Tales from the Spaceport Bar and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (Avon Books, 1987 and 1989). Covers by James Warhola and Doug Beekman Science fiction has a rep for being serious stuff. Tales of dystopias, climate catastrophes and environmental collapse, dire warnings about worrying trends, that’s SF in a nutshell. Even dressed up in its best story-telling adventure garb, Star Wars or Mad Max-style, it’s still often perceived as all about desperate battles in apocalyptic settings. Of course, science…
Read More Read More
Cover by Stephen Fabian Intro It is not intuitive to seek beauty in art deemed grotesque/weird, but most authors who produce horror/fantasy actually are usually (a) serious about their craft, and (b) driven my strange muses. This interview series engages contemporary authors & artists on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Previously we cornered weird fantasy authors like John Fultz, Janeen Webb, Aliya Whiteley, and Richard Lee Byers. Today we hear from the legendary author and editor…
Read More Read More
I read a lot of fantasy — most of it older works — and yet Darrell Schweitzer’s mesmerizing The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995) had escaped my attention until fairly recently. Around the time I reviewed another of Schweitzer’s books, Echoes of the Goddess (2013), John Fultz told me that if I was looking for something really wild, Mask was where to go, so I bought it. And for two years it sat there on the virtual TBR stack. When John…
Read More Read More
I was proud to publish two very fine stories by Darrell Schweitzer in the print version of Black Gate: the frontier horror story “A Dark Miracle” (BG 3) and the Thomas the Rhymer tale “Into the Gathering Dark” (BG 15). So I’m very pleased indeed to see a brand new collection from Mr. Schweitzer, Awaiting Strange Gods: Weird and Lovecraftian Fictions, which collects 22 tales in a very handsome package. In addition to a new introduction by S.T. Joshi, the…
Read More Read More
According to H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary canon of cosmic horror tales, the Great Old Ones such as Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog Sothoth, and all-mighty Azathoth have lurked in the dim places of the cosmos since the beginning of time. “That is not dead,” wrote the mad poet Abdul Alhazred, “which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.” One of Lovecraft’s most famous lines is the inspiration for a new hardcover volume of historical Cthulhu Mythos fiction from PS…
Read More Read More
The Goddess is dead. The Earth is very old. The fabric of time itself has worn thin. Who knows what might be glimpsed through it? — Opharastes, After Revelation When the Goddess who reigned over Earth died her body shattered and the pieces, resonating with her power, rained down over the world. Wherever they settled they caused great changes in both the people and the land. In some places new realities were created. In others, images of the Goddess herself…
Read More Read More
Special Black Gate Feature by John R. Fultz All rights reserved. Copyright 2006 by New Epoch Press. When speaking of the world’s greatest writers of fantasy fiction, there is one name that continues to surface among the true experts, if not on the lips of the general public: Darrell Schweitzer. Most widely known as a long-time editor of the legendary Weird Tales magazine (along with George Scithers and John Betancourt), Schweitzer is a prolific fantasist whose mythopoeic stories and novels…
Read More Read More
Darrell Schweitzer is one of fantasy’s true renaissance men. As co-editor of Weird Tales he’s kept alive the field’s most venerated and historic magazine, while simultaneously helping guide and shape the next generation of fantasy authors. As a literary critic he’s illuminated the careers of many modern masters with his Discovering Modern Horror Fiction series, The Thomas Ligotti Reader, the upcoming Neil Gaiman Reader, and many other fine works. But it’s with his fiction that he’s made his most important…
Read More Read More
Imagine a golden treasure chest filled to overflowing with rare and sparkling jewels. Now imagine the literary equivalent of that bounty: The jewels are visions of a fantastic world filled with dark magic, dead gods, and exotic cultures. The latest book from Darrell Schweitzer is a treasury of obscure tales woven into a single, epic tapestry of high fantasy. Echoes of the Goddess collects eleven stories set in the same weird world as Schweitzer’s second novel The Shattered Goddess (1982)….
Read More Read More
The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz. The Rogues in the House Podcast (2023). John Molinero cover art. The Rogues in the House Podcast, publishers of the Sword & Sorcery anthologies A Book of Blades Vol I and Vol II, now bring us a re-release of John R. Fultz’s The Revelations of Zang (available now in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover). John R. Fultz is no stranger to Black Gate having published in the hardcopy magazine and hosting his Skulls…
Read More Read More