Black Gate – Page 661 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Newly Completed Series: Heart of Dread by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston

Thursday, April 14, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The husband-and-wife team of Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston have some enviable successes under their belt, including the 8-volume Blue Blood series and the Witches of East End novels, which were adapted for the Lifetime network. On her own, de la Cruz is also the author of The Au Pairs series, Angels on Sunset Boulevard, Girl Stays in the Picture, and many others. Michael Johnston is no slouch on his own either — he just sold his epic fantasy series to Tor, and the opening volume appears next year.

Their coauthored YA trilogy Heart of Dread opened with Frozen (2013), set in an imaginatively conceived post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, frozen under the ice. The thought of another dystopian YA series puts me to sleep, but Frozen caught my attention. Check out the intriguing jacket copy and see if you agree.

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Check Out the Teaser Trailer for Marvel’s Doctor Strange

Thursday, April 14, 2016 John ONeill Comments 13 comments

I’m very excited by Marvel’s upcoming Doctor Strange movie, even more than I usually am by big-budget comic adaptations. And the brand new teaser trailer — featuring our first look at Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Strange, Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the sinister Baron Mordo — isn’t helping me stay calm at all.

I view Doctor Strange at the last major untapped Marvel property. The 1960s comic, by Stan Lee and the brilliant Steve Ditko, the team that created Spider-Man, created in Doctor Strange a truly unique comic character, a sorcerer-hero who learned to navigate the strange paths between our reality and the next, and in the process discovered an endless chain of bizarrely-connected — and frequently very dangerous — parallel dimensions. I had real fears the movie would gloss over that aspect of his origin story, or ignore it entirely, but this trailer has put those to rest. It’s going to be epic.

Doctor Strange is scheduled for release November 4. It also stars Rachel McAdams and Mads Mikkelsen, and is directed by Scott Derrickson (The Messengers, Sinister). See our previous coverage here and here. Derek Kunsken took a detailed look at Lee and Ditko’s original comic here and here.

Vintage Trash: I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA by Ted Mark

Wednesday, April 13, 2016 Sean McLachlan Comments 1 comment

i-was-a-teeny-bopper-for-the-cia-movie-poster-9999-1020429335 Many, many years ago I worked at a used bookstore called Bookmans in Tucson. Everybody from Arizona knows Bookmans. They have several stores around the state and they’re all as big as supermarkets, filled with used books, music, and games. Most books are half cover price, and employees got a 50% discount. Sometimes the manager would be like, “You did a good job today, Sean, take a book.”

I realized that I would never get another opportunity like that in my life and took full advantage. My library exploded with books on every topic imaginable. I also learned the joy of collecting vintage paperbacks, with the added joy of getting them for next to nothing.

So when I came across Ted Mark’s I Was A Teeny-Bopper For The CIA I just had to get it. I’d never heard of the title or author before (I wasn’t about to forget that title!) and figured this would be something I’d never see again. I was right, I’ve never seen that book again, and now, 20 years later, I finally got around to reading it.

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Ancient Murders and Eerie Late-Night Funerals: The House by the Churchyard by Sheridan Le Fanu

Wednesday, April 13, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

It’s been a while since I’ve carved money out of my monthly Amazon budget to order a few more splendidly creepy titles from Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural line — or, as we like to call them, TOMAToS. I always have a few on my wishlist (they’re marvelously inexpensive), and in my last order I made room for Sheridan Le Fanu’s famous 1863 novel The House by the Churchyard.

The Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu was the author of Carmilla (1872), one of the earliest vampire novels, as well as the gothic classic Uncle Silas (1864), and the collection In a Glass Darkly (1872). He’s often called the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century, and M. R. James described him as “absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.” The House by the Churchyard is considered one of his finest works, and indeed, one of the greatest gothic horror novels of the era.

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Vintage Treasures: Journeys of the Catechist by Alan Dean Foster

Wednesday, April 13, 2016 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

I don’t think Alan Dean Foster gets the respect he deserves. He’s an enormously gifted and prolific author who’s produced some of the most ambitious and successful series on the market, including the seventeen novels in the Pip & Flinx series (which my son read and re-read, awaiting each new volume anxiously), the 13 books of the Humanx Commonwealth, beginning with Nor Crystal Tears (1982), the 8 volumes of the Spellsinger saga, and many others. (My personal favorite Alan Dean Foster novel is probably Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (1978), one of his three Star Wars novels, but don’t hold that against me.)

For those of you looking for something maybe a little less ambitious and a little more manageable, Foster has also written several fine standalone trilogies, including Icerigger, The Founding of the Commonwealth, The Damned, and The Tipping Point. Perhaps his most highly regarded fantasy trilogy is Journeys of the Catechist, comprised of three novels published between 1998-2000 by Warner Aspect, all with covers by the great Keith Parkinson.

Carnivores of Light and Darkness (344 pages, $23 hardcover/$6.50 paperback, June 1998)
Into the Thinking Kingdoms (376 pages, $23 hardcover/$6.50 paperback, April 1999)
A Triumph of Souls (406 pages, $24.96 hardcover/$6.99 paperback, March 2000)

I was surprised and pleased to find a blurb on the back of my paperback editions from Todd Richmond at SF Site, who published a review of Into the Thinking Kingdoms back in 1999. I don’t think I’ll ever really get over how cool it is to discover blurbs I published on popular SF and fantasy books.

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Book Pairings: Who Fears Death & Jeweled Fire

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 0 Comment

In May 2015, I was at the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading in New York City when Nicole Kornher-Stace and Wesley Chu were featured; they were brilliant. Read their books.

But I’m not here to talk about them.

I’m here to talk about eavesdropping.

(Well, I’m here to talk about some books I read, but I’m gonna preface it by talking about eavesdropping.)

So, at KGB last May, I happened to be sitting at a table with an Agent and an Editor.

The Editor, she says to the Agent, “I really want to read fantasy novels with strong female friendships. WHY DON’T YOU SEND ME SOME?”

And the Agent, she sighs. “I’m trying. I’m trying.”

I found this conversation:

1.) SUPER REASSURING!!! I WRITE THOSE KINDS OF BOOKS! SOMEDAY AGENTS AND EDITORS WILL LOVE ME TOO!

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Future Treasures: Daughter of Albion by Ilka Tampke

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Ilka Tampke is an Australian author, and her debut novel was published in Australia last year under the title Skin, where it received a lot of attention. Now Thomas Dunne is bringing the book to American shores for the first time, with a new title: Daughter of Albion.

The tale begins in the village of Caer Cad in southwest Britain, AD 43, where a swaddled baby is found abandoned, just as the dark cloud of the Roman Empire begins to gather on the horizon. Drawing on Celtic British history, Tampke weaves a tale of Ancient Britain on the cusp of Roman invasion, the violent collision of two worlds, and a young woman torn between two men.

A baby girl is abandoned on the doorstep of the Tribequeen’s kitchen. Cookmother takes her in and names her Ailia. Without family, Ailia is an outsider in her village, forbidden from marriage and excluded from learning. Despite this, she grows up an intelligent and brave young woman, serving the Tribequeen of her township until the day when an encounter with an enigmatic man named Taliesin leads Ailia to the Mothers, the tribal ancestors, who have chosen her for another path.

Ailia’s growing awareness of her future role as the tribal protector and her relationships with the two very different men she loves will be utterly tested by the imminent threat of Emperor Claudius preparing to take the island.

Daughter of Albion: A Novel of Ancient Britain will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on April 19, 2016. It is 354 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Young Jin Lim.

March Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 0 Comment

March has come and gone and now it’s time for the short story roundup. It was a nice month for short swords & sorcery storytelling. Not a spectacular month, but a nice one.

I’ll start with Curtis Ellet’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue #50. Now in its fifth year, SSM, like most low-paying publications, is a hit-or-miss proposition for readers. Both of #50’s stories are hits.

“The Altar of the Toad” by Davide Mana is a simple and solid story with just enough characterization, world building, and action to serve as a perfect example of the minimum of what I want from the genre. I don’t need every S&S story to be a staggeringly brilliant literary achievement, only for it to take me away from the blacktop and the sounds of honking horns for a little while.

Aculeo, an ex-legionary, and Amunet, an Egyptian sorceress, make a tremendous mistake when they respond to a plea for help from a blind woman:

“I prayed for delivery,” she said, her head tilted to one side. A strand of stringy hair had come loose from her coif, and brushed her wrinkled cheek as she spoke. “I prayed for warriors, to deliver my daughter from the mouth of the Toad.”

In this genre that sort of request is bound to bring trouble. It does, and with more than a hint of Lovecraft Mythos terrors. Even though there are plenty of intimations that “Altar” is part of a larger narrative, it stands perfectly well on its own, something I prize highly. Mana has self-published several other stories of Aculeo and Amunet and I am very curious how they stack up against this one.

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Small-Scale Epic Childhood: Memories of Playing at the Cabin on the Mogollon Rim

Monday, April 11, 2016 Nick Ozment Comments 5 comments

Some of my fondest memories are days spent at my Nan and Grandad’s cabin in Heber, Arizona, up on the Mogollon Rim nestled in the largest ponderosa pine forest on the continent. Surrounded by that fantastic landscape, it was easy to let one’s imagination run as free as the Mogollon Monster…

The Woodpile

The “woodpile” behind my Nan and Grandad’s cabin was mostly dirt, left over from when part of the lot was first cleared to make way for the trailer (the cabin was a large trailer home, actually, with a deck built on). The wood came from the pine trees that had been cut down, their trunks buried under the heaping dirt mound, giving the woodpile its foundation and shape.

It wasn’t so big, really, but to my cousins and me it was our own private mountain fortress. How many times did we flop down on it for cover as Injuns shot arrows at us, and then return fire over its crest with our wood-knot guns? Or, other times, the wood-knots were machine guns and we were out there fighting Nazis.

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Clarkesworld 115 Now Available

Monday, April 11, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Tangent Online is, as usual, more on top of things than I am. Their review of the latest issue of Clarkesworld magazine was posted yesterday, before I’d even had a chance to look at this month’s cover. Reviewer Jason McGregor does a fine job of writing intriguing summaries for each story (a subtle art, and I know that from experience.) Here’s his summary of “Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Avery is a woman with something in her past which leads her to a strange and rootless life, so she is able to go on a journey at a moment’s notice when an employer calls her with a strange job. Alien artifacts have appeared all over North America (why just North America?) and humans who may be abductees eventually appear from them. Avery is to drive one of these, and an alien, to St. Louis. Along the way, she reflects on her life (ultimately revealing the great tragedy of her life, which the reader suspected in a general way), her strange companions, the nature of consciousness, and makes a decision with enormous consequences.

Read his complete review here.

Clarkesworld #115 has four new stories by Carolyn Ives Gilman, Chen Qiufan, Gregory Feeley, and Sara Saab, and two reprints by Garth Nix and Elizabeth Hand.

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