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Future Treasures: The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

Future Treasures: The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

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Faith Erin Hicks has had a pretty enviable career in comics, as a writer for Lumberjanes, Buffy: The High School Years and The Last of Us: American Dreams, and as an artist for Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, and Brain Camp. On her own she’s created Friends with Boys, Zombies Calling!, and the Eisner-Award winning The Adventures of Superhero Girl.

Her latest, The Nameless City, has the look and feel of epic fantasy. Built on an ancient mountain pass, cut through sheer rock by some long-lost technology, the Nameless City has been conquered so many times that its long-suffering inhabitants — a melting pot of an unknown number of previous civilizations — can’t even agree on what to call it. Thirteen year-old Kaidu, the privileged son of a tribal leader, comes to the city to meet his father, a general with the ruling Dao army, for the first time. General Andren is a kind man, but too busy to spend more than a few minutes a day with a son he’s never known.

Disappointed and lonely, Kaidu sneaks out of the protective enclave of the Palace each day to wander the city. There he meets Rat, a starving street urchin who steals his most precious possession: the ancient knife his father gave to him when they first met. Lost and humiliated, Kaidu chases Rat through the streets and across the rooftops of the city until he tackles Rat, retrieving his precious knife.

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Future Treasures: The Human Chord/The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood

Future Treasures: The Human Chord/The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood

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The Human Chord The Centaur Algernon Blackwood-small The Human Chord The Centaur Algernon Blackwood-back-small

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve not read much Algernon Blackwood. But I’ve been educated on his substantial contributions to the American horror genre by my fellow Black Gate writers, especially Ryan Harvey and Bill Lengeman. In his 2009 post “The Incredible Adventures of Algernon Blackwood,” Ryan wrote:

Of all the practitioners of the classic “weird tale”…  none entrances me more than Algernon Blackwood. Looking at the stable of the foundational authors of horror — luminaries like Poe, James, le Fanu, Machen, Lovecraft — it is Blackwood who has the strongest effect on me. Of all his lofty company, he is the one who seems to achieve the most numinous “weird” of all.

Blackwood is often referred to as a “ghost story” writer… But true ghosts rarely appear in his fiction. Blackwood liked to dance around the edge of easy classification, and as his work advanced through the 1900s and into the teens, it got even harder to pinpoint. Blackwood’s interest in spiritualism, his love of nature, and his pantheism started to overtake his more standard forays in supernatural terror. His writing turned more toward transcendentalism and away from plot. The most important precursor to this development is his 1911 novel The Centaur, which critic S. T. Joshi describes as Blackwood’s “spiritual autobiography.”

And in his 2015 review of Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, Bill Lengeman clearly agreed.

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Future Treasures: The Blood Red City by Justin Richards

Future Treasures: The Blood Red City by Justin Richards

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The Suicide Exhibition-small The Blood Red City-small

Justin Richards is a jack-of-all-trades. He’s written numerous books — including The Chaos Code, The Parliament of Blood, and the Time Runners series — as well as audio plays and a stage play. He’s also an editor for a media journal, with several anthologies to his credit. He’s the Creative Director for the BBC’s Doctor Who books, and has authored several himself (including Time Lord Fairytales, The Shakespeare Notebooks, and The Only Good Dalek).

None of that prepared me for his 2015 novel The Suicide Exhibition, which featured an insidious Nazis plot to use alien Vril technology to win the war, and the small band of British wartime intelligence agents who undertake a desperate mission to stop Heinrich Himmler from excavating ancient burial grounds and finding these extraterrestrial Übermenschen. Michael Moorcock said “Richards brings all his skills as a leading Doctor Who writer to this tale of wartime intelligence at odds with some of H.P. Lovecraft’s worst nightmares,” and Kirkus Reviews said “Richards’ true talent lies in crafting campy but believable dialogue which imbues the novel with a real sense of character… Part Indiana Jones, part X-Files, part Catch-22, it’s good campy fun.”

The Blood Red City, the second volume in The Never War, arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne before the end of the month. As the alien Vril awaken, Colonel Brinkman and his team at Station Z stuggle to solve an ancient mystery… while preparing for an imminent alien attack.

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Future Treasures: Man With No Name by Laird Barron

Future Treasures: Man With No Name by Laird Barron

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Man With No Name Laird Barron-small Man With No Name Laird Barron-back-small

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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Future Treasures: Harmony House by Nic Sheff

Future Treasures: Harmony House by Nic Sheff

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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.

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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The Pilgrims Will Elliott-small Shadow Will Elliott-small Worlds-End Will Elliott-small

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.

Future Treasures: Snakewood by Adrian Selby

Future Treasures: Snakewood by Adrian Selby

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Snakewood-smallHere’s an interesting little artifact. Snakewood, a debut fantasy of “betrayal, mystery, and bloody revenge,” tells the story of the Twenty, a band of mercenaries being hunted down one-by-one by an unknown killer.

What’s really fascinating is the plant-based magic system. The author says “Snakewood is set in a world where magic is in the plant-life, concoctions of which, known as ‘fightbrews’, radically transform the capabilities and appearance of warriors at a terrible cost.” It arrives in hardcover next week from Orbit Books.

A Lifetime of Enemies has its Own Price

Mercenaries who gave no quarter, they shook the pillars of the world through cunning, chemical brews, and cold steel.

Whoever met their price won.

Now, their glory days are behind them. Scattered to the wind and their genius leader in hiding, they are being hunted down and eliminated.

One by one.

Snakewood will be published by Orbit Books on March 15, 2016. It is 432 pages, priced at $26.00 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital version. Read an excerpt from the novel here.

Future Treasures: Stories of the Strange and Sinister by Frank Baker

Future Treasures: Stories of the Strange and Sinister by Frank Baker

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Stories of the Strange and Sinister first-smallI first discovered Valancourt’s marvelous 20th Century Classics line when I stumbled on their booth at the 2014 World Fantasy convention in Washington D.C.. I was so impressed, in fact, that I wrote up a lengthy survey of their back catalog as soon as I got home.

Valancourt has been bringing neglected horror and thriller classics back into print in handsome new editions for years now. Their latest subject is Frank Baker, whose first novel, The Twisted Tree, was published in 1935. He published an odd little book titled The Birds in 1936… it sold only about 300 copies, and Baker labeled it “a failure.” It likely would be utterly forgotten today, if Alfred Hitchcock had not turned it into a hit with his 1963 horror film of the same name.

Perhaps Baker’s most successful work was Miss Hargreaves (1940), a comic fantasy in which two young people invent a story about an elderly woman, only to find that their imagination has brought her to life. He published more than a dozen others, including Mr. Allenby Loses the Way (1945), Embers (1947), My Friend the Enemy (1948) and Talk of the Devil (1956), before his death in 1983.

Stories of the Strange and Sinister is his only collection. It was first published in 1983 (see cover at right), and has long been out of print.

The new edition will be published by Valancourt on March 15, 2016. It is 184 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version. See more details at the Valancourt website.

See all of our coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy here.

The Goblin King, New York Sorcery, and Demon Pirates: The New and Upcoming Fantasies of Tor.com

The Goblin King, New York Sorcery, and Demon Pirates: The New and Upcoming Fantasies of Tor.com

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I’ve been very much enjoying Tor.com‘s new line of novellas, which has produced a number of clear winners already. We’ve covered the first dozen or so, but they haven’t been resting in the past few weeks and months — far from it. When I checked this morning, I discovered more than a dozen new titles scheduled for the rest of this year, from authors such as Mary Robinette Kowal, Andy Remic, Tim Lebbon, Seanan McGuire, Michael R. Underwood, Matt Wallace, K. J. Parker, and many others.

It’s time to play catch-up. So here’s a detailed look at the next eight volumes on their schedule, including covers and (where available) links to cover reveals, sample chapters, and audio excerpts. It’s a smorgasbord of future fantasy from one of the best publishers in the business. Check it out.

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Future Treasures: An Unattractive Vampire by Jim McDoniel

Future Treasures: An Unattractive Vampire by Jim McDoniel

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An Unattractive Vampire-smallAre you a reader who yearns for a return to the days where vampires were monsters, instead of hunky leading men? Then have I got a book for you.

Jim McDoniel’s debut novel An Unattractive Vampire, a darkly comic urban fantasy of ancient horrors in suburban cities, is tailor-made for those sick of vampires that sparkle. It’s one of the first releases from new publishing house Sword & Laser, and will be available later this month.

After three centuries trapped underground, thousand-year-old Yulric Bile ― also known as the Curséd One, the Devil’s Apprentice, He Who Worships the Slumbering Horrors ― awakens only to find that no one believes he is a vampire. Apparently he’s just too ugly ― modern vampires, he soon discovers, are pretty, weak, and, most disturbing of all, good. Determined to reestablish his bloodstained reign, Yulric sets out to correct this disgusting turn of events or, at the very least, murder the person responsible.

With the help of pert vampire-wannabe Amanda; Simon, the eight-year-old reincarnation of his greatest foe; and a cadre of ancient and ugly horrors, Yulric prepares to battle the glamorous undead. But who will win the right to determine, once and for all, what it truly means to be a vampire?

An Unattractive Vampire will be published by Sword & Laser on March 15, 2016. It is 307 pages, priced at $13.99 in trade paperback and $8.99 for the digital version. The cover is designed by David Drummond.

See all of our coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy here.