A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Weird Menace: Robert E. Howard’s Conrad and Kirowan

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Weird Menace: Robert E. Howard’s Conrad and Kirowan

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

So basically, I don’t do horror. Robert E. Howard is my second-favorite writer in any genre (trailing only John D. MacDonald), and I’m not really even that into his horror stuff. “Pigeons from Hell” is considered one of his best stories, but I don’t really like it. Other than a few exceptions, like the terrific Robert R. McCammon, and F. Paul Wilson, horror doesn’t work for me (no, I don’t really care for Lovecraft, either, though I’m well-versed thanks to those old Del Rey paperbacks).

But I do like several stories which are in Del Rey’s The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, such as Solomon Kane’s “Rattle of Bones.” There’s an upcoming post on “Out of the Deep,” and we are about to talk about his Conrad and Kirowan tales, which are part of the Cthulhu Mythos.

SPOILER WARNING – Look…the story I’m about to discuss is eighty-one years old. And it’s readily available. If you read my stuff here, you know I try to minimize spoilers. But you’ve had a lot of opportunities to read Robert E Howard. You have been warned.

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Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part I

Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part I

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Betsy Wollheim

This interview was transcribed from a Zoom meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society on June 14, 2024, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer and hosted by Miriam Seidel.

Miriam Seidel: Betsy Wollheim has been a leading figure in SF and fantasy publishing for many decades, beginning as an editor at DAW Books in 1975, and taking over the company as president of DAW Books in 1985 from her father Donald A. Wollheim. She ran DAW with co-publisher Sheila E. Gilbert until Gilbert’s retirement recently. During her career she has worked with such noted authors as C.J. Cherryh, Tad Williams, Patrick Rothfuss, Nnedi Okorafor, Kristen Britain, Saladin Achmed, David Gerrold, Tanith Lee, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Wole Talabi, among others.

In 2012 she became the first female long-form editor to win the Hugo Award during her lifetime. [In 1986, Judy-Lynn del Rey won, but posthumously, and the Hugo was refused by her husband, Lester del Rey. –DS] In 2018 Betsy was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from World Fantasy. In 2022 DAW was purchased by Thinkingdom Media Group of Beijing to be the SF/F publishing line of Astra Publishing House. Betsy continues to lead her list as publisher of DAW with her former employees and authors on behalf of Astra.

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It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos, Part III

It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos, Part III

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The Curse (Trans World Entertainment, September 11, 1987) and In the Tall Grass (Netflix, October 4, 2019)

Yes, a new watch-a-thon, featuring me, a hopeless procrastinator, plumbing the depths of cinematic misery for your entertainment.

This time around, I will be watching Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-adjacent films, and as usual they must be films I’ve never seen before (which makes the task trickier and bound for disaster).

If you don’t know anything about Lovecraft’s writings, cosmic horror, the Mythos, or Cthulhu, panic not. Onwards!

The Curse (AKA The Farm) (1987) – Tubi

Directed by David Keith (no, the other one), The Curse is a slightly faithful adaptation of ‘The Color Out of Space,’ just without any, um, colors.

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Tor Doubles #13: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis

Tor Doubles #13: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis

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Cover for The New Atlantis by Michael Böhme
Cover for The Blind Geometer by Peter Gudynas

The New Atlantis was originally published in The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Hawthorn Books in May, 1975.  It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award and won the Locus poll.

The story opens with Le Guin’s narrator, Belle, returning home from a Wilderness Week aboard a bus where another passenger attempts to engage her in conversation, noting that a new continent is rising in the ocean, either the Atlantic or Pacific, but scientists have little information about it to go on. This exchange allows Le Guin to provide the reader with information about the climate change that is affecting her world. Manhattan underwater and parts of San Francisco are flooded.

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Goth Chick News: BGPCZ Solos into the Unknown at the Haunted America Conference

Goth Chick News: BGPCZ Solos into the Unknown at the Haunted America Conference

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Haunted American Conference

By Black Gate Photog Chris Z

So, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip…..

It was just another typical Friday night in the Goth Chick News bunker filling out expense reports for her Gothness when a call came in over “Zuni” (Goth Chick’s version of “Alexa”). It was the “Big Cheese” John O informing me that since GC is out on assignment (attending Gothicon… don’t laugh it’s a real thing) I would need to fill in on a ghostly adventure traveling to an exotic locale. Before I could even react, a puff of air, a prick on my neck and darkness.

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Third Time’s the Charm: Avram Davidson’s The Enemy of My Enemy

Third Time’s the Charm: Avram Davidson’s The Enemy of My Enemy

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We all have our favorite obscure or neglected authors, writers we get touchy about and on whose behalf we’re instantly ready to jump on top of a table, ball up our fists and yell at the top of our voices, “HEY!! Don’t forget THIS GUY!!!”

For me, Avram Davidson is at the top of that list. I’ll knock over the Parcheesi board for him any day of the week.

As is often the case with such semi-forgotten writers, he wasn’t always obscure or neglected; though never a behemoth like Heinlein, Clarke, or Bradbury, during the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s Davidson was quite well-known. He had three World Fantasy Awards to his credit, won a 1958 Hugo Award for his delightfully paranoid short story “Or All the Seas with Oysters” (read it and you’ll never turn your back on a closet full of coat hangers again) and was briefly the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Few people in the genre were more well-respected or personally beloved.

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part IV: Dray Prescot by Alan Burt Akers

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part IV: Dray Prescot by Alan Burt Akers

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Dray Prescot #17-24, all from DAW: Captive Scorpio (1978), Golden Scorpio (1978),  A Life for Kregen (1979), A Sword for Kregen (1979), A Fortune for Kregen (1979), A Victory for Kregen (1980), Beasts of Antares (1980), and Rebel of Antares (1980). Covers by Josh Kirby (#17-18), Richard Hescox (#19-23), and Ken Kelly (#24)

Not only is the Dray Prescot series the longest running Sword & Planet series ever published in English, but it’s also consistently of a high quality. There are quite a few volumes that — for me—rival any of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom books. Certainly, these two series are my all-time favorites, and together make up the primary influence on my own Sword & Planet series, the five books of the Talera series by Charles Allen Gramlich (Gotta get those “three” names in there.) I’ve posted about the Talera books before, but back to Kenneth Bulmer (who wrote the Prescot series as ‘Alan Burt Akers’) and Dray Prescot now.

I’ve never been one to put a lot of emphasis on covers, but the Bladud books, all five compendiums containing the last fifteen novels, have the same cover image with just a change in the color of the dust jacket. This made me long for the original DAW publications where each vibrant cover was tied directly to the book it illustrated.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Kirby O’Donnell and The Bloodstained God (REH)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Kirby O’Donnell and The Bloodstained God (REH)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

 

It can’t be a Summer of Pulp without some Robert E. Howard now, can it? Heck no!!! The looong shadow cast by my buddy Dave Hardy, with his two terrific essays on El Borak, still prevents me from tackling ‘The Swift.’

However, I am comfortable continuing to blaze my own trail regarding the similar, but different, Kirby O’Donnell.

I wrote about “Gold from Tartary,” and “Swords of Shahrazar,” in prior summers. Which just leaves the third, long-unpublished, “The Trail of the Bloodstained God.” Now having tackled this one, I’m sure there’s a Steve Clarney post (“The Fire of Asshurbanipal”) somewhere down the road.

In my first two essays, I explained how the second O’Donnell story, “Swords of Shahrazar,” found print first, in the October, 1934 issue of Top-Notch magazine. It was a direct sequel to “Gold from Tartary,” which appeared four months later in the January, 1935 issue of Thrilling Adventures. It’s quite likely that many people did not read “Swords,” then “Gold” shortly thereafter. But it certainly would seem odd to do so.

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Pseudoplumes, Nom de Nyms, Birds, & Oooze: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night

Pseudoplumes, Nom de Nyms, Birds, & Oooze: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night

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The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
(trade paperback reprint from Perigee Books, 1980). Cover by Michael Mariano

I’m not a big fan of literary criticism in any field (although I have committed some), but one of my big books from my late teens onward was Le Guin’s The Language of the Night (1979), especially for the essays “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” and “A Citizen of Mondath.”

Le Guin has some great passages in “Citizen” about what she liked to read as a kid, and how she liked it.

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It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos, Part II

It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos, Part II

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The Haunted Palace (American International Pictures, August 28, 1963)

Yes, a new watch-a-thon, featuring me, a hopeless procrastinator, plumbing the depths of cinematic misery for your entertainment.

This time around, I will be watching Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-tangential films, and as usual they must be films I’ve never seen before (which makes the task trickier and bound for disaster).

If you don’t know anything about Lovecraft’s writings, cosmic horror, the Mythos, or Cthulhu, that’s great — keep it that way. Onwards!

The Haunted Palace (1963) – Tubi

We kick off Part II with a stone-cold classic from AIP that I somehow had never seen before. A shock, I know.

Billed as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Haunted Palace, this film is, in reality, a retelling of Lovecraft’s ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” with just a fraction of Poe’s original poem used to frame the film as opening and closing quotes.

Fans of the story will recognize many familiar elements; Vincent Price plays Charles Ward, who has brought his wife to Arkham to claim an old palace he has inherited from his long-gone descendant, Joseph Curwen. Curwen (who was burned alive 110 years ago) was an infamous warlock who terrorised the town until his fiery comeuppance. He cursed the lynch mob as he sizzled, and true to his word is resurrected through an old portrait that he uses to possess the hapless Ward. Ward/Cullen is aided by his two fellow warlocks, Jabez and Simon, and proceeds to take vengeance on the descendants of his killers. Shenanigans ensue.

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