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Month: October 2014

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in September

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in September

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I’m honestly not sure where September went. It was just here a second ago, and then…. bam. It slipped out the back like a grounded teenager with the car keys.

Well, September may have been brief, but it was action packed. We published 108 blog entries, celebrating neglected fantasy of all kinds — old, new, and in between. We explained why humorous fantasy isn’t popular, examined the iconic beauty of Princess Leia, revealed the lost Sherlock Holmes story, and highlighted a great many new releases and vintage paperbacks. I’m still catching up on all the great stuff we covered, and it’s halfway through October already.

Our most popular article last month was Scott Taylor’s list of the Top 10 TSR Cover Paintings of All Time, a nostalgic look at the finest artwork from the Golden Age of roleplaying. If you played RPGs at all last century, Scott’s piece will bring back some great memories.

Second on the list was Part I of Patty Templeton’s Self-Publishing Checklist, an item-by-item catalog of the essential steps to getting your self-published novel into the hands of readers. Patty’s own book, There is no Lovely End, exploded onto the scene in July and has already become one of the hottest self-published horror titles of the year.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Michael Stone’s Streeter

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Michael Stone’s Streeter

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The Low End of NowhereJust after I moved to Colorado Springs, a Denver private investigator named Michael Stone released his first book about Streeter, a bounty hunter in the Mile High City. The Low End of Nowhere had a very cool cover by Owen Smith, who would provide three more for A Long Reach, Token of Remorse, and Totally Dead.

Then, nothing: After four very good novels, Stone simply quit writing. It was as if he’d suddenly passed away. Over the years, I tried to find some news of him on the web but came up empty. He just seemed to lose interest in being a writer in 1999.

That’s a shame, because the Streeter books are quite good. They are very much in the style of the old pulpsters, but with a light touch. Stone clearly appreciated those who had gone before him, like Hammett and Nebel. But his character was no Mike Hammer or Race Williams. There’s finesse in the writing that reminds me of Joe Gores and his DKA novels.

Steeter (we never learn any other name) is physically imposing, having played football at a small division one school for two years before a fight with tragic consequences derailed that life plan. He was working as a bouncer and an accountant (how many of those have you read about?) when he ended up getting a job as a bounty hunter.

He lifts weights daily, fighting a slowly losing battle against the aging process. He even buys some hair-restorer but promptly puts it in a bathroom drawer, afraid to use it. Streeter isn’t a superhero: he’s a guy who works hard at working hard.

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Discover the Best Short Fiction of the Year with Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2014

Discover the Best Short Fiction of the Year with Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2014

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The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2014-smallOver the last decade or so, I’ve watched the emergence of a new generation of leading anthology editors. Folks like Jonathan Strahan, John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton, Ian Whates, and Jonathan Oliver. These are the editors who are successfully defining the best in the genre, and whose books I order immediately.

And now, I’m very pleased to add Paula Guran to that short list. I sampled the fourth volume of her Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror back in February, and was very impressed. The fifth volume arrived this summer, with an absolutely stellar line up of authors, and I nabbed it the first chance I could.

Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror is the companion volume to The Year’s Best Science Ficiton and Fantasy, edited by Rich Horton and also published by Prime. We covered the 2014 edition of Rich’s series back in July. Together, these two volumes give you a comprehensive catalog of the best genre short fiction of the year.

This year, the book contains fiction from Dale Bailey, Nathan Ballingrud, Laird Barron, Elizabeth Bear, Neil Gaiman, Glen Hirshberg, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tanith Lee, Joe R. Lansdale, Ken Liu, Brandon Sanderson, Steve Rasnic Tem, Lisa Tuttle, Carrie Vaughn, and over a dozen others.

It draws from the finest magazines in the field, including Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Subterranean Online, Interzone, Apex Magazine, Asimov’s SF, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com, and top-notch anthologies like Fearsome Journeys, Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, Clockwork Phoenix 4, Dangerous Women, Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, and many others.

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The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in September

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in September

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The Black Fire Concerto-smallThe top fiction posts at Black Gate last month both come from writers who recently released popular new books.

Mike Allen returns to the top of our charts with the exclusive excerpt from his first novel, the dark fantasy The Black Fire Concerto. Not too surprising, given that Mike has received a lot of attention recently, chiefly as a result of his breakout collection, Unseaming, released on October 1st from Antimatter Press. Check it out here.

Knocked out of the top slot last month was “The Find,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen by Mark Rigney. “The Trade” and “The Keystone,” Parts I and III respectively, also made the list. Check out Mark’s first novel, the popular Check-Out Time, released on October 7 from Samhain Publishing.

The #3 and #4 fiction posts in September were from a couple who have become very acquainted with the top of our fiction charts: Janet Morris and Chris Morris. They claimed the #3 slot with an excerpt from their heroic fantasy novel, The Sacred Band, and #4 with “Seven Against Hell,” an exclusive sample from their new anthology, Poets in Hell.

Rounding out the Top Five was Joe Bonadonna’s exciting sword & sorcery tale featuring his popular hero Dorgo the Dowser, “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum.”

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Vintage Treasures: The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard

Vintage Treasures: The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard

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The Gods Hate Kansas-smallWith my Vintage Treasures posts, I like to showcase the best overlooked fantasy of the past half century or so. American fantasy is an enormously rich genre, but it also has a notoriously short memory, and there are countless buried treasures to rescue from undeserved obscurity.

Of course, sometimes I like to forget all that and just showcase the weird.

Joseph Millard was an American pulp science fiction writer who published nearly a dozen short stories between 1941 and 1943, and then apparently gave up writing for good. Most of his stories appeared in magazines like Thrilling Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, and other pulps. He died in 1989.

In November 1941, he published his only novel, The Gods Hate Kansas, in Startling Stories magazine. It was reprinted a decade later in the November 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Magazine, and then appeared in paperback in February 1964 from Monarch Books, with a brilliantly gonzo cover by Jack Thurston, featuring a raygun-wielding hero riding bareback on a little red number and giving the business to an earnest-looking bug-eye monster. I love this cover with a fierce passion, and I thank Joseph Millard for making it all possible. (Click the image at left for a mondo-sized version.)

The cover isn’t the only brilliant thing about this novel. There’s also the title. Why do the gods hate Kansas? What the hell did Kansas do, anyway? It’s one of those questions that brings you back to the paperback rack next to the checkout lane for a second look. Just 40 cents and the answer could be yours.

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Fantasy Scroll Magazine 3 Now Available

Fantasy Scroll Magazine 3 Now Available

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Fantasy Scroll Magazine 3-smallThe third issue of the new Fantasy Scroll Magazine is now available, and I’m very happy to see it.

Fantasy Scroll is edited by Iulian Ionescu, Frederick Doot, and Alexandra Zamorski. It’s a quality publication and issues appear online every three months. The contents include all kinds of fantastic literature — science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal short-fiction — and run the gamut from short stories to flash fiction to micro-fiction.

This issue looks very solid, with original fiction from Piers Anthony, Alex Shvartsman, and many others. The cover art is by Suebsin Pulsiri.

Here’s the complete fiction Table of Contents:

“Descant” by Piers Anthony
“The Peacemaker” by Rachel A. Brune
“My Favorite Photos of Anne” by Aaron Polson
“Verisimilitude” by Alan Murdock
“Orc Legal” by James Beamon
“Kindle My Heart” by Rebecca Birch
“Burn in Me” by Carrie Martin

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New Treasures: Jani and the Greater Game by Eric Brown

New Treasures: Jani and the Greater Game by Eric Brown

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Jani and the Greater Game-smallThis Eric Brown fellow is one of the most prolific of the new generation of SF and fantasy authors. He’s published a dozen novels in just the last five years, almost all of them with Solaris Books, including the Bengal Station trilogy, The Kings of Eternity (2011), Weird Space: The Devil’s Nebula (2012), Serene Invasion (2013), and Weird Space: Satan’s Reach (2013).

His latest is the opening book in a new steampunk action adventure series set in India in 1910, where the British rule with an iron fist thanks to a strange technology fueled by a mysterious power source… and their enemies covertly maneuver to discover its secrets in a political dance known as the Greater Game.

Eighteen-year-old Janisha Chatterjee, the Cambridge-educated daughter of an Indian government minister, is coming home to visit her father on his death-bed, when her airship is attacked and wrecked. Amid the debris, a stranger — monstrous but kind — saves her life and entrusts her with a mysterious device, which pitches her head-first into the “Greater Game,” the ongoing stand-off between British, Chinese and Russian powers in the Indian subcontinent.

Dodging British officers, Russian spies, and the dangerous priest Durga Das, Jani must bring the device to the foothills of the Himalayas; to the home of Annapurnite, the secret power source on which British domination was built. There she will learn the truth about Annapurnite — a truth that will change the world forever…

Jani and the Greater Game was published on July 29, 2014 by Solaris Books. It is 384 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Dominic Harman.

Why Did I Say That? Or, The Perils of Writing a Series

Why Did I Say That? Or, The Perils of Writing a Series

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Christie StylesA frequently heard complaint about a series, whether in book or TV form, is that the characters never change, and that they keep doing the same things over and over. Another frequently heard complaint is that the characters have changed out of all recognition from the ones we first knew and loved, and why do we never see them doing some of the things they used to do?

Why does this happen, you ask? Because writing a series is more complicated than it looks.

For one thing, you don’t actually know you’re writing a series until you’re on your third, or even your fourth, book. Sure, you may be planning to write a series long before that, but you’re not actually writing one until then. It probably isn’t until your third or fourth book that you have to consider one of the all important factors: will my characters age?

Agatha Christie famously regretted making Hercules Poirot a retiree when she wrote her first book about him, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, but she didn’t realize then that she’d be writing those novels for another 50 years. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, along with their recurring secondary characters, simply don’t age. Even though the world goes on around them, with very few exceptions each of their stories is told as if it was a single, stand alone novel.

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Frayling Tackles his own Yellow Peril

Frayling Tackles his own Yellow Peril

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Yellow PerilSerialFuManchuThe centennial of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu character is a topic I have covered both for the anniversary of the Devil Doctor’s first appearance in the story, “The Zayat Kiss,” in 1912 and the publication of the first novel (really a fix-up of stories), The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, in 1913.

While Rohmer and the character are largely forgotten outside of pulp circles today, the legacy of the criminal mastermind is alive and well in film and comics. The concept of the Yellow Peril from an era when the broad term Oriental grouped together people from parts of Eastern Europe with all of Asia and the Middle East may sound anachronistic, but given the continued delicate relations between the Middle East and the West, those same fears personified are still the stuff of fiction and paranoia well over a century on.

Sax Rohmer did not invent the criminal mastermind, nor was he the first to capitalize on the Yellow Peril for works of fiction. What he did do was create an archetype that managed to embody and transcend the fears of a “foreign other” to instead personify the fear of Western society falling to a superior intellect operating under a completely different set of values. Rohmer did this better than anyone before and while Fu Manchu as a name may seem ridiculous, the concept of the character is still with us from James Bond films to the media’s portrayal of terrorist leaders in the 21st Century.

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Goth Chick News: Vlad Tepes Does Time

Goth Chick News: Vlad Tepes Does Time

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Secret tunnels beneath Tokat Castle-smallAs if in response to the modern day bastardization of the vampire image (flannel shirts, shunning blood-drinking, etc., etc.), Dracula himself has started popping up everywhere.

Pardon the phraseology.

First, in June come the report from the University of Tallin that Vlad Dracula’s final resting place was likely not in the ruins of a Romanian monastery, but was instead in a Neapolitan chapel.

And now, just in time for Halloween, the UK’s Daily Mail reports more archaeological history about the real man Vlad Dracula.

A winding maze of secret dungeons and tunnels has been discovered beneath Tokat Castle in Turkey during restoration work on the site.  The ruins of the castle are located in the northern town of Tokat and these hidden cells may have been where Vlad Tepes himself was held hostage during the 15th century.

“The castle is completely surrounded by secret tunnels. It is very mysterious,” says restoration archaeologist İbrahim Çetin, who is working at the site.  He went on to tell the Daily News that one tunnel found is believed to have been used to reach nearby Roman baths. The dungeons, Çetin told the paper, were “built like a prison.”

“It is hard to estimate in which room Dracula was kept,” he said, “But he was around here.”

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