Singular Points

Final Thunstone Art

2012-01-27T06:06:00.003-05:00

The latest email from Haffner Press features the finished cover art by Raymond Swanland for the upcoming The Complete John Thunstone. I posted the cover rough a few weeks back. Looks really nice, says I.
It's funny how much I'm looking forward to this book, since I already own all the material inside. I think it's just because I'm happy to see Manly Wade Wellman's name on a new book cover and because this means that new readers will have a chance to discover Wellman's fiction. At a mere forty bucks for all the Thunstone short stories and both novels, this is a seriously good deal. Plus, I've bought enough books from Haffner Press to know how well made their books are. In fact, I was thinking this morning that Haffner would be a great publisher to reprint Karl Edward Wagner's Kane stories, which are sadly in need of being reprinted. An affordable, quality set of Kane would be a boon to fantasy readers everywhere.

Blind Shadows

2012-01-26T09:24:00.004-05:00

Okay, the novel by James A. Moore and me is titled Blind Shadows and will be out later this year from Arcane Wisdom Press, which is a new imprint of Bloodletting Press (Bloodletting has published books by folks like Joe Lansdale, Brian Keene, and Tom Piccirilli.) Arcane Wisdom Press has recently released new books from Rick Daken and Michael Kelly & Carol Weekes, as well as new editions of books by H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen with annotations by noted Lovecraft Scholar S.T. Joshi.
Blind Shadows isn't a Lovecraft pastiche but there are some Lovecraftian elements. I keep referring to it as 'Killer Rednecks From the Outer Dark', but Jim nixed that as a title. It's either a crime novel with horror elements or a horror novel with crime fiction elements. Guns, monsters, murder and mayhem. Most of the action takes place in a small Georgia town called Wellman. If you checked out our Halloween story PDF, you've already visited the town back in the 1970s.
Anyway, more info as I get it.

One With a Bit More Heart

2012-01-26T09:24:00.003-05:00

I mentioned a few posts ago that I'd acquired two books that had once belonged to writer Karl Edward Wagner. I've picked up one more. This one has a bit more meaning to me, however, in that unlike the other two books, which were contributor copies of books Wagner had stories in, this book was a favorite of his from his personal library.
In his essay, The Once and Future Kane, Wagner mentions that Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword was one of his favorite two or three novels of all time. He includes it in his list of influences as a writer of heroic fantasy, along with C.L. Moore and others. I purchased his copy of The Broken Sword to add to my own library. It's a first edition, signed by Anderson and with KEW's bookplate in the front. I'll be proud to put this one on my bookshelf.
Michael Moorcock maintains that the original Broken Sword is superior to the edition that Poul Anderson edited for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. I'll be interested in seeing how the two differ.

Kindling

2012-01-24T06:14:00.002-05:00

Made my first actual Kindle purchase this morning. And the winner is...Taken, the new Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novel from Robert Crais. The funny thing is, I'm not even home with my Kindle. Presumably the book will be waiting within its digital home when I arrive home this afternoon. Ah, technology...

Backtracking

2012-01-23T08:33:00.002-05:00

While rearranging some books last night it occurred to me how much weird and horror fiction I've accumulated in the past five years. I mean, I've read Lovecraft since I was a teenager, and obviously Robert E. Howard, and I was familiar with other S&S writers like C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, but most of my interest in other Weird Tales writers and writers of similar stuff has come about in the last decade, and much of that can be attributed to the influence of the late Karl Edward Wagner.
I had been aware of course, that Robert E. Howard had created what we know as sword & sorcery by introducing supernatural elements into Harold Lamb style historical adventure stories. But I don't think that idea really gelled for me until I read a comment from Wagner that his Kane stories were really horror stories with just enough action in them to qualify as heroic fantasy. (Wagner didn't care for the term sword & sorcery.)
This comment sent me in search of Wagner's horror fiction, which led to the discovery of other horror/weird writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Joseph Payne Brennan, and most importantly, Manly Wade Wellman.
A lot of this was serendipity. About the same time I discovered Wagner (though Michael Moorcock, oddly enough.) I was also collecting the Swords Against Darkness paperbacks. These contained sword & sorcery tales by Ramsey Campbell (Ryre) and Manly Wade Wellman (Kardios). So a lot of things seemed to be converging at once. I was seeing the fantasy work of various writers who were better known for their horror writing at the same time that I was discovering their horror and weird fiction.
Even Clark Ashton Smith, with whom I was familiar but not that well read in, suddenly leaped into focus with the new Nightshade collections of his stories, giving me the chance to immerse myself in his amazing fiction. And one thing led to another and now I have this ever growing collection of horror/weird fiction. So if Karl Edward Wagner seems to pop up in a lot of my posts, there's a reason. He's at the hub of my interest in weird tales.
Also, I think I've zeroed in on Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman because of their regional fiction. I was born and raised in the northern part of Georgia, and both men's tales of Southern horrors and fantasy resonate with me. A lot of that is showing up in my more recent writing.
Anyway, I suppose it is the nature of readers to seek out the influences of favorite writers, backtracking to the wellsprings of well loved stories. And in this, Karl Edward Wagner was and is an excellent guide. In his introductions to the Year's Best Horror Stories, his Forwards and notes in the Echoes of Valor series, his introductions and annotations to the Conan stories, and in countless essays, articles, and comments in various books and magazines, Wagner continues to offer sage advice on a genre he loved.

An Unexpected Discovery

2012-01-22T20:31:00.003-05:00

So I'm sitting here tonight, reading through Vol II of my recently acquired Whispers books and I was pleased to note that this volume had been signed (to someone named Mike) by Karl Edward Wagner. And I as I read along I found that it had also been signed by Ramsey Campbell. And Manly Wade Wellman. And Fritz Leiber! Dunno if the book dealer didn't notice this or what, but I'm calling this a good day.

Happy Birthday Robert E. Howard!

2012-01-22T10:58:00.002-05:00

Today is Robert E. Howard's birthday. If you've spent much time at this blog then you know that Howard has been a big part of my life since I was a kid. His creation Conan the Cimmerian is one of my very favorite fictional characters. Howard has given me untold hours of reading pleasure.
He's also one of my biggest influences as a writer. People say I write good fight scenes and I think I can credit REH with a lot of that. I'm always trying for that headlong visceral feel that Howard managed to get into his fights. I've learned other writing lessons from him as well.
I don't think Howard could have imagined, back in the 1930s when he was spinning his tales, that so many people would have been influenced by his work, and I'm sure he never would have believed what a huge cultural icon Conan would become. So here's to Robert E. Howard. Happy birthday sir, and thanks for all the great characters and stories

Desert of Souls Redux

2012-01-21T09:05:00.002-05:00

I reviewed The Desert of Souls, the debut novel of author Howard Andrew Jones, last February when the hardback came out. I'm going to recommend it again because it's just out in trade paperback.
Seriously, if you're one of those people (like me) who's always complaining about the sameness of current fantasy novels, you need to give this one a try. If you are tired of the latest retelling of medieval history dressed up with magic and dragons, or if you wish the Tolkien wannabes would just take a break, or if you cringe when you see yet another Anita Blake clone, then run down to your local bookstore and snatch up Desert of Souls.
The book's setting in 8th century Baghdad already sets it apart from the standard fantasy novel. You'll hear echoes of the Arabian Nights. Of Robert E. Howard and Harold Lamb. Maybe even a touch of Conan Doyle. But as I mentioned in my original review, these are evocations not imitations. Jones is too original a writer to just retread old ground.
Anyway, I'm going to supply a link to my full review from last year, just in case anyone wants more info. If you're up for swashbuckling action in an exotic setting with monsters, sorcery and even some romance, give Desert of Souls a try.

http://singular--points.blogspot.com/2011/02/desert-of-souls.html

Conan: Road of Kings #12

2012-01-20T06:40:00.002-05:00

Conan: Road of Kings issue #12 came in this week, finishing off the twelve issue mini series and setting up the next installment in the series, an adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Queen of the Black Coast. If you've been reading my reviews you know that I'm a big fan of RoK. In fact. I think it the best Conan mini-series Dark Horse has published that wasn't a REH adaptation. As the original pastiches go, I thought this one the most solid.
Now some of this could be ageing fanboy bias. Roy Thomas, the writer on Road of Kings was the original Conan comic book writer going all the way back to 1970. When I discovered Conan in 1973, Roy was at the helm and so I grew up reading his take. However, I don't think nostalgia is entirely to blame. I've stated over and over in these reviews how well Roy Thomas writes Conan. He "gets" the character in a way that is sometimes amazingly close to Howard, closer than most prose pastiche writers have gotten. The dialogue in RoK is as snappy as anything Thomas has ever written and his plotting seems effortless.
Road of Kings finds Conan in jail in the corrupt city of Argos, due to go before a notorious "hanging" judge. The charge? Conan knows who killed a guard captain and the watch thinks he knows where to find him. The judge orders Conan to turn in his friend. Conan, being Conan, declines. The judge makes threats, and Conan, being Conan...well let's just say things turn bloody. There's a nice bit where one of the soldiers, who has been threatening a shackled Conan, telling him how he would kill the barbarian if he got the chance, gets a chance. You can imagine how well this works out for him.
What's sort of interesting, is this is the second time Roy Thomas has adapted this particular scene. Way back in Marvel Comics' Conan the Barbarian issue #57, Roy set up his own adaptation of Queen of the Black Coast by dramatizing the courtroom scene, which is only told as a flashback in REH's original tale. The Marvel issue was illustrated by Mike Ploog whose Will Eisner-ish style was an interesting change from regular penciler, John Buscema. I'll have to dig that out this weekend and compare the two.
The art in this issue is another fine job by Mike Hawthorne. Hawthorne brings some serious storytelling chops to Conan. His panel to panel continuity reminds me of guys like Buscema and Gil Kane who knew how to move a story along and to actually tell the story with pictures. Hawthorne isn't interested in drawing loosely connected pin-ups, as many modern comics artists seems to be. He also spends a lot of time on facial expressions, so that the reader gets a better idea of the character's thoughts and emotional state. He doesn't just draw everyone scowling all the time. You can see Hawthorne's Conan thinking. His action scenes are first rate too. When Conan finally breaks free, get out of the way.
Anyway, issue #12 is a fine finish for the series. Well written and well drawn, with action, humor, and suspense. This week also saw the arrival of the Hardback collection of the first six issues of Road of Kings. I snatched that one up. I expect to re-read this series quite a bit in the future. So if you missed the original run, snag the hardback or the trade when it's out. Recommended

This Just In

2012-01-17T08:32:00.000-05:00

Woke up to some good news this morning. The novel I wrote with James A. Moore has been picked up and will be published in hardback this year. More details when I have them. Look mom, I'm a novelist.

The House of Silk

2012-01-16T08:28:00.002-05:00

I'd read a lot of favorable reviews about Anthony Horowitz's authorized Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, so I was ready to give it a try. I'm happy to say that the book lives up to the hype. It is not only a very good Sherlock Holmes pastiche, but also a good mystery/suspense novel on its own merits.
I've read well over 200 Sherlock Holmes pastiches, some good, many bad, but few excellent. I'd put The House of Silk near the top of the list. Why? To begin with, it feels like a Sherlock Holmes story. Horowitz isn't Doyle, but he has a good feel for Holmes and Watson. Their personalities are intact and the dialog reads true. During the first 80 or so pages, I got that familiar feeling of setting off on an adventure with Holmes, knowing that he would bring order out of chaos and set things right. And I think Horowitz was banking on that. That Holmes fans would slip into that groove with him.
Then, about page 90, things suddenly take a darker turn and Horowitz sends the great detective and his friend and assistant Watson into very "deep waters" indeed, and as the book progresses we follow Holmes into a Victorian nightmare. What impressed me about this approach was that, even though Horowitz adds some layers of realism to the crimes and the criminals that Holmes must confront, he doesn't loose sight of his protagonists. They remain the characters we know.
I'm purposefully not giving many plot details because this is a twisty, twisty tale and I don't want to give anything away. I will say, that while I figured out most of the mysteries and caught most of the clues, one thing did escape me. I always think someone has done a great job with a mystery if they 'played fair' and still managed to slip something past me. I've read thousands of mysteries and I know what to watch out for. Nothing comes out of left field in the end. All the facts were available. You just have to interpret them correctly.
Anyway, I certainly enjoyed this novel, and if the Conan Doyle estate wants Mr. Horowitz to write any more adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I'll certainly pick them up. Recommended.

Digital Holmes

2012-01-14T08:24:00.001-05:00

Well the Kindle arrived yesterday. Have to say, the thing comes pretty much ready to go out of the box. However it doesn't come with any books, and since I've got plenty to read this weekend, I didn't have anything I wanted to buy, but of course I wanted to try out my new toy. So I went to the free section and downloaded The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, one of my favorite books of all time. A few seconds later I was re-reading The Red-Headed League on my shiny new Kindle. One wonders what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have thought of his books being transmitted through the ether. Anyway, League is still a classic, no matter the format.

Steve Ditko Omnibus Vol II

2012-01-13T07:01:00.002-05:00

In my list of top comic book artists of all time, Steve Ditko would rate very high. I've always enjoyed his work and back when I was a working artist, I spent a lot of time looking at how Ditko constructed human figures. As writer Mike W. Barr points out in his introduction to DC Comics' Steve Ditko Omnibus Vol II, Ditko's knowledge of anatomy is textbook. You don't always see it, especially in his later work, but during his peak period of the 1960s you can really tell he knew his stuff. Don't let the quirky poses fool you. All the muscles connect where they should and that's especially impressive given the contortionist poses Ditko created for Spiderman, The Creeper, The Blue Beetle and the like.
There are some good examples in the first half of the Omnibus, with reprints one of Ditko's short lived 1970s DC projects, The Hawk and the Dove. Take a look at the physiques of the two sibling superheroes and you'll see what I'm talking about. This is some prime Ditko right here folks.
Unfortunately there's also a lot of not so prime Ditko in the second half of the book. There's a lot of stuff where Ditko did only pencils (and often, I suspect, very rough pencils) that are inked by other hands. Some of the stuff works and some...well, it doesn't. Of the stuff that does work, I was glad to get all of Ditko's Starman backup features together in one place. Looking forward to reading through those.
Perhaps some of the strangest art to me is Ditko's Legion of Super Heroes stuff. These characters are rather iconic to me, and somehow Ditko's unique approach just jars in these stories.
Anyway, much has been said about Ditko's politics, his reclusive nature and so on, and while I do find a lot of that fascinating, with this Omnibus (and the first volume) I'm just here for the art. In the last year or so I've been reading my way through a lot of the old Charlton Comics horror titles, such as Scary Tales and Ghost Manor. These contain tons of Ditko art that hasn't been reprinted since original publication. There are some Ditko gems in those comics. I've really come to appreciate Ditko's storytelling ability and the wide range of his art. There's plenty of that on view in the Steve Ditko Omnibus Vol II as well. Recommended.

Reading Report

2012-01-09T07:13:00.001-05:00

I seem to be in one of those periods where I don't want to read novels. Or perhaps I'm just not finding novels that hold my attention. In any case, most of my weekend reading was short stories. I read a couple out of the recently acquired Whispers IV, including tales by Hugh B. Cave and Ramsey Campbell.
Then I dipped into New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, a collection of newer Cthulhu mythos tales by folks like Caitlin Kiernan, Kim Newman, and Neil Gaiman. Some good stuff in there, but my only complaint is that too much is reprinted from the 2009 collection Lovecraft Unbound. Less than three years is too little time to include half a dozen stories from one book in another book, or that's my take anyway.
I went back to the Carcosa Press volume of Manly Wade Wellman's John Thunstone (and others) stories, Lonely Vigils. I'll probably have more to say about that later. I've recently been reading or re-reading all of the Thunstone adventures, and I'm sure I'll get around to talking about them. Might wait until the Haffner Press Complete John Thunstone book is out in April. Or not. We'll see.
Finally I jumped to the Harold Lamb Collection Swords From the West for the sanguinary romance, The Red Cock Crows, a tale of true love and much killing. Swords From the West may be my favorite volume in the Bison Books Lamb series, as it contains a big chunk of Lamb's crusader stories. I need to devote an entire post to Lamb's character Nial O'Gordon, who could have become Lamb's claim to fame, had there been more stories about him.
So anyway, my weekend was definitely a quality over quantity sort of thing. I do have a novel on the way from Amazon, The House of Silk, the new Sherlock Holmes pastiche that's been getting good reviews left and right. For now though, short and sweet seems to be the order of the day.

The Other Whispers

2012-01-08T20:31:00.001-05:00

Since so many folks recommended the Whispers series after I mentioned I'd picked up one volume,(and since I found the contents of that book to be excellent) I checked with the folks who sold me book IV and found that they had a set of all six books for a very good price, especially since, like the first one I bought, one of the others (volume V) had once belonged to writer Karl Edward Wagner. So those are winging their way to me as we speak. So now I'll own two books that once belonged to Wagner, and a full set of Whispers.

So Dark a Heritage

2012-01-07T07:13:00.001-05:00

This was Weird Tales stalwart Frank Belknap Long's first Gothic Romance novel. It came out in 1966 from Lancer books, publishers of the first Conan paperbacks, oddly enough. While this one has Long's name on the cover, his later books would appear under the pseudonym Lyda Belknap Long, using his wife's first name. The logic, presumably, was that women would be more likely to buy a romance written by a woman.
This is the third of Long's Gothics that I've read and it's the best written so far. The prose is smoother, the plotting more logical and the romance element is present throughout the book. In other words it seems as if Long was trying really hard on this one, perhaps because it was his first. Not that the other two I read were badly written, this one just seems to have had more thought put into it.
In this one, a woman named Louisa Delsarte receives word that her recently married sister, Emmeline, has died in a tragic (and rather gruesome) accident. Louisa sets out for New Orleans where her sister was living with her new husband Charles in Charles's creepy old mansion, Morisot Manor.
The first part of the book is understandably rather sad as Louisa attends her sister's funeral and deals with Emmeline's death. About a third of the way in though, the by now familiar Mood and Creepy factor kicks in as Long gets down to the stuff he knows best. Louisa is in for some ghostly happenings with a touch of voodoo and a little Satanism thrown in. As I noted, long seemed to be taking his time here, and things unfold in a less abrupt manner than in The Witch Tree. That may be bad or good, depending on how you like your Gothics. But the FBL trademark atmosphere is in place and Long gets to exercise some of his horror writer chops here too. All and all, I had fun with So Dark a Heritage. Think I'll wait a bit before I read another, though. I feel the need for something with more swords.

However, a word of advice before I go. Listen, if your sister is the heroine of a Gothic romance, you need to get out of town right now, because from what I've seen, you've got the life expectancy of a Star Trek Red-Shirt. Fathers don't fare well either. Actually, if any female member of your family takes a job as a governess at a creepy manor or castle, move to another country and change your name. I'm just saying.

Into Whose Hands

2012-01-05T06:07:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I received a copy of Whispers IV, a horror anthology from 1983 edited by Stuart David Schiff. This is my first volume of the series and I know little about Schiff, other than he published a small press magazine called Whispers and presumably many of the stories in this book originally appeared in the magazine. (A quick look at the indicia shows this to be the case, though a few of the stories came from other sources and some are original to the book.)
What makes this copy of particular interest to me though is that this book was the property of Karl Edward Wagner. This was his personal copy and there's a letter from Schiff and some Xeroxed reviews of the book that Schiff enclosed included with the book. I got the book from a bookshop in Wagner's home town of Chapel Hill NC. The shop has several items from the estates of Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman.
It's a little odd to think that the book used to sit in Wagner's home and now it's in mine. The letter from Schiff is addressed to Karl and his then wife Barbara and it's a chatty missive discussing conventions and such. Schiff mentions he hopes Wagner will appear in Whispers V.
Fittingly enough,Wagner's contribution to Whispers IV is the story 'Into Whose Hands'.
Anyway, the book has gone from Wagner's library to mine. I'll take good care of it.

Reflections for the Winter of My Soul

2012-01-04T12:21:00.002-05:00

An appropriate title, given we're in the bleak midwinter, and part of the reason I decided to re-read this Kane story by Karl Edward Wagner. Temperatures dipped into the teens last night and a wolfish wind came howling around the windows. It put me in mind of Wagner's creepy winter's tale, so I took down my copy of the Nightshade Press complete stories of Kane and followed Wagner's hero-villain into the teeth of a blizzard.
I only thought I was feeling the cold before. Once Wagner began to describe Kane's arduous trek through a whiteout nightmare I could almost feel the snow brushing against my skin. Reflections picks up some time after the events of the Kane novel Dark Crusade. Kane has taken a horrible vengeance on the prophet of Sataki but the few surviving priests of the order are tracking Kane relentlessly. Kane's flight takes him into the ice wastes where he soon finds himself lost in a snowstorm that he suspects may be of sorcerous origins.
Kane and his exhausted horse stumble upon a castle or manor house in the snow covered forest, where Kane collapses at the front door. He awakens to meet his host, his host's daughter, the host's son, a grouchy physician, a minstrel, and a few other characters. One of these folks thinks he's a werewolf. One of them really is a werewolf.
This is one of my favorite Kane stories, and not surprisingly one that has been optioned for a movie. (Though I think it's stuck in development hell.) The gloomy snow bound setting and the sinister cast, any of whom could be the werewolf, makes for a house party that would have sent Hercule Poirot running into the snow. There's much suspense and quite a bit of action as Kane faces foes human, animal, and supernatural. There's also a lot of the Gothic atmosphere Karl Edward Wagner was so fond of. It's not surprising that dark old castles feature in so many of Wagner's stories, as this is the classic Gothic setting. There's also the sort of virginal heroine who was so beloved of the classic Gothic authors. Well, unless she's the werewolf. Wagner does a good job of keeping the reader guessing the identity of the creature. Just when you think you've got it figured out, Wagner tosses a red herring your way.
Whoever the werewolf is, he or she squares off against Kane in a final battle that's both harrowing and well thought out. Once Kane realizes that he has to take on the werewolf hand to hand, he goes into it with all his skill and his centuries of knowledge. Kane, in case you've forgotten, is the biblical Cain, the first killer and still the best.
I recall thinking, a few years ago, when I first saw the Doctor Who episode Tooth and Claw, with its well realized CGI werewolf, that we finally have the special effects technology to do Reflections justice. In fact I also wondered if the writer of Tooth and Claw might have read Wagner's story. There aren't many similarities, but there are a few. I do think it would make an excellent movie.
Anyway, I was reminded as I reread Reflections For the Winter of My Soul (Great title!) what a good writer Karl Edward Wagner was. The man could not only spin a tale, but he could do so with such vivid imagery that he put you right there in the middle of the action. Just read those first few pages where Kane is fighting his way through the blizzard and I think you'll see what I mean. And then hang around until the werewolf shows up.

Cool Hand Kharrn

2012-01-02T12:24:00.001-05:00

Things have taken an ugly turn in Lord of the Rings online. Kharrn loses a confrontation with Saruman and ends up a prisoner in the depths of Isengard. Note the prison uniform. I must congratulate the developers on their willingness to try something different in an MMO. Now for a jailbreak...

A New Year

2012-01-02T08:12:00.001-05:00

2011, somewhat surprisingly, turned out to be my third most prolific year of blogging, reversing a downward trend since 2008 and only failing to match that second biggest blog year by a mere 7 posts. Guess I had a lot to talk about last year. Actually it was a good year for writing in general. I wrote a couple of short stories that I liked a great deal, I saw one story published, and I finally completed a novel.
So what does 2012 hold in store? Hopefully the publication of said novel, more stories, and more blogging. Other than that I can't really say. I'm not a maker of resolutions, and I have no firm plans for anything. It would be nice if I could take an actual vacation trip, but that hasn't panned out the last couple of years, so we'll see.
I have a couple of interesting things going on, but I'll wait and blog about those when I have more details. Today is the last day off before I have to return to work so I plan to be in extra-sloth mode. Hope everyone's New Year is going well.

One of Those D'oh! Moments

2011-12-31T12:08:00.002-05:00

I was reading an article this morning that mentioned a long interview with Manly Wade Wellman in an issue of an old Fanzine, Chacal #2, and I thought Gee, I need to get a copy of that. So I looked around on ebay and saw the cover and then I thought, um...I already have that. Got it for the Karl Edward Wagner stuff in that issue. A couple of minutes of digging and I found the magazine. Oh well, at least I didn't order a copy before I realized I already owned it...

My Top 10 Favorite Books of 2011

2011-12-29T09:26:00.001-05:00

Over at her book blog, The Literary Omnivore, my friend Clare is seeking lists of Top 10 favorite reads for the year. Note that these are favorites, so they don't require any qualification. This is the stuff that I had the most fun with in 2011. All of these books were reviewed here at the blog so if you want more info, just check the reviews. Anyway, in no particular order, here we go.

The Saga of Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard

The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones

Act of Providence by Joseph Payne Brennan

Let's Kill Ames by Lester Dent

Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Baltimore by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Smile No More by James A. Moore

Durandal by Harold Lamb

Harald Hardrada: The Warriors Way by John Marsden

There ya go. Some of the books are old, some of them brand new. Eric Brighteyes is the oldest and I don't know why it took me so long to get around to it. The Desert of Souls is the debut novel of my friend Howard Andrew Jones and Smile No More is part of a series by my pal James A. Moore. Being a friend doesn't get you on the list but it doesn't keep you off either.
Durandal was a rousing historical adventure, and Let's Kill Ames was a rare Doc Savage novel written in the first person POV, which gave it a distinctive flavor. Act of Providence was a book that blurred the lines between fiction and reality, and we know how I love those.
Baltimore was one of the best and most original horror novels I've read in a long time. Harald Hardrada was a fantastic historical biography. Kiss Her Goodbye was my favorite so far of the Spillane/Collins collaborations, and Collins' solo effort The Last Quarry was the best hardboiled book I've read in ages. Had this been a top 11 list, Collins would have shown up again with Quarry in the Middle.
Now I didn't count re-reads so folks like David Gemmell, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Poul Anderson didn't make the list, and I should probably do a list of top 10 favorite short stories of 2011 at some point because I read some really good short tales this year and those authors deserve a mention. Maybe later.

Check out Clare's list here:

http://theliteraryomnivore.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/the-sunday-salon-2011-in-review/

The Witch Tree

2011-12-27T21:16:00.001-05:00

And speaking of Frank Belknap Long, I mentioned a few posts back that Long had written some Gothic Romances in the 1970s, using his wife Lyda's name as a pseudonym. I've been slowly picking those up, and since I've been reading some of the stories in the Centipede Press FBL collection, I decided to read another of Long's Gothics to compare the writing styles.
While I won't classify the Gothics as potboilers, Long was a working writer and he wrote what he could sell. I doubt that they were his first choice and I do wonder how he got the gig. Perhaps through an agent. In any event, as I said, long was a pro and I'm sure he gave the Gothics his best shot.
The Witch Tree is the second of the books I've read. The first was To the Dark Tower, which I reviewed in July. Both books are concerned to some degree with Satanic cults, which seems to be a common feature in Long's Gothics. This isn't surprising, as novels and movies about Satan were very popular in the late 1960s/early 1970s when Long was writing these books.
The Witch Tree is about a woman named Joan Rondon who comes to a creepy island off the coast of East Greenville, South Carolina, in search of her sister Barbara, who has gone missing while assisting her former college professor in research involving the occult. Joan lands right in the midst of gory goings on and is in trouble pretty much from the moment she sets foot on Hawk Island. The book is only 174 pages long so that's most of the plot in a nutshell. Most of the mystery and suspense revolves around an Agatha Christie style twisty plot where you don't know who's a good guy and who's a bad guy.
As I noted in my review of To the dark Tower, Long's primary strength is developing mood. It's a dank, dark, creepy world that Joan has stumbled into and Long never lets you forget it.
One odd thing I noted about this "Gothic Romance" is that there's very little romance. Joan meets a couple of hot guys as the book unfolds and she notes their hotness, but nothing really happens There are indications at the end that Joan may end up with one of the men but that's about it. In other Gothics I've read by Madeleine Brent and Victoria Holt, the romance is usually a major subplot. I imagine there were some disappointed housewives who bought this one back in 1971. This is almost a straight ahead horror novel, closer in spirit to Long's other weird tales than to a love story. I recall that To the Dark Tower had a stronger romance element. Have to see about the others as I come across them. I have a copy of 'So Dark a Heritage' on the way, a Gothic that actually has Frank Belknap Long's name on the cover as opposed to the Lyda pen name.
Anyway, if you like Long, this will probably interest you. If you're a fan of old school Gothic Romances this might not have enough romance to make you happy. Plenty of Gothic trappings though

Centipede Press's Frank Belknap Long

2011-12-26T19:55:00.003-05:00

I don't know about you, but when I think of a Grimoire, a spell book, I think of a massive tome, almost too heavy to lift with one hand, filled with weird creatures and strange illustrations, perhaps with a jet black cover and a ribbon for keeping one's place. Centipede Press's Frank Belknap Long collection, part of their Masters of the Weird Tale series puts me in mind of just such a book. I received a copy of this 1022 page behemoth of a book as a Christmas gift from my pal Cliff and it is truly a wonderful and creepy volume.
If you're unfamiliar with Frank Belknap Long, you're not alone. Though he is one of the original writers for the pulp magazine Weird Tales, appearing side by side in the magazine with H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and though he is one of the "Lovecraft Circle" and generally considered the first writer to use the Cthulhu Mythos in a story after Lovecraft (The Hounds of Tindalos) Long has not found the popularity that the 'three musketeers' of Weird Tales have and his work hasn't been collected and reprinted to the same level as HPL, REH, and CAS.
The Centipede Press book goes a long way toward correcting this. This is the largest single collection of Long's work, featuring over 65 stories. The book focuses on Long's weird and horror stories and contains little of his science fiction output, as the title would suggest. Not only are Long's best know stories here, (The Space Eaters, The Horror From the Hills, etc,) but there are stories included that haven't been reprinted since their original publication in the Pulp magazines over 50 years ago. There simply hasn't been a collection like this of Frank Belknap Long's work.
In his excellent introduction to the collection, editor John Pelan points out that the popular conception of Long as a prolific producer of Lovecraft pastiches is way off the mark. Only a very few of Long's stories actually fit into the Cthulhu Mythos and some only marginally. Though Lovecraft did act as a mentor to Long early in long's career, Long wasn't a Lovecraft imitator by any stretch. In fact, as I've read through the first several stories in the collection, I've been very impressed with Long's ability to conjure original and disturbing horrors that are entirely his own. Tales like Second Night Out and Death Waters stay with you long after you've set the book aside. Frank Belknap Long dreamed some dark dreams, and that's for sure.
Now a few words about the book itself. Centipede press makes some darn nice books. Well bound, well made, with heavy paper and sharp printing. This book is lavishly illustrated with new drawings and paintings by Allen Kozowski, Randy Broeker, and others, as well as with classic artwork by Hannes Bok, Lee Brown Coye and the great Virgil Finlay. This is a quality production from the word go. It comes in a slipcase and is one of a signed limited edition of only 200. In other words, this was a really really nice gift. Thanks Cliff!

Weekend Report

2011-12-26T09:10:00.001-05:00

Christmas came and went, leaving barely a ripple this year. I just couldn't work up much interest. Not a 'bah-humbug' but more of a 'meh.' That's how it goes sometimes, I suppose. I did get some neat stuff and people seemed pleased with the gifts I gave, so we'll call it a success on that level. Anyway, I'm still off for more than a week, so life is good.
I didn't read much fiction over the weekend. A few short stories and some comic books. The one bit of Christmas reading I did was August Derleth's Solar Pons story The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians, which is about a row over a rare Dickens manuscript. Derleth is possibly my favorite Sherlock Holmes pastiche writer. His stories, though they don't actually feature Holmes and Watson but rather doppelgangers Solar Pons and Dr. Parker, are perhaps the closest in spirit to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of any of the numerous Holmes pastiches out there. As someone once noted, Pons isn't Holmes and he knows he isn't Holmes but he hopes you'll come along for his adventures anyway. Derleth wrote about Pons for decades, ultimately turning out more Solar Pons stories than Doyle wrote about Holmes. Later another writer, Basil Copper, wrote even more Solar Pons stories, pastiching the pastiche, if you will.
I'll devote an entire post to Solar Pons soon. One of the more interesting characters to come out of the Sherlockian obsession.
I also dug out Savage Sword of Conan issues #219 and #220 and reread the Conan/Solomon Kane team-up I mentioned in Savage Memories #9. Still holds up. The art is still great and the story still rockets along.
I read a couple of Manly Wade Wellman short stories and several by Frank Belknap Long. I'll talk about Long in my next post or so. Got a nifty collection of his work for Christmas. Anyway, that's how the Christmas weekend went. A little low key, but not bad at all. Hope yours was good.

Misty Mountains Cold

2011-12-25T12:39:00.002-05:00

Holiday greetings from Middle Earth. This is Kharrn the Barbarian on his giant goat, Rambam, riding through the Misty Mountains. What? You don't remember giant goats in Tolkien? Me neither. But who cares? It's a game. Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T08:39:00.002-05:00

Holiday Plans

2011-12-21T13:10:00.001-05:00

So here's what I'm looking at. I have to work half a day tomorrow, and then I'm off until I return to work on January Third, so I have 11 days off in a row, which is pretty sweet. I will be doing much reading and watching of movies during that time. Tonight is my first actual Christmas function and I have one on Christmas Eve and one Christmas Day. After that I'm free to goof off until the New Year.

Sunday Morning at the Bookstore

2011-12-18T10:58:00.003-05:00

I went to Barnes & Noble this morning to drink coffee and browse. I picked up a cinnamon dolce latte at the Starbucks next door to the bookstore and then began roaming the shelves, beginning with the Mystery section. The first thing that caught my eye was the word Pemberly. Jane Austen fan that I am, I had to have a look to see what author was doing their take on Jane Austen's work this time. (Pretty much everyone does at one time or another. I even have a sword and sorcery plot for Regency England. Don't dare me. I'll write it. Then you'll be sorry.) I was somewhat surprised to find that it was a new mystery by P.D. James, one of the great ladies of British Mystery. Apparently James is also a big admirer of Austen. I might have to give that one a try at some point.
The I spotted a book called Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making, which is John Curran's follow up to his earlier book, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks. I enjoyed the first book immensely. It was fascinating to read Christie's notes about writing her novels. I've told the story here before of how I once read 23 Christie books in a row and wrote down outlines of the plots to understand how to plot whodunits. This was suggested by mystery novelist Carolyn G. Hart, who provided the list of books in an article in Mystery Scene Magazine. I recommend the exercise to anyone considering writing traditional mystery novels. Christie is still hard to beat in terms of plot.
Anyway, the new book looks to be more of the same. It too, I'll probably pick up after the Holidays.
Then I bumped over to the SF/Fantasy section and had a look around. Still too many Tolkien clones, but now salted with too many Game of Thrones wannabes and far far too many Anita Blake knock-offs. I did find a nice new collection of the short stories of Fritz Leiber which I picked up. Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, from Nightshade Books has a nice balance of Leibers' fiction. Some horror. Some SF. A few Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories. It has an introduction by Neil Gaiman, which I was pleased about until I read said introduction and found a dig at Robert E. Howard (or more precisely, at Conan) that I may come back to for a later post. Or I'll just point it out to Al Harron and than Gaiman will rue the day. (Really it's fairly mild but I didn't like it.)
I didn't make it to the history section, figuring I'd just see more stuff I wanted to buy. I try to spend more money on others than on myself at Christmas. heh. Week after next though, the kid gloves are off.

There Was a Crooked Man

2011-12-17T20:19:00.003-05:00

While digging around on the net for information on Manly Wade Wellman, I came across a mention of a Hellboy comic book story that was apparently done in homage to Wellman's John the Balladeer, called The Crooked Man. Since one of my best friends owns a comic book store it wasn't too difficult for me to get a copy of the trade paperback reprinting the three issue mini series. I picked it up Wednesday and read the story last night. Great story. Not an adaptation of a Wellman yarn, but something done in the spirit of Wellman's stories. In fact The Crooked Man almost feels as if Wellman came back from the great beyond to lend writer Mike Mignola a hand with the script.
The story takes place in 1958, and finds Hellboy in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia where a woman has apparently been put into a coma by a witch. She's been struck by a 'witchball'. What's a witchball? Read the story and find out.
As Hellboy begins to investigate, a man named Tom Ferell appears. Seems Tom used to live in the area twenty years earlier but disappeared after some mysterious occurences and the deaths of his parents. Now Tom's back from his wandering to set things aright, but that will bring he and Hellboy into conflict with the titular Crooked man, a lesser aspect of Satan, but nothing to be trifled with.
In some ways Tom stands in for John the Balladeer as he and Hellboy hike up into the mountains to face witches, zombies, demon familiars, and all kinds of dark creatures. The story is filled with mountain folklore just as Manly Wade Wellman's tales were and Mignola manages to catch the dialog of the back woods folks just as Wellman did. It is indeed a fine, creepy homage. The story is illustrated by Richard Corben who does a great job of drawing deep woods, hound dogs, and creatures from hell.
Fans of Manly Wade Wellman will want to pick up this collection, not only because of the story itself, but because of two nice essay's on Wellman. Mignola talks about what a big influence John the Balladeer was in his creation of Hellboy, and then there's a wonderful four page appreciation in the back of the book by writer/editor John Pelan, a man who knows his Wellman. I learned from this essay that Wellman actually created DC Comics' supernatural hero The Phantom Stranger. You think I'd have known that, but I didn't.
Anyway, The Crooked Man is a great comic, and a nice tribute to Manly Wade Wellman. The other stories in the collection are darn good too. (Can you say Headless Ghost Pirate?) In fact I need to start picking up more of the Hellboy collections. I've been missing out on some good stuff.

Nothing Says Merry Christmas Like...

2011-12-15T10:36:00.002-05:00

So I have a cousin who's really into Roman history. For years I've given him books about ancient Rome. This year I had planned to give him something different, a Cold Steel training Gladius. This is a practice sword made of very tough plastic in the same size as a real Roman short sword. Cold steel actually makes a wide variety of practice weapons out of this hard, durable material. (They also have a very nice real Scottish Dirk I have my eye on for after the Holidays.) Think of them as high tech bokens. Anyway, when I got it out of the box I was so taken with it that I decided to keep it. Merry Christmas to me. My cousin will be fine with another book...

Thunstone Redux

2011-12-14T06:54:00.002-05:00

A while back I mentioned that next year Haffner Press would be publishing The Complete John Thunstone, a big volume collecting all the short stories and two novels about Manly Wade Wellman's occult investigator. Got an email this morning from Stephen Haffner about upcoming titles from Haffner Press. The blurb about the Thunstone volume included a preliminary drawing for the cover by artist Raymond Swanland. Keep in mind that this isn't the finished cover. Looks pretty nifty though.
Between this book from Haffner and the two volume Karl Edward Wagner horror collection from Centipede Press, 2012 looks to be a good year for Southern Horror and Fantasy writers. I'm hoping that now that all the Hok, Thunstone, and John the Balladeer stories are back in print, that someone will put together a new collection of Wellman's other horror stories, the ones that appeared in Carcosa Press's Worst Things Waiting and in The Valley So Low. That would make the majority of Wellman's work available to new readers, which would make me very happy. I'd also like to see a collection of Wellman's Kardios sword & sorcery stories, but that would make a pretty slender volume. Perhaps a publisher could break up the Wellman short stories into two volumes and include the Kardios stories in one of those.

For those of you just joining us, I'm including the contents list from The Complete John Thunstone.

Table of Contents
The Third Cry to Legba Weird Tales Nov ’43
The Golden Goblins Weird Tales Jan ’44
Hoofs Weird Tales Mar ’44
The Letters of Cold Fire Weird Tales May ’44
John Thunstone’s Inheritance Weird Tales Jul ’44
Sorcery from Thule Weird Tales Sep ’44
The Dead Man’s Hand Weird Tales Nov ’44
Thorne on the Threshold Weird Tales Jan ’45
The Shonokins Weird Tales Mar ’45
Blood from a Stone Weird Tales May ’45
The Dai Sword Weird Tales Jul ’45
Twice Cursed Weird Tales Mar ’46
Shonokin Town Weird Tales Jul ’46
The Leonardo Rondache Weird Tales Mar ’48
The Last Grave of Lill Warran Weird Tales May ’51
Rouse Him Not Kadath Jul ’82
What Dreams May Come, Doubleday 1983
The School of Darkness, Doubleday 1985

Harald Hardrada: The Warrior's Way

2011-12-13T07:36:00.002-05:00

John Marsden's biography of Harald Hardrada is one of the liveliest historical bios I've read. It's also one of the most fascinating. Marsden takes the hyperbole of the Norse Sagas and breaks things down into facts, using in depth research of historical records to get a better idea of what actually happened.
For instance, where King Harald's Saga, as related by Snorri Sturluson might say something like, "And Harald arrived in the land of the Rus (proto-Russia) and was immediately made leader of the king's forces", Marsden, using sources like the Primary Russian Chronicle, will then explain who was king at the time, what campaigns he was involved in, and what Harald was likely to have actually done in his service. Who Harald might have fought, what major battles he could have taken part in and so forth. Marsden's focus is on Harald as a professional soldier, which of course suits me down to the greaves.
Now you might wonder if this makes Harald's career any less impressive. The answer is no. Thing is, even if he might not have been the Norse Superman that the sagas make him, primary historical sources do back up most of the main points of the sagas. Harald is mentioned by Greeks, Russians, and others, and almost always in terms that show he was an impressive individual. By bringing the man into focus, Marsden has made the legend even more impressive.
I've also learned quite a bit about the makeup of what we now know as Russia and encountered tribes and cultures and peoples that I never knew existed, and I love learning stuff like that.
Marsden's detective work is very impressive. Using clues from the sagas (specific battles, names of people and places) he is able to give dates to many of the events that the sagas are unclear on and to clear up things like Harald's unnecessarily circuitous route to Constantinople as given in the sagas.
I'm about half way through the book and up to Harald's time in Constantinople. Looking forward to learning more about his battles with Arab pirates. Not surprisingly, the various Byzantine emperors often made use of their Viking mercenaries in the royal navy, since the Norsemen tended to know their way around a boat.
As I've mentioned before, many people have referred to Harald Hardrada as a 'real life Conan' and this book serves to further that idea. Imagine this seven foot tall Northman stalking red handed through the steppes and across desert sands, in pitched battles on the seas, and wandering the streets of cities like Jerusalem and Constantinople. Scenes to fire the imagination. And best of all, he was a real person.
This book came out in the UK in 2007 and hasn't been reprinted in America, so if you want to check it out you'll have to buy a used copy from Amazon or someone, as I did, but I've definitely found it worth the effort. Highly recommended.

Savage Memories #10

2011-12-12T10:04:00.001-05:00

In 1998-2000 I was living in Decatur, the Atlanta suburb I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Weekends would often find me back at the used book and comic store The Book Nook, still occasionally digging through the boxes of old fanzines and magazines, and occasionally I would pick up an old Savage Sword of Conan that I hadn't read.
That's when I started enjoying some of the issues that Chuck Dixon had written. Dixon had become one of my favorite writers at DC comics during the 1990s, when he was doing great stuff on Green Arrow, Robin, and other titles. Most of Dixon's DC output fell into the crime fiction category, so that was understandable, but I found that I liked his take on Conan as well. He seemed to like writing stories about Conan as a mercenary or frontier scout, and most of the sorcery he put into his stories seemed to be of the Weird Tales/Lovecraft school, so all in all he had an approach that, while not imitative of Robert E. Howard, still had the 'realism' factor that Howard was so fond of. Dixon's Conan was down and dirty. I still wasn't always thrilled with the art, but a good story offset that enough that I could enjoy it. So I built up a decent collection of most of Dixon's issues to add to the 60 or so SSoC issues which I still had.
And that was where things stood until 2004 when I decided to move from a rental house to an apartment.
If you're a collector, or just someone who reads a lot then you know how books accumulate. Add comic books and magazines to that and you have a good idea of how daunting a task moving all of that stuff would be. I had roughly 4500 hardback books, about that many paperbacks, and 18,000 comic books straining the foundations of my house. I didn't want to move all that, and truthfully I didn't need most of it anymore. So I did a little research and I decided that I would buy six new 6ftX4ft bookshelves for my new place and the number of books that would fit on those shelves would be all the books I would take along. (About 800 hardbacks.) I also got rid of all but about 1000 comics and about 800 paperbacks. It was a painful process, but I'm glad to say that here, at the close of 2011, I haven't missed much of what I got rid of. But there was an exception.
I had decided that I would keep the original 51 issues of Savage Sword of Conan that I'd bought as a kid, but get rid of everything else, and that's what I did. And for a couple of years I was okay with that. But then my interest in Robert E. Howard, Conan, and all things sword & sorcery swung back around to the front of my manias and I suddenly wished I hadn't gotten rid of the SSoC issues. In fact, I decided that I wanted a complete collection of the magazine.
And that brings us back to the present, since my acquisition of the full set was covered here on the blog a while back. It took a lot of Ebay watching and the help of the redoubtable Cliff, but I own a complete run of Savage Sword of Conan magazine. That also brings us to the end of the Savage Memories series. Doesn't mean that I won't be returning to Savage Sword as a subject, but this is a good place to end the tale of one boy/man's obsession with a comic mag. Thanks to everyone who has read these posts and to those who have commented. I can tell that a lot of you know exactly how I feel.

PS. The cover that accompanies this post is my favorite Joe Jusko SSoC cover and the first one I bought when I began my quest to get all of the issues.

Conan the Undead?

2011-12-11T16:04:00.004-05:00

Undead Conan was the phrase used in several previews of the new BOOM series, Valen the Outcast. It's somewhat apt in that the protagonist, Valen, is the former monarch of a Kingdom not unlike Aquilonia, but since Valen's entire origin hasn't been revealed I don't know about his background before becoming king. I don't get the idea that he was a barbarian, but hey, this is issue one. He is, however, a great big guy with a sword and a bad attitude. Oh and he's dead.
Well, he's technically undead, since he's walking around and talking, a sentient zombie as it were and he can only be er.. re-killed by having his heart pierced or his head cut off. Other wounds just make him mad. A necromancer named Korrus Nullus killed Valen on the battlefield and cursed him with 'unlife', as he apparently does with a lot of folks, who then become his thralls, but Valen somehow managed to escape being controlled by the sorcerer and now he's out for some payback. All and all, not a bad concept for a sword & sorcery comic.
The first issue zips along with sharp writing from Michael Alan Nelson and dark, moody art by Matteo Scalera. Both men seem well suited to the title, though I'm not familiar with either of them from other comics work. My only complaint is that the coloring, which is a bit too dark, often obscures the artwork and it can be hard to tell what's going on in some panels. (The fact that the borders between the panels are colored black doesn't help.)
Overall though, I enjoyed the first issue. It's not really Undead Conan, but it does have a nice S&S dark fantasy vibe, and the first issue is available for a buck. Give it a shot.

Good Press

2011-12-07T16:46:00.001-05:00

A nice mention of the Strange Worlds anthology (with my story Slavers of Trakor) over at Black Gate Magazine's site. Thanks guys!

http://www.blackgate.com/2011/12/01/new-treasures-strange-worlds/

Savage Memories #9

2011-12-06T06:43:00.002-05:00

It was a very sharp cover by British artist Colin Macneil that brought Savage Sword of Conan back to my attention in 1994. The cover was for issue #219, and I recall seeing it on the racks at the comic book store. I really liked the cover painting with the massive, ax-wielding Conan. Looking closer I saw that this issue contained an honest to gosh crossover between Robert E. Howard's arguably two most famous characters, Conan the Cimmerian and Solomon Kane the Puritan. Sucker for a crossover that I am, I was dubious. I didn't figure anyone but Roy Thomas could have pulled off that particular team-up and Roy was long gone. Still, I picked up the issue and flipped through it.
I liked Colin Macneil's black and white art even more than his cover painting. He drew a big, mean Conan and he actually made use of the magazine's black & white format, laying on the heavy shadows and using cross hatching to suggest forms and textures. And lo and behold, the story was written by none other than the man himself, Roy Thomas. Unbeknownst to me, Thomas had returned to writing for Marvel and had taken over the writing on Savage Sword of Conan with issue #190 in 1991. Shows how far off my radar the series was.
So I bought the magazine and read it. Thomas had taken REH's very short Solomon Kane fragment Death's Black Riders and used it as a springboard for an adventure that spanned centuries. (Riders is left intact in the adaptation and Macneil's moody art on those few pages is worth the price of admission itself.) Conan and Kane each have an adventure in the same Opar like Atlantean city, each man in his own time, but then sorcery brings the two of them together for the second part of the story. Yes, it was a continued story, so I ended up buying issue #220 as well.
Along with using Death's Black Riders, Thomas does a fine job of weaving elements from the REH Solomon Kane tale The Moon of Skulls and what little we know of Conan's adventures in ancient Africa into an action packed sword & sorcery yarn. It's interesting that Thomas decided to portray Kane in his later years, gray haired, but still a dangerous swordsman. There's also some fun stuff juxtaposing Kane's devout Christian beliefs with what he sees as Conan's pagan religion. All and all, a lot of fun.
And those were my last two new issues of Savage Sword of Conan. The series would limp along for 15 more issues before being cancelled. The color comic, Conan the Barbarian had already succumbed to poor sales. Marvel's 25 year run with the character of Conan was almost done

Savage Memories #8

2011-12-05T07:22:00.001-05:00

Back before my buddy Cliff Biggers opened his comic book store Dr. No's, the closest comic shop to me was the original Book Nook on Claremont Road in Decatur. (It has since moved and I've never been to the new location.) Decatur is a suburb of Atlanta and it was a good 45 minute drive from my home in Canton when I was a teenager. Still, every couple of weeks I would jump into my beat up Mustang Mach One and trundle down to the Book Nook. They had a pretty complete selection of Marvel and DC comics and they carried independent comics too. This was important since I had become a rabid fan of Dave Sim's Cerebus and the Book Nook was the only place I could get it. (They were also a used bookstore and I bought literally hundreds of old paperbacks there.)
And they had a lot of boxes on the floor under the racks of new comics, which contained unbagged and unboarded comics, magazines, and fanzines. After discovering Cerebus, Elf Quest, Tandra, and other independent comics, I started actively buying old fanzines and earlier self published comics. Book Nook was a treasure trove of these, but you had to dig, and dig I did.
So one day, in maybe 1982 or 1983, I was digging through the boxes and came across a battered copy of Savage Sword of Conan issue #61. I flipped through it and found that it had been both penciled and inked by John Buscema. I've explained before that Buscema was and is my biggest influence as a cartoonist. My stuff probably looks more like his than anyone else's to this day. Anyway, I loved it when Buscema inked his own work. There was a lush and seductive quality to his brushwork and the finished art had a personality and energy to it that wasn't present when Buscema's art was inked by others. So of course I had to buy it. I dug around and found a few more issues with art I liked and left the Book Nook that day with half a dozen or so back issues of SSoC.
Now I'd like to say that this reignited my interest in Conan and the magazine, but it didn't. I was there purely for the art. So whenever I was at Book Nook after that, I would check for back issues with Buscema artwork. I found a couple more that he both penciled and inked, but the major portion of the magazines were inked by other hands.
Not long after this, Cliff opened Dr. No's (Or more precisely he bought the store from its previous owner, but Cliff's store was so different from the original incarnation that it might as well have been a new store.) and my life took a major change. Not only did I have a comics store a mere fifteen minutes away, but I soon became good friends with the owner and that would lead to meeting many of the other people who are still among my best friends these days.
But back to Conan. Since I was frequenting Cliff's comic shop, I still saw new issues of Savage Sword of Conan on the stands. Occasionally I would flip through them, but I seldom found the art to my liking. John Buscema had moved on and I didn't care for most of the artists who followed him. I also hadn't thought much of the writing in the back issues I'd read, so the magazine was pretty much a wash out as far as I was concerned.
The first new issue of SSoC I bought after abandoning the magazine in 1980 was issue #149 in 1988 and that was because, again, I liked the art. Penciler Tom Grindberg was in his Neal Adams period then and Bob McLeod, a favorite inker, did the inks. I really liked the final look of the combined talents of Grindberg and McLeod. The story, by a fellow named Chuck Dixon was pretty decent too. However this was during the period when I still had little interest in fantasy or sword & sorcery, so two more years passed before I bought another issue. This was issue #176, which had art by Timothy Truman and a couple of other guys I knew mostly from First Comics, (a now defunct comic book publisher) and another good story from this Dixon guy. I believe this was Truman's first work on Conan, long before he would become writer and occasional artist for the character at Dark Horse comics.
After that issue, four more years would pass before I'd pick up a new issue of Savage Sword.

Joining the Dark Side

2011-12-04T12:28:00.003-05:00

My friend Cliff loaned me his Kindle for the weekend. I'd been wanting to try an e-reader and since Cliff had just finished the same book I'm currently reading, Stephen King's 11/22/63, he figured this would be a good time for me to finally give the world of e-books a try.
I must say, I didn't hate it. The Kindle is considerably lighter than the actual 849 page book which makes it a lot easier to read when I'm lying on the floor on my back, as I often do while reading. The screen is very clear and easy on the eyes. I had no trouble making the jump at all.
But, and you knew there would be a but, I'm still one of those guys who loves books. I just got a copy of the original Lancer release of Michael Moorcock's The Stealer of Souls with the Jack Gaughan cover featuring the infamous 'tall pointy hat' version of Elric, and I am absolutely tickled to own it. I love books. I suspect that I will always love books.
However I could see a lot of books that I'd be perfectly happy to own on an e-reader because I am more interested in the information in the book than the book itself. The convenience and portability of the Kindle has definitely impressed me. It would be great to take on vacation. It would also be handy over a weekend when I realize I need a book on fencing in Elizabethan era Venice and I need it NOW! (And yes that sort of thing does happen.)
So yeah, I can see an e-reader being a probable purchase in the not too distant future. Thanks, Cliff!

Savage Memories #7

2011-12-01T20:36:00.002-05:00

1980 was a big year for me. It was the year I finally managed to read the Lord of the Rings all the way through. It was the year I discovered crime fiction. And it was the year I stopped reading Savage Sword of Conan.
There were a couple of contributing factors for my abandoning the magazine. The first was the aforementioned discovery of the wild world of hardboiled fiction. I read a book called A Tan and Sandy Silence by John D. MacDonald and it changed my world. Reading MacDonald led to reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett which led to reading Robert B. Parker and Max Allan Collins and so on, and that pretty much ended my reading of fantasy and science fiction for a couple of decades. I've told that story here before, so I'll just reiterate that I have an obsessive personality and when I leap into something, I tend to do it whole hog. I was worse when I was a kid, so basically guns were in and swords were out.
Then there was what I considered the declining quality of the stories in the magazine. Most of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories had been adapted by 1980 and SSoC was featuring various Conan-nizations of non Conan REH and also adaptations of some of the Conan pastiches by other authors. I got through the adaptation of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's Conan the Buccaneer mostly on the strength of John Buscema's art, but by the time SSoC got around to adapting de Camp/Carter's Conan the Liberator, I was losing interest fast. I can actually remember the panel in issue #51 that pushed me over the edge. I have reproduced it here. Something about all those sawed off satyrs just irritated the heck out of me. This was not what Conan was supposed to be about, and even with the Buscema art and the great Earl Norem cover, I just couldn't get worked up over Conan fighting a bunch of Mr. Tumnus's cousins.
And that was pretty much it for me and Savage Sword of Conan. There wasn't any conscious decision to stop buying the magazine really. I just didn't pick it up with the next issue and soon SSoC, and the color Conan the Barbarian comic book had dropped from my radar. As it turned out, I'd picked a good point to jump off. Writer Roy Thomas left Marvel for DC soon after I'd departed and the quality of the writing plummeted. (As I learned when I started recollecting the magazine years later.) It would be quite some time before I returned to Savage Sword, and that would be too little and too late. More on that next time.

And Just in Case...

2011-11-29T18:08:00.003-05:00

And just in case you want to compare the Roy Thomas/John Buscema version of the same scene, (see previous post) here ya go.

More Cloonan Conan

2011-11-29T18:04:00.001-05:00

Comics Alliance has put up a few pages of the first issue of Brian Wood's and Becky Cloonan's adaptation of Queen of the Black Coast. I'm not going to swipe the "exclusive" pics, so I'll provide a link at the bottom of the page. Overall I like the art quite a bit, though I'm reserving judgement until I see more shots of Conan's face.
I do really like the last page of the preview where Conan says,

"And I promise you, if you don't put distance between us and those guardsmen on shore, I will drench this ship in your blood and that of your crew."

And then the next panel cuts to the crew's faces and they're like, "Wait..what did he just say?" . Very nice bit of visual "business."

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/11/29/conan-the-barbarian-1-brian-wood-becky-cloonan-preview/

Savage Memories #6

2011-11-29T06:46:00.003-05:00

My last Savage Memories post pretty much closed out the really golden days of discovering Savage Sword of Conan. After that I always seemed to be able to find the magazine and I bought it regularly for the next few years, but the mania had passed. I don't know that you can be that crazy about something once you pass adolescence. I remember Ray Bradbury talking about his love for the Buck Rogers comic strip and how he lived in anticipation of each day's strip. That was me and the Conan comics.
However, there were some later issues that stand out in my mind. Issue #20 featured an adaptation of the Robert E. Howard story The Slithering Shadow. The artwork on this issue was fantastic. John Buscema's pencils were at their Conan peak and Alfredo Alcala's inks brought dimension and texture to Buscema's dynamic figure work. Plus, I love the Earl Norem cover, showing a Lovecraftian horror in all it's gibbering, slavering, glory. I need to devote an entire post to Norem's work on the covers of SSoC.
Issue #30 had an amazing art job by Frank Brunner on a Roy Thomas adaptation of REH's The Scarlet Citadel. Just gorgeous art and very creepy in some places.
Issue #24 was something of an oddity in that it adapted a Robert E. Howard story that Roy Thomas had already adapted in the color pages of Conan the Barbarian issue #4 with artist Barry Smith. Thomas wanted to give the story a longer and more in depth adaptation and he wanted to see how John Buscema would handle the story. Makes for some interesting comparisons with the earlier adaptation.
Issues #33 and #34 featured great art by two comics legends, even if they were adapting two less than stellar de Camp/Carter stories. Gene Colan did his usual fine work on issue #33 and Carmine Infantino penciled issue #34. Alcala inked Infantino and it's very interesting to see what he did with Infantino's design oriented art.
If I seem a bit focused on the artwork, remember that this was in the days when I was learning to draw and when I wanted to be a comic book artist. I spent a lot of time studying the art, so these things are imbedded in my brain. However I was also absorbing the stories. As I've mentioned countless times in other posts, the comic books were my introduction to Conan and to Robert E. Howard, and Roy Thomas's well done adaptations made me want to read the prose stories. Thus I'm a bit dismissive of those "REH Purists" who dismiss the comic books. Many many REH fans discovered Howard through the comics.
Anyway, those are the issues that stand out in my mind from 1976 to 1980. So what happened in 1980? Tell you next time.

Weekend Report

2011-11-28T06:57:00.002-05:00

My five day weekend didn't get off to quite the start I had hoped for. Wednesday night, while leaving the Mexican restaurant where I'd just had dinner with friends, I wasn't paying attention and I stepped into a depression in the asphalt and rolled my ankle, leaving me with a bad sprain. By the time I got home, the ankle had swollen up to the size of a tennis ball, so I put some ice on it and took some pain killer. The next day I couldn't really walk on it, but I taped it up and hobbled up to the assisted living home to see my grandmother.
After that I went home and basically spent the next two days with my foot elevated. Wasn't that big a deal, as I had planned to spend a lot of the long weekend watching movies and reading, I just hadn't planned on it being enforced. I can walk normally now, but there's still some pain, and given what I know of sprains, that will probably be the case for a while.
So Thanksgiving was short. I didn't go to my brother's house for the annual dinner, so I didn't have any turkey. I'm okay with that. Thanksgiving isn't a big deal for me these days.
So overall, the weekend was fine, other than the ankle thing. I re-read David Gemmell's book Hero in the Shadows, which finishes up his Waylander series. I hadn't read that one in about a decade so I'd forgotten a lot of it. I was talking to my pal Brian, who I introduced to Gemmell's fiction, and he asked if anyone had stepped up to fill the gap left by Gemmell's death, and I told him sadly no. There's still no one writing the sort of action filled, hard edged fantasy that Gemmell did so well. It wasn't quite sword & sorcery, but it was close.
I finished that up and started on Stephen King's 11/22/63, which I commented on in the post below. Still working on that one. At 849 pages it's another King doorstop. As I mentioned in the previous post, the book is about time travel. Basically a guy goes back to try and stop the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Not exactly a new idea. But King gives it his own twist. The method of time travel only allows the traveler to go to one specific day, which is in 1958. So if the guy wants to stop the assassination, he has to spend five years of his life in the past. If anything goes wrong he could presumably try again, (Every trip is a reset.) but he'd have to give up another five years. Interesting concept. King does a great job of recreating the past as he remembers it, giving readers a glimpse of a world long gone. Oh and part of it takes place in King's fictional Maine town of Derry. And if you've been to Derry before, you know that means trouble. More on that later.
I watched a couple more episodes of the second season of The Walking Dead. You can tell the budget for the show has been cut by the shortage of zombies in what's theoretically a show about zombies. The writing is still pretty strong and character focused, but nothing much seems to be happening. The show's pace has slowed. Still enjoying it, but I haven't found the second season as strong as the first.
Did a re-watch on the David Tennant Doctor Who episode, The Christmas Invasion. This was Tennant's first actual episode as the Doctor and it's interesting seeing him getting into the role. This is also just a fun holiday episode with plenty of British Christmas trappings. I used to watch all the Doctor Who Christmas episodes on Christmas day, but there are so many now, that I'll be spreading them out a bit. I haven't watched last year's Christmas show since it originally aired so that will be the one I save for Christmas day, I think.
Anyway, I watched some other stuff and read some non-fiction and some comic books and I played Lord of the Rings Online a good bit. (Kharrn is level 72 of 75 now.) I also did a surprising amount of drawing. Guess I was just in the mood to sketch. Not much writing. Still recharging from finishing the novel and sorting ideas for next project. So there ya go.

That Darned Stephen King

2011-11-26T22:15:00.002-05:00

So I was just going to read the first chapter or so of Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63, and when I came up for air I was on page 124. I can't think of any other writer who can hold my attention like that these days. It probably helps that the book is about time travel, one of my favorite ideas for fiction, but really, it's just that King is so readable. He's just such a good storyteller. Truthfully I might have stopped a little earlier, but some characters from one of King's earlier novels showed up and I had to see what that was about and...darn him.

Cat-iversary

2011-11-22T07:31:00.001-05:00

Today marks the third year that I have had two cats living with me. On November 22nd, 2008, my friend Trish dropped off her two cats, Bruce and Amelia, to stay with me while her Air Force Reserve unit was deployed to Iraq. I was originally supposed to keep the cats for six to eight months, but various upheavals in Trish's life kept extending their stay until finally she and I decided the cats should just stay with me permanently. (Though I have promised Trish joint custody should she ever return to Georgia.)
Bruce has now lived with me longer than he lived with Trish, and Amelia is catching up, so I do consider them my cats. (Though as Rooster Cogburn observed, no one owns a cat. We're roommates.) They are a constant source of amusement, annoyance, and companionship.

Coming Up

2011-11-21T21:52:00.003-05:00

My to-be-read pile is toppling over as usual. Some of the books at the top of the pile.

11/23/63 By Stephen King

The Eagle's Prophecy by Simon Scarrow

Quarry's Ex by Max Allan Collins

The Silent Stars Go By (Doctor Who) by Dan Abnett

The Vault by Ruth Rendell

Looking good for Holiday season reading!

Monday is Better When It's Thursday

2011-11-21T06:03:00.000-05:00

My workplace is going to be closed Thursday and Friday this week to observe the Thanksgiving Holiday. Since I have several vacation days left here at the end of the year, I'm going to take Wednesday off as well. Say it with me. Five Day Weekend. So since my weekend starts the day after tomorrow, today is kind of like Thursday. And let me tell you, as a guy who hates Mondays, it's much easier to come in on a Monday when you know you only have two days to put in.
So what will I do with that many days off? Well Thursday I have family stuff, and Friday I'm having lunch with my buddy Brian, and beyond that, no plans so far. I finished the rewrites on Blind Shadows this weekend so I may start a new writing project. Otherwise, I suspect I'll read and draw and play Lord of the Rings Online and write blog posts about some of that.

Conan: Road of Kings Issue #10

2011-11-20T11:44:00.002-05:00

You know what I'm going to say. another great issue of Conan: Road of Kings. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but honestly, Roy Thomas has done such a bang-up job as writer on this title that I have to keep saying good things. RoK #10 once again jams as much story into one issue as most other comics use in a six issue arc. Conan, still trapped in the city of Tarantia with a group of rebels, agrees to help them in an attempted Coup d'état against the current king. Before it's all over, the big Cimmerian will have to hack his way through dozens of soldiers and one seriously pissed-off giant lizard. Artist Dan Panosian draws a suitably hulking, wild-eyed Conan, reminding me favorably of Big John Buscema. Go Dan!
As usual though, with Roy Thomas, it isn't all blood and thunder. Thomas again shows his skill at characterization and the ending is a little downbeat and Conan has to say goodbye to a comrade of whom he is perhaps more fond than he would care to admit. Thomas's Conan is human.
Anyway, next issue sees the return of artist Mike Hawthorne for the final two issues of this mini series. I've enjoyed Panosian's work a lot, and I'd certainly welcome his art on his own twelve issue Conan mini-series. In fact I'd like to see him on Kull or Solomon Kane at some point. I bet he'd do a great Kane. I'm looking forward to having Mike back for the finale though.

Still a Barbarian

2011-11-20T11:42:00.002-05:00

Okay, okay. A few of you were worried that my Lotro avatar Kharrn was loosing his Conan-esque look. See, he's still all barbarian looking under that crusader armor. Now calm down, as my buddy Nav would say.

Byzantine Dreams

2011-11-20T10:53:00.004-05:00

My study of the Byzantine Empire, set in motion about five years ago by my study of the Vikings, flared up again this weekend as I read Harold Lamb's biography of the Emperor Justinian and his Empress, Theodora and also Lamb's history of early Constantinople. Can't recommend both of these books enough. Lamb brings the same energy to his biographies and histories as he does to his historical fiction making for fast paced reading and easy comprehension of what other writers might have presented as dry facts and dates. In fact, one Lamb fan of my acquaintance went so far as to say he preferred Lamb's non fiction to his fiction. I won't go that far, but I can see what he meant.
Anyway, reading these books inspired me to re-watch the four part documentary Byzantium: The Lost Empire, which I own on DVD. Watching it post-Lamb was very interesting, especially seeing as how most of Lamb's information was still in line with current thinking on the Byzantine Empire. (Lamb's books were written in the 1950s.)
And that set me to re-reading sections of some of my history books. See how these things get started? So this morning I was thinking over breakfast that I would offer a guide to anyone who might like to begin studying the Byzantine empire. Just something to give you a working knowledge of the history of the second part of the Roman Empire and the influence that Byzantium exerted over history.

History Books:

A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich.

This is the cut-down version of Norwich's three-volume history of Byzantium. The best and most concise history I've found, covering the major events and the careers of the important rulers and citizens. Coming in at just over 400 pages, it includes a useful glossary, maps, and lists of Emperors and Sultans. If you read only one history of Byzantium, go with this one.

Sailing From Byzantium by Colin Wells

An excellent book for putting the Byzantine empire into historical context. in fact it's sub-titled, How a Lost Empire Shaped the World. Due for a re-read soon.

Fourteen Byzantine Rulers by Michael Psellus

My most well thumbed history book. Psellus served under two Byzantine rulers and was alive during the rules of others. This first hand account, though definitely biased, as are all first hand accounts, is still utterly fascinating.

Videos:

Byzantium: The Lost Empire

I'm going to recommend that the person newly interested in the Byzantines watch this video before he or she reads anything. It will give them a good grounding in the subject and make the reading easier to follow. Then watch it again after you've read a bunch of stuff to help cement your knowledge. This approach helped me a lot. Available on DVD, but I think someone uploaded it to Youtube recently.

Nova: The Vikings

The section about the Varangian Guard has some useful and fascinating information about the later part of the Empire when Norsemen served as bodyguards and mercenaries to the rulers of Byzantium.

There you go. Pretty painless, eh? If that whets your appetite, I'll recommend the two Harold Lamb books mentioned above and Daily Life in The Byzantine Empire by Marcus Rautman, plus I'll throw in some fiction. Try Poul Anderson's The Golden Horn, which is about Viking King Harald the Ruthless and his time in Constantinople, and The Sheen on the Silk, a suspense/mystery by Anne Perry set in medieval Constantinople.

See you in Byzantium.

The Fortunes of Kharrn

2011-11-18T19:48:00.001-05:00

It occurred to me that I haven't given a report on the adventures of Kharrn the Barbarian in Middle Earth for a bit. Truthfully I haven't had time to play much lately. Kharrn looks more like Cormac Fitzgeoffrey than Conan these days in his Crusader duds. Don't worry though. I can still switch him back to his barbarian tunic with the flip of a switch. Things are getting interesting in the new expansion. I've run across Saruman a couple of times and there are other links to the books. Nothing super new in terms of gameplay, but overall Isengard has a lot of cool stuff. Mostly I'm just enjoying all the medieval looking armor.

Hi Ho Lancelot!

2011-11-18T19:45:00.002-05:00

This is the new horse emote of Lord of the Rings on line. You can make your horse rear up just like the Lone Ranger and Silver. I always wanted to be able to do that in the game. This is my charger, Lancelot, by the way. Now if I only had a lance...

Savage Memories #5

2011-11-16T17:02:00.002-05:00

I mentioned in my last Savage Memories post that I'd have to backtrack to Savage Sword of Conan issue #11 because I wanted to take the time to read the actual Robert E. Howard story on which the Conan tale in that issue was based. This was an El Borak yarn called The Country of the Knife. El Borak, aka Francis X. Gordon was a former gunfighter from Texas and an adventurer in Asia, primarily in Afghanistan, whose adventures took place in (for Howard) contemporary times. Not that this kept the stories from having plenty of sword swinging action. 1920s-30s Afghanistan was still a wild and wooly place, at least in the pages of Adventure Magazine, where writers like Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy spun tales of adventure in far off places that would influence the young Robert E. Howard in the creation of his own Lawrence of Arabia style adventurer.
However, this meant that Conan scripter Roy Thomas had to do a bit of rewriting to turn Country of the Knife into a Hyborian Age tale. I've explained before that Thomas had two methods of adapting Robert E. Howard stories to the Conan comic. If he did a straight adaptation, changing very little, the credits box at the front of the comic book story would say 'adapted from the story by Robert E. Howard.' If Thomas did a good bit of rewriting, then the box would say 'freely adapted.'
I discovered the Marvel Conan the Barbarian color comic with issue #36, which featured a pure Roy Thomas story, not an adaptation, but within the next half a dozen issues or so, and one previous issue I found on a spinner rack, Thomas would adapt three REH non-Conan stories from widely varied sources into issues of the Conan comic. He adapted The Fire of Ashurbanipal, The House of Arabu, and oddly enough, The Purple Heart of Erlik . (Why do I say oddly about Erlik? Tell you later.)
So as you can see, a 'freely' adapted Robert E. Howard story was nothing new to me by the time I got around to Savage Sword issue #11's lead tale, The Abode of the Damned. And here's the thing. At age 13 or so, I still hadn't read much in the way of real Robert E. Howard, and truthfully I was probably happier with Roy's Conan-izations than I would have been with stories of El Borak, Wild Bill Clanton, and the rest. Forgive my callow youth, but all I wanted in those days was more Conan. With the exception of Solomon Kane, who I also discovered through Savage Sword, I didn't know or care much about Howard's other characters. All of that would come later. Anyway, the biggest change Thomas made in the story was changing one of the lead characters from male to female. In The Country of the knife, transplanted Englishman Stuart Brent is hanging out in his San Francisco apartment when he hears a scuffle in the hall. He opens the door to find one man viciously stabbing another. Brent hits the knife man with a whiskey bottle and the fellow flees. Brent is then stunned to learn that the victim is an old friend, one Dick Stockton, an agent with the British Secret service.
The dying Stockton tells Brent that Brent must get a message to a man called El Borak in Afghanistan. Brent, being a stand up guy, agrees, and travels to the far off land to deliver said message. Unfortunately Brent is taken prisoner by slave raiders who are traveling to a mysterious refuge for criminals called Rub El Harami. Along the way, a stranger joins the slavers and manages to aid Brent. Obviously this is El Borak in disguise, but that won't come out for some time.
In the Conan story, Brent is replaced by a woman named Mellani. Mel is a former prostitute who now owns her own small tavern. Late one night, after closing time, Mellani is pouring herself a drink when she hears a scuffle outside her door. She opens the door to find one man viciously stabbing another. Mel hits the knifeman with a wine jug and the fellow flees. Mel is then stunned to learn that that the victim is her ne'er-do-well brother.
The dying brother gives Mel a bit of information that she doesn't understand, and also tells her that his enemies are connected to the mysterious refuge for criminals Rub El Harami. Mel sets out for revenge against those who murdered her brother. Unfortunately Mellani is taken prisoner by slave raiders who are traveling to Rub El Harami. Along the way, a stranger joins the slavers and manages to aid Mellani. Obviously this is Conan in disguise, but that won't come out for some time. Except for the exchange of motives, personal revenge versus counter espionage, the narratives are pretty much the same for the first half of both stories, and of course, Mel is a chick. So why the sex change? Only Roy Thomas would know for sure, but I would speculate that the primary reason was that the El Borak story was lacking a hot babe and part of the mix for any Marvel Conan story was a hot chick, presumably to lure adolescent male readers in. (Worked for me.) In fact, many Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan covers featured scantily clad women even if there wasn't one in the story (or at least in the cover scene). This non-existent babe came to be referred to as Miraj by some of the comic creators.
As I read through Country of the Knife and Abode of the Damned, switching back and forth, I noted that the first half of Thomas's adaptation sticks pretty close to the REH tale, even using most of Howard's dialogue and many descriptions and such in the captions. (Thomas was really good about this, always striving for the REH flavor, even in his non-adaptations.) Thomas adds the other Marvel Conan requisite, a supernatural menace, in the form of three strange men with sorcerous powers who also seek the city of thieves, but otherwise events progress in similar fashion in both stories up until the travelers enter the city. After this, while some scenes and incidents occur in both stories, Thomas goes in more his own direction. The Country of the Knife is a very long story and Thomas understandably dropped a few of the subplots to make things work in the comics format. He was also building to his own climax, which is very different from the end of the El Borak yarn. So this one was definitely 'freely' adapted. Still, a lot of fun.
Oh, one more thing, as Colombo would say, L. Sprague de Camp, another man who Conan-nized several non-Conan REH stories, once said that it was easy to change the characters in these tales to Conan, because all Howard's heroes were basically the same character. I'd like to disagree with that. Francis X. Gordon is very much not Conan, and that's easy to see when you read The Country of the Knife. Gordon's character is much less serious in many ways, and seems to relish his disguises, being very much a 'method' actor when pretending to be a native. Sure, once the balloon goes up, Gordon can dole out the harshness with the best of them, but he's not the killing machine that Conan is. Sorry Sprague.
Wow, this has turned into a long post and I haven't even mentioned the fantastic art job on Abode of the Damned by John Buscema and Yong Montano. I'm including the splash page from the story, just so you can see how awesome the art was.

The Other Kirby Conan

2011-11-16T11:13:00.001-05:00

Everyone is familiar with the Jack Kirby cover for Giant Size Conan #5, and the two Kirby pencil drawings of Conan that are all over the net, but there's one more Kirby Conan illustration that tends to fall though the cracks, and that's the cover of Marvel Comics' 1977 Calendar. The reason, I think, that this one slips by is that the piece is so heavily inked and redrawn by John Romita, but take a close look and you can see the Kirby poses and musculature on most of the figures. Romita may have redrawn Spiderman entirely, as this wasn't a character Jack seemed to have the feel for.

That Which Remains

2011-11-15T13:16:00.002-05:00

"He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century."

_Doctor John H. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet.

Someone at work today made a joke about disposing of her husband's body in a woodchipper. I immediately said, "That doesn't work. The case in which that was attempted was ultimately solved because the chipper didn't get some teeth with identifiable dental work, and a large quantity of hair and bone chips were also left at the scene."
As usual, when I say something like that out of the blue, I got several glassy eyed stares. I didn't bother explaining that in a previous part of my life I had read virtually nothing but mystery novels and forensic texts. That's been over a decade ago, but some of that stuff stays with you, including forensic specialist Dr. Henry Lee's painstaking work on that case.

Belated Blogiversary

2011-11-13T07:09:00.000-05:00

Once again I let the anniversary of the start of this blog slip past. Nov 1st marked five years of blogging. Hard to believe I've been at it this long. 2011 turned out to be a big year for the blog, with over 200 posts, reversing the downward trend of 2009 and 2010. Don't know if I'll break the 250 mark, as I did in 2008, but still, much blogging.
The focus of the blog has remained books, though obviously I've reviewed a lot of comic books, movies, and other media. I tend to think of the real focus as being stories, because that is my primary interest in all the entertainment fields. I am a card carrying story junkie. I can't get through a day without at least one story, be it a TV show, comic, short story, movie, or novel. I just love stories. I think it's the reason I'm a writer as well. I love to tell a story as much as I love to experience one.
Anyway, I'd like to thank all the folks who read the blog. I've made some new friends by having a blog, and those folks have introduced me to new books and writers and have challenged my opinions and made me think. That makes it worthwhile for me to sit here and pound on the keys.

Acquisitions

2011-11-10T07:02:00.002-05:00

I got a lot of stuff yesterday. Part of it was new stuff I'd ordered through the comic store and part was some used books I'd ordered from various people and part of it was new books from Amazon.
At the comic book store I got the latest volume of Titan Book's Simon and Kirby Library, this one featuring their crime comics. There should be a ton of stuff in there I've never read, and there's an introduction by Max Allan Collins, a man who knows his stuff about comics and crime fiction. Also got The Essential Sgt. Fury, which has a bunch of Jack Kirby art as well. Go Jack! And finally, the latest issue of the Doc Savage reprints from Anthony Tollin's Sanctum books. This one contains three of the shorter Doc novels, only one of which I've already read.
Used book-wise, I got two books by Harold Lamb, and we know how much I like Harold Lamb. One is Theodora and the Emperor, a historical biography of, not surprisingly, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his Empress, Theodora. The other book is Constantinople :Birth of an Empire, which is Lamb's non-fiction book about the same time period covered in the novel (plus additional history.). I figure the two ought to compliment each other. I plan on digging into Lamb's two volume history of the crusades after this.
Then I got two new books in the mail from Amazon. The first is Ruth Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford novel, The Vault. Rendell is my favorite living British mystery writer, and the Wexford books are always well plotted and well written. Apparently much of The Vault takes place in London instead of in Wexford's usual more rural stomping grounds, so I'm looking forward to that.
The second is Kevin Sorbo's memoir about how a stroke almost killed him during the third season of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. I always wondered exactly what happened, so this should prove interesting.
As you can see, my reading is as eclectic as ever.

Writing Report. Done!

2011-11-08T07:38:00.001-05:00

Typed what should be the last scene on the novel I've been working on with James A. Moore and sent that to Jim. All that remains are any additions of Jim's and that's that. Currently titled Blind Shadows, it's a crime/horror novel with touches of H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, with a hardboiled attitude I think Mickey Spillane would have approved of, but it isn't a pastiche. So anyway, the first draft is done, more or less. So I'm feeling pretty pleased this morning. Until the rewrites anyway...

Savage Memories #4

2011-11-07T07:35:00.002-05:00

I told you last time that I'd tell you how I risked eternal damnation by reading Savage Sword of Conan. This will require that I skip ahead to issue #13. I'm getting ahead of myself because my discussion of issue #11 requires a rereading of one of Robert E. Howard's original stories. No terrible hardship there, but I haven't had a chance to dig it out, so I'll backtrack there soon. Oh and I missed issue #12 at the newsstand. There were still occasional bumps on the road to collecting the magazine. (All of these missed issues would become a moot point a couple of years later when I attended my first comic book convention. Back issues anyone?)
So, issue #13. This lead story in this one was actually a reprint from the color Conan comic, though I didn't notice at the time. Roy Thomas and Gil Kane had done a two-part adaptation of Robert E. Howard's non-Conan tale The Gods of Bal-Sagoth in Conan the Barbarian issues #17&18. Thomas had Conan-nized this story, replacing the original hero Turlogh O'Brien with the Cimmerian (no great stretch) and Turlogh's sidekick Athelstane the Saxon with a Vanirman named Fafnir, who had originally been a one shot joke character meant to represent Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd in an earlier issue of Conan the Barbarian.
Gil Kane's black and white artwork had been toned with gray washes to make it look more like a standard issue of SSoC and since I'd yet to see the original color comics, this was a new story to me. Later, when I would read Robert E. Howard's prose story, I'd see how closely Thomas had stuck to the original. Thomas was a huge fan of REH and an often underrated authority on the writer's work. Read some of the text features in early issues of SSoC and Savage Tales and you can see just how much Thomas knew about Howard. As a result, his adaptations were usually very close (Save for what he called 'freely' adapted, which meant the story had to be heavily rewritten for whatever reasons, usually that the time period wasn't similar enough to the Hyborian age to work easily.) to the originals and his pastiches and Conan-nizations always struck me as far more authentic than the majority of the prose pastiches. Thomas's Conan was remarkably consistent even in the stories not based on the writings of REH.
Anyway, here's where the damnation part comes in. I mentioned in my last Savage Memories post that I had found an alternate source to Blair Food Town for the occasional issue of Savage Sword of Conan. That was Landers Drugstore in downtown Canton, a drugstore with a full fountain/lunch counter and a magazine rack that carried, among other things, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Vampirella, and the Marvel line of black & white magazines.
However, the problem with Landers was that it was too far from my house to walk to, and of course, I still wasn't old enough to drive. I could occasionally get around this though, because at the time my mother worked at a bank in downtown. The bank closed at 4:00 in the afternoon, so what I would do, was get a note from my mom telling the school bus driver that I could get off the bus in downtown. That way I could visit the drugstore or other stores in downtown and then ride home with mom. I did this a lot from ages 12 to 15.
On the occasion that I hopped off the bus and found Savage Sword of Conan issue #13 there was a problem. It rained. As I recall, I had picked up the magazine and left the drugstore and a little while later it began to rain. I suppose I had the mag in a paper bag, but I knew that wouldn't protect it. I had to duck in somewhere for cover and the closest place was The Methodist church. That was the church I attended growing up and in those simpler times it was never locked. So I ran up the stairs to the front of the church as the rain began in earnest.
I stopped in the foyer, not wanting to go into the sanctuary. The interior of the Methodist church had been made of dark wood and it was creepy in the sanctuary with no one else there. So I sat down in the floor to wait for the rain to stop. Gradually my gaze fell upon the paper bag containing my magazine. My SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN MAGAZINE THAT PROBABLY CONTAINED HALF-NAKED WOMEN AND BLOOD AND GORE and I had brought it into the church. The only worse thing I could do would be to read it right there in the foyer. I think I resisted for about 15 seconds. I figured God had forgiven me for worse things. With any luck he wouldn't send me to hell for reading Conan.

Savage Memories #3

2011-11-02T05:54:00.004-05:00

As things would turn out, I didn't get copies of The Savage Sword of Conan issues #8 and #9. Once again I can only suppose they sold out at Blair Food Town before I could get there, still being too young to drive, though for all I know, they never got copies. Newsstand distribution was very spotty back in the 1970s.
Issue # 10, however, marked something of a turning point. I don't know if they started ordering more copies at the supermarket because every issue was selling out, or what, but after issue #10 I wouldn't miss more than a couple of issues until I stopped reading the magazine along about issue #60. (Actually I think it was issue #58, which would tie in with other things I'll get to in another post.)
Anyway, the other reasons I managed to get further issues were that I found at least one other source (a drugstore in downtown Canton) and I figured out how to walk to Blair's. See, Blair Foodtown was a couple of miles from my house, and while I certainly was up for the walk, my dad wouldn't let me walk anywhere that required I walk along the highway. Not an unreasonable restriction for a parent. There was one convenience store that I could reach entirely by going through woods and back roads (Canton was still very rural at that point) that sold color comic books (Yay!) but not the black & white mags like Savage Sword (boo!). They also sold Doc Savage paperbacks which was a plus a couple of years later.
I figured that there probably was some way I could cut through back roads and what have you to reach Blair's and after a little experimentation I found it. It was a long, roundabout path that probably involved a great deal of trespassing, since I was literally ducking through people's back yards, but it would get me to the Supermarket without getting too close to the highway, so I made it work. (So yes, you young whippersnapper fans, I really did walk miles to buy my Conan comics.)
But back to issue #10. This is an interesting issue in that it contains the last part of Marvel's Adaptation of Robert E. Howard's single Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon. The penultimate chapter had apparently appeared in SSoC issue #8, and the four preceding segments in the first four issues of Marvel's short lived color comic, Giant Sized Conan. I owned those comics, but of course I was missing a section because I didn't have SSoC #8. Still, I was pleased to see the end of the story. (Keep in mind that the Conan paperbacks were still out of print at this point, so I couldn't read the actual book.)
As far as I know, no one has ever collected all six parts of this adaptation under one cover. That would be a nice graphic novel. Are you listening Dark Horse!?
The best thing though, about issue #10, was that the story took up the whole issue and the entire thing was drawn by John Buscema, who was pretty much my favorite artist at the time. It's a great art job too, with lots of action and weird adventures and scantily clad women.
As I noted earlier, after this issue I was able to get most subsequent issues without any problem, but there were other adventures ahead. Next time, I'll tell you about how I risked eternal damnation to read Savage Sword of Conan.

Welcome to Wellman

2011-10-30T18:20:00.002-05:00

Just in time for Halloween, a short story by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge, set in Wellman Georgia, a small town where it's best to stay out of the woods on Halloween night. This is a teaser for Jim's and my upcoming novel Blind Shadows, much of which takes place in the same town.

download the Pdf here:

http://jamesamoorebooks.com/Index_files/wellmanshortstory.pdf

Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

2011-10-28T14:13:00.003-05:00

I rarely review a book before I finish it, but Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories, is, rather obviously, a book of short stories, about half of which I've already read and the other half I'm looking forward to reading, and since the book came out this month, I wanted to tell everyone to go out and buy a copy, so I'm reviewing it now.
If you're not familiar with Nathan Heller, he's the hero of a long running series of historical private eye novels, the plots of which are always based on actual unsolved crimes and in which fictional characters interact with figures from history. At various times Heller has been involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, The Black Dalia Murder, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, and most recently, (in this year's Bye Bye, Baby, which I bought, but haven't read yet) the death of Marilyn Monroe. Heller's cases span many decades and over the course of the series, the character grows and changes and ages in real time. The research done by author Max Allan Collins and his assistants is exhaustive, and the Heller books, in addition to being suspenseful mysteries, are fascinating portraits of other times. They are true historical novels, not just mysteries set in the past. The shorts are just as well researched and just as well written.
Of the short stories I've already read in this collection, most appeared in Robert J. Randisi's Private Eye Writers of America anthologies. These would include The Strawberry Teardrop, House Call, Marble Mildred, and Private Consultation. Probably my favorite of the stories so far, The Perfect Crime, originally appeared in Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, a book of Marlowe stories written by authors other than Chandler, which came out in 1988. Later Collins revised it into a Heller story. In a somewhat amusing incident, I actually bought my copy of the Chandler book at a Brentano's bookstore in San Diego one year when I was attending the San Diego Comic Con, and I promptly carried it back to the convention where Max Allan Collins was a guest and got him to sign it. Only a true bibliophile would take a break from a convention full of books and go to a bookstore. The Perfect Crime is about the death of actress Thelma Todd and is just a great story.
Anyway, once Halloween has passed and I settle down to reading something other than horror and ghost stories, I'll review some of the individual tales in the Heller collection. But don't wait for me. Pick up your own copy of Chicago Lightning (lightning was 1930s slang for machine gun fire) and while you're at it, get a copy of the first Heller novel, True Detective too. I think you'll like it.

Wolves

2011-10-28T06:34:00.003-05:00

A couple of posts ago I talked about the upcoming Dark Horse comics adaptation of Robert E. Howard's story Queen of the Black Coast and the fan based controversy surrounding the choice of Becky Cloonan as artist for the series. Cloonan had recommended that anyone interested in seeing how she would approach Conan check out her mini-comic Wolves. I dutifully ordered a copy and it arrived yesterday. I was very impressed. Wolves is a dark, moody, and very well drawn comic with a nice sword & sorcery vibe. Cloonan illustrates guys with swords, a werewolf, guys in plate armor and helmets, and woods as dark as those in Conan's homeland of Cimmeria, and she does a great job. I liked the fact that the ending is open to interpretation too. An impressive little comic that puts me in mind of Karl Edward Wagner's werewolf story, Reflections for the Winter of My Soul. Anyway, anyone concerned about Cloonan's chops for drawing Conan should definitely give Wolves a look. I liked what I saw.

If you'd like your own copy of Wolves go here.

http://beckycloonan.bigcartel.com/

Savage Memories #2

2011-10-26T14:56:00.003-05:00

If you read my first installment of Savage Memories, you learned of my discovery of Marvel's black & white magazine, Savage Tales and how I saw, in that issue, an advertisement for the upcoming Savage Sword of Conan magazine. I ended that post without saying whether or not I managed to get that first coveted issue of Savage Sword when it reached the stands. The answer is...no. Never even saw it. If any copies showed up at Blair's Food Town, the supermarket where I got most of my comics in the 1970s, I never saw them. Later I learned that they tended to only get two copies each of the various Marvel black & white mags. If I saw them and didn't have enough money on me to buy them, (My mom would spring for a 25 cents color comic but not a magazine that went for a buck.) I did what countless comic book fans have done for years. I hid them behind the stacks of Good Housekeeping and Sports Illustrated until I could get back with the cash. The trick was to go grocery shopping with my grandmother. She would buy all the comics I wanted without batting an eye, and better yet, she never even glanced at them, so the somewhat gory/sexy SSoC covers slipped right by.
Anyway, several months passed and I didn't see any issues of Savage Sword. Then, one Saturday morning when I accompanied the aforementioned grandmother to Blair's, I spotted a very Frazetta-ish cover painting featuring Conan facing off against what appeared to be a group of cave-men. Yes! An honest to gosh issue of Savage Sword of Conan. It was issue #7. So six issues had gotten past me. But not this one.
The Citadel at the Center of Time turned out to be one of my favorite issues of the early Savage Sword of Conan. In this story, written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by John Buscema and Alfredo Alcala, Conan runs afoul of a sorcerer who has found a way to pull artifacts out of different points in the time stream. The catch is, he has to put something in to get something out and the time pool he's discovered seems to prefer living beings to trade. Conan almost ends up in this pool (more of a well, really) but he manages to escape by fighting his way past cave-men, ape-men, and a tyrannosaurus.
This issue also featured part four of "An Informal History of Sword & Sorcery" by Lin Carter, and the first part of Thomas's adaptation of Robert E. Howard's essay, The Hyborian Age, with art by Walter Simonson. An all around great issue.
So now I knew more or less when SSoC shipped, you would figure I'd be able to get the magazine regularly, right? As it turned out, no. One of the problems of not being old enough to drive, mostly, but more about that later.

Conan, the Controversial

2011-10-24T12:14:00.004-05:00

The announcement that the creative team for Dark Horse Comics adaptation/expansion of Robert E. Howard's classic Conan story Queen of the Black Coast would be writer Brian Wood and artist Becky Cloonan has set the interwebs abuzz with comments, not surprisingly many of them uninformed and premature. Just from the few sketches and one color illo provided, I've heard Cloonan's version of Conan called everything from Emo Conan to Twilight Conan. Other comments attached to the art include pencil necked, too skinny, too manga, and too much eye makeup. Here's the deal folks. These are preliminary sketches. Let's wait and see what the comic book looks like.
I have a few reservations myself but I had some about Conan:Road of Kings artist Mike Hawthorne in the beginning and I ended up liking his version of Conan enough to buy a commission for Crom's sake. What did I learn from that? My knee jerk reaction isn't always an accurate one. (No, no. It's true.) I was familiar with Wood (more on that later) from his Viking series Northlanders. Cloonan I knew not at all. So I googled around and came up with enough of her artwork to see that she's very talented. I also have ordered her self published comic Wolves from her website, which she says is in the Conan genre. I'll review it when I get it.
The main positive thing I've noted from the sketches and art is there's a tremendous amount of energy and character to her drawing. I think Belit looks great, and since at least half the story is hers, that's a good thing. I would like to see some drawings of Conan and Belit together to get some scale however.
I've made no secret that John Buscema is THE Conan artist for me. He always will be. But that doesn't mean that I can't wrestle down the rabid fanboy who lives in the back of my brain who is screaming that anything that doesn't follow Buscema's lead is wrong. It's kind of like when another singer does a cover of a favorite song. If they stick too close to the original people call them unoriginal and if they stray too far, people say they've ruined the song.
So anyway, trying to keep an open mind here, just like I did with the Conan movie. Yeah it was awful, but I didn't decide that until I was sitting in the theater. So I plan to give Becky Cloonan's Conan a chance as well.
As far as Wood goes, my biggest concern is that he is admittedly not a long time fan and reader of Robert E. Howard. But I know he can write hard hitting comics and that's a start. I almost wish he were doing an original tale rather than an adaptation. Maybe later. Truthfully, at the moment, the writing concerns me more than the art, but again, let's give the guy a shot.

Weekend Report

2011-10-24T06:00:00.003-05:00

The weekend was fairly low key. I did a lot of writing. Jim and I have passed the 75 thousand word mark on the novel and are starting to turn things toward the end. We're estimating about 100k for the first draft. I got to play with some non-Euclidian geometry, which was fun.
Obviously I watched Hocus Pocus, which I reviewed below. Also watched several more episodes of season one of Supernatural. The series gains more weight as the episodes go, delving further into the lives and minds of brothers Sam and Dean Winchester. I found an episode set in an abandoned mental institution one of the strongest yet, and one with a faith healer had a nice twist. For every life the healer saved, somebody else had to die.
Read some good comic books. In addition to Conan: Road of Kings issue #9, I also read Marvel's Avengers 1959, written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin. I had thought the first issue so-so, but issue #2 really picks up the pace as Chaykin sends Nick Fury and his 1950s era allies into battle against a resurrected Nazi movement, which include some villains from Roy Thomas's World War Two era series, The Invaders. Possibly the most fun bit is Chaykin's linking of a very recognizable British secret agent to Fury's team. Who is he? That would be telling. Let's just say this nattily dressed fellow in a bowler hat was once an Avenger himself.
Also read the first issue of the DC/IDW crossover between The Legion of Super Heroes and Star Trek. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but it was actually a lot of fun. Writer Chris Roberson seems to be the perfect choice for this title as he is a huge fan of both Trek and the Legion. I'm including a link to an interview with Roberson at the bottom of this post. Thing is, Roberson has an ear for dialogue that sounds like the Classic Trek crew, and his Legionnaires ring true as well. There's plenty of crossover stuff from both series' universes and all kinds of in-jokes and references. Looking forward to the next issue. Oh, there were several variant covers for the first issue. I'm posting the one by Keith Giffin because this is probably as close as we're ever going to get to a drawing of Mr. Spock by Jack Kirby.
And I started The Dark at the End, the final (kind of) book in F. Paul Wilson's long running Repairman Jack series. I say 'kind of' because Wilson reveals in this book that though this volume does end Jack's adventures, he is going to write three novels that take place early in Jack's career, presumably showing what happened between Wilson's Young Adult Jack series and the first official Repairman Jack adventure, The Tomb. (Which famously doesn't have a tomb in it.)
Anyway, The Dark at the End leads into the sixth and final book in Wilson's 'Adversary' cycle, Night World. I've read Nightworld, but a somewhat revised edition is supposed to come out next year, so I'll give that a read when it hits the shelves.
So there ya go. That was pretty much the weekend. There was some Lord of the Rings Online playing in there too, and a few other things, but mostly some good reading and viewing.

Here's the link to the Roberson interview:

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/08/01/star-trek-legion-super-heroes-comic/

Hocus Pocus

2011-10-23T09:02:00.001-05:00

Jim and I were talking about Halloween movies and he brought up Hocus Pocus, a 1993 Disney film that I've always had a soft spot for. This is a great movie for the Halloween season because it takes place at Halloween and is full of Trick or Treaters, autumn leaves, the full moon, Halloween parties, and other such All Hallow's Eve imagery. It also has the advantage of sumptuous Disney production values. Beautiful sets, great costumes and top of the line (for 1993) special effects. I re-watched it last night.
The movie is about three Witches who were hung on Halloween in Salem 300 years earlier. Winifred Sanderson, the leader of the trio of sister witches (played by Bette Midler) manages to cast a last minute spell so that she and her sisters Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Mary (Kathy Najimy) can return from the dead.
Enter Max Dennison (Omri Katz) a California kid who's family has just moved to Salem. While out trick or treating with his younger sister Dani (a very young Thora Birch) Max unwittingly releases the three witches while trying to impress local girl Allison (Vinessa Shaw).
Now here's where the movie veers off into slightly creepy territory. The witches' spell only allows them to return to life for one night. In order to stay alive, they need the souls of children. A lot of children. In fact in the first five minutes of the film, the three sisters kill a little girl by quite literally sucking out her life force. To do this they use a spell from a book that is bound in human skin. They also curse a young man to live eternally as a black cat and poison another man, sew his mouth shut, and turn him into a zombie. And given comments the witches make as the movie progresses the sisters are apparently cannibals and enjoy eating children.
This may explain why the movie never found it's target audience in initial release. While ostensibly a comedy/adventure/musical/fantasy film, the children in jeopardy plot might have been a little strong for kids under eight. While the movie wasn't the flop a lot of articles claim (it grossed 45 million) it was far from a hit during its initial release. It has since become very popular on video and DVD.
Anyway, the witches are fun. Najimy is zany, Parker is sexy, and Midler chews the scenery like nobody's business. There are a lot of funny moments and the young members of the cast are good. I recommend this as a fun, slightly scary, family film, with a great Halloween vibe, but be aware there are some moments that might be a bit much for smaller children.

Conan Road of Kings #9

2011-10-21T18:25:00.003-05:00

The good news is someone ran off the creepy giant bugs who were attacking Conan and his small charge, Albiona at the end of Conan: Road of Kings issue #8. The bad news is the bugs were sent packing by ZOMBIES, so the first several pages of Road of Kings issue #9 were a torch lit battle with the undead horrors. But the good news is the fight with the zombies was ably illustrated by artist Dan Panosian, who is spelling regular series artist Mike Hawthorne for two issues.
Panosian's approach is a bit more rough hewn that the team of Hawthorne and inker John Lucas,(And by that I mean that Panosian's work has a more textured feel to it. Different inking style.) but it fits in nicely with the overall look of the mini-series. I enjoyed his art quite a bit.
Once again veteran Conan writer Roy Thomas puts more story and plot into one issue of a comic than many of today's comic book writers use in a six issue arc. Let me give a couple of examples. During the battle with the zombies Conan banters with a Gunderman Priest named J'honn. This may seem just an entertaining way to counterpoint the grim and deadly goings on, but it also makes you like and care about J'honn. In books we call this characterization. In comics we call this rare.
Also, the little girl Albiona, whom Conan is protecting, actually saves the big Cimmerian at one point, when he has fallen under a mass of the zombie attackers, by setting one of the creatures on fire. This will matter near the end when Conan has a chance to basically get out of Dodge, but he won't leave the child to her fate. Even way back to his Marvel days writing Conan, Roy Thomas understood the sort of rough honor the character displayed in the original REH stories. Conan might have been a thief and a killer, but he wouldn't desert a comrade, even if that comrade is just a child.
And there is yet another character driven surprise waiting at the end of the story. Amid all the action, monsters, and magic, Thomas is still telling a story about people. That's writing, folks.

The 2011 Fright Flick Festival

2011-10-19T11:04:00.002-05:00

As I noted in an earlier post, I haven't had as much time to do Halloween stuff this October as last year, but I am still working in some Halloween Movies. In addition to the two Lovecraft related films reviewed below, I have watched:

The Haunting. (1963) Pretty much an annual Halloween tradition for me. based on Shirley Jackson's novel, The Haunting of Hill House, this is the haunted house film to end all haunted house films and it remains my favorite scary movie.

King Kong. (1933) One of the classics. I don't know how many times I've seen it, but I never get tired of it. The special effects were groundbreaking for the day and many of them were used right up to the arrival of Computer Generated Imagery.

Next in Line:

Bubba Ho-Tep. (2002) Terrific adaptation of Joe Lansdale's creepy, funny, outrageous novella about an aging Elvis Presley fighting a Mummy in a retirement home in rural Texas. Bruce Campbell is great as The King, who as it turns out, didn't actually pass away in 1977.

Trick or Treat (2007) Haven't seen this anthology film yet but a couple of friends recommended it to me, and my pal Jim loaned me a copy.

I'm also still watching episodes of the first season of Supernatural and enjoying them quite a bit. Got a couple of other ideas for the season as well. I'll keep you posted.

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

2011-10-16T08:20:00.002-05:00

If you are a fan of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, then you need to see the documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown and if you know absolutely nothing about Lovecraft, then you need to see Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown.
For the knowledgeable, this is a fascinating look at Lovecraft, both his life and his work, and it features interviews with folks who have been influenced by Lovecraft, including authors Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, and Caitlin R. Kiernan and with filmmakers John Carpenter and Guillermo del Toro.
For the uninitiated, this is an excellent place to start as the documentary functions both as biography and as a critical look at Lovecraft's best known stories, including Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Rats in the Walls, and The Dunwich Horror.
What I enjoyed the most was that the information about the stories was given in historical context, as in here is where Lovecraft was and what was going on in his life when he wrote such and such a story. As a fan and a writer, I found this very interesting. All of this is covered in other places but the documentary gives it to you in a nice, concise way. As I said, great for someone looking to learn about Lovecraft. At right at 90 minutes there's a ton of information, so the documentary is good for repeated viewings. I know I'll be watching it again.

The Dunwich Horror 1970

2011-10-15T17:35:00.002-05:00

I had always heard that the 1970 movie version of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror was really bad, however I just watched it and found it entertaining. Oh sure it doesn't stick that closely to the original short story, which doesn't make me happy, but most of the main plot points are there, though filtered through a 1970s post-Rosemary's Baby sensibility.
I don't think Dean Stockwell is anybody's idea of Wilbur Whately, the spawn of a human mother and Lovecraft's great old one, Yog-Sothoth. he plays the character as a sort of mild satyr, never seeming truly evil.
As I noted, this is a very 1970s film and there's a lot talk about sex and psychology, but the sex scenes in the film consist mostly of Stockwell fondling Sandra Dee and of Sandra moaning a lot for no apparent reason. And there are a lot of people in robes and the occasional pentagram to make things seem vaguely satanic, though at one point Whately does point out that he doesn't believe in God or Satan, but rather in beings from another dimension.
The best parts for a Lovecraft fan are the constant mentions of great old ones, the Necronomicon, and other Lovecraft tropes. The movie even ends on more or less the same line as Lovecraft's story. All and all, far from the worst Lovecraft adaptation I've ever seen.

Conan The Gothic

2011-10-09T20:49:00.002-05:00

I have seen the theory put forward that Robert E. Howard read at least a couple of the Gothic novels of the 1700s-1800s, but I haven't seen any hard evidence of this. He doesn't mention them in his letters, except in passing, and none were found among the books in his library after his death. The main reason I think it highly unlikely is that books such as the Castle of Otranto and the Mysteries of Udolpho were rather difficult to come by in the 1930s, and especially out in the middle of Texas. Not impossible, mind you. Howard Often sent away for books, and someone like H.P. Lovecraft could have loaned him something, but even had he gotten his hands on them, he might have found the Gothic classics deathly dull. (I found Otranto a real slog. )The only mention (that I can recall) Howard makes of one of the 'standard four' as Karl Edward Wagner termed The Monk, Melmoth The Wanderer, and the two books mentioned above, is noting a copy of Otranto in the library of the character Conrad in the horror story The Children of the Night. There's little doubt REH was familiar with the Gothics since he had read H.P. Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, but as I said, no hard evidence exists that he ever read any of the novels.
Which brings me to the Conan tale, The Black Stranger, a story with an oddly Gothic structure. I'll be using a list of Gothic tropes included with Lilia Melani's 'The Gothic Experience" a course related website from Brooklyn College, to show what I mean. I used the same list when I looked at Karl Edward Wagner's The Gothic Touch a few years back.

* a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not,
* ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy,
* dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern houses, become spooky basements or attics,
* labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding stairs,
* shadows, a beam of moonlight in the blackness, a flickering candle, or the only source of light failing (a candle blown out or an electric failure),
* extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and extreme weather,
* omens and ancestral curses,
* magic, supernatural manifestations, or the suggestion of the supernatural,
* a passion-driven, willful villain-hero or villain,
* a curious heroine with a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued–frequently,
* a hero whose true identity is revealed by the end of the novel,
* horrifying (or terrifying) events or the threat of such happenings.

In the third part of his essay, Hyborian Genesis, Patrice Louinet points out that little is known about the composition of The Black Stranger, though it was apparently meant as a follow up to Beyond the Black River, and was another tale of frontier dwellers versus savages. He goes on to mention certain similarities of names and themes to Hawthorne's Scarlett Letter, though he feels this was probably unintentional. Howard probably read Hawthorne in school.
However on one of my re-reads of The Black Stranger, which is one of my favorite Conan yarns, I began to notice some things that reminded me of Radcliffe's Udolpho and of some lesser known Gothics such as Catherine Smith's Barozzi; Or the Venetian Sorceress.
Anyway back to the list.

* a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not.

Yes, the events take place in a large fortress and it's surroundings. Not a ruin, but a rambling structure, described in the story as a manor with a great hall, stairs, corridors, etc. (Though how the heck the owners built the thing after apparently being shipwrecked I don't know.)

* ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy.

No.

* dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern houses, become spooky basements or attics.

No.

* labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding stairs.

Yes. Conan finds himself in a huge cave with some sinister properties and the hallways of the manor are dark in a scene I'm going to describe in the next part of the list.

* shadows, a beam of moonlight in the blackness, a flickering candle, or the only source of light failing (a candle blown out or an electric failure),

Yes, there's a scene where the Lady Belesa and her ward, Tina, hear someone or something moving about in the hall and when they go to check on it they find all the usually lit candles out and the only light coming from the floor below.

* extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and extreme weather.

Yep, plenty of that. The fortress stands on the edge of a wilderness on a rocky coast and there are a couple of violent storms during the story, one possibly of supernatural origin.

* omens and ancestral curses.

Oh yeah. Count Valenso says of the titular Black Stranger. "Accursed indeed. A shadow of mine own red-stained past risen up to hound me to hell."

* magic, supernatural manifestations, or the suggestion of the supernatural.

Yep, the Black Stranger is a demon of some sort. He's got horns and everything. Also the child Tina seems to have some 'second sight' abilities.

* a passion-driven, willful villain-hero or villain.

That would be the aforementioned Count Valenso, who uprooted his entire household to escape the curse that haunts him. He seems an okay guy at first but by the end of the story he's whipping children and he's willing to marry his poor niece off to a bloodthirsty pirate to save his own skin. Udolpho's Count Montoni would love him.

* a curious heroine with a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued–frequently,

The very curious Lady Belesa faints in horror at the end of chapter three and almost again when she sees the Black Stranger, and of course Conan rescues her a couple of times.

* a hero whose true identity is revealed by the end of the novel.

Oddly enough, Conan himself, who isn't named until way into the story.

* horrifying (or terrifying) events or the threat of such happenings.

Yes. Lots. Blood and gore and supernatural menace abound.

I think what caught my attention Gothic-wise initially was the character of Belesa. Like many Gothic heroines before and since, she's at the mercy of the hero-villain, her uncle the Count. She's also the primary viewpoint character for the first part of the story, following a brief vignette with an unnamed Conan. And in many ways, it's her story. Conan's bloody battles with Picts and pirates are almost a separate thread. Tina's fey qualities add a little more of the Gothic touch, as does the classic Gothic device of the sins of the past catching up with the hero-villain. REH was once again experimenting and refusing to stick to the formula that the uninformed often claim he worked by.
Now does all this change my mind about REH reading the Gothics? Nah. He read enough horror by Lovecraft, Machen, and such that he probably picked up things second hand from the influences of those writers. Still, there's a lot of Gothic to The Black Stranger.

Returning Again For the First Time!

2011-10-08T19:23:00.004-05:00

Be sure and click on the pic that accompanies this post because the art by Tomas Giorello is absolutely beautiful. It is currently my desktop theme. They can print the book in black and white from the pencils as far as I'm concerned. This is from a preview for the new Dark Horse Comics adaptation of the Phoenix on the Sword, the very first of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, scripted by Timothy Truman with art by the aforementioned Mr. Giorello, the creative team behind the excellent adaptation of The Scarlet Citadel. Should be a lot of fun. I was a little put off by this blurb though:

"Dark Horse continues to roll on with Conan's adventures in January with the
return of King Conan. This time around, Thoth-Amon returns to plague Conan once
more."

Since this is the very first Conan story and the first appearance of the wizard Thoth-Amon (who isn't actually after Conan in REH's story) how exactly is old Thoth 'returning' to plague Conan 'again'?

Tales of the Hook

2011-10-08T19:10:00.003-05:00

We all heard them when were younger. The story of the man with a hook for a hand who killed kids on lovers lane or murdered a girl in her bedroom while her friend was sleeping, leaving a bloody message on the wall saying 'Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights.'
Hook Man, the 7th episode of season one of the TV series Supernatural, dramatizes these legends and manages to hit all the right notes. Cliff and Jim had been recommending this series to me for a while, so when I spotted a used box set of season one for a song at Movie Stop I decided to pick it up. Now that Halloween is approaching, I decided it was time to start watching the show. It took me a few episodes to get into the adventures of brothers Sam and Dean, the sons of a man who hunts supernatural menaces after his wife is killed by an evil entity. When the series begins, dad has gone missing and it falls to the boys to go looking for him, using his commonplace book as a clue. Along the way they take part in the family business, destroying ghosts, monsters, and all manner of evil creatures in towns all over America. Think of it as Route 66 with monsters.
The Hook Man episode was the one that finally made me decide I like the show a lot. It was very tightly written with some nice character bits for Sam and a good twist at the end. It also reminded me of stories that some of my teachers used to tell when I was in school. Probably get sued if they told such stories today. Anyway I'll be watching more episodes as the Halloween season continues.

The Coming (and Going) of Elric!

2011-10-07T17:20:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite stories from the semi-legendary Roy Thomas/Barry Smith run on Marvel Comics' Conan the Barbarian was the two part Conan/Elric team-up which appeared in issues #14-#15. Oddly enough though, while I owned several reprints of the story and a copy of issue #15, I had never picked up issue #14. Thanks to Ebay I have now corrected that little oversight. I received issue #14 today and now I may tell you a great secret. A while back I had written a big review of these two issues for Singular Points. So big, in fact that it was going to have to be several parts as I had researched the connections between the story and the books that Elric creator Michael Moorcock was writing at the time and had found some interesting contradictions between 'book' Elric and 'comicbook' Elric. And I had done some detective work on the origins of the wizard Kulan-Gath, one of the baddies in the comic, who went on to fight Spiderman, the X-men, and oddly enough, Red Sonja, including never before revealed info from Moorcock himself. And...I lost it. Once again I had failed to make proper backup files and when my PC died near the first of 2011, it took the article with it. I was so annoyed that I wasn't in any mood to rewrite the article. Now however, I think I may be ready to break out my notes and have at it again. So that was why I decided it was high time I owned my own copy of issue #14. This time I will write my review from the actual comics.

Halloween Stuff

2011-10-07T17:19:00.001-05:00

If you were reading this blog last October, you may recall that I spent practically the entire month celebrating Halloween. I had planned to do the same this year, but then I started work on this novel with Jim, so instead of reading a bunch of scary stories I am now writing a scary book, but I can't really blog much about that. However I am managing to work in some scary reading and some scary movies, and I'll blog about that soon. Just not likely to hit the level of Halloween posts I did last year.

Strange Worlds

2011-10-03T16:23:00.002-05:00

Jeff Doten just emailed me to let me know that Strange Worlds, the sword and planet anthology that contains my short story Slavers of Trakor is available. Each short story comes with a full color 'cover' and three black and white illustrations by Jeff. The book has a full color comic book story as well. Check it out here:

http://strangeworldsanthology.wordpress.com/

The Wedding of River Song

2011-10-02T18:55:00.003-05:00

Okay, I have to admit they got me. I figured out who River Song was and I didn't take the obvious red herring of the 'ganger' Doctor being the way out of the Doctor's apparent death. But I didn't figure out how the Doctor was actually going to cheat Death until about halfway through the final episode, so yeah, I caught it before they did it, but not in advance. All and all, a very satisfactory way to end the season. Most of the loose ends tied up nicely. I see from the advance information for this year's Doctor Who Christmas episode that the actors who portray Amy and Rory aren't mentioned, so presumably next season will bring a new companion or companions. I've enjoyed Amy and Rory and River, but I could do without all three for a season.

Ironclad

2011-10-02T16:20:00.001-05:00

I'd been wanting to see the movie Ironclad since seeing some footage from it while the film was still in production. Finally got around to watching it yesterday and it didn't disappoint. This is a brutal, bloody, historical film chocked full of action. Based loosely on the real life 1215 siege of Rochester Castle, Ironclad features James Purefoy (Rome, Solomon Kane) as a disgraced Knight Templar, who thought his fighting days were over, but who suddenly finds himself stuck in a hopeless battle against impossible odds.
In a lot of ways, the movie reminded me of a David Gemmell novel. Purefoy's character, Thomas Marshal, arrives at the castle with a ragtag group of mercenaries. There's the big strong guy, the slightly crazy guy, the rogue, and the archer of amazing skill. These are characters right out of Legend of Quest for Lost Heroes or Winter Warriors.
King John (Richard's brother) has just reneged on the Magna Carta and he shows up at Rochester Castle with a thousand mercenaries and Marshal and his crew must hold the castle until the rebels can bring more troops. Luckily for Marshal, the castle is extremely well designed and can be held by a small force. (In real life it was hunger that beat the besieged, not force.)
If you like siege films, you'll probably enjoy this one. There are catapults and sappers and archers and boiling oil. All the stuff one expects in this sort of story. Purefoy is good as the tormented hero and Paul Giamatti chews the scenery as King John. Derek Jacobi is on board to lend the film a little class. Other cast members include Jamie Foreman, who played the misguided father in the Doctor Who episode The Idiot's Lantern, and Jason Flemyng, who's currently a regular on Primeval. Oh, and Vladimir Kulich playing a Viking looking very much like the Viking he played in The 13th Warrior. Guy must have Viking on his resume.
The film is shot in an almost documentary style, lending a realism to it that a lot of historical films lack. It is very gory, so definitely not one for the kids. I wouldn't call Ironclad a great film but I enjoyed it quite a bit. I understand that it had a fairly limited budget, so it's pretty impressive, especially in the face of something like, oh I don't know...CONAN. In fact, as I watched this film I couldn't help but think that director Jonathan English could have done a decent Conan film with the same budget as Ironclad and a good script. Oh well.

Novel Ideas

2011-09-29T07:53:00.001-05:00

Sorry I've been less than bloggy the last couple of days. Been busy. I'm back in novel writing mode, but this time I'm not alone. My pal Jim, aka James A. Moore, asked me if I'd like to collaborate on a novel that would mix crime fiction with Lovecraft/Machen style horror. Well duh. Sure I would. We've been sending chapters back and forth at a dizzying pace, so that's kept me occupied. Things have calmed down some now, so I should be back to blogging soon. I'll keep you informed on how the writing goes

Fatal Error

2011-09-25T20:42:00.002-05:00

Just finished up F. Paul Wilson's penultimate Repairman Jack novel, Fatal Error. In a word? Wow. I mentioned in a couple of previous reviews that the last few RJ books had all become one big story (Wilson says much the same in a short author's note at the front of the book) and so there isn't as much sense of each book being complete in itself, but Wilson does a fine job in this one of giving a solid problem for Jack to handle that's only marginally tied to the larger story. And Jack needs that because he's grown really really tired of playing a waiting game when he would rather take the fight to the enemy. This one is action all the way, even as the final bits of the Secret History of the World fall into place.
Thing is, while I mostly agreed with Jack about taking the pro-active approach to the evil entity known as Rasalom, I had to give credence to the ancient warrior Glaeken's advice of caution as well. I think to some degree Jack is still underestimating just how dangerous Rasalom is. Then again, Glaeken is probably underestimating just how dangerous Jack is, something that I was reminded of in the last few chapters of Fatal Error, when Jack fights his way across a paralyzed city to get to the people he loves and protect them.
Anyway, this one sets things up for the last Repairman Jack book, The Dark at the End. That one hits the shelves October 11 and I'll read it as soon as I can get my grubby hands on it.

Slaine the Wanderer

2011-09-25T08:59:00.003-05:00

Someone asked me the other day if I, fan of sword & sorcery and barbarians that I am, was familiar with Slaine, the long running Celtic Barbarian comic from the UK. I told them what I'm about to tell you, that I had read some Slaine stories back in his early days in the British weekly comic 2000 A.D. but that I had lost touch with the character over the years.
Intrigued, I did a quick internet search and found that there were quite a few collections of the Slaine stories available, and looking at some of them I could tell that the character had undergone some interesting changes since I'd last encountered him. I asked my local comic shop owner, Cliff "Two Houses" Biggers, to order a couple of the Slaine books from his distributor. The first to arrive was the most recently published, Slaine the Wanderer. I gave it a read and have to say I enjoyed it tremendously. Dark humor, quirky characters, amazing artwork, and over the top violence. What's not to like.
If you're not familiar with Slaine, he's a sword & sorcery hero, obviously influenced by Conan, but based in Celtic myth. Created by writer Pat Mills, Slaine adventures in the Tir na nOg (the land of the young) fighting demons, wizards, monsters, mercenaries, and the other usual S&S bad guys. When I was reading Slaine back in the 1980s, the character was drawn in a fairly standard comic book style. I was vaguely aware that fan favorite Simon Bisley had taken the character to new artistic heights later on, but I wasn't reading a lot of fantasy, comic book or otherwise, in those days. I'll be checking them out in reprint form though, I can tell you. I'm hooked.
The current art on Slaine is by an artist named Clint Langley, who combines painting, photography, and digital art into a visually stunning style. There are the occasional panels that look a bit too much like retouched photographs, but for the most part Langley's style merges everything into an impressive whole. I like it a lot.
Slaine the Wanderer contains four blood-drenched stories, my favorite of which is Slaine The Exorcist, which is a darkly funny Gothic extravaganza full of demons, pitchfork waving townsfolk, premature burials, and plenty of ax-wielding action.
Anyway, two-thumbs up for Slaine the Wanderer. I'll be back for more.

Conan: Road of Kings #8

2011-09-23T19:40:00.003-05:00

Another Strong issue of Conan: Road of Kings from writer Roy Thomas and artist Mike Hawthorne. I alluded to Lone Wolf and Cub in my review of RoK issue 7 and this issue follows through on that comparison as Conan must guard the small girl child Albiona as he works his way through a series of catacombs. There are some nice bits of Conan acting as stand-in father for the child. (Tell Conan you're hungry and he'll go find some food by taking it away from thieves.) And Hawthorne, who draws a web comic about his own adventures as a father called Raising Crazy, is very well suited to illustrating the more humorous parts of the story.
However, when things turn serious, Hawthorne shifts into action mode to draw Conan fighting palace guards and defending his small charge from slimy giant centipedes, spiders, and such. And the last page is a really sharp illustration of...well, see for yourself. Just follow the link at the bottom of this post for samples of Mike Hawthorne's Conan pencil work. While you're there, check out his drawings of Batman, Big Barda, Power Girl and other DC heroes. I've no idea why DC comics hasn't snatched this artist up, because in my opinion his work is considerably stronger than some of the artists DC is using on their new 52 relaunch.
Anyway, issues 9 and 10 will be illustrated by Dan Panosian, whose work I like, and then Hawthorne will be back for issues 11 and 12 to finish up the series. Great stuff.

http://mikehawthorne.blogspot.com/2011/09/conan-road-of-kings-8-preview.html

A House Divided

2011-09-22T06:14:00.001-05:00

I'd like to congratulate my pal Cliff, who bought a new house yesterday. He's not moving. He just bought the house across the street from his current abode. He plans on using the second house as a studio for his musical interests, as an office, and as a guest house. (Oh and this way he can always park his car in the shade by switching driveways at different times of the day.) Basically he's just expanding his home into two buildings. Trust me, he has enough stuff that he can fill two houses if he wants.
Cliff had a second home in Rome Georgia several years back so it's not the first time he's owned two houses. The new one's just a bit closer. Now if he could just build a walkway from roof to roof...

Durandal

2011-09-19T06:16:00.004-05:00

I've raved about the work of Harold Lamb before, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that I loved Lamb's short novel, Durandal. This may be my favorite Lamb so far, as it contains knights and derring-do, as my pal Laura would say, and one of lamb's most interesting heroes, the strange Celt, Donn Dera, a character who might have had some influence on a young writer named Robert E. Howard, who enjoyed dropping Irish heroes into whatever exotic settings he could.
Set during The Crusades, Durandal gets off to a fast start as an agent of the Christian Emperor Theodore Lascaris convinces a knight named Sir Hugh of Taranto to wear the armor of the emperor, thus drawing the enemy away from Theodore. Hugh agrees and he is soon leading his 800 fellow Franks into battle against the Seljuk Turks. But what Hugh doesn't know, is that Theodore plans to betray him, holding his own forces out of the battle until the Franks have been slaughtered almost to the last man. Then Theodore sweeps in with his fresh troops to mop up the Turks.
But fate takes a turn and just when it seems that Sir Hugh will join his comrades in death, he is rescued by a warrior who fights so savagely that the Turks call him a demon. This is Donn Dera, the man of weapons, who hails from the Emerald Isle, a warrior so strong that he shatters every weapon he wields. In fact Donn Dera is seeking a weapon that even he can't destroy, the legendary sword of Roland, Durandal.
Donn Dera and Sir Hugh are taken prisoner by Arabs, but the wily Irishman soon enlists his captors in a mad plan to storm a fortress and steal away a great treasure, and of course to secure Durandal. But things don't go quite the way Donn Dera plans.
This is a book about heroes and villains, loyalty and treachery, friendship and honor. The battle scenes are amazing and the action rarely lets up. You won't find deep characterization here. The characters are sketched rather than painted, but they are fine sketches from the hands of a master. And like all of Lamb's work, the heroes or villains can be any race and any station. It's not good crusaders versus bad Arabs and Turks. No quick and easy labels for Lamb, which is even more impressive if you think about the era in which he wrote.
Durandal was the first of three interrelated stories which appeared in the 1920s in Adventure Magazine. The three stories were combined with some other lamb material and printed as a novel in 1931 called Durandal:A Crusader with the Horde. However, the version that I have is the 1981 Donald M. Grant illustrated edition which is only the first of the three stories. Coming in at 156 fast paced pages, it's a quick and energetic read. I have the second part, The Sea of Ravens, but Donald Grant died before the third part, Rusudan, was published. I suppose I'll have to track down a copy of the 1931 book at some point to see how everything turned out, but fortunately Durandal can be read as a stand alone adventure. Lamb was a savvy pulp writer and he knew that some of his readers might not be able to get all three stories.
It would be fun to speculate on the influences of incidents in this story on some of Robert E. Howard's work, but that will have to wait until a day when I have more time to compare texts. For now I'll just reiterate what I said in another post about Lamb. If you've read all of REH's stuff and you're seeking more stories with the ring of steel on steel, the fire of battle in the blood, and heroes willing to stake everything on the strength of their sword arms, you need to be reading Harold Lamb.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

2011-09-19T05:11:00.002-05:00

That's right you lubbers. It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So buckle your swashes, batten down your hatches, and swab your decks. Yarrrr!!
The REH fans among you can read Black Vulmea's Vengeance or The Island of Pirate Blood or if you just have to have Conan, go with Queen of the Black Coast or The Black Stranger. And don't forget, Yaaarrr!

Savage Memories

2011-09-18T08:22:00.001-05:00

Savage Tales #5 was the first issue of the Marvel Black & White Magazine that I ever saw. I was 12 years old and digging through the comics and magazines at Blair's Food Town, the only supermarket in those days in the small town of Canton Georgia, and the source of most of the early part of my comic book collection. Distribution was spotty back then and I don't know if Blair's hadn't carried the previous four issues or if I'd just never seen them. In any event, I bought that issue as soon as I beheld it. I'd been reading the Marvel color comic Conan the Barbarian for several months and I was desperate for ANYTHING else with Conan in it. Little did I suspect what a treasure trove I'd found.
To begin with, the magazine had a beautiful, vibrant cover by Neal Adams. Adams had drawn the first issue of Batman that I'd ever bought (The Joker's Five Way Revenge!) and I'd sought out his work in other DC Comics. His cover for Savage Tales #5 featured not only Conan but Marvel's resident jungle hero, Kazar. Of course, like many comic covers back in the day, the cover was a little misleading. The two characters don't actually appear together in the magazine.
The Conan story in that issue was written by Roy Thomas, whom I was familiar with from the color comics, and drawn by Jim Starlin. I don't recall if that was my first exposure to Starlin, but it's possible. However I saw right away that the magazine was much more violent than the Conan the Barbarian spinner rack comic. There was more blood and gore. There was more partial nudity too. See in those days the Comics Code of America still oversaw the color comics, protecting the youth of America from sex and violence in the four color pages of comic books.
But by putting out larger size black & white magazines, Marvel could get around the Comics Code. Savage Tales didn't fit on the spinner racks. It was a full size magazine and so it fell under different distribution rules and mailing restrictions. Thus, more sex and violence. It wasn't really that big a deal. The girls wore scantier clothing and the beheadings and disembowelments were shown with more detail. Any sex was implied, much as it was in TV at the time. But still, eye opening stuff for a 12 year old, let me tell you.
Then on the very next page following the Conan story, Roy Thomas wrote a short article entitled Savage Tales is Dead! Oh no. Were they already canceling the magazine, just when I had found it? But no. Roy was just being dramatic. The big announcement was that they were changing the format. Conan would no longer appear in Savage Tales. He was being replaced by Kazar as the cover feature. Why? Because Savage Tales featuring Conan had been so popular that Marvel was giving Conan his own black & white magazine, The Savage Sword of Conan! Holy cow. Now there would be two of these just discovered magazines I'd have to buy.
Now we come to what to me, was perhaps the most nifty part of the early days of Savage Tales and Savage Sword. The magazines didn't only feature illustrated stories, but also prose articles as well. Savage Tales #5 had part two of an article by Thomas about the Gnome Conan books. This was my first sight of the hardbacks that had brought Conan back from pulp oblivion. I reread the article this morning and it's still fascinating. This is the stuff I miss in the current Dark Horse 'phone book' reprints of the Savage Sword material.
Next up was yet another discovery, The Spell of the Dragon, a tale of Brak the Barbarian scripted by Brak's creator, John Jakes. I wasn't familiar with Brak or Jakes, but of course I soon would be. Weird thing about this story is that it's an original Brak tale, not an adaptation, and it was considered canon at the time, so this Brak story isn't available in any reprints of Brak tales but it is part of official continuity.
The final story for the issue was The Legend of the Lizard Men, featuring soon to be cover boy, Kazar, the lord of the hidden jungle. This one sports absolutely gorgeous art by John Buscema at his prime. Both penciled and inked by Buscema, this is amazing stuff.
As you can see, this was quite a find for a young sword &sorcery enthusiast. Heck, the letters column even had a letter from Fritz Leiber, congratulating Savage Tales on their adaptation of Red Nails and asking for a similar adaptation of People of the Black Circle. Of course in those pre-comic book shop days the next problem was how could I be sure of getting the next issue, and more importantly the first issue of Savage Sword of Conan? It would never have occurred to me at 12 to find the manager of the store and ask him to hold the comic for me. So did I get it? That's a story for next time.

The Maze of the Minotaur

2011-09-17T06:37:00.001-05:00

Tonight's episode of Doctor Who, The God Complex, apparently features a minotaur as one of the monsters. This is a little annoying to me, as I plotted a Doctor Who story a few month's back titled The Maze of the Minotaur. My basic idea was that the Doctor and Amy are visiting the isle of Crete and they end up in the maze under the palace of King Minos with a bunch of other folks being sacrificed to the minotaur. Of course, this being a Doctor Who story, the minotaur would turn out to be an alien construct, genetically engineered by marooned aliens as a guardian so they could be undisturbed while they worked at repairing the drive to their star ship. The big problem was that their extremely inefficient drive technology would require a huge amount of matter to operate. Say, about a third of the earth. So double menace and a chance for a last minute countdown of the sort Who fans love.
Anyway, tonight's episode looks to be nothing like that, but still, they're using a minotaur so phooey. I could still write it, but if I tried to sell it somewhere, it's always going to look like I was copying one of the TV episodes. Bah.

Doctor Spektor Volume 3

2011-09-16T06:16:00.002-05:00

While I'm shilling for Dark Horse Comics I might as well go ahead and mention volume three of their Occult Files of Doctor Spektor collections. This is my favorite volume so far, for reasons that will soon become apparent. The usual suspects are here, well written stories by Donald Glut (pronounced Gloot) and beautiful art by Jesse Santos. Santos had also started painting the covers of the comic by this point in the run and they are gorgeous.
What really makes this a great volume is that Glut was reaching the height of the crossovers he would become famous for and in the defining of the 'Glut-iverse.' The stories reprinted here see occult investigator Doctor Adam Spektor crossing paths with another famous Gold Key Doctor, Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom, and facing off againts an ancient wizard (or what's left of him) who had already caused problems for one of Gold Key's sword & sorcery heroes, Durak. And Durak also crosses time and space to team up with Doctor Spektor, so of course this is my favorite volume. It has sword & sorcery in it. Hello? But it gets even more convoluted. Durak was friends with Dagar, the titular character of the soon to be reprinted Gold Key S&S title Dagar the Invincible, and Dagar had done some time traveling himself, crossing timelines with Glut's caveman hero Tragg. Glut was slowly linking everything he had written at Gold Key and I remember catching a lot of this as a kid and being fascinated and delighted.
Year's later I got the chance to interview Don Glut for swordandsorcery.org and I asked him what was the fascination with team-ups and crossovers. he said:

"I just think it’s fun to do. Probably it’s the eternal fan in me who remembers how cool it was – long before continuity was so commonplace – just to see Green Arrow and Aquaman appear in a comic book panel together, or to read a story in which Tarzan goes to Pellucidar. Now nobody cares even when characters from different companies crossover into each other’s “universes.” I guess I’ve always thought of all my stories (including movies, short stories and novels) taking place in the same universe. Long ago I decided to plant clues in the comic-book stories, short stories, novels and now movies that were all connected. Maybe I was influenced by some of the writings by Phil Farmer…or by someone telling me how the Green Hornet was really the grand nephew of the Lone Ranger. Whatever, I decided to put all of these continuity clues all over the place in things I wrote. Someday, I thought, maybe somebody with way too much time on his or her hands would read something I wrote…maybe one of my Frankenstein novels…and spot references to my comic books, movies, whatever. "

And somebody did! Anyway, in volume three Spektor also has to deal with being turned into a werewolf, and with the return of the Frankenstein monster. And he travels to Rutland Vermont for Tom Fagan's Halloween celebration. If you're someone who enjoys old Universal Horror movies or if the kid in you just loves monsters, I highly recommend these collections of the Occult Files of Doctor Spektor. Good stories and good art and evil monsters. What more could you want?

Oh, if you want to read the full interview with Don Glut, go here:

http://www.swordandsorcery.org/int-comics-glut.asp

Creepy Presents Bernie Wrightson

2011-09-16T05:25:00.002-05:00

It seems my Halloween season is trying to jump the gun and get started in mid September. Dark Horse comics just released a must have item for me, a collection of all the stories that artist Bernie Wrightson did for the old Warren horror magazines Creepy and Eerie, called Creepy Presents Bernie Wrightson. If you're not familiar with Wrightson, he is an illustrator and comic book artist known for his fondness for the weird, the macabre, and the just plain grisly, and for his consummate skill at depicting that sort of imagery. Wrightson is the man who defined the look of DC's Swamp Thing and who produced an illustrated version of Frankenstein which is truly a work of art.
He was also a member of The Studio, a group of four young, rebellious artists (the other three were Barry Windsor Smith, Mike Kaluta, and the late Jeff Jones) who shared studio space and created some of the most impressive and influential fantasy art and comics of the 1970s.
But he got his start as a comic book artist and he did some of his best and yes, Creepiest work for the black and white magazines published by Jim Warren. The Creepy presents volume contains all the stories Wrightson drew or inked, plus all his many spot illos, pin ups, color illustrations, and frontispieces. These stories include The Pepper Lake Monster, The Muck Monster and what to me is the creepiest story Wrightson ever drew, Bruce Jones' Jennifer. I remember my buddy Lanny and me talking about this one on a cold Halloween night. Just disturbing as all get out.
The book also features Wrightson's amazing adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story Cool Air. This may have been my first exposure to Lovecraft, because if memory serves, I read this in comics form before I'd ever read any of Lovecraft's prose. There's an adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat as well.
Now get this. The entire collection is only $19.99. That's right. All this gruesome Wrightson goodness can be yours for the low low price of twenty bucks. The linework reproduction is great, the paper is very nice, and the color pages are lovely. Get down to your local comics shop and grab a copy.

Charles Rutledge's Book of Horror Vol III

2011-09-12T05:09:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year again. October approaches and I always try to get the table of contents up early for my annual imaginary horror anthology, so that anyone interested can track down any of these stories before Halloween. As always, the contents were pulled from a wide variety of sources. Several of them came from my recently acquired collection of DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories volumes. Others, like the ones by Howard and Lovecraft, are readily available in current books. The newest story is probably the one by Joe R. Lansdale, pulled from the 2011 anthology Supernatural Noir. The oldest is Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's The Hall Bedroom, which is available at the inestimable Literary Gothic website (Of which I shall have more to say later.) and I'll provide a link at the bottom of this post. It's a very strange little story, written in the early 1900s and I was impressed with the idea behind it. Not so much scary as unsettling.
Unfortunately the new volumes of Karl Edward Wagner's horror fiction won't be available until next year, but you can still track down the very creepy .220 Swift in the collection In a Lonely Place, and it was recently reprinted in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Monsters. I will note that I enjoyed using some of the stories that Wagner had picked for the DAW anthologies, making some of my own Best Horror choices from Wagner's past selections.

Anyway, here's this year's unlucky 13 scary stories.

Manly Wade Wellman/ Chastel

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman/ The Hall Bedroom

Karl Edward Wagner/ .220 Swift

H.P. Lovecraft/ The Dreams in the Witch House

Robert E. Howard/ Children of the Night

R. Chetwynd Hayes/ Acquiring a Family

Joe R. Lansdale/ Dead Sister

Hugh B. Cave/ From the Lower Deep

Clark Ashton Smith/ The Witchcraft of Ulua

Harlan Ellison/She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother

Joseph Payne Brennan/ The House on Stillcroft Street

Frank Belknap Long/ The Hounds of Tindalos

Stephen King/The Night Flier

This year's Stephen King selection, The Night Flier, is still one of the scariest short stories I've ever read. It's one of those that makes you stop and go whoa. When King is on, he's hard to beat. The Hugh B. Cave story also has a very shuddersome moment or two. Those are probably the just plain scariest of the lot. Anyway, I hope those of you interested in some Halloween reading can make use of this list. I wish you uneasy nights and shadow haunted days.

Here's the link to The Hall Bedroom. Explore the Literary Gothic site while you're there. I have found this to be a treasure trove of stories, information, and links to further reading dealing with the literature of the macabre. Can't recommend this site highly enough.

http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/hall_bedroom.html

Gotham City Gothic

2011-09-08T18:48:00.002-05:00

My friend Sara has put up a great review of the Batman story The Demon of Gothos Mansion. Sara's blog, My Love-Haunted Heart, specializes in the 'Girl Running Away From Houses" Gothic Romances that my mom loved when I was growing up. Check out a review by an aficionado of the Gothic, who brings her knowledge of the genre to the story.

http://hauntedhearts.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/the-demon-of-gothos-mansion/

They Giveth and they Taketh Away

2011-09-07T08:30:00.002-05:00

There are days that I think Dark Horse Comics is trying to break me. As the current license holders for the comic book version of Conan, they are not only publishing new Conan comics and collections left and right, but also putting out volumes of older Conan comics and while I'm glad to get these, so that I don't have to dig out my old comic books to reread the stories, the cost of all those collections adds up.
But wait, as they say, there's more. Dark Horse is also putting out nice hardcover reprints of various Gold Key comics that I loved as a kid. The Jesse Marsh Tarzan archives are coming up on volume 10 and they just published volume 3 of the Doctor Spektor archives. (More on the good Doctor later.) Next up are Dagar the Invincible and the Brothers of the Spear. Did I mention all these volumes are fifty bucks a pop? Far far less than you would pay for the original comics but it adds up when the books come fast and furious, as they tend to do toward the Holidays.
Now here's the deal. I just want to read the stories, so I'm just as happy with the reprints as with the actual comics. In fact in some ways I'm happier because I can stick the volumes on a shelf where they are easily accessible and I don't have to worry about damaging an aging comic book when I want to read them. And in the case of the Tarzan comics I could never have afforded the actual comics. So I'm very pleased that these volumes are coming out. The flip side, though is a definite crimp in my wallet.
Dark Horse isn't the only culprit of course. DC comics has been putting out a ton of reprint volumes, including the recent Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko Omnibuses. Next up for them is a Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth Omnibus. This is kind of interesting because DC had originally started out Kamandi as one of their Archive books, printed on super nice, slick paper, but after the success of the other Kirby Omnibuses, (Fourth World, OMAC,The Demon, etc) which were printed in a different format, they decided to start over with Kamandi in the Omnibus form. Now I don't know how the other people who bought the first couple of Kamandi Archives feel, but I'm delighted to have all my Kirby collections in matching formats. That way I can shelve them all together and just sit and beam at them. Yeah I'm a fanboy. Get over it.
So anyway, while I may occasionally gripe about the money, overall I'm mostly pleased to be getting these collections from Dark Horse and DC. But slow it down a little, will you guys?

Weekend Report

2011-09-06T09:25:00.001-05:00

Autumn has arrived and with it my usual restlessness. I found it hard to focus during my long Labor Day weekend, and just sort of bummed around. I started to read several different books but couldn't get into any of them. I finally ended up re-reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which I enjoyed much more on the second read, primarily because I've read so many of the 17th century Gothic novels now that are referenced or parodied in the book. It does make a difference. Enjoyment of a clever parody pretty much depends on a knowledge of the material being parodied. First time through I didn't get half the jokes.
I also read King Gautrek, one of the Norse sagas from the Penguin edition of Seven Viking Romances. Not romance in the modern sense, as in love stories, but the old meaning of romance, full of excitement, adventure, wonders, etc. I tell you, George R.R. Martin has nothing on the Vikings. Their games of thrones are so bloody that they make Martin look tame in comparison. It's funny, but the Sagas are something that probably would have bored me senseless as a kid, but I Love reading the things now. Of course I'm the same way about history in general. Stuff you couldn't have paid me to read in school just fascinates me now.
And that led to me re-reading Robert E. Howard's Cormac Mac Art short story, Swords of the Northern Sea, which is full of Viking battles and mile a minute action as only REH could write it. Stephen King once said that sparks almost seemed to fly from Howard's prose when he was on, and boy that's the case for this one. Cormac and his Norse pal Wulfhere Skull-splitter fight a running battle against a vastly superior force of men and Howard milks it for every bloody thing that it's worth. Seriously, if you haven't read this one, track it down.
I also read through the Jimmy Olsen stories in Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus volumes 1 and 2. I was just in the mood for some Kirby and those remain some of my favorites.
So I guess I did more focused reading than I thought over the weekend. But I'm still restless.

Peerless

2011-09-02T13:44:00.004-05:00

A couple of years back I reviewed Phillip Jose Farmer's The Adventure of The Peerless Peer, a novel that teamed Sherlock Holmes with Tarzan of the Apes. It remains one of my favorites of Farmer's works and it always kind of bothered me that it was out of print and fairly hard to come by for many years.
But not anymore! Thanks to the fine folks at Titan Books, publishers of numerous other once scarce Sherlock Holmes pastiches, you can now get a shiny new copy of the Peerless Peer for your very own. I ordered a copy last week, even though I already have two versions of it. (Three if you count The Adventure of the Three Madmen, an alternate version replacing Tarzan with the Jungle Book's Mowgli.) Nice to have a reading copy.
Anyway, this new version also contains a terrific afterword by Win Scott Eckert loaded with information about the identities of some of the characters Farmer included in the tale and their connections with Farmer's Wold Newton Universe. If you're not up on your pulp heroes and your obscure fictional detectives, Win has got you covered. He also explains about the Three Madmen version of the story. I highly recommend The Peerless Peer to fans of Holmes, Tarzan, and Farmer, and also to anyone who enjoys a fast paced, witty adventure.

A Few Thoughts on How to Make a Good Conan Film

2011-09-02T04:47:00.002-05:00

First, you need a writer/director who understands that Robert E. Howard's Conan isn't fantasy the way that Sindbad is fantasy. In fact it's barely fantasy at all, but rather closer to historical fiction with fantastic trappings. Robert E. Howard was all about realism, even with the magic and the monsters, and some Conan tales have very little fantasy element to them at all. So first, the film needs to look real. It needs to look like HBO's Rome or Ridley Scott's Gladiator. (Not actually Rome of course, but that level of realism.)You guys know I love Hercules and Xena but that isn't what Conan needs to look like. Think of the old Batman Franchise where Gotham City looked like a Star Wars set, and the new one, which takes place in the real world. A Conan film needs to be thought of as taking place in the real world. Maybe given a Mesopotamian look. (Though that would change depending on what story you were adapting. Howard used different pseudo-historical settings.)
Second, adapt one of the Robert E. Howard stories. Don't make some pastiche pulled from six of them or worse just graft the Conan character onto a throwaway wish-I was-directing-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean summer movie plot. I've heard filmmakers saying the REH stories aren't filmable, but they used to say that about the Lord of the Rings. It just took the right writers and director. Red Nails or People of the Black Circle both have enough story to generate a two hour movie and Red Nails in particular has a cast that would hit most of the idiotic Hollywood demographics without any additions. You know, strong woman, slinky woman, stalwart friend, burly villain, creepy villain, etc. All right there on the printed page.
Finally, not to invoke Peter Jackson again, but you need someone who likes and appreciates the source material as Jackson did with LotR. Now, what do I think the odds are of ever getting all this? Not too good. But as Mikey Boy says, there's still hope.

Two Hours of My Life Wasted

2011-09-01T15:47:00.001-05:00

Well, I have just walked in the door from viewing Conan the Barbarian. In a word? Awful. I hated it. I almost got up and walked out twice. Not surprisingly, it was a private showing. I was literally the only person in the theater. Everyone else was smarter than me and stayed home. Word of mouth is killing this movie, but not fast enough.
Badly written, cliched summer blockbuster plot made up of bits of other movies and some simpleton's idea of what comprises sword & sorcery. The dialog often didn't make sense. The film was badly edited. Most of the acting was horrendously bad. Look at it this way. Any movie where the best performance is Rose McGowan is a bad thing. The sets looked like leftovers from a bad viking movie. Someone should call Hercules The Legendary Journeys and tell them they can have their costumes back.
The only bright spots I can think of were a couple of the action sequences and Jason Momoa. Jason looked good as Conan. He spat his lines well enough. Given a decent script and a real director he would be okay. But seriously folks, I would rather watch the Arnold movie, and you know what I think of the Arnold movie. It was that bad. Even if I'd never heard of Robert E. Howard, I would consider this one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Save your money. Don't go.

The Spell of Seven

2011-08-31T06:29:00.002-05:00

During my sorting of old and new books, I stopped to look at some paperbacks I hadn't seen in a while. (Which is, of course, one of the pleasures of sorting books.) One of these volumes was The Spell of Seven, a 1965 anthology of sword & sorcery edited by L. Sprague De Camp. This one is a classic in that it contains Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Michael Moorcock, and Lord Dunsany. Crom, what a line up. And it has illustrations by Virgil Finlay!
REH weighs in with Shadows in Zamboula, which many fans consider lesser Conan. I've always liked the story. It has some truly gritty moments for Conan and some nice creepy bits. I haven't checked to see if this is the De Camp edited version, but it probably is. The acknowledgement page just says "Originally published in Weird Tales for November 1935."
The Fritz Leiber Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story is one of my favorites, Bazaar of the Bizarre, which manages to be a sword swinging tale and at the same time a biting social satire. Not nearly as easy as Leiber makes it look. Dark, funny, and exciting at the same time.
Elric and Moonglum appear in Moorcock's Kings in Darkness, a tale of Elric's wandering days. I actually need to sit down and give this one a reread. Haven't read it in a couple of years. I'll do that this weekend.
I've noted before that I don't consider the works of Lord Dunsany and Jack Vance to be sword & sorcery, but both were masters of original and interesting fantasy. Vance is well represented by a tale from The Dying Earth, Mazirian the Magician and the Dunsany story is one of his most popular and most anthologized, The Hoard of Gibbelins. (And yes that's Hoard not Horde.) The first line is a classic. "The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man."
I used to say the same of Clark Ashton Smith but Al Harron, of the inestimable Blog That Time Forgot, finally convinced me that at least some of Smith's work could be classified as S&S. That deserves a post of its own and I'll get around to it. However, the CAS tale in The Spell of Seven, The Dark Eidolon, is all sorcery and no swords. It's one of Smith's dark prose poems, filled with enough weird atmosphere and ideas to carry a novel. It's a tale of vengeance that brings to mind the old proverb 'when you set out for revenge, first dig two graves.'
But wait, you say. That's only six stories. Yeah, well, the seventh is L. Sprague De Camp's The Hungry Hercynian and though I am a fan of some of De Camp's work, this isn't one of his best. However we won't beat up on De Camp, because he put this anthology together and it is a very good one. There's also not much point in ragging him for anthologizing one of his own stories as that was standard procedure back in the day, when most people hired to put together anthologies were themselves writers of note.

Not Quite Kirby Conan

2011-08-30T16:57:00.004-05:00

Over at the CROM blog we were lamenting the fact that Jack Kirby didn't get to draw Conan many times. I thought I'd pull a Rich Buckler and swipe a Kirby figure and turn it into Conan. I've never been much of an inker so I just used Paint.net and did this quick homage to Jack and Conan.