Editor e escritor, Jeff Vandermeer ganhou por duas vezes o World Fantasy Award, tendo sido finalista de outros prémios inúmeras vezes. Conjuntamente com a esposa é responsável por inúmeras antologias, desde The New  Weird a Steampunk ou Fast Ships Black Sails.

Do autor de livros como Shriek e City of Saints and Madmen, será lançado Finch, que decorre na mesma cidade fantástica de Ambergris.

Ainda que possua uma sobreposição espacial com os anteriores livros em Ambergris, este parece diferenciar-se por impregnar o género policial

In the occupied and oppressed city-state of Ambergris, the detective John Finch must solve a sensitive double-murder for his inhuman masters, the Grey Caps.  Nothing is as it seems as he negotiates his way through the landscape of spies, rebels, and deception.  The fate of the city is in the balance, with Finch caught squarely in the middle.

A blunt sharp shock to the system, VanderMeer’s latest takes noir mystery, adds surreal fantasy, and comes up with a startling new hybrid.

De teor mais negro, chega-nos Living with the Dead publicado pela PS Publishing, o que desde já promete.

Ainda que Darrell Schweitzer escreva mais dentro do género do fantástico negro ou do horror, também tem obras dentro do fantástico ou da ficção científica. Algumas das suas obras, como Necromancies and Netherworlds: Uncanny ou Transients: And Other Disquieting Stories foram nomeadas para o World Fantasy Award.

Darrell Schweitzer é ainda um dos editores / contribuidores da Weird Tales.

Living with the Dead como o próprio nome indica, tem uma premissa negra:

The dead come from the sea, at night. They merely arrive and are discovered in the morning on the wharves, lying in great heaps. It has been the immemorial custom for people to take them into their homes, to find places for them, to pattern their increasingly cluttered lives around the growing accumulation of corpses. No one knows why, although it is the irresistible decree of the Unseen Government that the order of things must be preserved, at all costs. Old and young must participate, and carry away the dead, on bicycles, in carts, on their backs if need be. It has always been so. It always will be so.

This isn’t Hell, or an Afterlife, just a place, a fog-shrouded, tradition-stifled town without a name, where the dead are accommodated at the expense of the living, where the established way of life has become a grotesque absurdity, and a few brave or foolish or deviant souls struggle to find some meaning, and perhaps unravel the mystery of the dead.

The NightWatch e The DayWatch constituem parte de uma série fantástica de Sergei Lukyanenko que foi já adaptada para cinema.

Os livros centram-se na existência de um Mundo paralelo habitado por pessoas aparentemente normais mas que constituem os Outros – vampiros, magos ou bruxas; com capacidades mágicas. Existem os Outros da Luz e da Escuridão que se vigiam e lutam eternamente. Originais dentro do género, não são o expoente máximo da literatura, mas divertem; e ainda que possuam as banais figuras fantásticas míticas, estas são tratadas de um modo diferente do habitual.

Ainda que só tenha lido os dois primeiros, tenho vontade de ler os que se seguem – no seguimento de The Nightwatch e The Daywatch, foi lançado já um terceiro, Twilight Watch e chega agora a vez de The Last Watch:

While on holiday in Scotland, visiting a macabre tourist attraction, ‘The Dungeons of Edinburgh’, a young Russian tourist is murdered. As the police grapples with the fact that the cause of the young man’s death was a massive loss of blood, the Watches are immediately aware that there is a renegade vampire on the loose. Anton – the hero of The Night Watch and The Day Watch – is detailed to this seemingly mundane investigation, but on arriving in Scotland begins to realise that there is much more to the story than a wildcat vampire and a single murder.

Aided by Thomas, the head of Edinburgh’s Night Watch, Anton investigates and ruminates, and becomes aware that a team of unlicensed Others are hunting for a fabled magical treasure, hidden in the sixth level of the Twilight by Merlin himself…