Dogpatch Press

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Wild Dog City, by Lydia West
Raleigh, NC, Lulu.com, September 2014, hardcover $35.99 (iii + 264 pages), trade paperback $17.99, Kindle $5.99.

The opening of Wild Dog City is deliberately confusing.

“It was utterly dark, the cold air sinking in the high concrete tunnel with a dull rushing sound, like the long sigh of an invisible giant. The blackness was really absolute; the platforms and the blandly tiled walls and the trench lined with a metal track were all blanketed in that whispering emptiness. The electric lights that had once lit the subway had long since sputtered out.

But there was a sound, under the humming of air; claws softly scratching concrete.

‘Mother!’

The voice was high and strange, the word sharp in the blackness. It came again.

‘Mother! Mother, are you here?’” (p. 1) Read the rest of this entry »

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Bones of the Empire, by Jim Galford.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, August 2015, trade paperback $13.99 (508 pages), Kindle $2.99.

Bones of the Empire is Book 5 and the conclusion of Galford’s The Fall of Eldvar series. It connects the events in both Books 1 & 2, In Wilder Lands and Into the Desert Wilds, and Book 4, The Northern Approach. This is a continuous series, so it assumes that the reader is familiar with the events in the four prior novels. If you have not read them yet, you had better start with the first and read them in order. This is not a chore; the whole series is a single gripping adventure.

Eldvar is a world of humans, elves, dwarfs, talking dragons and more, including the wildlings who are anthropomorphic animals. The story’s focus on the wildlings is why the novels of The Fall of Eldvar have qualified for previous reviews. Most of the setting is similar to the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. (Bones of the Empire debuted at Rocky Mountain Fur Con 2015 in Denver.) The Northern Approach was about Raeln (a wildling wolf) and On’esquin (an orc), the leaders of a group of desperate refugees from fallen Lantonne fleeing the conquering Turessi necromantic armies of zombie warriors, abandoning the refugees to set out alone to fulfill the prophecy to overthrow the necromancers. That group meets up with the party of wildlings, humans, fae-kin, and everything else led by Estin (a ring-tailed lemur wildling) and Feanne (a red vixen) from the first two novels. (The wraparound cover by Rukis features Estin, Feanne, and two fanged dire wolves.) The four volumes of the series come together for this finale. Read the rest of this entry »

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

By Tooth and Claw: Clan of the Claw, Book 2 [edited by Bill Fawcett].
Riverdale, NY, Baen Books, April 2015, trade paperback $15.00 (309 pages), Kindle $8.99.

Book 1, Exiled: Clan of the Claw, was published in August 2011. I had begun to think that Book 2 would never come out.

Bill Fawcett has been editing, or packaging, books about the anthropomorphic feline Mrem fighting the anthropomorphic reptilian Liskash/Lizcanth for over twenty-five years. In 1989/90 he got four paperback novels by different authors published in Bantam Spectra’s Guardians of the Three series. Only one was any good, but that one, Keeper of the City by Peter Morwood & Diane Duane, is one of the finest anthropomorphic adventures ever written, well worth seeking out today. Fawcett’s second series, the 1999 three Shattered Light paperbacks for Pocket Books, was notable for only Catseye by William R. Forschen & Jaki Demarest, a cheerful ripoff of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers with a human teenage swordsman trying to join three Mrem King’s musketeers fighting a Lizcanth Cardinal’s Guard.

The Clan of the Claw series for Baen Books supposes that the giant meteor that crashed into the Earth 65.5 million years ago, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs (according to many paleontologists), never occurred. (This is the same premise as Pixar’s forthcoming The Good Dinosaur.) The dinosaurs continued to evolve and became the reptilian manlike Liskash. The new mammals also evolved and gave rise to the manlike felinoid Mrem. The two are deadly enemies. Both are about of Bronze Age technology, and possess “magic” that may really be psionic powers. The series takes place about 5.3 million years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean has just broken into and drowned the dry Mediterranean basin. The Clan of the Claw outline postulates that several clans of Mrem were living in the Mediterranean valley at the time. Most of those who did not drown scrambled up to the north to join the other Mrem clans in what is Europe today. One clan, the Clan of the Claw, went south and found itself in what is today North Africa, surrounded by hostile Liskash clans. The Mrem must battle their way around the new Mediterranean Sea to reach the other Mrem in Europe, endlessly defeating one Liskash clan after another. Read the rest of this entry »

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Tinder Stricken, by Heidi C. Vlach.
Sudbury, Ontario, Heidi C. Vlach, May 2015, trade paperback $14.00 (266 pages), Kindle $3.99.

“By dawn’s feeble light and one smoldering candle, Esha stared into the polished tin mirror, full of dread like every other morning. The goat had stolen a little more of her body through the night.” (p. 1)

Esha lives in a world in which most people turn into animals during their lifetimes:

“Only the luckiest people got to see their faces turn distinguished and their human hair go silver. The heavens gave humans precious little time in their ideal bodies and capable minds, before they slid back into more bestial form. Esha had reached her forty-eighth year of life and she was still mostly presentable – after physicians telling her she would be a bleating beast by her thirty-fifth. To some degree, Esha was doing well.” (ibid.)

Esha may be doing well physically, but socially she is among the lowest castes. Her world has an Eastern Asian aura; her greeting is “namaste”, her currency is rupees, bamboo grows everywhere; she is a farm woman working in the fields – her official name is Esha Of The Fields – of the Janjuman Farms, along with many identical low-caste women of the Fields. Most of them chew betel, a common narcotic. Esha has many field-sisters, but she has only one close friend; Gita Of The Fields, who is turning into a deer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Swallowtail and Sword: The Scholar’s Book of Story and Song, by H. Leighton Dickson
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, April 2015, trade paperback $11.99 (255 pages), Kindle $2.99.

This is an interlude, because it comes after Book 3, Songs in the Year of the Cat, the last published, but before Book 4, Bones in the Year of the Dragon, which has not been published yet.

“Before there was a Shogun, before there was a Journey, there was a Story.

Not just one story, but many. Stories of myth and legend and Ancestors; of horses and lions and mountains and monkeys. Of life and death and those in between and how you can see them if only you try. If you sit quietly and listen deeply, you might hear something you’ve never heard before. You might know something you’ve never known and you might understand how we came to be the people we are. It is elusive, I grant you. Cats are, after all, an inscrutable people.” (p. 7)

So begins Swallowtail and Sword: The Scholar’s Book of Story and Song. With stories, but there are also songs. And steel. “Much steel, for cats are warriors and our armies are the envy of the world.” (p. 8) And tea. And much more. If you have read Books 1-3 of Tails of the Upper Kingdom (and if you haven’t, why haven’t you?), you will know of that far-future Oriental Empire, and of some of its politics and its expeditions to the far West and its discovery that humans still exist. And are preparing to reclaim the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Stone God Awakens, by Philip José Farmer.
NYC, Ace Books, November 1970, paperback #78650, 75¢ (190 pages).

“He awoke and did not know where he was.

Flames were crackling fifty feet away. Woodsmoke stung his nose and brought tears. Somewhere, men were shouting and screaming. […]

He was in one end of a large building of gigantic logs, wooden pillars, and large overhead beams. Flames leaped along the wall toward him. The roof at the other end had just caved in, and the smoke was carried away by a vagary of the wind. He could see the sky outside. It was black, and then, far off, lightning flashed. About fifty yards away, lit by the flames, was a hill. On top of the hill were the silhouettes of trees. Fully leaved trees.

A moment ago, it had been winter. The deep snows had been piled around the buildings of the research center outside Syracuse, New York.” (p. 5)

The protagonist is Ulysses Singing Bear, a young scientist of native American descent in 1985 (fifteen years in the future when this book was published). He discovers that the fighting going on around him does not involve humans.

“The flames from the burning hall and from other buildings combined to illuminate the scene. Furry legs and tails, white and black and brown, danced around. The legs were human and yet not human. They bent queerly; they looked like the hind legs of four-footed animals that had decided to stand upright, like men, and so had evolved half-human, half-beast legs.

The owner of a pair of legs fell flat on his back, a spear stuck in his belly. The man became even more confused and shocked. The creature looked like a cross between a human being and a sealpoint Siamese cat. The body fur was white; the face below the forehead was black; the lower part of the arms, legs and the tail were black. The face was as flat as any human’s, but the nose was round and black, like a cat’s, and the ears were black and pointed. The mouth, open in death, revealed sharp feline teeth.” (p. 6) Read the rest of this entry »