| Ali B and the Forty Spaceships| It seems devilishly appropriate that in a US magazine with a western/historical theme, we’ve been blessed with a rather fabulous weird western fiction anthology this year—Dead Man’s Hand (Titan Books, May 2014) is edited by John Joseph Adams and has already ascended to the top of my own ‘fave anthology of the year’ list recently. Featuring some fabulous work by a roll call of great genre authors, there are some fabulous tales of alien gold fever, dangerous and dodgy playing cards, clockwork gunslingers, fastshooting Reverends, and reanimated corpses to be found herein. And despite a distinct ‘steampunk’-ish feel running through a number of the stories, they are all definitively set in the classic American Old West, bringing forth all the terror and heartache associated with such turbulent times. For a few years now, I’ve genuinely believed there’s a big hole where crossgenre westerns with a fantasy and/or science-fiction bent should be sitting (in a similar vein to Defiance and the tragically short-lived Firefly TV series for example), and this anthology serves as a handy reminder there’s a whole vista of endless possibilities surely going begging in this particular market. Regardless, names like Orson Scott Card, Walter Jon Williams, Elizabeth Bear, Joe R. Lansdale, Mike Resnick, Kelley Armstrong, Alan Dean Foster, Alastair Reynolds, Tad Williams, and Christie Yant won’t be lost on you guys over the pond, so you should already have this one on your wish list—it is really quite, quite excellent. I mentioned anthologies last time, too, citing them as an ideal format to allow readers to dip in and out of when there’s so much else going on, and praising the innovative nature of the many independent publishers (aka indies or small press) putting them out regularly. However, we did a disservice to one because the title of Jonathan Oliver’s award-winning anthology was missed off last time—it’s called End of the Road (Solaris, Nov. 2013), and deservedly won the British Fantasy Award for an excellent selection of original genre fiction from some brilliant and talented authors including Philip Reeve, Lavie Tidhar, Sophia McDougall, and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Sticking with the theme, albeit via a precariously thin connection to the violence thereof, I’ve been reading a few graphic novels of late and wanted to bring your attention to a couple of obscure ones you may have easily dismissed. Onslaught (Titan Comics, Sept. 2014) is by far one of the weirdest and most 112 | btsemag.com
hilarious things I’ve read in a long time and given its rather unsubtle subtitle, Excessive Space Violence For Boys and Girls, one can be forgiven for thinking this is most certainly ‘Not Suitable For Work’ (NSFW) or children—one of the stories is called “Into The Lair of the Space Wankers” for example (look it up). Written and illustrated in full colour by Greg Broadmore, this graphic work stars Dr. E. Grordbort, the self-styled master of maniacal mechanisms and Lord Cockswain, “a towering bastion of British heroism,” in a sparkling collection of wickedly black comic tales involving excessive violence, swearing, and the odd slaughter of harmless alien pond life. Featuring snippets from Grordbort’s catalogue of steampunk weaponry, a bestiary of the cosmos, a selection of dodgy testimonials, and a collection of shockingly non-PC (politically correct) posters sprinkled throughout, this really did make me cry out loud with laughter. Oh yes, and the artwork is simply gorgeous. In stark contrast to the above, we have Violent Cases (Dark Horse Books, Nov. 2013) from the pen of Neil Gaiman. This is illustrated by Dave McKean but carries a miserable palette of black, white, and greyish-brown all the way through, with the odd splash of red here and there. Presented as a form of fractured memoir, this very dark tale of violence, child abuse, and the fragility