The Thankless World of the Continuation Author

The Thankless World of the Continuation Author

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black-eyed blonde hi res cover.JPGblack_eyed_blondeDespite the title, this article is not intended as a forum for a continuation author to lament how unforgiving his critics are. Bad reviews are an inevitability and, in this instance, I’m the one bad-mouthing another continuation writer. I do not feel pangs of guilt, since the author in question is not only talented, but very successful and lauded in his industry. In other words, I’m an insignificant mouse picking on an elephant and that hopefully protects me from charges of betraying one of my own.

I recently read Benjamin Black’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, the first Philip Marlowe continuation novel in nearly 25 years. I can think of only one nice thing to say about the book and that is at long last Robert B. Parker need no longer be disparaged as the man who wrote the two worst Philip Marlowe mysteries. I am a fan of Black’s original historical mysteries, but my familiarity with his work did nothing to convince me he was a good choice to revive Raymond Chandler’s classic private eye hero, particularly when a talent such as Ace Atkins is active in the field writing new Spenser mysteries that do justice to the originals.

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Goth Chick News: My Halloween & Attractions Show 10th Anniversary

Goth Chick News: My Halloween & Attractions Show 10th Anniversary

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image002That headline alone probably qualifies me for Black Gate’s employee assistance program – the one where you sit in a calming space and talk about your feelings with no co-pay.

Unbelievable as it may sound, at least to me, I have been dragging around the Midwest for 10 years chasing one of the largest collections of disturbing paraphernalia to be bought and sold under one roof.

Yes, it’s time once again for Transworld’s annual bacchanalia – The Halloween and Attractions Show – and the official kick off of Goth Chick News’ “season.”  This is the show’s 19th year and it is officially the largest of its kind in the world focused on the haunt industry, packing over 300 exhibitors into the America’s Convention Center in St. Louis, MO.

If you ever wondered where all the “professional” haunted attractions get their gear, well now you know.  From The Travel Channel’s top picks to Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights, all those realistically gross props and blood-soaked latex ‘appliances’ have to come from somewhere.

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The Series Series: Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories by Peadar O Guilin

The Series Series: Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories by Peadar O Guilin

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Forever In The Memory Of God-smallHow did he pull it off?

The stories in Peadar O Guilin’s Forever in the Memory of God are in some ways old-school weird fiction, Clark Ashton Smith style, heavy on disturbing imagery and sanity-shattering trauma so far over the top that it risks going beyond gallows humor and straight into comic absurdity, and yet it works. Every time. Even for me, and this is usually not my kind of thing. What these stories have going for them that the old pulp classics didn’t is striking characterization, a flesh of psychological realism animating some surprising configurations of plot bones.

The characters in the three stories here collected find themselves in dire predicaments. These characters — not all of them can be called heroes — bring their own moments of insight and blindness, laughter and grief, to their struggles. O Guilin keeps them struggling against plot twist after plot twist, all the way to twisty endings that gave me that wonderful readerly shock followed by a sense of inevitability: What?! Oh, but of course!

In the opening story, “The First of Many,” a young woman, born into the Rememberer tribe in a post-alien-invasion Earth, is the first of her kind to be a host organism to the larval young of the slug-like conquerors. She copes with the gradual loss of her arm and her privacy in her own mind — as the larva learns to read her thoughts and chemically manipulate her emotions — with a gallows humor that will be familiar to anyone who has lived with a chronic illness.

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New Treasures: The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher

New Treasures: The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher

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The Six-Gun Tarot-smallI’ve mentioned my fondness for this new Weird Western genre before. In the right hands, it’s an invigorating mix of mythic adventure and the straight-out gonzo weird. There’s been no shortage of fine examples recently, including Lee Collins’s She Returns From War, Guy Adams’s Once Upon a Time in Hell, Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill’s Dead Reckoning, and the Bloodlands novels of Christine Cody. Heck, even Firefly is a weird western, if you squint at it right.

The latest volume to cross my desk, hot off the presses last week in paperback, is the debut novel by R.S. Belcher. In a starred review, Library Journal called it “an astonishing blend of first-rate steampunk fantasy and Western adventure,” which sounds like just the right mix in my book.

Nevada, 1869: Beyond the pitiless 40-Mile Desert lies Golgotha, a cattle town that hides more than its share of unnatural secrets. The sheriff bears the mark of the noose around his neck; some say he is a dead man whose time has not yet come. His half-human deputy is kin to coyotes. The mayor guards a hoard of mythical treasures. A banker’s wife belongs to a secret order of assassins. And a shady saloon owner, whose fingers are in everyone’s business, may know more about the town’s true origins than he’s letting on.

A haven for the blessed and the damned, Golgotha has known many strange events, but nothing like the primordial darkness stirring in the abandoned silver mine overlooking the town. Bleeding midnight, an ancient evil is spilling into the world, and unless the sheriff and his posse can saddle up in time, Golgotha will have seen its last dawn… and so will all of Creation.

The Six-Gun Tarot was published on January 22, 2013 by Tor Books. It is 368 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital edition. It was re-issued in paperback on March 25, 2014.

Vintage Treasures: Starwolf by Edmond Hamilton

Vintage Treasures: Starwolf by Edmond Hamilton

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Edmond Hamilton Starwolf-smallLast week, I wrote about a delightful collection of 80′s paperbacks I bought on eBay for just 10 bucks — including John Silbersack’s Buck Rogers novel Rogers’ Rangers, well worth $10 all on its own. Sometimes it’s good when no one else shares your hobbies.

I’m still digging through the remaining 74 volumes and continuing to make marvelous finds. Like the omnibus collection of pulp novels by Edmond Hamilton, gathering together all three volumes in his classic Starwolf trilogy. It contains The Weapon From Beyond (1967), The Closed Worlds (1968), and The World of the Starwolves (1968), all originally published by Ace. That’s a lot of classic space adventure from one of the greatest pulp writers of the 20th Century. Well worth tracking down, if you can find a copy.

The only mercy a Starwolf could expect was death…

Morgan Chane was a Starwolf – a member of the most infamous band of interstellar pirates in the galaxy. He had flown with the raiding packs, rockets screaming, to plunder the rich and slaughter the helpless.

But Morgan Chane was also a Terran, adopted as a child into the Starwolf clan. And when a quarrel erupted, Chane discovered that the Starwolves weighed his alien birth more heavily than all the years of comradeship. Now he is cast out of the clan – and running for his life.

But where, in all the galaxy, can a Starwolf expect to find refuge?

Starwolf was published by Ace Books in October 1982. It is 456 pages, priced at $3.50. It went through multiple printings between 1982 and 1990, but has otherwise never been reprinted. There is no digital edition. The cover is by David Schleinkofer, who was obviously influenced by one too many viewings of Battlestar Galactica.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Firefly, A Retrospective Part 8 — A Look at Serenity

Firefly, A Retrospective Part 8 — A Look at Serenity

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Serenity poster-smallAs some of you know, I just finished a seven-part blog on this site about the Firefly television series. We laughed, we cried, we stared at Jayne’s hat… and now it’s time to move on to the movie.

I consider Serenity to be part of the television show. Like the second season we never got, but compressed into a feature film.

It begins with a little voice-over narration telling us about this fictional world, centering on the war between the Alliance and the Independents. Then we see River as a child in school, but it’s a dream. She is back in the Alliance lab that messed with her brain. Simon is there, posing as a VIP on an inspection tour. He breaks her out of the facility.

I’m glad the movie starts with this scene, because although we’d heard about how Simon freed River in the TV series, we never got to see it. And this makes a terrific set-up for the rest of the movie.

And then the movie does something clever. The scene of Simon and River’s escape is paused in mid-action, and shown to be just a recording. It’s being viewed by the Operative (he’s so cool he doesn’t even need a real name) at the lab where the escape happened. The Operative wants River back because she may have learned the secrets of the Alliance leaders and that cannot be allowed. So the chase is on.

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The Waterloo Panorama: An Epic Example of Military Art

The Waterloo Panorama: An Epic Example of Military Art

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Marshal Ney leading his troops.
Marshal Ney leading his troops.

The Napoleonic era has always fascinated me for its visuals — the massive armies, the colorful costumes, and the sweeping scope of some of the battles. These terrible conflicts produced some of the finest military art in European history and I discovered a remarkable example of it when I visited Waterloo, Belgium, last week.

Preserved on the battlefield is a rare example of a panorama. A popular form of entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these large paintings are now rare. They were usually of epic scenes such as battles or Biblical stories or famous cities, and would be placed on the inside of round buildings to provide a 360 degree viewing experience. Others were set up on stage and unrolled like a scroll in front of the audience, each part relating a sequence of the story.

The Waterloo panorama is set in a round building and is 110 meters long and 14 meters high. It was painted by Louis Dumoulin and his assistants in 1912, just as those newfangled moving pictures were beginning to make panoramas obsolete.

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Star Trek Continues with “Lolani” and Soars to Warp Eight

Star Trek Continues with “Lolani” and Soars to Warp Eight

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lolani 3Last year I gushed about a lovingly crafted fan-made original Star Trek episode, “Pilgrim of Eternity,” and concluded by writing that I hoped the same team would make more.

And lo, it has come to pass. As a matter of fact, I somehow missed news of a Kickstarter (or Kirkstarter) in October AND the release of a second episode, “Lolani,” in February. According to the Star Trek Continues web site, a third episode has been filmed and is already being edited. The Kickstarter raised enough money for three additional episodes (of which the “in edit” episode is the first) and — if I’m not mistaken — gained the funds to construct a replica of the Enterprise engine room to add to their existing sets.

If you’re a fan of the original Star Trek series, you MUST watch “Lolani.” Even moreso than “Pilgrim of Eternity,” it feels like a lost episode. It’s not just the sets and the effects, which are truly astonishing in their faithfulness, it’s the pacing, and the music cues, and the fadeouts, and the story beats, and the writing — and the actors. These people understand who the original characters were and inhabit them — and I swear that this script could stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the finest entries in the original run.

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Future Treasures: The Leopard by K.V. Johansen

Future Treasures: The Leopard by K.V. Johansen

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The Leopard K V Johansen-smallLou Anders, editorial director of Pyr Books, may be the closest we have to Lin Carter in the field today: an editor with impeccable taste and boundless energy, who has also been a tireless champion for sword & sorcery. The latest he’s offering us is the opening volume in a new series from K.V. Johansen, the Canadian author of Blackdog (2011). Black Gate’s own James Enge blurbs The Leopard with a stylish tip of the hat to the great Harold Lamb: “I’m hooked. This mix of magic, Tibetan-style religion, and Harold Lamb-style adventure is pretty addicting.” Sounds pretty darn good to me.

Ahjvar, the assassin known as the Leopard, wants only to die, to end the curse that binds him to a life of horror. Although he has no reason to trust the goddess Catairanach or her messenger Deyandara, fugitive heir to a murdered tribal queen, desperation leads him to accept her bargain: if he kills the mad prophet known as the Voice of Marakand, Catairanach will free him of his curse. Accompanying him on his mission is the one person he has let close to him in a lifetime of death, a runaway slave named Ghu. Ahj knows Ghu is far from the half-wit others think him, but in Marakand, the great city where the caravan roads of east and west meet, both will need to face the deepest secrets of their souls, if either is to survive the undying enemies who hunt them and find a way through the darkness that damns the Leopard.

To Marakand, too, come a Northron wanderer and her demon verrbjarn lover, carrying the obsidian sword Lakkariss, a weapon forged by the Old Great Gods to bring their justice to the seven devils who escaped the cold hells so long before.

The Leopard is Volume One of Marakand. It will be published on June 10 by Pyr Books. It is 370 pages, to be priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital version. The second volume, The Lady, is scheduled to arrive in December (see the cover here).

Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One, edited by Laird Barron

Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One, edited by Laird Barron

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Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume One-smallYEAR’S BEST WEIRD FICTION, Vol. 1, edited by the great Laird Barron for Undertow Press, is scheduled for an August release. You can pre-order it right here. This will be a brilliant inauguration for the series. Each volume will be edited by a different “guest editor” and Undertow could not have made a better choice for their first book: Barron is one of the best weird/horror writers in the field. Here is the complete Table of Contents:

“Success” by Michael Blumlein, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov./Dec.
“Like Feather, Like Bone” by Kristi DeMeester, Shimmer #17
“A Terror” by Jeffrey Ford, Tor.com, July.
“The Key to Your Heart Is Made of Brass” by John R. Fultz, Fungi #21
“A Cavern of Redbrick” by Richard Gavin, Shadows & Tall Trees #5
“The Krakatoan” by Maria Dahvana Headley, Nightmare Magazine/The Lowest Heaven, July.
“Bor Urus” by John Langan, Shadow’s Edge
“Furnace” by Livia Llewellyn, The Grimscribe’s Puppets
“Eyes Exchange Bank” by Scott Nicolay, The Grimscribe’s Puppets
“A Quest of Dream” by W.H. Pugmire, Bohemians of Sesqua Valley
“(he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror” by Joseph S. Pulver Sr., Lovecraft eZine #28
“Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron” by A.C. Wise, Ideomancer Vol. 12 #2
“The Year of the Rat” by Chen Quifan, The Mag. of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August.
“Fox into Lady” by Anne-Sylvie Salzman, Darkscapes
“Olimpia’s Ghost” by Sofia Samatar, Phantom Drift #3
“The Nineteenth Step” by Simon Strantzas, Shadows Edge
“The Girl in the Blue Coat” by Anna Taborska, Exotic Gothic 5 Vol. 1
“In Limbo” by Jeffrey Thomas, Worship the Night
“Moonstruck” by Karin Tidbeck, Shadows & Tall Trees #5
“Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks” by Paul Tremblay, Bourbon Penn #8
“No Breather in the World But Thee” by Jeff VanderMeer, Nightmare Magazine, March.
“Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” by Damien Angelica Walters, Shock Totem #7.