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Goth Chick News: Stokers, Stokers, Everywhere, But Still Not One For Me

Goth Chick News: Stokers, Stokers, Everywhere, But Still Not One For Me

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Another year has passed without a single Bram Stoker Award appearing for sale on eBay. I really thought my time had come when I I told you that the Horror Writers Association (HWA) announced it had expelled a member from its ranks, who had been the recipient of multiple Stokers. As the recipient was entirely unrepentant, I felt sure he would make a statement by publicly unloading his awards, but alas. As my only hope of having one is to buy one on the open market, my mantle remains bereft of the pinnacle of all awards.

The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the approximately 1800 active members (in good standing) of the HWA. Several members of the HWA, including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse such writing awards, fearing it would incite competitiveness rather than friendly admiration. The HWA therefore went to great lengths to avoid mean-spirited competition by specifically seeking out new or overlooked writers and works, and officially issuing awards not based on “best of the year” criteria but for “superior achievement,” which allows for ties.

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Future Treasures: Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman

Future Treasures: Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman

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Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman. (DAW Books, July, 18th,  2023, 304pages). Cover art by Jeszika Le Vye.

 

Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman will be published this July by DAW Books. The stunning cover art by Jeszika Le Vye evokes and extends the signature covers of the Coldfire Trilogy crafted by Michael Whelan; the trilogy was released during 1991-1995 followed by a 2012 prequel novella, Dominion. Note that a revised version of Dominion, starring the Hunter himself, is in Nightborn!

Pre-order Nightborn: Coldfire Rising now from various retailers via the portal page on The Astra Publishing House page (DAW imprints).

But wait, there is more! Black Gate has an interview planned with C. S. Friedman leading up to the release. This is part of our “Beauty in Weird Fiction” series that focuses on the aesthetics of art in dark fantasy.  Fans of the Coldfire series will know that the mysterious, energetic fae is a beautiful and dangerous medium (see the astral blue entity in the cover above), and we’ll corner the author on her take on working visual, alluring magic. …

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New Treasures: Burrowed by Mary Baader Kaley

New Treasures: Burrowed by Mary Baader Kaley

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Burrowed (Angry Robot, January 10, 2023). Cover by Apostolos Gkantinas

We’re not that far into 2023, and there’s already been a fine crop of debut novelists. The latest to show up on my radar is Mary Baader Kaley, whose first novel Burrowed, a far-future tale of a genetic plague that splits humanity in two, was published by Angry Robot last month. I bought it the week after it came out at Barnes & Noble.

There’s lot of cool ideas in Burrowed (Booklist proclaims it “A great read for fans of postapocalyptic novels,” and Publishers Weekly says it “captivates with inventive science and adventure… [a] riveting thriller”), but the book didn’t really catch my eye until I read the author’s Big Idea post at John Scalzi’s blog, in which she explains that the idea for the novel arose out of the challenges of raising an autistic son.

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Future Treasures: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Future Treasures: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

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The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
(Harper Voyager, February 28, 2023). Cover by Ivan Belikov

I met Shannon Chakraborty at the 2018 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, where she conducted a delightful reading from her second novel The Kingdom of Copper, the sequel to her bestselling debut The City of Brass. Back then she went by the very cool name “S. A Chakraborty.” For her new book The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, she has changed her name slightly to “Shannon Chakraborty,” which is much easier to shout at somebody when you’re trying to get them to hold an elevator.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi will be published by Harper Voyager next week, and I’m going to go on record here as recommending you clear the end of the month for this one. Publishers Weekly calls it a swashbuckling adventure with “playful plot twists and thrilling action sequences [with a] charmingly crooked cast and dry humor,” and BookPage sums it up as “A swashbuckling high seas quest that’s rousing, profound and irresistible.” This sounds like the book I need.

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Vintage Treasures: The Plenty Trilogy by Colin Greenland

Vintage Treasures: The Plenty Trilogy by Colin Greenland

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Take Back Plenty, Seasons of Plenty, and Mother of Plenty (AvoNova, January 1992 and
January 1996, and Avon Eos, June 1998). Covers by Glenn Orbik, Jim Burns, and uncredited

Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty was one of the major British SF novels of the 90s. It won the British Science Fiction Award and the Clarke Award for Best SF Novel, and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Writing about its heroine, Tabitha Jute, in Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, John Clute said:

Colin Greenland, one of the sharpest and most innovative young British critics and novelists, had a bright idea. The old SF was joyous. So why not enjoy it, even now? Why not write Space Opera whose heroine – Tabitha Jute – may not change the universe, but who is superabundantly alive? So he did.

Greenland followed Take Back Plenty with two sequels, Seasons of Plenty, and Mother of Plenty, and one collection, The Plenty Principle, which included a prequel tale using the same setting, a derelict planet-sized starship “populated by gamblers, militarists, and space trash” known as Plenty.

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Repackaging a Classic: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

Repackaging a Classic: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

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Cinder, Volume One of The Lunar Chronicles (Square Fish, February 2020). Cover by Tomer Hanuka

I don’t usually hang out in the young adult section at Barnes & Noble. OK, that’s a blatant lie. I gawk at the colorful table displays like a starving zombie at a Springsteen concert. Let me start over.

I love the young adult section at Barnes & Noble, but I don’t usually buy a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I don’t often come across book descriptions like this one.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move…. Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction.

A Cinderella retelling dressed up as cyberpunk noir, described as “a cross between Cinderella, Terminator, and Star Wars” by Entertainment Weekly? That’s worth twelve bucks. I totally missed Marissa Meyer’s Cinder when it was released in hardcover a decade ago, but I was delighted to bring the new paperback edition home with me, and you know what? I’m glad I did.

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New Treasures: The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles

New Treasures: The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles

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The Last Blade Priest (Angry Robot, July 2022). Cover design by Alice Claire Coleman

I’m a little late out of the gate with this one. The Last Blade Priest came out last summer and I ignored it, despite the warm reviews from most of the usual sources (GrimDark Magazine called it “a brilliant epic… one of my favorite new releases of this year,” and Publishers Weekly said it’s “gripping… demonstrates the value of thoughtful, well-planned worldbuilding.”)

But it wasn’t until I stumbled across Ian Mond’s review at Locus Online last fall (“The Last Blade Priest… unashamedly embraces the tropes of epic fan­tasy – the political shenanigans, complex magic systems, and ancient, enigmatic Gods – that make the genre so much fun to read”) that my interest was finally piqued, and I bought a copy.

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Haunted Trucks, Ghostly Theaters, and Creepy Picnics: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Haunted Trucks, Ghostly Theaters, and Creepy Picnics: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII (DAW, November 1984). Cover by Vicente Segrelles

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII was the twelfth volume in the DAW Year’s Best Horror series and the fifth edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). The book was copyrighted and printed in 1984. After nine covers by Michael Whelan, we have a new cover artist, the Spanish artist Vicente Segrelles (1940–). I think this is a frightening cover and less fantastic than those that Whelan often did. I had this by my bed one night and actually turned the book over because the lich-woman in the mirror was sort of creeping me out. That’s pretty good horror art!

But an even bigger artistic change is that this is the first DAW Year’s Best Horror without the famous yellow DAW spine and the famous DAW yellow tag on the cover; though the DAW “number” is still ongoing, this one being 603. This major aesthetic switch came about for all of DAW’s titles in late 1984. I assume that the DAW powers-that-be thought after about twelve years a change was needed. Maybe, but it does sadly mark the end of an era in paperback publishing. Nevertheless, the cover font of The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII is still similar to previous volumes, keeping it artistically in a line to some degree.

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Vintage Treasures: Space Opera and Space Odysseys edited by Brian Aldiss

Vintage Treasures: Space Opera and Space Odysseys edited by Brian Aldiss

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Space Opera and Space Odysseys (Futura, July and December 1974). Covers by Eddie Jones

Brian Aldiss had a long and enviable career at the top of the science fiction field, with dozens of novels to his credit, and nearly three dozen collections.

But in his long career he also produced some excellent anthologies. In partnership with Harry Harrison he released nine annual volumes of Best SF (1967-1975), three retrospective titles looking at SF of the 1940s to the 1960s (Decade: The 1940s and its sequels), and fine standalone titles such as The Astounding-Analog Reader and Farewell Fantastic Venus! But on his own he also assembled several terrific volumes, including a few we’ve looked at in the past, including Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two and Perilous Planets.

Today I want to examine two wonderful paperback anthologies he released in 1974 with Futura in the UK (and later reprinted in the US in incomplete editions): Space Opera and Space Odysseys, which contain stories by Robert Sheckley, Donald Wandrei, Daniel F. Galouye, Edmond Hamilton, James E. Gunn, Philip K. Dick, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, A. E. van Vogt, Charles Harness, Randall Garrett, Isaac Asimov, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Edward E. Smith, Alfred Bester, Frank Belknap Long, James Tiptree, Jr. Ross Rocklynne, F. M. Busby, Poul Anderson, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and many others.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

Goth Chick News Reviews: Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

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Ghost Eaters (Quirk Books, September 20, 2022)

Author Clay McLeod Chapman only recently teamed up with Quirk Books, one of my all time favorite sources of strange and unusual stories. For that reason alone he should have been on my radar, not to mention that he is a prolific writer of comics, short stories and several other novels, most of the creepy variety. No, I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I made Chapman’s acquaintance via a suggestion from Amazon, whose algorithms, I must now grudgingly admit, know me pretty well.

In searching for some fun reading material to see me through a mind-numbing four-day business trip bracketed by an even more mind-numbing 9 hour round trip flight, Amazon served me up Ghost Eaters: A Novel as something I might like. Described by Esquire magazine as “Trainspotting meets Requiem For A Dream, rewritten as an avant-garde horror movie soundtracked by Nine Inch Nails,” it was a no-brainer that I was going to load this one on my tablet. However, I also hedged my bets by loading several other e-books by more familiar writers just in case this story couldn’t hold me.

Let me just tell you now, I needn’t have bothered.

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