Black Gate – Page 847 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Cherry Bomb by Caitlin R. Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney

Monday, February 9, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Caitlin R. Kiernan has received a lot of attention for her recent horror novels, especially The Red Tree (2009) and The Drowning Girl (2012). Her Siobhan Quinn urban fantasy novels had an unusual genesis, as she explains in the Author’s Note to this volume:

My thanks to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, who urged me to do this after reading Chapter One of Blood Oranges, which I’d actually written on a lark, as a joke, a protest against what “paranormal romance” has done to the once respectable genre of urban fantasy. I honestly never intended to write a whole Quinn book, much less three.

Cherry Bomb is the third (and final?) volume in the series, following Blood Oranges (2013) and Red Delicious (2014). All three were published under Caitlin R. Kiernan’s pseudonym, Kathleen Tierney.

Here’s the back cover copy.

Meet Siobhan Quinn — Half vampire, half werewolf, and retired monster hunter. Or so she thought…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Best I’ve Ever Read…

Monday, February 9, 2015 Bob Byrne Comments 7 comments

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out.

And so begins the best piece of writing I’ve come across.

In the seventies and the eighties, Robert R. McCammon was a successful horror author. Usher’s Passing (a sequel to Poe’s classic), Wolf’s Hour (World War II werewolf yarn) and Swan Song (post-apocalyptic epic) were among his excellent works. 1990’s Mine was a different kind of terror tale, as was 1992’s Gone South.

To oversimplify, McCammon wanted to move out of horror and into new genres. And he was told to forget it: to not mess with the formula (shades of Brian Wilson and Pet Sounds). So he wrote two historical novels that weren’t published, and he quit.

A decade later, that first historical book, Speaks the Nightbird finally saw the light of day in 2002 and has spawned seven sequels and one short story collection. The next book is under way. I read the first two and enjoyed them. But they grow continually darker and I quit after book three. Too much for me.

McCammon has written a few other novels and novellas, back in the horror genre. But he returned on his own terms, and not with a major publishing house.

Two thousand is a low estimate of how many books I’ve read, and the single finest piece of writing I’ve ever come across is in the introduction to his 1991’s Boy’s Life. Which isn’t really too surprising, because that is the finest book I’ve ever read; in any genre. It’s not a horror book: it’s a coming-of age tale. It’s a book about the magic of our youth. And what happens to that magic.

One of my favorite authors, Tony Hillerman, said that Fly on the Wall, was his attempt at writing The Great American Novel. He feels he came up short. He would know, though it’s in my Top Five Novels list. But I’m gonna say that Boy’s Life is McCammon’s Great American Novel. And it’s in the running for THE Great American novel You ask me for only one book to read (beyond the Bible), and I’m telling you Boy’s Life.

Here’s the rest of that snippet from the opening that has stayed with me for going on three decades:

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Who Should Be Writing the Cthulhu Mythos Today? Announcing the Winners of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Monday, February 9, 2015 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Three weeks ago we invited Black Gate readers to win a copy of the new Lovecraft-inspired anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, by suggesting who should be writing Lovecraftian horror today.

To make it challenging, all entries had to be a single sentence.

We received a near-record number of entries for this contest, too many to print here. But I’ve selected 20 of the more interesting, and reproduced them below.

Two winners were randomly drawn from a list of all qualified entries, and those two lucky readers will both receive a copy of Stephen Jones’s new horror anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, on sale now in trade paperback and digital formats from Titan Books.

First up is Jeffery Helms:

The writer I would most like to see write a Lovecraftian horror story today is Scott Snyder, whose comic work has elements of history, folklore, myths, and horror.

That’s certainly a fascinating choice. Scott Snyder’s work on American Vampire and Batman has garnered a lot of attention, and I’d like to see what he could do in Lovecraft’s back yard, too.

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Self-published Book Review: The Pirate Princess by Alice Rozen

Sunday, February 8, 2015 Donald Crankshaw Comments 0 Comment

If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. I’ve run short on books that I’ve received in the past year, so anything new has a good chance of being reviewed.

This month’s self-published novel is The Pirate Princess by Alice Rozen. This is a children’s book, and a sequel to a previous book called Jinx, after the main character in both novels. Jinx MacAbre is a ten-year-old witch and the daughter of the demon Lilith. She sees herself as a sort of superhero, dishing out punishments to school bullies, though she seems to lack much in the way of self-awareness. It’s not really clear whether her curses — swelling someone’s tongue so that he can’t speak, or turning someone green — are permanent, but if so, they are disproportionate to the actual crimes of the bullies, who after all are kids who generally grow out of that phase. But a sense of proportion may be a bit much to expect of a ten-year-old, and disproportionate punishments are a standard trope of fairy stories, a genre into which this story fits quite comfortably (though at last count, there was only one actual fairy in the story).

Jinx’s real problem aren’t her schoolyard adventures, though. It’s that not only is she a witch, she was born on Halloween, and as such is a very important ingredient in a rite called for by Davy Jones, the demon who rules the dead of the sea. And Sirena Avery, the titular pirate princess who looks about the same age as Jinx but in reality is a 300 year-old undead sea captain, is on a mission to deliver Jinx to Davy Jones to repay the debt to Jones that gave her The Flying Dutchman and a crew of the most famous pirates swallowed by the sea, including Samuel Bellamy, Edward Teach (“Blackbeard”), and more. They’ve come to claim Jinx and send her to Davy Jones’s Locker. The appearance of Jinx’s identical twin, Felix, complicates matters, and soon Jinx has to rescue her friends and her twin from Davy Jones himself.

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Monolith’s Conan Board Game Raises Over $2 Million on Kickstarter

Sunday, February 8, 2015 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

Earlier today the Kickstarter campaign for a new Conan miniatures game from start-up Monolith Board Games surpassed $2 million — more than 25 times the $80,000 goal. Monolith has no track record, but they’ve done a fine job generating excitement. Game components — including double-sided boards and over 70 plastic miniatures — look excellent, and the art, chiefly by Adrian Smith, is terrific. Here’s the description of the core game:

Conan is a miniature-based board game that pits one player, the overlord, who controls hordes of savage tribesmen, no-good lowlifes and undead minions against 1 to 4 players who incarnate the legendary Conan and his fellow adventurers. The gameplay is asymetric, as the overlord possesses a large selection of models and objectives which are his own, whereas the brave heroes are played from a first person perspective, much like in a role playing game. An adventure can be played out in 1 hour on one of the beautiful game boards as you pit your wits, daring and tactical acumen against your opponent.

Who the heck is Monolith, and why should you be giving them your hard earned money?

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Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1951: A Retro-Review

Sunday, February 8, 2015 Rich Horton Comments 3 comments

Here’s a review of a magazine issue that Matthew Wuertz has already covered here in his excellent ongoing traversal of Galaxy from its beginning … but I happened to read it and John O’Neill assures me that another (not necessarily dissenting) view is always welcome.

This is from the first year of Galaxy‘s existence. To me it reflects an magazine increasingly confident of its place. The cover doesn’t illustrate any story: it’s by Ed Emshwiller, titled “Relics of an Extinct Race”, and it depicts lizard-like aliens investigating rock strata containing remnants of human civilization.

The back cover advertises a book called The Education of a French Model, which was the memoirs of “Kiki de Montparnasse” (real name Alice Prin), who was somewhat famous as a nude model, and mistress of, among others, Man Ray, in the early part of the 20th Century. Her memoirs featured an introduction by Ernest Hemingway, which the ad happily trumpets. Other ads were for Saran Plastic Seat Covers, and for weight reducing chewing gum (called Kelpidine!), and other than that for books.

Interior illustrations were by Elizabeth MacIntyre, David Stone, David Maus, and “Willer” — this last a somewhat transparent (and, I would have thought, unnecessary) pseudonym for Ed Emshwiller (who usually signed his word Emsh). I note that except for Emshwiller the names are all unfamiliar, suggesting that H. L. Gold may have been looking for “new blood.” (For that matter, Emshwiller was “new blood” himself, a Gold discovery who had only begun illustrating for the SF magazines that year. It’s just that he’s the one of these illustrators who became a legend.)

Elizabeth MacIntyre is interesting as one of very few women SF illustrators in that era (the only other one I can think of offhand is the great Weird Tales artist Margaret Brundage). Todd Mason suggests, I think sensibly, that both the different set of illustrators and the unexpected advertisements can be attributed to Galaxy‘s publisher, World Editions, which had wider ambitions than just publishing SF.

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Future Treasures: The Silence by Tim Lebbon

Saturday, February 7, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Tim Lebbon’s novels include the post-apocalyptic fantasy Echo City, and the dark fantasy Noreela series (Dusk, Fallen, The Island). He won the Bram Stoker Award in 2001 for his short story “Reconstructing Amy,” and Dusk won the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award for best novel of the year in 2007. He had a bestseller in 2007 for his novelization of 30 Days of Night.

His latest is an end-of-the-world thriller featuring a horror born deep in the heart of the Earth…

The End of our world. The beginning of another.

In the darkness of an underround cave system, blind creatures hunt by sound. Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed… swarming from their prison, the creatures thrive and destroy. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death. As the hordes lay waste to Europe, a girl watches to see if they will cross the sea. Deaf for many years, she knows how to live in silence; now, it is her family’s only chance of survival. To leave their home, to shun others, to find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?

We last covered Tim Lebbon with his 2014 novel Coldbrook.

The Silence will be published by Titan Books on April 14, 2015. It is 361 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History

Saturday, February 7, 2015 Lawrence Schick Comments 27 comments

Recently some old friends in Akron, Ohio, turned up a few pages of the pre-TSR homebrew Dungeons & Dragons rules created by Tom Moldvay and me in the mid-1970s. I was delighted to see them, as I thought all of our early collaborative work had been lost to history.

I first encountered Tom Moldvay in late 1973 at a meeting of the Kent State University Science Fiction Club. We hit it off right away, and quickly decided we ought to collaborate on something — we just weren’t sure what.

In early ’74 Tom came back from an SF convention with Dungeons & Dragons in its original white box edition. He DMed a session, I DMed a session, and suddenly we knew what we were going to create together: a fantasy world setting for D&D.

We had both read widely in world history and mythology, and enjoyed a lot of the same fantasy fiction; we traded Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy books back and forth until we’d read them all, as well as everything we could find by Howard, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Merritt, Haggard, Harold Lamb, Dunsany, Hodgson, Machen, and Zelazny.

We were both nuts about Clark Ashton Smith, Tom was a Michael Moorcock and Philip José Farmer fanatic, while I could quote chapter and verse from the works of Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber. So we knew what we wanted to create: a single world setting that would enable us to simulate the fictional realities of these, our favorite authors.

It was going to have to be a big world.

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Suzette Haden Elgin, November 18, 1936 – January 27, 2015

Saturday, February 7, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Locus Online is reporting that fantasy author Suzette Haden Elgin, author of The Ozark Trilogy and the Coyote Jones novels, died last month.

Elgin’s first publication, “For the Sake of Grace,” the first part of her long-running series featuring Trigalactic Intelligence Service agent Coyote Jones, appeared in the May 1969 issue of F&SF. Her first novels — The Communipaths (1970), Furthest (1971), and At the Seventh Level (1972) — were part of the same series. They were collected in an omnibus volume from Pocket Books, Communipath Worlds, in 1980 (below, cover by Mara McAfee).

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense-small

Twelve Fair Kingdoms, the first novel in The Ozark Trilogy, came in 1981 (above, cover by Michael Flanagan); it was followed by The Grand Jubilee (1981), and And Then There’ll Be Fireworks (1981). Perhaps her most popular genre work, the Native Tongue trilogy — Native Tongue, The Judas Rose, and Earthsong (cover here) — were published between 1984 – 1994.

Elgin’s breakout book, the non-fiction bestseller The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, was published in June 1985. Among the book’s other accomplishments, it helped put fledgling publisher Barnes & Noble on the map, selling over 250,000 copies. Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1978. She died on January 27, 2015, at the age of 78.

New Treasures: Cthulhu Lives!, edited by Salomé Jones

Saturday, February 7, 2015 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

I don’t know much about Ghostwood Books, but I know they produce attractive books. They have a small but intriguing back catalog, including the story cycle/anthology Red Phone Box, with contributions from Warren Ellis and Salomé Jones, and Marion Grace Woolley’s Iranian historical fantasy Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran.

Jones has assembled a diverse array of contributors for her new anthology Cthulhu Lives!, including Michael Grey, Tim Dedopulos, G. K. Lomax, and many others. There’s also an afterword by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi. Here’s the book description.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.”

At the time of his death in 1937, American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was virtually unknown. The power of his stories was too vast to contain, however. As the decades slipped by, his dark visions laid down roots in the collected imagination of mankind, and they grew strong. Now Cthulhu is a name known to many and, deep under the seas, Lovecraft’s greatest creation becomes restless…

This volume brings together seventeen masterful tales of cosmic horror inspired by Lovecraft’s work. In his fiction, humanity is a tiny, accidental drop of light and life in the vast darkness of an uncaring universe a darkness populated by vast, utterly alien horrors. Our continued survival relies upon our utter obscurity, something that every fresh scientific wonder threatens to shatter.

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