In May DMR Books will release the anthology Terra Incognita: Lost Worlds of Fantasy and Adventure. This project was masterminded by Doug Draa, editor of Weirdbook Magazine. Doug assembled an all-star team of writers, including David C. Smith (author of Oron, The Sorcerer’s Shadow, and the Red Sonja series), Howard Andrew Jones (editor of Tales from the Magician’s Skull and author of the critically-acclaimed The Desert of Souls), Adrian Cole (author of numerous series, including The Voidal, The Dream Lords, and War on Rome), and John C. Hocking (author of Conan and the Emerald Lotus.)

Doug explains the concept of Terra Incognita (Latin for “unknown territory” or “unexplored land”) in the introduction:

Growing up I had a deep love for fantasy, horror, and science fiction that dealt with exploring the unknown and discovering lost and forgotten lands, places, and peoples. Writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Abraham Merritt devoted a large portion of their work to stories about exploring the unknown.
Genre fiction abounds with stories and novels about lost and forgotten peoples, cities, lands, and worlds. Burroughs alone wrote dozens of novels dealing with the lost. His rediscovery of post-apocalyptic Europe in The Lost Continent is a prime example. Poe and Verne explored the lost sub-Antarctic land of Tsalal. Abraham Merritt had the Snake Mother-guarded (and dinosaur infested) South American valley of Yu-Atlanchi. And speaking of South America we can’t forget Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. These stories of lost places and peoples spanned the globe. H. Rider Haggard took us to the secret African city of Kôr in She. The 1920s gave us Lovecraft’s Arabian “The Nameless City” and Robert E. Howard filled the American southwest with lost cities and peoples.
What most of the stories I’ve mentioned so far have in common is that they all take place in the, at least for the time they were written, modern world. Even in the early 20th century, there were still enough relatively unexplored regions of the world that their lost places were not completely unimaginable. These places were rapidly dwindling and so it wasn’t long before many of these kinds of stories moved further into the realms of the fantastic. Robert E. Howard placed his lost cities in the distant past while Leigh Brackett moved her lost cities and peoples into an, for the time, unreachable, but comprehensively near “Inhabitable Solar System.”
For this collection we are sticking to the realms of fantasy in order to see what is out there, lost and lurking.

Terra Incognita will appear in May in trade paperback and digital formats. The cover art was created by Lauren Gornik, whose work has appeared on other DMR titles such as Tanith Lee’s The Empress of Dreams, Manly Wade Wellman’s Cahena, and Harry Piper’s The Great Die Slow.

Table of Contents:
“Shadow of the Serpent” (a tale of Akram, hero of The Sorcerer’s Shadow) by David C. Smith
“The Place of Unutterable Names” by Adrian Cole
“One Hive. Two Queens.” by S.E. Lindberg
“The Siege of Eire” by J. Thomas Howard
“Warriors of Mogai” by Milton Davis
“Necropolis Gemstone” by John C. Hocking
“From the Darkness Beneath” by Howard Andrew Jones

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