High-spirited Mayhem: The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

High-spirited Mayhem: The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

Foundryside-small Shorefall-small


Foundryside, Shorefall, and Locklands (Crown and Del Rey, 2018 – 2022). Cover designs by Will Staehle

Robert Jackson Bennett is the author of the Divine Cities trilogy (City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles), as well as the BFA and Shirley Jackson Award winner Mr. Shivers. Locklands, the closing novel in his Founders series, was released at the end of June and, in keeping with tradition, we baked a cake here at our rooftop headquarters to celebrate the successful wrap of another quality fantasy trilogy. (Apropos of nothing, we badly need a gym in the rooftop headquarters…)

Former Black Gate blogger Amal El-Mohtar called Foundryside, the first volume in the trilogy:

Absolutely riveting… A magnificent, mind-blowing start to a series… I felt fully, utterly engaged by the ideas, actually in love with the core characters… and in awe of Bennett’s craft.

It came in fourth in the annual Locus poll for Best Fantasy Novel, and was selected as one of the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2018 by The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog. Here’s how they described it at the time.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: The Invitation

Goth Chick News Reviews: The Invitation

First, everything you’re about to read contains spoiler after spoiler. So, if you’re planning on seeing the new vampire flick, The Invitation, stop now – then again, maybe you should actually keep reading.

I pretty much love any story containing a vampire, so it was with a huge amount of anticipation that I first told you about The Invitation back at the beginning of August. All the better that I hadn’t heard of the stars or the director as it didn’t require me to suspend any disbelief about the characters. Though the trailer took some flack on the horror forums, I thought it looked fabulous. Sony Pictures clearly didn’t skimp on the production values. And yes, it was rated PG-13, but as a fan of classic horror films, I personally don’t think an R-rated blood bath equals a fabulous movie. So off I went to see The Invitation on the night it opened. I was even excited enough to drop some coin to see it in a swanky theater with waiter service, reclining lounge seats and craft cocktails.

If you’re still reading and haven’t seen it, here’s a quick synopsis.

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Random Reviews: “The Great Hunt,” by Elaine Cunningham

Random Reviews: “The Great Hunt,” by Elaine Cunningham

Cover by Michael Suffin
Cover by Michael Suffin

Elaine Cunningham’s “The Great Hunt” appeared in the April 1998 issue of Dragon, which ran one fantasy story in each issue of widely varying quality. The best of them were original tales, but many of them were clearly fictionalizations of the author’s role playing game. “The Great Hunt” falls between these two extremes, but it is clearly a story based on Dungeons and Dragons with its cast of Orcs, Half-Orcs, Elves, and humans. Set in Ed Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms, the tight connection to source material is to be expected.

The story focuses on Drom, Grimlish, and Badger, an Half-Orc, Orc, and human, respectively. They have been part of a raiding party known as the Talons of Malar. In addition to their devotion to the god, Drom and Grimlish maintained an affinity for wolves, an older form of their worship. The story begins the day after the Talons attacked an Elven camp.  The party has now split into smaller groups to track the few survivors through the woods.

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New Treasures: Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms edited by John Joseph Adams

New Treasures: Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms edited by John Joseph Adams

Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms (Grim Oak Press, March 8, 2022)

I owe my professional writing career to John Joseph Adams.

I published four stories in Black Gate magazine, all under the name Todd McAulty. I wrote one novel, The Robots of Gotham, and before I could really start to shop it around John purchased and published it under his John Joseph Adams imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. That was the first time I’d ever been paid for my fiction, and with that one sale, John made me a professional writer. He subsequently bought several of my short stories for Lightspeed magazine, including one I really wanted to call “Sixty Ton Killer Robot,” but John wisely retitled “The Ambient Intelligence.”

It’s no surprise that John and I are pretty aligned. We both love fast paced adventure SF and fantasy in colorful settings. Also robots! (Yeah I know. Everybody loves robots.) John is a prolific anthologist, with nearly 50 anthologies under his belt in the last 15 years or so, including the popular Wastelands and The Apocalypse Triptych volumes, and I’m always on the lookout for his latest. So I was excited to see Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, a fat volume of original stories from the top fantasists working today, including Kate Elliott, Carrie Vaughn, Tobias S. Buckell, James L. Cambias, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Jeffrey Ford, Becky Chambers, Theodora Goss, and many others.

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Exclusive Preview: The World of Catalyst by Brandon Crilly

Exclusive Preview: The World of Catalyst by Brandon Crilly


Catalyst by Brandon Crilly (Atthis Arts, October 11, 2022). Cover artist uncredited.

Hello, Black Gate folks! Normally I spend my time here raving about other people’s books, but this time I’m in the very weird position of talking about my own. Yikes. Catalyst is my debut fantasy novel, releasing in October from Atthis Arts, and John has graciously invited me to talk a bit about the world of the book.

Catalyst centers on three estranged friends: Mavrin, a street magician who doesn’t believe in real magic, other than what the Aspects provide; Eyasu, labeled a heretic by the Aspects’ followers but determined to prove a secret history everyone else rejects; and Deyeri, a retired soldier whose adopted city is threatened by forces tied to that history. They begin the story in different corners of Aelda, a world that split apart at its core a little over three centuries earlier, and would have been destroyed completely if not for the intervention of the Aspects: massive, cephalopod-like beings the people of Aelda believe to be their gods, who have been circling the planet ever since providing atmosphere and holding what remains of Aelda together.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Porch Pulp #2

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Porch Pulp #2

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

And we’re wrapping up another summer run of A (Black) Gat in the Hand with Back Porch Pulp #2. So, here we go!

DAVID DODGE

Back Porch Pulp is reading the first novel by David Dodge. He is best known as author of the thriller novel, To Catch a Thief.

Which became a famous Cary Grant movie, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I saw that on the big screen at The Ohio Theater. That was a treat.

I like his adventure novel, ‘Plunder of the Sun.’ Which became a not-famous movie, with Glenn Ford. Hard Case Crime reissued that book, introducing me to the author.

Dodge was an accountant. And his first couple novels were hardboiled ones starring San Francisco accountant Whit Whitney. I wrote an essay on Dodge and two of his novels, last month.

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Vintage Treasures: The Naphar Trilogy by Sharon Baker

Vintage Treasures: The Naphar Trilogy by Sharon Baker


Quarreling, They Met the Dragon, Journey to Membliar, and Burning Tears of Sassurum
(Avon, 1984, 1987, and 1988). Covers by Wayne Barlowe, Paul Lehr, and Ron Walotsky

Sharon Baker died in Seattle in June 1991, at the much-too-young age of 53. She began writing in her 40s, while she was busy raising four sons. In a Gale Contemporary Author interview in 1986 she said

I felt like a car appliance [and] to remind myself that I was not, I signed up for a weekly writing class… On good days, I no longer feel like an appendage of my station wagon or anything else. I feel like me. And I like it.

Her first novel was Quarreling, They Met the Dragon, published in 1984, and it drew immediate attention. In Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss praised it as evidence of “An original mind at work on an ingenious world.” Gene Wolfe said “Sharon Baker is better than good… [she will be] one of the field’s most important author’s by the close of this decade,” and Publishers Weekly compared her to Samuel R, Delany.

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Peter Straub: Men Love Him, Women Want to be Like Him 

Peter Straub: Men Love Him, Women Want to be Like Him 

TIna Jens and Peter Straub

Peter Straub, who passed away on September 4, was the Toastmaster at World Horror Convention 2006 San Francisco. Tina Jens was asked to write his “appreciation” essay for the program book. Here it is, in its entirety.

Barbie wants to be an astronaut. Geena Davis wants to be president. When I grow up, want to be Peter Straub. We’ve all got to have our dreams. And let’s face it, as dreams so, I’m shooting for a much farther star than Barbie or Geena.

Maybe it’s because, rumor has it, Peter still dresses for dinner each night. (And I’m not implying the alternative is Peter showing up for dinner in his skivvies.) If you’ve seen him at a convention, you know he looks damned fine in his custom suits. (We won’t talk about his old publicity photo where he looked like a dead ringer for Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show.)

Maybe it’s because he spent time as an ex-pat writer in Ireland, then London, or that he lists Raymond Chandler, Herman Melville, and Charles Dickens as his favorite authors, alongside Dennis Lehane and William Faulkner.

Maybe it’s because Rosemary Clooney, the brassy and beautiful singer of “Mambo, Italiano” was a family friend (which means he may well have had a play date with George Clooney). Although when he first told me that, I didn’t watch ER and was much more impressed that he knew Rosemary; but since we’re talking about it, Peter – can you introduce me to George?

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A Strange Song of Unknown Places: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft

A Strange Song of Unknown Places: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft

HPL’s original manuscript

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

HP Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a man who seems to have never been fully comfortable in the world. His racism, most unpleasantly, but also, his old-fashioned affectations and his adamant refusal to bend his artistic desires to the least sort of commercial demands, all these, I believe, indicate a severe unease with the way the world was (he even turned down the editorship of Weird Tales because he refused to move to Chicago “on aesthetic grounds.”) The old America, peopled by the heirs of the original colonial families, had been washed away on a tide of industrialization and immigration. It was decadent and in decline and he would not be a part of it.

From his earliest days, Lovecraft was plagued by strange dreams and nightmares. Many of these would serve as the basis of stories later in life. A tragic family life — his father died in an asylum of late-stage syphilis and his family slowly slipped into poverty — and an innate nervous disposition probably had much to do with his attitudes. At the heart of the horror stories for which he’s most famous is the belief that mankind is insignificant and powerless in the face of a vast and uncaring Universe. While I don’t think he was mentally ill or anything, I do believe he longed for some intangible, more fantastic and better world.

Not finding one at hand, he created one in a series of related tales that culminated with The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in 1927 (though it wouldn’t be published until 1943). Typically referred to as his Dream Cycle, Lovecraft was greatly influenced in writing these tales by Lord Dunsany‘s lush stories. The stories are filled with dense descriptive passages, surreal imagery, and the illogical logic of dreams.

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Random Reviews: “Pollen and Salt,” by Octavia Cade

Random Reviews: “Pollen and Salt,” by Octavia Cade

Cover by Eldar Zakirov
Cover by Eldar Zakirov

The stories in the database I’m using to determine what to review span a period of several hundred years. So far, the earliest the dice have selected is 1928’s “The Yeast Men,” by David H Keller, which came up on January 20.  While it isn’t inevitable that the dice would select a current story, it is quite possible and has happened. At the time I’m writing this review of Octavia Cade’s “Pollen and Salt,” the July/August 2022 issue of Asimov’s is the most recent issue of that magazine to have been published.

“Pollen and Salt” is the musings of a palynologist who is studying salt flats in a world much further along its route toward global warming than our own currently is. Waters are receding, which is indicative of the world’s move toward climate catastrophe, but at the same time opens up new and unique opportunities for study as once water covered areas are exposed.

Even as she explores the mysteries of the world and waxing nostalgic about everything that climate change has killed off, she is also dealing with the death of her partner and spouse, to whom “Pollen and Salt” is a running commentary as she tries to make sense of the world she is finding.

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