Someone’s Read it Already

L. Lee Lowe is self-published because she simply wanted to opt out of the publishing industry, full stop. She wants to be a writer — a person who writes and has people read what she writes — rather than a businessperson, and has arranged her writing career thusly. Her novel, Mortal Ghost, is available in a few different formats; one can read it for free on her website here, as blog entries. One can also go here for the book in podcast form, read by a young Welshman who is an acting student; here (direct link) for the whole thing in PDF format; here for various other formats, including HTML and various ereaders, and here for a POD via Lulu (not free).

Jesse Wright is homeless; however, one day, during a ridiculously hot summer in an unidentified part of England, he meets Sarah, who definitely isn’t homeless, and decides to take him on as a reclamation project of sorts. Jesse has issues of all kinds — intimacy, trust, whatnot — and while Sarah’s parents definitely help, it’s not easy. His nightmares — of a burning house and dying people — have always been there, but they’re becoming different. Perhaps it is one of his gifts — an amazing memory, an amazing ability to learn things very quickly, and something that may or may not have to do with fire — that is the key to the mystery that is Jesse? (more…)

Today’s short story collection, with a title like “The Best of,” represents another kind of short story collection: the retrospective, or career-spanning collection. These stories represent twenty-seven years’ worth of Michael Swanwick’s career, including five Hugo-Award-winning stories produced over the span of only six years. Mr. Swanwick is, according to his blurb, one of the most prolific writers of his generation; I’d never even heard of him before I received this ARC in the mail from Subterranean Press, but then again someone who writes mostly hard science fiction for adults and happens to be male might fly under my radar a bit. (I have my biases; who doesn’t? At least I’m working to overcome them!) He’s a Philadelphian with a rather large beard; he’s won nearly every single major award in the speculative fiction field, and usually more than once.

This massive collection — 470 pages — starts in 1980, with two of his earliest published works, and ends with a couple of stories copyrighted in 2007. Mr. Swanwick introduces his stories himself, in a three or four page introduction, and he gives a small amount of information on the background of each story. The tales range from pure high fantasy with elves to rock-hard science fiction; science-fictionalized blues to the edge of the world. The settings include various planets and moons, the earth’s moon, an office building in 1936, a pub in a secondary fantasy world, and more than one bar in the supposed current world. Nuclear war, first contact, and time-space paradoxes all have their days in these stories, but so do life, love, death, and humanity. (more…)

This is the single book that I have paid the least for this week; I think I paid twelve and a half cents for it. It’s a little warped, but the words are intact. Uh, by the way, Heather Graham the author isn’t Heather Graham the actress; the author’s actual name is Heather Graham Pozzessere, I guess, and I’m assuming she’s a little bit older, based on the years she’s been active. She also writes under her real name and under Shannon Drake; I stopped counting how many books she’d written after thirty, and I was nowhere near done. She writes historicals, suspense, and paranormals, among other things; this one is a paranormal suspense.

Lauren, Deanna, and Heidi are all from L.A.; they take a trip to New Orleans for Heidi’s bachelor party. On their first or second day there, they decide to get their fortunes read; the fortune-teller, Susan, tells Heidi that she will have a solid marriage; Deanna that she has a lot of passion; and Lauren, she warns, must get out of town immediately because her life is in danger. That night, since they obviously don’t leave, Lauren meets a tall, dark, and handsome man named Mark who mistakes her for his ex-fiancee; the next day, a headless and bloodless corpse turns up in the Mississippi River. Is she actually in danger? And why is Deanna acting so strangely? (more…)

Welcome to Day 3 of our Small Press Week. Today’s small press is Small Beer Press (small beer, for those who don’t know, is an older term for a low-alcohol brew; it used to be that drinking small beer was safer than drinking water); Kelly Link is one of the founders of this press. She also happens to be the co-editor of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections, as well as a short-story author in her own right. She lives in Massachusetts, and has a B.A. from Columbia and an M.F.A. from UNC-Greensboro; her stories have won the Nebula, the James Tiptree, Jr., and the World Fantasy Awards. Her second collection was published by Harcourt.

Stranger Things Happen is a collection of eleven stories; they range from deceptively simple tales that may or may not be about Nancy Drew, to stories that border on horror, passing through several fairy tales and ghost stories in the middle. A few of them are in second person; some feature male narrators, some feature female narrators, some feature children as narrators. Generally speaking, they’re all a little bit . . . strange. There’s some element in each tale — whether it’s the fact that the narrator is dead, or the fact that both main characters have the same name, or the presence of the Donner party — that is just a bit unsettling. (more…)

[Happy Independence Day, for my American readers, and happy fourth of July, to everyone!]

Charles de Lint, one of my favorite authors (a review here), went through a spate of writing horror and dark fantasy (more like slightly fantastic horror) novels under a pen name (Samuel M. Key) in the late 80s/early 90s. This novel is one of them, along with Mulengro and From a Whisper to a Scream. I enjoyed the latter of those two quite a bit, despite the darkness of the story, so for a little light reading I picked up Angel of Darkness. Oh, not a good idea. Due to the graphic nature of this book, I’m cutting all plot discussion. (more…)