Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/1

Hey! I've got some more books to tell you about, like I do every Monday. As always, I haven't read these yet, and I can't promise that I will ever read them. (Time is short, and the list of books is long.) But you might want to get to them before I do, so here's what I can tell you about them from a glance and some deep cogitation.

Ourselves is the first novel in a new contemporary fantasy series from S.G. Redling, coming as a trade paperback from Amazon's 47North imprint on January 27. (Those of you who think Amazon rightfully will crush all of corporate publishing ahead of it should put your money where your mouth is and buy the books they publish now; that's all I'll sat in that subject here.) It's one of those vampire novels that avoids using the word vampire: the "Nahan" are a secretive, long-lived race that hide among humanity, have vast power and wealth, and so forth. This book also hints that it has a lot of creepy sex in it -- "darkly sensual" is the term of art. All of those things are hugely popular, so I expect a lot of you will want to check out Ourselves.

And then there's The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert, with the brick-like cover design and sign of the mini-series of "Collected Stories" that Tor was doing about a decade ago. (See: Greg Bear, Arthur C. Clarke. There may have been more, but those are the ones I remember.) The Frank Herbert book also comes from Tor -- it's a hardcover hitting November 18th -- and claims to be the most complete collection of his short work ever published but doesn't quite insist that it has everything. (There are always drawers and attics, even almost thirty years after a writer dies.) This book has thirty-seven stories, originally published from 1952 to 1979, and also "The Daddy Box," which never was published before. My sense is that there are plenty of Dune fans but many fewer fans of anything else Herbert wrote, which is odd but not uncommon. But this finally exists, and big Herbert fans now have a single place to find most/nearly all of his short stuff.