Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis, $25.99. Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent. He sees an unusual woman with wires attached to her head in Spain, and the defector he is trying to bring back to England bursts into flames with no visible cause.
Upon returning to England, he is recruited to Milkweed, an intelligence project dedicated to using unusual phenomena to aid the War Cabinet.
Facing them are Germany’s Dr. Karl Heinreich von Westarp and the children he raised. Those children, with electrical enhancements, grew up with unusual talents. One can walk through walls, one can control fire, and one can see the future. With the help of von Westarp’s children, the Nazis are winning the war against England.
In a desperate move to stop them, Milkweed intelligence enlists Marsh’s friend William Beauclerk. Lord Beauclerk was reluctantly initiated by his grandfather into the rites of warlocks. There’s a secret history in Britain of men who communicate with the Eidolons, supernatural creatures who can control events on Earth but demand a harsh price for their services.
The intriguing mystery of the book is the psychic Gretel. She seems to be manipulating events to her interests as much as foreseeing the future. Marsh is a particular pawn in her plans. Even when things go badly, she is several steps ahead of everyone else.
“Bitter Seeds” starts with a resemblance to World War II, but Tregillis’ first novel establishes its place as a world in its own right with a passing similarity to our history.
Creatures of the Pool, by Ramsey Campbell, $7.99. Gavin Meadows leads walking tours of Liverpool, highlighting the seamier parts of the past, including a prime suspect to be Jack the Ripper. An obsession with the city’s past runs in the family. Gavin’s father, Deryck, is convinced there is a lost history of the city.
Gavin’s father gets into a conflict at the library over papers he insists the library should own. Gavin has to interrupt his tour to rescue his father from the library before the police get involved.
When Deryck goes missing, Gavin begins a frantic search. The police are no help, and a pair of inspectors who keep dropping by are menacingly odd. During an unusually rainy spell, Gavin’s parents’ home is being invaded by the damp. This is eroding his father’s research papers and forces his mother out of the house. Gavin thinks he sees creatures lurking about and increasingly menacing him.
The stars of the novel are the dank streets of Campbell’s hometown of Liverpool and the mysterious tunnels under the city. Campbell is a master of atmospheric creepiness that hints at old evils still very much alive.
Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, edited by Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan, $24.95. Picking high points from a brilliant 50-year career is bound to produce an excellent book. These 17 stories by Fritz Leiber prove the point.
A couple of the earliest stories bring old standards into the modern world. “Smoke Ghost” puts haunting into a grimy urban world. “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” is a natural blend of advertising and vampirism.
There are three stories from Leiber’s signature series of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. He invented the term “Sword and Sorcery” to describe these stories of magic and adventure. Although Leiber had been writing about the pair since his first publication in 1939, he only described their meeting in the 1970 novella “Ill Met in Lankhmar.” The story is one of the three Hugo award-winners in the collection.
Leiber grew up in the theater, and Shakespeare is represented by “Four Ghosts in Hamlet.” He also was an avid chess player, and a lot of the game’s history is represented in “Midnight by the Morphy Watch”; the title describes a gold watch once presented to 19th-century champion Paul Morphy.
This isn’t the first Leiber anthology, but he was so good, such a book should always be in print.
