"Falling Off the World" by Tim Lebbon

At the Fantasy Book Spot you can find a Tim Lebbon's story, "Falling Off the World". The story is one the stories that will be published in the forthcoming anthology "The Second Humdrumming Book of Horror Stories" selected by Ian Alexander Martin and published by Humdrumming.

The story pictures the journey of a girl, Holly, that accidentally (or not?) gets wrapped in a balloon rope and that balloon flies loose. Now, I have to start by saying that the story is a strange one, but it leaves you thinking nonetheless. The story is like reading a strange adaptation of the scene from "The Wizard of Oz" when Dorothy is taken by the tornado, Dorothy being replaced here by Holly and the tornado by the balloon. The story made me think at the one of the most common dreams of humans, falling dreams and at one of the greatest fears of humans, the fear of heights. Also, the title made me think of death, falling off the world may be synonymous with death, or with the disappearance from the face of the planet.

I liked the beginning of the story, well made, with sensation of motion very realistic and very well created. I also liked a quote that pictures the night like a blackboard where the events of the upcoming day will be written:

"Lying in bed at home, clouds covering the sky, streetlights turning off at midnight, she had always imagined darkness to be a blanked canvas of history upon which the new day could be drawn."

Even though the story is strange and I didn't get all of it, it made me curious about other Tim Lebbon's works and about the other stories that will be gathered in "The Second Humdrumming Book of Horror Stories".

In the mailbox

This week things run a little slow, tiring week at work, the European Championship, with a very dissapointing match made by Romania, a game made without courage and a burglary attempt on my car, nothing stolen but the right side door is damaged. Still I had some happy moments too, with new books received:

- "Havemercy" by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett (through the courtesy of Jaida Jones and Bantam Spectra);

- "The Wizard Lord" by Lawrence Watt-Evans (through the courtesy of Lawrence Watt-Evans and TOR);

- "The Ninth Talisman" by Lawrence Watt-Evans (through the courtesy of Lawrence Watt-Evans and TOR);

- "The Summer Palace" by Lawrence Watt-Evans (through the courtesy of Lawrence Watt-Evans and TOR);

- "Feast of Souls" by C.S. Friedman (through the courtesy of C.S. Friedman and DAW Books);

- "The Time of Terror" by Seth Hunter (through the courtesy of Headline Review).

Thank you very much.

British Fantasy Society Awards 2008

The British Fantasy Society announced the list of nominees for the BFS Awards 2008. The full list has a total of 188 nominees for the following categories: Best Novel (August Derleth Fantasy Award - 39 titles), Best Novella (24 titles), Best Short Fiction (48 titles), Best Collection (9 titles), Best Anthology (17 titles), Best Artist (18 names), Best Small Press (25 publishers) and Best Non-Fiction (8 titles). Also there will be two additional awards, "Karl Edward Wagner Special Award" and "Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer". The comprehensive list, that you can find at the British Fantasy Society site, includes names like Richard Bachman (I wonder who is he? :)), Clive Barker, Joe Hill, Tim Lebbon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, Steven Erikson and Lucius Shepard, just to name a few. The BFS Awards 2008 will be presented at Fantasycon 2008, that will take place between 19th and 21st September 2008 at Britannia Hotel in Nottingham.

"The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper" by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund

"The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper"

by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund

Format: Paperback, 512 pages

Publisher: Constable & Robinson

One of the greatest mysteries of the world is that of the identity of Jack the Ripper. When I was a child I saw a movie about Jack the Ripper and since then I'm more than curious about this subject. "The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper" by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund gathers a great amount of information on the subject and some theories on the case.

The first part of the book offers us a good view on the events that occured in 1888 in the Whitechapel area of London. This section of the book introduces us the victims, the suspects, the police investigation and the events. This section offers the complete events arranged in chronological order, the facts of the case and the background of the victims. Also here we will find other information such as the witness declarations, police views completed with some autopsy reports and the Jack the Ripper's letters received by the police, the "Dear Boss" letter, the "Saucy Jack" postcard and the "From Hell" letter.

The second part of the book is composed by different theories made by Ripperologists. Their essays on the subject talk about different theories and research made on the identity of Jack the Ripper, pointing to one of the suspects which the author of the essay believe to be the true Jack the Ripper, with some of them pointing the same suspect. Also we find essays in which the author talks about his passion for the subject, about the researches made by him and about his theory on the identity of Jack the Ripper. Some of them write essays different from the general line and talk about a diary of Jack the Ripper, about a political conspiracy and about the opinion of the mystery novels author, Patricia Cornwell, on the case.

At the end of the book you'll find a list of books and movies about Jack the Ripper gathered in Bibliography and Filmography sections. I know that the true identity of Jack the Ripper remains and I think will remain a mystery, but Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund's book is an excellent source for information on the case and anybody interested in Jack the Ripper will find all the needed information in "The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper".

Little pleasures

Now I know that this post walks on another path than my usual posts, but as you've seen here besides fantasy literature I'm a lover of fantasy art too. I have to tell you that a possible explanation can be that I grew up in a house were art was at her home. My mother's greatest passion is painting, although she doesn't have much time to paint nowadays, and my father was a drawing teacher, now retired.

One of my every day pleasures are offered by Google, when they change the letters of their heading with pictures that symbolize an event of the respective day. I will digress a little now and I will tell you that in John Joseph Adams' anthology, "Wastelands", that I read this year one story has something regarding this subject. In Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" the main character, caught in an apocalyptic event, googles at one point of the story and finds the Os from Google replaced by two mushroom clouds of an atomic bomb (creepy!). So, today Google offers us the pleasure of meeting Diego Velázquez with the help of another very nice header.

My parents have an album with Velázquez's paintings and I really love his works. The Google header appears because the painter was born on June 6, 1599. He was born in Seville, Spain, his full name is Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, but he's commonly known as Diego Velázquez and he was an important portrait artist and the leading painter in the court of King Philip IV. He died in Madrid on August 6, 1660. You can find an excellent biography of the painter on Wikipedia.

Speaking of art, at SF Signal you can find an excellent article in which several artists talk about "The 'Responsability' of Cover Art".

"Ravenous" by Ray Garton

"Ravenous"

by Ray Garton

Format: Paperback, 342 pages

Publisher: Leisure Fiction

Ray Garton has more than 20 novels published and he was nominated for the Bram Stoker award in 1988, for his novel "Live Girls". "Ravenous" is my first intersection with Ray Garton's works.

The Californian town Big Rock has a problem with a serial rapist. When Emily Crane, a local police receptionist, is raped by a half-human being and she kills him, the town's problem is not solved, but it's getting worse. Although Emily Crane kills her attacker, the sheriff Arlin Hurley sees him walking out from the morgue. After that the madness is starting and Sheriff Hurley will be surprised to find out that his town has a werewolf's infestation.

Ray Garton steps outside the werewolves stories boundaries. He depicts them in a different light, picturing his werewolves not as a lonely and unfortunate human, but as a pack of savage and soulless beasts. Also in Garton's novel the lycanthropy is not transmitted through bite as usual in this kind of stories, but is rather a sexual transmitted disease.

The pace of the novel is pretty good, although "Ravenous" starts and ends in a fast pace, but throughout the novel it slows down. The characters are rather flat, missing an in depth description and they doesn't attract too much. Daniel Fargo, the werewolf hunter, is also a common figure and it reminds me too much of Van Helsing. On the other hand, the community of Big Rock is well build, with realistic problems and activities. The end of the novel has an illogical situation in my opinion, but I will not get into details because in that case I will spoil your read.

Sometimes all the action of the novel seems only an excuse for sex scenes. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with sex scenes, I know that this scenes are an important part of modern novels and I remember that in my school days we had a book at the library that had hints of a sexual scene and everybody read that part, so when the book was opened it opened at that exact page because of the multiple use. Like I said in "Ravenous" lycanthropy is a sexual transmitted disease but the sex scenes are too many and some of them without an obvious relevance to the story.

"Ravenous" despite his flaws is a fun horror read that you can take in vacations or at the beach and Ray Garton has the merit of coming up with new ideas in werewolves stories.

Cover art

Subterranean Press will release this fall an edition of Orson Scott Card's fantasy novella, "Stonefather". They published on their site the cover art of the edition, an excellent work made by Tom Kidd. As the article states Tom Kidd will have some interior pen-and-ink illustrations, too. I really like the cover art and I can only imagine the interior art, so I can't wait to see the illustrations.