Black Gate

My Heart is a Chainsaw (Saga Press, August 2021)

It’s frequently very satisfying to get advance proofs of major titles long before they hit bookstores. If you’re lucky, you can get a heads up on the year’s most important releases before virtually anyone else, and you can enjoy watching the buzz steadily build.

I was lucky enough to get a copy of My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones back in March — hot on the heels of his 2020 breakout novel The Only Good Indians, which James McGlothlin said was “packed with wallops of horrific fright… a top-notch horror novel.” And I just fell in love with the premise: a disaffected teen and lover of slasher films sees a chillingly familiar pattern in a series of horrific local deaths, and tries in vain to warn her home town what is coming. Kirkus calls it “Extraordinary… an essential purchase,” and Polygon proclaims it “An intense homage to the classic horror films of yore.” Here’s a snippet from the starred review at Publisher’s Weekly.

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Robert Silverberg is a Science Fiction Grand Master, a living legend of SF, and one of the most prolific and widely respected genre writers of the 20th Century. And here he is, 21 years into the 21st Century, still producing important books that command our attention.

Is Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time an important book? Sure looks like it to me. It is, according to my count, his 50th collection, appearing almost exactly 60 years after his first, Next Stop the Stars, was published in 1962. It contains a dozen of his most celebrated stories, including tales of Spanish conquistadores who find the Fountain of Youth, a tourist in Mexico who makes a startling discovery, and spacefarers who find a nightmare world.

If you’re not familiar with Silverberg, this may be one of the most important and rewarding purchases you make this year. And if you are, you already know it’s an essential buy. It arrives in trade paperback from Three Rooms Press in two weeks. Here’s an excerpt from the enthusiastic Publisher’s Weekly review.

SFWA Grand Master Silverberg brings together 12 tension-filled speculative stories from throughout his long career in this impressive collection. Silverberg’s adventurous and melancholy tales are united in taking characters to vividly detailed settings, including a grisly ancient Egyptian embalming market in “Thebes of the Hundred Gates”; a “nightmare world” of “gaudy monsters” called Sidri Akrak in “Travelers”; and even the microscopic space between electrons in “Chip Runner.” Exploring themes of death and identity, the stories range from the bittersweet to the truly tragic, yet the collection never feels grim. These timeless topics also mean that even the decades-old stories still resonate… Readers will be won over by the immersive worldbuilding and clever plot twists of these thought-provoking stories.

Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time will be published by Three Rooms Press on April 20, 2021. It is 448 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.81 in digital formats. Get all the details at the publisher’s website.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.

The Helm of Midnight (Tor Books, April 13, 2021)

There’s something about a well-rendered fantasy city that speaks to me of adventure. Maybe it’s the classic tales of Leiber’s Lankhmar, or Gygax’s Greyhawk, Ellen Kushner’s Riverside, Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork, or so many others. When I see a procedural detective novel in a fantastical city, I look forward to a tale of intrigue, action and surprises.

That’s what I’m expecting from The Helm of Midnight, the first novel in a new trilogy from Marina Lostetter, author of the popular Noumenon space opera series that wrapped up last year. It arrives in hardcover from Tor in three weeks. Here’s the description.

In a daring and deadly heist, thieves have made away with an artifact of terrible power—the death mask of Louis Charbon. Made by a master craftsman, it is imbued with the spirit of a monster from history, a serial murderer who terrorized the city.

Now Charbon is loose once more, killing from beyond the grave. But these murders are different from before, not simply random but the work of a deliberate mind probing for answers to a sinister question.

It is up to Krona Hirvath and her fellow Regulators to enter the mind of madness to stop this insatiable killer while facing the terrible truths left in his wake.

K. B. Wagers, author of the Farian War trilogy, calls it “An utterly enthralling mystery of magic, masks, and murder. Marina Lostetter weaves together three stories to a stunning conclusion.” Maybe that’s just a couple of space opera writers sticking together, but I’m willing to take the chance.

The Helm of Midnight will be published by Tor Books on April 13, 2021. It is 456 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover, $13.99 digital, and $27.99 in audio formats. Read a generous excerpt at Tor.com.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.