Every war comes down to the flash of bright steel.
Even when the air is full of magic...
Aranthur and his friends have come together across different continents and realms with one purpose: to strike back against the forces which have torn a hole in the heavens and threaten to rip the world beneath them apart as well.
With time running short, and treason at home, there are battles to be fought on the field, in the magical arena, and in the ever-deadly realm of politics, and they must succeed on every front or everything will fall. Victory will require enemies to trust one another, old foes to fight together, spies to reveal the truth and steadfast allies to betray long-corrupt rulers.
Is Aranthur, a twenty-year-old student, really the master strategist to bring it all together? And can he and his friends overcome aeons of lies when their plans inevitably fall to pieces?
Do they even know, for sure, who the enemy is...?
Read more: Bright Steel - Miles Cameron
Review: Resurrection Men by David Craig
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
David Craig's Resurrection Men was published by Elsewhen Press in a digital edition in August 2018 and the paperback edition was published in October 2018.
Information about David Craig:
Aside from three months living on an oil tanker sailing back and forth between America and Africa, and two years living in a pub, David Craig grew up on the west coast of Scotland. He studied Software Engineering at university, but lost interest in the subject after (and admittedly prior to) graduation. He currently works as a resourcing administrator for a public service contact centre, and lives near Glasgow with his wife and two rabbits.
Being a published writer has been a life-long dream, and one he is delighted to finally realise with his debut novel, Resurrection Men, the first in the Sooty Feathers series.
Information about Resurrection Men:
There’s a supernatural war brewing...
...for control of the Second City of the British Empire
Glasgow 1893.
Wilton Hunt, a student, and Tam Foley, a laudanum-addicted pharmacist, are pursuing extra-curricular careers as body snatchers, or ‘resurrection men’, under cover of darkness. They exhume a girl’s corpse, only for it to disappear while their backs are turned. Confused and in need of the money the body would have earnt them, they investigate the corpse’s disappearance. They discover that bodies have started to turn up in the area with ripped-out throats and severe loss of blood, although not the one they lost. The police are being encouraged by powerful people to look the other way, and the deaths are going unreported by the press. As Hunt and Foley delve beneath the veneer of respectable society, they find themselves entangled in a dangerous underworld that is protected from scrutiny by the rich and powerful members of the elite but secretive Sooty Feathers Club.
Meanwhile, a mysterious circus arrives in the middle of the night, summoned as allies to help avenge a betrayal two centuries old…
Resurrection Men is the first book in David Craig’s Sooty Feathers series, a masterful gothic tale about a supernatural war for control of the Second City of the British Empire, and the struggle of flawed characters of uncertain virtue who try to avert it. It is set in a late 19th century Glasgow ruled by the undead - from the private clubs, town houses and country estates of the privileged to the dung-choked wynds and overcrowded slums of the poor. Undead unrest, a fallen angel, and religious zealots intent on driving out the forces of evil, set the stage for a diabolical conflict of biblical proportions.
REVIEW: RESURRECTION MEN BY DAVID CRAIG
Read more: Review: Resurrection Men by David Craig
Review: Green Jay and Crow by DJ Daniels
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
DJ Daniels' Green Jay and Crow was published by Abaddon Books (Rebellion Publishing) in December 2018.
Information about DJ Daniels:
DJ Daniels is an Australian author and musician. She writes when she manages to get her husband and two daughters out of the house and during lulls in the ongoing dog-lizard war. (Lizards are well ahead.) Her first novel, What the Dead Said, was followed by a raft of short stories which have appeared in publications such as Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and So It Goes. She was a judge for the 2012 Aurealis Awards and is one of the Sydney Story Factory's Ambassadors of Ink.
Click here to visit her official website.
Information about Green Jay and Crow:
“I WAS MEANT TO COME TO BARLEWIN. BUT I WAS NEVER MEANT TO STAY”
The half-forgotten streets of Barlewin, in the shadow of the High Track, are a good place to hide: among the aliens and the couriers, the robots and the doubles, where everyone has secrets.
Like Eva, a 3D-printed copy of another woman, built to be disposable. She should have disintegrated days ago... and she hasn’t.
And now her creator wants her back.
In Green Jay and Crow, DJ Daniels presents a powerful tale of humanity, identity, and the hope that drives us all.
REVIEW: GREEN JAY AND CROW BY DJ DANIELS
Read more: Review: Green Jay and Crow by DJ Daniels
GUEST POST: "They shot my idiot" - Revealing Humanity in Dark Characters by Clay Sanger
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Guest Post
Risingshadow has the honour of publishing a guest post by Clay Sanger.
Information about Clay Sanger:
Clay Sanger is a professional technogeek by day and a writer fiction the rest of the time. A life-long lover of all things wild, Clay spent much of his early adulthood wandering the four corners of the country in search of the weird and wonderful, the dark and the light. As chance would have it he found them. After meandering far and wide he returned to his native Ozarks where he lives with his dazzling wife, their sons, and a menagerie of mythical creatures both real and imagined.
He is the author Endsville, which is the first novel in the Outlaw Arcana series.
Click here to visit his official website.
Welcome to Los Angeles - where the secret worlds of the criminal and supernatural collide. Crime and black magic pay. In the City of Angels, no one does it better than Gabriel St. John and the House of the Crow...
ENDSVILLE introduces readers to the House of the Crow. Led by their enigmatic street captain Gabriel, the Crows are a secret coven of high-rolling occult gangsters operating out of Los Angeles. A gangland king by the name of Dante Washington enlists their aid to recover 34 million dollars in cash - stolen from him by what appears to be a hostile sorcerer.
The Crows battle through a vicious cycle of betrayal, violence, and black magic while on the hunt for Mr. Washington’s missing money. In the end, allies prove to be enemies, and there are much greater things at stake than covering up a multi-million dollar gangland heist.
GUEST POST: "They shot my idiot" - Revealing Humanity in Dark Characters by Clay Sanger
Read more: GUEST POST: "They shot my idiot" - Revealing Humanity in Dark Characters by Clay Sanger
Review: The Half-Drowned King by Linnea Hartsuyker
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Linnea Hartsuyker's The Half-Drowned King was published by HarperCollins/Little, Brown in August 2017.
Information about Linnea Hartsuyker:
Linnea Hartsuyker is a graduate of NYU's Fiction MFA program and Cornell University's Engineering school, and has been researching the rise and reign of Harald Fairhair since she first discovered she was descended from him at the age of seventeen, when her family traced its ancestry back through 1200 years of Swedish and Norwegian church records. Since then she has read extensively of Icelandic sagas, kayaked and skied the fjordland settings for this novel, and even become proficient in lifting Husafjell stones, as the Vikings did to become stronger.
Click here to visit her official website.
Information about The Half-Drowned King:
Since the death of Ragnvald Eysteinsson's father in battle, he has worked hard to protect his sister Svanhild and planned to inherit his family's land when he comes of age. But when the captain of his ship tries to kill him on the way home from a raiding excursion, he must confront his stepfather's betrayal, and find a way to protect his birthright. It is no easy feat in Viking-Age Norway, where a hundred petty rulers kill over parcels of land, and a prophesied high king is rising.
But where Ragnvald is expected to bleed, and even die, for his honour, Svanhild is simply expected to marry well. It's not a fate she relishes, and when the chance to leave her stepfather's cruelty comes at the hand of her brother's arch-rival, Svanhild is forced to make the ultimate choice: family or freedom.
Drawing from the Icelandic Sagas, The Half-Drowned King takes inspiration from the true story of Ragnvald of Maer, the right hand man of King Harald Fairhair, first king of all Norway, and his sister, Svanhild, as she tries to find freedom in a society where the higher her brother rises, the greater her worth as a political pawn.
REVIEW: THE HALF-DROWNED KING BY LINNEA HARTSUYKER
Read more: Review: The Half-Drowned King by Linnea Hartsuyker
Review: Resonance and Revolt by Rosanne Rabinowitz
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
- Category: Reviews
Rosanne Rabinowitz's Resonance and Revolt was published by Eibonvale Press in March 2018.
Information about Rosanne Rabinowitz in her own words:
"I started writing when I produced ‘zines in the 1990s like Feminaxe and Bad Attitude, contributing articles, reviews and interviews. Then I began to make stuff up. My fiction has since found its way into anthologies and magazines and I completed a creative writing MA at Sheffield Hallam University. My novella Helen's Story was a finalist for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for achievement in the ‘literature of the dark fantastic’. I live in South London, an area that Arthur Machen once described as "shapeless, unmeaning, dreary, dismal beyond words." In this most unshapen place I engage in a variety of occupations including care work, copywriting and freelance editing. I spend a lot of time drinking coffee and listening to loud music while looking out my tenth-floor window. Sometimes it's whisky."
Click here to visit her official website.
Information about Resonance and Revolt:
"Unfulfilled desires transmit themselves across the years in unfathomable ways..." - From Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
A sect of sensual medieval heretics stumbles upon the secrets of quantum entanglement, a centuries-old wanderer thrives on rebellion as well as blood in the ruins of post-WWI Munich. Anti-austerity demonstrations lead to haunting connections with past and parallel events, while quantum computing meets 'welfare reform' in our near-future. Meanwhile, persecuted Jews in early 20th century Russia must decide whether extraterrestrials are allies or the schnorrers out of space.
The stories of Rosanne Rabinowitz span the centuries in a remarkable mixture of European history and the familiar world of modern Britain – as well as some all-too-likely near futures. These stories are rooted in the spirit of resistance and rebellion without ever feeling didactic. They are coloured with a sense of the fantastic, the surreal and even the mystical – rubbing shoulders with the reality that arises from every street, every shout of fury or peal of laughter, every dizzying glimpse of human possibilities.
"All together as they are here, they weave a cyclical sense of the ebb and flow of power and tyranny and resistance, yet the end result is not hopeless but quite the opposite. Just like so many of the characters in Rosanne’s writing, as we read these stories gathered in one volume, we begin to see ourselves as living with echoes of and surrounded by the past. That the struggle is ongoing does not make it seem futile; instead, we are connected, for as one character notes, “what we call time, and history, exists in layers all around us. And I should be able to see every one of them.” Reading Rosanne’s stories feels like standing in the ruins of a thousand-year-old fortress where you can almost hear the past breathing around you, or in some other liminal place: a magical wood, perhaps, but sometimes the most ordinary of city streets, where you might slip into somewhere else before you realize what’s happened." - From the Introduction by Lynda E. Rucker
"I will always raise my voice and write things down so people will know about them. I will never be like a bell without a tongue." - From The Bells of the Harelle
REVIEW: RESONANCE AND REVOLT BY ROSANNE RABINOWITZ
Read more: Review: Resonance and Revolt by Rosanne Rabinowitz