Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak is a man of mystery. With a jagged streak of silver running through his black hair from his temple to the base of his skull and his exotic features and peculiar mannerisms, Zarnak is almost as outré as the enemies he fights. With a startling knowledge and a somewhat sinister history, Zarnak battled evil in three stories penned by Carter — “Curse of the Black Pharaoh”, “Dead of Night”, and “Perchance to Dream” — as well as in a half dozen or so more contributed by the likes of Robert M. Price, CJ Henderson, Joseph S. Pulver Sr. And James Chambers. All of these stories, for those interested, are collected in Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak: Supernatural Sleuth from Marietta Publishing.

Like the pulp characters Carter based him on, Zarnak is something of a Renaissance man. Educated at a number of prestigious universities, including the Heidelberg (where he studied theology with a certain Anton Phibes, according to “The Case of the Curiously Competent Conjurer” by James Ambuehl and Simon Bucher-Jones), the Sorbonne and Miskatonic University, he is an accredited physician, musician, theologian and metaphysicist. He speaks eleven languages and has one of the finest and most complete collections of occult literature in existence. His home drifts like a soap bubble between Half-Moon Street in London, No. 13 China Alley in San Francisco and a cursed apartment building in New York; always decorated in oriental splendour, it is filled to bursting with esoteric paraphernalia, including a hideously decorated mask of Yama which always hangs in a place of honour above Zarnak’s desk.

And, as the saying goes, ‘so a man’s home, his mind’ — Zarnak is the proverbial odd duck. By turns consoling and caustic, arrogant and affectionate, and almost inhumanly ruthless, Zarnak is no comforting Judge Pursuivant or soothing John Silence. He is singularly and irrepressibly Zarnak.

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Karl Edward Wagner was a man fascinated with monsters and, by most accounts, tormented by an overwhelming host of personal demons. A bearded and brawny hard-drinking Southerner who typed with two fingers like his childhood idol Robert E. Howard, he is perhaps best known for his iconic sword-and-sorcery character, Kane: a red-haired, black-hearted warrior whose love of battle and lust for knowledge combine into one all-consuming will to power. Wagner himself was an unlikely combination of savage and savant, his rough outlaw biker exterior sheltering a deep love for tales of imagination and wonder. At one time a practicing psychiatrist pursuing a doctorate in microbiology, he left that field for a writer’s life. He went on to edit numerous anthologies (including DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror from 1980 to 1994), co-found his own short-lived press, and pen several novels and collections. Most of Wagner’s original work is currently out-of-print. Centipede Press is releasing two hardcover collections of his short horror fiction this year. Hopefully, this will re-kindle interest in the man’s work, making it more available (and more affordable) for those who wish to read it.

I was first introduced to Karl Edward Wagner’s work through his R.E. Howard pastiche, Conan: The Road of Kings, a ripping good tale any fan of the barbarian hero should read. From this I moved onto the Kane material, tracked down in musty used bookstores or acquired through well-placed eBay sniping. Over the holidays I managed to find one of his horror collections stuffed into a shop’s bottom shelf. It is Wagner’s first horror collection, In a Lonely Place, and through it I discovered yet another impressive facet of the late author.

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I’ve been in unwilling low-content mode for the past couple of weeks (question: what’s worse than getting the flu at Christmas? Answer: getting the flu along with a sinus infection). That’s meant I’ve had some time to read, which is good for a number of reasons. As it happens, though, one of the things I picked up to read left me wondering something I’ve wondered several times before: why do certain books pull me along, and compel me to read them, even when I think they’re not particularly good?

The best example of what I mean is the Harry Potter books. I don’t dislike them, but I’ve never understood the way they absorb me when I read them. They’re tightly-plotted, yes, and the world is carefully-built — but these things together only create an odd video-game feel, where every riddle has its designated solution, and the lead characters wander around finding clues to unlock new areas or gifts or side quests, until everything’s resolved in a climactic scene. The characters are flat, the dialogue’s occasionally funny but not especially memorable, and the prose is bland at best. Yet the fact remains that when I read a Potter book I find it easier to move my gaze along the text on the page rather than turn away. It’s like being on a railway train, being carried over a fixed track, with no way to disembark except by something like an act of force, jumping to the ground while the thing’s moving at speed.

Over Christmas — just before, actually — I found another example of this phenomenon, when I read His Majesty’s Dragon, the first of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. It’s a story about the Napoleonic Wars, in a world where intelligent dragons exist and bond with human riders. I’d had it in mind to look into the series for a while, so when I found a used copy of the first book I grabbed it. And then found it had grabbed me. It’s unusual for me these days to find that I literally can’t put a book down; but that’s what happened with His Majesty’s Dragon. And I’m not sure why.

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There are two different stories about how it began.

In one story, there’s a writer-editor of boys’ adventure comics, who’s told by his boss — also his uncle — to create a new team of superheroes, a knock-off of the competition’s high-selling Justice League of America title. This isn’t what the writer really wants to do. But he talks it over with his wife. And he decides: I’m going to write the book the way I want to, without worrying about making perfect heroes. Maybe one of the leads will actually be a monster. Maybe another’ll be a teenager, the kind of character who in other books would just be a sidekick. They’ll bicker among themselves, and fight. They’ll be real people. And, in this story, that’s what the writer did; and it worked.

The other story has a veteran comics artist coming in to the studio of the second-rate company he’s working for. He finds the young writer-editor of the comics line crying because they’re moving the furniture out; the company’s about to close down. No problem, says the artist; you tell your uncle, the owner, to hold off folding the business. The artist, a veteran storyteller, knows how to make grab an audience. He starts cranking out the books, new title after new title. Superheroes are back in, so he starts doing superheroes like nobody ever did them, throwing everything he sees around him into his stories, everything he reads in newspapers and magazines, everything he ever found in history books and myths. Scientists. Mutants. Gods and monsters. In this story, that’s what the artist did; and it worked.

Human memory is fallible, especially when, as in this case, the two people closest to the case become estranged. What can be said for sure is this: starting in 1961, Marvel Comics, a formerly undistinguished publisher, began producing a wave of brilliant superhero comics. Most of them were written by Stan Lee, and most of the best were drawn by artist Jack Kirby — with another artist, Steve Ditko, producing two other remarkable books with Lee’s involvement. Of all the Kirby-Lee collaborations, perhaps the best was the original flagship book of the Marvel line, the first title that came in many ways to define Marvel Comics as a whole: The Fantastic Four.

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When last we spoke, you and me, the subject was what I wasn’t. Feel free to go back and refresh your memory, I’ll wait here. La, la, la; biddley-biddley-boooo; Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee….

Ah, good, you’re back. And you brought me a root-beer, much thanks. This time around, I’d like to address the subject of what I am. At least in part:  if we did the whole thing, we’d be here through Entropy, and I’d have to pay you by the hour.

You already know I’m a bibliophile, and a stfnal historian, and Estates Liaison for the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. I probably wouldn’t be here otherwise. I’m also a Leo (like that matters worth a tinker’s cuss), a native Virginian, white, middle-class and not nearly as overweight as I was a year ago. None of that is germane to this discussion, though, except perhaps peripherally.

For our purposes here at the Black Gate blog, I am a professional writer of science fiction and fantasy. Well, strictly speaking I write whatever I can get paid to write, within reason, but my preferences (not to mention my influences) run to fantastic fiction of one sort or another. I make no bones about that and never have; I don’t apologize to my family about it, I don’t qualify it as “something I’m doing to pay the rent while I work on My Novel,” and I don’t try to turn what I do into Art or Literature.

Don’t get me wrong, now; if anything I write approaches those lofty heights (and believe me, I do consider those heights both lofty and worthy of aspiration), I would be absolutely delighted. I’m just content when people tell me I’ve written a pretty good yarn. Anything else is space-icing on the cake-droid. With time-travel.

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I’ve been a bit under the weather the past couple of weeks, which has been annoying for a number of reasons. For one thing, I was unable to get my thoughts in enough order to respond adequately to three pieces of writing I came across several days ago. Each piece on its own seemed to pose interesting questions, and collectively they raised what seemed to me to be related issues about how one reads, and why; and how and why one reads fantasy in particular.

Well, my head’s cleared a bit over the past little while, and, however delayed, I’ve been able to frame responses (however wordy and inadequate) to the articles I had in mind. I present them here as open letters to the writers of the various pieces: Adam Gopnik, Mur Lafferty, and John C. Wright.

I: To Adam Gopnik

Dear Mr. Gopnik,

I read your recent article in The New Yorker, “The Dragon’s Egg,” with some interest. I haven’t read Christopher Paolini’s work; my interest is less in Young-Adult literature than in fantasy fiction. From that perspective I found your piece intriguing for what was left unsaid, or what you chose not to investigate. Specifically, I thought there were two major lacunae in the thinking underlying your approach to fantasy.

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Why has swords and sorcery languished while epic fantasy enjoys a wide readership? In an age of diminished attention spans and the proliferation of Twitter and video games, it’s hard to explain why ponderous five and seven and 12 book series dominate fantasy fiction while lean and mean swords and sorcery short stories and novels struggle to find markets (Black Gate and a few other outlets excepted).

During a recent reading of the late Karl Edward Wagner’s Dark Crusade (1976) a potential answer coalesced: Many readers want and expect deep characterization in their fiction, and it’s simply not a particularly strong suit of the swords and sorcery genre (or at least of classic swords and sorcery, circa 1930 through the early 1980s). Wagner is one of a handful of classic swords and sorcery authors to whom history has not been particularly kind*. His dark, God-accursed hero-villain Kane deserves a place alongside Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the roll of great genre heroes, but is sadly left off many “best of” swords and sorcery lists. Relegated to the status of cult figure, Kane is the darling of heroic fantasy connoisseurs but unread of by many casual genre fans, and unheard of by most of the larger fantasy fan base.

Kane and many of his swords and sorcery ilk are not what most modern readers would consider fully realized characters. You just don’t get anything close to the same level of introspection and cradle to the grave development of Kane in Dark Crusade as you do of, say, Kvothe in Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind.

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Warning: Some spoilers follow

Season 2 of AMC’s The Walking Dead is nearing its midseason point, and apparently it sucks, at least according to a vocal minority of viewers. Why? Too much talking and not enough action. With a name like The Walking Dead, each episode should be wall-to-wall flesh munching zombies and humans gunning down undead with head shots on the wing. Or so the detractors say.

Me? I’ve been enjoying the heck out of the series, and think it’s pretty darned perfect as far as serialized television goes. The Walking Dead isn’t just about zombies. It’s also a human drama, and I’m hooked.

But I guess characterization and engagement with philosophical and moral questions aren’t what the zombie diehards want. Here’s a real sampling of some of the comments I’ve found:

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Mrs. [Rosel George] Brown is just about the only one of F&SF’s former gaggle of housewives who doesn’t strike me as verging on the feebleminded; in fact, I think her work has attracted less attention than it deserves.

That’s James Blish (writing as William Atheling, Jr.) being nice. He was talking about Brown’s story in the August, 1962 issue of F&SF (then edited by Avram Davidson), pictured at right.

He doesn’t name the story – odd that a critic wouldn’t, even in a review published at the time – but a little online research shows it to be the novelette “The Fruiting Body.” It’s a pretty good read, too, as most of Brown’s work was.

For me, though, the salient point of the quote above is the off-hand contempt he throws on fine writers like Zenna Henderson, Katherine MacLean and Miriam Allen DeFord, a blatant disdain that is both unfortunate and unwarranted.

Looking over the first Blish/Atheling volume of collected criticism, The Issue at Hand (Advent Publishers, 1964), in fact, the reader finds similar contempt for one writer or another on nearly every page.

It gets worse. In the March, 1954 issue of Campbell’s Astounding, a story by one Arthur Zirul titled “Final Exam” appeared. It was the author’s very first story. Blish/Atheling, in the Spring 1954 issue of Redd Boggs’ fanzine Skyhook, devoted almost his entire column (which translated to an incredible six pages in book form) to tearing this story to shreds; calling it “…one of the worst stinkers ever to have been printed…”, and on and on.

Why? What was the point?

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This is the fifth in an ongoing series of posts about Romanticism and the development of fantasy fiction; you can find previous installments here, here, here, and here. To recap so far: I’ve looked at the emergence of the fantastic in English literature in the 18th century up to about 1789, noting that it was connected to a strain of antiquarianism. Then I looked at developments in French literature, which included the creation of a tradition of literary fairy tales as well as stories based on the Arabian Nights; last week I looked at German writing, and noted that the 1789 publication of Friedrich Schiller’s popular Der Geist-Sehrer, The Ghost-Seer, helped foster a tradition of popular horror writing in German which had a complex relationship of mutual influence with another horror tradition in England. That English tradition is what I aim to write about this week: the Gothic novel.

Today, the adjective ‘gothic’ implies a certain aesthetic, deriving from the word’s use to describe a certain kind of horror writing that had its height in the 1790s. That usage is a largely modern phenomenon. At the time, writers of books we now call ‘gothic’ mostly described their works as ‘romances.’ (Certain critics, incidentally, have argued that gothic writing is distinct from Romanticism proper; my definition of Romanticism is broad, and certainly includes works self-consciously written in the romance tradition.)

Why ‘gothic’? Before about the middle of the 18th century, ‘gothic’ referred to the Germanic peoples who sacked Rome, and by extension to the Middle Ages that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. ‘Gothic’ therefore also meant things that were outdated or obsolete, and particuarly all that was crude or tasteless. It tended to imply superstition, and the marvellous. It was implicitly opposed to the classical. As an adjective, it could mean English or German, Druidical, Norman, Tudor, even, in some contexts, ‘Oriental’.

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