Dear writers: Please be aware of ongoing scams by agent impersonators. Use extra caution with any unsolicited offers from agents. Reputable agents will not ask for upfront fees of any kind. For more information, look at sites such as Writer Beware (https://writerbeware.blog/). Please always check email addresses/spellings. All official emails from Donald Maass Literary Agency will come from an address that ends in @maassagency.com (2 A's, 2 S's in MAASS).

Review: Maplecroft by Cherie Priest

Sep 052014
 

Cover for Maplecroft by Cherie Priest. A woman's whose blond hair is in a proper Victorian updo has her back to us as she stands between two forebodingly lit marble columns. She is wearing a fancy blue Victorian dress. In her left hand, held slightly behind her, she holds a bloody ax.Romantic Times: Priest takes the epistolary format H.P. Lovecraft was fond of and uses it to far better effect, both in terms of characterization and horror. Her protagonists (Lizzie, her sister, her lover Nance O’Neil and the friendly Dr. Seabury) are extremely well drawn even as the nerve and mind-shredding events of 1895 drive them apart. Priest skillfully makes the menace around them specific and concrete while also remaining shadowy and unknowable, achieving maximum impact. Putting real historical characters in genre settings is an idea that’s seemed tired for a while, but this novel shows how compelling it can still be in the right hands. Continue reading »

 September 5, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Maplecroft by Cherie Priest

Sep 022014
 

Cover for Maplecroft by Cherie Priest. A woman's whose blond hair is in a proper Victorian updo has her back to us as she stands between two forebodingly lit marble columns. She is wearing a fancy blue Victorian dress. In her left hand, held slightly behind her, she holds a bloody ax.Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one….

The people of Fall River, Massachusetts, fear me. Perhaps rightfully so. I remain a suspect in the brutal deaths of my father and his second wife despite the verdict of innocence at my trial. With our inheritance, my sister, Emma, and I have taken up residence in Maplecroft, a mansion near the sea and far from gossip and scrutiny.

But it is not far enough from the affliction that possessed my parents. Their characters, their very souls, were consumed from within by something that left malevolent entities in their place. It originates from the ocean’s depths, plaguing the populace with tides of nightmares and madness.

This evil cannot hide from me. No matter what guise it assumes, I will be waiting for it. With an axe.

 September 2, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Deal: Jim Butcher

Aug 052014
 

Photo credit: Julie Woodman-Schneider.Kerrie Hughes and Jim Butcher’s FIERCE, a new contemporary fantasy anthology featuring the fierce breed of warriors who use their unique abilities to fight back the darkness and often skirt its edges (including stories by Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire, Mercedes Lackey, Rob Thurman, Kat Richardson and others), to Anne Sowards of Roc, in a very nice deal, by Lucienne Diver of The Knight Agency and Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.

 August 5, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Herb of Grace by Adina Senft

Aug 052014
 

Cover for Herb of Grace by Adina Senft. A young, white, blond, Amish woman kneels in the foreground, holding a watering can and tending to her herb garden. The background is a pleasant Amish farm.Amish widow Sarah Yoder has been struggling to raise her two teenaged sons and provide a home where family and members of her Old Order Amish church can find fellowship and friendship. Though she is close to her in-laws, lately it feels like her relationship with her boys is splintering. Her stepson Simon wants to move out west with his cousins to find work. And her youngest, Caleb, is spending far too much time over at the tumbledown home of a man who left the church long ago. Henry Byler only returned recently to Willow Creek when he inherited the family farm–under protest–and now seems caught in a struggle between the faith of his childhood and the world he’s come to know. Ruth Lehman, the local Dokterfraa, believes Sarah should use her gift for growing plants to become an herbal healer, too. Sarah is reluctant, however, uncertain if caring for others will take her away from her family–the place where she believes God wants her. But when she feels called to help members of her community, she soon discovers that the heart can be scarred as deeply as the body. As she compiles her herbs, she waits for God to do his healing work in a man who rues a harsh decision, in a lonely prodigal who has lost everything, and maybe even in a herbalist-in-training who firmly believes she will never love again.

 August 5, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Review: Last Plane to Heaven by Jay Lake

Aug 012014
 

Cover for Last Plane to Heaven by Jay Lake. Top half is a silhouette of a plane flying upward into ethereal blue skies and stars. Bottom half looks like it had the cover torn away, and lists the short stories within.Library Journal: Perhaps inevitably this collection has a sense of yearning to it: a desire for escape, a wish for broken things to be fixed, a longing for more time. Here both literal and metaphoric narratives deal with Lake’s struggles with terminal cancer, but readers will enjoy plenty of adventure and pure flights of fancy as well. Continue reading »

 August 1, 2014  Tagged with: ,

July Subsidiary Rights Deals

Jul 312014
 

a pair of black ear budsHugo Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal’s OF NOBLE FAMILY, STAGECRAFT, and GHOST TALKERS #1, to Steve Feldberg at Audible, in a three-book deal, by Jennifer Jackson.

World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling author Robert McCammon’s THE BORDER, about the teen-aged boy who may be the key to saving our way of life after Earth is caught on the border of a vicious and long-standing war between two alien civilizations, to Steve Feldberg at Audible, by Cameron McClure.

Sci-fi humorist Robert Sheckley’s mix of backlist novels, including favorites like CROMPTON DIVIDED and THE 10TH VICTIM, to Steve Feldberg at Audible, in a six-book deal, by Cameron McClure.

 July 31, 2014  Tagged with: , , ,

Starred Review: Maplecroft by Cherie Priest

Jul 282014
 

Cover for Maplecroft by Cherie Priest. A woman's whose blond hair is in a proper Victorian updo has her back to us as she stands between two forebodingly lit marble columns. She is wearing a fancy blue Victorian dress. In her left hand, held slightly behind her, she holds a bloody ax.Publishers Weekly: Lizbeth “Lizzie” Andrew Borden wields her axe against Lovecraftian entities in this terrifying and powerful series launch by fan favorite Priest (the Clockwork Century series). Two years after Lizzie infamously slew her mother and stepfather, she and her consumptive, scholarly older sister, Emma, remain in their hometown of Fall River, Mass., in an isolated and modified home called Maplecroft. Lizzie spends countless hours in her basement laboratory, trying to understand what transformed the Bordens into horrifying creatures, while protecting and caring for Emma and conducting a love affair with actress Nance O’Neil. Then Emma, who poses as “Dr. E.A. Jackson” to contribute to the men-only world of science, sends a biological sample to colleague Phillip Zollicoffer at Miskatonic University, with terrible consequences. Readers will be intrigued by the weird monsters and 19th-century science, but the story is really carried by the characters’ emotional dynamics, especially those between the Borden sisters.

 July 28, 2014  Tagged with: ,

Starred Review: Last Plane to Heaven by Jay Lake

Jul 222014
 

lake-lastplanetoheavenPublishers Weekly: The prolific Lake’s death in 2014, after a long, harrowing, and very public battle with cancer, gives extra weight to these 32 epitaphs. Lake’s command of language is strong and sincere, and his stories of everyday heartaches, filled with secret fears and self-delusion, whisk readers from inner geographies of mind to limitless gulfs of space. Lake’s characters emotionally embody the doomed heroism of Nordic gods sneering at grim fates, finding bittersweet redemption in dark byways of human ignorance. Reality is shattered when an alien controls a hardened mercenary’s dreams in the darkly romantic “Last Plane to Heaven: A Love Story.” Cynical humor greets oblivion in “The Speed of Time.” In surprisingly intelligent space opera (“Permanent Fatal Errors”) and a visit to the City Imperishable (“Promises”), revelations eschew oversentimentality for moral complexity. “Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names” injects pathos into the Cthulhu mythos, questioning identity and raising hackles. Malevolent faeries face metaphysical annihilation in a dying young woman’s cancer cells in “Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors.” And in “The Cancer Catechism,” Lake discovers faith in the inevitability of death. As he states, “In the end, words are all that survive us”; his fans and friends may find some comfort in the hope that his words will live on forever.

 July 22, 2014  Tagged with: ,

One-Eyed Jack by Elizabeth Bear

Jul 222014
 

bear-one-eyedjackThe One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King: personifications of the city of Las Vegas—its history, mystery, mystical power, and heart…

When the Suicide King vanishes—possibly killed—in the middle of a magic-rights turf war started by the avatars of Los Angeles, a notorious fictional assassin, and the mutilated ghost of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—his partner, the One-Eyed Jack, must seek the aid of a bizarre band of legendary and undead allies: the ghosts of Doc Holliday and John Henry the steel-driving man; the echoes of several imaginary super spies, decades displaced in time; and a vampire named Tribute, who bears a strikingresemblance to a certain long-lost icon of popular music.

All stories are true, but some stories are truer than others.

 July 22, 2014  Tagged with: ,
 Older Entries  Newer Entries