Black Gate

My introduction to Joan Aiken was her marvelous novel The Cuckoo Tree, which I had pressed on me by my friend Alex Lambert more than 30 years ago. That led me to Black Hearts in Battersea, Midnight is a Place, and The Whispering Mountain.

Small Beer Press, which has brought us many delightful volumes over the years, will be publishing a collection of Joan Aiken’s “Selected Strange Stories” next week, and I’m looking forward to it. Kirkus Reviews calls it:

A welcome anthology of fantasy stories by a 20th-century master. The author of the beloved classic gothic for children The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Aiken (1924-2004) also wrote hundreds of works of popular fiction that spanned the genres, from fantasy to horror to historical fiction, including several Jane Austen sequels. Naturally the tone of her books and short stories varies with their content, but its main notes include sophisticated, spritely satire and the darker moods of literary fairy tales. Fans of Wolves will recognize the honorable orphans and cruel guardians who populate these tales. Typically the wicked meet with fitting fates and the innocent triumph, though for Aiken, a good death counts as a happy ending. She plays with the contrast between the eldritch and modern culture and technology: ghosts and dead kings out of legend who contact the living by telephone, a doctor who writes prescriptions for fairies, a fairy princess who’s fond of Westerns.

The People in the Castle will be published by Small Beer Press on April 26, 2016. It is 256 pages, priced at $24 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover, “The Castle in the Air” (1939) is by Joan Aikman. Kelly Link provides an introduction, and you can read a complete sample story, “The Cold Flame,” at Tor.com.

Last year Dutch writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt won a Hugo Award for his story “The Day the World Turned Upside Down.” During my lengthy discussion with Tor editor Liz Gorinsky, who edited Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem (which won the Hugo for Best Novel last year), I learned that she was also editing Heuvelt’s first book to be published in English, the horror novel HEX.

Liz seems to have an unerring sense for foreign SF and fantasy that will appeal to an American audience. I trust her taste implicitly, and I find myself very intrigued by HEX. It was a bestselling novel in its original Dutch version; the English edition arrives in hardcover from Tor next week.

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

HEX will be published by Tor on April 26. It is 384 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. It was translated by Nancy Forest-Flier.

Ilka Tampke is an Australian author, and her debut novel was published in Australia last year under the title Skin, where it received a lot of attention. Now Thomas Dunne is bringing the book to American shores for the first time, with a new title: Daughter of Albion.

The tale begins in the village of Caer Cad in southwest Britain, AD 43, where a swaddled baby is found abandoned, just as the dark cloud of the Roman Empire begins to gather on the horizon. Drawing on Celtic British history, Tampke weaves a tale of Ancient Britain on the cusp of Roman invasion, the violent collision of two worlds, and a young woman torn between two men.

A baby girl is abandoned on the doorstep of the Tribequeen’s kitchen. Cookmother takes her in and names her Ailia. Without family, Ailia is an outsider in her village, forbidden from marriage and excluded from learning. Despite this, she grows up an intelligent and brave young woman, serving the Tribequeen of her township until the day when an encounter with an enigmatic man named Taliesin leads Ailia to the Mothers, the tribal ancestors, who have chosen her for another path.

Ailia’s growing awareness of her future role as the tribal protector and her relationships with the two very different men she loves will be utterly tested by the imminent threat of Emperor Claudius preparing to take the island.

Daughter of Albion: A Novel of Ancient Britain will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on April 19, 2016. It is 354 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Young Jin Lim.

Paula Guran is one of the most accomplished editors in the business. She’s done some of the best anthologies of the past few years, including my favorite book from 2015, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas — not to mention Weird Detectives, New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, Warrior Women, and many others.

Her newest is Street Magicks, a collection of the finest recent urban fantasy, and it looks right up there with her best. It includes stories by Charles de Lint, Scott Lynch, Ellen Klages, Delia Sherman, Neil Gaiman, Nisi Shawl, Jim Butcher, Jeffrey Ford, Nnedi Okorafor, and many others. It will be available in trade paperback this month from Prime Books. Check out that great cover by Scott Grimando (click for bigger version.)

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Stephanie Burgis is the author of the Kat, Incorrigible trilogy of Regency fantasy adventures for kids. Masks and Shadows, a tale of music, masquerades, and magic, is her first historical fantasy novel for adults, and it looks very promising indeed.

It’s getting some marvelous notices from writers I admire, including Aliette de Bodard (“Romance, music, and dark alchemy rise to a pitch-perfect ending”), Ellen Kushner (“Elegant and exciting… [it] delighted and enlightened me as much as it entertained”) and Kate Elliot (“Deftly told and hugely engaging… weaves together… a thrilling taste of love and politics, and the bitter threat of a deadly magic.”)

The year is 1779, and Carlo Morelli, the most renowned castrato singer in Europe, has been invited as an honored guest to Eszterháza Palace. With Carlo in Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s carriage, ride a Prussian spy and one of the most notorious alchemists in the Habsburg Empire. Already at Eszterháza is Charlotte von Steinbeck, the very proper sister of Prince Nikolaus’s mistress. Charlotte has retreated to the countryside to mourn her husband’s death. Now, she must overcome the ingrained rules of her society in order to uncover the dangerous secrets lurking within the palace’s golden walls. Music, magic, and blackmail mingle in a plot to assassinate the Habsburg Emperor and Empress — a plot that can only be stopped if Carlo and Charlotte can see through the masks worn by everyone they meet.

Masks and Shadows will be published by Pyr on April 12, 2016. It is 300 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition.