Black Gate – Page 746 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Talking Over the Drowning City: An Interview with Christopher Golden, Co-Author of Joe Golem, Occult Detective

Saturday, October 3, 2015 Derek Kunsken Comments 1 comment

I’ve been e-interviewing different comics creators (indie comics guys Mirror Comics and graphic novelist-turned-TV producer Jay Odjick) as well as comic book editors (Xander Jarowey, Heather Antos, Jake Thomas, and Daniel Ketchum, all from Marvel Comics).

This time out, I wanted to chat with Christopher Golden, a best-selling author and one half of the writing team (along with Mike Mignola) on the 5-issue series Joe Golem: Occult Detective, from Dark Horse. Issue #1 comes out in November, but Dark Horse was kind enough to share an advanced view with Black Gate for this interview 🙂

Click on any of the artwork in this article for bigger versions.

Hey Christopher. Thanks for the chance to chat. I read a review copy of Joe Golem, Occult Detective, and really enjoyed it. I hadn’t seen the world of the Drowning City before, but it was compelling.

Glad you dug it. Mike and I spent a lot of time crafting this world, making sure all the weird pieces fit, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what readers think.

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New Treasures: Rooms by Lauren Oliver

Saturday, October 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Ah, October. When suddenly you’re not the only one on your block reading ghost stories. It’s the one month a year when my reading choices actually feel normal.

Lauren Oliver is the author of a series of bestselling YA novels, including Vanishing Girls, Before I Fall, and the Delirium Trilogy. Her latest, Rooms, is something very different: an adult ghost story in the tradition of The Lovely Bones and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a tale of family, ghosts, secrets, and mystery. Caroline and her two children move into the home of her ex-husband after his death, but what they find is not what they expected… including the ghosts of two long-dead strangers, Alice and Sandra, with secrets of their own.

Rooms was published in hardcover by Ecco in September 2014, and reprinted in trade paperback on September 15, 2015. It is 320 pages and priced at $14.99, or $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Jeffrey Alan Love. Click on the above images for bigger versions.

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “Black Colossus”

Saturday, October 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Late last week, while Howard Andrew Jones and I were discussing how hard it is to write great fight scenes, Howard gave me a piece of advice. “Read “Black Colossus,”” he said. “That will show you how it should be done.” So I pulled out my copy of the Del Rey’s The Coming of Conan, and started in… but not before reading the story that chronologically precedes it, “Queen of the Black Coast,” featuring the lovely and fatal pirate queen Bêlit. This Robert E. Howard fellow… his stories are a graduate school class in action writing, and no mistake. Not coincidentally, Howard and Bill Ward continued their fascinating Conan re-read with “Black Colossus” last month, originally published in the June 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Here’s Bill:

It’s wonderful stuff, as is the resultant exchange between Conan and his former mercenary commander, Amalric, who remarks that Thespides’ hot-headed charge is the sort of thing that Conan used to get up to. Conan agrees, but says that was when he was only worried about his own hide, now he’s responsible for others. Here Conan’s essential decency and honor feeds right into his maturation — this battle is his first command, and it’s really a freak of fortune that Conan is even in this position. But he’s smart, and he respects his fellow soldiers, having emerged just days before from their ranks himself, and all of that factors into him growing into a position of responsibility. Earlier, there is also reference to how kingly he looks all decked out in his new armor, something Conan would retain in the back of his mind for years.

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Future Treasures: My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart by Martin Rose

Saturday, October 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I missed the first novel in Martin Rose’s new undead private investigator series, Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell (Talos, October 2014), and that’s beginning to look like a mistake. An intriguing mix of Raymond Chandler and George Romero, the first novel introduced us to “pre-deceased private investigator” Vitus Adamson, kept ambulatory only by hourly administrations of a powerful drug, who finds himself hot on the trail of a missing boy… one who bears a more-than-uncanny resemblance to his own long-dead son. Scott Kenemore called the novel “The shot in the arm that the zombie genre needs… Vitus Adamson shambles on the scene as an undead Sam Spade of the very best sort.”

As the second novel opens, Adamson is still picking up the pieces from the events of the first — not least of which is an unexpected return to the land of the living.

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Destroying Your Garden of Victory

Friday, October 2, 2015 mariebilodeau Comments 5 comments

Even princes make the time to destroy their gardens.

Winter is coming. Not in an unspecified amount of time, either. It’s coming, like, soon (ish). The days grow shorter, the winds howly-er, and the nights demand duvets. There’s not denying it, people. It’s time to Destroy your Garden of Victory.

… why destroy it? BECAUSE OTHERWISE WINTER WINS! If you do not burn your own house, and your neighbor burns it for you instead, does that neighbor then not win? But if you burn it first, and you stand beside it like a badass warrior, then you, my friend, win. You built the garden! Now you must destroy it!

So don’t wuss out – destroy your garden now!*

1. Have a Final Outdoor Battle

Nobody likes winter battles, let’s face it. They’re cold, blood gets all frozen, swords don’t wobble as effectively and the dangers of pneumonia are real. Plus, winter armor is heavy and uncomfortable. So, invite your neighbors for that final battle now! Be imaginative in how you taunt them to battle – remember, this is your last battle for probably half a year. Steal their sheep and sheer your flag into their side. Paint their fences an ugly color. Raise flags bearing insulting taunts. Just make it clear that the battle must take place in your garden and the winner gets the Victory Goat for the next six months. (Bonus: blood is great fertilizer for when you prepare next year’s Garden of Victory!)

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Vintage Treasures: The Cú Chulainn Novels of Gregory Frost

Friday, October 2, 2015 John ONeill Comments 17 comments

Celtic fantasy has always been a popular sub-genre, but it really exploded in the 80s, in the capable hands of writers such as Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, C.J. Cherryh, Katharine Kerr, and R.A. MacAvoy, and with bestsellers like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon.

In 1986 new writer Gregory Frost — whose debut novel Lyrec had been published by Ace two years earlier, and been well received — retold the great Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge (“Cattle Raid of Cooley”), the tale of the hero of Ulster, Cú Chulainn, Ireland’s greatest champion, who at the age of 17 single-handedly defended his people against the invading army of the sorceress queen Maeve. This began a two-book cycle retelling many of the tales of Cú Chulainn: Tain, published in 1986, and its sequel Remscela, which appeared in 1988.

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Armored Rampage!

Friday, October 2, 2015 M Harold Page Comments 2 comments

SVT 256 — “Write what you know”, they said.

Somebody yells, “Form a wedge! Form a wedge!”

This is my last chance to experience something I’ve craved since reading Ronald Welch’s Sun of York back when I was twelve. I love my plate armor, but I’m now in my forties, a dad, and my days of hitting the road with my armor are numbered. (“Write what you know”, they said. So I had set out to know what I wanted to write about.)

“Let me go first!”

I take my place at the front of the knot of my friends in armor from different periods. Everybody jostles around and, without the benefit of NCOs, forms a rough triangle with me at the point.

Ahead, the Viking ranks stiffen, dress their shields. Locals mostly, and many of them students, so there’s a lot of quilted armor and even some linen shirts.

I grin into my visor. We’re older, heavier in build. One-to-one we outweigh them and we’ve concentrated our weight into a human battering ram…

…and yes, it’s a small multi-period medieval faire at St Andrews, Scotland. The weapons aren’t sharp. It’s not real.

But read on, because the experience was illuminating…

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Shimmer 27 Now on Sale

Friday, October 2, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Shimmer #27, cover-dated September 2015, offers four new stories. Two are currently available on the website; the last two will be available later this month.

“Dustbaby,” by Alix E. Harrow
There were signs. There are always signs, when the world ends.

“A July Story,” by K.L. Owens
Iron red, linseed-cured, and caked in salt, in a place where the mercury never crept much above fifty Fahrenheit, the two-room house chose to keep its back to the sea. A wise choice, given the facing of the windows and the predilections of the wind.

“Black Planet,” by Stephen Case (available October 6)
Em did not dream the world. When the lights went out and the absence of her brother in the room across the hall became palpable, it was simply there, hanging in the space above her bed. She would stare at its invisible form, spinning silent and unseen, until she slept.

“The Law of the Conservation of Hair,” by Rachael K. Jones (available October 20)
That it has long been our joke that our hair lengths are inversely proportional, and cannot exceed the same cumulative mass it possessed on the day we met.

See the complete issue here.

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Goth Chick News: The Best Scares Are Made In America Scares…

Thursday, October 1, 2015 Sue Granquist Comments 3 comments

Over 40 years ago, Chicagoland brothers Phil and Bob Zagone realized that nothing ruined the chances of picking up a date on Halloween with a fantastic costume, faster than the sweaty mess you became under a rubber mask.

That — and there was no way to consume adult beverages while wearing one.

Committed to solving this age-old dilemma the brothers started working on several solutions which they eventually proposed to the Godfather of Halloween himself, Don Post of Don Post Studios in California.

Unfortunately (or rather fortunately), Mr. Post was too busy to consider their ideas, but advised the Zogones that if they were so keen to improve the mask industry, they were welcome to start their own company and have at it.

Which was precisely what Phil and Bob did in 1974, right here in their hometown of Chicago.

Welcome Black Gate readers, to the famous Zagone Studios Mask and Costume Company.

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Lionsgate Wins Bidding War for Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle

Thursday, October 1, 2015 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

As we reported in July, several major Hollywood studios — including Warner Bros., MGM and Lionsgate — were in a pitched bidding war for the rights to Patrick Rothfuss’ bestselling fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicle. Now The Hollywood Reporter, and Rothufuss’ blog, are ‎reporting that Lionsgate‬ has won the rights to develop the series for film, TV, and video game platforms.

Lionsgate has closed a complex multi-platform rights deal picking up The Kingkiller Chronicle, the best-selling fantasy book series by Patrick Rothfuss. The deal sets up the simultaneous development of movies, television series and video games with the goal to adapt the many stories across the mediums at the same time.

It also caps off interest and dealmaking that has gone on since mid-July, when Rothfuss met with studios such as Warner Bros., MGM and Lionsgate, among others, at Comic-Con.

Robert Lawrence, whose credits include 1990s classic Clueless as well as the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Rock Star and the drama The Last Castle, will produce. Lawrence was an early chaser of the Kingkiller series and stayed on the series even when it was temporarily set up at Fox Television.

Terms were not disclosed. Read the report at The Hollywood Reporter here, and at Rothfuss’ blog here.