Black Gate – Page 654 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: The Fisherman by John Langan

Tuesday, August 2, 2016 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

John Langan has had a stellar career. His first collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime, 2008) was nominated for a Stoker Award, and his debut novel House of Windows (2010) was warmly received. But it was his second collection, The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus Press, 2013), that really put him on the map, with plenty of folks praising it as one of the best collections of the year.

His second novel The Fisherman has all the markings of a breakout book. A novel of cosmic horror disguised as a tale of outdoor survival, The Fisherman looks like one of the strongest horror novels of the year. Laird Barron calls it “an epic, yet intimate, horror novel. Langan channels M. R. James, Robert E. Howard, and Norman Maclean. What you get is A River Runs through It… Straight to hell.”

The Fisherman was published by Word Horde — who’ve been doing some exceptional work recently — on June 30, 2016. It is 282 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Albert Bierstadt. Check out the book video and more here.

Learning the Uncanny Arts: The Secrets of the Uncanny Magazine Covers

Monday, August 1, 2016 Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas Comments 2 comments

One of the things we’ve learned here at Uncanny Magazine is that people really like our covers. Which is awesome. It means our evil plans :ahem: I mean, our specific vision of what we want for the magazine is working! This is why many of the backer levels of our currently running Uncanny Magazine Year Three Kickstarter include postcards or prints of our art.

For example, Tran Nguyen’s “Traveling to a Distant Day” won a Spectrum 23 Gold Award and is a finalist for a 2016 Chesley Award for Best Cover Illustration. Galen Dara’s “Bubbles and Blast Off” was super popular on Twitter, to the point where people demanded prints. We worked with Galen to make them happen in our Uncanny Magazine store. (There may be something even cooler going on with the Kickstarter in relation to that. Stay tuned.)

Black Gate thought it would be interesting for us to explain how we select our Uncanny Magazine covers.

So, without further ado…

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Pathfinder Meets Lovecraft: Starspawn by Wendy N. Wagner

Monday, August 1, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Wendy N. Wagner is the Managing Editor for Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines, as well as an editor for the fabulous Destroy series of anthologies, including Women Destroy Science Fiction, Women Destroy Fantasy, and Queers Destroy Science Fiction. She’s also the author of one previous Pathfinder Tales novel, Skinwalkers.

The sequel to Skinwalkers, Starspawn, will be published next week by Tor Books, and follows the notorious pirate Jendara as she returns to the cold northern isles of her home to settle down and raise her young son. When a mysterious tsunami wracks her island’s shore, she and her fearless crew must sail out to explore the strange island that’s risen from the sea floor. The marketing copy describes the novel as follows:

From Hugo Award winner Wendy N. Wagner comes a sword-swinging adventure in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft, set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Pathfinder meets Lovecraft? That’s definitely worth checking out.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Western Noir – Hell on Wheels

Monday, August 1, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 4 comments

Back in November of 2011, AMC debuted a gritty new western, Hell on Wheels. Anson Mount played Cullen Bohannon, a former Confederate soldier out for revenge against the Union soldiers who had killed his wife and son and burned his farm. His pursuit takes him to the camp of the Union Pacific Railroad, which is headed across the central plains under the leadership of Thomas Durrant (Colm Meany: O’Brien of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame).

While the series starts out as a revenge tale, Bohannon abandons that quest after he kills the wrong man and instead focuses on helping build the Transcontinental Railroad. The series becomes the story of the various employees and camp followers who move along as the laying of track progresses: the mobile community is ‘Hell on wheels.’

I’m writing about this series, which wrapped up weekend before last, because it is a Western Noir: And a darn good one. I had never seen Mount in anything before, but I’m telling you, he was made for this part. He’s the protagonist, but he’s not a white-hatted cowboy. Roy Rogers need not apply. He develops his own code of honor as the series progresses, but he’s a ‘get it done guy’ who rises from swinging a pick to the most important person in the Transcontinental’s story. And as he demonstrates many times, he isn’t afraid to use a gun.

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek V – The Final Frontier (1989)

Sunday, July 31, 2016 William I. Lengeman III Comments 4 comments

Early on I was inclined to be charitable about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and I wasn’t really sure what all the fuss was about. As you may be aware, the consensus seems to be that it was one of the worst of all of the Star Trek movies.

But up until about the halfway mark I didn’t quite get it. Not that the first half of this movie is a masterpiece, mind you. But as the second half began to unfold I started to catch on.

The plot can be dispensed with in a few words. Spock’s half-brother — one of those free-spirited emotional Vulcan types — commandeers the Enterprise and sets off to the center of the galaxy to find God. Which doesn’t seem to be all that far removed from the premise of the first Star Trek movie. Which also featured an abundance of scenes of people trying to look awed but mostly looking dopey. Since there’s little drama or interest to be found in this premise there’s also some standard stuff about Klingons with bad intentions lurking about.

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BookRiot on Seven Standalone Novels for Fantasy Lovers

Sunday, July 31, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Last week I stumbled on a copy of Yangsze Choo’s debut fantasy novel The Ghost Bride in a remainder bin at Barnes & Noble, and snatched it up. I first heard about it in Matthew David Surridge’s review here at Black Gate last year — and more recently, I saw it included in A.J. O’Connell’s entertaining article at BookRiot, 7 Standalone Novels for Fantasy Lovers, published back in March. It’s good to have a highly functional network that alerts you to the best new stuff.

The first thing I did after getting it home was to check the rest of A.J’s list though, to see what else I’ve missed. What’s so great about standalone novels? Here’s A.J. to explain it.

Stand-alone fantasy novels are beautiful things. You read one book, and get one complete story, with all the resolution you need. You can close the book with a satisfying thunk at the end, knowing that the characters have completed their journeys, and that all the ends are more or less tucked in neatly…

For this list, I stuck to two rules. The books had to be published more or less recently (the oldest book here is from 2008), and they had to be true stand-alones, not part of an author’s pre-existing fictional universe; just one perfect bubble of fiction, floating on its own.

Here’s what she said about The Ghost Bride:

Choo’s first novel is about the Chinese tradition of ghost marriage, a tradition in which one (or both) participants are dead. In this novel, the bride in question is Li Lan, a young woman whose family has fallen on hard times. Because her parents’ financial troubles have made it hard for her to find a husband, she is married off to the spirit of a wealthy young man who has recently died, and finds herself suddenly pulled into the world of the afterlife.

A.J. also discusses The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson, and several other intriguing titles. Check out the complete list here .

July 2016 Locus Now on Sale

Sunday, July 31, 2016 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

The July 2016 issue of Locus is numbered #666… so naturally it’s the horror issue, with lengthy interviews with Peter Straub and Joe Hill, and a photo story on “Stephen King and George R.R. Martin in Conversation.” The magazine is also packed with the usual reviews, news and features — including a photo spread on the Nebula Awards weekend, held here in Chicago.

But the big news for me was the detailed results of the annual Locus Awards. Amongst all the vote counts for Best Novel, Best Collection, and Best Editor, were the surprising results for Best Magazine. Surprising to me, anyway. 27 magazines were ranked by the readers of Locus; here’s the Top Ten.

Asimov’s SF
Tor.com
Fantasy & Science Fiction
Clarkesworld
File 770
Lightspeed
Analog
Black Gate
Uncanny
Strange Horizons

I was surprised and pleased to see Black Gate ranked above such excellent magazines as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Nightmare, Shimmer, and Weird Tales. I want to thank everyone for their support — believe me, it means a lot.

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Series Fantasy: Swords Versus Tanks by M. Harold Page

Saturday, July 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

M. Harold Page is Black Gate‘s Thursday afternoon blogger, and one of our most consistently popular contributors. He’s also a noted fantasy novelist in his own right, author of The Sword is Mightier, Blood in the Streets, Marshal Versus the Assassins, and his popular book on writing, Storyteller Tools. But his magnum opus is his five-volume series Swords vs Tanks. I’ve made a couple of efforts at writing a synopsis, and ultimately I think it’s best to let the author explain it himself. Here’s Mr Page:

What did I care about? What did I like? Swords, apparently, and tanks.

It was more than that. I’m fascinated by the medieval mentality, and by — at the other end of history — the emergence of modernity in the 1900s-1930s. Why not, I thought, bang the rocks together? Great idea!

Well it was a great idea. I set out to pen a Baen-style military yarn with time travelling communists clashing with magic-enabled knights… The end result was too short and the story had grown in the telling — shifting from Military to Heroic Fantasy (or was it, Heroic Steampunk?) while exploring themes about Medievalism versus Modernism… I realized that the editors were right: it was too fast paced by modern standards. What I’d written was not really a modern 100 thousand word Fantasy novel. Instead, it was three or four 1970s-style short novels making up a series like the old Michael Morcock yarns I grew up on.

Now, I could have taken each novella and expanded it into a Big Fat Fantasy. However, it worked rather well as an old school series. Doorstop tomes were an artefact of the practicalities of publishing back in the 1980s anyway. There was no literary reason to expand. Why the hell not just chop it up and release it in its natural form? And that, dear reader, is what I did.

Read the complete article, ‘Swords Versus Tanks — What “10 Years in the Making” Means,’ here. Swords Versus Tanks was published by Warrior Metal Tales; all five volumes are now available in digital format for $2.99 each. Click the images above for bigger versions.

A Tremendously Disappointing Re-Read: The Soaked-in Misogyny of Piers Anthony’s Xanth

Saturday, July 30, 2016 Derek Kunsken Comments 14 comments

When my life is super-busy, I tend to reread books that won’t invite my brain to start analyzing to see what I could learn. I reread Edgar Rice Burroughs’ biography, and recently, I thought I’d reread Piers Anthony’s Xanth series.

I first read the first novel, A Spell for Chameleon, in grade six and reread it maybe later in my teens. I remember it being charming and punny, but my memories were pretty dim. I was also wondering if I could recommend it to my 11-year old son after he finished with the Percy Jackson opus.

A Spell for Chameleon is about Bink, a person who lives in the North Village of the land of Xanth, where every plant and animal is magical and every person has a single magical talent, everyone except for Bink. If he doesn’t find out his magical talent, he’ll get kicked out of Xanth upon turning 25.

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New Treasures: Almost Insentient, Almost Divine by D P Watt

Saturday, July 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Almost Insentient Almost Divine-back-small

Michael Kelly and his team at Undertow Publications have been getting some long overdue attention recently. Two of their books, V.H. Leslie’s collection Skein and Bone, and Simon Strantzas’s anthology Aickman’s Heir’s, were nominated for the World Fantasy Award this year, and their exemplary anthologies Year’s Best Weird Fantasy, Volumes One and Two, have been heaped with praise.

They continue to produce beautiful and intriguing books. One of their latest is D P Watt’s collection Almost Insentient, Almost Divine. Watt’s previous collections include An Emporium of Automata (2013) and The Phantasmagorical Imperative: and Other Fabrications (2015). I’m not familiar with Watt, but that’s what Undertow is great at — introducing me to overlooked horror and dark fantasy writers who deserve my attention.

The stunning new collection of weird fiction from visionary writer D.P. Watt. The foolish wisdom of forlorn puppets. A diabolical chorus in many voices. Shadowy shapes emerging from the strange blueness. Dreamers of other truths. The delicate craft of filial love. You – and some other you. Creatures in the hedgerows. Cold rime creeping across darkened windows. The numinous night pool. A hive of pain. These and other nightmares await. “DP Watt has real talent. It touches on and reflects the world we know, but as in a glass darkly.” – Reggie Oliver

Almost Insentient, Almost Divine was published by Undertow Publications on May 17, 2016. It is 244 pages, priced at $17.99 in trade paperback and $5.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Tran Nguyen.