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Month: January 2013

Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Terror in the Vale” by E.E. Knight

Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Terror in the Vale” by E.E. Knight

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EE Knight-smallThe Blue Pilgrim, last seen in the Lords of Swords tale “That of the Pit” — which Todd McAulty said “could stand alongside the work of the masters like Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, or Karl Edward Wagner” in his review in Black Gate 8 — returns in a dark tale of ancient empires, brave villagers, and sorcery most dire.

“Discern!” the village father said, approaching at a heavy, puffing run. “The Vale is accursed! The great mill-house in Lambhop Dell has been visited now! Not a soul survives.”

“Get me a horse or a pony.”

From any of the hills surrounding Lambhop Dell the mill-house looked like no great structure. Only once you went down into the Dell did you appreciate the three levels and massive stones and timbers that went into its construction. Judging from damage to door and windows, an elephant and a hauling chain and hook had been at work here.

Rumor had proved wrong in one respect, however. A boy still lived, the grandson of the miller. He’d been found hiding among the gears of the water-wheel.

“Scarecrow-man!” the boy said. “The scarecrow-man came in the fog.” After that they could get nothing from him but tears.

E.E. Knight is the author of the Vampire Earth series, which began with Way of the Wolf, and the six-volume Age of Fire books. He is a frequent blogger for Black Gate.

You can see the complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by John R. Fultz, Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Donald S. Crankshaw, Aaron Bradford Starr, Sean McLachlan, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and Jason E. Thummel, here.

“The Terror in the Vale” is a complete 9,400-word novelette of heroic fantasy offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

New Treasures: The Haunted Land of Carcosa

New Treasures: The Haunted Land of Carcosa

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Carcosa-smallI’ve been enjoying the recent renaissance in retro-D&D gaming. For one thing, it’s brought back great memories of the adrenalin-filled dungeon crawls of my youth, without all the trouble and expense of getting a bunch of middle-aged gamers scattered across two countries back together around a table.

The first role-playing adventures, from Blackmoor to Descent Into the Depths of the Earth, were many and varied, but in large part they followed a similar theme: you crawled into a hole in the ground and killed stuff.

Sure, there were thrills and surprises aplenty — strange subterranean civilizations, weird magic and weirder creatures, and magical treasures of all kinds — but in general the concept wasn’t much different from the piñata. You hit things, and goodies fell out. To get a sense of those early dungeons, imagine wandering through an underground J.C. Penny’s where every cashmere sweater, discount steak knife, and toaster is enchanted and the floor staff have spears and a surly attitude, and you pretty much get the idea.

We thrilled to those early adventures, and at the same time we yearned for something closer to the fantasy novels we were reading. Gradually, the industry responded by producing more sophisticated products with cohesive storylines, real characters, and dungeons that made some kind of functional sense, and the old adventures — with their frog temples, endless magical fountains, and chatty vorpal blades — went the way of the dinosaur.

Of course, no sooner did that happen than we started yearning for the simple games of our youth. Go figure.

That in a nutshell is the story of the resurgence of OE (Original Edition) Dungeons and Dragons games like Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, and even the recent first edition AD&D reprints. And now that they have arrived — and the marketplace has embraced them — compatible adventure modules have started to pop up as well. I’ve rarely seen any as ambitious and as well thought-out as Geoffrey McKinney’s Carcosa.

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Cataclysms, Ghosts and Monsters: An Interview With Jeffrey E. Barlough

Cataclysms, Ghosts and Monsters: An Interview With Jeffrey E. Barlough

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what-i-found-at-hoole-smallThere’s nothing out there on the shelves like Jeffrey Barlough’s Western Lights novels. The series — called such because “the sole place on earth where lights still shine at night is in the west” — is a bouillabaisse of mystery, ghost story, and post-apocalyptic gaslamp fantasy. His seventh and most recent book, What I Found at Hoole, was published in November.

Dr. Barlough, who moonlights as a veterinary physician, kindly spoke to me about the world-building of the Western Lights, his latest project, and which Ice Age animal he’d most like to meet in a dark alley.

An Interview with Jeffrey E. Barlough

Conducted and transcribed by Jackson Kuhl, January 2013

Black Gate: The world of the Western Lights is technically an alternate history — the last glaciation never ended and British civilization has colonized North America’s western coast — and yet the timeline is so divergent — an environmental cataclysm, ghosts and monsters from mythology — that it might as well be a secondary world fantasy. Where did the disparate ideas for the Western Lights come from? What inspired you to write the first book, Dark Sleeper?

Barlough: Dark Sleeper resulted from combining three different projects I was working on at the time. One was a sci-fi story set in Ice Age California, another was a relatively straight-forward “Dickensian” mystery, and the third was a tale of the supernatural concerning an immortal Etruscan who turns up in 1920s Santa Barbara! At one point, I realized that combining these various elements into a single storyline might produce something unique. The backstory of the series was filled in by extrapolation from these differing components. My interest in Victorian fiction and paleontology dates from my childhood, while the Ice Age setting in particular was inspired by my time as a volunteer excavator at the famed Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

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Monsters and the Apocalypse: Enormous from Image Comics

Monsters and the Apocalypse: Enormous from Image Comics

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Enormous-smallOne thing I like about comics: they’re all about the impulse buy.

I can’t afford to impulse buy books, or my house would be full of them (well, more full than it already is). But comics are a different story. My weekly trip to the comic shop is all about buying whatever catches my eye.

Sure, there are titles I follow regularly — Ultimate Spider-Man, Fables, the brilliant Atomic Robo — but the comic shop is one of the few places I can still afford to experiment, and pick up a book just because it looks intriguing.

Some experiments work out better than others. Last week I found an odd artifact on the racks: an oversize graphic novel from Image Comics called Enormous. The artwork by Mehdi Cheggour looked spectacular, and Tim Daniel’s story — something about a planet-wide ecological catastrophe, desperate search-and-recovery efforts run out of an abandoned missile silo, and gigantic monsters towering over the ruins of America’s once-great cities — was precisely the kind of thing comics were invented for. I added it to my weekly selection without another thought.

Unfortunately I still don’t know much about Enormous, even after reading it. Yes, Cheggour’s artwork is spectacular, and Daniel’s story is something about an extinction level event and a desperate search for survivors. With giant monsters. The individual panels are marvelous, but the story is pretty much incomprehensible.

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Throne of the Crescent Moon: “The Best Fantasy Swashbuckler of the Year”

Throne of the Crescent Moon: “The Best Fantasy Swashbuckler of the Year”

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Throne of the Crescent MoonLong before I heard about Saladin Ahmed’s first novel Throne of the Crescent Moon, I heard great things about its author.

In 2009-2010, Saladin was busy making a name for himself with a series of very well-received short stories, published in such places as Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons. His “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela,” which originally appeared in Mike Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix 2, was a finalist for the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. By the time I met him at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio in 2010, the buzz was unmistakable. This was a writer who was going places.

Our Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones spoke enthusiastically about Saladin’s upcoming novel on a panel on Arabian Fantasy at WFC, saying he was a writer who brought a genuine love of Arabian history and a natural storyteller’s talent to adventure fantasy.

When you’ve been in the industry as long as I have, you get used to young writers getting talked up at conventions. But when Throne of the Crescent Moon arrived last February, it exceeded all expectations. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction called it “A delight in every imaginable way,” and io9 said it was “The best fantasy swashbuckler of the year so far.” Howard was right: with a single novel, Saladin Ahmed has vaulted to the front rank of modern adventure fantasy writers.

Throne of the Crescent Moon follows the exploits of Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, “The last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat,” who’s more interested in a quiet cup of tea than adventure. But the Crescent Moon Kingdoms are on a knife’s edge as a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the master thief known as the Falcon Prince reaches a boiling point. As the city begins to slide into open rebellion, a series of mysterious and brutal supernatural murders strike even greater fear into the populace. When Adoulla and his companions learn the murders are somehow connected to the rebellion, they’re swept up in a plot that threatens to destroy their city.

Throne of the Crescent Moon is the first volume in The Crescent Moon Kingdoms trilogy. It was released in hardcover in February 2012, and finally arrived in paperback on December 31. It is 367 pages in paperback, priced at $7.99 for the print and digital versions. The mass market edition is sure to reach an even wider audience and grow Saladin’s already vast legion of fans. Don’t be one of the last to catch on.

Three Against the Stars Blasts Off for Intergalactic Adventure

Three Against the Stars Blasts Off for Intergalactic Adventure

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3 against starsn21422Three Against the Stars is the second book I’ve read by Joe Bonadonna. Unlike his sword & sorcery work, this marks a venture into pure space fantasy. My knowledge of the genre is admittedly spotty. I was unfamiliar with the works of Edmond Hamilton and E. E. “Doc” Smith, who are both cited as influences, but part of the joy of genre fiction is that one does not need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all that has gone before since the influences are so pervasive, much of it strikes one as easily recognizable.

This tale of space marines calls to mind the works of Robert Heinlein, while the space war itself strongly reminded me of Malcolm Hulke’s early seventies Doctor Who serial, “Frontier in Space” with the Earth Empire brought to the brink of war with the lizard-like Draconian Empire thanks to acts of terror committed by the apelike Ogrons. What sets Bonadonna’s work apart from so many others who share similar influences is that he is able to authentically capture the fun and innocence without sacrificing intelligent commentary on war and imperialism.

This is an Airship 27 publication and art director Rob Davis does his usual stellar job of ensuring that their titles stand out as the most eye-catching on the market today. Laura Givens’s cover art perfectly captures the space fantasy artwork from publishers like Ace, Lancer, Del Rey, and Ballantine from decades past. Interior black & white illustrations by Pedro Cruz have a classy retro-style that one associates more with slicks than pulps. The decision to go with a more sophisticated style of illustration is well-suited to Bonadonna’s story, which has familiar elements, but offers a more philosophical dimension than one generally finds in pulp fiction.

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New Treasures: Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top, edited by Ekaterina Sedia

New Treasures: Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top, edited by Ekaterina Sedia

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Circus-smallSeems like I’ve done an awful lot of New Treasures posts this week. So I guess one more won’t matter.

Good thing too, because I’m dying to tell you about Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top, a new anthology from Ekaterina Sedia and Prime Books.

Have you ever seen a book and wanted it immediately? I mean, you just got the concept instantly, and knew it was what you were looking for?  What am I talking about — of course you have.

Well, that’s what happened with me and Circus. I was innocently browsing on Amazon, shopping for… well, I forget exactly. Anyway, there it was, displayed in 76-pixel glory in the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought widget (and man, the anonymous software engineer who invented that damn thing has cost me a fortune, lemme tell you.)

And I got it: a reprint anthology featuring classic fantasy tales of circuses light and dark. I was sold the moment I laid eyes on the terrific cover by Malgorzata Jasinska (click on the image at right for the full-sized version). Here’s Ekaterina Sedia from her introduction:

We have collected tales of children running away to join the circus and circuses doing the same, stories of circuses not of this world (in all senses of the word), circuses futuristic, nostalgic, filled with existential dread and/or joy. Acts mundane, and spectacular, and incomprehensible. Clowns and extinct animals. Magicians and werewolves. Acrobats and living musical instruments… Because we cannot help but love them — for the sake of the children we once were, or for the sake of the better adults we long to become.

Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top includes tales by Peter Straub, Jeff VanderMeer, Genevieve Valentine, Barry B. Longyear, Howard Waldrop, Neal Barrett Jr, Kij Johnson and many more. Complete Table of Contents after the jump.

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Goth Chick News: Zombies Beat Eight Avengers and One Spider-Man

Goth Chick News: Zombies Beat Eight Avengers and One Spider-Man

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image002Let’s hear it for the home team…

In their continuing bid to rule all media, zombies in the form of The Walking Dead #100 had the best selling comic in North America for 2012.

The biggest success story of the past decade, TWD revitalized the horror genre in comics and spawned a television series that has broken basic-cable records. Back in 2003, creator Robert Kirkman set out to write a book that would show what happens after a zombie movie ends, following a group of survivors as they navigate a treacherous new world and discover that evil doesn’t exist in the dead, but the living.

TWD #100, issued on July 11, 2012 by Image Comics, led the annual list of top-selling comics compiled by Diamond Comic Distributors.  In this installment, Kirkman shocked longtime readers by graphically killing off a key character, ultimately causing the book to sell out and go through three printings due to demand.

Here is the entire top 10 list, outnumbered but not ultimately ruled by Avengers vs. X-Men.

[Spoiler alert after the jump].
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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Assignments and Other Artificial Emergencies

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Assignments and Other Artificial Emergencies

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Binge readers beware!

“Finishing one Henry James novel a week is like trying to chug a pint of Bailey’s Irish Cream a day,” a favorite professor declared when I mentioned the reading pace of another professor’s class. “You can’t absorb it, you certainly can’t enjoy it, you’ll never want to look at it again, and there’s just no need to do that to yourself.” He regarded it as a violence against the books and their author, too, to demand that a class read them at a pace that could only make them repellent.

My mentor’s advice saved me from Henry James, and Henry James from me. I still think of that day often, when my students gorge themselves on dense books they’ve put off reading until their school deadlines are imminent.

For that matter, I think of it some weeks when I face the deadline for this blog column and realize I’m still not ready to talk about Stephen King’s On Writing or whatever other nebulous notion for a post hasn’t quite coalesced yet. The more worthy a book is of patient consideration, the more likely we are to attach some kind of assignment, an artificial emergency, to it.

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Vintage Treasures: The Fox Woman & Other Stories by A. Merritt

Vintage Treasures: The Fox Woman & Other Stories by A. Merritt

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The Fox Woman-smallI’m a pulp fan, and I have been for decades. The next time I’m marooned on a desert island, I’m taking as many magazines from the 1930s and ’40s as I can cram in the life raft.

Pulp novels though… you know, that’s another story. Ask me to name the great fantasy novels of the pulp era, and I run out of air pretty quickly. The fast action and colorful settings of great pulp fiction seem to work best at short length, which maybe explains why the era’s biggest names — H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith — wrote almost exclusively at that length.

Perhaps that also explains why the years have not been kind to the most popular fantasy novelists of the pulp era — Otis Adelbert Kline, Ray Cummings, John Taine, L. Ron Hubbard, Ralph Milne Farley. All were prolific novelists before the end of World War II and virtually all are long out of print.

That’s especially true of the man who was perhaps the biggest name in pulp fantasy: A. Merritt. For decades, his name on the cover of a pulp magazine guaranteed sales in the hundreds of thousands and his novels remained in print late into the ’70s.

I first tried Merritt at the age of fourteen — already a pulp fan, I’d read more than a few breathless reviews of his work from several sources. I found a copy of his 1931 novel, The Face in the Abyss, in the spinning racks of a used book store in Ottawa and snatched it up with considerable excitement… which quickly turned to disappointment.

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