Following on our record 1.26 million page views in July, Black Gate had an even more incredible August. There were lots of small triumphs, but the big one was receiving an Alfie Award from George R.R. Martin at Worldcon (at right). In his blog post explaining this year’s awards, George wrote:

One of my special ‘committee awards’ went to Black Gate, which had 461 nominations in the Fanzine category, second among all nominees and good for a place on the ballot. But Black Gate turned down the nomination, just as they did last year, to disassociate themselves from the slates. Turning down one Hugo nomination is hard, turning down two must be agony. Integrity like that deserves recognition, as does Black Gate itself. Editor John O’Neill was on hand to accept the Alfie.

Our top article last month was my report on the Alfie Awards, with pics from the associated Hugo Losers party. Second was M Harold Page’s study on how to capture the magic of a great dungeon crawl in fiction. And third was our look at Michael McDowell’s classic horror novel Cold Moon Over Babylon.

Rounding out the Top Five were William Patrick Maynard’s review of The Midnight Guardian (“a hardboiled pulp yarn that is so good, it immediately makes you set the author to one side with a handful of other standouts”), and Neil Baker’s gaming piece, “How No Man’s Sky Has Reinvigorated a Gaming Generation (No, Not That One).”

Also in the Top Ten were our report on the 2016 Hugo Award Winners, Parts One and Two of Fletcher Vredenburgh’s Summer Short Story Roundup, our summary of the Top 50 Black Gate Posts in July, and Bob Byrne’s detailed history of the TSR classic Dungeon!

The complete list of Top Articles for August follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

The Top 50 Black Gate posts in August were:

1. Black Gate Receives an Alfie Award from George R.R. Martin
2. How to Write a Dungeon Crawl (in Actual Fiction and Not a Tabletop Game!)
3. A Southern Tale of Spectral Revenge: Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell
4. Enter: The Midnight Guardian
5. How No Man’s Sky Has Reinvigorated a Gaming Generation (No, Not That One)
6. The 2016 Hugo Award Winners
7. Summer Short Story Roundup: Part One
8. The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in July
9. Summer Short Story Roundup: Part Two
10. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dungeon! – A New Kind of Board Game

     

11. An Epic Finale for Ancient Opar
12. The Women of Andre Norton’s Witch World
13. Dark Lords Through History: Waller Newell’s Tyrants
14. Goth Chick News: Our New Netflix Obsession – Stranger Things
15. The Flaw in Everything: Warren Ellis’ Karnak the Shatterer
16. The Shannara Chronicles Will Be Back (Though Amber will Not…)
17. Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu, Part Two
18. Beau Geste: Myth vs. Reality
19. Learning the Uncanny Arts: The Secrets of the Uncanny Magazine Covers
20. Straight On Till Morning

     

21. Forbes on the World’s Highest-Paid Authors in 2016
22. GenCon Update: Day 1, Part 1 – New Games
23. Goth Chick News: More Stranger Things – Yes Please!
24. Need Some Cthulhu?
25. GenCon: The Pathfinder Post (featuring Starfinder)
26. I Want to Believe: A Review of A Vision of Fire by Gillian Anderson & Jeff Rovin
27. #rurallife or Can You Hear Me Now?
28. The Groundbreaking SF Anthologies of Athena Andreadis
29. Pathfinder Meets Lovecraft: Starspawn by Wendy N. Wagner
30. A Hard-boiled Private Eye Who Becomes a Wizard’s Henchman: A Wizard’s Henchman by Matthew Hughes

     

31. Fantastic, August and September 1964: A Retro-Review
32. Two Interesting Roleplaying Kickstarters!
33. New Treasures: Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s The Big Book of Science Fiction
34. Proceeding in the Pulp Tradition by Writing Five Novels a Year: A Conversation With Guy Haley
35. When Men Were Men and Aliens Were Green and Up to No Good: The Pulp Tales of Robert Silverberg
36. Fantasia 2016, Day 2: Some Monsterism (Guillermo del Toro press conference and master class, The Dark Side of the Moon, Creature Designers — The Frankenstein Complex, and Rupture)
37. I Am Not a Serial Killer Film Drops (Someplaces) Tomorrow
38. Alaric’s Biggest Secret: “The Desert of Vanished Dreams” by Phyllis Eisenstein
39. Andrew Liptak on All the Best SF and Fantasy You Missed in August
40. Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Q29 Now Available

     

41. Future Treasures: The Call by Peadar O’Guilin
42. Fantasia 2016, Day 5: Bewitched and Bewailing (The Love Witch and The Wailing)
43. Check Out the Recent Fiction at Tor.com
44. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Vincent Starrett on the Great Detective
45. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Western Noir – Hell on Wheels
46. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Arsenic and Old Lace
47. A Scare You Straight Post-Apocalyptic Nightmare: B.C. Bell’s Bipolar Express
48. New Treasures: The Greatship by Robert Reed
49. GenCon Update: Day 1, Part 2 – Gaming Sequels and Expansions
50. Fantasia 2016, Day 4: Questioning Genre (Beware the Slenderman, In a Valley of Violence, and The Unseen)

There were plenty of older articles popular last month as well. The 25 most popular blog posts written before August were:

1. A Tremendously Disappointing Re-Read: The Soaked-in Misogyny of Piers Anthony’s Xanth
2. The IX by Andrew P. Weston
3. Heroic Fantasy with the Sharp Edge of Reality: A Review of The Sacred Band by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
4. New Treasures: The Library of America Publishes Elmore Leonard
5. A Detailed Explanation
6. Why I Created Labyrinth Lord
7. Part Gothic, Part Sword and Sorcery, and Part Horror: Andrew P. Weston’s Hell Bound
8. Art of the Genre: Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years
9. Vintage Treasures: The Silistra Quartet by Janet Morris
10. Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Skeleton Matters (Or, Why It’s Not OK to Skip Scenes in Your Third Act)
11. Tribulations Herculean and Tragic: Beyond Wizardwall by Janet Morris
12. Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek V – The Final Frontier (1989)
13. Return to Thieves World in Beyond Sanctuary: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris
14. Caught Between Rebels and the Empire’s Blackest Magic: Beyond the Veil: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris
15. Haunted Bushes, Serial Killers, and Mysterious Strangers: Algernon Blackwood’s The Listener and Other Stories
16. Love in War and Realms Beyond Imagining: A Review of The Fish, the Fighters and the Song Girl by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
17. “A Great Place to let Your Imagination Run Wild:” Joe Bonadonna Reviews Rogues in Hell
18. The Devil in the Details: A Review of Lawyers in Hell
19. I, The Sun by Janet Morris
20. The Perfect Prescription for Perdition: Doctors in Hell, edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
21. July 2016 Locus Now on Sale
22. Giving the Devil His Due: A Review of Dreamers in Hell
23. Art of the Genre: Art of Dungeon Maps
24. The Return of the King (1980)
25. An Open Letter to Dave Truesdale

The Top Black Gate Online Fiction features were:

1. An Excerpt from The Sacred Band by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
2. “Seven Against Hell” by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
3. An Excerpt from Truck Stop Earth by Michael A. Armstrong
4. “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum” by Joe Bonadonna
5. “Grady Spades Second Opinion” by Levi Black
6. An Excerpt from “The Dark Muse” by Karl Edward Wagner
7. “Awakening” by Judith Berman
8. “Godmother Lizard” by C.S.E. Cooney
9. “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying” by Alex Kreis
10. An Excerpt from Souldrifter by Garrett Calcaterra

The top categories last month were:

1. Vintage Treasures
2. Magazines
3. Books
4. Game Reviews
5. New Treasures
6. Comics
7. Future Treasures
8. Art of the Genre
9. Blog entry
10. Fiction
11. Reviews
12. Conan
13. Series Fantasy
14. Pulp
15. Discovering Robert E. Howard
16. Art
17. Convention Report
18. Contest
19. BG Staff
20. Editors Blog

The Top 50 Black Gate blog posts in July are here, and you can see all 98 posts we made in the month of August here.