Cover Unveiled for Earth Thirst by Mark Teppo

Mark Teppo--long-time friend of the blog--should be familiar to readers as we've covered his first two novels Lightbreaker and Heartland, interviewed him, and he's even stopped by to share some knowledge. So I couldn't pass up the chance to showoff the awesome cover for his next novel Earth Thirst--his take on Post-Apocalyptic Vampires. The art is by Cody Tilson who did my favorite cover of 2011, Seed. Knowing Teppo's work as I do I'm expecting an original take and I had a chance to get the lowdown on the project and the cover from him directly:

I've had the idea for Earth Thirst rattling around my head for a year or so now, but my schedule really hasn't been open enough to write it. After World Fantasy Convention last year, I realized that I probably wouldn't have a clear opening for another year or two and the idea behind the book did have some timeliness. If I waited and then tried to sell it--and then waited another year before it came out--I might miss the best opportunity.

So I sent Jeremy Lassen the pitch and a couple of chapters, explaining that I wasn't sure when I would have time to write it, but that I was very excited about their new books and their marketing efforts. I thought that they would know how to sell Earth Thirst and would get it in front of the right readers.

Jeremy emailed me back later that afternoon and said, "Yes, please, and how soon can I have it?"

I said, "Well, like I said, I'm super busy and . . . "

He replied, "Bla bla bla, writer's excuses, whining, not really listening. How about you get it to me as soon as you can and we'll put it in the schedule?"

(This is somewhat paraphrased, of course, but he and I had recently come to an understanding that the best way to get something on my schedule was to cram it on there and make me figure out how to solve the resultant time management problem.)

I meekly agree. Oh, who am kidding? I was thrilled.

A couple months later, I get a call that they're very excited about the premise of the book, they have a plan for marketing (which is exactly the sort of three word pitch I had been hoping to hear), and they're going to get Cody Tilson to do the cover.

"The guy who did the cover for Seed?" I ask after doing a quick Google search. "The guy who just won a Spectrum Award for Art Direction?"

"That's the one. You good with that?"

"Yeah, yeah, that'll be fine." All calm on the outside, jumping up and down on the inside.

Last week, they send me the cover. I'm still jumping up and down. Now I'm thrilled people will get a hint of what I'm talking about when I say I'm writing an eco-thriller with vampires.

Earth Thirst will be out January 8th from Night Shade Books. Here's the official blurb:

The Earth is dying. Humanity--over-breeding, over-consuming—is destroying the very planet they call home. Multinational corporations despoil the environment, market genetically modified crops to control the food supply, and use their wealth and influence and private armies to crush anything, and anyone, that gets in the way of their profits. Nothing human can stop them.

Once they did not fear the sun. Once they could breathe the air and sleep where they chose. But now they can rest only within the uncontaminated soil of Mother Earth—and the time has come for them to fight back against the ruthless corporations that threaten their immortal existence.

They are the last guardians of paradise, more than human but less than angels. They call themselves the Arcadians.

We know them as vampires. . . .

A Vampire Eco-Thriller? Count me in!

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NEWS | New Neal Stephenson collective project

According to Mark Teppo, author of The Codex of Souls series, he'll be working on a collective fiction project headed by Neal Stephen called The Mongoliad. This is no normal collaboration or book though. In fact details are still a bit sketchy, but here's what I've found out thus far. Teppo starts by saying:

I gave notice at my day job today. Fourteen years I've been there. Wrapping it up in the next two weeks to go be a writer full-time. I know. All of a sudden, isn't it? Well, it's been a long process of working in the wee hours of the day and night, but I've finally reached a point where I can't do everything all the time. I have reached the point of needing to simply.

Of course, it get complicated when Neal Stephenson twitters& today that "Our first demo of the new novel I am writing with Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and others" will be happening next week in San Francisco.

This is the Sekrit Project. Called The Mongoliad...

According to Stephenson's Facebook where the first announcement was made:

For those of you who don't know, The Mongoliad is a sort of serialized story, created by Neal Stephenson, and written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, and a number of other great authors. It will be told via custom apps on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Android, and will be something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.

This one has caught me quite by surprised, but Stephenson is the driving force and writer of the first story in this series(?) Foreworld,  but many other names look to be heavily involved. In some ways this reminds me of John Scalzi's Metatropolis as that was a collaborative world, but Stephenson seems to be taking this much farther afield and into the future using diverse platforms. Stephenson and company have set up a site for the collective called Subutai Corporation, which will carry more info as it is released as well as The Mongoliad. This project isn't only prose though as it looks like video will also be a component somehow and who knows what else. Here is a bit about the world:

The Mongoliad is a rip-roaring adventure tale set 1241, a pivotal year in history, when Europe thought that the Golden Horde was about to completely destroy their world. The Mongoliad is also the beginning of an experiment in storytelling, technology, and community-driven creativity.

Our story begins with a serial novel of sorts, which we will release over the course of about a year. Neal Stephenson created the world in which The Mongoliad is set, and presides benevolently over it. Our first set of stories is being written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, and a number of other authors; we're also working closely with artists, fight choreographers & other martial artists, programmers, film-makers, game designers, and a bunch of other folks to produce an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff which we think brings the story to life in ways that are pleasingly unique, and which can't be done in any single medium.

If you'll be in San Francisco on the 25th of May you can catch of preview of what we are in store for at the SF App Show. Since it will be released on Droid I'll definitely be taking a gander. Can you feel the meta? I know I do.

Hats off to Mark Teppo who is moving on to being a full-time writer. It must be daunting to make that move, but he is involved in a project at the ground floor that could help usher in a new way of publishing and interactive with stories.

UPDATE: Here is a bit more I just learned:

We're also working closely with artists, fight choreographers & other martial artists, programmers, film-makers, game designers, and a bunch of other folks to produce an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff which we think brings the story to life in ways that are pleasingly unique, and which can't be done in any single medium.

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GUEST POST | Mark Teppo On the Spectacle of Magic

Fellow bibliomaniac Mark Teppo should be no stranger to visitors of Mad Hatter's Bookshelf since I've covered his first two novels Lightbreaker and Heartland, which have a different temperament than most Urban Fantasy fair.  Mark's use of magick (that's with a k) in his writing has always intrigued me so I was pleased to see Mark decided to write on that topic. Enjoy!

On the Spectacle of Magic by Mark Teppo


There's a great profile with Ricky Jay in the New Yorker magazine. It opens with one of my favorite anecdotes about Jay. Jay, David Mamet, Gregory Mosher, and Chris Nogulich are in a bar, and Jay has been exhorted to do some card tricks. Now Jay is probably the best sleight-of-hand man alive, and "hey, man, do some card tricks" is akin to asking Itzak Perlman to if he knows any fiddlin' tunes.

Jay, consummate straight man, goes through a routine of card manipulation tricks--nothing terribly spectacular, but still, head-scratchingly wonderful stuff--and then spreads the deck out on the bar, face-up. "Concentrate on a card," he says to Nogulich, "but don't tell me what it is."

Nogulich thinks of a card, and Jay gathers the deck up, shuffles it, and makes two piles. He points to one of the two piles, and asks Nogulich what his card was. Nogulich says that it was the three of clubs, and when he turns over the top card, that's what it is.

Mosher, thinking he can fluster Jay, pipes up: "You know, Ricky, I was thinking of a card too."

Jay, after a moment of silence--and if you've seen Jay perform or in any of his roles in David Mamet's films, you've seen this silence from him--says, "Well, Gregory, that's interesting, but I only do this trick for one person at a time."

Mosher won't let it go. "I really was thinking of a card."

Jay isn't terribly happy. "This is a distinct change of procedure," he says, and then finally, he relents. "Very well. What was your card?"

Mosher says: "Two of spades."

Jay tells him to turn over the top card on the other pile. Mosher does, and it's the two of spades.

Penn & Teller like to pretend that they're letting the audience peek behind the curtain. They have a routine where Teller runs through a series of sleight-of-hand gags with a cigarette, and then they run through it again from the other side so that the audience can see how it is done. Somewhere along the way, Teller slips up and seemingly screws up the routine, but what actually happens is an even more clever bit of sleight-of-hand in plain sight of the audience.

As audiences become more aware--more cynical, more jaded--it becomes more difficult to bedazzle watchers with making cigarettes disappear, with making cards change their pips, with seeming to be in two places at once. There are some illusionists, certainly, who play to the Bigger! Louder! Faster! crowd, but the ones that leave a lasting impression are the ones who produce something out of nothing. Their magic is an astounding act of creation--there's really no other way to explain it--and part of their wonder and charm is that they are incredibly subtle. Blink and you'll miss them.

What makes them so memorable is that they suspend our cynicism. For a few seconds, we believe; and, really, we all yearn for those moments when we are allowed to witness the impossible. When we get a glimpse of something we don't understand--that can't have happened!--and it becomes this intensely private nugget lodged in our memories. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.

We've spent too many years in front row seats, rapt and wide-eyed, at the Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer Theater of Explosive Spectacle. Our entertainment must be thrown up on thirty foot tall screens, blasted at us through a bowel-liquefying, discretely-separated speaker stack, and filled with the dizzying hyperkineticism of rats on meth. Our sense of wonder is so moribund that it must first be shocked and pummeled back to life before it can be suspended. It's the First Rule of Modern Adventure Entertainment: shit must blow up.

(And I'm guilty of it, too. Don't think that I'm trying to take the moral high ground here. I blow up a lot of things in Lightbreaker. Not so much in Heartland, but I make up for it by moving all the cluster bombing to the landscape of the psyche.)

And we forget about the quiet magic. We forget about how little it can take to actually change the world. Aleister Crowley, the 20th century's most denigrated and most illusory trickster, defined magick as being the ability to create Change in conformity with one's Will (the extra 'k' to distinguish between this sort of sorcery and the more mundane trickery involving sleight-of-hand and misdirection, which in and of itself, is a bit of hand-waving and misdirection, but that's part of the insidious slipperiness of Crowley).

Go back and look at Ricky Jay's trick with the cards again. Look at it as if it were a subtle act of magick. Who created the change? Was it Mosher, who upset the world by asking his question? Did the change happen when he touched the second deck, summoning his card to the top? Or was it Jay, who exerted his Will over both men (without either of them being aware of it), planting in their minds the image of the card they would eventually name? Or is the change wrought by a need resident in our psyches, in our desire for it be "magic"?

Tomorrow, I bet you're going to remember the card trick. You're going to still be thinking about how it was done. You may never figure it out (though, if you do, let me know), but that won't detract from its mystery. It'll get more mysterious, the longer it lingers.

Urban Fantasy needs more of the quiet magic, the subtle bit of illusion that unspools over a long period of time in your brain. We may be drawn to the shiny bits that explode, but like all eruptions, these things will fade quickly. The real spectacle, the real magic trick, is the tiny gesture that peels back the curtain on the impossible. Only for a moment, mind you, but it’s long enough for us to desire to see it again.


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REVIEW | Heartland by Mark Teppo (Night Shade)

Heartland by Mark Teppo is the second in The Codex of Souls series, which picks up soon after the action of where Lightbreaker (reviewed here) drops you. In fact the excerpt for Heartland at the end of Lightbreaker doesn't appear in Heartland itself so definitely check it out as it lays out the impetus behind this volume. The reasons are still explained well in Heartland, but it helped introduce a fairly pivotal--if short lived--character.

Markham is back to his old haunts this time around as he travels to Paris to face La Société Lumineuse, the very group that thinks him 5 years dead. His strings have been pulled and he must fulfill the clouded wishes of its now deceased leader as Markham just have happened to add his soul to the recently rebooted Chorus, which leads to all kinds of odd and cryptic internal dialogue. Teppo smartly avoided having the obligatory fight on the Eiffel Tower, but he does visit other well known sites of Paris in a very action oriented story as Markham jumps from one fight to the next barely catching his breath in between.

Teppo doesn't suffer the sophomore slump at all with Heartland. In fact, the same level of cleverness and knowledge of the occult still clings to Teppo's prose as this man is a knowledge bucket of the arcane and manages to make it fresh and undaunting. Markham is given some added depth filling in his back story and the relationships he left behind. Even with all the reveals I can't help but think there is still a lot more of Markham left in the dark. Lightbreaker Markham was continually fighting to keep the Chorus in control, but now he is learning how powerful it can be when its working towards his own ends. Yet I still don't have a clear picture of how powerful Markham is despite all the opponents and obstacles he faces. This could stem from Teppo not wanting to empty his quiver too quickly, but it certainly left me more than curious about Markham. I guess it is a case of whetting my appetite for more.

We finally meet Marielle, Markham's perplexing lover from his days in Paris. If I had any complaints it would be the readiness that Marielle accepts what happened to her father, which came a bit too easy for me even given the explanation later on and there are almost too many turnabouts. Teppo really hammers home the old adage of trust no one.  Also, the pacing does feel a bit jumpy in a couple spots, but this was mostly due to Markham getting incapacitated a few too many times.

The Codex of Souls is without a doubt one of the most original Urban Fantasy series going right now. It has stepped away from the pack and embraced a different type of magic and a very different sensibility worth checking out. I give Heartland 8 out of 10 hats. While the series is projected to be 10 books when done the first two books comprise an arc that feels complete, but lays the ground work for a beautifully realized dark-world full of surprises and twists. The third in the series Angel Tongue can't get here soon enough for me.

Teppo has the prequel story Wolves, In Darkness up on the Codex of Souls site, which introduces many of the characters who show up in Heartland and also tells a much alluded to story from Markham's time with La Société Lumineuse. The story will also give you a good idea if you'd like Teppo's style.


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What is the Weirdest Book You've Ever Read?

Every so often a book comes along that leaves you shaking your head. Whether that shaking is a good or bad thing can often be very subjective as well. In some ways aren't the books that confound you the very books that stay with you because they provoke much thought even long after you've finished? Well, I am always curious about these books, which is why I asked more than a dozen authors: What is the weirdest book you've ever read? The earliest response by Lavie Tidhar is already up, but seeing all the different takes gives some wonderful perspective of what people consider weird.

The last entry is my own as Gail Carriger politely asked whether I was going to participate.  Me thinks she was merely goading me into taking a bit of my own medicine, but I laud her for it.  Please feel free to chime in with your own weirdest read in the comments.

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Mark Teppo

In many ways, I prefer weird, but at the same time, there are levels of weird. Jeff Vandermeer's Finch is weird, but it's a comprehensible weird. William Burroughs gets really weird, but you sign on for that ride when you open one of his books, and part of the ride is the alien landscape. The truly weird are books that I realize I don't have the right cipher keys to completely decode. Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books fall into this category. I understand the words on the page, but I'm very conscious that I'm not fully grokking the sub-text. You have to keep coming back to these sorts of books because they test your growth as a reader and as a thinker. It's only been in the last year that I feel that I've finally unlocked most of the secrets in Gene Wolfe's Books of the New Sun and Philip K. Dick's Valis.

These are the sorts of things that are constantly fascinating to me: how a writer can bury story in their language, how much meaning can be imparted by a single word choice, how they rely on the knowledge of the reader to supply context and meaning. These books stop being story--a defined tale with a beginning, middle, and end that communicates a linear progression of events that lead to a authorial summation of human nature--and become a clandestine transmission--a secret message passed between two people that is unique to their connection. What is written and what is read are never the same thing, really.

Mark Teppo is author of the Codex of Souls series which includes Lightbreaker and the recently released Heartland both published by Night Shade Books.

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Blake Charlton

Okay, so, so far the strangest book I've ever read I'm actually reading right now. It's titled Kill as Few Patients as Possible: and Fifty-Six Other Essays on How to be the World's Best Doctor by Oscar London.

It's a bit dated, creative-nonfiction humor. Sometimes funny, sometimes not. Never laugh-out-loud funny. But it is often insightful--albeit sometimes in an ironic or roundabout way--regarding the medical life (so far as I know as a med student). But what's odd about it is how earnest it is. One gets a sense of how much the author cares about and loves medicine. Most other medical humor I've encountered (many will be familiar with the laugh-out-loud House of God by Samuel Shem) is cynical and ultimately corrosive, using medicine's foibles to tear medicine into pieces. Reading London, however, is both frightening and encouraging.

I'm presently writing a novel with a physician protag, and I'm hoping to make her cynical, witty, and yet sympathetic (i.e. _not_ House MD). Add on to that the fact that in a few years I'll enter the hospital as a clinical med student, and try to get a hold on when and how to use humor appropriately. So reading this book feels a bit like my present is smashing up against a possible future in a disconcerting but at least interesting way.

Currently, Blake Charlton is writing fantasy novels, science fiction short stories, and academic essays on medical education and biomedical ethics. His debut Spellwright is due to be published in March by Tor. His short story Endosymbiont is featured in the anthology Seeds of Change.

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Lev Grossman

I initially said The Falls, by Peter Greenaway, but I'm reneging. It is, undoubtedly, a strange book, but I think some of the strangeness comes from its connection to the film of the same name. (Which I haven't seen.) Seems like cheating.

So instead I'm going to go hearken back to a time when I actually almost knew French well enough to read novels in it, at which time I read Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style. It's about a guy who sees another man, a stranger with a long neck, get into a disagreement with somebody else on a bus. Later that day he sees the same man in a railroad station. The man is explaining to a friend that he should get a button put on his overcoat.

That's it for action. It takes about two pages. For the rest of the book Queneau goes on to retell the same pointless story 99 times, in 99 different literary styles. He tells it from all points of view, in all tenses and moods. He tells it as a sonnet, as a word game, as a telegram, in anagrams, in different dialects, as a blurb for a novel, without using the letter 'e,' and on and on and on.

It's also impossible to say, when you're done, whether or not you enjoyed it, or what it meant, or if it meant anything. But it is unquestionably weird.

Lev Grossman is the New York Times best-selling author of The Magicians and Codex.  He is hard at work on the sequel to The Magicians currently titled The Magician King.  Grossman is senior book reviewer for Time and also the creator of the Nerd World blog.

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Ekaterina Sedia

Boy, that's a tough one. I have to say, for me it's a toss up between Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes, and Michael Cisco's The Traitor. Both are difficult to describe, but manage to create a very profound sense of surreal displacement within one's own skin -- these two books permanently tilt your point of view some imperceptible degrees, and you feel like you have a new set of eyes to look at the world with. This is not a pleasant feeling, necessarily, but for me these two books were terribly effective. They were so strange that they could not exist in the world as I perceived it, and thus the world needed to be expanded to accommodate them.

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Dark Wisdom, and Clarkesworld, as well as Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. She is also an award-winning editor of Paper Cities anthology, with Running with the Pack forthcoming.

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Lou Anders

The weirdest book I ever read was Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, his debut novel, published in 1984 and written without the middle initial. Oddly, it's the only Banks I've ever read, but it made a huge impression on me. It's impossible to talk about without spoiling, but its a deeply disturbing novel with a most unusual, and most unreliable, narrator/protagonist. I think if I didn't work in SF&F, I'd be a Chuck Palahniuk kind of reader, and Banks was in that space before there was a space. But since I do work in SF&F, I'll take a moment to shameless plug James Enge's Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way. As books that evolve directly out of the sword & sorcery stories of the Weird Tales tradition, these would be the "Weirdest" books we publish!

Lou Anders is the three-time Hugo nominated editor of Pyr Books, as well as the editor of 9 critically-acclaimed anthologies. He has been nominated for the PKD and WFC awards, and won the Chesley Award for Best Art Director.

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Sam Sykes

Probably the weirdest book I've ever read was Talyn by Holly Lisle. It had a very cool setting (two armies at war) with a very neat premise (fought entirely through magic). Somewhere along the line, though, the story began a very dramatic change that I will describe through my reactions in parentheses: it began as a war story (cool), a war story with MAGIC (COOL), a sudden peace breaks out (oh), a brief view of soldiers trying to cope without the war that gave them identity (very cool), a romance story (uh), a bondage fetish story (wait), a betrayal by a bondage fetishist mind controlling wizard (I said wait!), and then the last hundred pages were basically any excuse to do a strange sex scene at all points. By the time I read a character say (paraphrased): "Shit, she's (the main heroine) in shock! Get her naked! GET HER NAKED RIGHT NOW!" this book had basically secured the top list in my most unforgettable reads. It wasn't so much the weird sex fetishes that came out, but rather how abruptly they came out. Basically, it was like going to a dinner theater to watch a magician, only instead of seeing the magician pull a rabbit out of his hat, my waitress hopped up on my table, hiked up her skirt and peed on my steak. I was surprised, but not necessarily in a good way.

I also keep a running list of weird sexual phrases from books I've read. Currently topping that list is the phrase "his clockwork balls" from Andy Remic's Kell's Legend, with "the whorl of his anus" and "the root of his cock" from Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold coming in second and third, respectively.

Sam Sykes is the author of Tome of the Undergates, published in the UK by Gollancz in April of this year. He once wrestled an African White Rhino to the ground, can defeat nine out of ten Prime Ministers and is largely suspected to be the chief culprit behind reality television.

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I have a lot of contenders for the weirdest book I ever read. I thought of including some truly strange books, including things I’d read in galleys that were nearly unreadable, but then decided that wouldn’t be fair. Then I decided to define “weird” my way, which is “I can’t believe someone published this” primarily because the book breaks a bunch of rules. The problem is that most of the books that I define as weird in that way have become classics or familiar to us now, but they were so revolutionary in their time that people talked about them. I’m thinking in particular of Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries, which is all diary entries, homework assignments, and e-mails, and yet manages to have a great voice and a riveting style. (Now everyone is doing this.) By that definition, though, the weirdest book I can remember reading is Flowers in the Storm by Laura Kinsale. It’s an historical romance novel, so our handsome hero and our beautiful heroine should suffer the slings and arrows of love, separating and getting together again, with a happily ever after. But...her hero, while handsome and rich, has just suffered a stroke. In Regency England. While alone. So everyone thinks he went crazy—and he’s put into Bedlam, the insane asylum, where our heroine, a Quaker, helps her father care for the demented. Kinsale portrays the insane asylum in a historically accurate way—in other words, it’s a horrible place—and the romance continues from there, as our hero slowly recovers from the stroke, but doesn’t really recover the power of speech. It goes from there. It’s now considered a romance classic, but when it was published, it was revolutionary. (I really love this book—and recommend Kinsale to everyone who likes to read. She did some paranormal stuff before it became popular too, for you who like fantasy with your romance.)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written some weird books in her time as well, including a romance (as Kristine Grayson) whose hero is a garden gnome, kinda. (Completely Smitten) Her current novel is Diving into the Wreck, which is science fiction adventure, and was published by Pyr. Her next book is a collection of her award-winning short stories, called Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories to be published in the spring from Golden Gryphon. An even weirder Grayson novel, The Charming Way, in which Prince Charming (one of them, anyway) falls in love with the Evil Stepmother, will be published in Spring of 2011.

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Gail Carriger

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is my first pick. It wasn't until I read this book that I realized how utterly acid-trip bizarre a story could be and get away with it, especially if it also happened to be side-achingly funny. Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is right there in the same arena.

Ms. Gail Carriger began writing in order to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She is fond of teeny tiny hats and tropical fruit. She is the author of the Parasol Protectorate series, Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless.

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Jeffrey Thomas

I've read a lot of bizarre books, perhaps more bizarre than my choice, but I also have to consider literary merit...so the book that comes to mind is the novel The Other Side of the Mountain by Michael Bernanos. Bernanos was the son of the well known French author, George Bernanos, and if I recall correctly he was a troubled soul who died young. My aunt gave me this novel when I was a teenager, and its haunting imagery and desolate atmosphere have remained with me over the decades. The story itself is simple: a merchant vessel becomes becalmed at sea, and then wrecked, the only survivors being the young protagonist and an older cook. They reach an eerie island, where the trees all bow down to the ground at night, and where the statues (or are they statues?) of human beings can be found on the slopes of the island's ominous central mountain. Did the characters survive the wreck after all, or are they actually in Hell? Their efforts to survive are both depressing in their futility, and inspiring, in that the characters never cease to struggle against their circumstances, and their friendship sustains them where nothing else can. The story can be seen as a descent into madness (the author's?), and its hellish feel may have been inspired in part by the fact that Bernanos' father was a devout Catholic. The novel was republished a few years ago by Cherokee Publishing Company; it's a short read and I encourage readers of horror, dark fantasy, and the surreal to check it out.

Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Blue War, Deadstock, Punktown, Letters from Hades, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers, and the forthcoming The Fall of Hades. He lives in Massachusetts.

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Alex Bledsoe

The strangest book I've run across is a slender little volume called Dragons: The Modern Infestation, by Pamela Wharton Blanpied, first published in 1980.  I discovered it in one of those remainder stores that pop up every so often in otherwise abandoned shopping centers. This one was in Florence, Alabama, in the late 80s. They had two big stacks of the book, probably fifty copies in all. I picked it up because the title seemed intriguing, and when I flipped through it, it perplexed me even more. It seemed to be a straight non-fiction book, complete with diagrams, a bibliography, and photographs detailing the current efforts to understand dragons, real fire-breathing dragons, throughout the world. Yet even with helpful arrows indicating where the dragons were supposed to be in the photos, I couldn't see them. Or could I? Because if you stare at anything long enough, you start to see what you're looking for....

It wasn't until the advent of the internet a decade later that I finally learned the book was intended as a parody of scholarly works poking fun at their seriousness by applying it to a ridiculous topic like dragons. And I guess in a sense the joke was on me, because even after reading the book and realizing it couldn't be legitimate (one dragon converses, Pern-like, with a researcher) I still didn't understand the point.

When I began researching dragons for my novel Burn Me Deadly, I tried unsuccessfully to track down Ms. Blanpied. She is evidently as elusive as the beasts in her book, if she even truly exists (if you read this, Ms. Blanpied, I'd still love to talk to you). But whoever she is, wherever she is, I hope she finally got her laugh.

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He has been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. I now live in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls. The author of the Eddie LaCrosse high fantasy/hardboiled mysteries (The Sword-Edged Blonde, Burn Me Deadly and the forthcoming Dark Jenny), two novels about vampires in 1975 Memphis (Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood) and the first Tufa novel, The Hum and the Shiver, due in 2011.

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Victor Gischler

In the broadest sense of the word "weird" I shall pick Joe Meno's wonderful The Boy Detective Fails. I think there are many books that are much, much weirder, but Meno's book was an odd, strange little fairy tale that I enjoyed so much it still stays with me. What struck me as most "weird" was less the story itself and more the way I enjoyed the book. Usually I want to be driven through a story. I want the pace to keep me flipping pages. But I found myself sort of gently floating through The Boy Detective Fails as this gentle, whimsical story unfolded.

Victor Gischler is the author of author of 4 hard-boiled crime novels. including his debut novel Gun Monkeys which was nominated for the Edgar Award, and his novel Shotgun Opera was an Anthony Award finalist. His fifth novel Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse and most recent novel Vampire A-Go-Go actually have nothing to do with one another. He is also hard at work on many Deadpool comics for Marvel.

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Jesse Bullington

Upon first being asked my mind started turning to William S. Burroughs and other experimental authors that seemed way out on the outer fringes, but upon reflection I think that one book that really struck me as intrinsically weird when I first read it was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Unlike Naked Lunch, which is a weird book full of weird stuff, sure, Invisible Cities actually caught me off guard as a teenager--it wasn't that crazy stuff happened or the style was unusual, it was that the entire book as a whole seemed alien to me. The book consists of Marco Polo describing cities he has supposedly encountered to Kublai Khan but the novel is so much more than that--in addition to being a superficially fun read it's also an intricate puzzle, an incredibly nuanced work passed off as a casual series of descriptions. While not as well known as Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (the single best piece of post modern fiction ever written) or The Baron in the Trees (a comparatively straight-forward fable), Invisible Cities remains a masterpiece, and quite possibly the weirdest book I've ever read--it was certainly the weirdest I'd ever read at the time, and don't know of any book that has matched it since.

Jesse Bullington is the author of the novel The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, as well as numerous articles and pieces of short fiction.  He is currently at work on his second novel The Enterprise of Death.

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Michael, The Mad Hatter

For me it would have to be The Shape We're In by Jonathan Letham. It is a bit of a cheat as I asked everyone else to stick to novels, and The Shape We're In is a novelette at best.  Yet, it is the story that had me scratching my head days after finishing.  Told from the point of view of an alcoholic garbage man charged with moving trash from one section of a giant immobile vessel shape of sorts to another it is cynical yet hilarious at the same time. In search of his missing son the garbage man ventures into far off sections of the shape and meets hordes of odd cultures that have evolved there. I hesitate to say more as there is a big reveal that is worth uncovering on your own.

Michael, The Mad Hatter is an elusive hat and book collector spending far too much money and time on both.  He is secretly planning to open the world's first Haberdashery and Book Emporium. He also runs a little book review blog of some sort.

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GUEST POST | Lavie Tidhar author of The Bookman

Best Books of 2009 (That I've read)
AUTHOR INTERVIEW | Mark Teppo author of Lightbreaker

LOOKING FORWARD | Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi, & Steampunk to Watch for in 2010

Culling this list was quite difficult compared to the anthology edition and the Fantasy list. For the purposes of this list I've put any Zombie related titles under Urban Fantasy. Be forewarned spoilers do exist in these descriptions if it is a long running series. Everything is listed in publication order by category.

Urban Fantasy is definitely top-loaded for the first few months of 2010 with many major releases for long-established series with a new Dresden Files and Nightside. We've got some big guns with Mieville checking in with Kraken, which is a standalone. Amelia Beamer's debut The Loving Dead sounds like a great twist on zombies. One theme I noticed was very few Sci-Fi books piqued my interest that weren't from either small houses such a Powell's Silversands and Jason Stoddard's Winning Mars or those that only have a UK publication scheduled as with Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. In the Steampunk area we've got Lavie Tidhar's debut novel The Bookman, which is also the start of a trilogy. George Mann is treating us to two helpings of his Steampunk world with Ghosts of Manhattan and The Osiris Ritual while we should see the next two volumes of Gail Carriger's series this year as well. All in all this should be a jam-packed year and this only comprises releases up to September for the most part.

URBAN FANTASY

The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny (Nightside 10) by Simon R. Green
Release Date: January 5 |  Publisher: Ace

Things were going so well for P.I. John Taylor, that it was only a matter of time before everything hit the fan. Walker, the powerful, ever-present, never to-be-trusted agent who runs the Nightside on behalf of The Authorities, is dying. And he wants John to be his successor-a job that comes with more baggage, and more enemies, than anyone can possibly imagine.

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Heartland (Codex of Souls 2) by Mark Teppo

Release Date: January  | Publisher: Night Shade Books

Seek the Light! Embrace the Heartland! Markham returns to Paris where he lost his love - and nearly his life! The ancient order of manipulative magicians that once cast him out is now in turmoil... a turmoil made all the greater by the swaths of destruction that Markham tried to avert in the Pacific Northwest. Teamed with an unlikely partner, Markham seeks to overturn the corrupt remains of an order no longer able to police its own practitioners. Yet, he can't escape the feeling that he's still just a pawn in a larger game. The second novel of the Codex of Souls further explores the strange occult world first introduced in Lightbreaker. Mark Teppo's vision of a magical underworld is a non-stop adventure that continues to bring new light to the occult origins of our history.

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Where Angels Fear to Tread (Remy Chandler 3) by Thomas E.Sniegoski
Release Date: March 2  |  Publisher: Roc

Six year-old Zoe York has been taken and her mother has come to Remy for help. She shows him crude, childlike drawings that she claims are Zoe's visions of the future, everything leading up to her abduction, and some beyond. Like the picture of a man with wings who would come and save her-a man who is an angel.

Zoe's preternatural gifts have made her a target for those who wish to exploit her power to their own destructive ends. The search will take Remy to dark places he would rather avoid. But to save an innocent, Remy will ally himself with a variety of lesser evils-and his soul may pay the price...

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Changes (Dresden Files 12) by Jim Butcher
Release Date: April 6  |  Publisher: Roc

Long ago, Susan Rodriguez was Harry Dresden's lover-until she was attacked by his enemies, leaving her torn between her own humanity and the bloodlust of the vampiric Red Court. Susan then disappeared to South America, where she could fight both her savage gift and those who cursed her with it.

Now Arianna Ortega, Duchess of the Red Court, has discovered a secret Susan has long kept, and she plans to use it-against Harry. To prevail this time, he may have no choice but to embrace the raging fury of his own untapped dark power. Because Harry's not fighting to save the world...

He's fighting to save his child.

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Kraken by China Mieville
Release Date: June 29 |  Publisher: Del Rey

Kraken is a standalone with a very Lovecraftian twist. Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god.

A god that someone is hoping will end the world.

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The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia

Release date: July 2010  |  Publisher: Prime Books

Sedia is always mixing things up from book to book and this description is no different.

Vimbai moves into a dilapidated house in the dunes, trying to escape her embarrassing immigrant mother, and discovers that one of her new roommates has a pocket universe instead of hair, there is a psychic energy baby living in the telephone wires, and her dead Zimbabwean grandmother is now doing dishes in the kitchen. When the house gets lost at sea and creatures of African urban legends all but take it over, Vimbai has to turn to horseshoe crabs in the ocean, to ask for their help in getting home to New Jersey.

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Discord's Apple by Carrie Vaughn - Series Debut
Release Date: July  |  Publisher Tor

When Evie Walker goes home to spend time with her dying father, she discovers that his creaky old house in Hope’s Fort, Colorado, is not the only legacy she stands to inherit. Hidden behind the old basement door is a secret and magical storeroom, a place where wondrous treasures from myth and legend are kept safe until they are needed again.

The magic of the storeroom prevents access to any who are not intended to use the items. But just because it has never been done does not mean it cannot be done. And there are certainly those who will give anything to find a way in. Evie must guard the storeroom against ancient and malicious forces, protecting the past and the future even as the present unravels around them. Old heroes and notorious villains alike will rise to fight on her side or to undermine her most desperate gambits. At stake is the fate of the world, and the prevention of nothing less than the apocalypse.

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The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer - Debut
Release Date: July 15  |  Publisher: Night Shade Books

Girls! Zombies! Zeppelins!

Locus Editor Beamer's debut has been pitched as if Shaun of the Dead and Garden State had a love child living in San Francisco, you'd have this sexy novel, set at the outbreak of a zombie plague.

Kate and Michael are roommates living in the Oakland hills, working at the same Trader Joes supermarket. A night of drunken revelry changes their lives forever, but not in the way that anyone would expect. A slow-spreading plague of zombie-ism breaks out at their house party, spreading amongst their circle of friends, and simultaneously through the Bay Area. This zombie plague - an STD of sorts - is spread through sex and kissing, turning its victims into mindless, horny, voracious killers. Thrust into extremes by this slow- motion tragedy, Kate and Michael are forced to confront the choices they've made in their lives, and their fears of commitment, while trying to stay alive and reunite in the one place in the Bay Area that's likely to be safe and secure from the zombie hoards: Alcatraz.

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Pariah by Bob Fingerman
Release Date: August 3 | Publisher: Tor

A frightening, darkly comedic look at people surviving a zombie onslaught, from award-winning comics sensation and novelist Bob Fingerman.

The world is in chaos. A zombie plague has devoured every nation on the planet. New York City is no exception. Imagine eight million zombies. Shoulder to shoulder. Walking the streets, looking for their next meal. The residents of one apartment building have bonded to keep themselves safe from the onslaught, but their inevitable demise lurks right outside their window, a constant reminder of the doom that awaits them. Forced to remain in the safety of the building, the tenants find themselves at each others’ throats. When they spy a lone teenage girl who walks among the hordes, unattacked by the undead, their world opens up.

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Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll - Series Debut
Release Date: August  |  Publisher: Tor

When New York City jewelry designer Garet James stumbles into a strange antiques shop in her  neighborhood, her life is turned upside down. John Dee, the enigmatic shopkeeper, asks her to open a vintage silver box for a generous sum of money. Oddly, the symbol of a swan on the box exactly matches the ring given to Garet by her deceased mother. Garet can’t believe this eerie coincidence until she opens the box and otherworldly things start happening.…The precious silver box is stolen from Garet’s home. When she investigates, Garet learns that she has been pulled into a prophecy that is hundreds of years old. Opening the box has unleashed an evil force onto the streets of Manhattan. Gradually, Garet pieces together her true identity—one that her deceased mother desperately tried to protect her from. Generations of women in Garet’s family, including her beloved mother, suffered and died at the hands of this prevailing evil. Does Garet possess the power to reclaim the box and defeat this devastating force?

On her journey, she will meet fey folk who walk unnoticed among humans and a sexy vampire who also happens to be a hedge fund manager that she can’t stop thinking about. Can Garet trust anyone to guide her? The fairies reveal a desire to overpower mere humans, and the seductive vampire has the power to steal the life from her body. Using her newfound powers and sharp wit, Garet will muster everything she’s got to shut down the evil taking over her friends, family, New York City, and the world.

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STEAMPUNK

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar - Debut / Series Debut
Release Date: January UK/June US|  Publishers: Angry Robot

Tidhar has been making a name for himself in short form for many years now and with his first novel being the start of a steampunk series it is a must.  With his first novel length work being a Steampunk book I just have to try it.  A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees - there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack. For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how? Like a steam-powered take on V for Vendetta, rich with satire and slashed through with automatons, giant lizards, pirates, airships and wild adventure, The Bookman is the first of a series.

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Changeless (The Parasol Protectorate 2) by Gail Carriger
Release Date: March 30  | Publisher: Orbit

Soulless was one of the most fun I've had all year.  So Changeless will be a must for me to check out.  Plus I think this will have less of the romance angle that was a bit strong for me in the first book.

Alexia Tarabotti, now Lady Maccon, awakens in the wee hours of the mid-afternoon to find her husband, who should be decently asleep like any normal werewolf, yelling at the top of his lungs. Then he disappears - leaving her to deal with a regiment of supernatural soldiers encamped on her doorstep, a plethora of exorcised ghosts, and an angry Queen Victoria.

But Alexia is armed with her trusty parasol, the latest fashions, and an arsenal of biting civility. Even when her investigations take her into the backwaters of ugly waistcoats, Scotland, she is prepared: upending werewolf pack dynamics as only A soulless can.

She might even find time to track down her wayward husband, if she feels like it.

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The Gaslight Dogs by Karin Lowachee
Release Date:  March 30  |  Publisher: Orbit

A steampunkish tale with a Inuit protagonist is what caught me here.  At the edge of the known world, an ancient nomadic tribe faces a new enemy-an Empire fueled by technology and war.

A young spiritwalker of the Aniw and a captain in the Ciracusan army find themselves unexpectedly thrown together. The Aniw girl, taken prisoner from her people, must teach the reluctant soldier a forbidden talent - one that may turn the tide of the war and will surely forever brand him an outcast.

From the rippling curtains of light in an Arctic sky, to the gaslit cobbled streets of the city, war is coming to the frozen north. Two people have a choice that will decide the fates of nations - and may cast them into a darkness that threatens to bring destruction to both their peoples.

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Pinion by Jay Lake
Release Date: March 30 | Publisher: Tor

The final book in Lake's clockpunk series following the events of Mainspring and Escapement.

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Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann
Release Date: April 27 | Publisher: Pyr

Ghosts of Manhattan is a spin off of sorts to Mann's Newbury & Hobbes series only placed in the US and pushed forward in time, which should make for a very interesting setting. Lou Anders has also mention it should harken to something close to The Shadow.

1926. New York. The Roaring Twenties. Jazz. Flappers. Prohibition. Coal-powered cars. A cold war with a British Empire that still covers half of the globe. Yet things have developed differently to established history. America is in the midst of a cold war with a British Empire that has only just buried Queen Victoria, her life artificially preserved to the age of 107. Coal-powered cars roar along roads thick with pedestrians, biplanes take off from standing with primitive rocket boosters, and monsters lurk behind closed doors and around every corner. This is a time in need of heroes. It is a time for The Ghost. A series of targeted murders are occurring all over the city, the victims found with ancient Roman coins placed on their eyelids after death. The trail appears to lead to a group of Italian American gangsters and their boss, who the mobsters have dubbed "The Roman." However, as The Ghost soon discovers, there is more to The Roman than at first appears, and more bizarre happenings that he soon links to the man, including moss-golems posing as mobsters and a plot to bring an ancient pagan god into the physical world in a cavern beneath the city. As The Ghost draws nearer to The Roman and the center of his dangerous web, he must battle with foes both physical and supernatural and call on help from the most unexpected of quarters if he is to stop The Roman and halt the imminent destruction of the city.

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The Osiris Ritual (Newbury & Hobbes 2) by George Mann
Release Date: August 3  |  Publisher: Tor

Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator for the Crown, imagines life can be a little quieter from now on after his dual success in solving The Affinity Bridge affair. But he hasn't banked on his villainous predecessor, Knox, hell bent on achieving immortality, not to mention a secret agent who isn't quite as he seems...So continues an adventure quite unlike any other, a thrilling steampunk mystery and the second in the series of "Newbury & Hobbes" investigations.

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Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

Release Date: September(est)  |  Publisher: Tor

Follow-up to the wondrous Boneshaker, Cherie has thus far described the alterna-world Civil War era Steampunk adventure Dreadnought as more gruesome than the first.  The Clockwork Century books are meant to be standalone so it wouldn't be inappropriate to read them out of order.

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Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
Release Date: October | Publisher: Simon Pulse

Follow-up to Leviathan.

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SCIENCE FICTION

Absorption by John Meaney - Series Debut
Release Date: February | Publisher: Gollancz

The universe is dark. And it is alive.

People across the universe are glimpsing shards of darkness moving at the edge of their vision; hearing echoes of a dark, disturbing musical chord; and dreaming of becoming crystal, and joining the Ragnarok Council. Absorption is the first of a new space opera trilogy packed with space warfare and mindblowing rationale for Norse mythology. This is SF to rival Peter F. Hamilton.

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Winning Mars by Jason Stoddard - Debut
Release Date: March 1 | Publisher: Prime Books

Jere Gutierrez is bucking the trend at the dying art of "linear" entertainment - what we know today as TV shows. His combination of astounding stories, captured in the moment, are captivating millions. Of course, every one of his stories are fabricated and engineered and orchestrated, even though they're sold as "real." Unfortunately for Jere, his backers have begun to see through his tricks. Desperate for another story, one large enough to capture the attention of the world, he teams up with a retired TV executive to create an ad-supported mission to Mars, complete with corporate sponsors and extreme sports events. What Jere doesn't know is just how captivating his Winning Mars will be.

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Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
Release Date: February | Gollancz

No announced US publication as of yet, but the interesting description and setting has piqued my interest greatly.  Also a video game is planned based around the book which is slated to be released on Xbox and for the PC in 2010.

The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend. More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. Rusted railways lead into emptiness. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man's time is over. A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. They live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity's last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters - or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct - the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price. VDNKh is the northernmost inhabited station on its line. It was one of the Metro's best stations and still remains secure. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared. Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. He holds the future of his native station in his hands, the whole Metro - and maybe the whole of humanity.

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Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley
Release Date: March 23  |  Publisher: Pyr

The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earth's forces loot their cities, settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the 'Outer problem'. But Earth's victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by Avernus, the Outers' greatest genius, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isn't as easy as he thought. And in Greater Brazil, the Outers' democratic traditions have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them. After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war - especially the victors.

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Silversands by Gareth L Powell - Debut Novella
Release Date: April | Publisher: Pendragon Press

In an age where interstellar travel is dangerous and unpredictable, and no-one knows exactly where they’ll end up, Avril Bradley is a Communications officer onboard a ship sent to re-contact as many of these lost souls as possible.

But a mysterious explosion strands her in a world of political intrigue, espionage and subterfuge; a world of retired cops, digital ghosts and corporate assassins who fight for possession of computer data that had lain undisturbed for almost a century. . .

This is the debut novel from the critically-acclaimed author of the short story collection The Last Reef, Gareth L Powell, with stunning cover artwork by Vincent Chong.

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Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds
Release Date: June 1 | Publisher: Ace
Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different - and rigidly enforced - level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains ...Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels - and with the dying body comes bad news. If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality - and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability.

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ODD ONES

Sleepless by Charlie Huston
Release Date: January 12 | Publisher Ballantiine

A gripping and imaginative work of speculative fiction about an epidemic of sleeplessness from the bestselling author who Stephen King calls "one of the most remarkable prose stylists to emerge from the noir tradition in this century," for fans of William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk.

The world is in the grip of an epidemic of sleeplessness. In L.A., a cop named Parker Haas is working undercover to stop black market trade of a drug called Dreamer, the only thing that helps the sleepless. But his interest in the drug is more than professional. His wife is sleepless, and they don't know yet if their infant daughter is also sick. Then Park discovers that the black market he's trying to stop is the creation of the very company that makes the drug. But how can a lowly cop go after the son of one of the world's richest and most powerful men?

Trapped by these things--a dying wife, an infant daughter, a truth that could unravel his career--Park risks all for one chance to do his part in repairing a broken world.

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The House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni
Release Date: March 4 | Publisher: Putnam

Sebastian Prendergast lives in a geodesic dome with his eccentric grandmother, who homeschooled him in the teachings of futurist philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller. But when his grandmother has a stroke, Sebastian is forced to leave the dome and make his own way in town.

Jared Whitcomb is a chain-smoking sixteen-year-old heart-transplant recipient who befriends Sebastian, and begins to teach him about all the things he has been missing, including grape soda, girls, and Sid Vicious. They form a punk band called The Rash, and it's clear that the upcoming Methodist Church talent show has never seen the likes of them. Wholly original, The House of Tomorrow is the story of a young man's self-discovery, a dying woman's last wish, and a band of misfits trying desperately to be heard.


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LOOKING FORWARD | Fantasy Books to Watch for in 2010
LOOKING FORWARD | Collection & Anthologies Coming in 2010
RECOMMENDATIONS | Best Books of 2009 (That I've read)

AUTHOR INTERVIEW | Mark Teppo author of Lightbreaker

I enjoyed Mark Teppo's Lightbreaker (reviewed here) so much I had to interview him, which he thankfully accepted. Heartland the second book in the Codex of Souls series will be released in February 2010 along with many other planned volumes in the series. Teppo also contributed to the World Fantasy Award nominated Paper Cities Urban Fantasy Anthology reviewed here.



MH: Hello Mr. Teppo, welcome to Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf. Thank you for taking time to answer our questions. Firstly, can you tell us a little about yourself?


TEPPO: Well, I’m in an inveterate bibliophile. The rest is more mundane: geek job in the biotech industry, father of two children who are already smarter than me, clumsy in ways of the kitchen and the yard; that sort of thing. As for the bibliophile part, books are a necessary part of my existence. When my wife and I were shopping for our first house, I used to get really bothered by homes that didn’t have any books. The creepiest was the place where the bookcases were hidden in the master bedroom closet. 


MH: For those who haven’t read Lightbreaker, what would you say to perspective readers to whet their appetite? 


TEPPO: It’s not Urban Fantasy as you know it. Instead of celebrating the magical in fantastic creatures (faerie, vampire, were-, and so on), Lightbreaker takes its cues from the historical record, building a system of magick based on existing systems and philosophical and religious history. 


MH: Lightbreaker delves into many different types of magick, but mostly Western Occultism. What is your interest/involvement in the Occult beyond books? 


TEPPO: Mitch Horowitz has a book coming out soon called Occult America and he starts off with a reminder that the derivation of the word “occult” is simply “the unknown,” and that it has been some of the more outrageous PR efforts of various entities and individuals who have given the term its nefarious meaning. Erik Davis, in his book for 33 1/3 on Led Zeppelin, likens himself to an “occulture critic,” and I really like that appellation. We are seekers of knowledge, really, and without labeling ourselves as adherents of any one system, we are interested in all of them. Which, I realize, isn’t really an answer. At least not a sensational one, but the truth is rather prosaic: I’ve done enough reading to see the parallels between too many religious systems; it’s hard to pick one as being “better” than another when most of them quickly label unbelievers as lesser people, and that seems counter to the fabulous mystery that is human existence. It’s more curious to me that we can have so many systems—and they all fervently claim superiority—but their differences come down to what you could, loosely, call “regionalisms.” It’s the same sort of statistical anomaly that gave birth to conscious life: that we’d all come up with widely divergent “religious” systems that have so much in common in their underlying framework. That, really, suggests, there is something grander at work, and clinging to any system as being better or more insightful than another seems to be missing the bigger picture.
MH: The idea of souls is central to Lightbreaker. How did you come to create Markham’s Chorus? 


TEPPO: I wanted to magic agnostic—as much as I could—in my system and so I wanted Markham to stamp his personality, if you will, on the world vision. The Chorus was a way to refer what was going on in his head in a shorthand way without having to rely on some nomenclature that relied on the audience’s knowledge of a certain system. Or, rather, I didn’t want readers to think, “Oh, he calls it ‘X,’ he must be a ‘Y.’” The “Chorus” came sort of naturally after that. I don’t think there were even that many choices I was considering. It was one of those “and he’s got these souls in his head—call ‘em a . . . ‘Chorus’ . . . yeah, that’s it, the Chorus” moments.


MH: How do your stories take shape? Are you a detailed outliner or more streams of consciousness?


TEPPO: Traditionally, I’m very organic, stream of consciousness, in my method. I will usually build enough of a framework to know what the book is supposed to be about, and then I’ll start. I’ll get about 60% of the way, hit that Dark Night of the Soul moment of despair, and then panic. That used to suck terribly, but I’ve gotten better about that point, and now I look forward to it, because it usually means that my subconscious has finally broken through and said, “No, really, this isn’t going to work; you need to back up a bit.” So, I do. I cut back to about 40% or so, figure out where the story is supposed to go (as it is there, floating in my head by now), and then it’s pretty much a straight path to the end. The couple of times I’ve explained this to people, it seems to terrify them, but I prefer to be actively writing rather than planning. So, this period where I spiral out of control is just me planning without a net, essentially. It helps that I’ve gotten over my dread fear of revising, and typically when I finish a draft, it’s fairly solid. The rest is a matter of knocking off the weird edges and polishing. 


MH: I noted a change between when the cover of Lightbreaker was originally announced and the final product. Why the change and are you happy with the final design? 


TEPPO: I’m thrilled with the cover. I gave Chris McGrath, the cover artist, a very vague description of Markham (“he’s a guy who likes to blend in with a crowd” was the gist of it, if I remember correctly), and we sent him the chapter where Markham and Katarina finally meet again. From that, he managed to build a cover that, I think, nicely encapsulates the antagonism of their relationship (they aren’t facing the same way), and sets the tone for the series. The folks at Night Shade opted to tighten up the focus of the image and lighten the edges, which I think was a great idea. McGrath tends to put a lot of texturing in his work (which I really dig), which doesn’t always translate well at a distance of more than five feet, and so I think that focusing in the two characters and building the white frame really makes the cover pop out more on the shelf.
I can’t complain. The cover presents the book in a very nice way.


MH: Without giving too much away, what is in store for Markham in Heartland? 

TEPPO: We opted to add the somewhat lengthy teaser for Heartland to the back of Lightbreaker to make it clear there was more going on than Markham realized. And Heartland is the culmination of that larger scheme. He goes back to Paris to deal with all the history that he left behind there and to confront the Watchers on their home turf. Everything is falling apart in the organization with the death of the Hierarch, all the Watchers are vying for a piece of the what’s left, and Markham is the wild card thrown into the mix. 

MH: So far The Codex of Souls has three books announced, but I read in another interview that you have plans for 10 books. What are you up to? And at what rate do you think they’ll be published? Do you have any plans for any more short stories with the same characters? 

TEPPO: In the short story department, there’s the novella “Wolves, in Darkness” that is posted to the codexofsouls.com website (Chapter One sample here, and there are links along the bottom to the rest). It takes place prior to Lightbreaker, and introduces some of the back story between Antoine, Markham, and Marielle. You can read it before Lightbreaker without it ruining anything in that book; however, you can also read it before Heartland as the events in that story are referenced quite heavily in Heartland. There’s also the piece “How I Came to Magick,” which I’m still working on finding the right place for, but I’m typically using it at readings as it is a nice introduction to the world. I’ve also been invited to submit a story to an anthology about wizards and I’m toying with something about the kanaimà practices in South America that will be a Markham story. These sorts of things aren’t part of the grand plan, but I’m not averse to them happening. Not all stories are novels, you know? As for the series itself, yes, I’ve plotted it fairly loosely through ten books, and ten is somewhat arbitrary, but I do like the idea of marrying the books to the structure of the Spheres of the Sephiroth, in which case, ten will, at least, be the end of the CODEX. Whether it is the end of Markham’s story, I don’t really know. But between now and, say, 2020, I don’t see any reason not to have a Markham book every year. Publisher and public willing, of course. The CODEX is structured as a rolling dualogy. Book 2 is the sequel to Book 1 and ties up that story line; Book 3 picks up some threads from Book 1 and wraps up in Book 4; Book 5 picks up left over danglers from Book 3, and Book 6. . . well, you get the idea. This also allows easy entry points for new readers, while also giving existing readers a reason to look forward to the next volume. I’m not interested in doing a reset every book. The world is a different place at the end of Lightbreaker, and it is going to continue to change, but at the same time, I don’t want to make it inaccessible to new readers who wander in at the fifth book. Nor do I really want it to be this open-ended thing that never has an end. I think this arc of Markham’s life will be played out by the end of the tenth book; if there is more to tell, then we’ll see what happens. . . 

MH: Who are some under rated authors you think should have a wider readership? 

TEPPO: I think Barth Anderson is fantastic. His The Magician And The Fool was brilliantly subversive and I wish everyone would rush out and read it immediately. Darin Bradley has a book coming out next year that I’m very excited about. The parts of it I’ve seen are the sort of linguistic cleverness that fills me with all sorts of jealousy. I’m glad to see that Chris Roberson and Cherie Priest have books coming out in a steady pace for the next few years as their stuff is always great to read. 

MH: What Urban Fantasy books do you read? 

TEPPO: Now that I’m done with Heartland, I can catch up with Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim and Mike Carey’s Felix Castor books, which I’ve been putting off so as to not be too unduly influenced by. Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series (though I am one or two behind) is on my shelf too. I’ve started Mark Chadbourn’s Age of Misrule books, and I’m both glad and saddened that I hadn’t read them earlier. The writer in me is glad in that they would have totally put me off my game had I read them a few years ago; the reader is sad in that I’m sorry that I hadn’t known about them until Pyr published them over here in the US with sexy John Picacio covers. I’m really having a ball with World’s End, and am looking forward to devouring the other two. I have to admit that I’ve not been kept up with Urban Fantasy over the last few years as I had the impression that most of it was mired in vampire and werewolf mythology, and I have a blind spot to those sorts of creatures—I just don’t find them all that interesting and haven’t really found a way to write about them that doesn’t descend into parody almost immediately. As such, I’ve been out of touch, but I’m trying to get caught up. Some of my fears have been upheld, and in some cases I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books, for example. I’m glad to see that Dresden has stopped being a pushover. I saw the cover to the new one—Change—the other day, and it appears that Dresden is out of Chicago, and I’m very curious to see just how much change is in store for the character. 

MH: What was the road to having The Codex of Souls published by Night Shade? 

TEPPO: Long, and it’ll make any fledgling writer out there cringe in terror. Suffice to say that the first draft of Lightbreaker was written in 1995. The only things that remain from that draft is some of the characters, the Chorus, and the big widescreen ending. The rest—and it was a lot of thinly veiled vampires and werewolves and, OMG!, werewolves that were psychic vampires!—was thrown out for the New Millenial Rewrite where the whole Western Esoterica focus was pushed to be the world-view. Two agents, more than a dozen rejections spread out over two cycles of about two to three years each, two complete page one rewrites, and a lot of whisky later, it’s on the shelf. I have, for the record, now written six drafts of Heartland. The one I signed off on a few hours before I started these questions will, hopefully, be the last. It’s not as filled with explode-y! bits as Lightbreaker, but everyone is much, much meaner to each other. I think it’s a fair trade-off. 

MH: Do you have any plans for books outside of The Codex of Souls series? 

TEPPO: Yes, two things are in the brain bin now: the Sprawl books and what’s being referred to as the Devil Sex books. The Sprawl books are built out the world that can be found in “Chance Island” (check here), “Faith, Hidden in the Hands of the Blind”(check here), and the story in Paper Cities, “The One That Got Away.” I think. It keeps, er, sprawling. There’s a 17K novella called “Instrument” that will be the second book, I think. The first one will be about the Luckies, and “Faith...” was a bit of a test run of some of the characters. The working title of the first Devil Sex book is The Devil’s Paperwork, and it’s sort of The Office as if run by the Handmaidens of Satan with bits of the Malleus Maleficarum and Paradise Lost thrown in because, well, the distinction between “porn” and “erotica” is the amount of literary cred you can muster, isn’t it? It was initially meant to be something light-hearted that didn’t require a metric ton of research or that I actually get my Latin chops back up to speed, but it’s started to get away from me. Like these things do. I’m a couple chapters in, and I need to actually pause and write a synopsis so that my agent can go and off and sell this thing because, you know, that’s the way this process is supposed to work. 

MH: If you could be any character from a fantasy book who would it be and why? 

TEPPO: King Mob from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, because I’d love to pull back the curtain on the Archons. Or one of the two protagonists from Colin Wilson’s The Philosopher’s Stone. The guys who trepane themselves into a higher state of consciousness. Actually, being a character in a Miyazaki film would be cool. I’d love to be a kid who could stun a frog in mid-leap and leave him hanging in the air. 

MH: What are 2 things about you most people don’t know? Do you have a pet monkey you keep sequestered in the backyard? Do you have a closet clown aversion? 

TEPPO: I hate squash. Utterly hate it. If that TV show Fear Factor was still on, all they would have to do for the food challenge is bring out a plate of baked squash and I’d be done. And I do hear the clowns once in a while. Seriously. Usually when it is dark. They’re out in the back yard, laughing. It’s creepy, and I don’t know what it is that triggers the noise in my head, but that’s what it sounds like. Not a lot of them. Probably only one or two, but that’s all it takes. . . 

MH: I have to ask. Where did you get bunny outfit and how often do you wear it? 

TEPPO: The best man at my wedding took us out bar “hopping” for my bachelor party. And he even said it like that, with big air quotes and everything. The upside is that I got to keep the suit which I thought was decent of him. Now, I drag it out once a year for Easter, and the kids couldn’t care less. Next year, no bunny suit. We’ll see how much fun Easter is then, damnit. 

MH: Is there anything else you’d like to add? 

TEPPO: The usual contact stuff: website www.markteppo.com, facebook , blog, and twitter. Thanks for the questions. 

MH: Thank you for your time. I look forward to the continuation of Markham’s story in Heartland.

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