Black Gate

I’m a big fan of B. Chris Bell’s film-noirish, pulp fiction stories, and his wonderful novel, Tales of the Bagman Volume 1, The Bagman Vs The World’s Fair, and Tales of the Bagman, Volume 3, all published by Airship27 Productions (and previously reviewed by me here at Black Gate.) So I jumped at the first chance I had to read his excellent, and very hard to pigeon-hole, Bipolar Express. Now, when I say it’s hard to pigeon-hole, I mean it. You can’t slap a label on this one, folks. But I will say this — it’s an important novel: serious, with that element of scary realism, gallows humor and touch of madness that will keep you laughing while the story shakes you up.

This is a novel of truths and wisdom that casts an observant eye on a certain segment of society many of us don’t like to think about: alcoholics, drug addicts, rehab centers and asylums. Bipolar Express has much in common with The Man with the Golden Arm, The Lost Weekend, and Trainspotting, with a macabre touch of Philip K. Dick to add a whole other level to the novel. It’s a “scare you straight,” post-apocalyptic story with a science fiction element that I won’t spoil for you: is what’s happening to the characters reality? Or is it all a shared hallucination? This would make one hell of a freaking movie! It’s also quite a wild ride. I’m not even sure how to tell you about it. So first I’m going to tell what Chris says about it, and then I’m just going wing it from there.

A misdiagnosed mentally ill man spends thirty days in a mental institution. Four years later he finds himself rescued from his own destructive impulses by his fellow patients, who inform him that the magnetic poles have begun to shift, just as they have every 250,000 years. Regardless of the truth, now he’s trying to survive the worst winter in Chicago history along with his mentally ill friends, a man with no fingers, and a cannibal dog. And, if the cold, starvation and illness don’t kill him, there’s a gang roving the city that will. Along the way he’ll discover magnetism affects the behavior of birds, elephants, ants, even humans. And then there are those ‘radioactive’ rays in the sky… this is a novel about failure, redemption, and the end of a world.

Okay, now it’s my turn. And whether or not you think I’m writing in any sort of logical order is your problem.

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We have this long history of actors trying to make a name for themselves through other creative endeavors, and it seems to be getting popular. Actors jumping into the music industry, like Kiefer Sutherland, David Duchovney and Malin Akerman. Actors exploring the world of visual art (Anthony Hopkins is an avid painter, I learned recently). And there are a lot of actors who try their hand at writing. And I don’t mean cookbooks (no disrespect to Gwyneth Paltrow) but writing fiction, which takes a little more talent and skill.

As my inaugural post here at Black Gate I want to talk about Gillian Anderson, specifically her debut novel A Vision of Fire, which she co-wrote with NYT-bestselling author Jeff Rovin. As the blurbs on the back of the book jacket say (click the image above right to sample them), the idea of Agent Dana Scully writing speculative fiction is enough to get our attention, even if expectations aren’t particularly high. But luckily for us, it turns out Anderson knows what she’s doing.

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see this post for instructions to submit. I’ve received very few submissions recently, and I’d like to get more.

Disclosure: Mike Duran edited a story of mine for Coach’s Midnight Diner once. I’m also Facebook friends with him, and got to know him a little in person at a con last year. I think I can still be objective in reviewing his novel.

Saint Death is the second in Mike Duran’s paranormal noir Reagan Moon series. I’ve read a number of his stories before, from the religious supernatural fiction of The Resurrection and The Telling, to the more bizarre stories like Winterland. But his self-published Reagan Moon novels are where Mike seems to have hit his stride. Or perhaps, they’re more along the lines of the type of fiction I like to read.

Paranormal reporter (or paparazzi, as some people call him) Reagan Moon has been hunting ghosts all his career, but he never really believed in them until he had an undeniable experience with the supernatural in The Ghost Box. At the climax of that adventure, Reagan was struck by lightning, and the odd, perhaps supernatural, cross-like Tau that he wore was fused with his chest, preserving its shape in a Lichtenberg figure. The lightning also gave him what he calls stormgifts, such as a strange intuition, a limited ability to heal others, and most weirdly, the ability to teleport—except the teleporting is more like moving between worlds, and punching a hole through anything standing in the way in this one. But using the stormgifts is hard, requiring an effort of focus and will that are difficult for Reagan to summon, and each time he uses them, the Tau scar seems to grow.

Reagan’s troubles take on a supernatural aspect again when a tip from his patron, and fellow gifted, Klammer, sends him to an LA ranch to look for someone called the Shroud. There he finds a Santa Muerte shrine, a wannabe vampire, and a cult priestess named Etherea, threatening to summon the archangel of death for another go at the Tenth Plague of Egypt, the killing of the firstborn. Fortunately, Reagan is assisted by his guardian angel Bernard, his shapeshifting almost-girlfriend Kanya, and the members of the Imperia, an eclectic collection of fellow gifted, whose abilities are consuming their bodies just as Reagan’s is.

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