Black Gate

Two years ago, when The Best of R.A. Lafferty was published by Gollancz SF Masterworks, I wrote an excited New Treasures article that began like this:

Fabulous! Lafferty is one of my favorite short story writers, and far too much of his work — virtually all of it, really — is either long out of print, or available only in very expensive collector’s editions from Centipede Press. The prospect of a generous collection of his best short fiction in a compact and affordable trade paperback edition… seemed too good to be true.

It almost was. The Gollancz edition was very hard to acquire in the US (and it still is). Fortunately Tor Books saw fit to reprint the book as part of their own Tor Essentials line earlier this month, and it’s now widely available in a handsome and affordable trade paperback edition. Here’s the publisher’s description.

Tor Essentials presents science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.

Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, a winner of the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914-2002) was an American original, a teller of acute, indescribably loopy tall tales whose work has been compared to that of Avram Davidson, Flannery O’Connor, Flann O’Brien, and Gene Wolfe.

The Best of R. A. Lafferty presents 22 of his best flights of offbeat imagination, ranging from classics like “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” and “The Primary Education of the Cameroi” to his Hugo Award-winning “Eurema’s Dam.”

Introduced by Neil Gaiman, the volume also contains story introductions and afterwords by, among many others, Michael Dirda, Samuel R. Delany, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Robson, Harlan Ellison, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman, and Patton Oswalt.

This is a joyous, wonderful, and wholly surprising book that belongs in the collection of every serious science fiction reader. Here the complete Table of Contents.

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I don’t pay a lot of attention to the limited edition small press genre market here because, well, most of their output is overpriced and aimed squarely at collectors. The exception is Subterranean Press, who do fabulous work — and routinely produce much more reasonably priced editions of their high-end volumes.

The latest author to get the Subterranean treatment is Michael Marshall Smith, author of Spares (1996), Bad Things (2009), and many other novels, and more than half a dozen short story collections, including What You Make It (1999), and More Tomorrow & Other Stories (2003). The Best of Michael Marshall Smith is a mammoth 568-page retrospective that gathers 30 of Smith’s best stories from his lengthy and successful career. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls it a standout collection:

This standout collection showcase Smith’s facility at imbuing genre tropes with humanity. Every entry offers something unexpected, while grounding inventive paranormal situations in recognizable emotion. Smith.. crafts a plausible sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann” with “Window of Erich Zann,” successfully transplanting the tale from Europe to Haight-Ashbury and exploring the protagonist’s capacity to see into a terrifying alternate reality. Smith’s first published short story, “The Man Who Drew Cats,” which won the British Fantasy Award in 1991, offers a searing window into domestic violence…

Here’s the publisher’s description.

In 1990, British-born author Michael Marshall Smith burst on to the literary scene with his first story “The Man Who Drew Cats.” It won the prestigious British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, and he went on to win the award again the next year. In a career that has now spanned three decades he has written nearly 100 short stories, published more than a dozen best-selling novels around the world, and scripted numerous movie and television projects. Now, to celebrate his three decades as a writer, The Best of Michael Marshall Smith brings together thirty of his most emotive and powerful stories (including all his award-winning short fiction), along with extensive story notes by the author.

Featuring evocative heading illustrations by Les Edwards, this career-spanning collection includes such memorable tales as “Hell Hath Enlarged Itself,” “More Tomorrow,” “To Receive is Better,” “What You Make It,” “Later,” “The Dark Land,” “What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night,” “Always,” and many others, in their definitive versions.

By turns touching, disturbing, and frightening, these stories are not limited by theme or genre, but reveal a writer always in command, and whose imagination knows no bounds. The Best of Michael Marshall Smith is the ultimate compilation of the author’s work, and stands as a testament to his mastery of, and commitment to, his craft.

The Best of Michael Marshall Smith was published by Subterranean Press in a deluxe hardcover edition on December 31, 2020. It is 568 pages, priced at $44 in hardcover and $6.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Stefan Koidl; the interior story heading illustrations are by Les Edwards. Order directly from the Subterranean website.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

C. M. Waggoner’s debut novel was Unnatural Magic (which we covered here almost exactly a year ago). Her latest, published last month by Ace, is set in the same world. I admit I’m very intrigued by the description for The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry, the tale of a down-and-out fire witch and a young gentlewoman who team up to stop a deadly conspiracy.

Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt — again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins.

Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn. With the help of a bird-loving necromancer, a shapeshifting schoolgirl, and an ill-tempered reanimated mouse named Buttons, Delly and Winn are determined to get the best of an adversary who wields a twisted magic and has friends in the highest of places.

Come on, I know that description is like nothing else you’ve ever read. (Romance, undead, and a reanimated mouse named Buttons! That’s a winning combo right there.) Martin Cahill at Tor.com is very taken with this book:

Waggoner’s characters absolutely shine… Agatha Christie in design and Pratchett-esque in execution… The plot… is [a] daring sequence of events that kept me enthralled and rooted to my seat for hours on end. A protection job turns into a murder mystery, turns into a revenge quest, turns into a courtship, turns into something like Breaking Bad by way of “let’s burn it down from the inside,” and ends up somewhere around the end of a Shakespearean comedy and tragedy combined.

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry was published by Ace Books on January 12, 2021. It is 384 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover art and design is by Jess Cruickshank. Read the complete first chapter at Tor.com.

See all our coverage of the best new science fiction and fantasy right here.