Michael Shea in San Diego on August 17, 2013
Aug.08, 2013
Michael Shea is coming to San Diego to the Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore!
Come and listen to Michael as he reads from his latest novel “Assault on Sunrise.”
Join us on 08/17/2013 at 2:00 pm for this interesting event
The Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore is located in San Diego at 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302,
For more information you can call the bookstore at tel. 858-268-4747
Locus Magazine’s Faren Miller reviews ASSAULT ON SUNRISE
Aug.06, 2013
Faren MIller reviews ASSAULT ON SUNRISE in Locus Magazine
Locus Looks at Books: Faren Miller
Assault on Sunrise, Michael Shea (Tor 978- 0 -7653-2436-8, $25.99, 288pp, hc) August 2013
Though I haven’t been able to keep up with everything Michael Shea has written in various subgenres of SF and fantasy since I started reviewing his work more than 30 years ago, he never disappoints. Even when I arrive in midtrilogy (Assault on Sunrise is book two), it’s not hard to catch up with the quirky cast of players and techs associated with the future Hollywood introduced in The Extra.
As cities like Los Angeles become more like enormous slums and a few industry moguls run amok without fear of governmental restraint, some people escape to their own odd little communities: towns like Sunrise, up in the Trinity Mountains where the air is still clear and the corporate fist hasn’t quashed all freedom. But that’s about to change.
Mainly in order to strike back at the little group of upstarts who disrupted filmmaking in The Extra, Panoply Studios’ vengeful CEO trumps up a murder charge that condemns Sunrise and all of its inhabitants to the latest, most sweeping and ruthless form of judicial sentence: a ‘‘live-action’’ filming of an attack (also known as Assault on Sunrise), that follows an exhaustively planned script where invading monsters aren’t just special effects. Instead of digital manipulations, Panoply’s Hollywood conjurers deal in something more like mad science, an unholy combination of genetics and robotics.
The refugees have enough experience, and links to insiders still in the business, to get some notion of what they’ll face, yet they can only scramble to set up makeshift countermeasures as the attack escalates and grows ever more complex. Soon they’re busy stealing ‘‘rafts’’ (the flying ships suitable for either camera shots or bombings), lab testing a sample of the bizarre gel that develops into seemingly immortal, selfregenerating giant bugs, or pursuing an urgent quest for design flaws in the finished products.
Shea doesn’t simply give us harried action figures in a sketchy landscape. By Chapter XII, ‘‘The Monster’s Flesh’’, we know these people well enough to feel the host of individual presences and high emotions that jostle against each other in a passage like this one:
At the back corner of Ike’s Engine Repair’s
big-vaulted garage was a small, crowded
machine shop. Devlin bade everyone in.
Mazy, Lance, and Radner were already
there. Shutting the door, she sealed them
all in the cold oily smell of machinery. It
was somehow the right scent, a smell of
mustered weapons, of danger and urgent
defenses.
One character – whose wife is four months pregnant in the book’s opening scene – takes a more direct hold of later chapters, speaking in the first person. Like a film’s occasional uses of close-up and specific focus among larger vistas, Curtis takes us with him into the heart of his own adventures, though he never looms as an epic hero would – not even after managing, with a ‘‘lucky shot,’’ to blow the head off an insectile invader.
Amid such mayhem, not everybody can survive, and each loss cuts deep. But enough do make it through, or get born into chaos, to leave me eager for the battles of book three, Fortress Hollywood.
Whistle and I’ll Come For You My Lad – by M.R. James
Jun.18, 2013
The great Montague Rhodes James has bequeathed a real treat in this piece. How often are we shown a ghost on a windy beach under the wide open sky? Where would the thrill of the unheimlich be, that qualm of the uncanny, with the bright heavens all unfurled above our spector? All I can say is M.R. JAMES had MY spine nailed. Between the wide, wild sea and windy sky it came seeking, darting left and right as it advanced like a hound tracking spoor, and the great James had done the deed: I’d seen a ghost, a blind appetitive thing with a vile, unearthly energy had just crawled through my mind! Thank you MRJ. You rock.
Marc Laidlaw’s LENG/ Lovecraft Unbound
Jun.14, 2013
Marc Laidlaw is ace enough to know what near neighbors horror and humor are.
The grotesque is the soul of both. In Leng we see the two strains impeccably entwined. Our narrator, newly alighted in Leng: “Never have I visited a culture where mushrooms were of such great ethnic and economic importance.” (!) “… For myself, a mere mushroom enthusiast ” (as opposed to a real mycologist!) “it was an intoxicating stroll.”
To quote Leng at length is hard to resist, but would mar the delight awaiting the unwarned reader. The narrator is penetrating the high fastnesses of Leng in search of Schurr and Perry, two renowned mycologists who have gone before him.
Our seekers at length encounter Heinrich Perry at a temple situated just below the great plateau of Leng. Evasively he indicates that his wife Danielle Schurr is not immediately on hand because, “she has been recognized as a superior practitioner of the mushroom cult.”
These initial disclosures discohere into a yet more alien landsape, a narrative tour de force of transmutation of our characters and their setting alike. In this narrative as in all good horror, the floor caves in beneath us, again, and again, and at last.
Voice From The Ooze
Jun.14, 2013
Me and the computer. Think the beginning of 2001. The chimp with the femur. In that movie, the femur, with one toss twirled like a baton to become a space station. For me, I’m still figuring out one end of that bone from the other. But I am now realizing how rewarding a dialogue can be had through this “new” (to me) medium. So, I’m going to start posting reviews of literature, contemporary and/or permanently relevant. The first one will be of Marc Laidlaw’s LENG, originally appearing in Ellen Datlow’s anthology LOVECRAFT UNBOUND. I also have a piece in the this collection, THE RECRUITER.
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Free Stuff from Author Michael Shea
In Memory Drive Slow
“In Memory Drive Slow” is a weird tale inspired by a handwritten sign the author once saw on a Sonoma Country back road.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
Year: 2017
Publisher: Hippocampus PressMichael Shea (1946–2014) was one of the most distinguished, respected, and beloved figures in the fields of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He won two World Fantasy Awards, and his <i>Nifft the Lean</i> series of fantasy adventure novels attracted a wide audience. He also wrote powerful tales of supernatural horror, including several tales elaborating upon H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
This first major volume of writings and tributes to appear after his untimely death contains an array of fiction, poetry, and other writings that demonstrate Shea’s effortless skill in different genres and styles. Four substantial tales–including the unpublished novella “Credit Card” and the award-winning “The Growlimb”–are included, together with an intriguing assortment of weird and fantastic poetry, published and unpublished, including verses that appeared at key moments in his novels and stories.
The volume features tributes to Shea’s unique personal and literary gifts by such figures as Laird Barron, Cody Goodfellow, Marc Laidlaw, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and Jason V Brock, as well as a portfolio of artwork illustrating Shea’s writings by such artists as Michael Whelan, Alan Clark, John Stewart, Allen Koszowski, and Steve Gilbert. The book concludes with a comprehensive bibliography of Shea’s writings.
This book is a poignant testimonial to the imperishable imprint that Michael Shea left upon the domain of imaginative fiction, and upon the individuals whose lives he touched.
Linda Shea, writer and artist, was married to Michael Shea for more than thirty years. S. T. Joshi is a leading author, critic, and editor in the realm of weird fiction and included Shea’s writings in several of
his anthologies, including the acclaimed <i>Black Wings</i> series.Price: $20.00
Purchase NowDemiurge – The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea
Year: 2018
Publisher: Dark RenaissanceFor more than thirty years, Michael Shea has been making his own distinctive contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos devised by H. P. Lovecraft—an entire universe of gods and monsters that hundreds of writers have imitated. But Shea has done a lot more than merely mimic Lovecraft’s prose or add a new god or “forbidden book” to the Mythos. In his Mythos tales, Shea has infused his own unique vision and perspective.The much-reprinted “Fat Face” takes us into the seedy underworld of prostitutes and drug dealers in San Francisco, while other tales such as “Dagoniad,” “Copping Squid,” and “Tsathoggua” vividly meld Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the contemporary world of California, with its swimming pools and beachcombers. Shea was also fascinated with Lovecraft’s novel of Antarctic horror, At the Mountains of Madness, and his stories “Under the Shelf” and “Beneath the Beardmore” take us to that frozen land of death and terror.
The title story, “Demiurge,” is a previously unpublished novella that draws upon Lovecraft’s tales of psychic possession in its chilling portrayal of a nameless monster who may be the harbinger of the overthrow of the entire human race. Michael Shea (1946–2014) was the award-winning author of The Color out of Time, the Nifft the Lean series of fantasy novels, and the classic tales “Polyphemus” and “The Autopsy.” This volume of his complete Cthulhu Mythos tales has been assembled by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft and the Mythos.This volume features wraparound cover artwork and five interior illustrations by renowned artist Aeron Alfrey (MADHOUSE)
Price: $23.94
A Quest For Simbilis
Year: 2020
Publisher: SpatterlightBy dint of a mispronounced spell, Cugel the Clever finds himself once again unceremoniously dumped by a winged demon onto the bleak far northern shores of the Sea of Cutz — the location of a fierce battle aeons past between the archmagician Simbilis and the hordes of the subworlds league. Vowing to exact comprehensive revenge from Iucounu, the Laughing Magician, Cugel sets forth on the long journey back to Almery.
Expecting potent magical gifts in recompense, Cugel swears fealty to Mumber Sull, the exiled Thane of Icthyll. Under the guttering blood-red sun, the two set off across the lands of the Dying Earth to obtain the aid of the legendary Simbilis. They must face cannibals, sorcery, demons, and all the other deadly and sinister creatures that populate the Earth in its final days…
In this — his first published novel — World Fantasy Award winner Michael Shea recounts the further adventures of Cugel the Clever with the permission of Jack Vance, author of The Eyes of the Overworld. Shea subsequently wrote his seminal Nifft the Lean stories, which are foreshadowed, in many ways, in the present work. Dan Temianka, author of The Jack Vance Lexicon, provides an introduction for this new edition, which sheds light upon Shea, Vance, and Temianka’s lifelong friendship with Michael Shea.
On the Paladins of Vance label, Spatterlight publishes original works by authors who have given their own imagination free rein in the many wonderful worlds of the Grandmaster of fantasy & sci-fi.
Price: $13.95
Mr Cannyharme, A Novel of Lovecraftian Terror
Year: 2021
Publisher: Hippocampus PressMichael Shea wrote the previously unpublished novel Mr. Cannyharme in 1981, and it constitutes a remarkable adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s early story “The Hound” (1922), about the depredations of an ancient Dutch vampire. In Shea’s novel, Mr. Cannyharme stalks the seedy Mission District of San Francisco in the aftermath of the hippie movement of the 1960s. Holed up in a rundown hotel, the seemingly harmless Cannyharme—aged, feeble, bent almost double with a crippling disease—is the focus of the supernatural terror in the novel.
Mr. Cannyharme, written in a vibrant prose that brings to life the multitude of characters that populate the book, is a triumph of Lovecraftian terror, but also speaks of the way in which those who are regarded as the refuse of society can assert their dignity and self-worth in a grim environment. In this sense, it proves to be a novel affirming the triumph of the human spirit over the horrors facing it.
Price: $20.00
Purchase now
Note: PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED
The Autopsy / Best Weird Stories of Michael Shea
Year: 2022
Publisher: Hippocampus PressA new 2022 Collection of Michael Shea Stories by Hippocampus Press and a great way to read his classic story “The Autopsy” which has been adapted for TV for Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. “The Autopsy” is one of several tales that mingles gruesomeness and science fiction. Others include “Polyphemus,” where the members of a spaceship encounter the titanic eye of some unthinkably vast and hostile entity. “The Angel of Death” exhibits the battle of two alien entities as they successively inhabit hapless human beings in their quest for supremacy.
Shea’s sensitivity to the downtrodden is exhibited in such tales as “The Horror on the #33,” “Water of Life,” and “Tollbooth,” populated by homeless people, prostitutes, drug dealers, and other disdained members of society. Shea’s affinity for California is shown in “Fill it with Regular,” “Upscale,” and other tales that bring his native state to life. As a bonus, two unpublished stories are included: “Feeding Spiders,” evoking the work of a writer who adopted California as his home-Ray Bradbury; and “Ghost,” where a vengeful ghost stalks the tough streets of South Boston.
Price: $20.00
Purchase now