The Book Plank

Darker Gods by James A. Moore Religion as a Dark Force in Fantasy It’s an interesting thing, religion. In the right hands and mindset it can make amazing things happen. Communities can get together and build villages in pretty quickly. Homes and farms ruined by natural forces can be restored in short order because neighbors and friends can gather together and work as a unit. Often times those units are started by the religious leader in an area. The Amish raise barns in a day that no single person could manage in a month. But then we have to look at the other side of that coin. Atrocities have been committed in the name of God or gods. The witch hunts in Europe devastated tens of thousands. Wars were fought in the name of God, not because it was a different god, but merely because the ways of worshipping said god did not match up. Well, okay, and because there was land and gold to consider, but it was all done in the name of the one god. The Crusades. The Holy Inquisition....

Guest Blog: Who is Sherlock Holmes? by Paul Kane. Who is Sherlock Holmes, really? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot in the past, particularly in the last few years as I’ve started writing Holmesian fiction myself – and specifically Holmesian Horror. I’ve written four stories featuring Holmes now: ‘The Crimson Mystery’ – which was the first one I tried, but has only recently come out through SST with cover art from legendary Jaws and Empire Strikes Back artist Roger Kastel; ‘The Greatest Mystery’, which appeared in Gaslight Arcanum edited by J.R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec; ‘The Case of the Lost Soul’ – a novelette for Simon Clark’s The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad , which transports Holmes and Watson to Haiti; and finally my new novel for Solaris, Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell , which pits our hero against Clive Barker’s most famous villains, the Hellraising Cenobites. In each one my depiction of Holmes has been a little different, as necessitat...

Escaping the Castle : Medieval Europe in fantasy fiction. By Adrian Tchaikovsky Fantasy fiction has an odd relationship with history, a relationship that involves jumping into bed a lot and telling inaccurate stories about it the next morning.             Some books are set in a straight-up historical setting, but where magic, dragons or some other mythical element is real, albeit sufficiently low-key so as not to disrupt the course of recorded history (which course may itself have been populated by people who believed in both magic and dragons, albeit sufficiently distant so as not to disrupt their lives). Other books present a secondary world that clearly shows the influences of the real. My own insect-kinden from Shadows of the Apt start off with a classical flavour (Ants with big shields and shortswords; not too much of a puzzler where that came from) and then make a jump to 20 th century history when the war really...

Guest Blog: A Life Less Zombie by Colin Sinclair As soon as I noticed that Abaddon Books were hosting another open door, I knew exactly what to do. I had a sure-fire stellar pitch already prepped and good to go. There would be zombies, and Nazis, and Nazis fighting zombies, and Soviet Special Forces battling Nazis, zombies and, yes, Nazi-zombies. All of this whilst our heroes infiltrate underground bunkers of eldritch Egyptian magic and delve into dungeons of dark betrayal. Maybe there'd be a plucky upper-crust British officer sort—isn't there always?—keen to Do His Bit in the war against the undead masses of the Last Reich. I'd probably also need a hard-eyed Mademoiselle from La Résistance , seeking vengeance for a (mostly) dead family in war-torn France. In essence, though, we're talking endless, tireless ranks of brain munching shamblers. It would be zombies-zombies-zombies, all the way down. Except. I'd tried something similar for a prev...

Cursed Relics and Urban Fantasy by Gail Z. Martin What is it about cursed objects that sparks our imagination? And why do they show up so much in urban fantasy? Cursed and magically malicious objects play a central role in my Deadly Curiosities urban fantasy series. My main character, Cassidy Kincaide, is a psychometric who can read the history or magic of an object by touching it—and she can also pick up on strong emotional resonance as well. Trifles and Folly, the antique store that has been in her family for over three hundred years, exists to get dangerous magical items off the market and out of the wrong hands. Set in a city like Charleston, SC that takes huge pride in his history (and is one of the most haunted cities in America), there’s no danger that my fictional crew will run out of supernatural threats to counter. But the idea of cursed relics or haunted objects runs deep, and it shows up in plenty of books, TV shows and movies, from Needful Things to Dr. ...

  A few toughts about zombies by Alison Littlewood AH, ZOMBIES. ZOMBIES! Those stinky denizens of the realm of the walking dead. I have to confess, I’d never written a story with zombies in it until someone asked me to. I think that’s partly because I didn’t grow up reading genre fiction. I borrowed my brother’s Stephen King novels when I was younger, but other than that I read anything and everything that fell into my grasp. I remember a few years ago going to a writers’ convention, and having to go away and Google “Cthulhu”. Once I realised it was genre fiction that got me itching to get to the keyboard I’ve naturally become more immersed in it and I’ve grown to love it dearly. But I’ve had to play catch-up to see what has gone before, and it’s difficult to shake the sense of coming to it from the outside. So, writing about one of the horror readers’ best-loved tropes, and one with such a long history, was kind of daunting. On the other hand, when ...

On Creating the Weir by Jay Posey If you’ve read any of the Legends of the Duskwalker trilogy, you’ve bumped into the Weir; the glowy-blue-eyed fiends that wander the Open wastes of the Duskwalker world at night, harvesting anyone unlucky enough to be caught outside when the sun goes down. If you haven’t read the books, thinking of the Weir as (fast) cybernetic zombies is a pretty good starting point. But it would be a mistake to think that’s all there is to them. I wouldn’t blame you, of course, because that’s pretty much what I thought about them at first too. I met them about the same time readers did, which was in the Prologue of Three , the first novel in the trilogy. When I started writing that scene, I knew it was a bad idea in the Duskwalker world to be outside when the sun went down, but I didn’t know exactly why. I just knew there was Something Out There. When the Weir showed up, they were a terrifying mystery. There was no doubt they were the Something Out There,...