Sycamore (preorder)

(preorder—to be published in Spring)

Dust jacket illustration by Francois Vaillancourt.

Published by Thunderstorm Books.

We’ve been fortunate enough to lock in copies of the signed, limited edition of Sycamore, the debut novel in Ian Rogers’ Black Lands series. The Thunderstorm Books edition, the first hardcover edition of the novel, is buttressed by a brand new, 32,000 word novella, The Sun Never Rises.

About the Book:

Back in 1945, the first portal opened a tear in reality leading from our world into the mysterious Black Lands, a realm of perpetual night filled with strange and deadly entities. Soon another portal appeared. Then another. Today, the government secures every portal they find, but with more and more opening, and no idea how to predict or prevent the next one’s arrival, society is teetering on the brink of panic.

Felix Renn knows the Black Lands all too well. His career as a private investigator has dragged him closer to it than most, and has garnered him a reputation for dealing with supernatural threats. But people who interact with the Black Lands have a habit of turning up dead in horrible ways—if they turn up at all—so when the chance comes up to take on a simple missing person’s case in the small town of Sycamore, he eagerly jumps at the opportunity.

Only, something else is happening in Sycamore too. A serial killer is on the loose, and as the bodies continue to pile up, it becomes clear that the perpetrator may be something less—or someone more—than human.

Felix may have thought he was done with the Black Lands, but he soon discovers a terrifying truth: the Black Lands isn’t done with him.

Edition Features:

• 7×10 oversized trim.
• Introduction by Jeffrey Thomas.
• Limited to 200 numbered copies signed by Ian Rogers.
• Includes a brand-new 32,000 word novella, The Sun Never Rises.

THE SUN NEVER RISES
(excerpt)

The sun went into eclipse but didn’t come out again.

At least that’s what all the news stations were screaming about that afternoon. They had reporters on the streets talking excitedly about this “unprecedented meteorological event,” saying an eclipse could last no longer than seven minutes or so, and this one had been going on for over an hour. I checked my watch and supposed they might have been right, but I hadn’t really been paying attention.

To be honest, I didn’t even known there was going to be an eclipse that day. I’d been in my office all morning catching up on paperwork, one of the banes of a private eye’s existence that Chandler and Hammett never mentioned in their detective novels. Around noon I got to thinking about grabbing some lunch at the deli on the corner and went to ask Sandra if she wanted to join me. She was sitting at her desk, glued to her computer monitor. I figured she was reading the latest from TMZ, which delivered what I called the three Hs—Hollywood, hoopla, and horror. I went over and stood behind her chair so I could look over her shoulder. This was something Sandra usually hated, but her attention was so focused on what she was watching that she didn’t even notice I was there.

Several video windows were open on her screen, each one showing the feed from a different news network—CNN, CBC, MS NOW, Fox News, the BBC. Sandra would listen to one for a few seconds, then mute the sound and move on to the next. The reporters were all doing stand-ups outside, their normally cool demeanors frayed at the edges, their voices a mixture of excitement and hysteria as they gestured wildly at something above and behind them.

It didn’t take long to figure out the situation. Even with Sandra hopscotching back and forth across the video windows, I got the gist pretty quickly.

I muttered, “My god,” and Sandra glanced over her shoulder at me. Then she did a double-take.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look pale.”

I almost did a double-take myself. Sandra had been acting nicer to me lately, either out of sympathy for what happened to me on my last case—a real doozy in a town called Sycamore that I was in no rush to visit again—or because of the raise I’d recently given her.

I didn’t know how I looked right then, but I was certainly feeling pale as I watched those news reports from cities along the eclipse’s path of totality. It didn’t cast them into full-on darkness, more of a hazy, yellowish half-light, as though a lampshade had been slipped over the sun. Seeing it made me feel uneasy in a way that was both familiar and unsettling.

Sandra seemed to suddenly remember that Toronto was one of those cities in line of the eclipse, and hopped out of her seat. “I need to see this for myself,” she said. “Are you coming?”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

Sandra stopped in mid-step and looked at me with blank surprise. “But this is… is… impossible,” she stammered, gesturing upward the same way the reporters had done. “Don’t you want to see it?”

“I prefer to witness the impossible after I’ve had my lunch.”

That was me, a quick-draw with the sardonic wit. I think my voice only shook a little.

Sandra didn’t seem to notice. She shook her head and said, “You’re so weird.” Then she was gone, out the door and down the stairs to the street.

I was heading back to my office when the door opened again. I figured it was Sandra and said, “What’s the matter? Forget your eclipse goggles?”

Only it wasn’t her. It was another woman. Someone I didn’t know. “Excuse me?” she said.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

The woman gave a distracted nod. “Are you Felix Renn? The private investigator?”

“Yes and yes,” I said, and offered my hand. She shook it and we took a moment to size each other up.

She was short and compact, with delicate, almost elfin features—small green eyes, a nub of nose, thin, almost nonexistent lips, short straw-coloured hair. She should have been wearing a frayed tunic and a sturdy backpack for the long journey to Mount Doom. Instead she wore a suede fall jacket over a dark blouse and tan slacks. An outfit more befitting the battlefields of Toronto’s financial district than Middle-Earth.

I gestured for her to follow me into my office.

Once we were seated, me behind my desk and her in front of it, I folded my hands in my lap and said, “So how about that eclipse? I hear they’re calling it an unprecedented meteorological event.”

“Oh, yes, right,” the woman said, sounding as distracted as her nod had been. I could see she was trying to stay focused on the task at hand, trying to be all business. That was fine by me; I wasn’t much for small talk, either.

“How can I help you?”

“My name is Janet Lemire,” she said. “My father died recently. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two years ago and his progression was very rapid. It was startling, actually, the way it ate away at his mind so quickly. Taking pieces of him every few weeks, then every few days. We were able to get him into a long-term care home this past spring, and he was gone by the fall.”

“That’s fast,” I said. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” she said, again with the distracted nod. “It was a tragedy and a mercy. At the end he wasn’t the same person he’d been even two years ago. Certainly not the man I’d grown up with, the one who had raised me and supported me and loved me. It was sad when he passed, but there was some relief there, as well. He was suffering and he wasn’t going to get better, only worse. I hate to say it, because it makes me feel incredibly guilty, but I was glad when he finally died.”

“I think it’s normal to feel that way. Dementia is an awful disease. It doesn’t just affect the person suffering from it. It affects everyone around them.”

“Yes, it does,” Janet said. “It really does.” Her eyes went distant, then they misted, then they began to run.

I pushed a box of tissues across the desk toward her. “Do you want me to look into something from your father’s life?”

Janet took a clutch of tissues, wiped her eyes, then blew her nose into them. “No,” she said in a thick voice. “His death.”

SYCAMORE
(excerpt)

It started over seventy years ago, although some people (myself included) believe it actually began much earlier than that.

On December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy bombers, designated Flight 19, left Fort Lauderdale to complete a training exercise off the Florida coast. When they failed to return, a massive search effort was carried out. Neither the planes nor the crews of Flight 19 were ever found, but something else was discovered.

Another world.

A dark dimension lying right next-door to our own.

The Black Lands.

That’s what they called it, those first explorers who went off in search of missing planes and instead found a sunless realm, a place of forever night that was filled with all manner of supernatural creatures — some of them straight out of our oldest myths and folklore, others that not even the most demented human mind could conceive.

It was a discovery that changed the world. Hundreds of portals, all of them invisible to the naked eye, had instantaneously appeared in the area where the Navy planes had vanished. Flight 19 was the first casualty of the Black Lands, but it wouldn’t be the last.

Months later, when it became clear the portals weren’t going anywhere, the powers that be decided that drastic measures must be taken. A massive section of the Atlantic Ocean encompassing nearly two million square miles was declared off-limits to all travel, business and recreational. All shipping routes and flight paths were altered to avoid the area, which over time came to be known as the Bermuda Triangle.

Policing a border of this size, especially on water, was virtually impossible, but those who disobeyed the warnings and entered the Triangle ended up discovering that this was the sort of place that policed itself. After a few years passed and more planes and ships vanished without a trace, the rest of the world began to smarten up and give the area a wide, wide berth.

Even though the loss of Flight 19 had been a terrible tragedy, and the arrival of the portals an unexpected and unsettling event, the world might have been able to move on if things had ended there.

But then another portal showed up.

On land.

###

It was in a farmer’s field outside Orrin, Kansas.

The farmer who owned the field discovered the portal by accident when he happened to drive his tractor through it. Much like Flight 19, neither the farmer nor his tractor were ever recovered, and it took several days for investigators to figure out what had happened.

By then, seven people were dead. Not by passing through the portal, but by something that had crossed over from the other side.

Eventually the authorities were able to kill the creature. A werewolf, or what is more commonly known these days as a shifter. I’ve seen pictures of it in history books.

In the aftermath, the government was at a loss for what to do with a dimensional rift on American soil. They ended up doing the only thing they could think of.

They put a fence up around it. Then they tried to move on.

When the second portal appeared four months later, in the heart of downtown Prague, the world began to realize they had a very serious problem on their hands.