Contemporary Authors

• Last Dragon Wizards of the Coast Discoveries (Renton, WA), 2008

1. Last dragon LCCN 2007018085 Type of material Book Personal name McDermott, J. M., 1979- Main title Last dragon / J.M. McDermott. Published/Created Renton, WA : Wizards of the Coast Discoveries, c2008. Description 390 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9780786948574 (trade pbk.) 0786948574 (trade pbk.) CALL NUMBER PS3613.C38688 L37 2008 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER PS3613.C38688 L37 2008 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• The Fortress at the End of Time - 2017 Tor.com (Macmillan), London
• We Leave Together - 2014 Word Horde, Petaluma
• Straggletaggle - 2014 Bad Ducky Industries, --
• The Lady or the Tiger, Death Mask and Eulogy, and Other Re-Imaginings - 2012 CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Charleston, SC
• Maze - 2013 Apex Book Company, Centreville, VA
• Never Knew Another - 2011 Night Shade Books, San Francisco, CA
• When We Were Executioners - 2012 Night Shade Books, San Francisco, CA
• Disintegration Visions - 2012 Apex Book Company, Centreville, VA
• Women and Monsters - 2011 Bad Ducky Industries, --

• Macmillan - https://us.macmillan.com/author/joemmcdermott/

  JOE M. McDERMOTT is best known for the novels Last Dragon, Never Knew Another, and Maze. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program. He lives in Texas.

• J M McDermott - https://jmmcdermott.wordpress.com/about-me/

  About Me

  J M McDermott is a robot fueled by literature, vegetables, and caffeine. He lives in San Antonio, TX, where he stands on street corners and shouts at passing cars about the future. He is the author of six novels and two short story collections.

  He holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and an MFA in Popular Fiction from the Stonecoast Program of the University of Southern Maine.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._McDermott

  J. M. McDermott
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  J. M. McDermott is an American writer of fantasy, and science fiction.

  McDermott lives in Georgia, and holds an MFA in Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine and a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston.[1]

  His first novel, Last Dragon, was #6 on Amazon.com's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2008,[2] shortlisted for a Crawford Prize for First Fantasy,[3] and on Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading List for Debuts in 2008.[4] His second novel, Never Knew Another[5] [6] is the beginning of the Dogsland Trilogy, from Nightshade Books.[7][8] It received strong critical praise including a review by noted genre critic, John Clute, in Strange Horizons.[9] The second novel of the trilogy was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, praising the depiction of the anti-hero of the novel.[6]

  Books[edit]
  Last Dragon[10]
  Never Knew Another[11][12]
  When We Were Executioners[13][14]
  Maze[15]
  We Leave Together[16]

• Daily Geekette - blog - https://dailygeekette.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/the-fortress-at-the-end-of-time-an-interview-with-joe-m-mcdermott/

  QUOTED: "I made the main couple straight because I didn’t believe the readers who needed that message of tolerance and empathy would even allow space in their imagination for a long serial about a gay couple. I felt like, as a creator, if I made Rachel and Jona, instead, Roger and Jona, the idea that even positing that there is some kind of toxic presence inside people, they are still human, so your argument about the wickedness of the gay is wrong would have been missed by the people who most need to internalize that idea."

  The Fortress at the End of Time: An interview with Joe M. McDermott.
  January 16, 2017Booksbook release, book review, Dino Buzzati, fantasy writers, future, gender, Joe M. McDermott, Julian Gracq, Maureen McHugh, military sci-fi, sci-fi, sci-fi writers, science fiction, space, space travel, the dogsland trilogy, the fortress at the end of time, tor bookslexgurst
  Does space travel and the possibility of discovering new worlds interest you? What about the unending ethical dilemmas of cloning? If you also appreciate Science Fiction when it focuses on personal inner conflict and the day-to-day aspect of life in at the lonely edge of the galaxy, then Joe M. McDermott‘s The Fortress at the End of Time might be right up your alley.

  Cover art by Jaime Jones.
  Cover art by Jaime Jones.

  Mr. McDermott is best known for Fantasy and heavily mythology-inspired writings, novels and short stories, rather than Science Fiction. His collection of short stories Women and Monsters is particularly poignant and quite stunning. The Fortress at the End of Time (TFatEoT), while set firmly in the Sci-Fi genre, still tackles many of the ethical concepts prominent in his other work.

  The protagonist, from whose mind the story unfolds, is Ronaldo Aldo. Aldo grew up on a boat, floating around the Pacific Ocean, with his mother and father (an oil rig engineer). He has little in the way of prospects on Earth, so he joins the military and his clone is sent to an unenviable posting at the edge of the known universe.

  His clone, you ask? Yes, individuals are trained and sent as clones to the far-reaching areas of space, where they are stationed, presumably never to go ‘back’ to Earth, or anywhere else, for that matter. If they survive, there is the option of retirement on another colony. There are some interesting questions that arise, as the clones are fully developed when they reach their destination, and possess all of the knowledge of their predecessor, for better or for worse.

  TFatEoT progresses as Aldo confesses what it was that lead him to his current predicament, and will leave the reader wondering what is actually at the root of your principals and your personhood, in such a world. There is some action, but it’s not an exploding-planets-and-laser-beams sort of story. The pace is cautious but deliberate, and while Aldo is not always ‘likable’ , most of the time it was easy to see why he made the decisions he did (read some of the Geekettes’ opinions of likable characters here!).

  jm-mcdermott

  Let’s start with an easy question: What are your favorite Science Fiction influences? Books, shows, movies old or new?

  I never really thought about writing science fiction until I read the amazing work of Maureen McHugh. I read a lot of science fiction, definitely, but it wasn’t until I read her work – particularly OF MOTHERS AND OTHER MONSTERS and MISSION CHILD – that I encountered someone structuring and thinking about narrative and character in a way I could creatively grok. It was like a switch flipped inside my mind where I realized I could, actually, do that genre, too. I was almost exclusively fantasy prior. The influences of the particular books in question go back a ways, though. Dino Buzzati and Julian Gracq are the major influence of this novel. They both wrote books about a distant, forgotten military outpost that were philosophical and thoughtful and beautiful. They felt like better military fiction than the military science fiction I had read because they were about the soul-crushing nature of the situation, itself, in their own, different ways.

  The Fortress at the End of Time isn’t like some other Sci-Fi stories that I have read, or have tried to read. Personally, good Science Fiction needs a very human touch, in addition to a lot of specialized research regarding technology– one of the reasons I think that a franchise like Star Trek is so popular and has had so many incarnations. For instance, Aldo grew-up on a boat in the Pacific Rim, as his father was a contractor with deep-sea mining companies. This seems almost a mundane and not particularly space- aged way for our protagonist and narrator to have lived his childhood and teenaged years. What is it about the intersection of technology, time, people, and all of the possible relationships between them that interests you?

  When I teach college composition, one of the things I try to teach is how the things we do everyday shape us, like how urban planning and architecture actually influence our interior lives. Imagine cars versus buses, for example. In a car, you are in control, and you can have personal conversations with family and friends. A car feels like a mobile living room. It also disconnects you from other people in other cars. You see only a bunch of headlights, instead of the people inside of them. Compare that to what it’s like to rely on public transportation, and how that might change your experiences that change your attitude and sense of community.

  Insurance companies can fill out data in a chart and figure out your whole life, to the point of death. The space around us, and how we choose to live and how we are influenced by what is around us and how it is laid out, is part of that actuarial table. We still have free will, I think, though others may argue against that, because we can choose the landscape, and we can choose the apartment and the location and the commute. But, so much of our life is decided by our landscape, our tools, our daily routine.

  It’s a big subject. In college, I had students invent a ridiculous method of transportion to replace cars – skateboards, Futurama-esque tube travel, etc – and figure out how it would change the material reality of our communities in the way that cars have completely reshaped our cities and communities. (Bear in mind, cars are a little over century old, on the large scale. The first Model T was made in 1908! How much our cities changed from that in just 108 years!) After we figure out the material changes, I ask them to figure out how that would change relationships of people. Would families be closer? Would neighbors be closer? Would we talk more, or less? What would we talk about, more or less?

  Architecture is an argument for how people live. We live in this sort of collective imagination of how we ought to live. Everything we touch, every road we drive on, every object in our house and life, was imagined before it was built and carries with it cultural force to suggest how it ought to be used and why. We live inside the imagination, and call it the real world. I am fascinated by this, and think and write about it a lot. I think man-made climate change is a good example of this. We imagined that we could just keep burning this gasoline, burning this oil. We built our cities around the idea of the motor engine and the endless electricity of burning fuel. Our imagined city was not in alignment with the real of the city, and the distance between the imaginary space and the real is destroying us. Another example, I think, is the rise of depression. Our cities are built to be lonely spaces, with people in distant suburbs, who chase jobs away from family and community. The rise of depression is, to me, a sign that we’ve built our cities in a way that is imagined to be better, but in the real is not.

  Right off the bat, you introduce us to a diverse cast of characters. Having read some of your other books, this is [refreshingly] not an anomaly in your work. It tends to still be a men’s club despite, Mary Shelley writing what was considered to be the very first Sci-Fi novel. Why do you think that white, and usually male, is the default characterization in so many writers’ work, especially in this day and age?

  I don’t have a good answer, I’m afraid. I can’t speak for every creator and every reader. I know that when I wrote The Dogsland Trilogy, that was about homosexuality, and I made the main couple straight because I didn’t believe the readers who needed that message of tolerance and empathy would even allow space in their imagination for a long serial about a gay couple. I felt like, as a creator, if I made Rachel and Jona, instead, Roger and Jona, the idea that even positing that there is some kind of toxic presence inside people, they are still human, so your argument about the wickedness of the gay is wrong would have been missed by the people who most need to internalize that idea. Living in the suburban heart of the Bible Belt my whole life, once across the street from a church called “Fire and Praise”, I was pleasantly shocked to see how quickly gay marriage and gay equality rocketed through our culture and court system. It wasn’t anything like the community I knew. I wasn’t being as subversive as I thought I was. I probably could have written Roger and Jona.

  So, some of it, at least, may be the sense by writers, whether deserved or not, that if we push the envelope too far, no one will follow us. It takes courage to do that. And, I should add, it takes privilege. I am not in danger of losing my house or my health if one book fails. Other authors don’t have the luxury of taking risks. It is a luxury. Ergo, the people who are most likely to be able to take risks are going to be people who have the sort of protections that marginalized communities don’t always have. Ergo, we privileged few will take the risks that inspire us, which may not include bringing in diverse voices.

  And I don’t think I deserve much credit for diversity, honestly. Ronaldo Aldo still codes as a white man, regardless of my intentions. I didn’t write a gay couple in Dogsland. I haven’t had a solid female lead in a while. Much of MAZE was led and driven by a character that was given my face and name.

  Earth religions– Wicca, Christianity, Islam– figure prominently in the lives of the individuals in Fortress, as do the themes of sin and confessing, seemingly without any great criticism, although there are also atheistic characters, too. Did your personal relationship to spirituality and ritual affect how religion was dealt with in Fortress?

  Yes and no. One of my criticisms of Science Fiction when it is not well-written is the construction of futures where either everyone’s soul is going to the same place, or no one has a concept of spirituality at all. The future of religion and spirituality, I suspect, is going to be at least as messy and diverse as the past. In a particular situation like the Citadel, where anybody could come from anywhere on Earth, there is going to be a lot of variation in the destination of souls. The Monastery [on the terraformed Colony] seems equipped to handle that.

  Ronaldo confesses his sins so that he can clear his conscience and join the monastic order there. I was thinking about the strong tradition of Christian confessional writing, definitely, and the monks and priests and nuns in my own family, definitely. I don’t think my sense of spirituality was much a part of this one, though. There isn’t a character in the book that takes on much of my own sense of ritual and spirituality. It’s more about how the extreme circumstances would warp such things, really. In my own writing, I tend to reserve my ideas about faith and the spirit for poetry, not fiction.

  Fiction is about conflict, right? Man versus man, man versus nature, man versus self, man versus society. So, really, what fiction is about is sin. It’s about those moments where situations or choices push individuals and groups into sinful harm of some fashion. Fiction is a form that tries to grapple with sin, and hopefully get people thinking about the damage done, the way it can be healed, and the way things could be better. Ergo, fiction is always a devil’s game. It’s dancing with darkness. If it’s good enough, maybe it’s able to dance those devils back into the cage.

  Ronaldo’s clone has his first intimate relationship with Amanda, a transgender woman, on the Colony that the humans are trying to terraform. Most people seem to accept Amanda without question, although a number of individuals continue to deadname her. While racism seems to have diminished in this world, sexism and transphobia still exist. How did you decide what types of bigotry and otherness still existed in this world, in relation to things such as race and religion, that no longer seem like they’re such divisive concepts?

  I think that the choice was about the meanness of the small town, so to speak. The potential meanness, I should say. The acceptance of transgender reality is not evenly distributed, and folks at the Citadel are going to get cloned from all over the world. The monastery is not deeply discussed, but I sort of envision the major world religions merging into the same sort of bureaucracy of faith while debating all their religious differences endlessly. I don’t think it’s so hard to believe Islam and Christianity, for example, would someday merge into something like Coptic Christians versus Catholics, for example, as similar as our religions are in many of the most important ways. When the differences are theological, not moral, it’s fairly easy to imagine a future of endless theological debate coupled with a united structural front, like university philosophy departments.

  But, inside of that endless debate, in a small community where everyone will know everyone extremely well, and everyone came from different cultures, there’s going to be hiccups along the way.

  I hope it is clear, at least, that the author believes strongly that a transgender woman is a woman, and perfectly capable of being the female lead. Adebayo Anderson, also, has a ‘boy’s’ name. She is described in an androgynous fashion intentionally, while still being very much a woman, and I encourage readers to considers carefully why such a choice was made.

  One of my very favorite ideas in Fortress is that the enemy that the Citadel is supposed to be protecting the solar system from an enemy that might not even exist, as they are described as potentially gaseous aliens who leave no trace of their bodies after an attack– thus, no one’s ever found evidence of them! In our own time of fear-mongering, and senselessly making enemies out of individuals or groups of defenseless people, this seems poignant, after I get past the concept of awesome evaporating aliens. As an author, what is your process for gathering information to avoid this hive-mind pitfall of believing what you’ve always been told, and how does/does it overlap with your everyday life?

  I believe what I’m told all the time. I’m not a climate scientist, but I believe them when they tell me what they find. I’m not an economist, but I believe what they say when they write about the economy. I’m not a botanist, but I believe them when they tell me about the plants in my little garden. I think we live in a time when people with bad intentions can access a very large megaphone and use it to create harm. I believe emotion is a much more powerful force in our daily life and decisions than we give it credit. I think we often use reason to explain away our instincts, instead of using reason to overcome them. And, I know that I am just as guilty of that as anybody.

  The Fortress at the End of Time, by Joe M. McDermott will be available tomorrow, January 17th at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

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• Word Horde - http://wordhorde.com/tag/j-m-mcdermott/

  QUOTED: "I lost an uncle many, many years ago to HIV. He was gay. As an adult, years later, right around 2005, 2006, I was living in Euless, TX. The Hurst-Euless-Bedford Metroplex was not exactly always a place that was very friendly to people who were not part of the mainstream religious right of our culture, in the places where I often found myself among the bookstores and bars and coffee shops."
  "I figured with fantasy I could make this imaginary poison real. I could invent a world where there were people who actually had this poison in them as infectious as others seem to think the gay is, in its way. And, as I would reveal in the books, it wouldn’t matter if the demon stain was real, because they’d still be humans."

  An interview with J. M. McDermott, author of We Leave Together
  NEWSCREATIONISM, DINO BUZZATI, HALDOR LAXNESS, HIV, J. M. MCDERMOTT, JONA, JULIAN GRAQ, MAUREEN MCHUGH, MILITARY SF, RACHEL NOLANDER, STRAGGLETAGGLE, TEXAS, WE LEAVE TOGETHER, WOMEN AND MONSTERS, ZACHARY JERNIGAN
  Recently, Sean M. Thompson had a chance to talk with J. M. McDermott about his Dogsland novel, We Leave Together.

  For the readers who might not be aware, tell us about your fantasy series, the third book of which in the series is We Leave Together?

  I lost an uncle many, many years ago to HIV. He was gay. As an adult, years later, right around 2005, 2006, I was living in Euless, TX. The Hurst-Euless-Bedford Metroplex was not exactly always a place that was very friendly to people who were not part of the mainstream religious right of our culture, in the places where I often found myself among the bookstores and bars and coffee shops. Creationism was openly contested and scoffed upon. Megachurches that spouted hate from the pulpit and contested science grew and grew, with evangelists all over trying to pull more people in.

  When dating someone, I’d casually bring up Creationism in conversation as a form of self-protection against destructive anti-Science ideologies.

  At the time, I imagined what it must be like to be gay in a world openly hostile to that way of being, and having to stay sort of hidden about it. Going to work, going to the store, going home, and always with the specter of the revelation containing an edge of potential violence: verbal abuse or even genuine, physical danger — and God save the transgendered person discovered in parts of that town!

  I imagined back into history, and across history, where for so long so many people didn’t even have the word to express what they felt about other people, knowing only the fear of being discovered. I imagined the police officers going around and raiding gay bars, beating up homeless gay and lesbian people who had been kicked out of their homes — rendered homeless — for just being themselves. People around me at the time — not my friends, mind, just people — talked openly with such pride in their voice about the poison of homosexuality and all sorts of awful, spitefulness. And, they talked this way while the very people they openly reviled were probably just a few tables down in the coffee shops, going to a different, more tolerant church around the corner, and/or sitting at the edge of the bar. Hatred is such an awful thing. I hate hatred.

  So, I can go on at length about this, because this subject can piss me off something fierce, and I carried that anger quietly for a long time. My uncle was a good person, and he didn’t deserve to be called all kinds of poison, and he didn’t deserve to die of such a poison as that awful disease, and to be separated from his family and community because of their hatred of him. He passed in ‘93, when I was just 13, and I was only just learning the meaning of the word that people called him in my cloistered childhood. Again, as an adult and an author, that was in the neighborhood of 2005, 2006, gay marriage was not even something the average person would know about, much less consider viable to become a law of this land. Tolerance was just not the way things were done, then, for a large portion of our country. It wasn’t even imagined. The only thing that was imagined was the evil and sin of the orientation.

  I figured with fantasy I could make this imaginary poison real. I could invent a world where there were people who actually had this poison in them as infectious as others seem to think the gay is, in its way. And, as I would reveal in the books, it wouldn’t matter if the demon stain was real, because they’d still be humans. As well, treating people like monsters has a great way of creating monsters out of people. I thought about the larger message of tolerance, and injustice, and how cities and communities eat themselves, and how it is all connected in cycles of misery and suffering.

  I thought that if I wrote about two gay men in love, the people who most need to read about the humanity of the other would assume the book wasn’t for them. So, I wrote a heterosexual love story, instead, with Jona, the disgraced lord of a noble house fallen into poverty and ruin, and a Rachel Nolander, a mystic woman who never believes that she will find peace, much less love. Both carry a stain that makes the very blood and sweat and tears of them a toxin to everyone around them. I wrote about the city that eats their poor, as the large cities of Texas do. I wrote about a lot of things that angered me that I saw in the world around me. I wrote about nature and the city and the relationship between what is natural and what is cultural.

  WLT_FCover_300dpi

  What do you think the role of genre is in fiction?

  I don’t know in the slightest, and the older I get, the less I know.

  Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

  Whenever I take D&D personality tests, and I’ve taken a few, I actually test as a True Neutral Druid nine out of ten, and a True Neutral Monk, for that lingering one.

  Beyond that, I will say only ‘Yes’.

  How long did it take you to write We Leave Together? Have you ever had a faster turn around on a book you’ve written?

  I don’t remember.

  I prefer to forget as much as possible about the books that I have written, because it makes it more likely that I will write another one. It is like going to the dentist. If I think about the procedures too much, I’ll never go back.

  I also try to write a new kind of book every time, to make sure I don’t write the same things over and over. Every new book is starting over brand new, and I learn how to write again every time.

  Who are some of the writers that you admire?

  Lately, I have been enthralled with Julian Graq, Haldor Laxness, and Zachary Jernigan. I am writing a lot of science fiction, of late, and I have a very difficult time, I feel, escaping the shadow that Maureen McHugh spreads across my imagined futures.

  If demons existed, what do you think their end game would be on Earth?

  Demons exist on earth, but we don’t call them that. Daemons of pure energy, pure sin, that exist only to consume and corrupt are here. They have no corporeal form, but they pollute the corporeal with their energy and corruption of human will. We call them corporations, and I think the end game is consumption of all things, a sort of uber-monopolistic entity that touches every industry, extracting everything from them, where the system of extraction is more important than the people who live and work inside the system.

  I have written about this twice, in fact. In the short story ‘Hestia’ in my collection Women and Monsters, the only way to preserve endangered species and homeless men is to devour them and turn them into shit. In my novel, Straggletaggle, the end game of industry is splayed out, a perfect rule of corporate law and efficiency, devouring everything until nothing is left of man and soul and green grass and birdsong, and it is the most terrible and frightening thing in the world.

  Corporations are daemonic. They don’t have to be evil, but self-interest and self-interested actors make them so far too often for my taste and comfort.

  What are you working on currently?

  I am nearly finished with a deep space colony of quantum clones, and their unillustrious Astral Navigator. It is a novella heavily influenced by The Opposing Shore by Julian Graq, and The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati. In my opinion, much of military science fiction details very exciting things, and much of the actual experience of most military personnel is terribly dull and sort of theatrical in nature, pretending to be at war, or pretending to be warriors, so to speak. The vast majority of soldiers never even fire an epithet, much less a gun, in the direction of an enemy. I thought I should write a military science fiction piece about that, for a change.

• Apex Magazine - https://www.apex-magazine.com/interview-with-j-m-mcdermott/

  Interview with J.M. McDermott

  by J. M. McDermott on Jul 7, 2009 in Interviews | 0 comments
  Tags: apex magazine, interview, issue 1, j.m. mcdermott
  J.M. McDermott published his first novel, Last Dragon, in January, 2008 under the Wizards of the Coast Discoveries program. Last Dragon drew immediate praise from both fans and critics for its stylistic prose and unconventional narrative structure. The book went on to make the ‘Editors Choice’ top ten at Amazon.com.
  Apex Publications published the eBook versions of Last Dragon in June, 2009. In 2011, Apex re-issued the print version.
  Prior to the publication of Last Dragon, McDermott was a prolific short fiction and poetry writer. His work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, GUD, Dark Recesses, and more. He maintains an active blog at jmmcdermott.blogspot.com.
  JS: It’s fun reading reviews of Last Dragon. Critics often struggle to describe the book in any meaningful fashion. Outside of calling Last Dragon ‘dark fantasy’, do you label it as any current sub-genre type of fiction?
  JMM: I’ve always called it, to myself and others as ‘anti-epic’ fantasy, wherein I am intentionally doing everything that makes epic fantasy ‘Epic Fantasy’ completely and totally backwards. By doing this, I think I’m pushing what is possible for a genre book to be. I’ve been known to describe the book as ‘Pulp Fiction’-stle epic fantasy with non-linearity and high artistry done in a genre with little history of it, with an emphasis on the personal interactions between these characters more than on their deeds.
  I actually see a lot of similarities to my book and to whatever it is that is developing in the slow burn down from New Weird, especially the work of writers like Sarah Monette and Hal Duncan, who are both brilliant. I hadn’t seen any of their stuff, obviously, when I was writing the book seven or eight years ago, but I think we probably share a lot of influences, or perhaps influences of influences.
  These days, when people ask me to describe my book, I often just shrug and advise them to google. It’s been a few years, and I think critics have done an excellent job describing the book. Even reviewers that didn’t care for the book communicate successfully what it is the reader will experience, and I know I’m very grateful to them all for that.
  It’s a dense book, surprisingly long for it’s relatively short length, and it is difficult to explicate exactly everything I was trying to convey in some sort of a manageable soundbyte.
  Look, just check it out for yourself. Fictionwise will let you read a whole chapter for free, right?
  JS: I’m delighted you queried us in regards to the e-rights for Last Dragon. You could have went to a number of larger e-book publishers, so why Apex?
  JMM: First, I have to say, that I was especially interested in an eBook because I had heard from reader who, for whatever reason, have difficultly acquiring paper editions of books. I had gotten in the habit of just shooting them a PDF I had slapped together if they promised not to be book pirates. I think it’s safe to assume that readers are basically well-intentioned, upstanding individuals, and trustworthy. Thus far, I’ve been proven correct.
  Then, one day, it occurred to me that I actually owned eBook rights to my book. I poked around a couple afternoons to figure out what to do with these rights. This is where Apex comes in.
  Apex is one of the highly-respected indie shops active in the genre that gets titles reviewed everywhere genre books are reviewed. When I noticed Apex was getting the eBook editions for sale at every eBook store I could think of, and more, with good cover art, querying them about this little side project entered the realm of a no-brainer. I want my book up for sale everywhere it can be sold, so every reader can find it in the format they prefer, and I want it competitively priced so my readers can afford it.
  Apex was the first shop I explicitly queried about doing an eBook.
  JS: Your use of language in Last Dragon is to be commended. Are you secretly a Pulitzer-winning poet?
  JMM: No. I am, however, a Rhysling-nominated poet, right this moment, in the Long-Form category, for “3 Poems called Cosmic” in Abyss & Apex’s third quarter issue, 2008.
  JS: I found it interested in how you portrayed the book’s female protagonist, Zahn, in such an unconventional manner. She’s not especially likable, kills plenty of people, and isn’t looking for love. Do you plan on bringing her back for a sequel?
  JMM: No sequels. This book was, to me, about culling down a multi-book epic fantasy series into one, and only one, tome. The entire story is already told. If there were any sort of sequel involved, it wouldn’t be with any of the main characters, and it would probably need to be in a very different, unexplored region of the world. Even then, it would require multiple wheelbarrows full of money and public outcry on par with a Presidential election. I’d also be—rightfully—accused of “selling out”.
  JS: Do you have any books coming out that we should know about?
  JMM: Some writers seem to have a book coming out every single year. They write a strange book. They sell the strange book to a major publisher. We read the strange book. Boom Boom Boom, over and over.
  I’ve actually gotten very close to the end of another book that my agent has politely suggested might not be New York Times bestseller material. I’m polishing it up, with my agent’s gentle guidance and the borrowed eyes of some trusted friends. Hopefully, when we’re done, this strange book might actually be marketable.
  In the meantime, I write short stories and poems. My next short story should be out from Weird Tales, soon. I’ve got more on the way, from a few other notable folks. Poking around on my blog should point anyone who’s curious to lots and lots of things already in the world, and keep you informed of what’s coming next at jmmcdermott.blogspot.com).
  JS: As always, a pleasure, thank you for the interview.

  JMM: Thanks for your time, everyone, and I hope you enjoy reading my book!

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Print Marked Items
The Fortress at the End of Time
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p55.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Fortress at the End of Time
Joe M. McDermott.Tor, $19.99 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-0-7653-9280-0
A military officer suffers through a nightmarish posting on the furthest edges of human civilization in this
introspective, oddly subdued far-future tale. Ensign Ronaldo Aldo just wants to fly spaceships, but instead he's trapped
aboard the Citadel, a claustrophobic space station, where he's surrounded by corrupt colleagues and neglectful
superiors with absolutely no hope of escape or promotion. As he whiles away his days, plagued by bad luck and poor
choices, he struggles to reconcile his principles with the ways things are actually done on the Citadel. Eventually, he
chooses to do the unthinkable in a final attempt to change his dead-end existence. Though McDermott (Maze)
introduces some intriguing concepts, such as humankind spreading through space with the use of so-called quantum
clones, the execution suffers from stilted dialogue and emotional detachment, as well as a general air of apathy and
fatalism; whether Aldo is pursuing romance or watching a crewmate die horribly, his narration never fully engages the
reader. This passionless, purposeless, high-concept story never truly hits its mark, and the conclusion will leave readers
cold. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Fortress at the End of Time." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 55. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224867&it=r&asid=dfd19ff730b846b847a60b31d4747dbd.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
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McDermott, J.M. Last Dragon
Jackie Cassada
Library Journal.
132.20 (Dec. 1, 2007): p105.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
McDermott, J.M. Last Dragon. Discoveries[TM]: Wizards of the Coast. Feb. 2008. c.400p. ISBN 978-0-7869-4857-4.
pap. $17.95. FANTASY
A journey focused on revenge becomes an odyssey of self-discovery and of the founding of an empire in blood and
sacrifice. As Zhan searches for her grandfather, a creature no longer human that has killed his entire village, she travels
in the company of Seth, a fire-breathing shaman; Korinyes, a gypsy who is more than she seems; and Adel, a paladin
present at the slaying of the last dragon. McDermott's debut novel requires careful reading to piece together a story told
in nonlinear form, as mercurial as memories and as visceral as death. This fantasy adventure belongs in libraries where
literary fantasy in the tradition of Gene Wolf, A.A. Attanasio, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is popular.
Cassada, Jackie
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Cassada, Jackie. "McDermott, J.M. Last Dragon." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2007, p. 105. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA172905950&it=r&asid=a42e25da35332e1f1c53a0c8d3674bb4.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A172905950
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When We Were Executioners
Publishers Weekly.
258.50 (Dec. 12, 2011): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
When We Were Executioners
J.M. McDermott. Night Shade (www.nightshadebooks.com), $14.99 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-59780-338-0
The second Dogsland novel picks up where Never Knew Another left off, with a wolfskin-wearing priest and priestess
of Erin reconstructing the last days of Jona, Lord Joni, a half-demon corporal of the King's Men, from residual dreams
that imbue his found skull. Hoping to track down and terminate two similarly demon-tainted Dogslanders of Jona's
acquaintance--Rachel Nolander, his lover, and Salvatore Fidelio, his detested enemy--the priestly pair follow Jona's
memories through adventures that include his clashes with drug smugglers and his assassination of suitors to the
daughter of a powerful lord, whereby Jona hopes to manipulate the succession. McDermott make Jona a compelling
antihero, by turns ruthless and compassionate. The author's real achievement, though, is his vivid evocation of
Dogsland, a quasi-medieval realm whose squalor, depravity, and brutality give credible context for the best and worst
behaviors, as well as the novel's subtly fantastic goings-on. Agent: Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"When We Were Executioners." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2011, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA275130000&it=r&asid=5e5cc2ada79accba0b567399ba1310c6.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A275130000

QUOTED: "Readers will ... find Dogsland a grittily imagined fantasy world."

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We Leave Together
Publishers Weekly.
261.17 (Apr. 28, 2014): p117.
COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
We Leave Together
J.M. McDermott. Word Horde
(www.wordhorde.com), $15.99 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-939905-04-8
McDermott's third novel set in Dogsland (after When We Were Executioners) brings closure to the saga of the
deceased Jona Lord Joni, whose memory-filled skull yields the narrative. Jona, a half-demon noble dispossessed of his
family's lands, is working as a King's Man, trying to stanch the flow of addictive demon weed into the city, when he is
approached by its main distributor, the Lady Sabachthani, with her scheme to take over Dogsland. Jona's collusion is
complicated by his half-demon lover, Rachel Nolander, who is trying to break her brother's addiction to the weed.
Although McDermott provides backstories for his characters that were only vaguely sketched in the previous novels,
this installment is still patchy in spots, and leaves loose ends flailing. Regardless, readers will still find Dogsland a
grittily imagined fantasy world, with a personality as vivid as any of its residents. June)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"We Leave Together." Publishers Weekly, 28 Apr. 2014, p. 117. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA366866917&it=r&asid=0d4cd492d0a4f7ea439e5d9eade0016d.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A366866917

QUOTED: "Readers will be eager to return to Dogsland in hope of finding answers."

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Never Knew Another
Publishers Weekly.
258.5 (Jan. 31, 2011): p35.
COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Never Knew Another
J.M. McDermott. Night Shade (www.nightshadebooks.com), $14.99 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-59780-215-4
This well-wrought fantasy trilogy launch maps the boundaries and sensibilities of Dogsland, a quasi-medieval domain
that is hostile to any resident tainted by demon blood. McDermott (Last Dragon) evokes the lifestyles, politics, and
attitudes of the realm through the experiences of three half-demons trying to go about their business unobtrusively:
Jona, a dispossessed lord working as a noble's guard; Rachel Nolander, a cleaning maid living with her thuggish fully
human brother; and Salvatore, a thief whose activities threaten to call attention to the unsavory activities of Jona's
employer. Paths cross randomly and soon interesting connections develop among the characters. McDermott leaves
many questions open, including the identities of the tale's wolfskin-wearing narrators, and readers will be eager to
return to Dogsland in hope of finding answers. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Never Knew Another." Publishers Weekly, 31 Jan. 2011, p. 35. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA248578133&it=r&asid=a4dd0486a37c7296ec90e89fe563ead5.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A248578133

"The Fortress at the End of Time." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 55. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224867&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. Cassada, Jackie. "McDermott, J.M. Last Dragon." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2007, p. 105. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA172905950&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. "When We Were Executioners." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2011, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA275130000&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. "We Leave Together." Publishers Weekly, 28 Apr. 2014, p. 117. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA366866917&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. "Never Knew Another." Publishers Weekly, 31 Jan. 2011, p. 35. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA248578133&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.

• RT Book Reviews
  https://www.rtbookreviews.com/book-review/fortress-end-time
  Word count: 326

  QUOTED: "McDermott’s latest isn’t exactly a page-turning thriller, but readers will be sucked into the odd life that exists for Ronaldo Aldo II."

  THE FORTRESS AT THE END OF TIME
  Author(s): Joe M. McDermott
  McDermott’s latest isn’t exactly a page-turning thriller, but readers will be sucked into the odd life that exists for Ronaldo Aldo II. Part philosophical debate and part gritty space “memoir,” the conceit of Fortress is that we’re reading a confession Aldo has written to explain his actions as he sits in a lonely cell at the edge of humanity’s reach. The story works on many different levels, and readers come to know Aldo and feel for his plight. While the science that makes it all possible isn’t around yet, this is speculative fiction; who’s to say this sort of confession won’t be necessary some day?
  Humans have expanded across the galaxy, but because of distance problems associated with relative time and space, those who reach the edges are clones, created and sent from Earth along an ansible line. Receiving an assignment on the listening station Citadel, War College graduate Ronaldo Aldo arrives with memories of a life spent on a planet he’s never seen, hoping he’ll be able to transcend and be re-cloned over and over again to greater postings. But the situation on the station is bleak: suicides are common and the station and the small human colony on the neighboring planet are constantly at odds over the ansible’s use. Aldo is by-the-book and fails to make friends, and he’s outsmarted by the monks who control the planet and his coworkers in space. After a decade, he’s still considered the new guy; with nothing to look forward to, Aldo makes a decision that will have repercussions throughout the galaxy. (TOR.COM, Jan., 268 pp., $19.99)
  Reviewed by:
  Karen Sweeny-Justice

• New York Journal of Books
  http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/fortress-end-time
  Word count: 568

  QUOTED: "The Fortress at the End of Time is a good read and well crafted. Fans of hard science with a literary bent in their science fiction will love it. Fans of high action and blow things up science fiction will probably not."

  The Fortress at the End of Time

  Image of The Fortress at the End of Time
  Author(s):
  Joe M. McDermott
  Release Date:
  January 16, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Tor.com
  Pages:
  305
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Jake Bible
  Joe M. McDermott's The Fortress at the End of Time is inventive, thought-provoking, insightful, ambitious, and tedious. Extremely well written, it is a novel for those who love to explore the ideas and ethics of space travel, and deep isolation, as apposed to those that love to explore.

  At times brilliant, it can also get bogged down in its own intellectual exercises and will bore those looking for action oriented military scifi, while exciting those that are tired of the same old spaceships firing lasers and Space Marines hunting aliens.

  Set in the far, far, far future, The Fortress at the End of Time is the story of Captain Ronaldo Aldo who has committed "an unforgivable crime." The novella is his confession to this crime, hinting at what he has done while also keeping the reader in constant suspense as to the exact nature of his offense. He is not necessarily a likable protagonist, as he freely admits, and at times it is hard to not want to see the confessor thrown out into the deep, dark space that he fights to keep at bay.

  Moved across the galaxy by ansible, a technology that transmits all the information that makes a person who they are to a machine that can create an instant copy, the Renaldo Aldo that we learn about is a clone of the one left back on Earth. The redundancy of his name is an obvious allusion to the redundancy of his body. It is a highly inventive concept and the central conceit of the novella.

  But even with the inventiveness of the tech and world building, the novella is not a fast read. It is a slow burn of a morality play where the confessor is at once the defendant and the prosecutor. His own guilt plays so heavy in the narrative that it is hard to see how anything beyond his death could be the resolution.

  Yet even with the weight of the theme, the novella is compelling and has a climax (if a slow novella such as this can have a climax) that both satisfies the reader and leaves him/her in a state of questioning.

  All in all, The Fortress at the End of Time is a good read and well crafted. Fans of hard science with a literary bent in their science fiction will love it. Fans of high action and blow things up science fiction will probably not. The choice is left to the reader.

  Jake Bible is a prolific author of YA and adult novels and short fiction in horror, action/thriller, and science fiction, as well as works that combine elements of multiple genres. He is also a screenwriter and inventor of the drabble novel.

• The Verge
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/17/14223772/fortress-at-the-end-of-time-joe-mcdermott-book-review
  Word count: 906

  QUOTED: "The Fortress at the End of Time is an essential read, and feels like it’s a throwback to the era of classic science fiction from authors such as Frank Herbert or Ursula K. Le Guin, but never dated. McDermott takes a slow, thoughtful approach to this multilayered little book, playing out plotlines over years, and paying full attention to how the story’s events affect the characters, rather than the other way around."

  FORTRESS AT THE END OF TIME IS A BRILLIANT THROWBACK TO CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION
  A multilayered and thoughtful short novel
  by Andrew Liptak@AndrewLiptak Jan 17, 2017, 11:00am EST
  SHARE

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  LINKEDIN
  When a soldier is stationed at the furthest human outpost in the galaxy, he’s confronted with an incredible challenge: staying alive in a meaningless existence, hoping to one day be promoted to a better location.

  Joe M. McDermott’s new short novel The Fortress at the End of Time is a thoughtful investigation of how people cope when their lives are put on hold, and a brilliant analysis of technology, faith, and the point where they meet. The Fortress at the End of Time is set in a far future in which humanity has expanded across the galaxy and battled a vicious (and unexplained) enemy. The war is long over, and humanity has secured a few hundred planets. Each planet is colonized via “ansibles” which supply and populate Earth’s growing colonies.

  The ansible is a long-established science fiction fixture created by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1966, usually represented as an instantaneous communication device. But McDermott’s ansible is essentially a replicator, which allows for the instantaneous duplication of an object or person.

  The story begins when Captain Ronaldo Aldo, an astro-navigational officer for Earth’s military, confesses to committing a terrible (but unnamed) crime. The rest of the novel covers the events leading up to the confession, beginning with Aldo’s graduation from War College and his assignment to a dead-end planet — or, rather, his clone is posted to this bleak dump, called the Citadel, in another corner of the galaxy.

  The original Aldo remains on Earth, where he presumably has a normal life. The new Aldo has all his memories, but while he’s a new person, he’s burdened by his predecessor’s record and actions. He will remain on the Citadel forever, but he hopes by doing a commendable job, he can get a clone of himself (complete with all his memories from the Citadel) created on a more interesting planet. Aldo despairs: the Citadel is the furthest colony from Earth. If he can’t prove himself worthy of ascension, he’ll remain in this banal posting for the rest of his life. If he succeeds, he will be permitted to step into the ansible once more, and move to a new planet.

  Day in and day out, he maintains a decaying space station and contends with a dysfunctional, boring crew. Suicide rates are abnormally high at the Citadel, and corruption is rampant.

  This short novel hinges on the agony and anxiety of being trapped by the status quo. The desire to break free from the predictable is present not just in relationships, but settings. Earth is in a sort of pause, waiting for the return of its vague enemy. The station and planet Citadel are waiting for an ice comet to provide the next step of a centuries-long terraforming process.

  Aldo himself is emotionally frozen. On the Citadel, he’s unresponsive to a potential romance with a crewmate. If he does manage to send a clone of himself somewhere interesting, he doesn’t want it yearning for someone he left behind.

  Tor.com
  The other major theme in The Fortress at the End of Time is the unexpected consequences of technology. Humanity has developed amazing tech: colonies far out in the depths of space, ansibles that teleport people across the stars, and starships that can take down unknown enemy spacecraft. Yet each advancement carries unusual problems. Ansible trips load their passengers with the burden of the past: the duplicates have to contend with their original selves’ memories and experiences, while forging their own futures.

  McDermott is careful to show that science and technology don’t have all the answers. A monastery on the planet siphons off military deserters who are stuck in moralistic quandaries, questioning the role the military plays in expanding humanity’s footprint in the galaxy. The deserters are a worthy foil, posing heavy questions for the crew: when people are reborn through the ansible are their souls transported, too? Do they have hope of redemption in future lives?

  The Fortress at the End of Time is an essential read, and feels like it’s a throwback to the era of classic science fiction from authors such as Frank Herbert or Ursula K. Le Guin, but never dated. McDermott takes a slow, thoughtful approach to this multilayered little book, playing out plotlines over years, and paying full attention to how the story’s events affect the characters, rather than the other way around. His hard-science details and logical explanations should satisfy more scientifically minded readers, but they are accompanied by a moral core that sticks long after the final page.

• Pop Culture Beast
  http://www.popculturebeast.com/book-fortress-end-time-joe-m-mcdermott/
  Word count: 374

  Book: The Fortress at the End of Time (Joe M. McDermott)
  JL Jamieson01.2017Book Review, Books
  fortressThe Fortress at the End of Time

  Joe M. McDermott

  Tor.com

  January 17th, 2017

  Ensign Ronaldo Aldo just wanted to be cloned by ansible to a good post, fly ships on missions deep into space, and get more clones promoted out to other postings. That’s all anyone in the Service wants.

  Unfortunately, his ratings weren’t particularly stellar, so his first cloning is to humanity’s most remote outpost. It’s so grim and boring, the person he’s sent to replace committed suicide.

  He just wants to follow the rules and do a good job, but life out at Citadel isn’t that simple.

  The basic premise of the book is that humanity has propagated all over space by data transmission by a tool called an ansible. It scans a person in one location, transmits data, and reconstructs them from matter at the remote location, creating a clone, or copy. When people do a good job and get promoted, they’re cloned again out to someplace better.

  The main character isn’t an admirable guy (or even an interesting one), but through boredom, frustration, and ingenuity born of desperation we watch him turn from disappointed but stubbornly optimistic to pessimistic and reckless. The story is told as Aldo recounting his ‘crimes’ to a confessor, and we learn that although his crime may be seen as serious, by the end you can’t really blame him.

  For anyone who’s been stuck in a dead end job in the ass end of nowhere that killed their optimism and good will, you’ll probably see Aldo’s unraveling as almost familiar.

  Behave Andromeda Romano-Lax

  JL Jamieson
  JL Jamieson is a strange book nerd who writes technical documents by day, and book news, reviews, and other assorted opinions for you by night. She is working on her own fiction, and spends time making jewelry to sell at local conventions, as well as stalking the social media accounts of all your favorite writers.

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/we-leave-together/
  Word count: 502

  QUOTED: "McDermott demonstrates a masterful ability to convey the emotional struggle of the characters through imagery. ... The complexity of this novel, although a bit confusing at first due to the scattered sequences of the scenes, can also be appreciated."

  We Leave Together

  Reviewed by Jessica S. Council
  August 27, 2014

  Emotionally wrought imagery conveys the characters’ struggles in this rich fantasy novel.

  Set in a world full of darkness and demon influence, J. M. McDermott’s We Leave Together is a story of love, addiction, despair, and desire. This heart-wrenching tale follows the final memories of a King’s man—a man who devotes his life to carrying out the will of the king—whose entire life has been affected by the existence of demons who walk the earth.

  The unnamed narrator, a “wolfwoman” blessed by the god Elishta to see into the memories of the fallen King’s man Jona Lord Joni, goes back in time to learn the truth of what actually happened in Dogsland so she can tell the world what the king has truly done to his people. Her mission to write it all down for the world to read is challenged by secrecy, broken memories, and partial recollection of the locals. Soldiering on in her search, however, she discovers the true origin of demon weed; the secret that changes demon-child Lord Joni’s life forever, along with the fate of the entire town.

  McDermott demonstrates a masterful ability to convey the emotional struggle of the characters through imagery. “Sergeant Calipari stepped up from the bed, and he was already in his uniform. He had slept in it. He pulled his boots on over bare feet and grabbed his cloak and belt from the night table, which was almost the only furniture here.” This scene illustrates the melancholy of the characters and strengthens the drive that pushes the characters toward their goal.

  The complexity of this novel, although a bit confusing at first due to the scattered sequences of the scenes, can also be appreciated. Being forced to piece together the events of the story with scenes that do not happen in order, as the main character is piecing the story together for herself, is both challenging and intriguing. The only drawback to this is that by the middle of the novel, readers already know what happened after those events. It’s like reading the ending first, something not all readers enjoy.

  We Leave Together is definitely a novel to add to the reading list.

  Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/we-leave-together/
  Word count: 970

  "We Leave Together."
  By Ana Grilo on June 27, 2014
  I see what I see of the city, by the grace of the goddess Erin, who granted me the lost memories of the demon child’s skull that I might root out the evil of the world.

  I recently wrote about trilogy endings and how saying goodbye to a favorite series is both sad and exciting. I found myself revisiting that bittersweet moment recently when I read We Leave Together by J.M. McDermott, the final book in the excellent, and sadly under-read, Dogsland Trilogy (Never Knew Another, When We Were Executioners, We Leave Together). It’s a trilogy I wish had gotten more attention from fellow SFF readers because it is so good: It succeeds in what it sets out to do, it’s grim but it engages with its grimness in a thoughtful way and the prose itself is enough to recommend the book on its own.

  It starts as an unnamed narrator and her husband, both Walkers and shapeshifter priests of the Goddess Erin, come across a dead man’s body, a demon-child, a soldier named Jona. As a priestess of Erin, the narrator is able to, upon touching his skull, absorb Jona’s memories. It’s through those memories, which the narrator writes down, that the labyrinthine life of Dogsland and its inhabitants come to life. She follows on Jona’s footsteps to perform their mission: to completely eradicate—through the powers of fire and death—all the signs that he was ever alive and to find and vanquish the other demon-children living in Dogsland: Jona’s lover Rachel and his enemy Salvatore. Demon-children are a danger to others—inherently evil. Single drops of their bodily fluids are deadly poisonous.

  As the narrator traverses Dogsland and goes deep into Jona’s mind (and eventually also into his lover’s Rachel’s memories), the sights and smells of this city come to life and the nature of demon-children are examined. The more the story progresses, the more we come to understand the intricacy of this tale, the complexity of questions about nature and nurture which often go over the head of the narrator herself (for she is a fanatical blunt instrument) but which are inescapable to the reader.

  Continue reading >

  We will kill him, and fight the stain of demons in this city. We are not executioners. We are healers, now, in a fire and revolution and the reaping of the weeds, to cull the weakness in the streets of men. The streets will burn with fire before we are done here.When We Were Executioners

  This is a story about a city where the corruption and decadence of the rich exist alongside the paucity and desperation of the poor. Where addiction to demon weed is ubiquitous and very little hope exist that things will ever change. Where there is a Day King and a Night King and they both have power but the Night King (a woman, actually) wants more. To Jona, Dogsland is everything he has ever known, where his family has lived for always, a place he both loves and hates. To Rachel, it is a place where she found succour, love and damnation. She came to Dogsland to start anew with her brother and it’s also where she fell in love. It’s where her brother became addicted to a drug that is ruining their lives and putting them both in danger. She must leave, but she can only leave if her brother leaves with her (“We leave together”).

  It’s a story about two people, Jona and Rachel, demon-children who, before meeting each other, never knew another like themselves. It’s about the fact that they never asked to be born like they are, who continuously question their own nature. Jona never sleeps; Rachel has never had a moment of grace, her body covered in scales. When they cry, their tears burn through cloth and skin and so they keep everything bottled up, always. Both have lived in hiding all their lives, fearing their own nature: Are they really evil? Can they ever be good? If they perform corrupt acts, is it because they were born like this or because they have chosen to act this way?

  As you can tell, this trilogy is notWe Leave Together exactly all about ponies and rainbows. It’s extremely grim but one that fully engages with its own griminess and asks questions of it: how to change the state of things? Is the corruption to be accepted because it’s the way things are? Is a small act of corruption enough to condemn a person? These are not easy questions, and the more we get to know (and care for) the characters (or at least some of them), the more complicated it gets.

  We are not executioners. We are healers, now, in a fire and revolution and the reaping of the weeds, to cull the weakness in the streets of men. The streets will burn with fire before we are done here.

  Throughout Books 1 and 2, it was really hard to predict how all the pieces of this puzzle would fit together. But by the time I finished We Leave Together, everything did come together beautifully. Finding out the exact circumstances of Jona’s death and what happened to Rachel (YES! Rachel! You go, girl!) just about broke my heart in the best possible way.

  In Book Smugglerish: 8 out of 10 for the trilogy as a whole.

  Thea James and Ana Grilo are The Book Smugglers, a website for speculative fiction and YA. You can also find them on Twitter.

• Strange Horizons
  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/when-we-were-executioners-by-j-m-mcdermott/
  Word count: 2449

  QUOTED: "It's great stuff, a tense, breakneck-paced work, and one made all the more impressive because none of the above plot points or elided-over-here twists provide the text's paramount enjoyment. Where Never Knew Another shines is in its writing, the decadent, rich prose that a reader would gladly follow for its own reward. The writing swims effortlessly from first person to third, from present to past, propelling the above storyline, building fascinatingly conflicted characters and societies, and generally doing everything that brilliant writing should—it's great art and great craft all rolled into one."
  "Down to the page count, it's exactly the same length as its predecessor, but it's so rich in detail that it feels twice as long. Yet for all its differences, the parallels McDermott weaves between the two are among the most satisfying elements, as demonstrated by how he winds down toward his finale."

  REVIEWS SIZE / / /
  WHEN WE WERE EXECUTIONERS BY J. M. MCDERMOTT
  JESSE BULLINGTON
  ISSUE: 19 MARCH 2012
  When We Were Executioners cover
  J. M. McDermott's Never Knew Another (2011), the first entry in his fantastical Dogsland Trilogy, packed an epic's worth of punch into a scant 232 pages. That novel, which I reviewed for Innsmouth Free Press, did just about everything right, combining an intriguing cast and plot with cheek-gnawing moral conundrums and exquisite, lyrical writing. The near-perfection of that trilogy-opener raised my hopes to dangerously lofty heights for McDermott's second entry in the trilogy, When We Were Executioners, but for the most part McDermott manages to meet these expectations.

  The central conceit of this quasi-medieval secondary world trilogy is that demons sometimes mate with humans, with any resulting children, called "of-demons," being tainted from birth. Although they can sometimes disguise the myriad physical manifestations of this taint (patches of reptilian scales instead of skin, etc.), these half-demons are inherently toxic: their sweat and tears eat away at their clothing, their saliva and blood are poisonous to flora and fauna. There is no cure, and the half-demons are persecuted by human authorities, as well as the werewolf clergy of a moon goddess who are known as Erin's Walkers. Execution is always the result.

  Obviously this setup is dangerously loaded if we follow it to any real world analogue, even with the of-demons being represented as individuals rather than dyed-in-the-wool evildoers. There's no real getting around this element, but it's a testament to McDermott's writing that this never hobbles the project. It is decidedly secondary world, after all, and his sympathetic treatment of beings who cannot help their heritage is made more interesting by the premise that the persecuted minority is actually as dangerous as the ignorant, fearful majority believes them to be. That the of-demon characters in these novels veer from the meticulously careful to the fatally irresponsible when it comes to the risk of poisoning mundane humans is as realistic as it is nerve-wracking, from the perspective of the reader—the abject is personified here, both as petty and profound.

  The main narrator of these onion-layered novels is one of these shapeshifting Erin's Walkers, with the overarching plot revolving around her investigation into several half-demons hiding in Dogsland—what the Walkers call human society in general, and the teeming city where much of the action takes place in particular. The Walkers have a sometimes-shaky jurisdiction over the hunting of half-demons even in human settlements, given their unique abilities at locating their quarry. The method our narrator uses to track down the of-demons provides much more than plot advancement—When We Were Executioners begins as the Walker's first-person account of the investigation, but by handling the skull of a deceased half-demon named Jona, she is able to engage with his memories.

  The premise of psychic/necromantic detectives is a well-worn one, but McDermott takes what could be a predictable and even cheesy device and completely owns it. Both novels thus weave between the Walker narrator's perspective and third-person accounts of a half-demon's double-life in Dogsland, with When We Were Executioners beginning in much the same way that Never Knew Another both began and concluded:

  I dream of dead men.

  The skull that rests upon a lip in the cave pollutes my mind, in sleep. Corporal Jona, the Lord of Joni, died in the woods. My husband and I found him there, polluting the ground with the stain of the demon in Jona's blood. (p. 1)
  Jona's skull is what drove Never Knew Another, and it's what drives When We Were Executioners. In the first novel we met Jona through his memories, memories of growing up the only son of a noble family fallen on hard enough times that Jona works as a king's man (essentially a beat cop in the unnamed city's militia). A bitter, corrupt man willing to kill in order to hide his half-demon heritage, Jona meets Rachel Nolander, another of-demon who has successfully hidden her true nature. Rachel and her fully-human brother Djoss arrive in Dogsland and settle in the Pens, the worst part of town that also happens to be Jona's jurisdiction. While Djoss becomes involved in the illicit trade of "pink," the addictive narcotic of choice for Dogslanders, Rachel and Jona begin a wary courtship that, given how the story is being told, we know is doomed from inception.

  Complications arise as Jona is blackmailed by a powerful underworld figure known as the Night King, and then compounded by the introduction of a third half-demon character, a dissipated thief and conman named Salvatore. Before the novel reaches its perhaps overly hasty finale, Jona has successfully framed and thus damned Aggie, a girlfriend of Salvatore's, by substituting his own blood for hers after accusations arise that she is of-demon. It's all wrapped up the machinations of the Sabachthani family, who are next in line to rule Dogsland after the ailing king dies; that the noble family is not above trafficking in toxic of-demon remains to help power its dark sorceries is discovered by the Walkers as the novel draws to its close.

  It's great stuff, a tense, breakneck-paced work, and one made all the more impressive because none of the above plot points or elided-over-here twists provide the text's paramount enjoyment. Where Never Knew Another shines is in its writing, the decadent, rich prose that a reader would gladly follow for its own reward. The writing swims effortlessly from first person to third, from present to past, propelling the above storyline, building fascinatingly conflicted characters and societies, and generally doing everything that brilliant writing should—it's great art and great craft all rolled into one:

  Ants have no souls to lose. We gave the tainted skull back to the body while we cleaned away the bones. We planted two red queens in his gaping mouth, and blessed them both to hasten their hungry daughters. When only bones remained, we planted tough dandelions to eat the worst of the stain from the earth. We'd harvest the first generation of dandelions before they spread their white seeds. Then, we will plant sunflowers. This first generation of sunflowers will be short and covered in thorns, but those sunflowers' children will be better. In a few generations, the flowers won't need to be burned.

  Someday sunflowers will once again bloom again here. They will be as tall as men, and smell sweet. (Never Knew Another, p.3)
  This imagery, beyond everything else it is doing, would be perfect even if it were not recalled to fine effect in the haunting finale:

  We will return to the city, in the depth of night, but not yet.

  Salvatore had lived long and long before we knew him. Like the city that had hid him from us, Erin will come for him and tear all the buildings down around him. Sunflowers will grow tall and golden there. The wolves will run the dogs away and rule the rocky ground where the bricks lay broken. (Never Knew Another, p. 231)
  Which brings us to When We Were Executioners, a novel every bit as gorgeously written as its predecessor. We return to Dogland and the Walkers' pondering of Jona's skull, which still holds many secrets. While Never Knew Another sprawled in all directions, temporally as well as spatially and thematically, its follow-up narrows its focus significantly. Some readers who enjoyed the first novel's quick pacing may be turned off by the languid turn this book takes, but I appreciated being able to catch my breath and better get to know the characters. Granted, I may not have liked them as much once I knew them better, but I'm fine following a flawed or even repellent character, so long as he or she is interesting.

  We pick up the novel with our Walker narrator and her husband returning to Dogsland to continue their investigation. They had left the city during the climax of Never Knew Another, following their confiscation of two other of-demon skulls they seized from the Sabachthani estate—Lord Sabachthani being the most powerful noble in Dogsland, a practitioner of proscribed sorceries, and the dying father of Lady Ela Sabachthani, an equally dangerous noble and heir to the entire kingdom. Lord Sabachthani we meet only briefly in a confrontation early in the novel, when the Walkers pay him a visit for some verbal fencing.

  Although this scene early on leads the reader to anticipate more of the Walkers' investigation, for the bulk of the novel they are even more in the background than in Never Knew Another. This is a bit of a shame, as those sections were some of my favorites from the first novel, and the hardline, almost-fascist black and white filter they apply to Dogsland's endless shades of grey is a nice dichotomy. They are also contain some of the most colorful, enchanting writing:

  Inn beds acquired too many old smells for wolf noses. In this little room, a thousand lovers had left the ghosts of their affections in the sheets. With the loamy soap smell and the sea wind and the maid sweat from all the trips down the stairs, through the wash, onto the line, and back again for more lovers, I'd only dream of the mechanical motion of anonymous lovers and anonymous maids like clock hands tearing at the white linen skin of the sheets. I'd wake up dizzy. (p. 18)
  Almost the entirety of the book settles on Jona and Rachel, together and apart. Rachel works as a maid cleaning up in brothels, while her brother Djoss and his two friends form a drug dealing gang called the Three Kings of Dogsland. Jona's already precarious position as a crooked king's man continues to erode, and between carrying out contract killings on behalf of his blackmailers and stealing time with Rachel, he visits Aggie—the girl condemned to death as an of-demon after Jona frames her—in her prison cell.

  The segments where Jona tends to Aggie start off as heartbreaking, but I'll confess to growing frustrated as Aggie failed to develop much as a character or do anything beyond pine away for Salvatore, her of-demon lover who has already forgotten her despite Jona's attempts to convince him to help her escape. Initially, we're moved that selfish, ruthless Jona is trying to help Aggie, but then he cops a feel of her breast while she's passed out, and the sympathy we were building for Jona is dealt a hard blow. That so much time is spent with Jona and Aggie without the main plotline progressing is representative of the shift between this book and its predecessor—here, McDermott is more interested in exploring the moral landscapes and emotional plots he introduced in the first novel, rather than advancing them.

  For some, this will definitely feel like wheel-spinning, which is of course the most common pitfall of a middle book in a trilogy. To my mind, though, it seems more likely that this what McDermott planned from the beginning—a slow burn series of character studies and brooding meditations on human frailty, rather than a plot-driven adventure. In Never Knew Another, the novelty of McDermott's achingly marvelous prose carried the reader along, but going into a text with the expectation of that language leads one to pay sharper attention to what else is at work—and while the plot is fine, that was never the text's chief strength. It's an even more desperate, brutal read than Never Knew Another, where a scene of Jona gate-crashing a noble's ball with Rachel in tow is even more tense than his assassination-and-get-away set pieces.

  What made Never Knew Another such a remarkable read was how unexpected and fresh a read it was. With that in mind, I should have suspected that When We Were Executioners would go in a very different direction from what I might have anticipated. Down to the page count, it's exactly the same length as its predecessor, but it's so rich in detail that it feels twice as long. Yet for all its differences, the parallels McDermott weaves between the two are among the most satisfying elements, as demonstrated by how he winds down toward his finale:

  There is another demon skull to claim, an old one more terrifying than any living. We will no longer be executioners chasing after a prize. We will be the fire that purifies this city for a thousand years. Let the rain come and cool the ash from our flame. We were supposed to be executioners. We were supposed to be hunters and killers of abominations. (p. 231)
  The question of how McDermott will concludes the trilogy is less sure than ever now, save the certainty that it will be interesting.

  Jesse Bullington is the author of the novels The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, The Enterprise of Death, and the forthcoming The Folly of the World. His short fiction, articles, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he can be found online at www.jessebullington.com.

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  © Copyright 2012 Jesse Bullington
  ABOUT JESSE BULLINGTON
  Jesse Bullington is the author of the novels The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, The Enterprise of Death, and the recently released The Folly of the World. His short fiction, articles, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he can be found online at www.jessebullington.com, as well as similarly disreputable locales.
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• Fantasy Book Review
  http://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/JM-McDermott/Never-Knew-Another.html
  Word count: 369

  QUOTED: "Never Knew Another is a must read novel. It’s quick, beautiful, well written and leaves you wanting more. ... Lovely, dark, and graceful this story is sure to capture your imagination."

  Never Knew Another by JM McDermott
  Never Knew Another book cover
  Free preview
  Rating
  9.5/10
  Lovely, dark, and graceful this story is sure to capture your imagination.
  A Recommended Book of the Month
  Never Knew Another is a stunningly beautiful novel.
  There are few other words that I can think that would be describe reading this quick 200 + page book besides them although I would add eloquent, original, and intriguing.
  The reader is invited into the world of two walkers (humans that can change into wolf form with the help of a skin across their backs) on a journey to hunt out demon children and cleanse the earth.
  It all began as they happened upon the slain body of Jon, Lord Joni, in a circle of stained, burnt and dead grasses. The blood spilled was so foul that nothing living could continue living after having come into contact with it. A special talent of the walkers (whom we never learn their true names) is to see inside the memories of the fallen demon child. The memories intermingle with past and current events in a wonderful and interesting way.
  The reader follows Jona as he begins upon his path to what will finally be his ultimate doom.
  Can a demon child be a King’s man and enforce the law?
  Can someone born tainted do good?
  These concepts come up more and more as the book goes on as the characters question their motives, their blood, and their very existence.
  All in all Never Knew Another is a must read novel. It’s quick, beautiful, well written and leaves you wanting more (the author has stated that this is book one of a series). The storyline and plot is original and well thought out and beautifully executed. Lovely, dark, and graceful this story is sure to capture your imagination.
  This Never Knew Another book review was written by Preita Salyer

• Strange Horizons
  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/maze-by-j-m-mcdermott/
  Word count: 2824

  QUOTED: "a powerful and provocative work that lingers in the mind and that demands subsequent investigations."
  "new, powerful and brimming with mystery."

  REVIEWS SIZE / / /
  MAZE BY J. M. MCDERMOTT
  NINA ALLAN
  ISSUE: 12 MAY 2014
  Maze cover
  The end of genre is at hand. It did not die in a massive burst, and there was no single moment to point to that nails the coffin shut. No, it is the way things die when the demographics shift. The radios that play that song dwindle into the AM bands, go out like little lights, with a few hanging on a while, for old time's sake. This is happening. This is our future. Genre existed to create a space for the marginalized dreamers, the outsiders, and the strange. But, everyone is strange now. Our biggest movies are genre. Our biggest musical acts are bisexual aliens. Everyone loves comic books, now. The conventions make the front page news all over the world. Like all good, American things, our young people love it more when it comes back to us made strange by a foreign culture. It's not the Beatles, this time. It's Anime.
  As part of the above interview at SF Signal, J. M. McDermott says of his most recent novel, Maze:

  It is science fiction. It does not read like science fiction most of the time, because the landscape is alive and hungry and you have no tools that you do not peel from tree bark and fallen stones in this place.
  He is certainly right that Maze does not read like science fiction most of the time. For much of the first half of the novel, populated by monsters, djinn, speaking lights and abandoned cities and predatory satyrs, I remained convinced that I was reading a work of the more obscure kind of magical realism. Only as I fought my way forward into the book's second half did I begin to catch lucid glimpses of what McDermott might be up to. Even now that I have finished reading those glimpses remain partial, and I find myself wishing there was more story to come, even though while I was reading it I found the existing text perplexingly unforgiving at times.

  Maze begins straightforwardly enough, with a statement of fact:

  My name is Maia Station.

  I was born in the sky, on a station. I never expected to be anywhere else. I was a scientist, but I can't remember how to do anything scientific after ten years surviving in the maze. The tools I took for granted before this life are gone. The great coils and conductors and artificial constructs that I used to treat like toys are as distant as the stars in the sky. My memories of the station and my memories of here are all disjointed, as if everything before the maze is wrapped in silver gauze—my mother, my childhood friends, all the things I did and learned—until the tear, when I woke up in the maze, and the sand ground away my mind.

  I don't know how it all happened—how I arrived here from there. None of the others do, either. (p. 1)
  If this opening reminded me of anything, it was Vincenzo Natali's 1997 movie Cube, in which a small group of disparate individuals awaken to find themselves trapped inside the eponymous cube, a seemingly inescapable series of interlocking puzzle boxes, whose intricacies they must solve in order not just to escape but to stay alive. Cube is a kind of ultimate locked room mystery, in which an obscurely malign environment seems selectively designed to feed off the weaknesses and past trauma of those captured within—as indeed, in a disappointing climb-down from mystery to conspiracy, it is ultimately revealed to be.

  Anyone picking up Maze hoping for the literary equivalent of a Rubik's Cube has made a mistake. Whether it is a happy or an unlucky one will depend on the temperament of the reader.

  From the above plainspoken opening we are drawn rapidly down the maze's passageways into a world of dead ends and vagaries, a set of circumstances we have as little hope of properly unraveling as Maia Station herself. The narrative is presented in four sections, each from the point of view of one of the maze's inhabitants. Though these characters' lives overlap and intersect, each of their stories cast a separate light on events. Maia Station comes from far in our future and it is perhaps for this reason that she is least able to adapt mentally to the primitive conditions inside the maze. Her account of what has happened to her is fractured and confused. That of her daughter, Julie, who was born in the maze and knows no other life, seems more linear and more logical as a result. Wang Xin, who came to the maze as a young boy after falling off his bicycle, has become a seer and a warrior, a leader whom the maze's other inhabitants look to for guidance. Joseph, whose journey to the maze is chronicled in more detail than any of the other characters', appears most tormented by memories of his former life and his inability to understand what has happened to him.

  Joseph is a corporate lawyer in Fort Worth, Texas. His time is not our time. A flu pandemic has caused seismic damage to society's infrastructure. The big cities are in terminal decline, terrorized by gangs of squatters who wage interminable turf wars over food and territory. Yet this is still a world we recognize. Joseph has a job, an apartment, work colleagues. When we first meet him he has just returned from a high school reunion where a chance meeting with a woman named Karen "Parks" Rogers has rendered him sleepless. It is in this enervated condition that Joseph first notices a ball of light hovering above his bed:

  I reached a hand out. I cupped the glowing ball of dusty light in my hand. I pulled it close to my face. I looked down and knew it was a woman in my hand, although I had no evidence either way. I just knew this puff of light was a woman. (p. 34)
  Joseph absorbs the light into his lung, and a short time later "a huge, broken blister" that has erupted on his chest breaks, and a woman emerges. The woman calls herself Jenny. Jenny takes up residence in Joseph's apartment, from where she kidnaps him—and his erstwhile schoolfellow Parks—out of Fort Worth and into the maze:

  The sink opened for us then. Like some kind of snake, the sink rose up, widened its mouth and wrapped over us, we shrank, spilled head over heels like water and tumbled into the sink. I don’t know which, I remember both.

  The pipes pressed against my skin. I didn't fit. It was musty and damp. It was full of small maggots that wiggled towards the fresh air on both ends of the sink, that were smashed into my body, my face, my ears, nose and mouth. I clung to Djinni's body.I felt the cats moving around my ankles, all screaming into the maggots. (p. 53)
  Joseph emerges into a world he cannot comprehend. An abandoned city sits on a hill. At the foot of the hill the maze begins, a vast labyrinth of passages and halls that extends infinitely in all directions. Desperate for food and water, Joseph stumbles into the maze's entrance, where he encounters first a savage beast-man who tries to kill him, and then a tribe of Neolithic humans who take him in, feed him, and begin to teach him the rudiments of hunting and survival. They view Joseph as a helpless innocent who talks in riddles they neither care about nor understand. They fear Jenny, or "Djinni," as they might fear a ghost of legend, a malevolent spirit. The maze's corridors are alive with monsters, animal, vegetable, and mineral. The people of the maze display little curiosity about the maze's origins or what it might mean. It is simply the world as they know it. Their main preoccupation is not with whys and wherefores, but with finding enough food to last them through the vicious winters, when snow descends upon the maze and they must sometimes resort to cannibalism to survive. If Joseph is to survive also, he has no choice but to abandon his former existence, and accept that the maze is now his world, too:

  Fort Worth was a dream in the night. I had no way of explaining the journey here, the things I had faced.

  We had encountered an alien, if you want to call her that, for truly she was alien to us. We had fallen through the wormhole, if you want to call it that, for truly there were worms. We had slipped between the fabrics of realities we did not understand . . .

  We lived here, in the maze . . .

  We made the best lives for ourselves that we could.

  What else could we do? (p. 90)
  Wang Xin's story takes place a decade or more later. He shows us Joseph: older, more experienced in the ways of the maze and with children of his own. The tribe, dissatisfied with the old methods of hand-to-mouth survival, seek a safer living environment and more reliable and sustainable methods of harvesting food. Wang Xin believes he can see a better life for them all, and sets out across dangerous terrain to lead them towards it. The tale he tells is ripe with prophecies, betrayals, and new beginnings. Another decade on, Julie Station's testimony describes a community of peasant farmers, living in an established community complete with familial relations, nascent religion, gossip, adultery, friendship, and feuds. Julie has never forgotten her mother's scientific insistence on questioning the surface appearance of things. Refusing to accept the traditional role of woman as home-maker and stock-keeper, she is driven to transgress the existing social order in more ways than one:

  Everything can turn a corner and fall headlong into one of the endless tesseracts that end in the maze, where stone halls and dangerous traps and hungry beasts wait for all strays.

  Who made the maze?

  My mother had said aliens. Lucius' sister had preached about Neophilism and Lucifer. Sara said Loki, the trickster god. Ascalon's wife sang of a spider king, weaving stone webs and sleeping unseen in our grove, eating souls that had fallen into his web.

  We hadn't had anyone new find our village since I was a little girl, and that one died before I got to know him and ask him about things. (p. 163)
  Who made the maze? Julie asks. Of our four "strays" it is only Julie who asks that question. Maia and Joseph are more preoccupied with how they arrived there. Wang Xin seems content to expand and enhance the life he has fallen into. If Joseph, speaking in the language of myth and superstition ("ghost," "monster," "beast") seems like the protagonist in a classic portal fantasy, then it is surely Julie, speaking in the language of empirical enquiry ("alien," "scientist," "tesseract") who best represents this novel's central and defining allegiance towards science fiction.

  For although Maze can be read on one level as precisely this kind of portal fantasy (McDermott has stated that one of the original inspirations for this novel was Jim Henson's movie Labyrinth [1986]), it is primarily a book about questioning rather than acceptance. As readers, we can enjoy the manticores and minotaurs, the ice flowers and the rose deer; we can luxuriate in the richness of the creative act that brought such a confounding environment into being. But the deliberate interplay of different narrative strands, the confrontational nature of the text suggests we would be doing the novel a disservice if we did not also pause to ask not only who built the maze and how did our protagonists arrived there but what the maze is for and what it might represent? Are the people of the maze truly native to it, or are they all strays in origin, different only in that some of them are more recently arrived than others? Is the city on the hill evidence of a more advanced alien civilization, or are the Neolithic villagers themselves the decayed descendents of those that built it? Are the monsters really monsters, or machines that elude adequate description in a world where the technologies that produced them have fallen into extinction?

  When we enter the maze, are we in fact stumbling into a microcosm of our own past, present, and future?

  Maze answers none of these questions, and makes no apologies for refusing to give up its secrets. Indeed, it could be argued that Maze is a novel about secrets, or to put it more precisely, a novel about the nature of the unknown. What McDermott offers us in Maze is nothing short of our own private encounter with the alien. An encounter with the alien, by definition, should elude and defy any kind of easy explanation. Like Joseph and Maia, we might fall back on accustomed imagery to rationalize our experiences—minotaur, monster, maze—because for the moment we have no other. We must spend a long time looking and exploring before we can even begin to come up with the language—a new language—to adequately describe what we have seen.

  Reading Maze, I could not help but be reminded of Annihilation, the recently published first installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, which similarly poses as fantasy but whose underpinnings and core conceits are as rigorously science fictional as anything by Aldiss or Clarke. Both novels make informed and original use of what we might dub the Roadside Picnic trope—a tract or zone of land that is amorally hostile to exploratory incursions, most deadly in the fact that it is not in fact magical or supernatural but simply incomprehensible by current human standards. Those who enter it seek to interpret it via a frame of reference that simply slides off it, smashing their outmoded science and often themselves on its own irrelevance.

  We might go one further in surmising that Maze is not just a science fiction novel, but a novel about science fiction itself. In a literary climate where much of the speculative lexicon has become devalued, overused, pulped for our easier digestion into a kind of comfort food for the imagination, McDermott has set about the business of ripping down that infrastructure and starting from scratch, presenting us with the raw materials of enquiry and suggesting we do a bit of work for ourselves for once. What is a maze after all, but a space to explore, to confront unexpected dangers, to get lost in?

  As a reader, I found Maze to be a powerful and provocative work that lingers in the mind and that demands subsequent investigations. As a writer, I leave the book with the refreshed conviction that it is always possible to reinvent the boundaries, to write science fiction that is new, powerful and brimming with mystery.

  Maze is a wake-up call, a kick up the arse, a light in the lung. As a novel it is tough meat, but like the minotaur jerky that feeds the maze's inhabitants throughout the winter, it sustains.

  Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in Best Horror of the Year #2, Year's Best SF #28, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012. Her story cycle The Silver Wind was published by Eibonvale Press in 2011, and her most recent book, Stardust, is available from PS Publishing. Nina's website is at www.ninaallan.co.uk. She lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex.

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  © Copyright 2014 Nina Allan
  ABOUT NINA ALLAN
  Nina Allan's stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year #6, The Year's Best Science Fiction #33, and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Her novella Spin, a science fictional re-imagining of the Arachne myth, won the BSFA Award in 2014, and her story-cycle The Silver Wind was awarded the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire in the same year. Her debut novel The Race was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel The Rift will be published in 2017. Nina lives and works on the Isle of Bute in Western Scotland. Find her blog, The Spider's House, at www.ninaallan.co.uk.
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• HorrorNews.net
  http://horrornews.net/84701/book-review-maze-author-j-m-mcdermott/
  Word count: 765

  QUOTED: "a story full of interesting ideas, an intriguing central philosophy and complicated characters facing complicated situations that was nearly destroyed by the way it was told. If you can power through the style choice, there is plenty to love here, but it asks quite a bit in return."

  Book Review: Maze – Author J.M. McDermott
  Anton Cancre 05/04/2014 Book Reviews

  mazeMazeI know only one prayer.

  Whatever gods are in this maze, may you suffer as we have suffered. May our prayers leave you ill and dying, as you have left us.

  I like bizarre, complicated stories. The kind that warp and wrap themselves into intricate designs of opaque obscurity and leave you scratching your head and rereading the same paragraph thirteen times to be sure what you think happened really did just happen and not the other thing that you suspect may have occurred and holy f*ck what is the deal with that guy who just did the thing he shouldn’t be able to do? When I’m in the right mood, I get a kick out of those and I was certainly in the mood when I picked up Maze.

  Maze isn’t so much a single, cohesive story as it is four separate stories of the lives of people who live within the titular structure. Some, like Maia Station and Joseph were born on other worlds and in other times, ripped from their homes into a terrifying and violent new existence. Others, like Wang Xin and Jenny Station were born there. Each story overlaps and interweaves, while revolving around the compromises they must make to survive among rampaging Trolls, Minotaurs, Harpies, Stone Cows, Cavemen and the ravages of nature without being able to take advantage of the conveniences we take for granted. Sacrifices of body, hope, fate and faith will be required of all.

  I’ve complained before about the dearth of imagination put into much science fiction and fantasy, but there is no problem with that here. McDermott takes both tropes and myths we think we are familiar with and spins them into new yarn. This world and the creatures that inhabit it feel wholly new and vibrant, in their own brutal way. J.M. then uses our expectations of these myths and tropes as misdirection to get us looking up when he pulls the cloth from beneath our feet. It’s a nice trick and it’s used to marvelous effect in bending minds.

  At the same time, everything seems very organic. The society we experience exists and operates the way it does as a direct result of the way the world is constructed. They are people adapting to their surroundings and it fits seamlessly. The world building is outstanding here.

  Similarly, the arcs and conflicts of the characters were quite engaging. A woman struggling to survive, alone, in an alien world. A man trying desperately to hunt down and save someone he doomed to this existence by his own sad attempts to end his isolation. Another man pushing to reconcile the world he exists within and the one expects. A young woman struggling between the expectations of society and her own needs. None of these are simple problems, none result in simple solutions and no one get the happily ever after treatment.

  However, there were some problems with readability. The writing style is very clunky and uncomfortable, especially when it comes to dialogue. Take this bit of dialogue as an example: “Joseph, I have to tell you this, Joseph, and I want you to not forget this. You have your children and had your great love. I have had none. I am in love with this woman.” It is technically grammatically correct, but hits the tongue all wrong. I get the strong feeling that this was a stylistic choice, and I respect that, but it pulled me out of the narrative and kept me from being able to settle into the story. That could very well be an experience killer for many people. It certainly made the whole less enjoyable for me.

  By and large, I was left with a story full of interesting ideas, an intriguing central philosophy and complicated characters facing complicated situations that was nearly destroyed by the way it was told. If you can power through the style choice, there is plenty to love here, but it asks quite a bit in return.

  buy it directly from Apex here.

• Horror Web
  http://www.littlebunnycthulhu.com/index.php/2014/02/16/book-review-maze-by-j-m-mcdermott/
  Word count: 462

  Book Review – Maze by J.M McDermott
  February 16th, 2014 Absinthe

  Review by Frank Errington:

  Having just finished J. M. Mcdermott’s epic novel Maze the only thought that comes to mind is the line from the Grateful Dead’s classic Truckin’ “What a long strange trip it’s been.” Some questions come mind that beg to be answered. “Did I enjoy it?” “Yes.” “Did I understand it?” “No. Not at all.”

  Here’s the italicized opening…

  My name is Jenny.
  I was in a city inside of a city inside of a city.
  In the shadows there, I slept. I knew only my name–nothing else–and nothing, and nothing else for a very long time.
  I slid from behind a shadow and a shadow. I saw you sleeping here.
  Put me in your lung.
  Breathe deep.

  And from there it got weird.

  Maze is a set of four separate, yet interconnected, stories set in a complex world the inhabitants refer to as the Maze. A place where some people stumble in and never find a way out, yet others are born and live their entire lives there never knowing any other existence.

  The Maze is full of monsters. Gargoyles, minotaurs, trolls, harpies, dogmen, and that’s just scratching the surface. It’s a dangerous place with a focus on survival, while living a primitive, tribal existence.

  the experience of reading this novel was at times surreal . In fact there were moments when I thought this must be what it’s like to be on a hallucinogenic drug.

  The people who live in the Maze were constantly looking for food and a fresh supply of water, but even that wasn’t always available. “Then, before I could talk myself out of it, I drank the water from the sewer. It tasted like rotten eggs, dirt, and something else indescribably awful. I choked down the urge to puke. I expected that this water was going to make me horribly ill–possibly kill me. I did not drink enough to quench my thirst. I couldn’t.”

  Bizarre doesn’t even begin to describe Maze, but despite the overall strangeness and leaving me with more questions than answers, when I finished the book, I actually found myself wanting more.

  Maze is available now in both trade paperback, and various ebook formats, through Apex books and Amazon.com.

  If you count your self among the adventurous in your reading selections then I can definitely recommend J. M. McDermottt’s Maze.

  Look for more of Frank’s reviews on the Horror-Web Message Board!

• Fantasy Literature
  http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/maze/
  Word count: 1236

  Maze: Scary, surreal, and scattered
  Readers’ average rating:
  fantasy and science fiction book reviewsMaze by J.M. McDermott fantasy book reviewsMaze by J.M. McDermott
  J.M. McDermott’s Maze is about a maze. Or possibly the maze: An unending series of stone halls and corridors which lurks in our primordial past, populated by monstrous creatures, loops and fragments of non-linear time, and a ragged band of humans who somehow got stranded there. The maze is never revealed to have any moral or mechanical logic; it just is, and the people who live there just do. Maze operates as a disjointed series of narratives about the people who have fallen into the maze. There are glimpses of their past worlds (a spaceship, medieval France, dystopian Texas), but the bulk of the novel is about the gritty, ugly process of surviving in an inhospitable place. It’s surreal, scattered, gruesome, and sometimes excellent.
  Many books with ambitions towards literary surrealism leave me floating in a haze of meaningless strangeness — oh look, I think, I bet another unsettling and distantly symbolic Event is about to happen. And, occasionally, Maze floundered in that muddy territory. There are horrible insect-like creatures with infants’ heads. There’s a plant rooted in a woman’s belly growing tiny monster-fetuses. There’s a journey down a sewer pipe covered in maggots. It’s a kind of New Weird horror that must be used sparingly to retain its power, because the strangeness quickly piles up into an amorphous ball of non-surprise. In Maze, it could become the glum certainty that whatever that new creature is, it’s probably going to kill you.
  It’s the subtler pieces of McDermott’s writing that are more successful. Beneath the everyday horrors of trolls and minotaurs, the real horror of the maze is in the unknown — the monsters they haven’t seen, or barely understand. At its best moments, it reminded me of the perfectly-orchestrated terror in Danielewski’s House of Leaves. There’s a labyrinth at the heart of House of Leaves, too, except that it lives inside a perfectly normal suburban home. At one point a little girl asks her father to play a game with her called “always.” Later, it’s suggested that the word “always” is very much like “hallways,” isn’t it? And you realize the little girl has been playing light-heartedly in the halls of the maze. McDermott wrote a similar scene: An eerie ghost girl named Jenny is living in a man’s apartment. Only later does someone else pronounce her name more correctly: djinni. And the reader is suddenly very afraid of Jenny. It’s a chilling piece of word-craft built on the slippage between the written word and the thing said aloud.
  There are moments, too, of compelling characterization. One of the narrators was a scientist in her pre-Maze life, and her efforts to get her daughter to understand about things like bacteria and infection are heartbreakingly futile. Her daughter eventually became my favorite character, Julie Station, an intelligent and angry outcast. The two women bookend the story and render the sometimes-brutal masculinity of other characters more palatable.
  In some senses, Maze is a decline story. Narratives about the decay of civilization always reveal much more about their era than they do about the nature of mankind. Lord of the Flies told us more about a particular moment of English disillusionment, post-war and post-empire, than the savage natures of pre-teen boys. A hundred years earlier, Ballantyne told the same story about British boys stranded on an island, but his story was about British-ness, moral character, and the innate ability of young English boys to keep a stiff upper lip.
  McDermott’s stranded humans become very much like a huddled tribe of Homo sapiens on the outskirts of the world, with predatory monsters and poison fruits and a few Homo heidelbergensis lurking around every corner. Out of this primordial ooze, McDermott imagines a return to ancient hunter-gatherer gender relations: women stay behind the barricades and weave nets, while men wander around the maze with clubs. It’s not an illogical or impossible scenario (although the strict “man the hunter” brand of anthropological thinking has been severely eroded over time). But Maze has a feeling of inevitability and determinism to it. There are mutinous characters who resist their assigned roles (like Julie Station), but the hierarchy itself was an inexorable reality.
  “There is only one path here,” McDermott tells us, “built upon the lie of all mazes — that there are many paths to choose.” But does our only path honestly lead there? Without my refrigerator and state-granted civil rights, would I immediately descend to net-weaving and bread-baking? I have always preferred to believe differently.
  But for those who are less allergic to the biological determinism of gender — and who don’t mind the unexplained and slightly gruesome — Maze is a worthwhile read. It’s gracefully written, and concerned simultaneously with the murkiest, oldest fears of the human psyche, and the fantastic at its most deadly.
  Publication Date: January 12, 2014. From every corner of time and space, sometimes people go missing without a trace. They never come back. Get lost in the long stone halls of the maze with the ones that find each other, form tribes, scrape out a life from rocks and sand. Their stories interweave. Maia Station is a scientist ripped from stasis, but she has no tools to test the way things are. Instead, she raises her daughter as best she can and survives. Wang Xin once had his head dipped in water, and a djinni in the water entered his eye. He sees the future, exactly as it was supposed to be if he hadn’t seen the light, but it does him no good in the life he has. In a world much like our own, Joseph comes home from a ten year high school reunion and encounters a light in the darkness. The light speaks. My name is Jenny. Put me in your lung. Breathe deep.

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  January 16th, 2014. Alix E. Harrow´s rating: 3.5 | J.M. McDermott | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

  ALIX E. HARROW recently got her MA in History at the University of Vermont, and has circled back to her Old Kentucky Home with her partner Nick Stiner. She spends her time desperately repairing their newly-purchased home, reading fantasy books, throwing a frisbee for their neurotic border collie, and trying to cook authentic Mexican food. She makes a hilariously small amount of money writing high school history curriculum. Alix is dipping her toes into the blogosphere at The Other Side of the Rain, in an attempt to sharpen her writing skills and also not-incidentally talk about the books she loves. Some of her favorite authors include Neil Gaiman, Ursula LeGuin, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Susanna Clarke.
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• Strange Horizons
  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/last-dragon-by-j-m-mcdermott/
  Word count: 1392

  QUOTED: "The characters are both intense and bizarre. The cultures likewise. Readers prepared to disregard the fulsome blurbs on the cover and work hard at the text will enjoy this fine first novel."

  REVIEWS SIZE / / /
  LAST DRAGON BY J.M. MCDERMOTT
  MICHAEL LEVY
  ISSUE: 7 APRIL 2008
  Last Dragon cover
  I'm working from an Advanced Reading Copy of J.M. McDermott's first novel Last Dragon, mind you, rather than the finished product, and maybe things are better on the actual book cover, but I thought I'd start my review with a short discussion of book cover blurbs and how they can both help and hurt a novel. There are good blurbs that say intelligent things about your book and that will hype sales, and then there are blurbs that are so exaggerated and claim so much that you're better off without them. McDermott's novel, unfortunately, is saddled with a couple of blurbs of the latter sort. According to the editors at Wizards of the Coast, Last Dragon is "the most startlingly original fantasy novel in decades." Right. Worse still, they insist that McDermott "brings the fantasy genre to new literary heights with a remarkable first novel that will leave critics and readers alike in stunned awe."

  Stunned awe. I ask you, how many fantasy or science fiction novels have ever left you in stunned awe and particularly how many first novels? Neuromancer, maybe? The Hobbit, perhaps? It's a very short list, in any case, and one that Last Dragon does not belong on. My guess is that such self-evidently over the top claims are likely to hurt McDermott's sales rather than help them, turning off the casual bookstore browser. That would be a shame, because this is an excellent book. One wishes that the editors had instead limited themselves to the far more intelligent blurbs that appear on the website (and perhaps on the final book as well) from the likes of novelists Jeff VanderMeer and Paul Witcover, who do make it clear, without exaggeration, that this is indeed a book worth reading. End of sermon, on to the novel itself.

  First the basics: we're dealing with a very grim secondary universe here. Magic is present, but relatively low-key and rarely fun. There were real dragons once, but they're all dead. In general most people have it bloody awful. Zhan, an aging woman, perhaps an empress, is recalling her life in what we eventually realize are a series of short letters, or perhaps diary entries, ostensibly written to someone we learn later in the book is a long-absent lover. Because none of novel's many, fragmented sections contain either headings or dates, however, and since they jump back and forth in time and space, things quickly get rather confusing in a nicely literary and post-modern manner. As a young woman, a member of a primitive northern tribe, Zhan was quite literally in the midst of taking her final vows as a warrior when she was called back home by a terrible tragedy. For reasons that are never entirely clear, her grandfather, a wild, perhaps mad, wanderer who had spent years away from their ancestral village, had returned home and slaughtered Zhan's entire extended family before escaping south through the snow. Zhan and her shaman uncle, Seth, have been charged with tracking him down, executing him, and returning him to the village to bear witness to his crime, and, yes, that is the intended order of events since in this culture death does not necessarily bring an end to consciousness.

  Following the grandfather's trail through many hardships, Zhan and her uncle eventually reach the powerful southern civilization of Proliux which is more advanced perhaps, but no less violent and considerably more vicious and decadent than their own. Accumulating companions—a renegade noblewoman, an aging mercenary, a simpleton, a beautiful gypsy who turns out to be something other than entirely human—in the prescribed fantasy tale manner she and Seth capture her grandfather, execute him, and begin the long trek home, the dead grandfather trudging along in zombie form on the end of a rope. Unwittingly, however, they have also alerted the vicious and greedy rulers of Proliux to the existence of a perhaps less powerful civilization to their north and Zhan and her friends soon find themselves racing ahead of an army, hoping to reach home in time to spread a warning of impending invasion.

  So that's the plot of Last Dragon, but it isn't really what the novel is about and I haven't really told you anything that will detract from your enjoyment of the book, if, of course, this is the kind of book you enjoy. In actual fact, Last Dragon is far more a novel of form and style than it is one of plot or specific content. Indeed, despite the book's intensely literary pose and prose, the violent northern barbarian culture and the equally violent but decadent southern civilization that McDermott depict aren't really anything that won't be familiar to veteran readers of Robert E. Howard, who it strikes me may be every bit as much an influence on the novel as McDermott's acknowledged masters, Gene Wolfe and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

  I've already referred to the ways in which the novel jumps back and forth in time and space. McDermott, a recent graduate of the University of Houston's Creative Writing program, uses this post-modern cut-up technique aggressively, beginning his tale with a whole series of in medias res plot lines whose relationship to each other is never made explicit, but must instead be inferred gradually over many pages and with significant hard work on the part of the reader. Occasionally, and without preamble, he introduces equally fragmented plot lines giving the backgrounds of other characters. This difficulty invites a variety of interesting and perhaps fruitful misreadings (Wait a minute! How did she get from here to there? Isn't that character already dead? When did these two people meet? Just who was the "I" in that half-page segment?). Adding to the complexity is McDermott's allusive and often metaphorical first person prose—one source of comparison to Gene Wolfe, no doubt. As the book opens, Zhan reminisces:

  My fingers are like spiders drifting over my memories in my webbed brain. The husks of the dead gaze up at me, and my teeth sink in and I speak their ghosts. But it's all mixed up in my head. I can't separate lines from lines, or people from people. Everything is in this web, Esumi. Even you.
  These lines are as well written as the rest of the novel, and give a legitimate reason for the book's fragmented structure—Zhan's an aging woman, near death and can't be expected to keep things straight. Large portions of the narrator's life, including her rise to power, her marriage, the establishment of the empire over which she presumably rules, even the details of her relationship with Esumi, the lover to whom this entire project in reconstructed memory is dedicated, are almost entirely implicit, matters of elision rather than narration, things to be inferred from the background.

  Early in Last Dragon, I found myself often confused, even floundering. If I hadn't been assigned to review the book, I might not have finished it. But I'm very glad I did. McDermott's method is complex and his odd combination of high-literary ambition with what are essentially pulp materials may not appeal to some readers. Still, there's significant power here and it's drawn from both the author's literary and pulp interests. The characters are both intense and bizarre. The cultures likewise. Readers prepared to disregard the fulsome blurbs on the cover and work hard at the text will enjoy this fine first novel.

  Michael Levy teaches English at an obscure Wisconsin university and is a past president of both the Science Fiction Research Association and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

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  © Copyright 2008 Michael Levy
  ABOUT MICHAEL LEVY
  Michael Levy teaches English at an obscure Wisconsin university and is a past president of both the Science Fiction Research Association and The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
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