New Online Source for Weird: Weird Fiction Review

In celebration of the UK publication of the huge - and I mean huge at 116 (!) stories and over 750,000 words - anthology The Weird : A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, the new site Weird Fiction Review has been launched recently with a lot of goodies you can explore by clicking on the link above.

For example you can find the opening lines for all 116 stories in the anthology HERE - so incidentally its table of contents too. We wish Weird Fiction Review a long and fruitful life!

In the US, The Weird : A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories will be published next year in May as an 1152 page trade paperback and ebook by Tor and while I do not have yet an Amazon link, there is one in the leaked Spring-Summer 2012 Tor catalog. Warning: the link goes to a big pdf file so it may take a while to open, but you can download the pdf by right clicking and using "save link as". The anthology is a must for me and I plan to get it on publication, most likely as an ebook but maybe in both print and electronic formats.

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In the meantime you can get a taste of weird from the recent anthology ODD? edited also by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer which is available for now in ebook form from Amazon or even better - less expensive and drm-free - from the independent ebook retailer Weigthless Books where I got my epub copy recently. While it has only (only!) 19 stories, it gives a great taste of both contemporary and classic weird fiction.

I browsed all the opening lines and read and greatly enjoyed the first four stories including The Bloat Toad by Leopoldo Lugones which has been translated from Spanish by Larry Nolen who blogs at the interesting The Of Blog. Look for a full review of Odd? on Fantasy Book Critic, most likely next Sunday, November 20th.

"City of the Snakes" by Darren Shan (Reviewed by Mihir Wanchoo)

Official Author Website

Order the book HERE

Read an excerpt HERE

Read FBC’s review of Procession Of The Dead

Read FBC’s Review of Hell’s Horizon

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Darren O'Shaughnessy is the much acclaimed author of the "Saga of Darren Shan" and "The Demonata" series. He has previously taken various pen names such as D.B. Shan and Darren Shan which he now uses to differentiate between his adult and YA books. He was born in London but moved to Ireland during his childhood. He currently spends his time between living in the Irish countryside as well as in London. The first book in the "Saga of Darren Shan" was made into a film called "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" and was released a couple years ago.

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: For ten years Capac Raimi has ruled the City. Created by the first Cardinal to continue his legacy, Capac cannot be killed.

Then Capac disappears. His trusted lieutenant, Ford Tasso, suspects the mysterious villacs, ancient and powerful Incan priests. To Ford, only one man has the cunning to outwit such adversaries-Al Jeery, who has taken the guise of his father, the terrifying assassin Paucar Wami.

Al has no love for Capac and no wish to tangle with the villacs. Until Ford promises him the one thing he truly craves-retribution against the man who killed those he loved most and destroyed his life. Lured into the twisted, nightmarish world of the Incan priests, Al will learn more about the City than he ever imagined, and be offered more power than he ever desired.

But in the City, everything comes at a cost...

FORMAT/INFO: The hardcover edition of City of the Snakes is 307 pages long divided into four titled parts and an epilogue section. Each section is further divided into titled and numbered chapters for a total of twenty-seven chapters. The Narration is via first person and features Al Jeery for the major part and Capac Raimi for the remaining chapters, the individual narrators of the previous two books. This is the third book in the City trilogy and is set ten years after the events of the first two books. This book will have to be read after the first two to make sense of the over arcing plot and characters and only then can the entire story be wholly appreciated.

June 2, 2011 marked the Hardback publication of City of the Snakes via Grand Central Publishing.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: I was awaiting “City of the Snakes” since the moment I finished “Hell’s Horizon”. I knew that the third book would be taking a time leap and would be featuring characters from both the previous books. After liking the weird but excellent start to the series, I was curious how the author planned to end the series and how would Capac and Jeery interact with each other and what would this mean for the City.

The story opens up ten years after the events of Procession of the Dead and we find that Capac has indeed risen to the top however he’s not been completely able to control his environment. He wonders whether he did the right thing in the climax of Procession of the Dead as things haven’t gone smoothly as per the Cardinal’s predictions. His henchmen have been constantly betraying him and somehow he has started seeing ghosts of past personae. Convinced he’s slowly losing his mind, he turns to Ford Tasso to help him however before he can be of any service, Capac is reunited with a particular person from his past. His besotted entanglement however leads him down a path from where return is nigh impossible. Al Jeery is then contacted by Ford Tasso to locate and retrieve Capac, that however is easier said than done as the usual suspects are the city’s worst kept secret, its Incan priests. As Al slowly makes his way through the twisted lanes of the City, he starts realizing that perhaps Capac was seeing something concrete after all. And the worst nightmare the City has ever faced, the deadly psychopathic assassin Paucar Wami, has returned and perhaps he will want to find out what Al has been up to for the past ten years.

This book is the last book in the trilogy and therefore it does bring into play all the characters which have been introduced so far. This is a good move on the author’s part as it further raises the scales. There is a theme of redemption which plays out between the pages and all characters have to face it. The plot of the book is coalesced a bit from the first two as in the first we had a crusade of one person to rise to the top and in the second there is the search for the missing person. This book manages to combine both these elements and gives the reader something new and familiar at the same time. The plot manages to recreate the intensity of the previous books while giving the characters a push in a newer direction. Both the POV characters are charismatic ones and while Capac does get a smaller role of sorts, he does manage to convey his growth as a character and a crime lord. The real scene stealer is Al Jeery who has spent the last ten years trying to live up a legend so he can find the man who has led him to become the very thing he despises. Al’s growth is very vividly described and the events of this book further test his mettle.

The prose does not disappoint in this one after the excellent turns in the previous books as the author vividly shows the city, its Incan priests and the strange world wherein they inhabit. The book has a strong climax and manages to tie up all the threads which have been introduced so far. I felt this was rather excellent because as a reader I got complete closure from the story. The author also has been brutal with all of his characters as many meet their ends and those who are left alive are worse for wear. Lastly I think the way the author ends the story is rather a mystical one, one can draw inferences from it about what might have happened and all possibilities stand true. The bittersweet nature of the ending does justice to this dark tale and this ending is one which cannot be predicted as well.

Drawbacks were few but present, namely that Capac gets a reduced role. While from a plot point-of-view it is justified, the reader would have definitely benefitted from seeing more of his grey nature. The ending to the story while action-packed ends with a literal bang and perhaps some readers might have liked to read a few more details about it. The book does do its best to keep the tension and intrigue throughout its pages however the weirdness sometimes does overwhelm it.

CONCLUSION: A powerful ending to a dark saga, the characters of the City are not ones which the reader will easily forget. City of the Snakes is a good book to end out a trilogy and it remains to be seen what readers down the line will make of it when they read all the three books together. I for one, enjoyed this gritty, weird urban fantasy story about power, corruption and the redemption of one’s soul. A must read for all readers of the previous books and for those who like their stories dark & with a slice of Noir.

More on 2011 Books Read and 2012 Releases Received (by Liviu Suciu)

As I have been way too tired to write a cogent review of the excellent anthology Solaris Rising about which you can find my scattered thoughts HERE and a full review most likely on Sunday, Nov 13, I updated my 2011 Releases Read post which now stands at 120 books, mostly novels and more generally fiction, though I included a very strong associational natural philosophy/speculative science book by David Deutsch too, though not the few other non-fiction 2011 books I read end to end so far.

I took a look at the distribution of these books as far as review copies versus copies bought/borrowed by me went and I was happy to note that the split was technically even 60-60, though it is true that in 5 cases I also got review copies after I bought and read the respective books. While in two cases (Home Fires and The Silent Land) the review copies were unexpected, in the other three I expected them but I still could not stop myself buying the books (The Sea Watch, Cold Fire, Heirs of the Blade) asap and of course these three all rank in my top 25 of the year - here as I do not like list repetitions, automatically a second series book that appears in the same year with another one like The Sea Watch gets #26, though technically it should be somewhere in the mid-teens.

I also was happy to note that of my top 10 books, 4 (#1, 3, 4, 6) were not review copies, while two more above (#5, #10) were also first bought by me. In the top 25, 10 were obtained by me, three are dual bought/review copies and thirteen are review copies. So all in all a good mix and I even looked at the number of reviews I did on Fantasy Book Critic versus only on Goodreads and while the numbers are skewed more towards review copies (some mid 40's against mid 30's), the ratio was not bad considering that almost all the review copies I got were sff which have priority in reviewing here, while a good chunk of the books I got myself are non-sff which get reviewed on an excellence/notable factor first and foremost.

As 2012 books go, two more review copies have been obtained by me, The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta (first published in 2011 in the UK, but the one I have is the US Feb 2012 e-arc) and Expeditions to the Mountains of the Moon by Mark Hodder (the third Burton/Swinburne adventure) in addition to the Michael Flynn one noted HERE.

As it happens I have not yet read any of them and I am curious which will be the first 2012 novel I will read - the odds favor heavily A Thunder Rising by David Weber for which an e-arc is imminent (as in check Baen Webscriptions 10 times a day to see if the earc got released and I can buy it) or The Great Game by Lavie Tidhar which I also expect soon, but otherwise the Vyleta novel may get there as I am currently in the mood for the darker kind of book.

"Cold Vengeance" by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (Reviewed by Mihir Wanchoo)

Official Author Website

Order Cold Vengeance HERE

Read the first chapter HERE

Read FBC’s review of Fever Dream

Read FBC’s review of Gideon’s Sword

Read FBC Interview with Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are New York Times best-selling collaborators who have written fifteen previous novels. Douglas Preston lives in Santa Fe and Maine and Lincoln Child lives in New Jersey. They usually meet each other while touring or at conferences. Douglas Preston was a curator previously for the New York natural history museum in which their first book Relic was set. Lincoln Child was an editor with St. Martins previously. Their debut book was made into a movie of the same name by Paramount.

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: Devastated by the discovery that his wife, Helen, was murdered, Special Agent Pendergast must have retribution. But revenge is not simple.

As he stalks his wife's betrayers-a chase that takes him from the wild moors of Scotland to the bustling streets of New York City and the darkest bayous of Louisiana-he is also forced to dig further into Helen's past. And he is stunned to learn that Helen may have been a collaborator in her own murder.

Peeling back the layers of deception, Pendergast realizes that the conspiracy is deeper, goes back generations, and is more monstrous than he could have ever imagined-and everything he's believed, everything he's trusted, everything he's understood . . . may be a horrific lie.

FORMAT/INFO: Cold Vengeance is 358 pages divided into eighty-three chapters. Narration is via Third person and features the characters are Aloysius X.L. Pendergast, Lt. Vincent D’Agosta, Ned Betterton, Corrie Swanson, Judson Esterhazy, Dr. John Felder and couple of others. This book is the second in the Helen Pendergast Trilogy and picks up the plot directly from Fever Dream. It is however highly unadvisable to start reading from here as the plot contains a lot of spoilers for the previous book.

August 2, 2011 marked the North American Hardcover publication of Cold Vengeance via Grand Central Publishing.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: Cold Vengeance is the second book in the Helen Pendergast trilogy that began with Fever Dream last year. I very much enjoyed the new twist envisioned by the authors as Pendergast begins to re-examine his past and find out about his wife. This move was a brilliant one by the authors and Fever Dream rekindled many a jaded fan back into Pendergast’s throes.

This book begins almost immediately after the events of the last book. Pendergast has gone hunting with his brother-in-law Judson Esterhazy, things soon go awry and Pendergast is forced to go underground perhaps a second time in his life (the first time was around the events of the Diogenes trilogy). For things are definitely what they seem and this time around even the ever-doughty Vincent D’Agosta can’t be of much help. Things soon take a turn for the unexpected as Corrie Swanson begins her investigation into Pendergast’s absence. Aiding her in cause is Vincent D’Agosta who is slowly recovering from the events of the previous title. On a separate track Ned Betterton is a investigative reporter who fills in the void left by Bill Smithback in Preston-Child world and lastly there is the continuation of Constance’s storyline from the events of the previous few books and we get a viewpoint from Dr. John Felder which helps the reader in knowing more of what is developing.

Thus with such a convoluted storyline, the authors plunge the readers into a morass of storylines wherein nothing is as it seems and Pendergast is even more bewildered than he was shown in the previous volume. The basic storyline is about Helen Pendergast, the long-thought-to-be dead wife of agent Pendergast, however things and plots have been unearthed which make it seem that Helen was murdered and did not die in a hunting accident. This book not only validates that theory but pushes forward a new one which will further shock Pendergast as well as the readers.

The authors have to be congratulated for not only twisting the reader’s perceptions but also backing it up with a tremendous story which does not stop shocking the reader while maintaining its pace and potential. This story’s pace is one which does not allow any time for the reader to pause and collect their thoughts as it carries the reader forward through out. The re-appearance of fan-favorite characters of Corrie Swanson & Vincent D’Agosta further helps in engaging the reader as Pendergast is not often present on the scene of action. It’s very difficult to discuss the details of the plot as even the smallest points are spoiler-ish and therefore its best if the readers themselves come across these points in their reading journey. Among the book’s finer facets are the side plots, which do not detract any attention from the main plot and keep the readers, further engrossed in trying to figure out how it will all end?

The most surprising thing of the book is how assured the authors seem to be in an environment wherein their comfort level is at its zenith, earlier this year the same duo had released Gideon’s Sword and its very hard to believe that both the books were written by the same people in almost an overlapping time period. The difference between both books is startling in terms of plot, characterization and plot twists and is unfathomable. Another remarkable aspect of this book is that even though this is the middle book of the trilogy, it does not show any such signs. It rushes towards the climax while keeping the reader guessing and goes on to deliver not one but two explosive revelations which will have massive repercussions in Pendergast’s world.

This book does not get any better than the pervious excellent thrillers like Reliquary, Cabinet of Curiosities, Riptide, etc. from these virtuoso masters. Not only will it invigorate the series but will go on to gain more fans for the series as many readers who haven’t read the previous series titles can readily start reading the books from Fever Dream and thus will still be enchanted by the world and the characters created by Messrs. Preston & Child.

CONCLUSION: An excellent thriller, "The Dark Knight" to its predecessor and an out-and-out page-turner. Preston & Child have written a fiendishly clever book and inserted enough surprises in it to flummox the most veteran readers and with an ending even more devious than all their previous ones; next year cannot come soon enough for the final book and the resolution to the mystery of Helen Pendergast.

"Scholar" by L.E. Modesitt (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu)

Official L.E. Modesitt Website
Order "Scholar" HERE
Read FBC Review of Imager
Read FBC Review of Imager's Challenge
Read FBC Review of Imager's Intrigue

INTRODUCTION: After the trilogy consisting of Imager, Imager's Challenge and Imager's Intrigue that introduced us to Rhenn, one of the most enchanting narrators in recent fantasy, LE Modesitt goes back in time before the unification of Solidar to give us a tale that introduces another great character, the scholar of the title and secret imager, Quaeryt Rytersyn.

"Hundreds of years before the time of Imager, the continent of Lydar is fragmented. Years of war have consolidated five nations into three--Bovaria, Telaryn, and Antiago. Quaeryt is a scholar and a friend of Bhayar, the young ruler of Telaryn. Worried about his future and the escalating intrigues in Solis, the capital city, Quaeryt persuades Bhayar to send him to Tilbor, conquered ten years earlier by Bhayar’s father, in order to see if the number and extent of occupying troops can be reduced so that they can be re-deployed to the border with warlike Bovaria.

Quaeryt has managed to conceal the fact that he is an imager, since the life expectancies of imagers in Lydar is short. Just before Quaeryt departs, Bhayar’s youngest sister passes a letter to the scholar-imager, a letter that could well embroil Quaeryt in the welter of court politics he had hoped to leave behind. On top of that, on his voyage and journey to Tilbor he must face pirates, storms, poisonings, attempted murder, as well as discovering the fact that he is not quite who he thought he was. To make it all worse, the order of scholars to which he belongs is jeopardized in more ways than one."

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: As "Scholar" takes us back centuries from the superb world of the original Imager series, I would say that the novel is quite accessible even if one has not read the first series and LE Modesitt's world building skills are again on display here. However for people familiar with Rhenn's world, you will recognize the same general social and political division of holders, factors and artisans, the Phaarsi already being viewed with suspicion and occasionally persecuted, though at this moment in time there is no Imager Collegium, while princes rule the three countries that make up Solidar and relatively recent battles and conquests that reduced said number to three are fresh in everyone's memories.

Stylistically the main difference between Scholar and the earlier three Imager novels is the third person narration, but as the novel follows Quaeryt from a relatively intimate point of view, the differences are minimal and they boil down to a less immediate feel as opposed to Rhenn's intense narration.

Scholar also has some similarity with Imager's Intrigue as it is mostly a fantasy thriller though it has quite a lot of battles and fights too, so it moves toward clear adventure in the last third. The novel is also a very good example of the classical approach to the sff genre - the modest but super competent hero that has been favored in the genre for a long time though today this is more a science fictional than a fantasy-nal approach since in the latter pretty conservative genre, the destined, noble blood heroes are more common.

As such, Scholar heavily depends on how much you like and empathize with Quearyt, the orphan scholar turned sailing master, turned scholar again when one of his legs got injured, secret imager and all around expert at intrigue and getting out of sticky situations while working for what he perceives to be the greater good.

His adventures in the service of Lord Bhayar and his task of "solving" the tricky situation in a conquered but still restive ten years later northern province, takes him from the sea to the forests, from hovels to palaces, from corrupt officials to fighting bandits and even rebel armies, while having to deal with corruption and even treason in both his scholar order as well as in the officialdom of the country...
Scholar is a standalone with a definite close to its main thread though of course more is to come next year. A dash of romance too and a superb ending made Scholar (A++) one of my top 25 novels of 2011.