Black Gate – Page 721 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Styx by Bavo Dhooge

Tuesday, November 24, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

This flourishing sub-genre of undead detective fiction? I like it. Recent examples include Tim Waggoner’s zombie detective saga The Nekropolis Archives, Stefan Petrucha’s Dead Mann series, Stephen Blackmoore’s Eric Carter books, Chris F. Holm’s Dead Harvest, Simon Kurt Unsworth’s The Devil’s Detective (a detective in hell), and Ian Tregillis’s Something More Than Night (a detective in heaven).

Bavo Dhooge’s Styx promises an intriguing spin on the zombie detective. Rafael Styx is a corrupt Belgian cop who is gunned down in pursuit of a diabolical serial murder. In death he meets the famous nude painter Paul Delvaux, who gives him his first real clue… and Styx finds his cop instincts won’t let him rest. Returning as a zombie (with an inconvenient taste for human flesh), Styx takes up the case again. Even death won’t stop him from capturing his murderer.

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The Late November Fantasy Magazine Rack

Tuesday, November 24, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

We’ve got lots of great magazine coverage to point you towards the best new short fiction this month. We started our coverage of Interfictions with issue #6, and reported on the arrival of the massive Best Of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Volume 1. In our reviews section, Learned Foote took a look at Nike Salway’s “The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club” in the October Lightspeed, and Fletcher Vredenburgh highlighted the best in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Swords and Sorcery Magazine in his October Round-Up. For vintage fiction fans, Matthew Wuertz journeys back over 60 years to look at a magazine from January 1953, with fiction by Philip K. Dick and Clifford D. Simak, in the latest installment of his issue-by-issue read of Galaxy.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our November Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

As we’ve mentioned before, all of these magazines are completely dependent on fans and readers to keep them alive. Many are marginal operations for whom a handful of subscriptions may mean the difference between life and death. Why not check one or two out, and try a sample issue? There are magazines here for every budget, from completely free to $12.95/issue. If you find something intriguing, I hope you’ll consider taking a chance on a subscription. I think you’ll find it’s money very well spent.

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An Adventurer’s Guide to the Middle Ages: Town Watch? Where?

Tuesday, November 24, 2015 Comments 22 comments

CityWatch_GuardsCover — …an Ankh Morpork-style town watch

The first thing that Conan — or Locke Lamora, or Grey Mouser, or Vimes, or a D&D party — would notice about a real medieval city would be the almost total absence of an Ankh Morpork-style town watch.

It’s a stock trope: here come a dozen ~~Keystone Cops~~ town watch in their funny armour, to arrest the drunken barbarian or catch the thief. Only it’s not like that in reality, or at least not quite like that in Later Medieval and Early Modern England, France, and Germany.

That’s not a criticism. Fantasy writers must write what they will. Dickensian thief takers are plausible, and raise themes to do with policing and justice. However, if, like me, you write Historical Adventure Fiction , then you need to know how policing worked because integrity, and because somebody else will know and will gleefully correct you in reviews. (It’s funny when your research is better than theirs though — and the one time I ever answered a review.)

It’s actually quite hard to drill down to D&D level details about the medieval past. Scholars are usually more interested in the development of legal systems and local authority than what happens when Conan gets into a brawl. However, there are a few useful sources: This PhD thesis on trial by battle; The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (link); The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms (link); plus various more antiquarian tomes on my research shelf.

And, there are some surprises beneath the crust of sometimes dry text. Let’s kick off with what every aspiring thief and rogue needs to know…

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Future Treasures: Steal the Sky by Megan E. O’Keefe

Monday, November 23, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Megan E. O’Keefe has published stories in Shimmer and Writers of the Future Volume 30. Her first novel launches an ambitious fantasy series set in an oasis city, featuring a noble conman on the run from some very powerful people who stumbles onto a complicated conspiracy… and a chance to pull off a heist of epic proportions.

Detan Honding, a wanted conman of noble birth and ignoble tongue, has found himself in the oasis city of Aransa. He and his trusted companion Tibs may have pulled off one too many cons against the city’s elite and need to make a quick escape. They set their sight’s on their biggest heist yet — the gorgeous airship of the exiled commodore Thratia.

But in the middle of his scheme, a face changer known as a doppel starts murdering key members of Aransa’s government. The sudden paranoia makes Detan’s plans of stealing Thratia’s ship that much harder. And with this sudden power vacuum, Thratia can solidify her power and wreck havoc against the Empire. But the doppel isn’t working for Thratia and has her own intentions. Did Detan accidentally walk into a revolution and a crusade? He has to be careful — there’s a reason most people think he’s dead. And if his dangerous secret gets revealed, he has a lot more to worry about than a stolen airship.

Steal the Sky is the first volume of The Scorched Continent. It will be published by Angry Robot on January 5, 2016. It is 448 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition.

Magazine Spotlight on Whistling Shade: The HORROR ISSUE!

Monday, November 23, 2015 Nick Ozment Comments 3 comments

Unless you frequent coffee shops, book- or record stores in Minneapolis and St. Paul, you probably have never come across the literary journal Whistling Shade, a fine regional publication currently in its fifteenth year. Black Gate readers may want to track down a copy of the Fall-Winter 2015 issue, though, as there is much herein of particular interest. No road trip or airline ticket is necessary: a full PDF replica of this horror-themed issue is available for $1 HERE. All of the issue’s contents are also posted (free) online HERE.

In addition to the horror fiction and poetry, the issue includes two excellent pieces on H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch. Sten Johnson’s eight-page essay “The Lonely World of H.P. Lovecraft” is one of the finest introductions of the enigmatic author I’ve seen. It provides not only a lively biographical sketch but does a swell job of situating Lovecraft’s oeuvre in the canon of twentieth-century literature. In “Once More Around the Bloch: The Man Behind the Fright Mask,” Thomas R. Smith provides a tribute to his mentor Robert Bloch that is entertaining, insightful, and thought provoking.

Before I give you a rundown of the table of contents, please indulge me a moment while I brag a bit as a proud father. This issue marks the first publication for my six-year-old daughter. Her poem “The Ghost that Hides in My House,” which she came up with this past summer and I faithfully copied down, appears on page 2 of Whistling Shade‘s HORROR Issue! In landing her first acceptance at the age of six, she has got me beat by a full decade. The publisher has kindly granted me permission to reprint Irelyn’s poem here (Please check it out just after the “Read More” tag — she’s very excited about it and will be stoked to know lots more people read it online).

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Vintage Treasures: Beyond the Curtain of Dark edited by Peter Haining

Monday, November 23, 2015 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Peter Haining was a prolific editor, producing over 100 anthologies between 1965 and his death in 2007. Black Gate readers are probably most familiar with his Sherlock Holmes books (which Bob Byrne has mentioned more than once), his 1976 Weird Tales facsimile anthology, and his various volumes on the pulps, including The Fantastic Pulps (1976), Terror!: A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines (1977), Supernatural Sleuths (1986), and The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines (2001).

I stumbled across a very rewarding anthology of horror stories in a $1 bin at Windy City Pulp and paper earlier this year. Beyond the Curtain of Dark was originally published in October 1966 in the UK by Four Square Books, with a delightful cover by Josh Kirby (above left). It was reissued in November 1972 by New English Library in the UK with a cover by the fabulous Bruce Pennington (middle), and in the US by Pinnacle Books (right, cover artist unknown). It contains 23 stories, a nice mix of pre-1910 fiction (nine stories by Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Marion Crawford and others) and pulp horror stories published between 1938-1965 (14 stories by Robert Bloch, Harry Harrison, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Isaac Asimov, and others).

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Vincent Starrett’s intro to The Adventures of Solar Pons

Monday, November 23, 2015 Bob Byrne Comments 10 comments

I received my DVD of Ian McKellan’s Mr. Holmes in the mail and anxiously popped it into the player, with the expectation that I would be writing about it for this week’s post. I fell asleep during the first try. Hey: I’m 48 years old and by the time my son is asleep and I settle down in front of the television, I’m near my own bedtime. It happens.

It took two further sessions to complete the film. It was such a disappointment that I’m not going to do a review. At least, not for a while. It’s a fair British melodrama, but as to the elements I look for in a Holmes movie, sadly lacking. I’ll note that most of my Holmes friends really liked it, so I’m in the minority. But that’s how I saw it.

Which left me with a hole in the schedule. An overview of Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library (a nine-book collection of some classic Holmes writings from yesteryear) is high on my list. But I’ve still got some re-reading to do before that’s a go.

So, glancing over my shelves, my eyes, of course, wandered towards Solar Pons. Noted Sherlockian Vincent Starrett wrote the introduction to the first Pons short story collection, In Re: Sherlock Holmes – The Adventures of Solar Pons. I talked about the Doyle sons’ attempt to stop publication of that book in a prior post.

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November 2015 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

Monday, November 23, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The November issue of the online magazine Nightmare contains original short stories from Matthew Kressel and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and reprints from Gemma Files (“The Emperor’s Old Bones,” which won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999) and F. Paul Wilson (another reprint from the 1984 anthology Masques).

Original Stories

“Lacrimosa” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The woman is a mound of dirt and rags pushing a squeaky shopping cart; a lump that moves steadily, slowly forward as if dragged by an invisible tide. Her long, greasy hair hides her face but Ramon feels her staring at him. He looks ahead. The best thing to do with the homeless mob littering Vancouver is to ignore it. Give them a buck and the beggars cling to you like barnacles. “Have you seen my children?” the woman asks.

“Demon in Aisle 6” by Matthew Kressel
I first saw the demon the Sunday after you died. It was 11:53 p.m. Just seven minutes until I would have grabbed my knapsack and biked home to Mom and bed and a life of sound sleep. That night the flurries were drifting down like nuclear ash.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Younger Sibling of 1st & Tight Limited 3rd: Simple Limited 3rd & The Case for Choosing A Single-Character POV

Sunday, November 22, 2015 Tina Jens Comments 1 comment

This is Part 5 in the Choosing Your Narrative POV Series.

We’re continuing our examination of eight POV approaches commonly used in Fantasy. (You can find links to the previous installments in this series at the end of this article.) This week we’re looking at another variation of 3rd Person that is more closely related to 1st Person than to the Omniscient 3rds. And, I’ll explain why I think a single POV is most often the best choice for a traditional fantasy narrative.

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New Treasures: Thief of Midnight and Fell the Angels by Catherine Butzen

Sunday, November 22, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Stark House puts out extremely interesting books. Just this year they’ve published Tracy Knight’s The Astonished Eye and Barry N. Malzberg’s Underlay, among many others. Last month they released the sequel to Catherine Butzen debut novel Thief of Midnight, featuring the return of the monster-hunting Society for the Security of Reality, which keeps the world safe from the nefarious plots of creatures such as werewolves, ghouls, faeries, and boogymen.

I completely missed Thief of Midnight when it was first released in 2010, so I’m pleased I have another chance to jump onto this series. Fell the Angels picks up the story a month after the previous novel, when Abby Marquise finds herself dealing with dark magic-wielding faeries who have invaded Chicago.

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