As most everyone in the fantasy short fiction world has heard by now, Realms of Fantasy magazine is shutting down after their next issue.

Realms wasn’t perfect–in recent years their editorial tastes had migrated more toward the literary and farther away from the traditionally fantastical, and the business office sold subscribers’ names to commercial mailing lists. But they consistently published far more new authors than the only other top magazine interested in fantasy, and their editorial staff gave public updates that let slushpile submitters like me follow what was going on with our submissions. They were also the higest-profile fantasy magazine in the world, so they attracted famous authors and lots of attention.

Hopefully something new will come along to fill their role as the leading magazine of general fantasy. But they will be missed.

Today marks the release of a novel that I read large parts of years ago in manuscript form. This will be the first time I’ll get to see a manuscript that I read transformed into an actual, real, major-house published novel.

Maggie Ronald, who was a classmate of mine at the Viable Paradise workshop in 2004, has her urban fantasy novel Spiral Hunt coming out from Eos Books today. It’s set in Boston, Maggie’s hometown, and features lots of Celtic-inspired supernatural stuff.

It also includes references to the Red Sox, a topic dear to my own heart! When I first read parts of the novel in 2004, the Red Sox’s legendary curse of not winning the World Series since their star left-handed pitcher Mr. Ruth had been sold to the New York Highlanders was used in the novel. But of course, less than two weeks after our workshop session in New England, the Sox won the World Series, so Maggie had to rewrite that part!

Urban fantasy is not usually a favorite of mine, but I love the city of Boston and I really enjoyed Maggie’s character-centered approach. So if you like urban fantasy or Boston, definitely give Spiral Hunt a look.

My colleague Jay Ridler, with the ink drying on his PhD in War Studies, has started writing a non-fiction column at Fearzone.com about horror outside the traditional definitions of that subgenre.  Jay knows a ton about horror, both in the genre and out, so this column should be great.

He also knows a ton about war. His innaugural column, the first of a two-parter, is about the influence that the horrors of 20th-century warfare in the two World Wars had on fiction. If you’re an armchair military historian like me, and you love gritty fiction about characters in horrible circumstances, definitely check it out.

The Agony Column at bookotron.com recently podcasted an interview with Lou Anders, editor at Pyr Books, about the “New Fantasy” — recent epic fantasy that’s grittier and darker than the 80s/early 90s epic fantasy of authors like Raymond E. Feist and Robert Jordan. He mentions British authors Joe Abercrombie and Mark Chadbourne, who I’ve heard about but haven’t read yet.

I’ve seen bloggers musing if this “New” Fantasy is a reaction to the darker emotional tone of the post-9/11 era, but I’ve read too many examples of grittier epic fantasy predating that period (and predating the label “New Fantasy”) for that theory to hold water. George R. R. Martin’s Ice and Fire novels, beginning in the mid-90s, featured a whole new level of grit and brutality. I think their commercial success, more than anything else, is what has spawned this wave of grittier epic fantasy. Steven Erikson’s Malazan saga, first published in Europe also in the mid-90s, also featured more grit than most everything else at that time. And going back to that 80s era of “cleaner” 80s epic fantasy, Glen Cook’s Black Company novels, which Erikson cites as a major influence on his Malazan books, were the unheralded pioneers of grit and brutality in this subgenre.

I do like the trend toward realism and vividness in epic fantasy, and I agree that it’s the same grit that classic-style swords & sorcery had, now creeping into the epic novels. And it does perfectly fit the darker emotional mood of the current era. But I don’t think this New Fantasy is quite that new.