Search Results for: book club

Goth Chick News: Chicago Comic Con 2012: The Best (Creepy Stuff) at the Con

Once again, it’s time to welcome the pop-culture bacchanalia that is Wizard World’s Comic Con back to Chicago; and this year’s event was bigger and more chocked full of celebrities, costumes ,and other “things that make you go umm?” than ever before. Wizard World, Inc produces Comic Cons across North America that celebrate (and oh how they celebrate!) graphic novels, comic books, movies, TV shows, gaming, technology, toys, and social networking. The events feature celebrities from movies and TV, artists…

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New Treasures: Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

Okay, technically, this is both a Vintage Treasure and a New Treasure. It’s a brand spanking new edition of a novel that came out nearly two decades ago, in 1995. But what a novel. The sequel to Anno Dracula, one of the most acclaimed vampire novels of the 90s — an alternate history in which Count Dracula has killed Van Helsing, married Queen Victoria, imposed a police state and launched a terrifying new era of British vampire domination — The Bloody Red Baron picks…

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Enjoying Vintage Comics with The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics

One of the great things about the 21st Century? Cheap comic reprints (I know, that’s top of your list too, right?) Seriously. When I was growing up, if you wanted to know what happened in Amazing Spider-Man #65, you had to find someone five years older than you and pester the hell outta them until they told you. As comic archival systems went, it was crude and had little to recommend it. Not today. Now you have an embarrassment of choices. Want…

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Q&A With Tolkien and the Great War Author John Garth on Michael Martinez’ Middle-earth website

As a subscriber to the Mythsoc listserv, I was very grateful to find a link from Michael Martinez — proprietor of the fine Middle-earth.xenite.org website — to a recent interview conducted with J.R.R. Tolkien scholar, John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003). It’s a fascinating read and worth checking out; you can find it here. Some reviewers have dubbed Tolkien and the Great War the best book on Tolkien that…

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A Wiscon Reading Report: The Best in Upcoming Fantasy

Last weekend I drove to Madison, Wisconsin, for Wiscon, one of the best SF conventions in the Midwest. My travel companions were four young women, and the two-hour drive from Chicago was filled with enthusiastic discussions of My Little Pony, how to cook kale, the most satisfactory sexual positions, and who that hot-looking agent was. When I wasn’t driving I sat in the back and kept my mouth shut. You can learn a lot about life by keeping your mouth shut. For…

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Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Battleship

You sunk my interest. And so The Avengers gets another week at #1. Welcome to the Billion Dollar Club. Have a seat next to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and watch that The Dark Knight doesn’t try to steal your popcorn. The question burning my mind as I left the theater after watching Battleship was: “Why ‘Fortunate Son’?” At the close of two hours of a rah-rah, fist pumping, pro-military glamor parade, why play one…

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LORE Returns from the Grave

LORE is back! You can’t keep a good mag down. [Insert your own zombie joke here] Back in the 90s LORE was one of the coolest independently-produced horror mags to see the light of day, showcasing stellar talents like Harlan Ellison, Richard Corben, Brian Lumley, and the late, great Brian McNaughton, to name only a few. Recently LORE dug itself out of its own musty tomb and returned in an improved “2.0” version. I spoke with the mag’s co-founder Rod…

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Goth Chick News: Vampire Novel of the Century? I’ll Be the Judge of That

Last week, beloved editor and big cheese John O’Neill told you about the 2011 Bram Stoker Award winners which included what I consider a travesty of justice perpetuated on the vampire-genre-loving community by the Horror Writers Association (HWA). In January the HWA, an international association of writers, publishing professionals, and supporters of horror literature, in conjunction with the Bram Stoker Family Estate and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, announced the nominees for the one-time-only, Bram Stoker Vampire Novel of the…

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Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes

Cabinet des Fées presents Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes! These are not the rhymes you jumped rope to as a child. Erzebet YellowBoy announced on March 12th: “Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes shows you what a childhood pastime looks like when you dial macabre up to eleven. If playground fun got married to the genetically engineered child of Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, their offspring would be Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes. …In tribute to all of the animal friends and helpers without whom…

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“As Good As it Gets:” B&N Explorations on John Fultz’s Seven Princes

The accolades continue to come in for John Fultz’s debut novel Seven Princes, the first installment in the Books of the Shaper. Here’s Paul Goat Allen from Explorations,  Barnes & Noble’s Science Fiction & Fantasy blog: Set in a sprawling world saturated with dark magic and inhabited by giants, humans, and a vast array of fantastical creatures, the novel begins with the realm on the verge of war. An ancient sorcerer named Elhathym has returned and, after a necromantic bloodbath, has usurped…

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