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The Only Devil Book You’ll Ever Need: The Book of Fiends – A Malefic Bestiary for Fifth Edition by Robert J. Schwalb

The Only Devil Book You’ll Ever Need: The Book of Fiends – A Malefic Bestiary for Fifth Edition by Robert J. Schwalb

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The Book of Fiends (Green Ronin Publishing, March 8, 2022). Cover by Svetoslav Petrov

It’s a cliché to say that a good role playing campaign is like a satisfying fantasy series, packed with realistic characters, compelling action, and vivid settings. It’s more accurate, I think, to say that truly great role playing shares an essential ingredient with the best fantasy. I mean, of course, that it’s all about the villains.

Want to keep your players coming back, clutching well-worn character sheets and eager for action? You need challenges worthy of their time, and you won’t get that with the same generic dragons week after week. You need truly malefic opponents with legendary skills, cunning agendas, and awe-inspiring magic at their disposal.

There are some terrific resources out there to help you craft really memorable villains, but for my money the best one on the market is The Book of Fiends by Robert J. Schwalb, with Aaron Loeb, Erik Mona, and Chris Pramas. It’s a massive 254-page tome filled to the brim with inventive and truly original infernal menaces for Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. There isn’t another book published in the last five years I’ve drawn from as heavily for my own game as this one. I don’t care why kind of RPG you play, The Book of Fiends will up your game.

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Future Treasures: Eyes of the Void, Book 2 of The Final Architecture by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Future Treasures: Eyes of the Void, Book 2 of The Final Architecture by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void (Orbit, August 3, 2021, and November 22, 2022). Cover design by Steve Stone

Adrian Tchaikovsky is equally at home with ambitious epic fantasy (including his Echoes of the Fall trilogy, and the sprawling, 13-volume Apt series) and big-canvas science fiction (including Warhammer 40K and his Arthur C. Clarke award-winning Children of Time novels).

HIs latest is an ambitious space opera trilogy. It began with Shard of Earth, which BookPage labeled “one of the most stunning space operas I’ve read this year… glorious,” and Publishers Weekly called “dazzlingly suspenseful… a mix of lively fight scenes, friendly banter, and high-stakes intrigue.”

Next month the second installment Eyes of the Void drops, and the advance buzz for this one is just as rapturous. I usually avoid a series until at least three novels are in print, but I may have to make an exception for this one.

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New Treasures: The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan

New Treasures: The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan

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The Justice of Kings (Orbit, August 23, 2022). Cover by Martina Fackova

These days it’s all about blending genres. Dark fantasy police procedurals (Dan Stout’s The Carter Archives). High fantasy romance (Foz Meadow’s A Strange and Stubborn Endurance). Cthulhu mythos and epic fantasy (Jonathan Mayberry’s Kagen the Damned). If you can imagine it, then trust me, it’s out there.

Some genres go together better than others, though. For my money, the ideal pairing is the tightly plotted murder mystery, blended with the sprawling cast of an ambitious political fantasy. Turns out that perfectly describes Richard Swan’s brand new novel The Justice of Kings, released at the end of August by Orbit. Booklist labels it “Rich and interesting,” and Grimdark Magazine flat out calls it “Brilliant.” Here’s an excerpt from the enthusiastic starred review at Kirkus.

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Vintage Treasures: The Lord Darcy Adventures by Randall Garrett

Vintage Treasures: The Lord Darcy Adventures by Randall Garrett

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Too Many Magicians, Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates
(Ace, 1979 – 1981). Cover art by Robert Adragna

In 1977 Jim Baen accepted an offer from publisher Tom Doherty to return to Ace Books to head their science fiction line. Doherty left Ace to found Tor Books in 1980 and Baen soon followed him, but his years at Ace were extraordinarily productive. He resurrected an enormous amount of classic SF and fantasy from the magazines and brought it to a brand new audience, including Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Poul Anderson’s Flandry, Keith Laumer’s Retief, Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker, H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy novels, and collections by Robert Sheckley, James Tiptree, Jr, Robert E. Howard, James H. Schmitz, Barry N. Malzberg, and countless others.

One of the most distinctive works Baen championed was Randall Garrett’s tales of occult detective Lord Darcy, set in an alternate England in which the laws of Magic are rigorously codified, but the laws of physics remain unknown. He gathered them into three volumes: the novel Too Many Magicians and the collections Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates. They captured a brand new readership, and the books have been reprinted half a dozen times in subsequent decades.

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New Treasures: Servants of War by Larry Correia and Steve Diamond

New Treasures: Servants of War by Larry Correia and Steve Diamond

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Servants of War by Larry Correia and Steve Diamond (Baen Books, 2022. 424pages). Cover art by Alan Pollack

Veteran fantasy readers may yawn if they hear about an epic fantasy about a farm boy in a remote village rising to power, and the first few pages of Servants of War dangles that trope before readers. And then horror rushes in like a tidal wave, and before Chapter 1 can end, the worn trope is burning with hellfire billowing alchemical smoke, a Grimdark spirit rises out of the book to slap the reader in the face, crank the head back, and pour gasoline-action down a thirsty throat.

Welcome to Servants of War. The combination of military-fantasy veteran Larry Correria with horror-guru Steve Diamond promises “military fantasy with horror” and you’ll get trenches full of that. Baen released this masterpiece that opens The Age of Ravens series in hardcover and audiobook in March 2022; the paperback is due February 2023.  Without spoiling, this post covers a summary, excerpts, and a small hint as to the forthcoming sequel.
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Goth Chick News: AMC’s Interview with the Vampire Brings a Classic Novel Back from the Dead

Goth Chick News: AMC’s Interview with the Vampire Brings a Classic Novel Back from the Dead

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To say I have a lot of feels about what I’m about to tell you is an understatement.

Author Anne Rice, who passed away from complications of a stroke last December at age 80, had been a large part of my life for a very long time. I, like so many, fell in love with her first novel, Interview with the Vampire back in high school. From there I devoured all of her vampire and witch novels, buying each one in multiple formats. Because of Rice I took my first trip to New Orleans where much of these novels are set and where Rice herself lived at the time, in an antebellum mansion in the Garden District.

I fell as hard for NOLA as I did for Rice’s books and to this day I travel there several times a year to soak in atmosphere as dense and timeless as the immortals she wrote about. Throughout these years I came to have a nodding acquaintance with Rice herself, first seeing her at each of her book signings, and finally landing an annual invitation to attend her “Vampire Ball” held in NOLA each October. We didn’t hang out or anything, but she did call me by name and take time to chat each time we met.

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Some Tales from Night’s Plutonian Shore: My Favorite Edgar Allan Poe Stories

Some Tales from Night’s Plutonian Shore: My Favorite Edgar Allan Poe Stories

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I do not have a precise memory of when I first read one of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales. Perhaps it was a bowdlerized version of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” perhaps “Some Words With a Mummy” in one of my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest omnibuses. It might have been the Classic Comics version of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I definitely saw most of the Roger Corman movie adaptations with Vincent Price on the 4:30 Movie on ABC. I know I picked up a copy of Scholastic Book’s collection, Eight Tales of Terror, at a used book sale at Our Lady of Good Counsel. The important thing is, Edgar Allan Poe‘s creations have been with me as a reader of the weird and the fantastic from my earliest days.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve actually read any of Poe’s stories, so, as the Halloween season is upon us, it seems the proper time to return to them. I had no doubt I would still enjoy them, but I really had no idea just how good and groundbreaking they really are. Lovecraft, in his seminal essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” stated that by focusing on the psychological and not the Gothic, “Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror.” I don’t think it’s an overstatement. There are few boogeymen or vampires here; instead, it’s mostly warped and broken minds, the sadism of the vengeful, and the nightmares of the delirious.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is credited with creating the detective story (he didn’t), the modern short story (he was one of the earliest American practitioners of the form), and contemporary horror fiction (he helped). His life was plagued by misfortune and missteps and to this day, his death at the unfortunate young age of forty remains a mystery, though it has been attributed to alcoholism, drug addiction, syphilis, and even murder. Whatever the circumstances of his life, his work remains one of the pinnacles of American writing, of Romanticism, and of weird fiction.

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The Most Ambitious SF Novel of 2021: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

The Most Ambitious SF Novel of 2021: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

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The Actual Star (Harper Voyager reprint edition, August 16, 2022). Cover art by Monica Byrne

The trick to really staying on top of the best SF and fantasy, I’ve found, is to take the time to find a handful of excellent reviewers, and trust what they tell you. I’ve discovered over long years that Rich Horton is one of the most reliable and discerning readers out there, and this is what he posted on Facebook three days ago.

I just finished reading (via listening to) The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne. I don’t think it’s perfect, but I will say it is way more ambitious than any other 2021 SF novel I’ve read, and I strongly think it deserved a Hugo nomination.

By strange coincidence, I’d just picked up a copy of the Harper Voyager paperback reprint of The Actual Star, and had a copy to hand. See how fate works for you when you let it?

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of British SF 1 and 2 edited by Mike Ashley

Vintage Treasures: The Best of British SF 1 and 2 edited by Mike Ashley

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The Best of British SF 1 and 2 (Orbit, 1977). Covers by Bob Layzell

Every once in a while I sit back, take stock of our accomplishments, and think, “Man. We’ve showcased countless forgotten writers here at Black Gate, discussed tens of thousands of neglected books, writing late into the night on tight deadlines, and nobody has spell checked anything.”

Still, I’m justifiably proud of what we’ve accomplished in the 23 years this website has been live. Though I do have to admit that we have been, like the market at large, over-focused on American publishing. So I was delighted to find the massive two-volume anthology The Best of British SF 1 and 2, published as paperback originals by Orbit in 1977.

Containing nearly 800 pages of short fiction from Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, John Russell Fearn, Eric Frank Russell, Arthur C. Clarke, John Christopher, John Brunner, E. C. Tubb, Brian W. Aldiss, James White, Bob Shaw, Philip E. High, Colin Kapp, Kingsley Amis, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Keith Roberts, and many others — all interspersed with insightful genre history and commentary from editor Mike Ashley — these books are a wonderful retrospective of the finest science fiction from across the pond.

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A Masterclass in Grand-Scale Storytelling: The Legacy of the Mercenary King by Nick Martell

A Masterclass in Grand-Scale Storytelling: The Legacy of the Mercenary King by Nick Martell

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The Legacy of the Mercenary King trilogy: The Kingdom of Liars, The Two-Faced Queen and The Voyage
of the Forgotten (Saga Press, February 8, 2022). Covers by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme and Benjamin Carré

I love it when a fantasy trilogy sneaks up on me.

It seemed like just yesterday we were reporting on the imminent release of The Kingdom of Liars, the debut fantasy from 23-year old wunderkind Nick Martell, getting rave reviews from all quarters. Now I find the third volume in the trilogy will be released in a matter of weeks…. how did that happen?

The acclaim for this series has only grown with each volume. At Tor.com, Paul Weimer described it as “Something like PKD and [Gene] Wolfe teaming up to write City State Fantasy.” Kirkus called the first one “An impressive fantasy debut,” but pulled out all the stops for The Two-Faced Queen, saying “Simply put, this series is a masterclass in grand-scale storytelling. The future of epic fantasy is here — and this saga is it.”

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