Reviewing the Mail, Week of 12/20: Not Manga

And this is the second half of my "talking about stuff that came in the mail last week" post, focusing on books that are not manga. Most of them are SF/Fantasy, and most of them come from 375 Hudson Street, not that either of those means anything.

And I'll start out with a book that I read a year or so ago, but is having its first really widely-distributed edition now: Charles Stross's excellent Lovecraftian/information-technological spy novel The Jennifer Morgue, the sequel to the nearly as excellent The Atrocity Archives. (Though my excellence detector only shows a difference within the margin of error, and yours many vary.) While googling to see if I'd written about Jennifer Morgue before -- why bother to remember things for yourself when there's the Internet? -- I discovered that I'm one of five quotes for the original hardcover edition of Jennifer Morgue on this page. Small world. Also while googling, I discovered that the SFBC omnibus, On Her Majesty's Occult Service -- a title I'm still quietly proud of -- is still in print, and has my original copy for it, still attributed to me. And I wrote about it briefly here, back when I had to be coy about the SFF I was reading, since I was reading it professionally. (Ah, the halcyon days of youth!) Anyway -- Stross is one of the best and most vital SF writers working today, and the "Laundry" novels, in my biased opinion, are his very best work. So, if you read the stuff at all, you owe it to yourself to at least sample Atrocity Archives or Jennifer Morgue. Seriously -- not reading Stross now is like not reading Gibson in the '80s, Niven in the '60s, or Heinlein in the '40s. This new trade paperback edition of Jennifer Morgue is published by Ace, and will be available in January.

The third book in Joshua Palmatier's debut trilogy, The Vacant Throne, will be reprinted by DAW in mass-market in January as well. Oddly, even though the hardcover came out precisely a year before -- January of 2008 -- the book has a 2006 copyright. I've met Palmatier briefly -- we were on a panel together, at one of the ill-fated New Jersey Lunacons -- so I feel guilty for not reading his books. Maybe if someone else reads them, I'll feel less guilty!

Also from DAW in January is an original paperback from Jim C. Hines (author of the "Goblin" trilogy), called The Stepsister Scheme. It's another one fairy-tale-people-revamped story, a subgenre that's resurgent since the success of Bill Willingham's comics series Fables. (Or -- and this is more likely, I'm afraid -- Shrek.) In this one, Cinderella's husband is kidnapped by one of the stepsisters, spoiling her happily-ever-after, so she goes to rescue him, backed up by Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Everybody loves the tough chicks these days, so I expect The Stepsister Scheme will find many happy readers.

The next book amuses me for purely extra-textual reasons. See, the "Horsemistress Saga" -- starting with Airs Beneath the Moon -- is written by a writer credited as "Toby Bishop" (though the copyright page notes the name of Louise Marley). I, too, have a writer named Toby Bishop in the program I work on, but the books couldn't be more different. (My Toby Bishop has a major book coming up in March called Corporate Resiliency: Managing the Growing Risk of Fraud and Corruption, which unfortunately for the world is strongly needed these days.) The fantastic Toby Bishop writes novels in which a young woman bonds with a magical flying horse and is needed to help save the world -- see! totally different! The new "Horsemistress" book, the one I have in front of me right now, is Airs of Night and Sea, and it's a January mass-market from Ace.

And then I got four books for kids about Spider-Man from HarperCollins -- a 4x4, Battle Against Doc Ock; an "I Can Read!" book, Spider-Man Versus the Vulture; and two short chapter books, Evil Comes in Pairs and The Secret Life of Black Cat. I tested Versus the Vulture on my younger son (playing the part of "Thing 2") earlier in the week, and we both had a lot of fun. I expect to try the other three books on both of my sons, and, assuming I remember, report back. All four will be published tomorrow.

One More Bite is the fifth in Jennifer Rardin's "Jaz Parks" contemporary fantasy series, about a CIA wet-works agent in a world where things are even wetter -- and weirder -- than ours. I particularly like the covers for this series, which are simultaneously classy and eye-catching, clearly fitting into the urban fantasy subgenre (tough chicks! leather! weaponry!) without being silly about it (no tramp stamps, low-riding pants or wide expanses of exposed flesh). One More Bite is also coming in January, in trade paperback.

Mean Streets is one of those four-novellas-as-a-book concoctions that have gotten very popular in the romance field over the past decade, and have now seeped into urban fantasy as well. (The difference between the romance-novel version and the traditional anthology? These books credit no editor, and make no bones about just being four stories in vaguely the same subgenre, published together because the authors all publish novels with the same house.) Mean Streets is coming from Roc as a January trade paperback, and makes a nice distinction between two sets of authors -- Jim Butcher and Simon R. Green are "New York Times Bestselling Authors," while Kat Richardson and Thomas E. Sniegoski are "National Bestselling Authors." All of the writers contribute long stories set in the major urban-fantasy series, so, if you read at least tow of 'em, this is probably an obvious buy.

In Shade and Shadow is the first novel in "The Noble Dead Saga -- Series Two" by Barb and J.C. Hendee, in what looks like creeping TV-ism in the book world. (Generally, in the past, each sub-series would get a title of its own -- witness "The Scions of Shannara," "The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant," and "DragonLance Legends.") Previously, the same influence has been seen in the world of comics, with Top Cow's recent "pilot season," but it hadn't infected books before that I'd seen.) As far as I know, the Noble Dead series is about a high fantasy world with a lot of vampires in it -- presumably, two great tastes that the fans love together. This new one, launching the second series, will be published in hardcover by Roc in January.

Just Another Judgement Day is the ninth "Nightside" novel from Simon R. Green, and will be published in January by Ace in hardcover, which means -- if my successors haven't run into unforeseen difficulties -- that there should be a third three-in-one omnibus from a certain book club reprinting it, Hell to Pay, and The Unnatural Inquirer, sometime soon. (My former boss, Ellen Asher, quite liked these contemporary fantasy novels about a tough London gumshoe who works the supernatural side of the street, and I trust her judgment.)

And last this week is a new nonfiction book from the Thomas Dunne Books imprint of St. Martin's Press, Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King by Lisa Rogak. It's a short (just under 250 pages) unauthorized biography of Horror's Big Kahuna, by a writer who has done several other author-biographies (generally a good sign, since it means she's got experience with the form and that editors keep asking her for more. There's already a huge shelf of books about King, but I gather that there's always room for one more -- this one joins that shelf in January.