@GemmaFiles @ChiZinePub #Review THE HEXSLINGER OMNIBUS by Gemma Files.

The Hexslinger Omnibus review
Author: Gemma Files
5 out of 5 stars

Book Info: Genre: Weird Western/Supernatural Horror/Steampunk
Reading Level: Adult
Recommended for: Fans of Weird West, horror, those interested in Meso-American religious practices
Trigger Warnings for series: murder (including mass murder), killing, execution, non PC language, fighting, violence, suicide, explicit M/M sex (first book only), human sacrifice, self injury, giant spiders
Animal Injuries: several horses are killed during a melee

My Thoughts on Omnnibus: The omnibus includes the Hexslinger trilogy as well as three bonus short stories, “Hexmas”., “Like a Bowl of Fire”, and “In Scarlet Town (Today)”. I have written individual reviews for each of the books in the trilogy, so for more detail on any given book, check that out. I will use this review to talk about the series as a whole, and also to review the three short stories.

One of the things I really liked about this series is the characters, and character development. Some of these people are really quite horrible human beings at the beginning, like Songbird and Chess Pargeter, yet they grow and change through the course of the series in such as way as to begin on a path to redemption. Others start out good people, like Ash Rook and Mesach Love, only to fall out of grace through one reason or another. I liked that the author was willing to make that sort of gamble. While I imagine there will be plenty of people for whom this series is definitely not their cup of tea, but for those who might like a Weird Western with some gay romance, well, this should fulfill that nicely.

As far as the short stories:
“Hexmas” is set 6 or 7 years after the events of the main trilogy. Ed Morrow and Yancey Colder Kloves are homesteading in the desert on a plot that Chess helped set up, but a new neighbor—a hex woman from Iceland—is causing trouble for them due to her fear that Yancey is a hex and will try to destroy her. To make things even more tricky, Yancey is close to delivering her first child, and afraid the neighbor woman will kill the babe upon its birth. Chess, recently elected Sheriff of Hexicas, comes to visit just in time. This short is more lighthearted, at least at the beginning, than a lot of the trilogy, and that was nice to see. It was also neat to see how Ed and Yancey have been keeping themselves during the time in question. There is mention that Yancey has been using her dead-speaker skills to try to learn more about her heritage, both from her father's Jewish tradition, and her mother's Romani.

“Like a Bowl of Fire” is set shortly after the events of the trilogy. Chess is traveling with Charlie, the young man he meets in the epilogue of book 3. They have traveled back east, where a local man has pointed them toward a section of land on which nothing will grow. Anything that goes there burns, be it a person or a plant. Chess and Charlie have to figure out why this is happening and try to stop it. During this short, we find out that Charlie has a special way with the arachnorses, the large spiders born from the giant spider in the third book, which are being trained as mounts. We also see how Chess has grown in his wisdom over the years.

“In Scarlet Town (Today)” takes place about a year before “Hexmas”. The leaders of Hexicas summon Chess to help them solve a murder, which should be impossible due to the Oath that all hexes must take to live in Hex City. Chess uncovers a cauldron of bad feelings between the hexes and the so-called “naturals”, upon whom many of the hexes look down and consider inferior, while the “naturals” are resentful of their treatment but feel they are stuck there and unable to leave. Charlie does as much to solve this as Chess.

I really did enjoy all the short stories, which gave a more in-depth look at some of the people from the series, as well as catching the reader up on them since the end of the series. Fans of the trilogy might want to purchase the omnibus mainly so they can read these stories, if for no other reason. I really have enjoyed reading these stories and look forward to whatever this author might come up with next. Watch for a guest post from the author, and a giveaway, coming on Friday on my blog!

Series Information: The Hexslinger Series
Book 1: A Book of Tongues, review linked here
Book 2: A Rope of Thorns, review linked here
Book 3: A Tree of Bones, review linked here

Disclosure: I received a copy of the omnibus from ChiZine in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Omnibus Synopsis: It’s 1867, and the Civil War is over. But the blood has just begun to flow.

For Asher Rook, Chess Pargeter, and Ed Morrow, the war has left its mark in tangled lines of association and cataclysmic love, woken hexslinger magic, and the terrible attentions of a dead god. “Reverend” Asher Rook is the unwilling gateway for the Mayan goddess Ixchel to birth her pantheon back into the world of the living, and to do it she’ll force Rook to sacrifice his lover and fellow outlaw Chess Pargeter. But being dead won’t bar Chess from taking vengeance, and Pargeter will claw his way back out of Hell, teaming with undercover-Pinkerton-agent-turned-outlaw Ed Morrow to wreak it. What comes back into the world in the form of Chess Pargeter is a walking wound, Chess’s very presence tearing a crack in the world and reshaping everything around him while Ixchel establishes Hex City, a city state defying the very laws of nature—an act that will draw battle lines between a passel of dead gods and monsters, hexes galore, spiritualists, practitioners of black science, a coalition set against Ixchel led by Allan Pinkerton himself, and everyone unfortunate enough to be caught between the colliding forces. None of which will stop Chess from hunting down Rook, now consort to Ixchel, even if he has to rip the world apart to do it.

With the barriers between worlds crumbling, a new war being waged across the American West, and Ixchel preparing to kick off an Apocalypse fed by shed human blood while Rook plots one, final, redemptive treachery of his own, everything will come down to Chess Pargeter, once again trapped in a nightmarish underworld. But Chess has fought his way out of hell before. . . .

@Rasnictem and @ChiZinePub: Steve Tem Guest post: The Genre Question featuring "Celestial Inventories"

Today I have a guest post from Steve Rasnic Tem, author of Celestial Inventories from ChiZine Pub.  Before I turn things over to Steve, let me give you the synopsis of this very interesting-sounding anthology. I have this book in my review queue, so I'll be reviewing it at some point as well.

Synopsis:
Among the transforming events in these twenty-two genre-bending stories: an office worker and his wife fade into a literal invisibility; a photographer discovers the unexpected in the faces of dead children; a girl moves onto a strange street when she fails to return from trick-or-treating; an artist devotes his career to contracting diseases; a plague of head explosions becomes a new form of terrorism; a couple's aging dismantles reality; and a seemingly pointless life finds final expression in bits of folded paper. Steve Rasnic Tem's other works include Deadfall Hotel, Onion Songs, Ugly Behavior, and The Man on the Ceiling. Celestial Inventories may be the World Fantasy Award-winning author's finest collection to date.

Doesn't that sound interesting? I've linked to its Amazon page above on the title, so go check it out if you're interested. Now, without further ado, is Steve Rasnic Tem to talk about "The Genre Question".

THE GENRE CONVERSATION

Steve Rasnic Tem

I’ve loved genre fiction almost as long as I’ve been reading.  Our high school library didn’t have much of it—I had to make do with Jules Verne, folklore, and fairy tales.  But my cousin had several crates of Gold Medal paperbacks stored at my grand parents’ house—noir fiction mostly—and I happily read through those over several summers.  And when our small community finally got a public library I read my way through every book with one of those “science fiction” stickers on it.  Then I tackled the mysteries, and the westerns.  It’s a love that has never left me, and when I first started writing, I wanted to write stories like the ones in those books.

Or did I?

What attracted me to science fiction and fantasy initially was that sense that it was about, essentially, an invisible world.  I couldn’t step outside my house and point to the things and environments which populated these stories.  These tales were furnished with things of the mind—objects which hadn’t yet been invented or perhaps only existed inside dreams or in the imagination.  And yet to me they felt so real.  They elicited a strong emotional response.  They seemed, for whatever reason, essential.  And these stories were the only way I could access them.

When you begin writing your first task is to learn how to write a story that “works,” that feels satisfactory and complete on the page.  You do this by studying stories and taking them apart, playing with the tropes in your favorite fiction and using them in new ways.  And once you’ve finally learned how to write a story that works you’re reluctant to depart from the methods and approaches you used to get there.

The only problem with this is that you’ve forced your imagination down a narrower and narrower path in order to get to those first stories that work for an editor and for an audience.  To a certain extent the results of your imaginative explorations have been preselected, your imagination “filtered.” This is a necessary process, especially in the beginning—there are simply too many choices to be made, and the structures of genre can simplify those selections.  The drawback, however, is that you’ve also had to cut yourself off from some of your originality.  At a certain point genre fiction becomes predictable fiction.

I’ve spent much of the last ten years trying to roll my process back a bit.  In a way, I’ve tried to unschool my imagination, to get it back to a beginning in which I knew less about what I was doing, but imagined more.  It’s a difficult process.  It’s hard to loosen your grip on that leash of what you know.  But I noticed that some of the stories that came out of that process were different somehow.  They looked like fantasy, sf, and horror stories, but they weren’t quite of those genres.  As close as I’ve come to define, these stories became participants in a conversation with f and sf.  What I liked about them most was that they seemed more “mine” than many of the stories I had written previously.

Writers often tell me, “I’m a horror writer because the only ideas that ever occur to me are horror ideas” or “I’m a science fiction writer because I only come up with science fiction ideas.”  But I believe that it’s too easy to program ourselves to create only within certain parameters.  The reason we come up with only horror ideas is that’s the only place we’re seriously looking.  So I encourage writers to force themselves to look in other places and come up with different kinds of ideas. 

Sometimes in order to break myself of the genre habit I play games with my imagination. I set up a framework for a story and then develop it depending on things that are entirely random.  My novelette “Celestial Inventory” takes place in one room.  A man has lived there his entire life.  I decided I was going to write the story from somewhere in middle age until the day of his death, and in order to structure it I wrote words on slips of paper, objects that would be in a room, and I decided, arbitrarily, that I had to write about those things in that order and consistent with his aging.  So I wrote about batteries, dust bunnies, coat hangers, doors, floor, ceiling, etc. Each piece became an imaginative meta-essay about that object (ala Francis Ponge). And it was the most fun I’d ever had writing. 

Later I wrote a novella for Wormhole Books—“The World Recalled” --in which I did the reverse.  The story starts with the day of the character’s death.  I gave him a strange kind of aphasia in which he says things incorrectly.  I put pieces of paper with words into a bag and drew two of them at a time, pulling up combinations like BED SLIDE and SHOWER RADIO and NEWSPAPER LADLE.  Each section of the novella was to have one of those phrases as its title.  So I had to write a piece about a newspaper ladle, taking place when he is somewhere in his thirties. 

“The World Recalled” is not really classifiable in terms of genre.  I suppose it’s something like magical realism, although I hesitate to use that term out of its cultural context.  I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.  It stretched what I could do.  These two works, “The World Recalled” and “Celestial Inventory,” begin and end my new collection CELESTIAL INVENTORIES (ChiZine, August).

In his essay “The Trans-Realist Manifesto,” science fiction writer Rudy Rucker posits that the tropes of science fiction can be identified with basic modes of human communication and interaction.  Time travel corresponds with memory, flight with enlightenment, alternate worlds with the variety of human perspective, telepathy with our ability to communicate fully.  So he takes a basic human need and relates it to a science fiction trope. 

You can do the same thing with horror.  You might posit that ghost stories are really about the persistence of memory, vampires about spiritual and physical hunger, werewolves about anger and insatiable need.  I imagine you could even do something similar with mystery or western tropes.  What excites me most about this process is it’s a way to conceptualize stories at the level of basic human emotions before genre comes into play—potentially it’s a way to circumvent the damage that genre consciousness can do to your imaginative process.

CELESTIAL INVENTORIES collects many of the stories I wrote during my process of attempting to loosen the ties of genre.  I’ve also included a few earlier stories which seemed consistent with this approach. They don’t abandon genre entirely—in fact in some ways I think they express my love for genre.  Some of them veer further from the traditional expectations of f & sf than others, but all I think, feel very much “mine.”    

Feel free to comment with your thoughts about genre below. Remember, they're moderated, which means they won't show up right away, but I'll approve them just as quickly as I can. Thanks for joining me here today!

@James_Marshall and @ChiZinePub How to End Human Suffering winners

Right, so you remember the excellent guest post by James Marshall last week (linked here), right?  If you haven't read it yet, so check it out, it really rocks.  So, I've drawn the winners for the books!  Yep. I'll be e-mailing out information to ChiZine and your books should arrive soon.

The winners are...

Paperback:

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Ebooks:

a Rafflecopter giveaway


The winners have been contacted via e-mail and their information has been sent to the ChiZine representative. Congratulations to the winners, and better luck next time to everyone else. Stay tuned, you know there are always more giveaways just around the corner!

@james_marshall and @chizinepub Present: #guestpost and #giveaway How to End Human Suffering book 2 "Zombie versus Fairy featuring Albinos"

Oh, I have a double treat for you today, Now is Goners!  Not only do I have a super-cool guest post from the very awesome James Marshall, who has written the awesome books Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies (review here) and Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos (review here), the first two books in the How to End Human Suffering series, but I also have giveaways of the second book!  Thanks to ChiZine Pub (follow them on Twitter @chizinepub), I have one paperback copy for a US/Canada resident, and two e-book copies in the format of the winner's choice!

I also want to say I have followed ChiZine since way back when they first started a little ezine called Chiaroscuro, which was sometime in the late 1990s.  To see the sort of success they are having is very satisfying to me.

Anyway, first the guest post, and then I will link the giveaways.  Remember, to sign up for the paperback you must have an address in the US or Canada, but the e-book giveaway is open internationally.  I will label them so you know which you may enter.

Without further ado, here is James Marshall to tell us about his exploits in narrator reliability.

     In my How To End Human Suffering series, I wanted to explore narrator reliability. In the first book, NINJA VERSUS PIRATE FEATURING ZOMBIES, the protagonist and narrator is a sixteen-year-old pirate and spiritual leader named Guy Boy Man. When we're first introduced to Guy, he claims to be wearing a shiny white high-tech ceremonial robe, the Pope's big tall golden hat, and that he has a faithful shoulder-perched raven. He says that he recently killed his parents with a hatchet, pirated trillions of dollars from the economy, and that, at the moment, he's openly drinking whiskey in the hallway of his high school wherein zombie teens with helmets and metal muzzles mingle with regular students.

     Is Guy Boy Man crazy or is his world? It's explicitly stated that other characters aren't experiencing reality the same way that he is. At one point, Guy's cute pink-haired girlfriend, Baby Doll15, who has a unicorn that follows her everywhere, refers to Guy's kick-ass Gothic castle as an “abandoned factory”(66). When Guy and some of his hot young female followers pick a crop of human babies from a farmer's field and burn them, Sweetie Honey—Guy's African-American ninja friend—asks him why he's burning “a bunch of lettuce”(189).

     In NINJA VERSUS PIRATE FEATURING ZOMBIES, the reader is never really certain what or how much is really happening. He or she probably suspects that all the crazy events detailed in the novel aren't meant to be “really” occurring and are, instead, housed in the narrator's deranged mind. All of that gets turned on its head in the next novel.

    In ZOMBIE VERSUS FAIRY FEATURING ALBINOS, we're introduced to a new protagonist and narrator, a depressed zombie named Buck Burger who is tired of going through the motions of being undead. Hoping to feel alive again, he takes a shower, with soap. His zombie wife insists he see a doctor, who prescribes him an anti-depressant. When he goes to get his prescription filled, Buck meets a beautiful pharmacist fairy and quickly becomes a pawn in a cold war between zombies and supernatural creatures.

     Making Buck Burger the narrator of the second novel allowed me to make all the events of the first novel “real” on a level that only Guy Boy Man is experiencing. There's a clue to this in the Prologue of NINJA VERSUS PIRATE FEATURING ZOMBIES, which is a modern-day retelling of Plato's Parable of the Cave: in it, Guy discovers there are different layers of reality and, in one of these, everyone in the world is bound with chains. Once Guy escapes, he resolves to return there and “free everyone, starting with the hot young girls”(10).

     Exploring narrator reliability in the How To End Human Suffering series allows me to play with readers' expectations and to conflate our own world with one filled with zombies and supernatural creatures.

Follow James Marshall:
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And if you don't yet have Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies you can buy it by clicking the title (for the Kindle edition) or clicking here for the paperback edition.  If you are in a hurry, you can buy Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos in Kindle format by clicking the title, or the paperback version by clicking here.


Okay, so here are the giveaways. First for a paperback edition of Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos, only people with a US or Canada address can sign up here.
a Rafflecopter giveaway


Here you can sign up for one of two copies of Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos in e-book, winner's choice of format. Open internationally.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Attention Writers and Poets!: ChiZine Publications Rannu Fund Submissions now open!

I just learned that the 2013 CZP (ChiZine Publications)/Rannu Fund Award is now open to submissions of fiction and poetry through May 31, 2013.  I had been told the following by the ChiZine representative. 

 Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman are the tie-breaking judges for fiction and poetry, respectively! 

So, if you want to submit something to the contest, here is where you should go.

According to that site, here is some info about the contest.

In Memoriam

Erich Rannu

January 2, 1922 - April 4, 2013 

Founded July 8, 2008 by Sandra Kasturi and Brett Alexander Savory, co-publishers of ChiZine Publications and ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words in honour of the thirtieth wedding anniversary of Sandra's mother and step-father, and their contributions to the arts and education both in Canada and Estonia.

 The Fund, brought to you in collaboration with ChiZine Publications, offers two awards per year of $500 CDN each, one for fiction, one for poetry, granted to two writers of speculative literature (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism, surrealism, etc.), of any nationality/place of residence, at any stage of their career. Please see the guidelines for more information. 

For more information, see the Entry Rules page here. Or click on the guidelines link above.

And if you enter?  Best of luck!

ChiZine Presents Cover Reveal "The Warrior who Carried Life" re-release!

Originally published in 1985, this fantasy novel by Geoff Ryman is scheduled to be re-published by ChiZine on April 15, 2013.  You can pre-order the print edition of the book at a 30% discount (and receive the e-book version free) at ChiZine right now at this link.  Isn't this new cover absolutely stunning?







General book information:

Trade Paperback Info

300 pages

ISBN-10: 1927469384

ISBN-13: 978-1927469385

Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches

This book is a re-write of the Gilgamesh epic, and I'm very excited to read and review it (I have an ARC) as soon as I have the chance to do so.

In the meantime, here's the synopsis, so you have a feel for the book.

Synopsis:
To defeat her enemies . . . she must make them immortal.

Only men are allowed into the wells of vision. But Cara’s mother defies this edict and is killed, but not before returning with a vision of terrible and wonderful things that are to come . . . and all because of five-year-old Cara.

Years later, evil destroys the rest of Cara’s family. In a rage, Cara uses magic to transform herself into a male warrior. But she finds that to defeat her enemies, she must break the cycle of violence, not continue it.

As Cara’s mother’s vision of destiny is fulfilled, the wonderful follows the terrible, and a quest for revenge becomes a quest for eternal life.

Book Review: "The Inner City" by Karen Heuler

The Inner City review
Author: Karen Heule
5 out of 5 stars

Book Info: Genre: Dark fiction/short stories, anthology
Reading Level: Adult
Recommended for: Fans of the strange, the dark, the macabre, the beautiful

My Thoughts: Usually when I review anthologies I'll put up a list of stories in the books and try to give a bit of info about them, but this particular anthology is all by the same author, so I'll just address the writing. Which is brilliant and creepy. Each of the stories is a brilliant gem, and each has a wonderfully strange or macabre or surprising ending. For those who enjoy the strange, the dark, the weirdly beautiful, these stories are definitely for you. Check this great little anthology out right away.

For more information about this book, please follow this link to see John Scalzi's Big Idea post about this book, which is very good. To purchase the book directly from ChiZine, you can click here (where formatting allowed) or on the cover image.

Disclosure: I received an ARC from ChiZine Publications in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. I also was part of the cover reveal, and that post can be seen here (linked where formatting allowed).

Synopsis: Heuler’s stories dart out at what the world is doing and centre on how the individual copes with it. Anything is possible: people breed dogs with humans to create a servant class; beneath one great city lies another city, running it surreptitiously; an employee finds that her hair has been stolen by someone intent on getting her job; strange fish fall from trees and birds talk too much; a boy tries to figure out what he can get when the Rapture leaves good stuff behind. Everything is familiar; everything is different. Behind it all, is there some strange kind of design or merely just the chance to adapt? In Heuler’ s stories, characters cope with the strange without thinking it’ s strange, sometimes invested in what’ s going on, sometimes trapped by it, but always finding their own way in.