The Adventures of Roderick Langham: now out, in print and ebook!

free epub | free mobi | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

Roderick Langham is a retired soldier, disgraced police inspector, and reluctant occult detective. He inhabits the world of Sherlock Holmes, investigates cases with John Watson and Sebastian Moran, and is able to perceive the reality concealed by the illusion of everyday appearances. These nine stories follow Langham from his first encounter with the inexplicable in the Himalayan hills to his investigation of the wreck of the Demeter and his growing realisation that the dales, moors, and wolds which surround his Yorkshire refuge are home to an evil far older than the honeycomb of medieval monasteries and Roman ruins suggests.

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Rafe McGregor is the author of The Value of Literature, The Architect of Murder, six collections of short fiction, and one hundred and fifty magazine articles, journal papers, and review essays. He lectures at the University of York and can be found online at @rafemcgregor. The cover is by Dave Elsey.

Praise for Rafe McGregor’s The Architect of Murder:

“Arthur Conan Doyle is alive and well, and writing under the name Rafe McGregor.” – Tess Gerritsen

“Rafe McGregor is the architect of murderously good historical fiction.” – Gyles Brandreth

“…a fascinating marriage of investigative mayhem with keen attention to historical detail…” – Graham Hurley

“There’s some dandy police procedure…and plenty of interesting characters to carry the story along.” – Bill Crider

“…an exciting read, giving a very authentic flavour of the period…” – Bernard Knight

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Review copies available in print, pdf, epub and mobi. Please send requests to theakersquarterlyfiction@gmail.com.

Available for pre-order: Space University Trent: Hyperparasite by Walt Brunston

Now available for pre-order, the first ebook novella from Theaker's Paperback Library. It's a reprint of Walt Brunston's Space University Trent: Hyperparasite, his adaptation of the classic (but rarely seen) television episode, which first appeared in TQF13. It'll be out on April 30.

In this short novella Mack Hardiman leads the spacefaring university's investigation into a lost colony on the world Adontis. The ebook also includes an introduction to this much-loved show and, for reference, a complete list of its episodes.

It's Kindle-only for the time being. Just 99p in the UK.

Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #47 – out now!

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #47. Didn’t think we would get this far, did you? You thought we’d fall for your pathetic little traps. The giant toothpicks in the walls. The pits filled with rabid badgers. The radioactive bananas.

But we survived all of that, and here we are with another issue of probably the best fantasy zine in the world! (Though once again we missed out on a Hugo nomination. It’s almost as if the voters don’t know we exist! Either that or we seem so utterly professional that we must surely be a semiprozine, if not a fully-fledged magazine! Yes, that must be it.)

So here is Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #47, unburdened by awards, and bouncing with glee, ready to make you slightly happier than you already are: free epub, free mobi, free pdf, print UK, print USA, Kindle UK store, Kindle US store.

It features four stories. “Abandon” by Mitchell Edgeworth takes the Black Swan into spooky territory. Antonella Coriander, who almost definitely exists, and is almost definitely not a pseudonym used to disguise our woeful lack of female contributors, begins her new serial Les Aventures Fantastiques de Beatrice et Veronique with “Bike Ride to Peril”.

In Chris Roper’s story “Witchinga” a guy finds out that there are worse things than losing your job, even in the USA. And finally Anthony Malone’s satire “Zombie & Son” does its best to get us into legal trouble with a parody of beloved members of the British establishment which almost certainly does not reflect the real nature of any of the persons concerned.

The issue also includes reviews by Stephen Theaker, Douglas J. Ogurek and Jacob Edwards of: Divergent, Doctor Who: The Web of Fear, Elvenquest: The Complete Second Series, The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, Ghost Train to New Orleans by Mur Lafferty, The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza by James Kochalka, Her, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, I, Frankenstein, Justice League of America, Vol. 1, New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, Template by Matthew Hughes, Terra Obscura: S.M.A.S.H. of Two Worlds, The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb, and Wonder Woman Unbound by Tim Hanley.

These swanky shoes are brought to you by the following elves:

Anthony Malone’s fiction has been published in Murky Depths, The Delinquent, Lowestoft Chronicle, The Quotable, Mad Swirl, Litro Online, Bull Magazine and many others and his short stories are included in the anthologies Villainy (Halls Brothers Entertainment), Dieselpunk (Static Movement), Cup of Joe (Wicked East Press) and others. He has read at numerous Live–Lit events and recorded for London Link Radio. He lives in London. Website: www.anthonymalone.co.uk.

Antonella Coriander has not previously been published, to her great dismay. Her story in this issue is the first in what we hope will be a new ongoing Oulippean serial.

Chris Roper writes, teaches and takes photographs in Vietnam.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work has appeared in the BFS Journal, The Literary Review, Morpheus Tales, Gone Lawn, and several anthologies. He lives in a Chicago suburb with the woman whose husband he is and their five pets. In this issue he reviews Divergent, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, I, Frankenstein and Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. His website: www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com.

Howard Watts is a writer, artist and composer living in Seaford who provides the lovely cover art for this issue, illustrating a hypothetical moment of rest from Antonella’s story. His DeviantArt page is here.

Jacob Edwards belongs in truth to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, but we’re happy to be his bit on the side. This writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist’s website is at: www.jacobedwards.id.au. In this issue he reviews Doctor Who: The Web of Fear and Her.

Mitchell Edgeworth has recently left Australia for pastures new. His fiction has been published in Pseudopod and SQ Mag, as well as here. He keeps a blog at www.grubstreethack.wordpress.com and tweets as @mitchedgeworth. “Abandon” is the latest in his Black Swan series to appear in these pages. Like everything we publish, it can be read quite happily in isolation, but if you want to find out how the Black Swan got off the ground and into business, see his stories in #40 (“Homecoming”), #42 (“Drydock”), #43 (“Flight”) and #46 (“Customs”).

Stephen Theaker reviews a bunch of interesting things in this issue: Elvenquest: The Complete Second Series, The Exploits of Engelbrecht, Ghost Train to New Orleans, The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza, Justice League of America, Vol. 1, New Amsterdam, Template, Terra Obscura: S.M.A.S.H. of Two Worlds, The Winds of Gath and Wonder Woman Unbound. He liked some of them very much. For those readers who care about such things, four of those were purchases, four were supplied by the publishers via NetGalley, one was supplied by the publisher via Audible, and one was a birthday present. Theaker’s work has also appeared in Black Static, Interzone, Prism and the BFS Journal.

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Bonus! To celebrate this new issue, all our Amazon exclusive ebooks are absolutely free this week (the offers should kick in over the course of the day): Professor Challenger in Space, Quiet, the Tin Can Brains Are Hunting!, The Fear Man, Howard Phillips in His Nerves Extruded, Howard Phillips and the Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta, Howard Phillips and the Day the Moon Wept Blood, The Mercury Annual and Pilgrims at the White Horizon.

All 46 back issues of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.

Theakerly plans for 2014

We’ve been a bit quiet on here since the beginning of the year, with just the one blog post so far, a review from Douglas, but don’t fear! We’re still here! I’ve been writing quite a bit, but most of it has gone into interminable BFS discussions of one kind or another.

So, what are our plans for this year of Theaker’s? Well, we aim to publish four quarterly issues of the magazine as usual, in March, June, September and December, or thereabouts. We will also publish, at long last, John’s novel The Hatchling in paperback and ebook.

I’m aiming once again to have a new review here on the blog each Monday (I managed that about 35 times in 2013). The Wednesday lists may or may not make a comeback. In truth, I rather resent them for attracting more hits than the reviews which require so much more work to produce!

The Theakerly thoughts will definitely return. They provide a useful and moderately healthy way to empty the rubbish from my head. Their absence over the last month has principally been down to the frequency with which my thoughts have been unpublishable.

On the reviews front, I’ve been asking publishers to take us off their mailing lists for print review copies. I hardly ever read print books these days and when I try they take me three or four times as long as they should, however good the books.

It’s a shame, because there are few feelings as pleasant as receiving a mystery book package in the post. But nice as that is, and grateful as I was to receive them, I think they were a drag on my reviewing and reading.

Let’s see how it goes. Whatever your plans for the year, I hope they come to fruition!

Pilgrims at the White Horizon by Michael Wyndham Thomas – now out!

It began with The Mercury Annual. It ends here!

Kidresh, Mopatakeh and Dreest, panicked Tharles of Razalia, separated from Earth by vast distances and untold layers of reality, are determined to contact their maker, the one who left their world unfinished. That wasn’t Keith Huxtable, expert handyman, but since he’s just about the only person who remembers their world’s fleeting appearance in a 1950s comic strip, he’s the one they’ve got pegged! The unfinished bits are spreading. Eating away at Razalia. Beings are falling in and they don’t come out. Can Keith fix it? And get back home in time to save his comics collection and his marriage?

A tribute to the magic of British annuals! A father and daughter in an intergalactic adventure beyond imagination! The story you weren’t expecting but will never forget!

Pilgrims at the White Horizon. Part 2 of Valiant Razalia.
ISBN 978-0-9561533-4-0. 300pp. Ebook/paperback. Cover art by Simon Bell. Cover collage and design by the publisher.

“one of the strangest stories I have read in a long while”
— Antony G. Williams, The British Fantasy Society, of The Mercury Annual

Available in the following convenient places:

Print
At Amazon.co.uk
At Amazon.com

Ebook (DRM-free)
At Amazon.co.uk
At Amazon.com

Kindle MatchBook
Every print copy purchased from Amazon will get you a free Kindle copy, once Amazon’s MatchBook kicks in! (Currently expected in October.)

Kindle lending library
If you have Amazon Prime you can borrow the ebook for free!

The Mercury Annual
Pilgrims at the White Horizon can be read perfectly well without having read its predecessor, but completists should know that The Mercury Annual is now free on Kindle and will remain so for the next few days (Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com).

Review copies
If you produce reviews (it doesn't matter where – Amazon, Goodreads, blogs, magazines, Twitter, Facebook, oral declamations) get in touch and we’ll be delighted to send you a free ebook copy of Pilgrims (or any of our other books).

Pilgrims launch – photographs!

Yesterday was the launch of Pilgrims at the White Horizon, and, astonishingly, even though it was the night of the UK premiere of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the last ever episode of The IT Crowd, people came!

A few photos of the event, which took place at The Light House Media Centre in Wolverhampton.

Here is Michael Thomas reading from the book:

And from a distance:

And here he is being quizzed about the book by Campbell Perry:

As I mentioned at the launch, this is probably the oddest novel I’ve ever finished reading. But then it is a sequel to The Mercury Annual, a book that ended with what was effectively a sixty-page conversation!

Be sure to give this one a chance to cast its peculiar, poetic spell on you!

More information about the new book will appear on the site tomorrow, to coincide with its predecessor being free for a few days.

Pilgrims at the White Horizon: launching on Friday at 7.00 pm, Wolverhampton

In 2009 we published a novel by Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Mercury Annual. That was a mistake. I love the book and I’m glad it’s been published, but it deserved a better publisher than me, one dedicated to publishing books and bringing them to readers’ attention rather than squeezing them in around a quarterly magazine! I haven’t made time to do any of the books I’ve published by other people any justice.

However, undeterred by my rubbishness Michael Thomas came back to us with the follow-up, and after a dilatory gestation period Pilgrims at the White Horizon will finally be launched this Friday, at 7.00 pm, at the Light House in Wolverhampton.

In this volume Keith is dragged off to Valiant Razalia, a far-off world hardly anyone remembers – because it only ever appeared in one panel of one comic strip in one British annual! – by bizarre alien beings who think he’s their creator and want him to finish the job. Along for the ride is Keith’s daughter, for whom it’s at least a break from her studies.

This will probably be the last book I publish for a while by anyone but me and John (unless I decide to give book publishing something more than a half-hearted go). I’ve taken an absolute age to get it ready for publication and I feel terrible about that. But it’s worth the wait. If you can’t make it to the Light House, watch out for it on Amazon this weekend.

Event: Book launch! Of Michael W. Thomas’s new novel, Pilgrims at the White Horizon. Date: Friday, 27 September 2013, 7.00 pm to 9.00 pm. Venue: The Light House Media Centre, Wolverhampton. http://www.light-house.co.uk/.

For more information about the author see: http://www.michaelwthomas.co.uk/

Theaker's plans for 2013

Visits to our blog have reached new heights recently, reaching 5,000 monthly hits for the first time – and then 6,000! Such big leaps are normally a sign that someone is moaning about us (we are awful, awful people!), but this time I'm choosing to believe it's because there are hundreds – thousands! – of you out there fascinated by our activities, and wondering what our plans are for reviewing and publishing this year.

Well, since you asked... Last year I got into a muddle trying to review every single thing I read, so this year I'm going to limit my ambitions to writing just one new review each week to appear on the Theaker's Quarterly blog each Monday. I've earmarked Sunday mornings for writing reviews (so bye bye Jonathan Ross Show!). Reviews by our other contributors will appear on Fridays, as well as reviews that appeared for the first time in the magazine's previous issue.

As far as publishing goes, we've decided to skip the fourth issue of TQF planned for 2012 rather than rushing something out (in a throwback to our early days I was going to use one of my unpublished novels, but it really wasn't good enough – hard to believe, I know!) and move straight to the 2013 issues. So four issues this year, planned for March, June, September and December.

We also have two books loosely scheduled to come out this year in paperback and ebook: John's novel The Hatchling and Michael Wyndham Thomas's Pilgrims at the White Horizon. Both are very good, and I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I've enjoyed working on them. No other books planned at present (and no submissions, please), because we just don't have the time to do them justice. John's book has been on our schedule for four or five years now!

Five silly novels – now on Kindle!

  

My last post here was to apologise for our lack of activity, and this one's to announce we've published four new ebooks, as well as finally producing the Kindle version of an old favourite! Quite a turnaround! So what's going on? Well, these four NaNoWriMo novels appeared in our magazine in our early days, and we'd always meant to publish them as books, but never made the time. And in truth, they weren't really worth the effort! But that didn't stop them clogging up our publishing plans, and getting in the way of us doing more interesting projects. So, I thought, let's just get the buggers out and move on.

None of them are particularly good, and all bear the scars of having been written in under a month, but there's a good joke every twenty pages or so in each of them. (It's only the one joke, but it is recycled mercilessly.*) I ummed and ahhed for a while about whether to publish Howard's novels under his own name, but, you know, he did gamble away all his rights in them to me in a late-night game of Carcassonne. Putting my name on them just makes the admin easier.

Links are to Amazon UK, but the books are available on Kindle worldwide. All these ebooks are Kindle exclusives for now.

Quiet, the Tin Can Brains Are Hunting! – a semi-sequel to Professor Challenger in Space, this was originally published as a Rocket eBook all the way back on 22 January 2001. Mrs Challenger sends a mismatched team of heroes and villains out on a mission to stop the tin can brains.

The Fear Man – the President of Earth battles the universe to get his unborn daughter back. Great idea, poor execution!

Howard Phillips in His Nerves Extruded – following the events of the as yet unpublished (and largely unwritten) Howard Phillips and the Ghastly Mountain Howard is looking for more members to join his band. He has hired beautiful actresses to carry him around on a palanquin.

Howard Phillips and the Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta – Howard goes on a mission to a haunted undersea base.

Howard Phillips and the Day the Moon Wept Blood – the worst writer in the world mounts a literary takeover of England, seizing control of our bookshops and making his base at the British Library.

*And like most of the jokes in these books, that line was stolen from Groo the Wanderer.

Five Forgotten Stories - three copies up for grabs on Goodreads!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Five Forgotten Stories

by John Hall

Giveaway ends July 31, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

If you don't win, the book's currently available for just 86p/$1.42 on Kindle (see Amazon UK and Amazon US respectively). Free Kindle/epub copies available upon request for bloggers and reviewers.

The Arthur Conan Doyle Weirdnight – Photographic Evidence!

The Conan Doyle Weirdnight was tremendously entertaining. Though initial attendance was not huge, by the end many pubgoers had been tempted in by the sight of men in fancy suits!

There were three readings. Here is Joshua Roberts, reading from "The Captain of the Pole Star".

Here's Martin Pursey, who read from "A Pastoral Horror":

And here's Robin Bailey, reading from "The Terror of Blue John Gap":

Conan Doyle night tomorrow!

I'm having a very literary fortnight. Last night was the twin launch of Michael Wyndham Thomas's Port Winston Mulberry (designed by Littlejohn and Bray) and Roz Goddard's The Sopranos Sonnets (Nine Arches Press) at the extremely impressive Priory Rooms in Birmingham.

On Saturday night (July 17) we'll be launching our own new book, The Conan Doyle Weirdbook, as part of Oxfam Books and Music Moseley's Conan Doyle Weirdnight. It's at the Prince of Wales pub, Alcester Road, Moseley Village, Birmingham, starting at 7.30pm. More details here. The price of admission, don't forget, is a book donation!

The Weirdbook will be exclusively available from Oxfam Books and Music Moseley for a period, before being made more widely available. The wonderful cover art is by John Shanks.

And then the Saturday after next (July 31) we have the British Fantasy Society open afternoon in London: 1pm until 5pm at the The George, 213 Strand, London, WC2R 1AP, featuring Angry Robot's Lauren Beukes. More details here.

Five Forgotten Stories, by John Hall

Astute readers will recall that in the winter of 1934–1935, Robert Harrison Blake – whose last days are recorded in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” – wrote five weird tales. There has been some controversy over these stories, notably the question as to whether they were published under different titles or lost when Blake met his untimely demise. Some ten years ago, now, I acquired an old exercise book which belonged to a certain “Robert Blake” of Providence. The document has been reliably dated to the 1930s and appears to have taken sixty-odd years to make the journey from his hands in Rhode Island, New England to mine in Yorkshire, old England. Although it is impossible to verify the identity of the author beyond a reasonable doubt, the book contains outlines for five tales with the titles mentioned by Lovecraft.

These present tales are offered as my own attempts to reconstruct them.

The second book in Theaker's Paperback Library, Five Forgotten Stories, by the mysterious John Hall, is now inching its way out into the world. It's available from Lulu (here: Five Forgotten Stories), Amazon and many other fine bookshops.

The five stories in this collection – The Stairs in the Crypt, Shaggai, The Burrower Beneath, The Feaster from the Stars and In the Vale of Pnath – previously appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction.

John Hall is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles, Sexton Blake, H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery.

The cover art is by John Shanks, who draws on demand at Homegrown Goodness.

"Required reading for the Lovecraftian fanatic." – The eNovella Review

Professor Challenger in Space - [no longer] free on Feedbooks

By way of advertising our newer books, we've made our very first publication, Professor Challenger in Space, available for free download from Feedbooks.

Arthur Conan Doyle's great science-hero, Professor Challenger, sets off on new and terrifying adventures across the galaxy! First he gathers together the old gang – Professor Summerlee, Lord Roxton, and the journalist, Edward Malone – and then they are off on the one journey they never before undertook – into space! They meet unusual new friends, encounter vicious new enemies, and at least one of the party falls victim to violence! Another may well fall in love! And the others are sure to talk, argue, drink whisky and smoke cigars, if nothing else!

Though I'm much prouder of the things we're publishing nowadays, I have to admit I still have a soft spot for this silly book.

Update (26/9/12): after a couple of years - and over four thousand downloads! - we've taken this book down from Feedbooks. You can now find it on Kindle. Here it is on Amazon.com, and here it is on Amazon.co.uk.

The Mercury Annual, by Michael Wyndham Thomas

The Razalians take the sun’s contempt in good part. The nature of their planet has long inured them to disappointment – hope, too, but this isn’t as bleak as it may sound. They know examples aplenty of what hope can lead to – most notably, in their system, the Twenty Aeons war between Barask and Sehunda, adjacent planets at the opposite end of the arc. There, the hope ignited and persisted on both sides that the other would surrender its world. So powerful did the hope grow that the actual reason for hostilities was clean forgotten by Aeon Three. It finally took the intervention of the sun – tired of seeing its spiral path littered with phosphorescent cannon-shafts and the goggling eyes of garotted helots – to lay all hope to rest. For three and thirty parts of an aeon, it looped around these two planets alone, sending out secondary rays to warm the rest of the arc (apart from Razalia, which got a dab or two, equal to an electric fire left on for half-an-hour every other day). Closer and closer it looped, till the famed serpent’s-tail rivers of Barask were boiling and the thousand-foot snow-trees of Sehunda were stripped of their magenta bark. Only then did the planets’ leaders cease hostilities.

"one of the strangest stories I have read in a long while ... The characters are well-drawn, the scenario and relationships entirely convincing. … I will be looking to get hold of Part 2 when it comes out." – Anthony Williams, Prism

A new book by Michael Wyndham Thomas! The Mercury Annual is now available from Lulu, Amazon and all over the place, for about £6.99 – an ebook version is available from Lulu for £2.50!

And now available on Kindle!

Small, unfinished, more like a blueprint for a world than the real thing, Razalia props up one end of the Arc of the Fifteen Planets. In some places, its landscape looks like the efforts of a water-colourist suddenly called away from his easel. The Razalians live with the gaps – those spaces of unfathomable white – in many of their ridges, valleys, forests.

And then the white begins to move…

Parts of this book first appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #8 and #14.

Michael Wyndham Thomas is a poet, fiction-writer, dramatist and musician who has been widely published in the UK, Europe and North America. His first poetry collection, God's Machynlleth and Other Poems, is available from Flarestack, while Port Winston Mulberry is forthcoming from Peterloo Poets. His CD, Seventeen Poems (and a Bit of a Song), is now on release from MayB Studios. Publication of his novel, The Song of the Sun, is also forthcoming, as are productions of his play, Mr Culverson's Apostle. Since April 2004 Michael has been poet-in-residence at the annual Robert Frost Poetry Festival, Key West, Florida. In consequence, he is now Poet-at-Large in the Navy of the Conch Republic of Key West. He undertakes these "bardic" duties with due solemnity and happy bafflement. See www.michaelwthomas.co.uk for more information.

The cover art is from Simon Bell, an artist who works in a wide range of media and lectures in Art and Design at Coventry University.

Review copies: we've taken a leaf out of PS Publishing's book on this one – we'll supply pdfs of our books to anyone who can point us to where their reviews appear (online or offline), whether that's a blog, a website, a magazine, an ezine or so on. If you'd prefer the books in another format, for example epub, just let us know. Email silveragebooks@blueyonder.co.uk and include a link to your previous reviews or the publication you're reviewing for.