We’ve been loading the 28 volumes of the Gorean Chronicles, John Norman’s bestselling cult science fiction series, onto the Kindle, and we’re told a bunch of them are now available with the rest to follow in pretty short order. Go to the Kindle store and download to your heart’s content. Don’t worry if you see a “No Image Available” icon – it takes a while for their site to grab the images from ours. Your Kindle will have the full image, such as the one displayed here for Tarnsman of Gor, the first novel in the series. And if you should enter “Gor by John Norman” in the Kindle search box and be asked “Do you mean God by John Norman,” you tell them No, we mean Gor!

Tarnsman was released by Ballantine in 1966, and over the next fifteen years or so another 24 were published by Ballantine and then DAW. The books were enormously popular and sales were tremendous – until, one day it all ground to a halt, mysteriously, like that scene at the end of War of the Worlds where a seemingly invincible alien catches cold and drops dead. What happened? Tastes in reading habits change but usually they evolve rather than fall off a cliff as Gor did.

To learn what happened, read Are John Norman’s Gors “Boy Books”?

And for the full inventory of his works, visit the John Norman page on E-Reads.

RC

Clare Bell’s Jaguar Princess brings the author’s gifts for fantasy to the exotic world of the Aztecs.

Mixcati’s people are descended from the Olmec Jaguar Gods and she is fated for great things—both wonderful and dangerous. She can, unexpectedly and without warning, turn into a living, wild Jaguar, just as her ancestors have done since time immemorial. Once stolen into slavery, she must struggle to survive and to learn to fulfill her destiny in an Aztec culture that understands her strength, fears her power and wants her dead. She must face destruction at their hands—or come into her true power as The Jaguar Princess.

Click here to see all Clare Bell titles published by E-Reads.

As we count down the days until Christmas, age-old questions about the true identify of Jesus loom over our spiritual consciousness. Max Dimont’s Appointment in Jerusalem clarifies the questions themselves, and speculates on some intriguing answers as well. Was Jesus a Zealot plotting to overthrow Roman hegemony in the Holy Land? Was he a member of an occult and libertine group of Gnostics? Did he come out of the obscure Jewish Essene sect, which created a form of Christianity before there was a Christ? Or was he indeed the son of God as the devout believe?

Appointment in Jerusalem, offered by E-Reads in both print and e-book editions, will not settle the debate but will certainly clarify the issues. Here’s the introduction, and we invite your comments.

Wishing you a happy holiday season.

- Richard Curtis

While studying his beloved San Francisco through binoculars from his apartment window, horror writer Franz Westen is astonished to see a mysterious figure waving at him from a hilltop two miles away. He walks to Corona Heights and looks back at his building – and discovers the same figure waving at him from his apartment window! He soon finds himself caught in a century-spanning curse that may have destroyed Clark Ashton Smith and Jack London.

The book is Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber, and it was 1978 winner of the World Fantasy Award. E-Reads is happy to offer it as an e-book. The print version, paired with another Leiber horror classic, Conjure Wife, is available from Tor.

“In today’s terms this is horror in the style of The Blair Witch Project. A story permeated by a sense of menacing creepiness” says one Amazon.com reviewer.

Fritz Leiber is considered one of science fiction’s legends. Author of a prodigious number of stories and novels, many of which were made into films, he is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won awards too numerous to count including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died in 1992.

Publication of Our Lady of Darkness brings to 13 the number of works by Leiber published by E-Reads. Visit our Leiber page to see them all and order any that may be missing from your collection.

With publication of The Loveliest Dead E-Reads continues its program of reissues of horror novels by Grand Master Ray Garton.

In this novel Garton is at the top of his macabre form. The “loveliest dead” are far from lovely but they are definitely dead and making life hell for the living. Following a sequence of increasingly dire personal tragedies, culminating in the unexplained death of their four-year-old son, Josh, Jenna and David Kella plan to make a new start of their lives on the old family homestead they’ve inherited just outside Eureka, California with their surviving son Miles. What they discover, though, is a nightmare. Ghostly children play on the backyard swings and vanish abruptly. In a cruel and maddening irony, one of the child ghosts resembles their dead son Josh. The horrors pile up as psychics, Ouija boards and poltergeists drive the couple to the borders of madness and terror.

Ray Garton is the author of close to sixty books of which perhaps the best known is Bram Stoker nominee Live Girls. E-Reads has recently released his widely-praised novel Sex and Violence in Hollywood, bringing to 5 the Garton books in our program. We have no intention of stopping there.
RC

During the reign of the Emperor Vespasian and shortly after Roman armies have crushed the Jewish revolt in Judea and destroyed the Temple, a young Roman Questor and investigating magistrate, Julius Varro, is commissioned to investigate the story that a Jew rose from the dead after being crucified in Jerusalem some forty years before. Implicit in his commission is the mandate that he must return with proof of the conclusion that such an event could not have happened.

The fast-growing cult of the Nazarene is becoming a threat to the political stability in the region—and to the power of Rome as well—and convincing disproof of the story. Many of the witnesses to the tale are long dead, the trail of evidence is chancy at best. Many of the living feel compelled to lie to protect their own lives. Questor Varro pursues his mission with zeal and conviction, determined to produce a report that will demolish the claims put forward by those he regards as religious fanatics and crackpots. Along the way, his investigation stirs religious passions, immerses him in unexpected intrigue and foments violence. He also finds himself attracted to a beautiful Jewish slave girl.

Varro completes his report demolishing the myth that seems to be fueling the new Christian movement and is set to return to Rome when an extraordinary, in fact miraculous, event occurs that changes everything…including Varro’s own beliefs.

In Inquest, a magnificently conceived and executed historical novel, Roman historian Stephen Dando-Collins invents a historical conceit worthy of the work worthy of comparison with The Da Vinci Code.

RC

Don’t know what a lot lizard is? You obviously haven’t been hanging around truck stops. And you may never want to go near one after you read Ray Garton’s Lot Lizards

A “lot lizard” is a female hooker who works highway truck stops as her territory. When trucker Bill Ketter looks for a little relaxation and release, he discovers, too late, that he has bitten off more than he can chew. In fact, his lot lizard is the one that does the biting–she is a vampire, one of number who move from one truck stop to the next under the watchful and vicious eyes of the repulsive Carsey Brothers. Against his will, Bill becomes one of the undead. He follows the brothers and their cargo to another stop where he meets his ex-wife and children and Bill finds himself battling the vampires and their age-old leader for the life of his teenaged son.

Horror Grand Master Ray Garton has created another small masterpiece, contemporary adult horror at its most gruesome and loaded with extras doses of sex and gore. The confined setting creates a perfect claustrophobic stage for the story and the hellaciously quick pace never lets the action slow down.

In People of the Sky by Clare Bell, old technology survives and even thrives on the challenges of a new planet populated by ancient human spirits.

Kesbe Temiya, a freelance flyer, accepts a commission to deliver an ancient-but-restored C-47 (a Gooney Bird in 20th Century parlance, named The Gooney Berg by its new owner) to a collector of rare aircraft on the planet Oneway.

Dropped off by a starship, Temiya gets side-tracked by bad weather, rescued by a mysterious figure riding an alien flying creature and stranded in a long-vanished Pueblo Indian colony which follows the prophecy of the Blue Star Kachina and lives the old ways, isolated from technology and away from the white man. Despite her own Pueblo blood, Kesbe is an outsider and only by adopting the ways of the People of the Sky, including a ritual that may turn her, too, into a throwback and could even kill her, can she find the help she needs to fulfill her mission—and find the life that is right for her.

Click here to see all Clare Bell titles published by E-Reads.

Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) may be best known as a fantasy writer, but he published widely and successfully in the horror and science fiction fields. One of his major SF creations is the Change War, a series of stories and short novels about rival time-traveling forces locked in a bitter, ages-long struggle for control of the human universe where battles alter history and then change it again until there’s no certainty about what might once have happened.

The most notable work of the series is the Hugo Award-winning novel The Big Time in which doctors, entertainers, and wounded soldiers find themselves treacherously trapped with an activated atomic bomb inside the Place, a room existing outside of space-time. Leiber creates a tense, claustrophobic SF mystery, and a brilliant, unique locked-room whodunit. In addition to the Hugo, Nebula, Derleth, Lovecraft, and World Fantasy Awards, Fritz Leiber received the Grand Master of Fantasy (Gandalf) Award, the Life Achievement Lovecraft Award, and the Grand Master Nebula Award.

The Big Time may be purchased as an e-book or print volume.

E-Reads publishes many of Leiber’s greatest works including Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, which Time Magazine’s book editor, Lev Grossman, named as one of the top six fantasy works of all time. View E-Reads’ Leiber book list here.

RC

John Norman’s fans simply could not ask for a better holiday gift than Kur of Gor, the 28th volume of Norman’s bestselling Gorean universe series.