Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Sandy Ferber

Falling Angel: A masterful horror novel

Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg

At one point in William Hjortsberg‘s masterful horror novel, Falling Angel, Epiphany Proudfoot, a 17-year-old voodoo priestess, tells the detective hero Harry Angel, “you sure know a lot about the city.” The city in question is the New York of 1959, and if Angel knows a lot about this crazy burg, then Hjortsberg, in the course of this tale, demonstrates that he knows even more.

While much has been said of this book’s scary elements — its voodoo ceremonies and Black Mass meeting and horrible murders — what impressed me most about this tale is the incredible attention to realistic detail that the author invests it with.

The House on the Borderland: Awe and shudders

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson‘s first published novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907), is a tale of survival after a foundering at sea, replete with carnivorous trees, crab monsters, bipedal slugmen and giant octopi. In his now-classic second novel, The House on the Borderland, which was released the following year, Hodgson, remarkably, upped the ante, and the result is one of the first instances of “cosmic horror” in literature,

The Black Spider: A horror novella

The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf

A novella-length piece written by a Swiss pastor in 1842 that initially seems to serve more as a religious parable than anything else — an unlikely choice as a Top 100 Horror selection, one would think. And yet, there it is, Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (or, as it was titled in its original German, Die schwarze Spinne), holding pride of place in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman‘s excellent overview volume Horror: 100 Best Books.

The Boats of the Glen Carrig: As memorable as can be

The Boats of the Glen Carrig by William Hope Hodgson

The conventional words of wisdom for any aspiring new author have long been “write what you know,” a bit of advice that English author William Hope Hodgson seemingly took to heart with his first published novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Before embarking on his writing career, Hodgson had spent eight years at sea, first as an apprentice for four years and then, after a two-year break, as a third mate for another long stretch.

Three Hearts and Three Lions: A compact hard fantasy epic

Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson

Chosen for inclusion in both David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels and Cawthorn & Moorcock’s Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, Three Hearts and Three Lions had long been on my “must read someday” list. This compactly written epic of “hard fantasy” was first serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953 and released in an expanded book format in 1961.

December 17th, 2013. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Poul Anderson | SFF Reviews | 7 comments |

Bill, the Galactic Hero: Very amusing

Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison

I once met a woman in a bookstore who was in the process of buying Harry Harrison’s 1965 classic Bill, the Galactic Hero. She told me that she’d read it many times already, and that it was the funniest book ever. Well, I’ve never forgotten that conversation, and had long been meaning to ascertain whether or not this woman was right. It took me almost 20 years to get around to this book, but having just finished Bill,

December 10th, 2013. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Harry Harrison | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

The House of Souls: The Best of Arthur Machen

The House of Souls: The Best of Arthur Machen by Arthur Machen

I had been wanting to check out Arthur Machen’s 1906 collection of short stories, entitled The House of Souls, for quite some time; ever since I had read two highly laudatory pieces written about this work and its author. The first was H.P. Lovecraft‘s comments in his widely referred to essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in which he claims “Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen.”

Some of Your Blood: A very sad book

Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon

In the 1978 horror movie Martin, writer/director George A. Romero presented us with a young man who enjoys killing people and drinking their blood, but who may or may not be a so-called “vampire”; the film is wonderfully ambiguous all the way down the line on that score. Seventeen years before Martin skulked through the dreary suburbs of Pittsburgh, however, another unconventional vampire was given to the world, in the pages of Theodore Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood.

Invaders from Earth: A perfect little sci-fi adventure

Invaders from Earth by Robert Silverberg

There is apparently a marked difference in the novels that sci-fi great Robert Silverberg wrote before 1967 and the ones he penned from ’67 to eight or nine years after. Those two dozen novels of the 1954-’65 period, it has been said, are well-written, polished, plot-driven tales reminiscent of the pulp era of sci-fi’s Golden Age. But after author/editor Frederik Pohl gave Silverberg freedom to write as he chose in ’67, a new, more mature, more literate quality entered Silverberg’s work, and the two dozen novels that he wrote during this second phase of his career are often cited as his best.

Deus Irae: A way-out scenario from Dick and Zelazny

Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick

Of the 36 science fiction novels, nine mainstream novels, one children’s book and over 120 short stories that cult author Philip K. Dick produced before his premature death at age 53, in 1982, only two creations were done in collaboration with another author. The first was 1966’s The Ganymede Takeover, which Dick co-wrote with budding writer Ray Nelson. An alien invasion novel that deals with the snakelike telepathic inhabitants of the Jovian moon as well as the Terran rebels who resist them,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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