Got an email from Amazon the other day reminding me that Frank Black, playing as Black Francis, has a new 7 track mini-album, entitled Svn Fngrs, out next week on Cooking Vinyl here in the UK. You can currently listen to three tracks from it over on the Black Francis website; click on the guitar at the bottom and the music player appears, complete with an interesting Pixies-jazz-style track.
Here’s the video for “I Sent Away” to whet your appetite further -
Welcome to Punktown. Enjoy your stay. If you survive.
Punktown is a violent place, a dark city full of corruption, gangs, bio-engineering, mutants and freakish fads. Deadstock is a noir-ish SF thriller/horror tale, starting with a seemingly straightforward private detective’s search for a missing doll, but soon becoming something more sinister as the plot develops and secrets are uncovered. Very much an action piece, the story speeds along with hardly a pause, Mr Thomas ably demonstrating he knows how to pace a novel. Elements of back story are judiciously scattered in the right places to keep the momentum going but giving the reader just enough time to catch breath and learn more about the central character Jeremy Stake, and the past that haunts him.
This is my first proper visit to the Punktown world of Jeffrey Thomas but it won’t be my last; there’s a follow up to this one called Blue War due from Solaris next month for a start.
Yes, Mr Banks’ publisher Little, Brown have finally given him the website he deserves; the old one was rather dated and poorly maintained, with very little in the way of regular updates. So now they’ve seen sense and called in webmeister Darren to give it not just an overhaul but a completely new house, over at www.iain-banks.net, and very fine it looks too. There’s already been more news updates in the last couple of days than there was in the last four years of the previous site, but then Iain is a bit busy at the moment, what with a new book to promote.
Now if they can sort out a new home for the very active forum hiding within the old site there’ll be a small group of very happy people.
Joe Lansdale is an author I decided to check out last year after reading numerous good reports all over the web about his work. US publisher Golden Gryphon have three collections of his short stories, still readily available in the UK. The first two, High Cotton and Bumper Crop, are regarded as the definitive collections of his short story output, selected by Joe his ownself, and it was these two I decided to read as my introduction to his writing. Bought High Cotton, was impressed, so bought Bumper Crop, and have the third one, Mad Dog Summer, a paperback only reissue of a Subterranean special edition on the increasingly more cluttered “to read” shelves.
Joe is a prolific writer, and a lot of his older stories and books can be difficult to come by. It’s just as well then that he is generous enough to host these shorter works on his website. Every Thursday a different story is uploaded, with the previous one removed, so you only get a week to read it. This week’s is a great fun piece of flash fiction - Cat, Dog, and Baby - available in the High Cotton anthology. Like much of his work it’s not for the easily offended so be warned before strolling on over to read it, complete with a short introduction on how the story came about.
If you enjoy that one keep checking that link each week, usually on a Friday here in the UK, for more masterful story telling. I’ve links below to The Book Depository for the three Golden Gryphon anthologies if you’re sufficiently impressed to want to buy them.
Mr Asher has been busy with not just one, but two new books due out this year. First up is the next of his Agent Cormac series entitled Line War, which has an Amazon date of 4 April. Nothing on Tor UK’s website as yet.
Then in May from US publisher Night Shade Books, we get another Cormac novel, called Shadow of the Scorpion or Cormac: The Early Years, a shorter tale covering events before the first book, Gridlinked. Neal has that many timelines running from book to book I don’t know how he keeps track of them all.
Got an email from Amazon the other day reminding me that Frank Black, playing as Black Francis, has a new 7 track mini-album, entitled Svn Fngrs, out next week on Cooking Vinyl here in the UK. You can currently listen to three tracks from it over on the Black Francis website; click on the guitar at the bottom and the music player appears, complete with an interesting Pixies-jazz-style track.
