You can add Green Man Review to those quite taken with Elizabeth Bear’s 30,000 word new novella, Bone and Jewel Creatures. To wit: “Bear has developed a way of describing the concrete that hints at much wider things, much deeper themes, leaving it to the reader to make the connections… It’s a brief story, with no more flesh than it needs, much like Bijou. And it’s a good one.”

We’ve approved all of the elements for Creatures, so it’s on track to ship in roughly the next month.

Now that the art is all in hand, the signature pages are done, and we’re only one solid proofing from heading to the printer, it’s a good time to announce our next project with Neal Stephenson. We’re privileged to publish the first hardcover edition of his classic Zodiac: an Eco-Thriller as a signed limited edition, featuring a cover, title page, and chapter head by Patrick Arrasmith, whose graceful line work made our edition of Snow Crash such a beautiful volume.

Until April 2, 2010, we’re offering the Signed Limited Edition at $55 Off, so feel free to get your preorder in early.

We’ve just seen the advance copies of Connie Willis’s time travel epic, Blackout, and the book turned out beautifully. Copies should be going out to customers in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, here’s a bit from Michael Dirda’s review in The Washington Post: “Blackout plunges the reader right into the middle of three key happenings of 1940: the rescue of the British troops from Dunkirk, the evacuation of children to rural villages and country houses, and the life of ordinary Londoners during the Blitz. Every detail rings true, with the kind of authority that only intense research can bring. Still, all of Willis’s knowledge is subsumed in her bravura storytelling: “Blackout” is, by turns, witty, suspenseful, harrowing and occasionally comic to the point of slapstick.”

While we’re at it, here’s a shorter bit from a short review in The Cleveland Plain Dealer: “…despite the conceit of time travel, the book shows the attention to period detail that defines historical novels.”

– Bone and Jewel Creatures (Elizabeth Bear), April 12;
– The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury), March 20, although the slipcases will add 6-8 weeks to production;
– A Pleasure to Burn (Ray Bradbury), March 22;
– The New Dead (edited by Christopher Golden), March 19;
– Songs of a Dead Dreamer (Thomas Ligotti), March 22;
– Mister Slaughter (Robert McCammon, reprint), April 9;
– The God Engines (John Scalzi, reprint), March 18;
– The Sagan Diary (John Scalzi, reprint), March 19;
– Blackout (Connie Willis), March 16;

Again, please remember these are tentative dates when the books will be finished. Our warehouse is so overwhelmed that we’re likely to be a few weeks behind release dates when shipping.

Here is a list of books already done, ready to be shipped as soon as we can manage:

– The Book of Dreams (edited by Nick Gevers);
– The Club Dumas (Arturo Perez-Reverte);
– The Skylark (Peter Straub);
– The Happiest Days of Our Lives (Wil Wheaton);

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Joe Hill’s new novel, Horns (Amazon / BN / Powells), then you’re behind the cool-kid curve. Be warned, as good as his debut, Heart-Shaped Box was, Horns represents a huge step forward in complexity and ambition. It’s also one unsparing, uncompromising mother of a read. Finally, don’t forget that our friends at PS Publishing will soon be releasing a limited edition of Horns, illustrated by Vincent Chong. (We’re unlikely to be carrying this edition, so please order direct from PS.)

Finally, one of our finest purveyors of short fiction offers up some of his strongest work in Wild Child and Other Stories (Amazon / BN / Powells). T. Coraghessan Boyle’s been playing tricks with words and baby boomer concerns for a few decades now, and his latest collection is no different. If you find Wild Child to your liking, you may also want to check out his hugely impressive T.C. Boyle Stories, or the more focused If the River Was Whiskey, the latter being on the very short list of my two or three favorite collections.

We’re ending this issue of Subterranean Online with a long dark fantasy novella by one of our favorite new writers, Livia Llewellyn. Head over and check out “Her Deepness“, where the first two installments (of four) have now been posted.

Later this week we’ll begin shipping Arturo Perez-Reverte’s acclaimed novel, The Club Dumas, which joins Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind as one of our nicest productions.

Since its initial publication in 1993, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas has been widely recognized as one of the most intricate, rewarding “literary” mysteries of the modern era. It is one of those all too rare novels that imprints itself on the reader’s memory, that offers new pleasures and new discoveries with each successive reading.

The Club Dumas is a multi-layered quest story featuring “mercenary” book hunter Lucas Corso, who is hired to authenticate a pair of literary curiosities: a hand-written fragment of Alexander Dumas’s masterpiece, The Three Musketeers and a rare edition of a proscribed volume of black magic entitled The Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows. These interlinked quests lead Corso into a labyrinth of murder, suicide, and satanic rituals. At the same time, they lead him into the heart of a carefully constructed narrative that is strange, familiar, and deeply seductive, all at once.

Using elements from John Milton, Umberto Eco, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and, of course, Alexander Dumas, this enthralling novel is an intellectual thriller of the highest order. More importantly, it is a profoundly erudite meditation on the importance of books, and on the power they continue to exert on us across the centuries.

The Club Dumas will be produced to the highest standards, printed in two colors on 80# Finch, bound in a fine cloth, with a projected full-color cover, five full-color interior plates, and sixteen duotone images by Vincent Chong.

Locus magazine just ran a lengthy review about Peter Straub’s The Skylark, the original (and 200 manuscript pages longer) version of what was to become his new novel, A Dark Matter. As Stefan Dziemianowicz noted, “As regards the differences between the two versions of the novel, The Skylark provides a more detailed linear account of events leading up to the event in the agronomy meadow, and fuller backstory for the characters… The publication of the two together constitutes a major event in horror publishing this early in the 21st century.”

Also, given the large number of direct orders we have on hand for The Skylark, we’ve decided not to fill large online retail and wholesale orders for this title.

The first review for Patrick Rothfuss’s The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed is in, from Booklist. Here’s just one highlight: “The inclusion of three successive ending points, each darker in nature than its predecessor, allows the faint of heart the chance to stop, but really, the payoff for hanging on to the final ending is too good to miss.”

We have been running a special on the Signed Limited Edition ($25 off the cover price) but forgot to mention it was expiring in our newsletter, so have decided to extend it to March 19.