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Month: August 2012

New Treasures: Laird Barron’s The Croning

New Treasures: Laird Barron’s The Croning

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croningHoward and I first met the talented Laird Barron at the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, Texas in 2006. At the time he’d published only a handful of short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION and a few other markets — but what great stories they were, including”Hallucigenia,” “The Imago Sequence,” and “Shiva, Open Your Eye.”

Laird turned out to be a fascinating and entertaining guy. Seriously, next time you’re at a convention, hang with this guy. He has a pure, unabashed love of Lovecraft, pulp and crime fiction, and westerns, and his fiction combines these elements in marvelous new ways. And if you get a chance, ask him to explain his famous comment that the Bible is “the greatest horror story ever told.”

Laird’s first collection was The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, released in trade paperback by Night Shade Books in 2007; it was followed by Occultation in 2010 (also from Night Shade). He won the 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for his collections, and has been nominated for numerous other awards, including the Crawford, Sturgeon, International Horror Guild, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker and Locus Awards. These two books helped cement his reputation, and transform him from a rising young star to one of the most respected dark fantasy and horror writers working today.

His long-awaited first novel, The Croning, arrived in May, and true to form it combines cosmic horror and noir fiction in Barron’s signature style:

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us. Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret…of The Croning.

The Croning is 245 pages; it is available in hardcover (for $24.99) and digital ($8.99) format from Night Shade Books.

The Thrill of the Unexpected: Why I Edit Clockwork Phoenix

The Thrill of the Unexpected: Why I Edit Clockwork Phoenix

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Hi, folks! Mike Allen here. When I last came through, I blogged about monsters. I want to thank Black Gate overlord John O’Neill for granting me leave to return to this space and shill my new project.

Among the many things I do, I’m the editor of a series of fantasy anthologies called Clockwork Phoenix. At least, the first three books were marketed as fantasy by my previous publisher, even though I included some strange science fiction in their pages as well. (Though I’m someone who sees science fiction as a subset of fantasy rather than a whole separate thing, one of the reasons I’ll use them if they’re odd enough.)

One of the rewards were offering is a signed, numbered, limited edition chapbook of Cherie Priests fantasy tale The Immigrant.
One of the rewards we're offering is a signed, numbered, limited edition chapbook of Cherie Priest's fantasy tale "The Immigrant."

And I’m going to be editing and publishing a fourth volume in the series, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that’s still underway. As of this writing I’m closing in on an $8,000 goal that will let me for the first time pay five cents a word for fiction – we’re going pro. If we keep going past that, I hope to launch a webzine that will be a companion to Clockwork Phoenix and the poetry journal I also edit and publish, Mythic Delirium, creating even more space for the kind of writing I love to thrive. But we’ll blow up that bridge when we come to it, eh?

John suggested I talk to you folks about how Clockwork Phoenix functions as a fantasy market, and I think that’s a fair question, given what Black Gate is all about.

Put bluntly, Clockwork Phoenix is a market for those who want to push the boundaries of what fantasy can be. I encourage stylistic experiments but insist the stories should also be compelling.

I want to point out that this gives me also sorts of freedom to include material that can’t be easily classified, I wouldn’t call it a break with long standing tradition in our field, at least as I’ve experienced said traditions.

I want to tell you how I was first introduced to short fiction that carries the fantasy label. I’m pretty sure then you’ll see what I mean.

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Electric Velocipede #24 Now Available

Electric Velocipede #24 Now Available

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electric-velocipede-24John Klima’s Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction magazine released its 24th big issue this week. In his editorial, “A Remembrance of the Future,” John talks about modern art, graffiti artist Banksy, and the future of the magazine:

Electric Velocipede has made its own transformation. From a small one-man show print publication, to a dedicated team of people putting out a solid magazine, to an online publication. We’re still navigating the waters and figuring out what’s next, but the transformations have helped keep things interesting and exciting… This is an interesting issue, and we’re opening it with a piece that’s as powerful and different (and subtle) as past work from Hal Duncan and Jeffrey Ford. New work will be going up on an ongoing basis, and the whole issue will be available as an ebook shortly.

The complete table of contents, with online publication dates, is as follows:

NOVELETTE

  • “Heaven Under Earth” by Aliette de Bodard (8/27)

SHORT STORIES

  • “Cutting” by Ken Liu (7/30)
  • “Night’s Slow Poison” by Ann Leckie (8/6)
  • “The Mezzo” by Eli Effinger-Weintraub (8/13)
  • “Under the Tree” by Tania Hershman (8/20)
  • “For They Heard the First Sound and Trembled” by Jessica Breheny (9/4)
  • “To Dive Into a Godling, Where Life Begins” by Jacques Barcia (9/10)
  • “The Lotus Eaters” by Michelle Muenzler (9/17)
  • “The Leaf” by Erik T. Johnson (9/24)

NON-FICTION

  • “A Remembrance of the Future” by John Klima (7/30)
  • “Content TKTK: A Soul Unchained” by John Ottinger III (8/20)
  • “Blindfold Taste Test” with William Shunn (9/17)

Issue 24 of Electric Velocipede is available for free online here. We last covered Electric Velocipede with issue 21/22.

Art of the Genre: When Music and Gaming Mix

Art of the Genre: When Music and Gaming Mix

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329302-rotk_2_3242_mouth_sauron_superI’m still far away from home, four weeks into a seven week stint that takes me all over the U.S. During the trip, I’ve had my fair share of adventures, but something I’ve truly enjoyed during the vacation is time spent sharing memories of my life with my son.

Many of these came in the form of gaming memories during my stay in my home town last week. For some reason, an old fantasy song got into my head as my son was jumping with my DM’s, Mark’s, niece on a trampoline. The song, ‘Towers of the Teeth’ is one of the two greatest Orc lyrical masterpieces ever. It comes from the Rankin/Bass version of The Return of the King.

Now in my mind, especially this version today, this is a very weak film, but the music is another story entirely. For those of you that don’t remember, or haven’t checked the link above, the song goes:

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