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Vampires, Frozen Worlds, and Gambling With the Devil: The Best of Fritz Leiber

Vampires, Frozen Worlds, and Gambling With the Devil: The Best of Fritz Leiber

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In my last post I reviewed The Best of Stanley Weinbaum, the first volume in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. In this one I’ll review the second in the series, The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974). The introduction was done by the excellent sci-fi/fantasy author Poul Anderson (1926-2001). The cover was by Dean Ellis (1920-2009), though a later 1979 printing (see below) has a cover by Michael Herring (1947-).

Fritz Leiber is probably best known for his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser sword and sorcery tales. At least, that was my introduction to him. He also produced some of the most well-loved horror tales of the twentieth century, such as “Smoke Ghost” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.” I’ve read some of his science fiction in The Book of Fritz Leiber (Daw, 1974) and Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories (Night Shade Books, 2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Charles N. Brown. But it was interesting to read a book dedicated completely to Leiber’s science fiction (though there are one or two stories that I’m not sure fit this moniker).

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Try India’s Lord of the Rings: The Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi

Try India’s Lord of the Rings: The Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi

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It’s not often that something truly original and new crosses my desk — and when it does, it’s usually from a writer who ventures far from the well-trod paths of Western Fantasy, like Nnedi Okorafor, Ken Liu, or Nisi Shawl.

So I was very intrigued when I received a copy of The Oath of the Vayuputras, the closing volume of The Shiva Trilogy, which the Hindustan Times calls “India’s Lord of the Rings.” A massive, sprawling epic, The Shiva Trilogy is nothing less than a tale of ancient civilizations, gods, and a holy war for the very soul of India. It has become an international bestseller, with over 2.5 million copies in print.

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New Treasures: Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom by David Neilsen

New Treasures: Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom by David Neilsen

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dr-fell-and-the-playground-of-doom-smallAh, Halloween. That gorgeous, short-lived season when publishers cram a year’s worth of spooky fiction into a single month.

If you pay attention for the next few weeks, you’ll see a delicious flood of horror for all ages in your local bookstore. New novels and collections by Stephen King, Laird Barron, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Robert Aickman, and many others.

There’s plenty for younger readers, too (after all, they tend to embrace the Halloween spirit even more than us old folks). One of the more intriguing releases for younger readers to cross my desk recently was Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom, by David Neilsen. It’s a Middle Grade horror story written by someone who does one-man performances based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft… who can resist that??

When the mysterious Dr. Fell moves into the abandoned house that had once been the neighborhood kids’ hangout, he immediately builds a playground to win them over. But as the ever-changing play space becomes bigger and more elaborate, the children and their parents fall deeper under the doctor’s spell.

Only Jerry, Nancy, and Gail are immune to the lure of his extravagant wonderland. And they alone notice that when the injuries begin to pile up on the jungle gym, somehow Dr. Fell is able to heal each one with miraculous speed. Now the three children must find a way to uncover the doctor’s secret power without being captivated by his trickery.

“Recommended for school libraries that need to breathe life into their traditional mystery collections.” —School Library Journal

Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom was published by Crown Books for Young Readers on August 9, 2016. It is 240 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital version.

The Man Behind The Princess Bride

The Man Behind The Princess Bride

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goldman-11111“It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.” Wm. Goldman

Anyone who has been reading my posts over the last few years already knows that The Princess Bride (TPB) is one of my favourite – if not my favourite – movies. Family and friends quote from it all the time. “Morons!” we’ll exclaim when faced with any, or, “Murdered by pirates is good,” we mutter as we walk away from someone who should be.

And I know there will be some who disagree with me, but I think TPB is one of the few examples where the movie is actually better than the book. And why not? They were both written by the same person, one who understands clearly what he’s doing:

Here is one of the main rules of adaptation: you cannot be literally faithful to the source material.
Here’s another that critics never get: you should not be literally faithful to the source material. It is in a different form, a form that does not have the camera.
Here is the most important rule of adaptation: you must be totally faithful to the intention of the source material.
— from Which Lie Did I Tell?

Which, by the way, is the perfect answer to people who complain when movies turn out to be different from books. It’s only when screenwriters fail in that last rule that they’ve done a bad job.

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Future Treasures: Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Future Treasures: Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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certain-dark-things-banner-smallSilvia Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican born Canadian fantasy writer. Her debut novel, Signal to Noise, was a finalist for the British Fantasy, Locus, Aurora and Solaris awards, and made seven year’s best lists, including B&N’s Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Buzzfeed, i09, and Tor.com. Earlier this year she was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award for her Lovecraftian anthology She Walks in Shadows.

Her second novel, Certain Dark Things, is one of the most highly anticipated releases of the fall. Paul Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts) says it “is steeped in the history of Mexico City and vampire lore and yet manages to deftly re-invent the bloodsucker… Certain Dark Things packs a wallop.” And Lavie Tidhar says:

Not since Anne Rice’s seminal Interview with the Vampire has the vampire story been so radically reimagined. Silvia Moreno-Garcia reinvents it for the 21st century in this high-concept, explosive tale of narco-vampires in Mexico City, and just when you thought it was safe to step out of the coffin. Certain Dark Things is dark, inimitable, and so very, very cool. Unmissable.

Sounds pretty intriguing already! Here’s the description.

Welcome to Mexico City… An Oasis In A Sea Of Vampires…

Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is busy eeking out a living when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life.

Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, must feast on the young to survive and Domingo looks especially tasty. Smart, beautiful, and dangerous, Atl needs to escape to South America, far from the rival narco-vampire clan pursuing her. Domingo is smitten.

Her plan doesn’t include developing any real attachment to Domingo. Hell, the only living creature she loves is her trusty Doberman. Little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his effervescent charm.

And then there’s Ana, a cop who suddenly finds herself following a trail of corpses and winds up smack in the middle of vampire gang rivalries.

Vampires, humans, cops, and gangsters collide in the dark streets of Mexico City. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive?

Certain Dark Things will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on October 25, 2016. It is 323 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Kerri Resnick. Get more details at Silvia’s website.

John DeNardo’s Savory Selection of Science Fiction and Fantasy for October

John DeNardo’s Savory Selection of Science Fiction and Fantasy for October

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Over at Kirkus Reviews, the tireless John DeNardo itemizes the 13 “must-read science fiction and fantasy books being released in October.” And John reads even more than I do, so he should know. Here he is on Faller by Will McIntosh, which will be released by Tor Books on October 25.

The people of the world find themselves on floating islands of rock, with no memory of who they are, how they got there, or what happened. A man calling himself Faller discovers in his pocket a photo of himself with a woman… thus prompting him to find the woman he can no longer remember… This science fiction thriller starts with a mystery that will make you not want to put the book down.

And Impersonations by Walter Jon Williams (Tor.com, October 4).

After the fall of an evil empire that subjugated both humans and aliens, a hero emerged from the civil war that followed. But Caroline Sula offended her superiors by winning a battle without their permission, and now she is posted to old Earth to keep her quiet. But the powers that be aren’t content; someone is manufacturing evidence that would lead to her false imprisonment… This is a sweeping space opera with an emphasis on adventure.

And Yesternight by Cat Winters (William Morrow, October 4).

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New Treasures: The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories by Robert Aickman

New Treasures: The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories by Robert Aickman

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Robert Aickman was one of the finest horror writers in our field. He received the World Fantasy Award in 1975, and the British Fantasy Award in 1981, the year he died.

Not familiar with Aickman? Great! There’s never been a better time to try him. The marvelous Valancourt Books has returned much of his work to print, including The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories, an omnibus collection of his early work, released in hardcover and an affordable trade paperback format last week. It contains his debut novel The Late Breakfasters (1964), half a dozen short stories, and a new introduction by Philip Challinor.

I first discovered Valancourt by standing in front of their booth at the World Fantasy Convention a few years ago, and being absolutely astounded at how many terrific books they have in their back catalog. Here’s a few I’ve managed to highlight recently at Black Gate.

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The Dandelion Dynasty and Sagrada Família

The Dandelion Dynasty and Sagrada Família

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The Dandelion Dynasty is an attempt at melding two separate literary traditions, both of which I’ve been fortunate enough to inhabit.

One of them traces a lineage from ancient, fragmentary pre-dynastic legends and Warring States Period annals to the spare, vivid biographies in Records of the Grand Historian, to elegant Tang Dynasty lyric poems and politically subversive Yuan Dynasty plays and pre-modern Ming Dynasty novels, and thence to the first vernacular Chinese stories, whose awkward but also lively language is cobbled together by great writers who were also courageous translators and who enriched the new medium with neologisms and adopted grammatical structures and strange metaphors imported from the West, and finally, to the wuxia classics that revived the strength of Chinese storytelling and the modern web serials that represent the lives of men and women in a society seized by some of the greatest upheavals and tumultuous changes ever encountered by any human society, incorporating along the way historical romances, oral storytelling, and magnificent fantasies that have been built up by generations of artists, brick by brick,  like the Great Wall itself.

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Horror and Swords & Sorcery

Horror and Swords & Sorcery

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by Virgil Finlay

The air has turned crisp, the sun is dipping below the horizon earlier each evening, and the supermarket candy section seems to have grown exponentially. Halloween is just around the corner and, like many of you, my mind has turned to haunts and frights.

Horror is one of the primary elements dividing swords & sorcery from epic fantasy. To quote the Horror Writers Association’s site, horror fiction is that which “elicits an emotional reaction that includes some aspect of fear or dread.” Horror has been intrinsic to the genre from its earliest days. Robert E. Howard’s heroes, Kull, Conan, Bran, and Solomon Kane all face off against supernatural horror. In general, the worlds of S&S are dark and dangerous. The protagonists, mostly loners, find themselves pitted against an inimical universe populated with carnivorous forces of darkness that sate their hunger on humanity.

Epic fantasy is concerned with things like the fate of the world, the battle between Light and Darkness, or big dynastic squabbles. There may be moments of terror in epic fantasy (e.g. LotR’s Watcher in the Water; A Song of Ice and Fire’s wights), but it’s rarely the main event. Not in every story, but in most of their S&S work, writers like Clark Ashton Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, and C. L. Moore, created tales that were horror first and foremost. They spun nightmares and darkness into thread and, along with strands of adventure and mystery, wove from it something moodier than Prof. Tolkien or his successors.

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Self-Published Book Review: The Soldier and the Slave by Andrew J. Luther

Self-Published Book Review: The Soldier and the Slave by Andrew J. Luther

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see this post for instructions to submit. I’ve received very few submissions recently, and I’d like to get more.

the-soldier-and-the-slave-front-600x966The Soldier and the Slave by Andrew J. Luther is this month’s self-published novel. I last reviewed a book of Mr. Luther’s in 2015, called The Severed Oath, the second book of his Tales of The Undying Empire series of standalone novels. The Soldier and the Slave is the beginning of a new trilogy in that world called The Undying Empire: Rebellion.

In The Severed Oath, the Emperor played only a small part. He wasn’t very helpful, but neither was he particularly malevolent. The Emperor does not appear in The Soldier and the Slave, but he has a much more sinister role. He has ordered a detachment of his legions, led by Commander Kied, to secure a valley while a small team of specialists search for something hidden in it. The valley is inhabited by farmers, unimportant but citizens of the Empire. While Kied is initially content to follow orders, even if it involves confining Imperial citizens to their homes, he balks when he discovers what’s planned for the second part of his orders: the wholesale execution of the citizenry. His refusal, while noble, leads only to his arrest and imprisonment, and the execution of his command staff.

Reduced to a slave in the mines, he is paired up with Rotos. A giant of a man, Rotos is not only strong, but powerful, possessing abilities unlike any that Kied has seen. He can overwhelm most people with sheer presence, though Kied proves at least partially resistant. Rotos is also unfriendly, unwilling to even talk to Kied at first.

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