Arcane Arts and Cold Steel (Pulp Hero Press, December 24, 2025)

David C. Smith is a name that speaks to lovers of sword & sorcery, if not with the power of a Karl Edward Wagner, then not far behind, and if you love the genre but don’t know Dave’s name…1) Shame on you; 2) Let me get you up to speed.

A powerful writer of the genre’s last great flowering in the late 70s, Dave’s Tales of Attluma — a sunken lost continent — have spanned five decades, chronicling multiple eras in the lost land’s history — including its destruction — beginning with the epic saga of Oron and most recently, the Unforgiven-esque Sometime Lofty Towers, which I will go on record as calling the best s&s novel since the Elric-fixups, and with more emotional punch.

Dave is also the man who, with another S&S giant, the late Richard L. Tierney, successfully took one of the most vapid characters in S&S — Roy Thomas’s sexing up and dumbing down of Robert E. Howard’s Red Sonya into Marvel’s Red Sonja — and wrote a brilliant, six-volume work-for-hire that are worth the sometimes high prices they command in used bookstores.

Finally, his Literary Biography of Robert E. Howard is one of the most important pieces of Howard scholarship produced in the last twenty years.

Sometime Lofty Towers by David C. Smith (Brackenbury Books,‎ December 2025). Cover by Saša Đurđević

All of which is saying, Dave knows this genre inside and out. Not just its history, but how to write it.

And that bring us to Arcane Arts and Cold Steel: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction (with a foreword by BG‘s very own John O’Neill).

Advertised as “Part master class, part genre analysis, Arcane Arts and Cold Steel is written for authors who want to write bestselling sword-and-sorcery for a modern audience.” This is true, but the publisher undersells the book’s power. Yes, the book has a lengthy appendix in which Dave speaks directly to the aspiring writer and reveals his tool kit, and an interview transcript where he speaks to both his career, his long hiatus, and the lay of the S&S writing landscape today. But the core of the book is something much more.

Tales of Attluma by David C. Smith (Pulp Hero Press,‎ December 24, 2025). Cover by Tom Barber

Beginning with a short, concise history of the genre, Dave gets into what IS sword & sorcery fiction, not by trying to create a list of characteristics (Brian Murphy and the late Howard Andrew Jones already did yeoman work here), but by the working nuts & bolts that is usually reserved for snobby lit-crit books.

Smith sees sword & sorcery as the ancestral descendent of myth cycles — Gilgamesh fighting Humbaba, Theseus & the Minotaur, the adventures of the Argonauts — as those tales are immediate and personal, whereas high fantasy is more akin to the great epics.

The Sorcerer’s Shadow by David C. Smith (Zebra Books,‎ September 1978). Cover by Doug Beekman

Like Howard Andrew Jones, he sees the immediate predecessor of the genre in the historical adventure fiction of the late 19th century and first years of the 20th century: the work of Haggard and Lamb, the pantheon of pulp writers in Adventure and Argosy, that all coalesced as a young man from west Texas synthesized those experiences, the successful John Carter and Tarzan pennings of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the weird horror he already wrote and created the characters of Solomon Kane, Kull and Conan, launching a new genre along the way.

Drawing on a century of fiction — from the foundations laid by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, to the gritty reinventions of Karl Edward Wagner and Charles Saunders, and into the “New Edge” renaissance pioneered by Howard Andrew Jones, Smith looks at story structure: character & setting; plot & scene construction; style, voice, and tone; the use of horror & the supernatural; even the role of the inhuman as character and lens on human issues. Like a lit-crit academic, he digs deep into these topics through extensive examples from real published sources.

The Shadow of Sorcery by David C. Smith (Wildside Press, March 5, 2026). Cover by Mike Hoffman

And this is the first gold mine. Yes, of course, we see Howard, Leiber, Moorcock and Wagner being cited and examined, but there are as many — or more — examples from the writers of Smith’s generation, such as Adrian Cole, Richard Tierney and Charles Saunders, and even more from active writers today: Jason Ray Carney, Milton Davis, John Fultz, Bryn Hammond, Schuyler Hernstrom, John Hocking, the late Howard Andrew Jones, Dariel Quioge, Jason M. Waltz, Clint Werner and more.

Where the work differs from the usual lit-crit manual is that the author is actually a major figure in the genre he is analyzing and has an actual love of the material he is not afraid to show. This is not some dry, literary analysis of sword & sorcery as literature — this is a paean to the genre, to the power of *genre* fiction and *plot* to do all of the things usually reserved for pure literature.

Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery by
Brian Murphy (Pulp Hero Press,‎ January 16, 2020). Cover by Tom Barber

Along the way we get snippets of genius from a century of writing, and I guarantee you’ll find stories and writers you never knew about. But you will also see why the oft-maligned “genre” can be powerful literature in its own right, even when its first goal is — gasp — entertainment. You will also find that there is a clear pattern of what makes sword & sorcery a distinct sub-genre, the defiant “attitude” coined by Jason M. Waltz in his massive anthology Neither Beg Nor Yield, making this a perfect companion volume to Brian Murphy’s Flame & Crimson: A history of sword & sorcery.

It’s rare that we get to see a genre analyzed by one of its own luminaries, even rarer they then sit down and tell you how to hone your writing for that field. This is a delightful read that serves on many levels and deserves the praise it is receiving.