer Kevin P Hallett demonstrates a knack for producing tantalizing three-sentence descriptions for each of the original pieces in the latest issue of Grimdark magazine.

“The Law of the Harvest” by Tim Waggoner

This horror fantasy short story is set in a world where the new power has expelled the old gods from the Dominion. Torvan is a harrower, sworn to find and kill any of these fallen gods that still live. He enters a poor village, where one of the Fallen is living off the people who scratch out a life there…

“The Bed of the Crimson King” by Filip Wiltgren

The Crimson King rose from a simple farm boy to become the hero who defeated the witches in this short fantasy. Now, in his elder years, he yearns for the simpler life of his youth. But a surviving witch is planning her revenge…

“Pre-emptive Revenge” by Rob J. Hayes

“Pre-emptive Revenge” is a short fantasy set in a medieval land. Betrim’s wife will rule this land; but first, all the members of the ruling Jogaren clan must die. Betrim has laid siege to a city and trapped a Jogaren family inside…

The issue also has fiction by Peter Orullian and Teresa Frohock.

The latest issue went on sale October 1. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Last of a Series… For Now: The Sea of Time by P.C. Hodgell

Last of a Series… For Now: The Sea of Time by P.C. Hodgell

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Baen finally does right by Jame and Hodgell

Earlier this year I promised myself I would finally finish all the volumes in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath series so far. I did that yesterday, with my completion of The Sea of Time (2014). I’m really enjoying the series and book 7 is a blast. Regular readers will be shocked to read my one complaint: it’s too short. Before I explain that, let me fill you in on the book and tell you all about its good points.

First, one more time, the setup:

Thirty thousand years ago, Perimal Darkling began to devour the series of parallel universes called the Chain of Creation. To fight against it, the Three-Faced God forged three separate races into one: feline-like Arrin-Ken to serve as judges; heavily-muscled Kendar to serve as soldiers and craftsmen; fine-featured humanoid Highborn to rule them. For 27,000 years, the Kencyrath fought a losing battle, one universe after another falling to the darkness. Three thousand years ago, the High Lord Gerridon, fearful of death, betrayed his people to Perimal Darkling in exchange for immortality. Fleeing yet again, the Kencyrath landed on the world of Rathilien. Since then, they haven’t heard from their god and Perimal Darkling has seemed satisfied to lurk at the edges of their new home. Monotheists trapped on an alien world with many gods, the Kencyrath have had to struggle to make a life on Rathilien.

Now, the power of the Three-Faced God seems to be reappearing. The Kencyrath believe that only the Tyr-ridan, three Highborn reflecting the three aspects of their god — destroyer, preserver, and creator — will be able to defeat Perimal Darkling. Jame, raised in the heart of Perimal Darkling, is fated to be the Regonereth: That-Which-Destroys.

At the end of the previous book, Honor’s Paradox, series heroine, Jame, had survived all the tests and trials thrown at her by the curriculum and her enemies at the Kencyrath military academy, and was promoted to second year cadet.  The Sea of Time opens with Jame arriving at the Southern Host. The Host is the main force of Kencyrath soldiers, hired out to the wealthy city of Kothifir.

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New Treasures: Crow Shine by Alan Baxter

New Treasures: Crow Shine by Alan Baxter

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Crow Shine is the debut horror collection from Australian dark fantasy writer Alan Baxter. I’ve never heard of Baxter, but the book is generating a lot of buzz from people I have heard of, like Nathan Ballingrud, who called it “A sweeping collection of horror and dark fantasy stories, packed with misfits and devils, repentant fathers and clockwork miracles.” On his website, Baxter talks about a little about the book.

It’s no news to regular readers here what a fan I am of short stories. Ever since I was about 11 years old and picked up a Roald Dahl book called Switch Bitch, expecting something like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Danny the Champion of the World and got… well, I got my mind blown. I think the short story and novella are a unique art form, one that is incredibly hard to do well, entirely different from novels, but one that is utterly captivating… So to be in a position now where a publisher as respected as Ticonderoga are publishing a book collecting the best of my own short stories? My mind is blown again. It’s amazing. Crow Shine will contain nineteen short stories and novellas, and is named after one of the three stories original to this collection. The other sixteen are drawn across many years of my yarns exploring the dark weird fantastic that I love so much.

Baxter’s short fiction has been published in F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Postscripts, Daily Science Fiction, Midnight Echo, Pseudopod, and in more than twenty anthologies. He is the author of the dark fantasy trilogy, Bound, Obsidian, and Abduction (the Alex Caine series) from by HarperVoyager, and the dark urban fantasy novels RealmShift and MageSign from Gryphonwood Press.

Crow Shine was published by Ticonderoga Publications on November 11, 2016. It is 296 pages, priced at $29.99 in hardcover, $22.99 in trade paperback, and $4.99 for the digital edition. I don’t know who did the excellent cover, but I’m trying to find out.

Explore the Dark Side of Dreams in Nightmare’s Realm: New Tales of the Weird & Fantastic

Explore the Dark Side of Dreams in Nightmare’s Realm: New Tales of the Weird & Fantastic

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nightmares-realm-new-tales-of-the-weird-and-fantastic-smallDark Regions Press is offering a deluxe signed limited edition hardcover edition of their upcoming anthology Nightmare’s Realm: New Tales of the Weird & Fantastic, edited by S. T. Joshi. It contains original fiction from Ramsey Campbell, Steve Rasnic Tem, John Langan, Simon Strantzas, John Shirley, Darrell Schweitzer, Gemma Files, and many others, all focusing on the theme of dreams and nightmares.

The striking cover artwork is by Samuel Araya (click the image at right for a bigger version). The limited edition is well out of my price range at $150, but there’s a trade paperback and digital edition promised for early next year as well.

Dreams and nightmares — what Ambrose Bierce called “visions of the night” — are the basis of some of the greatest weird fiction in literary history. The unruly images that torment us in sleep are usually dispelled by the coming of day — but can they be dismissed so easily? Do nightmares have some impalpable reality that can affect our daily lives, the lives of those around us, and perhaps the very fabric of the universe?

This volume contains seventeen original stories by some of the leading contemporary writers of weird fiction. Each tale probes the relation of nightmares to the real world, and to the human mind, in ways that are baffling, intriguing, terrifying, and poignant. Are we dreaming or are we awake? Can dreams gain a kind of quasi-reality and affect the workings of the real world? Can technology enhance or even create a dream-realm?

All all-star cast has contributed stories long and short … David Barker … Jason V Brock … Ramsey Campbell … Gemma Files … Richard Gavin … Caitlín R. Kiernan … Nancy Kilpatrick … John Langan … Reggie Oliver … W. H. Pugmire … Darrell Schweitzer … John Shirley … Simon Strantzas … Steve Rasnic Tem … Jonathan Thomas … Donald Tyson … Stephen Woodworth … The volume is edited by S. T. Joshi, a leading critic and anthologist of weird fiction.

Who can say that the nightmare is merely a wisp of fancy engendered by our own minds? After all, it was Edgar Allan Poe who said: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Field Bazaar

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Field Bazaar

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field_doyleIn December of 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rather unceremoniously tossed Sherlock Holmes off of a ledge at the Reichenbach Falls, stunning (and angering) the great detective’s legion of fans. Doyle, who famously said that Holmes “kept him from better things” (meaning, the more important, much less popular works that Doyle really wanted to write), insisted that he was done with Holmes and that was that.

Of course, from August 1901 through September of 1902, The Strand Magazine serialized the most famous of all the Holmes tales, The Hound of the Baskervilles. But Doyle let fans know that this was a tale from before Reichenbach and the great detective was still D-E-A-D dead.

However, the temptation of big and easy money was too much for the author to resist and he was lured into writing the short stories that made up The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

However, most casual fans do not know that Doyle actually gave Holmes a return appearance in 1896: yes, five years before Watson travelled to Dartmoor with Sir Henry. Read on…

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Amazing Stories, November 1961: A Retro-Review

Amazing Stories, November 1961: A Retro-Review

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amazing-stories-november-1961-smallThis is an earlyish Cele Goldsmith issue. Unusually, it has only three stories.

The editorial is given over to a reprint of part of an interview with an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics from New York University, Richard Courant, that had been published in Challenge. Courant is presented as something of a skeptic about computers, though as presented his skepticism seems sensible enough. The only other feature is a pretty short book review column (it was cut, and the lettercol eliminated, to make room for the complete novel in one issue). The books reviewed were Level 7, by Mordecai Roshwald, a once famous post-apocalyptic novel, now little-known, which S. E. Cotts praises highly in terms that make it sound absolutely dreadful; and The Synthetic Man, by Theodore Sturgeon, a novel better known as The Dreaming Jewels, which Cotts also likes. The cover is by Alex Schomburg, and the interiors are by Virgil Finlay and Dan Adkins.

A word about S. E. Cotts, the book reviewer for Amazing throughout most of Cele Goldsmith’s tenure. I have long wondered who Cotts was, and also whether Cotts might have been a woman. In recent correspondence, Robert Silverberg, who succeeded Cotts as Amazing’s book reviewer (after a one column appearance by Lester Del Rey), said that he thought (but was not sure) that S. E. Cotts was actually Cele Goldsmith’s sister. I have never heard that before, and it’s pretty intriguing. (We might note that Floyd C. Gale, book reviewer for Galaxy in the 1950s, was editor H. L. Gold’s brother.)

The cover story is a novelet, “Meteor Strike!”, by Donald E. Westlake (12,500 words). Westlake, who was born in 1933 and died in 2008, was one of the great crime fiction writers of our time. I am particularly fond of his comic capers featuring the thief John Dortmunder. Others plump for his darker novels about a criminal named Parker, written as by Richard Stark. Early in his career, Westlake published a fair amount of Science Fiction, before bidding a bitter farewell to the field in a rant published in the great fanzine Xero. Westlake complained about SF’s conservatism, and particularly about John Campbell. Alas, I feel his argument — which had some merit — loses some force simply because, truth be told, Westlake was a pretty mediocre SF writer.

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Future Treasures: The Alchemists of Loom by Elise Kova

Future Treasures: The Alchemists of Loom by Elise Kova

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perf5.500x8.500.inddElise Kova is the author of the bestselling Air Awaken series, and its prequel, the Golden Guard Trilogy, all from Silver Wing Press. Her newest novel, The Alchemists of Loom, is the opening volume in the Loom Saga. The second volume, The Dragons of Nova, arrives in July from Keymaster Press. I’ve never heard of Kaymaster, but I’ll grant them this — they produce attractive books.

Her vengeance. His vision.

Ari lost everything she once loved when the Five Guilds’ resistance fell to the Dragon King. Now, she uses her unparalleled gift for clockwork machinery in tandem with notoriously unscrupulous morals to contribute to a thriving underground organ market. There isn’t a place on Loom that is secure from the engineer-turned-thief, and her magical talents are sold to the highest bidder as long as the job defies their Dragon oppressors.

Cvareh would do anything to see his sister usurp the Dragon King and sit on the throne. His family’s house has endured the shame of being the lowest rung in the Dragons’ society for far too long. The Alchemist Guild, down on Loom, may just hold the key to putting his kin in power, if Cvareh can get to them before the Dragon King’s assassins.

When Ari stumbles upon a wounded Cvareh, she sees an opportunity to slaughter an enemy and make a profit off his corpse. But the Dragon sees an opportunity to navigate Loom with the best person to get him where he wants to go.

He offers her the one thing Ari can’t refuse: A wish of her greatest desire, if she brings him to the Alchemists of Loom.

The Alchemists of Loom will be published by Keymaster Press on January 10, 2017. It is 380 pages, priced at $23.99 in hardcover and $4.99 for the digital edition.

No Adaptations?

No Adaptations?

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bondLately I’ve been looking at adaptations, both novel-to-movie, and novel or movie to TV series. I been talking about them in terms of what I thought was successfully done, and occasionally pointed at my favourites. In their comments people observed that while they agreed, for the most part, with my suggestions, they had suggestions of their own. All of us had to admit, however, that we were sometimes unfamiliar with either the source work, or the adaptation, or even both.

Have a look for yourself, here, and here.

One of the things I didn’t look at was movies or TV series adapted from story cycles, or from book series. The most successful of the latter has to be the Bond franchise, from the novels by Ian Fleming. How many movies have been made? 26? 27? Edgar Rice Burroughs’ character Tarzan has appeared in both movies and TV series. It seems there’s a new Tarzan film every 20 years or so, but none have been as successful as the Johnny Weismuller/Margaret O’Sullivan films of the 1930’s and 40’s. Do we need to mention Perry Mason?

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Absolutely Stunning: Kill Six Billion Demons

Absolutely Stunning: Kill Six Billion Demons

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For almost a decade now, my cliché detector has been set a little too high. This affects what I like to read (if I’ve seen it before, I’ll often take a pass) and what I write (the weirder the environments and situations, the more fun I have).

I keep an eye on lot of comics and in the last years Karnak, Monstress and Nameless have caught my eye, among others. But during the summer, I got to read Kill Six Billion Demons, by Abaddon.

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