Black Gate

Well, we’re heading into fall (at least, for those readers in the Northern Hemisphere), and that’s reading season. Time to snuggle down with a good book or three, as the weather turns foul outside. My choice for Labor Day weekend is the debut novel by Forrest Leo, a Monty Pythonesque fantasy about a poet who accidentally sells his wife to the devil — then assembles a band of adventurers to rescue her. BookRiot labels it “a delight,” and Locus calls it “Wonderfully demented and comical… as if Tom Holt and Oscar Wilde got together and decided to do up a steampunk novelty… a robust, riotous romp.”

When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns from his butler that they’re broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him.

Distraught and contemplating suicide, Savage accidentally conjures the Devil — the polite “Gentleman” of the title — who appears at one of the society parties Savage abhors. The two hit it off: the Devil talks about his home, where he employs Dante as a gardener; Savage lends him a volume of Tennyson. But when the party’s over and Vivien has disappeared, the poet concludes in horror that he must have inadvertently sold his wife to the dark lord.

Newly in love with Vivian, Savage plans a rescue mission to Hell that includes Simmons, the butler; Tompkins, the bookseller; Ashley Lancaster, swashbuckling Buddhist; Will Kensington, inventor of a flying machine; and Savage’s spirited kid sister, Lizzie, freshly booted from boarding school for a “dalliance.” Throughout, his cousin’s quibbling footnotes to the text push the story into comedy nirvana.

Lionel and his friends encounter trapdoors, duels, anarchist-fearing bobbies, the social pressure of not knowing enough about art history, and the poisonous wit of his poetical archenemy. Fresh, action-packed and very, very funny, The Gentleman is a giddy farce that recalls the masterful confections of P.G. Wodehouse and Hergé’s beautifully detailed Tintin adventures.

The Gentleman was published by Penguin Press on August 16, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $26 on hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

Over at The Verge, Andrew Liptak has posted a handy little reader’s guide titled “New Adventures: all the best science fiction and fantasy books coming out in August.” It appeared way back on August 1, but I just got around to reading it now, which really makes it All the Best SF and Fantasy I Missed in August. But whatever, it’s packed with lots of great recommended reading, and anyway September looks a lot quieter than August, so maybe I can get caught up. Here’s hoping.

Andrew seems intrigued by the steampunk adventure The Guild Conspiracy, by Brooke Johnson, the sequel to The Brass Giant (2015).

The latest installment of Brooke Johnson’s Chroniker City finds its hero Petra Wade six months after her last adventure. Tasked with building a war machine, she’s been sabotaging the project to try and stave off a coming war, and her overseers are watching her every move. It’s been a while since we’ve picked up a good steampunk adventure, and this one looks like it’s just what we need.

And also the moody Alternate History tale The Last Days of Night, by Graham Moore.

Set in 1888 at the birth of the electrical age, it follows a young lawyer named Paul Cravath who’s asked to defend industry titan George Westinghouse against a billion dollar lawsuit from inventor Thomas Edison. This novel is being adapted into a film by The Imitation Game‘s director, Morten Tyldum, which has us excited.

And the latest novella from Tor.com Publishing: The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson.

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Dennis Mahoney’s previous novel was Fellow Mortals (2013), the tale of a small community struggling to recover from a fire. Bell Weather is a significant departure, an adventure fantasy set in a strange world not quite our own, where a mysterious young woman, rescued from a flooded river, is brought to an isolated settlement where dark forces terrorize the surrounding woods. Katherine Dunn (Geek Love) says, “The time is far off, the place is charming strange, and this is rollicking, jaw-clenching adventure.” And Kirkus Reviews gives it a rave, saying:

A young woman’s past catches up with her in a magic, recently colonized new world in this historical fantasy… The real strength of this novel is its stunning worldbuilding, which merges the aesthetic of the Colonial Americas with Márquez-style magical realism.

This one sounds hard to qualify… but if you enjoy historical fantasy, magic realism, or adventure fantasy, Bell Weather definitely sounds worth a shot.

Bell Weather was published by St. Martin’s Griffin on August 9, 2016. It is 384 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback, or $9.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Willco (click the images above for bigger versions).