Following the excellent review at Grasping at the Wind, Lois Tilton at Locus Online has weighed in on Black Gate 14. 

Here’s what she said about Matthew David Surridge’s “The Word of Azrael”:

Enough adventures to fill many books. Here might well be the ultimate sword and sorcery, in that it both epitomizes and deconstructs the form with a subtle irony…The author is compressing all possible adventures into one, and eventually the threads begin to come together. The tale illustrates how much of what we recognize as S&S lies in certain tropes and themes, and in particular the tone of its prose. RECOMMENDED

She also had kind words for “The Wine-Dark Sea” by Isabel Pelech:

Very dark fantasy. Newyn was disfigured as a child by the local magic called lohan; now she is a masked assassin. She is hired by an old woman to rescue her son from a lohan-filled submerged city, fallen long ago to some malevolent magic. The lohan haunting the place makes it possible to breathe the water, but persons who venture there rarely return… There is nothing commonplace about the setting. The submerged city is filled with wondrous horrors. RECOMMENDED

She also gave a RECOMMENDED rating for “Devil on the Wind” by Michael Jasper and Jay Lake, calling it:

All fireworks, as the authors have pulled out their purpurean pyrotechnics in depiction of Lena and her sorcerous battles.

You can read the complete review here.

Art by Mark Evans for “The Wine-Dark Sea.”