Check out the shiny new covers we've got for James Lovegrove's newest ebooks!
We've got seven ebooks from James's backlist going up for sale through all good ebook retailers next January.
These colourful covers are designed by artist Pye Parr, who you might remember from his designs for our Monarchies of God series.
Pye is currently designing covers for Untied Kingdom and The Foreigners, the final two books we will be re-issuing in this set.
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Tuesday (after Tiw/Tyr, the Germanic god of war) is to Mardi (after Mars, the Roman god of war)
as Thursday (after Thunor/Thor, the Germanic god of thunder) is to Jeudi (after Jove, the Roman god of thunder)
and Friday (after Friga/Frigga, the Germanic goddess of fertility) is to Vendredi (after Venus, the Roman goddess of fertility).
Wotcher all,Supernatural horror fiction is undergoing something of a renaissance, and an excellent sampling of the best writers in this field is provided by THE END OF THE LINE (Solaris, £7.99), edited by Jonathan Oliver.
Although they share a common background - most are set on the London Underground - the stories cover a surprisingly diverse range, from the graphic sex and violence of Stephen Volk's savage tale of voyeurism and corruption among media folk to Christopher Fowler's unexpectedly gentle ghost story. The stories by Pat Cadigan, Nicholas Royle and Ramsey Campbell are also exceptionally good.
There are things out there, in the weirder reaches of space-time where reality is an optional extra. Horrible things, usually with tentacles. Al-Hazred glimpsed them, John Dee summoned them, HP Lovecraft wrote about them, and Alan Turing mapped the paths from our universe to theirs. The right calculation can call up entities from other, older universes, or invoke their powers. Invisibility? Easy! Animating the dead? Trivial! Binding lesser demons to your will? Easily doable!
Opening up the way for the Great Old Ones to come through and eat our brains? Unfortunately, much too easy.
That’s where the Laundry comes in – it’s a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth (and more particularly, the UK). You work for the Laundry. The hours are long, the pay is sub-par, the co-workers are… interesting (in the Chinese curse sense of the word), and the bureaucracy is stifling – but you do get to wave basilisk guns and bullet wards around, and to go on challenging and exciting missions to exotic locations like quaint, legend-haunted Wigan, cursed Slough and Wolverhampton where the walls are thin.
You may even get to save the world.
Just make sure you get a receipt.
THE LAUNDRY roleplaying game is based on the award-winning Laundry series by the even-more-award-winning CHARLES STROSS, and uses the also-award-winning BASIC ROLEPLAYING SYSTEM (CALL OF CTHULHU). In this book, you’ll find:
•Computational demonology, summoning extradimensional horrors, and three ways to use a shotgun to banish alien monsters.
•A history of the Laundry and the other occult intelligence agencies
•Classified briefings on known threats and monstrous horrors
•Streamlined rules for character creation, investigation and combat
•Three ready-to-play missions
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If you're a Charles Stross fan, we bet you can't wait for our Solaris Books anthology of new science fiction, Engineering Infinity, where Charlie's spooky deep-space story Bit Rot will appear for the first time! Coming January 2011...
Chris Fowler, Sarah Pinborough, Adam Nevill and End of the Line author Conrad Williams
David Bradley, editor-in-chief of SFX, and End of the Line author Al Ewing
Editor David Moore, Charles Rudkin, End of the Line author Gary MacMahon and Abaddon Books author Scott Andrews
Wotcher all,
Hello Again!A couple of my favorite horror novels have involved subways and I even enjoyed the underground sequences in the movie Mimic. The stories involve a variety of unexpected characters and critters lurking therein. Several of them are genuinely creepy and evoke claustrophobic terror.
There's something for most horror tastes, from the explicitly graphic to the more subtle. More than one story starts in one direction then takes a sharp left into more unusual territory... while some play with familiar tropes from a different genre.
I love anthologies for the fact that they provide a great opportunity to discover new writers, and to see a different side to those whose work I already enjoy. This collection has a great premise and it's really interesting to see how the authors have interpreted it... The end of the line? I suspect this is just the beginning for an exciting new collection of themed horror anthologies from publisher Solaris.
The End of the Line is a pleasingly atmospheric anthology, one that fans of original horror will find studded with darkly glittering jewels.
Niall Alexander at the Speculative Scotsman simply loves the new edition of Eric Brown's Engineman:Engineman is an elegy of addiction, at its core, a lyrical and indelibly persuasive fable of one man's hunger for something greater, something more. And it is that rare - not to mention precious - thing in science fiction: a cracking good story over and above an account of awesome future tech.
Liviu at the Fantasy Book Critic site is similarly effusive about Paul Kearney's Corvus:A page turner that will keep you hooked until the end... we somehow want both sides to win. Corvus (A+) delivered what I expected of it with brio and reinforced the standing of Paul Kearney as a master of military fantasy.
Brian Sammons, of the Innsmouth Free Press, has offered up a review of Ellen Datlow's multiple-award-winning Poe as part of Poe Week:Poe-heads rejoice! Poe is usually used as a starting-off point, a place to give some Poe flavor or theme, but then the stories usually go off on their merry way in a wide range of directions... consider this one highly recommended by me.
Wotcher all,Follow the talented Mr Richard Ford on twitter for more news from him @Rich4ord, and don't forget to follow @solarisbooks for all the news as well, of course.Thaddeus Blaklok – mercenary, demonist, bastard and thug-for-hire – is pressed into retrieving a mysterious key for his clandestine benefactors. Little does he know that other parties seek to secure this artefact for their own nefarious ends and soon he is pursued by brutal cultists, bloodthirsty gangsters, deadly mercenaries and hell spawned monsters, all bent on stopping him by any means necessary.
In a lightning-paced quest that takes him across the length and breadth of the steam-fuelled city of Manufactory, Blaklok must use his wits and his own demonic powers to keep the key from those who would use it for ill, and open the gates to Hell itself.
Spotted two other reviews of The End of the Line around the blogosphere, there's SciFiOnline's review and there's Graeme's Fantasy Book Review, which says:-
Wotcher all,
“Infantry,” growled Mrs Strogger.
“Oh yeah?” snarled Franco, popping up from between her legs like some rabid, bruise-covered, blood- and saliva-smeared last-minute self-ejected caesarean.
