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Year: 2021

The Dark and Puzzling Present: The Medusa Deep, Book 2 of The Midnight Games by David Neil Lee

The Dark and Puzzling Present: The Medusa Deep, Book 2 of The Midnight Games by David Neil Lee

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The Midnight Games (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016) and its sequel
The Medusa Deep (Poplar Press, 2021). Covers by Rachel Rosen, unknown

In his first guest post for Black Gate way back in 2016, The Midnight Games and Why I Wrote Them, David Neil Lee talked about his debut novel and the sequel he hoped to write some day.

For the past twelve years my family and I have lived a couple of blocks from Ivor Wynne, the local football stadium, and we hear all the noise from the Tiger Cats games. So I began a novel in which my protagonist hears a racket from the stadium at night, which he thinks of as “midnight games.” However, they are not games at all, but the cruel ceremonies of a local cult which is trying to summon to earth the Great Old Ones of the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos; trying with what turns out to be a fair degree of success….

What sort of monsters does the cult summon? — well how about those hideous prickly house centipedes that I scoop out of the bathtub of our old house from spring till fall every year. I don’t kill them, I put them in a jar and throw them in a garden — what if they were some sort of hmm, spawn of Yog-Sothoth, summoned here by the games? What about if one of them thrived in our garden, and grew and grew and grew?

I know what you’re thinking. “Dammit that sounds like fun. Why don’t I do that?” Well, if you’re a Black Gate reader, chances are that you do do that…

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Sublime, Cruel Beauty: An Interview with Jason Ray Carney

Sublime, Cruel Beauty: An Interview with Jason Ray Carney

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Jason Ray Carney (aka Ayolo)

Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction

It is not intuitive to seek beauty in art deemed grotesque/weird, but most authors who produce horror/fantasy actually are usually (a) serious about their craft, and (b) driven by strange muses. To help reveal divine mysteries passed through artists, this interview series engages contemporary authors on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Recent guests on Black Gate have included Darrell Schweitzer, Sebastian Jones, Charles Gramlich, Anna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg. See the full list of interviews at the end of this post.

This one features Jason Ray Carney who is rapidly becoming everpresent across Weird Fiction and Sword & Sorcery communities (in fact you can probably corner him in the Whetstone S&S Tavern (hosted on Discord)). By day, he is a Lecturer in Popular Literature at Christopher Newport University. He is the author of the academic book, Weird Tales of Modernity (McFarland), and the fantasy anthology, Rakefire and Other Stories (Pulp Hero Press, reviewed on Black Gate). He recently edited Savage Scrolls: Thrilling Tales of Sword and Sorcery for Pulp Hero Press and is an editor at The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, for Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery and for Witch House Magazine: Amateur Magazine of Cosmic Horror. Incidentally, Jason Ray Carney has also contributed here at Black Gate with a post on Robert E. Howard’s Bran Mak Morn character and musings on How Sword & Sorcery Brings Us Life.

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Fantasia 2021, Part XII: Little Vampire

Fantasia 2021, Part XII: Little Vampire

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I opened the fourth day of Fantasia 2021 with a bundle of two animated films. The shorter was “Bye-Bye Elida,” a 35-minute piece written and directed by Titouan Bordeau. It takes place in a strange desert, where various people and creatures wander about and connect up. There is no dialogue, and I felt the piece might have benefitted from more explanation — or from more detailed visual storytelling, one of the two. The general idea here is clear; the different characters the film presents, cutting between them at odd points, are all players in an overall ecology. It’s a little like Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld (a most peculiar comic book experience), a similarity enhanced by the whimsical designs, the 2D linework, and the restrained colours. But I didn’t find myself engaged in the same way; the individual sections had too rudimentary a narrative, and at least at one viewing the conclusion didn’t tie enough together for me. It’s an interesting experiment, but not to my mind entirely successful.

The feature film was Little Vampire, directed by Joann Sfar from his own graphic novels, with the adaptation co-scripted by Sandrina Jardel. It opens with Pandora (Camille Cottin), the young and beautiful mother of a ten-year-old boy (Louise Lacoste) being chased with her child by an aristocrat obsessed with her; she calls on the spirits of the dead; they answer; the woman and boy become a vampire, and flee with the skeletal captain of a flying ship — the Flying Dutchman (Jean-Paul Rouve). Three hundred years later, they’ve built a sanctuary from the twisted monster the cruel nobleman has become, a thing called the Gibbus (Alex Lutz). Pandora and the Flying Dutchman have ensured that their boy, known only as Little Vampire, doesn’t remember any of the long pursuit. Instead they all live (well, as it were) in a sprawling crumbling mansion on a hill, where Little Vampire and his monster friends watch horror movies every night.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Lone Wolf and Cub Part 2

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Lone Wolf and Cub Part 2

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The Mandalorian

We’ve already gone into the origins of the Lone Wolf and Cub films in the manga series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, so this week let’s look at its influence on later productions, particularly the Star Wars series The Mandalorian. I’m far from the first person to point out the connections between the two, but as they show the continuing relevance of Lone Wolf and Cub even fifty years later, I think it’s worthwhile to revisit them.

To state the obvious, The Mandalorian draws most of its inspiration from the Western genre, especially the Italian variety known as Spaghetti Westerns, and of course from the Star Wars saga itself. But the Lone Wolf influence is strong: the visual archetype of the solo martial artist fighting off waves of enemies with a young son by his side or in his arms is powerful, and was adopted in whole.

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Fantasia 2021, Part XI: Tombs of the Blind Dead

Fantasia 2021, Part XI: Tombs of the Blind Dead

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Written and directed by David Mataró, “Tongue With Capers” (“Llengua amb tàperes”) is a 15-minute Catalan-language short involving the walking dead. Months after a zombie apocalypse, a man (Toni De los Ángeles) holed up in a bar rescues his neighbour (Aina Cortès), who has a strange plan to communicate with the zombies. The film plays as a huis clos, two actors in a single location, with quick dialogue and a twist at the end. Like most zombie movies, it’s about human beings and how they behave to each other; in this case there’s something to say about how well we knw each other and maybe what it’s like to be in community with each other. It’s a nice piece, with a fair bit of nastiness but little gore.

Bundled with the short was the classic 1972 Spanish-Portuguese feature Tombs of the Blind Dead (La noche del terror ciego, also known in English as The Blind Dead, Tombs of the Evil Dead, Legend of the Blind Dead, Mark of the Devil Part 4: Tombs of the Blind Dead, Mark of the Devil Part V: Night of the Blind Terror, and, in a recut form with a tacked-on prologue, Revenge From Planet Ape). Written and directed by Amando de Ossorio, Synapse Films spent over a year creating a painstaking high-definition restoration of the movie. Tombs was quite successful on its initial release, spawning three sequels (while inspiring many other films and at least one comic) and helping to start a boom in Spanish horror cinema. I was pleased to see how well it holds up, especially in the lovely Synapse restoration.

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Exciting Storytelling from one of the Best Writers of Heroic Fantasy: When the Goddess Wakes by Howard Andrew Jones

Exciting Storytelling from one of the Best Writers of Heroic Fantasy: When the Goddess Wakes by Howard Andrew Jones

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When the Goddess Wakes (St. Martin’s Press, August 2021). Cover by Lauren Saint-Onge

Whenever a trilogy wraps up, we bake a cake in the Black Gate offices. When that trilogy belongs to our own Howard Andrew Jones, our first Managing Editor, we bake a cake in the shape of the world of Amber. (No, we don’t know how it turned out. The damn cake keeps vanishing.)

When the Goddess Wakes, the final novel in Howard’s Ring-Sworn Trilogy, follows For the Killing of Kings (2018) and Upon the Flight of the Queen (2019). In his review of the first volume here at Black Gate, Fletcher Vredenburgh said “It moves at an astounding pace… This is exciting storytelling from one of the best and most knowledgeable writers of heroic fantasy.” Seth Lindberg proclaimed the second volume is “reminiscent of Zelazny… I was completely floored.” And in a starred review, Publishers Weekly called the final volume an “emotional roller coaster.”

When the Goddess Wakes was published on August 24th by St. Martin’s Press, and it brings to a close one of the most original and exciting fantasy series of the 21st Century. You owe it to yourself to check it out. And when you do, visit us again to share your thoughts. Pick up a copy today.

Fantasia 2021, Part X: Tin Can

Fantasia 2021, Part X: Tin Can

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The Fantasia International Film Festival does a good job matching genres when they bundle a short together with a feature. So Tin Can, a feature-length claustrophobic near-future science-fiction film, came with “Death Valley,” an 11-minute tale of a future of environmental devastation; both about isolation and both featuring protagonists isolated from the world. THe short, written and directed by Grace Sloan, follows a woman in the future living in space who is determined to travel to Death Valley on a barren Earth in order to practise yoga as the sun sets, and then go back into space to attend her friend’s New Year’s Eve party. Things do not go as planned. There’s a nice retro feel to the movie, which looks like it was shot on film, and the effects have the bargain-basement feel of an analog era without feeling cheap for the sake of being cheap — rather, they feel cheap for the sake of an aesthetic, which is perfectly fine. The film’s a little opaque, narratively, but at least provides scope for contemplation; I take it as a piece about the clash between a promised future and the never-quite-dying past.

Then came Tin Can, a Canadian science-fiction movie with strong horror overtones. Directed by Seth A. Smith and written by Smith with Darcy Spidle, it takes place in the near future as a pandemic named Coral ravages eastern Canada. One researcher, Fret (Anna Hopkins) thinks she may have a cure, but then she’s kidnapped and finds herself waking up in a suspended animation pod. The movie’s about her slow struggle to get out of the oversized tin can and learn the truth of what’s happened to her; we as viewers slowly find out as she does.

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The Adventures of Dramatic Podcast Production in a Pandemic: An Interview with J. Barton Mitchell on Fathom, the Prequel to Derelict

The Adventures of Dramatic Podcast Production in a Pandemic: An Interview with J. Barton Mitchell on Fathom, the Prequel to Derelict

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J. Barton Mitchell is the author of the YA novels The Conquered Earth Trilogy, and the prison planet novel, The Razor. Pre-pandemic, he was also in the process of producing his dramatic science fiction podcast, Derelict. For that project he hired professional actors, flying them out to Santa Fe, where he lives, and having them perform together, playing off one another in his recording studio.

Then the pandemic hit, and that shut down production of the podcast, but not Mitchell’s drive to create more adventures in that world (which is set in the same universe as The Razor). So he got to work on a prequel series, Fathom. While Derelict took place on a derelict spaceship, Fathom takes place deep under the sea. I interviewed my friend about this latest project (Episode 4 of which goes live today). We discuss how he changed his production process to be able to continue recording and producing through the pandemic.

You can support this podcast series through its Patreon page. …

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Vintage Treasures: Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy 10: Ghosts edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh

Vintage Treasures: Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy 10: Ghosts edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh

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Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy 10: Ghosts (Signet/New American Library, 1988). Cover by J. K. Potter

Isaac Asimov had a lot of gifts. He was a world famous polymath, a marvelous science explainer and popularizer, and a pretty darned skilled writer of science fiction. But he doesn’t get a lot of credit for one of his greatest talents, a skill in short supply even today: The man knew how to sell anthologies.

After some of his early SF anthologies became enduring top-sellers, often remaining in print for decades (including The Hugo Winners, Volume I and II, Before the Golden Age, and Where Do We Go From Here), publishers discovered that the name Isaac Asimov on the cover of an anthology almost guaranteed it would sell.

Asimov exploited this heavily for the remainder of his career, lending his fame to many important anthology series, often co-created with frequent collaborators Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. These include The Great Science Fiction Stories (25 volumes in 23 years), Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction (10 volumes in 8 years), and Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Fantasy (12 volumes in 9 years). It’s that last one we’re going to look at today, with one of the final volumes: Ghosts, published by Signet in 1988.

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Fantasia 2021, Part IX: Frank & Zed

Fantasia 2021, Part IX: Frank & Zed

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“A Puff Before Dying,” a 10-minute short written and directed by the team of Mike Pinkney and Michael Reich, is a public-service advertisement performed with marionettes. It’s a little like Team America: World Police, I suppose, with a similar sense of irony. There’s a teenage girl (Annie Mebane) who smokes marijuana; her father (James Kirkland) is a cop who hates pot because he’s seen too many people die in car crashes where the driver was stoned; the girl goes for a drive with pothead friends; and the PSA plays out as you might expect. I was not immediately impressed by the humour of the short, but the fact it was actually paid for and approved by The National Road Safety Foundation brings the irony of the piece to another level — it’s so intensely ironic, it’s wrapped back around to being sincere. You can judge the thing for yourself, as the NRSF has it available on their website (scroll down, or search in page for ‘puff’).

The feature that the Fantasia Film Festival bundled with the short was Frank & Zed, a gory puppet movie filled to the brim with felted carnage. Written and directed by Jesse Blanchard, it took six years to make with no studio backing — a Kickstarter-funded DIY project driven by Blanchard’s determination and optimism (on display in a question-and-answer session on Fantasia’s YouTube page). Does the 90-minute result justify the time and effort?

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