Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.
Lesser Demons by Norman Partridge
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While the sun blisters a dying world, a mutant spider battles a squad of toy soldiers and a plastic cowboy on his last ride…
A gangster, a sheriff, and a mysterious traveler face an army of mechanical vampires burrowing up from hell itself during a wild Montana storm…
In a desert poisoned by atomic radiation, an abused boy stands between a rampaging giant and the hunter who would make him a grisly trophy…
Beneath a full Arizona moon, a drifter faces a pack of merciless human animals and the werewolf who butchered his sister…
In the American West, a legendary gunslinger delivers a cursed bounty to the one-horse town where his partner’s ghost awaits.
Tales of hardboiled horror and Twilight Zone noir. Cross-genre blowtorches with bad guys and worse guys. Love stories both dark and bittersweet. A brand new novella and extensive story notes. You ll find this and more in the fifth collection from three-time Bram Stoker award-winner Norman Partridge, an author Locus calls ‘one of the most dependable, exciting, and entertaining practitioners of dark suspense and dark fantasy… emphasis on the dark.’
In Lesser Demons, Partridge explores the kind of fiction that made him both a horror fan and a writer. Using the shotgun prose of a crime novel, the title story draws a deadly bead on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. ‘The Iron Dead’ introduces Chaney, a monster-hunting pulp hero with a mechanical hand built in hell. ‘Carrion’ cuts a mean swath through Robert E. Howard territory, while ‘The Big Man’ explores dark shadows of American life never imagined in the atom-age horror movies of the fifties.
Part celebration, part reinvention, Lesser Demons only serves to underscore RevolutionSF‘s verdict: "Norman Partridge is the finest writer of short horror fiction going."
A new Partridge book always creates a reason for celebration. I interviewed him back in ’07 for the paperback release of his latest novel Dark Harvest.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty by Raymond Benson
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METAL GEAR SOLID: THE BEAST IS BACK.
WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
In a torrential downpour, former FOXHOUND agent Solid Snake stands on the George Washington Bridge–ready to launch himself onto the deck of the U.S.S. Discovery as it passes below. Inside Discovery is a new generation of Metal Gear. But in the next hour, Snake’s world explodes.
Two years later, a young, unproven agent code-named Raiden must penetrate the mystery of what went so insanely wrong that night.
In a labyrinthine superstructure in New York Harbor known as the Big Shell, enemies, allies, secret agents, and double-dealers converge: Russian commandos, a cyber Vamp, a long-legged, leather-clad, rifle-bearing beauty named Fortune, a deformed, finely manicured bomber called Fatman, and a mysterious Mister X. Somewhere in the maze, as well, is the president himself–his biometrics coded to a bomb that can take out Manhattan, his loyalties unknown. Now the rookie Raiden is fighting his way to one discovery after another, including the rebirth of Solid Snake himself and a nightmare organization with a history, a plan, and a terrifying superweapon hidden in plain sight.
The Secret History of Science Fiction Edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel
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This ingeniously conceived anthology raises the intriguing question, If Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow had won the Nebula award in 1973, would the future distinction between literary fiction and science fiction have been erased? Exploring the possibility of an alternate history of speculative fiction, this literary collection reveals that the lines between genres have already been obscured. Don DeLillo’s “Human Moments in World War III” follows the strange detachment of two astronauts who are orbiting in a skylab while a third world war rages on earth. “The Ziggurat” by Gene Wolfe traverses a dissolving marriage, a custody dispute, and the visit of time travelers from the future. T. C. Boyle’s “Descent of Man” is the subversively funny tale of a man who suspects that his primatologist lover is having an affair with one of her charges. In “Schwarzschild Radius,” Connie Willis draws an allegorical parallel between the horrors of trench warfare and the speculative physics of black holes. Artfully crafted and offering a wealth of esteemed authors—from writers within the genre to those normally associated with mainstream fiction, as well as those with a crossover reputation—this volume aptly demonstrates that great science fiction appears in many guises.
Fascinating collection of tales. Will make for some excellent holiday reading.