Search Results for: david C Smith

Watch the Windycon Sword & Sorcery Panel with Mike Penkas, David C. Smith, Adrian Simmons, and John O’Neill

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Mike Penkas moderates the Sword & Sorcery panel at Windycon 47 Windycon 47 was held in Lombard, IL from November 12-14. I was a guest of the convention, with a reading and several panels, and it was an absolute delight to attend an in-person convention again. Carlos Hernandez was the Author Guest of Honor, and his wife Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney (former Managing Editor of Black Gate) was the Poetry G.O.H. In addition to their other activities, the two conducted…

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Pulp Hero Press Re-releases Waters of Darkness by David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna

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Waters of Darkness (Pulp Hero Press, October 19, 2020). Cover uncredited. Pulp Hero Press has reprinted David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna’s classic sword & pirate novel Waters of Darkness. Joe and Dave are well known to readers of Black Gate, and their first collaboration was very warmly received when it first appeared from Damnation Books in 2013. Here’s a slice from William Patrick Maynard’s enthusiastic BG review, “Set Sail on the Waters of Darkness.” The shade of Robert E….

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Tales of Attluma by David C. Smith: A Review and Oron Series Tour Guide

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David C. Smith was the 2019 Guest of Honor at Howard Days 2019 for good reason, having written the acclaimed Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography in 2018 to complement his decades of writing Sword & Sorcery (he has 26 novels written or co-written, including the Red Sonja series with Richard L. Tierney, the Oron and The Fall of the First World series, and more). He crafts his own flavor of adventure-horror with his Tales of Attluma (teased earlier at  Black Gate), heavily influenced by Robert E. Howard…

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Sword & Sorcery from a Bygone Era: Tales of Attluma by David C. Smith

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Cover art by Tom Barber David C. Smith has written a number of articles for Black Gate, most recently a fine review of Brian Murphy’s history of Sword-and-Sorcery, Flame and Crimson. He’s also the author of twenty-six novels and collections, including Oron, The Fall of the First World trilogy, and Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography. His newest is Tales of Attluma, a collection of classic S&S tales from Bob McLain’s Pulp Hero Press, most of which appeared in hard-to-find…

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Of Swords & Scrolls: An Interview with Author David C. Smith

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Joe Bonadonna introduces David C. Smith In 1978, before emails and the Internet, I was working on a novella and reading Dave’s excellent first novel, Oron, when I came across a plot device/character trait in his novel that bore a striking similarity to something I had already incorporated into my story. Already a fan of Dave’s, and knowing he knew Charles Saunders, to whom I had sold several short stories for his and Charles de Lint’s excellent Dragonfields, I asked…

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Hither Came Conan: David C. Smith on “Pool of the Black One”

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Welcome back to the latest installment of Hither Came Conan, where a leading Robert E. Howard expert (and me) examine one of the original Conan stories each week, highlighting what’s best. Up today, it’s author and Howard literary biographer David C. Smith. I reda Oron long before I discovered Conan. Read on! By mid-1932, when Robert E. Howard wrote “The Pool of the Black One,” his tenth story to feature Conan the Cimmerian, he was well past the journeyman phase…

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: David C. Smith on Bran Mak Morn

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I discovered Oron before I first read a Conan tale. It was pretty much my introduction to barbarians in the world of fantasy. Author David C. Smith co-wrote the Red Sonja and Bran Mak Morn books with Richard Tierney. It’s safe to say that he knows his Howard. And about barbarians. So it’s natural that our ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series turned to Dave to talk about Bran Mak Morn. “Worms of the Earth” was one of the first non-Conan…

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Shadow of Dia-Sust” by David C. Smith

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David C. Smith’s 1978 sword & sorcery novel Oron is a classic of the genre. Its success led to four sequels: The Sorcerer’s Shadow (1978), Mosutha’s Magic (1982), The Valley of Ogrum (1982), and the collection The Ghost Army (1983). David’s new short story collection, The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, includes the first new Oron story in 30 years, “The Shadow of Dia-Sust,” in which the young barbarian helps a dying witch exact an overdue revenge; and…

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Sumerian Zombies, Chicago Vampires, and Stephen King: David C. Smith’s The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories

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David C. Smith has been a friend to Black Gate almost as long as we’ve been around. I remember attending a World Fantasy Convention with Howard Andrew Jones many, many moons ago when we were both four years old (or thereabouts), when Howard dragged me excitedly to an autograph session to meet him. Dave was astoundingly gracious to two young sword & sorcery fans, entertaining us with tales of writing Red Sonja novels with Richard L. Tierney and the wild…

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Dark Muse by David C. Smith

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Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Dark Muse, the new noir thriller from David C. Smith. Jack Mathis, a bright young book editor in Chicago, has found the next great American writer. Yet this anonymous genius is inspired to create in the darkest way imaginable: he picks his victims carefully, murders them gruesomely, then gives them new life in the best stories Jack has ever read. The writer knows all about Jack. All about…

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