The Iron Dragon’s Daughter: A Wholly Biased Review

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter: A Wholly Biased Review

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The-Iron-Dragons-Daughter-smallAh, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. John O’Neill asked me for a review a few weeks ago, and I thought, “Really? You want me to be objective when she and I are so very much in love?”

Because it is love, you know? And it burns hot enough to turn all negative comments to ash.

I’ve driven friends away with this obsession. “What do you see in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter?” they ask. “She’s so incoherent. She has practically no… no character.”

Yes, all right, all right. We’re talking about a book here. I knew that. Ink and paper, rather than flesh and bone. Born — apologies! — published in 1993. To some, like myself, it became a classic, but others greeted it with bewilderment and it has collected a slew (31%) of apathetic reviews on sites like Amazon.

The book has flaws, you see? It takes the type of liberties that would have most sane reviewers flinging stars away like wasps found on a beloved child.

“Where’s the plot?” they cry.

“Why is the main character so bland?”

Both of these accusations ring true. Michael Swanwick’s story does have an arc that flows from the first page to the last, but rather than a rushing torrent, what we have here meanders across an exotic plain of wonders, leaving half-finished tales behind like so many oxbow lakes.

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Future Treasures: Roses and Rot by Kat Howard

Future Treasures: Roses and Rot by Kat Howard

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Roses and Rot-smallI enjoy a good fairy-tale retelling, especially those written with a modern sensibility — and a dark edge. Kat Howard’s debut novel, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Novel of Summer 2016, looks like it fits my criteria nicely.

The marketing for Roses & Rot includes an enviable blurb from Neil Gaiman (“Kat Howard is a remarkable young writer”), and the promise that its main characters, Imogen and her sister Marin, find themselves living in a fairy tale as the story unfolds. But which fairy tale? Ah, that’s part of the mystery.

A prestigious artists’ retreat holds dark secrets as desire for art and love are within grasp for Imogen and her sister, Marin, but at a terrible price.

What would you sacrifice for everything you ever dreamed of?

Imogen has grown up reading fairy tales about mothers who die and make way for cruel stepmothers. As a child, she used to lie in bed wishing that her life would become one of these tragic fairy tales because she couldn’t imagine how a stepmother could be worse than her mother now. As adults, Imogen and her sister Marin are accepted to an elite post-grad arts program — Imogen as a writer and Marin as a dancer. Soon enough, though, they realize that there’s more to the school than meets the eye. Imogen might be living in the fairy tale she’s dreamed about as a child, but it’s one that will pit her against Marin if she decides to escape her past to find her heart’s desire.

Roses and Rot will be published by Saga Press on May 17, 2016. It is 307 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover, and $7.99 for the digital version.

April 2016 Apex Magazine Now Available

April 2016 Apex Magazine Now Available

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Apex Magazine April 2016-smallI love Sarah Zar’s cover to Apex #83 (at right; click for bigger version); and the contents look pretty good, too. Jason Sizemore gives us the complete scoop in his editorial.

This month we’re publishing only two works of original fiction, because both are lengthy pieces, totaling nearly 14,000 words combined, and our goal is to publish around 12,000 words of original fiction each month. In Andrew Neil Gray’s “The Laura Ingalls Experience,” a mech takes a simulated adventure to the American frontier of the 1800s. A search for self in a hollow world makes for poignant story. “The Teratologist’s Brother” by Brandon H. Bell is a prime example of the type of world/unsettling SF Apex Magazine strives to publish. Part dystopia, part Lovecraftian, you will be piecing the puzzles of this story together long after you finish reading it.

Former Apex Magazine editor and frequent contributor Catherynne M. Valente returns to our pages (after a too-lengthy absence) with “The Quidnunx.” This novelette reprint is a masterful example of world building and creating something that is both entirely alien and entirely beautiful. Geoffrey Girard, author of the upcoming Apex Publications collection, first communions, gives us a taste of his collection by sharing the story “Collecting James” with the Apex Magazine readers. Having the story fresh in my mind, I can honestly say if this one doesn’t make you squirm, then you’re a tougher person than I.

For our nonfiction selections, we have two interviews. Russell Dickerson talks with our cover artist Sarah Zar. Andrea Johnson questions author Andrew Neil Grey. Finally, rounding out the issue are poems by John Yu Branscum, Michael VanCalbergh, Jeremy Paden, and Craig Finlay. Our podcast this month is “The Teratologist’s Brother” by Brandon H. Bell.

Here’s the complete TOC, with links to all the free content.

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Star Trek Continues Fundraiser

Star Trek Continues Fundraiser

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trek continues crewThe final days of the newest Star Trek Continues fundraiser are upon us. If you haven’t seen my rave reviews of some of the previous episodes, go take a look — and then drop by their site and watch some of the episodes!

If you’re a fan of the original Star Trek television show, you owe it to yourself to go watch these loving recreations  made by extremely talented volunteers. You’ll swear that these are the same sets, and you’ll swear that most of these scripts were found in the file cabinet of D.C. Fontana or Gene L. Coon.

Last year’s fund raiser (or KIRKstarter, heh) got the funds for a few more episodes AND an engineering room set, which is now complete (you can see a virtual tour on this page). The new fundraiser will help pay for more episodes, rent at the facility where they’re filming the episodes, and pay for some expensive post production on one of the episodes they’ve just finished filming.

If this sounds up your alley (or in your sector) don’t delay. There are only a few days left to help out.

Once More Into the Primal Land: Tarra Khash: Hrossak! by Brian Lumley

Once More Into the Primal Land: Tarra Khash: Hrossak! by Brian Lumley

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oie_331744OeH2c07SWith Tarra Khash: Hrossak!, the British horror luminary Brian Lumley returns with six more stories of derring-do and magical skullduggery set in his primeval land, Theem’hdra. (Two years ago, I reviewed The House of Cthulhu, his first collection of swords & sorcery stories, here at Black Gate.) For those not familiar with the great island-continent, it’s another prehistoric land shoehorned into the Lovecraft Mythos timeline that includes Mu, Lemuria, Hyboria, Hyperborea, and several other forgotten places. It’s the sort of place endemic to tales of swords & sorcery, replete with strong-muscled heroes, conniving merchants, demon-haunted tombs, backstabbing villains, and dastardly wizards with faces hidden in deep cowls (all of which are found in this book).

Any moderately-read consumer of S&S will have experienced these elements, if not to the point of boredom, at least a whole bunch. To get away with the use of such hoary elements, an author must use them without a bit of irony, and with brio. Lumley does exactly that.

Lumley told Robert M. Price that his inspiration for The House of Cthulhu was the work of Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany, and it’s a claim only bolstered by the tales in this collection. While his prose is never as ornate or bejewelled as his models, there is a similar love for exotic, haunted landscapes draped in mystery and populated by ancient deities and uncanny magic.

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Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Six – “The Call of Siva”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Six – “The Call of Siva”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on May 2, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 260 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

ColliersSivainsidious6“The Call of Siva” was the fifth installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu first published in The Story-Teller in February 1913. The story would later comprise Chapters 13-15 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (initially re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for its U.S. publication). Rohmer had built several of his Fu-Manchu stories on protracted paranoia and had previously made good use of a Limehouse opium den as a setting, but “The Call of Siva” sees him letting his plotline be dictated by the altered state of the waking dreamer for the first time and to great effect.

The story opens with our narrator, Dr. Petrie relating a strange dream which begins with him writhing on the floor in agony. Rohmer makes good use of Stygian darkness, Oriental tapestries, and Mohammedan paradise as suggestive imagery that Petrie’s queer dream, at once both mystifying and terrifying, is uniquely Eastern in origin. This point is confirmed as Petrie awakens with Nayland Smith as his cell mate. Only at this point does Rohmer resume something approaching a conventional narrative with Petrie’s murky recollection of he and Smith rushing to warn Graham Guthrie that he has been marked for assassination when they are abducted by unseen assailants from a passing limousine.

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Interview With James Stoddard: To Tour Evenmere, The Night Land, and Other Exotic Locales

Interview With James Stoddard: To Tour Evenmere, The Night Land, and Other Exotic Locales

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james stoddardJames Stoddard made his first short-story sale to Amazing Stories in 1985, under the pen name James Turpin. His first novel, The High House, published by Warner New Aspect in 1998, made an impressive debut. Publishers Weekly enthused, “In his first novel, Stoddard tells a thrilling story that features not only a unique and powerful family but a magnificent edifice filled with mysterious doors and passageways that link kingdoms and unite the universe.”

Cynthia Ward concurred:

“The modern armies of Tolkien clones have vanquished the diversity of high fantasy, with few exceptions: Little, Big by John Crowley, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, Clouds End by Sean Stewart — and now The High House, an astonishingly imaginative, individual, and assured first novel by James Stoddard.”

What would prove to be the first book in the Evenmere Chronicles was followed up two years later by The False House. And then the House went dark.

Loyal fans waited years — 15 years, to be exact. But on December 9, 2015, Stoddard fulfilled their wishes without help of a major publisher, releasing Book 3: Evenmere (Ransom House, available through Amazon for $12.89) and completing the story of Carter Anderson and the strange house that goes on forever, the house with a dragon in its attic and monsters in its basement and countless wonders in between.

In the decade-and-a-half between visits to the High House, Stoddard also took readers on a tour of William Hope Hodgson’s strange future nightmare vision in The Night Land, A Story Retold (2010). He also returned to shorter forms, producing highly-regarded short stories and novellas for magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction.

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GreyDogTales on Equation Thrillers

GreyDogTales on Equation Thrillers

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Stories in the Dark-small Dracula's Brood-small Bone to His Bone-small

Yesterday my friend Neil Baker, publisher at April Moon Books, introduced me to blogger John Linwood Grant, who blogs at GreyDogTales. I wandered over to his corner of the internet, and was delighted to find a fascinating discussion of the Equation Chillers, a line of British horror anthologies I’d never heard of.

Right, let’s go back a few years. Nearly three decades, in fact. One of our finds of the late eighties was the short-lived Equation Chillers series. Sadly, only eight books were ever produced directly under the imprint. We have battered copies of all of them which we bought at the time, thank goodness.

They were, in a way, the precursor of the Wordsworth Editions, where lost, rare or unusual stories of the supernatural suddenly became available at an affordable price. Equation revived a whole haunted house full of Victorian and Edwardian short stories, and it’s worth noting all eight volumes here, with the occasional comment from us.

Anything in the spirit of the delightful Wordsworth Editions Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural (or, as we prefer to call them, TOMAToS) has my immediate attention. Check out John’s full article — with plenty of marvelous cover scans — here. And it looks like I’ll be spending some quality time at his website.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Enter Jim Chee

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Enter Jim Chee

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Chee_NavajolandSo, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes has talked about Tony Hillerman here and Joe Leaphorn here. Leaphorn had featured in the first three novels: The Blessing Way, Dance Hall of the Dead and Listening Woman. This week, we turn our attention to Jim Chee

For his fourth Navajo Police novel, People of Darkness, Hillerman needed a less wise, less assimilated policeman. He actually considered flashing back to a younger Leaphorn but decided against that and instead created the younger, more naïve, Chee. He would hold for the next three books.

In addition to providing an alternative protagonist, Hillerman also changes the opening. In prior books, they begin outside, painting a picture of the reservation: Louis Horsman, on the run from the law, is setting traps to catch kangaroo rats (when he encounters a skinwalker – a witch). George Bowlegs is out running to practice for a Zuni religious ritual (and has a similarly unhappy encounter). And how about this descriptive passage to begin Listening Woman:

“The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the old Hopi villages at Shongopov and Second Mesa.”

But People of Darkness begins with somebody looking out her office window in a cancer clinic. Things certainly do get started with a bang!

Chee’s introduction is reminiscent of the opening scene of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. We have a “common” private investigator visiting a rich client of higher social standing. Rosemary Vines wants Chee to take some leave and find a box of keepsakes stolen from her husband. Her husband says it’s all a big mistake: no worry. Hillerman mixes in the Native American Church (the ones that caused the big legal furor over using peyote in their rituals).

Of all Hillerman’s books in the series, this one is most like a private eye novel and has a bit of a Ross MacDonald feel to it, as an event from long ago hangs over the current investigation.

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