Black Gate – Page 98 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

GenCon Writers Symposium (Aug 2022) : R. A. Salvatore Guest of Honor

Saturday, June 25, 2022 SELindberg Comments 3 comments

GenCon Writer’s Symposium is back!

Aug4-7th, 2022; Indianapolis, IN

Gen Con just announced that legendary fantasy author R. A. Salvatore is the 2022 Author Guest of Honor!

Thirty-four years ago, he created the character of Drizzt Do’Urden, the dark elf who has withstood the test of time to stand today as an icon in the fantasy genre. With his work in the Forgotten Realms, the Crimson Shadow, the DemonWars Saga, and other series, Salvatore has sold more than thirty million books worldwide and has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list more than two dozen times. He considers writing to be his personal journey, but still, he’s quite pleased that so many are walking the road beside him!

He will be participating in several Writer’s Symposium events (click to browse and register via the GenCon portal) during the convention, including book signings and appearances.

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Goth Chick News: Midwest Haunters Bus Tour – Because Its Only 130 Days Until Halloween

Saturday, June 25, 2022 Sue Granquist Comments 2 comments

I’m going to go ahead and say it, because I know you’re thinking it. Yes, its only June and yes, there are a solid four months until Halloween.

But all the spooky wonderfulness that pops up in the month of October doesn’t materialize overnight. Nope, it requires months of planning, therefore making it necessary for Black Gate Photog Chris Z and I tool around the Midwest wracking up enormous expense reports to bring you news from this incredible unseen world; a world which is moving year-round, and ultimately generates $10B plus annually in the US alone (NRF, 2021).

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Adventures in Supernatural Dystopia: The Edinburgh Nights Novels by T. L. Huchu

Friday, June 24, 2022 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

The Library of the Dead and Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments (Tor Books, June 2021 and April 2022)

Tor Books seems to have a hit on its hands with the Edinburgh Nights novels by Zimbabwe author T. L. Huchu (who writes non-genre novels under the name Tendai Huchu). The opening book The Library of the Dead hit the bestseller lists in the US, and expectations were high for the second, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, which arrived in April.

The international press raved about the first book. The Times called it “A fast-paced, future-set Edinburgh thriller… mixes magical mysteries with a streetwise style of writing,” and SFX labeled it “One of the strangest and most compelling fantasy worlds you’ll see all year.” But my favorite coverage was Stuart Kelly’s thoughtful review in The Scotsman, which said, “Contemporary fantasy, at its best, is both escapist and urgent: this does both admirably.” Here’s a longer snippet.

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Random Reviews: “Sweeping the Hearthstones” by Betsy James

Thursday, June 23, 2022 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

Betsy James published the Seeker Chronicles trilogy of YA novels between 1989 and 2006, but didn’t publish her first short story until 2008. Three years later, in October 2011, her second short story, “Sweeping the Heathstone,” appeared as the penultimate story in the final issue of the late, lamented Realms of Fantasy.

Corrie is a sixteen year old orphan who was raised by the Roadsouls and turned over to Neely Sheeker, who needed help running her roadhouse near Carmony. For Corrie, the change comes at the perfect time, as she is entering womanhood and she views it as a reflection of that change in status. Neely is a reasonable boss, concerned about Corrie’s well-being as well as her ability to do the job for which she was hired. Her biggest concern is that Corrie is discovering her own sexuality and appears to be a bit boy-crazy in a setting which gives her the opportunity to experiment in ways that Neely doesn’t consider appropriate.

Neely also gives Corrie her own room, one of the main features of which is an enormous hearthstone which appears to have been in place since time immemorial. The presence of the hearthstone fills Corries with a sense that there is something strange about it and she takes Neely’s warning that “you’d let the man under that stone feel you up” seriously, despite Neely pointing out that if there is a man under the hearthstone, he has lain there for over a millennium. …

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: More o’ Zorro

Wednesday, June 22, 2022 Lawrence Ellsworth Comments 7 comments

Zorro, like the Batman, who borrowed more than a little from the adventures of the masked hero, is a perennial; Hollywood always has another reboot percolating in pre-production somewhere, and occasionally one of these makes it to the screen and the black-clad outlaw rides again. Disney’s Zorro was the definitive version from the late Fifties until the Seventies, when alternative takes on the evergreen character began to appear once more. The legend of Zorro is sturdy, iconic, and can stand a lot of revision and still work quite well. This week let’s look at Guy Williams’ version for Disney, and then a couple of variations on the theme once the character began to emerge from Williams’ long shadow.

(Reminder: Zorro’s first appearance, by the hero’s creator, Johnston McCulley, is included in Your Editor’s Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure anthology.)

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Exploring the Darkness That Surrounds Us: Lies of Tenderness by Stephen Volk

Tuesday, June 21, 2022 Mario Guslandi Comments 0 Comment

Lies of Tenderness (PS Publishing, May 2022). Cover by Pedro Marques

Lies of Tenderness
Stephen Volk
PS Publishing (482 pages, £25.00 in hardcover, May 1, 2022)
Cover art by Pedro Marques

Horror fiction comes in many shades. There’s graphic horror; splatterpunk (or whatever it’s called nowadays) full of gore, blood and other amenities; and there is a type of quiet horror, of higher literary quality, exploring with a more elegant touch the darkness that surrounds us.

Charles L. Grant, Robert Aickman, and more recently Reggie Oliver and Steve Duffy are just a few examples of that latter sub-genre. And Stephen Volk. Author of a couple of collections, playwright and TV author, Volk returns with a new collection featuring seventeen pieces, both stories and novellas, some previously unpublished, some reprinted from anthologies or magazines.

The atmospheres here are dark and sinister, but the narrative style is consistently elegant, sensitive and totally captivating, so much so than even readers exclusively devoted to mainstream fiction would fully enjoy Lies of Tenderness.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Weird Menace from Robert E. Howard

Monday, June 20, 2022 Bob Byrne Comments 9 comments

“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)

My area of expertise is the hardboiled/Pi genre. But today, we’ll jump over to the ‘shudder pulps.’ In 1933, Popular Publications (Harry Steeger) switched the ailing Dime Mystery over to a new, weird menace format. This started a short fun of success for that pulp sub-genre. Popular jumped in with both feet, shortly after launching Terror Tales, and then Horror Stories. As the tone shifted from weird, eerie, menacing elements to torture, depravity and sadism, a public outcry arose against these shudder pulps and the sub-genre died in the early forties.

Robert E. Howard, always looking for new markets, succeeded in placing “Black Talons” in the December, 1933 issue of Strange Detective Stories. “Fangs of Gold” (a Steve Harrison tale) followed there in February of 1934. Another Harrison story, “The Tomb’s Secret, was in that same February issue, under the pseudonym, Patrick Ervin.

Assuming he was actually getting paid (something that happened with irregularity from Weird Tales), this was a good market for Howard. “Dead Man’s Doom,” the next Harrison story, was slated for the March, 1934 issue. And then, the magazine folded. The story wouldn’t see print until 1978 as “Lord of the Dead” in the Sukll-Face paperback.

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Vintage Treasures: The Budayeen Trilogy by George Alec Effinger

Sunday, June 19, 2022 John ONeill Comments 16 comments

The Budayeen Trilogy: When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss
(Bantam Spectra, 1988, 1990, and 1992). Covers by Jim Burns (When Gravity Fails), and Paul Youll & Steve Youll

George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen trilogy, sometimes called the Marîd Audran trilogy, is one of the enduring early classics of cyberpunk.

It had its birth in his short story “The City on the Sand,” originally published in the April 1973 issue The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was his first story set in the futuristic walled city of Budayeen, the city in the sand, a place of dark shadows and even darker inhabitants. Eventually Effinger set nine tales in Budayeen, including his most famous story, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winner “Schrödinger’s Kitten,” and all three of his most popular novels: When Gravity Fails (1987), A Fire in the Sun (1989), and The Exile Kiss (1991), featuring the street-smart detective Marîd Audran.

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A Lush Visual History of Science Fiction: Futures Past by Jim Emerson

Saturday, June 18, 2022 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The first two issues of Futures Past, a Visual History of Science Fiction, edited and published by Jim Emerson

Way back in the 90s, before most of you young whippersnappers were born, Jim Emerson had a very fine fanzine called Futures Past, covering the birth of modern science fiction. He published four issues, each covering one year of SF history, from 1926-29.

In 2014 Jim resurrected his fondly-remembered zine as a 64-page digital magazine, with gorgeous full-color pages. The first issue covered 1926, the year Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories. Futures Past Vol. 1 illuminated the Birth of Modern Science Fiction, covering all the highlights of science fiction publishing in magazines and books.

A Kickstarter intended to fund full-color print versions of the new version in 2014 wasn’t successful. Undaunted, Jim funded the project himself, and earlier this year I was surprised and very pleased to receive a print copy of Futures Past, Volume 2 in the mail. Covering the year 1927 and the Dawn of the SF Blockbuster, this 144-page publication is a love letter to a forgotten era, when a brand new literary genre was being born in the pages of pulp magazines, books, and on the silver screen.

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New Treasures: The Best of David Brin

Friday, June 17, 2022 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The Best of David Brin (Subterranean Press, July 31, 2021). Cover by Patrick Farley

Subterranean Press has done a flat-out fabulous job of producing memorable single-author collections over the last decade.

For one thing, Subterranean mastermind William Schafer has terrific taste. He edited a delightful small press magazine (titled, appropriately enough, Subterranean) for many years, and demonstrated admirable skill at selecting and editing short fiction. For another, he’s been working at it tirelessly for decades, and it shows. He’s produced dozens of Best of retrospective collections from many of the top SF, fantasy and horror writers in biz, including Lucius Shepard (two volumes!), John Kessel, Walter Jon Williams, Elizabeth Hand, Elizabeth Bear, Michael Marshall Smith, Harry Turtledove, Greg Egan, Chaz Brenchley, Alastair Reynolds, Gregory Benford, Nancy Kress, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Joe Haldeman, Kage Baker, Neal Barrett, Jr., Robert Silverberg, Peter S. Beagle, Michael Swanwick, Larry Niven, and many others.

And thirdly — these are really gorgeous books. They’re generously sized hardcovers, published in both deluxe limited formats and very reasonable-priced trade hardcover editions, usually around 40 bucks retail. The one that grabbed my eye recently was The Best of David Brin, released just last year. It’s a feast of a book, just the thing I need to settle down with after a long and tiring week.

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