A review of Martha Wells' Emilie and the Hollow World

Written by Seregil of Rhiminee (Sunday, 28 April 2013 12:45 pm)

Category: Articles

Martha Well's Emilie and the Hollow World was published by Strange Chemistry in March/April 2013.

Information about Martha Wells:

Martha Wells is the author of five Ile-Rien novels (The Element of Fire, The Death of the Necromancer, The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air and The Gate of Gods), Books of the Raksura trilogy (The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths), City of Bones, Wheel of the Infinite and two Stargate Atlantis novels (Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary and Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement). She has also written short stories and non-fiction articles.

Martha Wells' official website can be found here.

Information about Emilie and the Hollow World:

While running away from home for reasons that are eminently defensible, Emilie’s plans to stow away on the steamship Merry Bell and reach her cousin in the big city go awry, landing her on the wrong ship and at the beginning of a fantastic adventure.

Taken under the protection of Lady Marlende, Emilie learns that the crew hopes to use the aether currents and an experimental engine, and with the assistance of Lord Engal, journey to the interior of the planet in search of Marlende’s missing father.

With the ship damaged on arrival, they attempt to traverse the strange lands on their quest. But when evidence points to sabotage and they encounter the treacherous Lord Ivers, along with the strange race of the sea-lands, Emilie has to make some challenging decisions and take daring action if they are ever to reach the surface world again.

A REVIEW OF MARTHA WELLS' EMILIE AND THE HOLLOW WORLD

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A review of Rhys Hughes' Tallest Stories

Written by Seregil of Rhiminee (Tuesday, 23 April 2013 11:10 am)

Category: Articles

Rhys Hughes' Tallest Stories was published by Eibonvale Press in March 2013.

Information about the author:

Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 and began writing fiction from a young age. None of his early efforts saw print, mainly because he never submitted them anywhere or even showed them to anyone else. Those stories have all been lost.

Eventually he began sending his work to editors. His first published story was called 'An Ideal Vocation' and it appeared in an obscure anthology in 1992. Encouraged by this "success", he then proceeded to bombard the British small-press with hundreds of eccentric tales for almost two decades. His first book, the now almost legendary Worming the Harpy, was published by Tartarus Press in 1995. He has published many volumes since then, chiefly collections of short-stories but also a few novels, in several languages.

He considers his three best and most "Hughesian" books to be The Smell of Telescopes, The Truth Spinner and (of course) Tallest Stories. The latter took 15 years to put together and is a self-contained story-cycle that is also a microcosmic version of the grand story-cycle that will eventually feature all his lifetime's fiction, each story linked forwards, backwards and sideways to other stories in the cycle.

When not writing or reading, he indulges his passions for mountaineering, music, philosophy and making things that only sometimes work.

Click here to visit his blog.

Information about Tallest Stories:

Welcome to The Tallest Story, the second most grandiose pub in the world – always at least one narrow alley and three imaginary corners away from the Cardiff waterfront – a pub that lies in another dimension, somewhere between dawn and sunrise and adjacent to both infinity and eternity – where the floor is not made out of toenails, but out of all the words that are spoken for no good reason. A place where the only currency that matters is stories...

If every tale told in a tavern is a tall story, then what happens when the entire universe becomes a tavern? It means that every story ever told is tall and therefore untrue, and this includes the true tales. They are all lies. But a lie is a concept only possible because it can be contrasted with truth: without its opposite concept it makes no sense at all. This implies one of two unlikely things, (a) the universe is not really a tavern, (b) there are other universes beyond this one where true stories exist. If you ever learn which is the correct answer to this riddle please let me know.

60 linked stories, 60 illustrations, 18 years in the making - this is probably Rhys Hughes' most important book to date.

A REVIEW OF RHYS HUGHES' TALLEST STORIES

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A review of D. P. Watt's An Emporium of Automata

Written by Seregil of Rhiminee (Sunday, 07 April 2013 2:42 pm)

Category: Articles

This new edition of D. P. Watt's An Emporium of Automata was published by Eibonvale Press in February/March 2013. (An Emporium of Automata was originally published by Ex Occidente Press in 2010.)

Information about the author:

D. P. Watt is a writer living in the bowels of England. He balances his time between lecturing in drama and devising new 'creative recipes', 'illegal' and 'heretical' methods to resurrect a world of awful literary wonder. His short stories have appeared with Side Real Press, Megazanthus Press, Hieroglyphic Press and his two novellas, The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller and Dehiscence are available from Ex Occidente Press. You can find him at The Interlude House: http://www.theinterludehouse.webs.com/.

Information about An Emporium of Automata:

"There has existed all through the Ages an extraordinary idea that puppets are inanimate creatures controlled by human beings; but after spending some years behind the scenes in manipulating the strings of marionettes I am well assured that the position is quite the reverse, and that a puppet-showman is entirely at the mercy of his figures."

- Walter Wilkinson, The Peep Show, 1933

I can think of no better quotation that sets the stage for this magnificent collection of timeless and haunting tales by British weirdsmith D. P. Watt. This new edition of the author's collection, An Emporium of Automata, delivers a thesis of the theatrically strange. In these stories the frightening hints penned above by a literate Punch and Judy man long ago are cunningly proven and made starkly manifest. This fine new edition places in the hands of all seekers after the beautiful and weird a grand collection which, for so long, has been privy to the locked bookcases of collectors and connoisseurs of the macabre and fantastique.

Story after uncanny story unfolds before the reader; a maze of carnival mirrors that we fear we might never escape from. Here are missing tales from some lost, darkly romantic Germanic madman's attic. The rotting, wooden fissures that manifest fill in a gaping and pockmarked wooden maw somewhere between E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nabokov and Ligotti. To name these vaguely reminiscent stylists is far too simple. Watt dips first and foremost into his own, personal experience.

Through his sepia colored lens we are allowed to gape inside the old trunks of puppet men who have sold their souls in the rain, so that they might write such stories as these. The reader senses the authenticity of these cryptic pains, ritualistic longings, gorgeous and slow destructions. A literary answer to the modern neon sewer, these pages embrace the worship of decay, the altars of the desolate and all things archaic or fundamentally grotesque. The violently attractive, dangerously jagged islands of the mind which Mr. Watt guides us to are his own half-charted territories. I must also note that the book is structured in a manner, and so dense, that one is really getting three books of first-rate outré literature for the price of one.

Puppets rejoice! Read herein these baroque fables in which the drifting souls, toys and ticking things of men revert to fulfill far more ancient impulses. You have nothing to lose but the strings of your mind. Just as Walter Wilkinson was finally convinced that "a puppet-showman is entirely at the mercy of his figures." so too, the reader of An Emporium of Automata will find themselves utterly at the mercy of dark conductor, D. P. Watt, who wields his rusty-scalpel words with the precision and mad gusto of a wildly leering, yet jaded, carnival showman.

- Charles Schneider, author of The Mauve Embellishments

A REVIEW OF D. P. WATT'S AN EMPORIUM OF AUTOMATA

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A review of Edward M. Erdelac's Merkabah Rider series (books 1-3)

Written by Seregil of Rhiminee (Monday, 01 April 2013 1:18 pm)

Category: Articles

Edward M. Erdelac's Tales of a High Planes Drifter (2009), The Mensch with No Name (2010) and Have Glyphs Will Travel (2011) were published by Damnation Books.

Information about the author:

Edward M. Erdelac is a member of the HWA and the author of five novels (including the acclaimed weird western series Merkabah Rider) and several short stories. He is an independent filmmaker, award winning screenwriter, and sometime Star Wars contributor.

Born in Indiana, educated in Chicago, he resides in the Los Angeles area with his wife and a bonda fide slew of children and cats.

Click here to visit the author's blog.

Information about the Merkabah Rider series:

Set in the 1880's, the Merkabah Rider series follows the adventures of the Rider, a Hasidic gunslinger hunting the renegade teacher who betrayed his mystic Jewish order of astral travelers to the Great Old Ones. Along the way, the Rider encounters a demonically possessed ex-Confederate sharpshooter, a gang of half-demon outlaws with a mystical cannon, fights an invisible menace with Doc Holliday, and takes on the demon queen Lilith and a bordello of antedeluvian succubi among other things.

Each novel is presented as a collection of pulp adventure novellas, like the old Zebra paperback collections of Robert E. Howard stories. The series currently consists of three installments, Tales of a High Planes Drifter, The Mensch with No Name, and Have Glyphs Will Travel, with the fourth and final volume, Once Upon a Time in the Weird West, due out this year. Think of a Jewish Solomon Kane set in the old west, and that's Merkabah Rider.

A REVIEW OF EDWARD M. ERDELAC'S MERKABAH RIDER SERIES (BOOKS 1-3)

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A review of Dave Weaver's Jacey's Kingdom

Written by Seregil of Rhiminee (Wednesday, 27 March 2013 2:25 pm)

Category: Articles

Dave Weaver's Jacey's Kingdom was published by Elsewhen Press as an e-book in January 2013 and it will be published as a paperback in March 2013.

Information about Dave Weaver:

Dave Weaver, a graphic designer, was born in darkest Surrey. He took quite a long time to begin writing. About a decade ago he joined the local Verulam Writers' Circle and has since had a number of short stories published in various anthologies and webzines. Much of his writing hovers on the shifting borders between fantasy and reality. He holds a particular fascination for the uncertain times of Britain's Dark Ages, no doubt inspired by the ruins of the Roman town of Verulamium near where he lives with his family and a cat called Trillian. Jacey's Kingdom is his first novel.

Click here to visit the author's blog.

Information about Jacey's Kingdom:

Jacey's Kingdom is an enthralling tale that revolves around a startlingly desperate reality: Jacey Jackson, a talented student destined for Cambridge, collapses with a brain tumour while sitting her final history exam at school. In her mind she struggles through a quasi-historical sixth century dreamscape whilst the surgeons fight to save her life.

Jacey is helped by a stranger called George, who finds himself trapped in her nightmare after a terrible car accident. There are quests, battles, and a love story ahead of them, before we find out if Jacey will awake from her coma or perish on the operating table. And who, or what, is George? In this book, Dave Weaver questions our perception of reality and the redemptive power of dreams; are our experiences of fear, conflict, friendship and love any less real or meaningful when they take place in the mind rather than the "real" physical world?

Dave Weaver has been writing for ten years, with short stories published in anthologies, magazines and online in the UK and USA. Jacey's Kingdom is his first published novel. He cleverly weaves a tale that takes the almost unimaginable drama of an eighteen year-old girl whose life is in the balance, relying on modern surgery to bring her back from the brink, and conceives the world that she has constructed in her mind to deal with the trauma happening to her body. Developing the friendship between Jacey and George in a natural and witty style, despite their unlikely situation and the difference in their ages, Dave has produced a story that is both exciting and thought-provoking. We are sure that this book will be a must-read story for adults and young adults alike.

A REVIEW OF DAVE WEAVER'S JACEY'S KINGDOM

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