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The Spoils of Capricon: Rooks and Ruin by Melissa Caruso

The Spoils of Capricon: Rooks and Ruin by Melissa Caruso

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The Rooks and Ruin trilogy: The Obsidian Tower, The Quicksilver Court, and The Ivory Tomb
(Orbit, 2020, 2021, and 2022). Covers by Peter Bollinger, Mike Heath, and Peter Bollinger

On Saturday I was wandering through the well-stocked Dealer’s Room at Capricon 43 in Chicago with Rich Horton, looking for new books of all kinds. (And if there’s a guy you want at your side as you struggle to find quality books, believe me, it’s Rich Horton. He has great taste and a well informed opinion on everything — and I do mean everything.) I stumbled on the newly-released The Ivory Tomb, the concluding novel in Melissa Caruso’s Rooks and Ruin, and read the first paragraph of the back cover.

The Dark Days have returned. The Demon of Carnage mercilessly cuts through villagers and armies. The Demon of Corruption rots the land. The Serene Empire and the Witch Lords race towards war. And in the middle of it all stands Rxyander, the Warden of Gloamingard.

That’s a lot of demons. Do I really want to read a trilogy about Dark Days, demons, Witch Lords, and a gloom-shrouded castle called ‘Gloamingard’??

Ha! You know me so well. Of course I do. I bought that book so fast Rich didn’t even know what happened.

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Street Thieves and Queen’s Guards: Dance of Thieves by Mary E. Pearson

Street Thieves and Queen’s Guards: Dance of Thieves by Mary E. Pearson

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Dance of Thieves and Vow of Thieves (Square Fish, 2019 and 2022). Covers by Rich Deas and Mike Burroughs

I don’t pay as much attention to Young Adult fantasy as I should. It’s not experiencing the explosion of bestsellers and media attention it was just a few years ago, but it’s still one of the bright spots in genre publishing, and where a lot of talented writers are doing some excellent work.

Fortunately Barnes & Noble makes it easy for me to stumble on some of the most exciting titles, and that’s exactly what happened on Sunday when I stopped in front of their YA display tables. There in the center was Dance of Thieves, the first of a two-volume series featuring an outlaw family, a legendary street thief, a dark secret, the young women of the Queen’s guard, a son thrust suddenly into power, and a life-and-death cat and mouse game between them all. It shares a setting with the author’s bestselling Remnant Chronicles, which helped pique my interest, and that (and the enticing description) was enough to convince me to take it home.

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Skybound Moves Forward With Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber

Skybound Moves Forward With Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber

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The Great Book of Amber, containing Roger Zelazny’s 10-volume
Amber Chronicles (Avon EOS, December 1999). Cover by Tim White

Molly Templeton at Tor.com is reporting that Stephen Colbert has joined forces with Skybound Entertainment to develop an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, bringing much-needed hope that the long delayed-series will finally be brought to the screen.

In 2016, Skybound Entertainment announced that the series was in the works, with The Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman also on board. Though it’s been nearly seven years, this team is still in place, alongside Vincent Newman Entertainment and now Colbert’s production company, Spartina. Variety reports that Colbert said, “I’ve carried the story of Corwin in my head for over 40 years, and I’m thrilled to partner with Skybound and Vincent Newman to bring these worlds to life. All roads lead to Amber, and I’m happy to be walking them.”

Roger Zelazny was one of the greatest fantasy and science fiction writers of the 20th Century, and The Chronicles of Amber was his magnum opus. If you want to dip your toe into the original novels, Rajan Khanna has a splendid book-by-book reread at Tor.com.

A Valentine’s Gift for Lovers of Fantasy Intrigue: The Tyranny of Faith by Richard Swan

A Valentine’s Gift for Lovers of Fantasy Intrigue: The Tyranny of Faith by Richard Swan

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The Justice of Kings and The Tyranny of Faith (Orbit, 2022 and 2023). Covers by Martina Fackova

When I wrote about Richard Swan’s debut fantasy novel The Justice of Kings back in October, I got an enthusiastic response. Wayne Ligon called it “My favorite fantasy this year, so far!” and BG blogger Sarah Avery said,

I’m a sucker for fantasy novels that care about the rule of law. I loved Sebastian de Castell’s Greatcoats series, about badass itinerant magistrates in a recently failed state, to no end. This one looks likely to scratch the same itch.

Hot on the heels of The Justice of Kings comes The Tyranny of Faith, due from Orbit on Valentine’s Day. Kirkus Reviews tells us, “While The Justice of Kings was pretty dark, this volume gets even grittier.” I know that’s just what you bloodthirsty lot were dying to hear.

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The Fantastic Realms of Luis Royo

The Fantastic Realms of Luis Royo

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Realms of Fantasy covers by Luis Royo. Row 1: October 1997, April 1998, October 1998.
Row 2: December 1999, October 2001, December 2002. Row 3: October 2004, August 2005, June 2006

Three days ago I wrote a quick piece about a pair of late 90s Ace paperbacks by Cary Osborne, Deathweave and Darkloom. The thing that first attracted my interest — as it often is — was the great covers for both books, in this case the work of the talented Spanish artist Luis Royo. Royo got his start in Heavy Metal in the early 80s, and by the mid-90s was a fixture on SF and fantasy book covers in the UK and US. IMDB credits him with well over 300 covers, for every major book publisher, including Bantam, Tor, DAW, Roc, Ace, Questar, Avon Eos, Pocket Books, HarperPrism, the Science Fiction Book Club, and many, many others.

Royo has a distinctive style, one well suited to selling adventure fantasy, and he helped launch the career of several major genre writers of the era, including Julie E. Czerneda (with her Trade Pact novels), Walter Jon Williams (Hardwired), David Gemmell (Druss the Legend), Elizabeth Haydon (The Rhapsody Trilogy) Sara Douglass (The Wayfarer Redemption), and many others.

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The White Space Novels by Elizabeth Bear

The White Space Novels by Elizabeth Bear

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Ancestral Night and Machine (Saga Press, March 2019 and October 2020). Covers by Getty Images and Jae Song

Elizabeth Bear is chiefly known as a fantasy writer these days. She won the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and she’s had a hand in more than eight acclaimed series in the years since, including The Edda of Burdens trilogy, the Eternal Sky trilogy, and The Lotus Kingdoms trilogy, all from Tor. When I wrote about her new space opera novel Ancestral Night back in 2019, I quoted the Publishers Weekly review that first got my attention.

Outstanding… Bear’s welcome return to hard SF after several years of writing well-received steampunk and epic fantasy. As an engineer on a scrappy space salvage tug, narrator Haimey Dz has a comfortable, relatively low-stress existence, chumming with pilot Connla Kuruscz and AI shipmind Singer. Then, while aboard a booby-trapped derelict ship, she is infected with a not-quite-parasitic alien device that gives her insights into the universe’s structure. This makes her valuable not only to the apparently benevolent interstellar government, the Synarche, but also to the vicious association of space pirates… Amid a space opera resurgence, Bear’s novel sets the bar high.

While shipping for some Christmas break reading at B&N last week, I laid eyes on the sequel for the first time. The trade edition of Machine was released in July of 2021, and now looks very handsome on my bookshelf next to the first one.

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Vintage Treasures: Deathweave and Darkloom by Cary Osborne

Vintage Treasures: Deathweave and Darkloom by Cary Osborne

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Deathweave and Darkloom (Ace Books, 1998 & 1999). Covers by Royo

I bought a collection of vintage paperbacks on eBay a while back (I do that a lot), and buried in the mix was one I knew nothing about, a midlist ACE SF adventure titled Deathweave by Cary Osborne.

Now, I love midlist paperbacks. They’re basically an undiscovered country. If you’re an entry-level author, the theory is that if you work long enough, like countless writers before you, you’ll eventually build an audience large enough to break out of midlist and start hitting the bestseller lists. Of course, the vast majority of writers never make it, which means that most midlist titles vanish after a few months in the sun, never to be seen or mentioned again. There are many, many talented writers who never had the good fortune (or perseverance, or celebrity connections, or whatever pixie dust it takes) to break into the front rank, and toil away in undeserved obscurity their entire career.

What does all this mean? It means these eBay lots I buy are littered with undiscovered gold, that’s what it means. Which means that when Deathweave finally fell into my eager hands 24 years after Ace first published it, I treated it as exactly that. Especially when I found out it had a sequel, Darkloom, which I tracked down a few weeks later.

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Monsters, Mechs, and a Multi-Book Saga: Nightwatch Over Windscar by K. Eason

Monsters, Mechs, and a Multi-Book Saga: Nightwatch Over Windscar by K. Eason

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The novels of The Weep: Nightwatch on the Hinterlands and Nightwatch Over Windscar
(DAW, October 2021 and November 2022). Covers by Tim Green/Faceout

I’m pretty much an impulse buyer. When I pick up a book and it mentions monsters, interstellar Confederations, extra-dimensional horrors, subterranean ruins, witches, and decommissioned battle mechs — all in the first two paragraphs — I’m usually sold.

That’s exactly what happened when I read the inside jacket copy for Nightwatch Over Windscar, the new novel by K. Eason. I paid for that damn thing and had it home before I even finished the third paragraph of the jacket copy.

If I’d paid even the teeniest bit of additional attention, I might have also noticed that it’s the second book of The Weep, a two-book series set in the world of Eason’s popular science fantasy Thorne Chronicles, which opened with How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse and continued in How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge. Doesn’t look like you need to read those books to enjoy The Weep… good thing, because tracking down the first book, Nightwatch on the Hinterlands, is effort enough. I was looking forward to riding out this massive winter storm and Christmas break with what I have on hand.

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A Dark and Glorious Vision: Michael Moorcock’s Elric, from Titan Comics

A Dark and Glorious Vision: Michael Moorcock’s Elric, from Titan Comics

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All four volumes in Michael Moorcock’s Elric from Titan Comics (2014 – 2022)

There’s been a lot of comic adaptations of Michael Moorcock’s Elric over the years. Perhaps the most famous is the French artist Philippe Druillet’s ambitious rendition of The Eternal Champion, but there have been many others associated with the character, including P. Craig Russell, James Cawthorn, Walter Simonsen, Mike Mignolia, Howard Chaykin, and many more. First Comics had a lengthy association with Moorcock for many years, producing highly regarded adaptations of Elric, Hawkmoon, and others. I think my favorite was Mark Shainblum’s lengthy Chronicles of Corum adaptation.

Titan Comics has had a long partnership with Moorcock, and recently it has released the best Elric adaptation I have ever seen, in any medium. The four volumes, The Ruby Throne, Stormbringer, The White Wolf, and The Dreaming City, are among my favorite comics of any kind in the past few years. Produced by the French team that includes the writer Julien Blondel and several enormously talented artists, including Didier Poli, Julien Telo, Robin Recht, and Jean Bastide, these books belong in every decent library of modern fantasy.

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A Sprawling Norse Epic for the Snowy Season:The Bloodsworn Saga by John Gwynne

A Sprawling Norse Epic for the Snowy Season:The Bloodsworn Saga by John Gwynne

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The Shadow of the Gods and The Hunger of the Gods (Orbit, 2021-22). Covers by Marcus Whinney

As we head into the the holidays, prime reading season, I’m in the market for a good adventure saga. John Gwynne’s Bloodsworn Saga looks like it could fit the bill. It’s got Saga right there in the title, and big-ass monsters front and center on the covers. The universe doesn’t usually serve me stuff on a platter but, I dunno, maybe this is just one of those times.

These books are popular, and that’s not a bad sign either. The Shadow of the Gods has a whopping 19,231 ratings, and a stellar 4.29 score on Goodreads, barely a year and a half after release. It’s popular with critics, too. Medium proclaims it “Magnificent… Gwynne shows why he’s one of the genre’s best,” and Publishers Weekly calls it a “jam-packed epic… [with] blood-soaked battles against trolls and frost-spiders.”

Trolls and frost-spiders! That’s exactly what I’m talking about right there. But the review that really caught my attention was at Vulture, who included it in their Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of the Year last year.

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