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New Treasures: These Vicious Masks by Tarun Shanker and Kelly Zekas

New Treasures: These Vicious Masks by Tarun Shanker and Kelly Zekas

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Well here’s something interesting — a Victorian era superhero novel. Debut novelists Tarun Shanker and Kelly Zekas bring us the tale of Evelyn Wyndham and her sister Rose, a Victorian adventure featuring evening parties, abductions, a love triangle, witty dialog, mysterious and secret societies, fog-shrouded London, villains with phenomenal abilities, intrigue, mystery, and more. It’s being called Jane Austen meets X-Men, which isn’t a description I hear very often.

These Vicious Masks was published by Swoon Reads on February 9, 2016. It is 320 pages, priced at $9.99 for both the trade paperback and digital editions. The cover is by Rich Deas. Click on the back cover above to read the complete description. See the complete details, including a brief excerpt, at the Swoon Reads website.

See all of our coverage of the best in New Fantasy here.

Future Treasures: Man With No Name by Laird Barron

Future Treasures: Man With No Name by Laird Barron

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Laird Barron is one of the modern masters of horror. James McGlothlin reviewed his latest collection for us, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, saying, “Barron is still one of the leading horror voices of today… I highly recommend it!”

Barron’s also been highly prolific, releasing a steady steam of books in the last few years — including first novel The Croning, the novella X’s For Eyes, and the first volume of the new Year’s Best Weird Fiction anthology series from Undertow Publications.

His latest is a promising-looking novella that looks closer to a modern thriller than anything else. Click the back cover above for the book description. The first of the Nanashi Novellas, Man With No Name was called “Bold, complex, and absolutely riveting” by Jonathan Maberry. It arrives this week from JournalStone.

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New Treasures: Warhammer: Lords of the Dead

New Treasures: Warhammer: Lords of the Dead

Warhammer Lords of the Dead-smallI really enjoy these Warhammer omnibus editions. They’re a tremendous bargain, for one thing. They typically contain 2-3 full length novels, plus the assorted short story or two. I’ve collected more than a few, and while I especially enjoy the science fiction offshoot, Warhammer 40K, the straight-up Warhammer volumes have proven to be a reliable source of modern sword & sorcery, most notably the tales of Gotrek & Felix, C. L. Werner’s Brunner the Bounty Hunter, and Kim Newman’s The Vampire Genevieve.

I’m extremely interested in the new omnibus Lords of the Dead, which includes the first two novels in the End Times series: Chris Wraigh’s The Fall of Altdorf, and The Return of Nagash, by Black Gate blogger Josh Reynolds, author of our popular series on The Nightmare Men. Here’s the description.

The fate of The Old World hangs in the balance. Heroes rise and fall as they battle the Ruinous Powers in a last desperate attempt to save the mortal realm. The Gods of Chaos only want total destruction and their victory seems inevitable……

The Return of Nagash

As the forces of Chaos threaten to drown the world in madness, Mannfred von Carstein and Arkhan the Black put aside their difference and plot to resurrect the one being with the power to stand against the servants of the Ruinous Powers and restore order to the world – the Great Necromancer himself. As they set about gathering artefacts to use in their dark ritual, armies converge on Sylvania, intent on stopping them. But Arkhan and Mannfred are determined to complete their task. No matter the cost, Nagash must rise again.

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A Tale of Two Covers: The Last Page by Anthony Huso

A Tale of Two Covers: The Last Page by Anthony Huso

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I bought the hardcover edition of Anthony Huso’s debut novel The Last Page after reading Matthew David Surridge’s review in Black Gate 12.

The Last Page is a high fantasy steampunk novel, and a love story. We follow the sexually charged relationship between the improbably named Caliph Howl, heir to the throne of the northern country of Stonehold, and a witch named Sena. The two of them meet at university, go their own ways, and then come together again after Caliph has become king and Sena has acquired a vastly powerful magical tome…  what really makes the first book work is its language. The prose is strong, quick and dense in the best ways. The diction, the word choice, is inventive; the imagery is both original and concise. At its best, Huso’s language recalls Wolfe or Vance…

The last time I was in a bookstore I did a double take when I saw the trade paperback edition, which has been given a dramatically different cover. The hardcover edition (above left) was packaged as an urban fantasy, with a beautiful woman with glowing eyes on the cover. The paperback (at right) has been completely redesigned as a fantasy adventure novel, showing a huge fleet of airships massing over a sprawling fantasy landscape. If you’re not paying attention, it’d be pretty easy to mistake it for a completely different book.

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Future Treasures: Harmony House by Nic Sheff

Future Treasures: Harmony House by Nic Sheff

Harmony House Nic Sheff-smallThe YA dystopian trend doesn’t seem like it will run out of energy too soon. My eyes glaze over these days when I see them at the bookstore.

There’s plenty of original and interesting YA work being produced that don’t involve nightmare dsytopian scenarios, however. Nic Sheff, author of the bestselling memoir Tweak, an account of his teen years as a crystal meth addict, and its follow up We All Fall Down: Living with Addiction, brings us Harmony House, a YA horror novel. It arrives in hardcover from HarperTeen later this month.

Something’s not right in Beach Haven.

Jen Noonan’s father thinks a move to Harmony House is the key to salvation, but to everyone who has lived there before, it is a portal to pure horror.

After her alcoholic mother’s death, Jen’s father cracked. He dragged Jen to a dilapidated old manor on the shore of New Jersey to start their new lives—but Jen can tell that the place has an unhappy history. She can feel it the same way she can feel her anger flowing out of her, affecting the world in strange ways she can’t explain.

But Harmony House is more than just a creepy old estate. It’s got a chilling past — and the more Jen discovers its secrets, the more the house awakens. Visions of a strange boy who lived in the house long ago follow Jen wherever she goes, and her father’s already-fragile sanity disintegrates before her eyes. As the forces in the house join together to terrorize Jen, she must find a way to escape the past she didn’t know was haunting her — and the mysterious and terrible power she didn’t realize she had.

Harmony House will be published by HarperTeen on March 22, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

Bombs and Gorgeous Automatons: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

Bombs and Gorgeous Automatons: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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Imagine living in 1800s London and working near Scotland Yard as a telegraphist. Now, imagine how the foundations of your uneventful life are upended when a stranger saves you from a catastrophic bombing. And get this: they knew it would happen.

Thus begins The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley. When Thaniel Steepleton, the disillusioned telegraphist, befriends Keita Mori, a masterful watchmaker, their lives begin to weave around the clock. Cursed with the ability to see the future, Mori struggles to live in the present whilst preventing bad things from happening to Thaniel. In the meantime, bad things unfortunately happen to Mori, considering he ranks as the premier suspect in the bombing. Later on, a brilliant physicist named Grace enters their lives and attempts to rid Mori of his ability to foretell the future.

Along with this gripping tale, we learn about Mori’s aristocratic past in a war-torn Japan. We also learn the reason why he needed to start his life anew in London. Matsumoto, a man from his past, also journeys to London and weaves in and out of Grace’s life, hoping to find a place of permanence. The two subplots strengthen the plot in their center.

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New Treasures: The Last Girl by Joe Hart

New Treasures: The Last Girl by Joe Hart

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Joe Hart is the author of several horror and thriller novels, including The River Is Dark, Lineage, and Widow Town. His latest is the opening novel in a new post-apocalyptic series in which a mysterious worldwide epidemic dramatically reduces the number of females born, from 50% of births to less than 1 percent. Twenty-five years after the first infection, there’s still no cure, and there are fewer than a thousand woman on the face of the Earth.

The Last Girl tells the tale of Zoey, and a few other surviving women, kept in a research compound desperately searching for the cause of the epidemic. It’s not a life Zoey wants… and when she makes a bid for freedom, she takes the future of mankind into her hands.

The second volume in The Dominion Trilogy, The Final Trade, is scheduled to be released on September 13, 2016. The Last Girl was published by Thomas & Mercer on March 1, 2016. It is 371 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $5.99 for the digital price. The cover was designed by M.S. Corley. Click the images above for bigger versions.

Future Treasures: World’s End by Will Elliott, Volume 3 of The Pendulum Trilogy

Future Treasures: World’s End by Will Elliott, Volume 3 of The Pendulum Trilogy

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In The Pilgrims (2014), the opening volume of Will Elliott’s Pendulum Trilogy, down on his luck London journalist Eric Albright discovered a strange red door on the graffiti-covered walls under a bridge near his home. When the door opened and gang of strange bandits — including a giant — dashed out and robbed a nearby store, Eric and his friend Case decided to go through the door… to the land of Levaal, a fantasy kingdom populated by power damaged mages, stone giants, pit devils, and a mountain-sized dragon sleeping beneath a great white castle. In Shadow (2015), Eric and his new friends found themselves in the thick of a brutal war. And in the third and final volume, World’s End, coming later this month from Tor, Levaal faces the final battle in an age-old war between worlds. One more fantasy trilogy brought to a successful close! Every time that happens, we bake a cake.

When Eric Albright, a luckless London slacker, and his pal Stuart Casey went through a battered red door under a railway bridge, the last thing they expected to find was another world. There lay the strange, dark realm of Levaal, whose tyrant lord Vous has ascended to godhood. The great wall which has divided the land has been brought down, setting loose a horde of demonic Tormentors. In their sky prisons, the dragons are stirring, set to defy their slumbering creator and steal humanity’s world.

Shilen, a dragon cloaked in human form, has convinced Eric and Aziel, Vous’s daughter, to help free the dragons from their sky-prison, or Earth will be destroyed. She promises great power, and safety for all Eric’s favoured people, but Shilen has an ulterior motive, for the dragons wish to control humankind completely.

World’s End will be published by Tor Books on March 22, 2016. It is 432 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital format. The cover is by Cynthia Sheppard.

New Treasures: Mort(e) by Robert Repino

New Treasures: Mort(e) by Robert Repino

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Robert Repino’s Mort(e) is an unusual book.

In his article “Five Books in Which Giant Insects Ruin Everyone’s Day” at Tor.com last year, Eric Smith described it thusly:

An epic science-fiction thriller out on January 20th, Mort(e) introduces you to a world that’s been conquered by hyper-intelligent giant ants… Tired of mankind’s treatment of the world, the ants have risen to take the planet, and have made other animals self-aware. It’s an epic battle between humans, ants, dogs, ants, cats, ants, raccoons, ants, and it is incredible. And the protagonist, a housecat named Mort(e), will stick with you long after you close the pages.

I found the newly released trade paperback at the bookstore this week, and was impressed enough with the accolades on the back cover to bring it home. Mort(e) was included in Andrew Liptak’s Very Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Book Of 2015 at i09, and listed as an Amazon Best Book of January 2015. BookRiot called it “Absolutely incredible.. The apocalypse has never, ever been this entertaining.” (Click the cover above to see the complete text.)

I’ve been intrigued by anthropomorphic fantasy ever since I first read Watership Down, and this one sounds right up my alley. Mort(e) was published in hardcover on January 20 of last year, and was reprinted by Soho Press on February 9, 2016. It is 358 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Napo Ng.

Series Fantasy: The Half-Light City by M.J. Scott

Series Fantasy: The Half-Light City by M.J. Scott

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Three years ago I received a package of review copies from Roc Books that included Iron Kin, which turned out to be the third book in a dark fantasy series called The Half-Light City. I was intrigued enough by the cover and the description to dash off a quick New Treasures article, and also to order the opening volume, Shadow Kin.

And truthfully, after that I sort of forgot about it. Until I stumbled on all four books in the series at Barnes & Noble on Saturday. Now, it’s nothing new to come across a fantasy series at B&N (frankly, it’s a lot tougher to find books that aren’t part of a series), but what interested me was that — wonder of wonders — this one was complete, and all four books were right there on the shelves, mine for the taking. Hallelujah, it’s some kind of miracle.

You have to understand that my weekly Saturday trip to the bookstore routinely goes like this. Browse the shelves until something catches my eye. Ooooo, that looks cool. Wait, is this part of a series? Of course it is, why do I even ask. What volume is this? Crap, number six? How the hell did I miss five previous volumes? Never mind, I’ll just grab the first one. They don’t have it? Come on! Looks like I’m reading The Hobbit again this weekend.

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