A Slew of Pyr Covers (New covers for Sykes, Hodder, and the Griffiths)

Information on Pyr's Fall/Winter 2012 is starting to trickle out and it looks to be a great season ahead with a couple series being wrapped up that I've been following since the beginning.

The Skybound Sea will finish off Sam Sykes' first trilogy The Aeons' Gate, which started so well with Tome of the Undergates [reviewed here]. Pyr has done a much better job with the cover than the UK version, which is all kinds of blah. I was still hoping to finally get my Dragonman cover though. I'll shut up about that now since that ship has clear sunk and how could I not like a cover that put me a quote from me on the front? That's a first for me though I've been on quite a few back covers and inside pages at this point. It still never gets old.

After two volumes of odd, bloody introspection and diversions Sykes has left himself a lot of story to wrap-up, but he's more than equipped to handle it. The Skybound Sea will be out in early September. I haven't found an official blurb that says much , but here is the brief UK description:

After the misadventures of the first two books Lenk and his companions must finally turn away from fighting each other and for their own survival and look to saving the entire human race. A terrible demon has risen from beneath the sea and where it came from thousands could follow. And all the while an alien race is planning the extinction of humanity. The third volume in the Aeon's Gate trilogy widens the action out dramatically. TOME OF THE UNDERGATES was based mainly on a ship, BLACK HALO moved the action to an island of bones, THE SKYBOUND SEA takes us out into a world threatened with a uniquely imagined and terrifying apocalypse.

A Red Sun Also Rises is Mark Hodder's first non-Burton & Swinburne novel, but it does involved Steampunk is some fashion. The alien on the cover is so creepy I'll have to check it out. Bottom line is it sounds like a Sword & Planet novel influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs and given Hodder's style he's apt to make it a fun take. Little has been released about this story yet except this interesting post from Hodder, but here's the blurb:

When Reverend Aiden Fleischer, vicar of the sleepy town of Theaston Vale, finds a hunchbacked, light-sensitive and crippled vagabond named Clarissa Stark begging at his door, little does he suspect it's the start of an adventure that's literally out of this world!

Bribed by an unscrupulous family, Fleischer and his companion flee to London's missionary college, but in wicked Whitechapel, the faithless priest stumbles upon one of Jack the Ripper's victims and becomes convinced that he himself is the notorious killer. With her friend's mind shattered, Miss Stark is relieved when they are both posted to the far away Melanesian island of Koluwai, but here they encounter an even darker evil, one that transports them to another planet.

Beneath the twin suns of the planet Ptallaya, Fleischer and Stark encounter an alien species, the Yatsill, master mimics who, after gaining access to Miss Stark's mind, create their own bizarre version of Victorian London.

But Fleischer and Stark's new home from home is not safe, for the Blood Gods will soon invade, and if he is to defeat them and rescue the woman he's come to love, Fleischer must first face his own inner demons!

A Red Sun Also Rises will be released in early December. Also, of note is the fact that Hodder recently signed with Pyr for 3 more Burton & Swinburne novels.

The Kingmakers by Clay and Susan Griffith is also the final book in the Vampire Empire trilogy, although I think there is plenty more to this world to explore. Even though I haven't done full reviews of the first two books they've quickly become one of my favorite Vampire series as they blend action pulp sensibilities with Steampunk, Colonialism, Romance and  Post-Apocalyptic fiction so well. The Kingmakers will be out in September as well. No blurb has been released.

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