As Booklist notes, “Lumley is a master of subtle horror and grotesquery, with a career spanning more than 40 forty years —this collection ranges from 1976 to 2008 — and even the oldest have aged quite well… As is the mandate of horror, these stories take off from ways in which the world is already strange — and go further into the depths of the imagination… In short, this is an excellent collection for completist fans, and a broad introduction for new readers.”

We’re reading the files for Jonathan Carroll’s mammoth short story collection, The Woman Who Married a Cloud, for final review. In the meantime, Booklist just weighed in… “Better-known as a novelist, Carroll has won more awards with his short stories, which are of a piece. Set in mundane contemporary America, they customarily focus on a man or woman in a middle-class couple whose relationship has been or is stressed, broken, empty, or tentatively developing… Carroll wants not to shock but to suggest that life really may be very, very strange.”

We’ll get right to it. China Mieville’s new novel, Railsea, is drawing near unprecedented levels of praise. Have a look…

From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review):
“Miéville (Un Lun Dun) returns to YA fiction with a superb, swashbuckling tale of adventure on the railsea, a vast prairie densely crisscrossed by train tracks… Working variations on such classics as Moby-Dick, Robinson Crusoe, and A Wizard of Earthsea, this massively imaginative and frequently playful novel features eccentric characters, amazing monsters, and, at its heart, an intense sense of wonder.”

From The AV Club:
“Miéville manages to weld a rich science-fiction concept to influences like Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson (yes, there are pirates; how could there not be?)…”

From Kirkus Reviews:
“What made Railsea a definite winner for me was the narrative. The narrator of the story is not only omniscient but also omnipresent. It is the true conductor of this train—it stops whenever it pleases and relates each character’s adventure at its own beck and call with as many or as little words as it wants. I found it extremely charming, even though I have the feeling that it might annoy some readers. I also truly appreciated the diversity of this world, in which some families are polyamorous and strong female characters abound.”

From NPR:
“[Railsea] feels like a great adventure, meant for girls and boys, as well as for the grown-up readers of science fiction and fantasy who admire the complicated worlds Miéville built for such adult novels as Perdido Street Station and Embassytown.

Look for our edition, complete with a dust jacket by Vincent Chong, later this summer. In addition, an upcoming edition of our email newsletter, Notes from the Underground, will feature an exclusive interview with China about Railsea, conducted by acclaimed new fantasy writer Kat Howard.

We’re making progress on Paolo Bacigalupi’s latest novel, The Drowned Cities. The exclusive interview for our limited edition is in hand, and the book has been fully designed and proofread. We’re merely waiting on the artwork (by Jon Foster, who also illustrated Ship Breaker), and the signature sheets.

Meanwhile, the book is not lacking for laudatory reviews:

From The Los Angeles Times:
“The Drowned Cities is not for the faint of heart… It is far more violent even than “The Hunger Games” conclusion, “Mockingay.” The action is oftentimes barbaric. Amputations are common. Even more bodies pile up as a result of atrocities committed with acid and, of course, guns. Many of the book’s minor characters delight in torturing their victims, pouring flesh-eating chemicals down bare-skinned backs and smashing their faces into the dirt. At one point Mahlia notes that surviving only creates more killing.”

From The Verge:
“The Drowned Cities stands out as one of the most brutal pieces of YA fiction in recent years… The Drowned Cities is a believably militaristic place, civilian life seeping in around the edges of the endless patriotic battles. Despite its reclamation by vines and animals, Mahlia’s world is filled with vibrant and well-sketched people, even if they treat her with — at best — veiled hostility and suspicion… After all that, it feels almost odd to say that Drowned Cities is almost uplifting for a Bacigalupi novel. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it may be because unlike some previous works, it offers the possibility of redemption as well as revenge. There’s plenty of catharsis to be had, along with an assurance that not even the most powerful are immune from harm. But it also acknowledges that the villains are tragic as well as monstrous.”

From The Washington Post:
“A new Paolo Bacigalupi novel is reason to celebrate — no matter how old you are…Bacigalupi’s latest, The Drowned Cities, is his second straight young adult release, but that shouldn’t deter the writer’s older fans from picking up the book (even if you have to do it on the sly).

We’ll soon be stocking a pair of beyond excellent short story collections by Howard Waldrop, both published by Old Earth Books.

Things Will Never Be the Same focuses on Howard’s shorter tales, including 16 of them, while Other Worlds, Better Lives gathers seven of his novella-length excursions into the strange, including the classic short novel, A Dozen Tough Jobs.

Don’t take our word for it. Here’s a smattering of praise for Howard:

From Tim Powers:
“There’s no better writer alive than Howard Waldrop, and here are all his best stories, with funny and fascinating afterwords — you need this book.”

From Connie Willis:
“It always feels like Christmas when a new Howard Waldrop collection arrives, and this one is as crammed with wonderful presents as Santa’s sack. This is even better than getting a BB gun!”

From George R. R. Martin:
“The only problem with Things Will Never Be the Same is that it’s not nearly long enough. Sure, sure, it’s chock full of great stories by the best short fiction writer of his generation, modern classics like “The Ugly Chickens” and “Flying Saucer Rock n Roll” and “Heart of Whitenesse” and many more… but there are two or three times as many terrific Waldrop stories, equally good and sometimes even better, that have been left out for want of space. There’s only one solution. Read this book… and then go out and track down all of Waldrop’s other collections and read them too.”

Now, to the book’s description and table of contents:

The stories collected here, written between August of 1987 and May of 1990, demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities. Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my “To the Promised Land” is built around two speculative fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocketships to other worlds. But in fact we’ve sent plenty of rocketships to other worlds by now, so only my story’s alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it’s the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story.

—Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Limited: 150 signed numbered copies, bound in leather and cloth
Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• The Dead Man’s Eyes
• Enter A Soldier. Later: Enter Another
• To The Promised Land
• Chip Runner
• A Sleep And A Forgetting
• In Another Country
• The Asenion Solution
• We Are For The Dark
• Lion Time In Timbuctoo
• A Tip On A Turtle

Our warehouse is awash in copies of Robert McCammon’s latest Matthew Corbett adventure, The Providence Rider. Unsigned trade hardcovers have gone out to our large online retail accounts and wholesalers, while individual orders are waiting for Rick to be here to sign copies on June 19-21.

We have a lot of promotion planned for this novel—one of the best we’ve ever published—and expect reviews to spring up all over the net, and in print, as well. The latest is from Library Journal: “McCammon has constructed an intriguing series of suspense novels using a historical setting with interesting details and characters… [H]e has managed to keep his main character viable and credible as Corbett continues to confront dangerous situations. Fans of the earlier books will enjoy this compelling follow-up.”

Our latest offering at Subterranean is a strong, 10,000 word tale by Caitlin R. Kiernan: “Random Thoughts before a Fatal Crash“. Read it to see why Cait’s one of our finest purveyors of short fiction.

In other Kiernan news, we’re doing the final file review of her new collection, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. Remember, the Signed Limited Edition includes a bonus 20,000 word hardcover collection, The Yellow Book.

Copies of John Scalzi’s 24 Frames into the Future are in our wherehouse, where we’re checking them in, and slotting them into our shipping schedule. If you haven’t picked one up, now’s a great time to avail yourself of 400+ pages of Scalzi’s unfiltered wit.

We’re days away from finishing shipping the capstone novella in Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam series. ad eternum is reviewing and selling as well as its predecessors. Today, we received another review to add to its ledger of same.

From SF Signal:
“The writing is top notch: stylish without being hard to consume, descriptive without being padded, and conducive to engrossing the reader into this world… [B]ased on this read of Ad Eternum, I think the New Amsterdam series is worth checking out.”

As a reminder, here’s a bit from the earlier PW review:
“…there are enough incidents and reunions with old acquaintances to prompt Bear’s likable wampyr to insightful reflection on the shortcomings of immortality, and to espouse wisdom that comes from more than one lifetime of having to deal with mortals and their all-too-human natures.”

Finally, don’t forget: The signed limited edition comes with a 9,000 word chapbook, Underground, available nowhere else.