Blessed are the legend-makers with their  rhyme of things not found within  recorded  time.

from ‘Mythopoeia‘ (1931) by JRR Tolkien

The impetus to write my Tolkien series came from rewatching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and realizing just how much I dislike them. That realization drove me back to the actual books. Diving once more into Middle-earth inspired me to begin a deeper exploration of Prof. Tolkien’s works, creation, and their influences.

My original motivation, largely of drafting a retort to the films, was quickly supplanted as soon as I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring and once again read that opening line:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

I found myself immediately being pulled into the great vortex of Tolkien’s art and ideas. As my previous entries into this series describe, my attention was sometimes drawn to different elements that it had been on previous reading and my appreciation for certain things had grown over the years. What I’m not sure I brought up much was how much enjoyment I get from actually reading Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

The deep currents that run through the professor’s books are what keep me coming back, but it’s the thrilling adventure and moments of awesome that, I think, bring me back so often. The great themes of sacrifice and standing against darkness and decay bear revisiting by us all regularly in these shadowed times, but that can be heavy going. Episodes like the running fight in Moria, the charge of the Rohirrim at the Pelennor Fields, or Éowyn standing against the Witch King, remain gripping, no less so this time than the very first time I encountered them fifty years ago. For all the intricate history of Middle-earth and heavily detailed environment, for all the professor’s devotion to his invented languages as well as his themes, these are terrific tales of adventure filled with epic battles and heroic stands, and I love them. As it was his 134th birthday yesterday, which would’ve made him three years older than Bilbo Baggins, why don’t you celebrate by pulling one of his books off the shelf and start reading it one more time?

The Silmarillion wasn’t a slog, but it’s a much more challenging book than the others. Just to be clear, as I’m not sure my piece makes it as clear as I hoped, I do like it. Nonetheless, it made me want to catch my breath, so to speak, and think about what’s next for this series, because I do intend to carry it on for several more entries.

As mentioned last time, I will be reading Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin. I’ll skip Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, but only because I wrote about it for Bob Byrne’s Tolkien series a couple of years ago and The Children of Húrin because I wrote about that book in 2018. I’m curious about The Notion Club Papers, mentioned last time around by commenter Dale Nelson. I’d also like to get to his versions of ‘Gawain and the Green Knight,’ ‘Pearl’ and ‘Orfeo.’ If I’m ambitious enough, I’ll work up something on the various tomes of Tolkien lore that seemed everywhere in the seventies and eighties, some of of which I have very fond memories of. After those works, we’ll see what we can see. So, Tolkien’s writing will remain my focus here at Black Gate for several month to come and I hope you’ll take the trip along with me, especially in the comments.

It hasn’t been all terrible oaths and sunken lands, this past winter, surprisingly. I recently discovered the value of audiobooks while cooking and shoveling snow. I find they’re most enjoyable when revisiting books I’ve already read. So, I’ve spent many hours distracted from more mundane task listening to audio versions of my two favorite supernatural detectives series; John Connolly’s Charlie Parker and Laird Barron’s Isaiah Coleridge.

I came across the Charlie Parker books in a roundabout way. I watched a Kevin Costner horror movie, The New Daughter. I liked it and discovered it came from a Connolly story of the same name and picked up the collection it’s in, Nocturnes (2004). I’d seen Connolly mentioned as the author of the Charlie Parker books and thought they looked like little more than airport thrillers. Nocturnes features a Charlie Parker novella, ‘The Reflecting Eye,’ and it grabbed me by the collar and shook me about, shouting ‘I am not an airport thriller!’ Within a year or so, I’d read most of the books published up to that time. As of now, there are twenty three novels and one novella. The next book, A River Red With Blood comes out in the spring.

Connolly’s style can be haunting and beautiful, without ever giving up its hardboiled edge. Grief and despair permeate many of his books, and at the same time, they’re filled with brutal nobility. Parker moves through a world haunted by the dead and many other, worse things, an implacable force of justice, even if he believes he’s driven more by his own need for vengeance. Connolly’s universe is one filled with demons, both human and inhuman, where dark things lay forgotten beneath our feet and ready to spring on us without warning.

This is a honeycomb world.

You must be careful where you step.

And you must be ready for what you might find.

from The Killing Kind (2001)

Via audiobook on Spotify, I just caught up with the one I’d missed out on, The Nameless Ones, and am in the middle of listening to the very first installment, Every Dead Thing. I’ve written two articles about Connolly and the Parker books at my site; New Find: John Connolly and A Honeycomb World: John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series.

I discovered Laird Barron here on Blackgate.com. Amazon tells me I bought my first collection of his stories, The Imago Sequence in 2013. Considering the number of pieces he’s written here trying to get folks to read Barron’s remorselessly dark tales, I suspect it was one of James McGlothlin’s, and probably the one reviewing The Croning. Whichever one it was, it was enough to get me to buy a book and immediately get hooked on Barron. Within a few months, I’d read two more collections, Occultation and Other Stories and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All as well as The Croning.

When he turned his hand to hardboiled crime stories, I admit I was a little let down. While I hadn’t actually loved Barron’s 2016 collection, Swift to Chase, I didn’t know if I needed to read something about an ex-mobster who’d become a private detective in Upstate New York. Once again, I was wrong.

I bough the first, Blood Standard (2018), on a whim one night. Something about it I read in the description, or that someone had mentioned, caught my metaphorical eye. As to be expected, the writing was great, but, unexpectedly, Isaiah Coleridge, half-Maori and mob-exile from Alaska, was more than just a high concept character. Yes, we’ve met the retired criminal gone straight, before, but Coleridge seemed something more, quite possibly something out of the stories from deepest human history. The story was exciting and the mystery intriguing. Barron plots a solid mystery and he’s got a way with writing violence as bone-crunching and wince-inducing as the best. There was something nagging at the back of my skull. Was there a supernatural element to the book after all?

Pretty soon it became clear that not only were the books thick with Barron’s take on cosmic horror, they were even connected to many of his other stories. Without any fanfare, he’s started taking on the trappings of a mythic figure, complete with faithful hound and loyal comic sidekick and the ability to stand up against dark forces. They’re more hardboiled than Connolly’s books, but Barron never lets you forget his prose is some of the best. There are three novels and one novella in the series right now.

Nature has a plan for me as well. An exit into the posthumous life by a silver bullet through the heart or peacefully in my sleep. Maybe, when it’s time, I’ll return home to the utter North, lie down on autumn tundra beneath the aurora borealis, and commend my spirit to the fields of ancient lights. Whichever way it goes, the worms in the earth patiently abide.

from Worse Angels (2020)

Finally, I’ll be back next time with a review of Eda Blessed III, Milton Davis’ newest collection of Omari Ket’s adventures in the world of Ki-Khanga. You can read a little about the previous volume right here on Blackgate by SE Lindberg.

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Fletcher Vredenburgh writes a column the first Sunday of the month at Black Gate, mostly about older books he hasn’t read before. He also posts at his own site, Stuff I Like when his muse hits him.