Black Gate, # 11, Summer 2007

Eleven issues in, Black Gate seems to be finding a distinctive voice. Of course, the downside of a distinctive voice is becoming predictable, but so far, there’s been no sign of that. The table of contents contains nine stories, four from authors new to the magazine and three continuing stories. Of these, one will end with the next installment. Overall, the quality of writing has steadily improved, and there is still a wide variety of story types; this issue ranges from horror to humor. Mark Sumner’s “The Naturalist” is perhaps closest to the fantasy adventures of old, but he brings a modern sense of character and worldbuilding to the horror-adventure tale of the Golden Age.

While this review is primarily about the stories, I think it would be a mistake to ignore the features that make Black Gate distinctive and immensely readable: the remarkable scope of Rich Horton’s reading and reviewing expertise, the spot art (this issue by Lance King) and my very favorite, the comic Knights of the Dinner Table: The Java Joint. This issue’s comic was especially nifty, showing the wide range of the authors’ reading in genre.

To the stories themselves.

Peadar O’ Guilin’s “Where Beauty Lies in Wait” establishes with impressive economy a very strange alien world in which puberty introduces a brief window of time before adulthood and the possibility of surprising change. Darrack has to protect his adolescing son, Parm, from the wiles of a much married older woman. The story is not without a very dark humor, but it’s terrifying, poignant, and quite thought-provoking, an outstanding kickoff to this issue

There are two recurring characters wandering through picaresque worlds who I rejoice to see in Black Gate’s table of contents. One is Dao Shi, the other is Morlock Ambrosius. In James Enge’s “The Lawless Hours,” the old, twisted sorcerer, Morlock, is shown us from someone else’s point of view for the first time. Roble is a Rider—one of the armed men who sort of keep law during the lawless hours in the Land of the Four Castles, but whose real purpose is to keep people from wandering the woods at night and bring them out dead or alive. Either way, the Boneless One will consume them and gain power, aided by people called The Bargainers. These have made a deal with the Boneless One in order to survive. It’s not a great life, but it’s the only life Roble knows, and after his sister and niece got trapped in the woods and disappeared, he is determined to cheat the Boneless One of as many victims as he can.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to decode your way of life and bring meaning to the madness. And then sometimes you can help the outsider to change things. This point of view is a nicely contemporary overlay on the picaresque weirdness of Morlock’s world, and Morlock is even more interesting when seen from the perspective of someone else, as he works to solve the problems of the Four Castles people. I think this is my favorite Morlock story yet: the characterizations are so good, the worldbuilding imaginative and complex.

Maria V. Snyder breaks up the mood with a short, clever piece called “The Wizard’s Daily Horoscope.” I was particularly engaged by the fact that I could read each zodiac sign’s horoscope in sequence, then go back and read the three zodiac horoscopes day by day, and get a different story experience either way.

Martha Wells established herself as a sword & sorcery writer par excellence in her Ile-Rien world, following the adventures of the wizard-hunters Ilias and Giliead. In “Holy Places,” she goes back to the beginning of Ilias and Giliead’s partnership. It is the story of a family—brotherhood—of longing and expectation and the cost of a craving to be close to power. As always, Wells’s action is terrific and visual.

A very welcome return of Dao Shi, the charlatan exorcist, is in “From the Heart of the Earth to the Pearls of the Sky” by Iain Rowan. This is the fourth installment in Dao Shi’s tale, but these installments all stand alone; this is the second picaresque series I welcome seeing again in Black Gate’s pages. The Empire is less weird and more a blend of Chinese myth and magic, but there is a strong vein of satire traditional in picaresque.

At the start, Dao Shi tells us that he’s a charlatan, but he is no longer wasting brains and talent on gaining enough money to indulge his taste for pleasures. He is on a quest to find out why his son, a superlative and dedicated warrior in the Emperor’s army, was killed. Rowan is skilled at inserting a line or two of backstory here and there to gain the reader’s interest and sympathy.

Previously, Dao Shi was alone as well as lonely, but in this story, Li Wen is with him, the woman he met at the end of the previous tale. In this story, we learn a little more about her, and the world, as Dao Shi runs from the Emperors guards. As previously, there are signs that more of Dao Shi’s story is to come. This tale gives us deeper looks into character, shows subtle change in Dao Shi himself. And as I have come to expect in Rowan’s writing, there is a mastery blend of image, action, and humor as well as insight in this tale.

Black Gate #11 gives us new authors, such as David Evan Harris, whose “The Mudslinger” is also a first publication. And a fine debut story it is. The point-of-view character is Dredge, a boy who was apprenticed to an old mage because he seemed to have magical promise. He’s an elemental, but it turned out his power is to sling mud. That’s it. Poor Dredge is not exactly the exalted mage he and his family hoped for; his name is actually Kellin, but it was inevitable he’d be given some sort of “muddy” nickname. To everyone’s surprise, the Oracle insists that he is to accompany the prince, the mage, the oracle himself, and some guardsmen against the terrifying invaders…It’s a ripping good sword & sorcery tale told in an appealing style, with excellent characterizations. A powerful ending left me wanting to read a lot more about this world..

“Soulthief” by Ben Wolcott introduces another author new to the magazine. Our point of view is Garren, an expert at…let’s call it climbing, who, we find out in medias res, has been hired by a ghost to climb a tower. It’s clearly a mage tower—black, smooth, and very tough to climb. But the reward of gold is tempting…only the higher Garren gets, the more complications seem to ensue. The pacing never lets down as the stakes climb even higher than Garren. The voice is just right for this humorous tale.

“The Entrance of Bob Into Valhalla” by William I. Lengeman III hits a triple; three nifty stories by newcomers in a row. This one is a short-short and I think will appeal to anyone who, like me, has read a lot of S&S. The expert play between the expectations of this subgenre and the most mundane details (Bob, our sword-swinging hero, is also a freelance software documentation specialist) make this story a crack-up.

Mark Sumner’s “The Naturalist II: An Incident at Gray’s Works” is the second in a longer work called “The Naturalist.” This is a horrific fantasy tale set in an alternate America in 1832, when unbeatable “antriders” are attacking towns one by one and killing all the inhabitants. The eponymous naturalist is named Brown, and the story is related through his journal as he travels with the much-tried troops of Captain Valamont. Their world is falling apart, and they just want to survive. In this installment, they wander into British territory as they try to escape the invading terror. This really isn’t a story so much as an installment, exactly as advertised; the story is grim, staying the same in tone from beginning to end, as you’d expect from the middle of a longer work. Sumner is a master worldbuilder, his characterizations complex and his details convincing. I think evaluation must wait on the reading of the entire tale.

At 224 pages, Black Gate #11 delivers book-length fantasy reading.