The Black Hawks and The Righteous (HarperVoyager, October 2019 and September 2021).
Covers by Richard Anderson (left) and uncredited
I bought David Wragg’s debut fantasy The Black Hawks when it first appeared in 2019. It sounded right up my alley — the tale of a dysfunctional band of mercenaries drafted into a desperate conflict to protect a stranded prince.
I was delighted to see a second — and apparently, final — volume appear at the end of last year. The Righteous concludes the tales of the seasoned (and entertaining) mercenary band, and opens with them imprisoned and sentenced for execution for their part in the rebellion, alongside their employer, the knight Vedren Chel. A daring escape sends them on the run, and headlong into a brand new adventure.
What pushed you to get Wyldblood up and running? And for the uninitiated, what exactly is Wyldblood?
It all started in lockdown, as many things do. I’ve published magazines before, but nothing like Wyldblood, and it just felt like the right time. More importantly, I had the time, though for some reason that’s been quickly sucked away in a nasty combination of too much reading to do and the real world returning with full force.
Wyldblood is a small press and we specialize in science fiction and fantasy – speculative fiction, basically, though we’re not big fans of horror and stories that drip too much blood. We publish a regular magazine (we’re up to issue 8), occasional anthologies (we’ve got werewolves in Call of the Wyld and steampunk in Runs Like Clockwork), reprints of classic authors and, when we get all our reading done, we’ll be publishing original novels and novellas. We’re based in the U.K., but we’re everywhere, really. We lurk on the internet: wyldblood.com and @WyldbloodPress.
Seven Deaths of an Empire (Solaris, June 2021). Cover artist uncredited
I’m late to the party with this one. Solaris published G R Matthews’s mainstream debut Seven Deaths of an Empire in June of last year, and it received plenty of good notice. Library Journal called it “reminiscent of Game of Thrones,” SFX Magazine labeled it “Refreshingly original,” and Grimdark Magazine proclaimed it “fantasy at its finest.” Why do I always miss the good ones?
At this point I figure I’d wait for the paperback, and that’s finally arriving at the end of this month. About time — I’m impatient to learn what all the fuss is about.
It’s as if Hollywood, or at least director Ti West, finally granted Black Gate photog Chris Z’s greatest wish.
Though his suggestions for movies I need to review have never it past the Big Cheese John O (“We do NOT work blue at Black Gate”), Chris Z takes enormous pleasure in creating fake email accounts and sending in suggestions like, “Please have Goth Chick review Zombeavers!” or “I’d love to read Goth Chick’s take on Zombies vs. Strippers!” Never mind that even if I had an inclination to accommodate Chris Z’s suggestions with more than an eyeroll, getting my hands on these movies requires using my credit card number in places it definitely shouldn’t be left on its own.
So, color me shocked when I learned about the movie X and the fact I could actually pull up into my local AMC Theater and see it, which I fully intend to do ASAP.
Tesseracts 14, Edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, Cover by Erik Mohr
Michael R. Colangelo’s “Rocketship Red” was published in the fourteenth installment of the long-running Canadian anthology series Tesseracts, a volume edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory in 2010. In addition to writing short fiction, Colangelo has served as a reviewer for FearZone and the fiction editor for The Harrow, an on-line zine that ran from 1998 until 2009.
“Rocketship Red” feels a bit like a throwback piece, the sort of story aimed at juveniles in the 1950s, which gives it an almost instantaneous feeling of nostalgia. It opens with Eagan running through the Canadian wheatfields near his father’s soy farm, flying a bright red kite and pretending the kite is a rocket and he’s its intrepid pilot. Although Eagan hated working the soy farm, he knew it would be his life, however a visit from two American air force captains who were coming to buy soy, would change the trajectory of his life.
Eagan’s interest in rockets and space, however, causes him to forge a bond with Captain Sampson, who tells Eagan to reach out to him when he turns seventeen and is able to attend “rocket flying school,” a phrase that reinforces the nostalgic element of the story. The rest of the story briefly outlines Eagan’s conflict with his father over leaving the soy farm, his attendance at the Flight Academy, and his career as a pilot, all covered in less than three pages.
If that seems like a lot to fit into a few short pages, it is. In many ways Colangelo’s story feels more like an outline for a longer story, or even a novel, that could follow Eagan’s journey from soy farmer’s son to cadet at the academy to his career flying rockets for the air force with explorations of Sampson’s mentorship of him. Furthermore, Colangelo introduces various throw-away concepts in the story, such as antimatter farming projects, dark zones in space, and the rift. None of these are given any detail, but they do serve to provide broad strokes for Eagan’s career.
By the Eighties the once-thriving genre of pirate movies had been condemned and hung from the yardarm, and based upon the crimes against cinema of this week’s first two films, it’s easy to see why. The terrible Cutthroat Island would follow in 1995 to put the final nail in the genre’s coffin until it lurched from the grave for a surprise resurrection in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean.
But don’t lament too loudly, for if there’s one piratical scallywag not even ill-conceived and overblown cinematic hubris can catch and hang at Executioner’s Dock, it’s that unrepentant scoundrel Long John Silver. An’ ye can lay to that, matey! …
After Dark: The Best Horror Fiction of Tony Richards (Weird House Press, November 17, 2021). Cover by K.L. Turner
Tony Richards is a British horror writer, author of eight collections of short stories and several novels of dark fiction. Although for some reason he may be unfairly less celebrated than some of his countrymen, he’s certainly one of the very best producing horror fiction today.
Praise to small American imprint Weird House Press for assembling twenty-five tales and a novella covering forty years of Richards’ career in After Dark: The Best Horror Fiction of Tony Richards, released in paperback and digital formats this past November.
Although I’m familiar with some of Richards’ previous (and excellent) collections, regretfully I had missed a few, and this one offered me the chance to savor some of his stories for the very first time.
Hall of Smoke and Temple of No God (Titan Books, January 2021 and February 2022). Cover designs by Julia Lloyd
I first took notice of H.M. Long’s debut fantasy Hall of Smoke when The Guardian included it in their roundup of The best recent science fiction and fantasy last January, calling it “a compelling debut.” Closer to home, Paul Weimer at Tor.com celebrated it as that rarity of rarities — an entertaining fantasy focused on the most-neglected of the D&D archetypes, the cleric. (He also name-checked Greg Stafford’s Glorantha in his review, which warmed my heart.)
I saw a copy for the first time in Barnes & Noble on Saturday — alongside the newly-released sequel Temple of No God. The combination proved too much for someone with notoriously poor impulse control, and both volumes ended up coming home with me.
So, in 2020, as the Pandemic settled in like an unwanted relative who just came for a week and is still tying up the bathroom, I did a series of posts for the FB Page of the Nero Wolfe fan club, The Wolfe Pack. I speculated on what Stay at Home would be like for Archie, living in the Brownstone with Nero Wolfe, Fritz Brenner, and Theodore Horstmann. I have already re-posted days one through thirty-nine. Here are days forty (April 30) and forty-one (May 1). It helps if you read the series in order, so I’ve included links to the earlier entries.
Day Forty– 2020 Stay at Home
Saul called today. The governor announced that he was releasing some prisoners due to excessive coronavirus exposure in the prisons. And as Lon had predicted, Arthur Goldstein was one of them. Wolfe had brought Saul in late in the case to try and get him for killing the guard. Saul, who rarely comes up short, and hates doing so even more than I do – if that’s possible – hadn’t been able to get what we wanted.
“Instead of him getting the chair, he’s going home.”
“Yeah. That’s an itch I’d like to scratch.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll do something stupid, now that he’s out,” Saul mused.
R is for Rocket (Bantam, 1965, cover by Paul Lehr), The Golden Apples of the Sun
(Bantam, 1970, cover by Dean Ellis), Long After Midnight (Bantam, 1978, cover by Ian Miller)
June 5, 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest speculative fiction writers of all time. It’s fair to say that no author has positively affected my path into reading, and subsequently writing, to the extent that he did. Through this four-part series, I hope to convey some of the joy and wonder that Bradbury instilled in me and so many others, by revisiting a selection of his short stories that have continued to resonate with me throughout the years. Disclaimer: I don’t profess that my selection are his greatest tales, no matter what your definition of the term, but they hold a special place in my pantheon of stories, and I hope they will be worthy of your time.
