Conan: City of the Dead (Titan Books, June 18, 2024). Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love John C. Hocking’s (1960 -) Conan and the Emerald Lotus came along in 1995, near the end of the Tor Conan pastiche series of books. I’d read a lot of pastiches early but by ’95 was burned out on them and stopped picking up the new ones. So I never read Hocking’s entry. Until now. In 2024, Titan Books published Conan City of the Dead,…
Conan: City of the Dead, by John C. Hocking (2024, Titan Books. 507p) It’s June of 2024, and Titan Books has just delivered John C. Hocking’s City of the Dead which contains both Conan and the Emerald Lotus (1995, TOR) and its follow-up Conan and the Living Plague — a book lost in the limbo of publishing craziness for ~two decades! Hocking also wrote a bridging novella set in between these two novels called “Black Starlight” (serialized across Conan comics…
Conan: Black Starlight (Titan Books, October 17, 2023) The name John C. Hocking is well known to long-time Black Gate readers. He published several terrific stories in the print version of the magazine, including two tales in his Brand the Viking series, and the opening stories in his popular Archivist series, “A River Through Darkness and Light” and “Vestments of Pestilence,” which was continued in Skelos and Weirdbook. He’s also launched a brand new series, the King’s Blade tales, in…
To help reveal the muses that inspire weird fiction and horror writers, this interview series engages contemporary authors on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Recent guests on Black Gate broaching this topic have included Darrell Schweitzer, Sebastian Jones, Charles Gramlich, Anna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg, Stephen Leigh, Jason Ray Carney. See the full list of interviews at the end of this post. Today we corner John C. Hocking whose Conan pastiche we reviewed a few months ago. John C. Hocking is…
John C. Hocking’s Conan Pastiches Conan and the Emerald Lotus by John C. Hocking emerged from Tor in 1995 (Ciruelo Cabral cover artist), and was reprinted in 1999 (with a Ken Kelly cover); both paperbacks are insanely expensive now (i.e. $500+ on Amazon, 2021 price). In 2019 Hocking released a 12-part serialized novella “Black Starlight” published in the back of the recent Conan the Barbarian comic (the comic portion was written by Jason Aaron), a direct sequel to “Emerald Lotus”…
I’m here to sing the praises of Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “The Scarlet Citadel.” This classic yarn first appeared in the January 1933 issue of Weird Tales and was the second Conan story to see print, following “The Phoenix on the Sword.” This is a tale of Conan when he was King of Aquilonia, and many, Karl Edward Wagner among them, have noted it shows clear parallels to Howard’s only Conan novel, the peerless The Hour of the Dragon….
John C. Hocking returns to the pages of Black Gate after too long an absence, with another exciting tale of the Archivist and his friend Lucella. Sevron Glauco turned with a swirl of his fine cloak, and we followed him out of guard tower 47 into the nighted city of Frekore, wondering where we were going and what a daughter of the Royal House wanted with two such as us. “She’s broken house arrest in defiance of the King,” I…
Jeff Crook at The Sorcerers Guild interviews John C. Hocking and John O’Neill, following last week’s announcement that “The Face in the Sea” won The Harper’s Pen Award for best all-around Sword & Sorcery short story of 2009. SG: What’s on your launch pad right now? What’s in your future? John C. Hocking: The third Brand tale, by far the longest and most ambitious, is in Black Gate 14, which just came out. Five years back, when Howard Andrew Jones was editing the Flashing Swords…
The Sorcerer’s Guild has announced that John C. Hocking’s “The Face in the Sea” (Black Gate 13) has won The Harper’s Pen Award for the best all-around Sword & Sorcery short story of 2009. Award administator Jeff Crook puts it this way: John’s story is a superb example of the genre, harkening back to the master himself – REH. It hit all the points I mentioned in my previous post: two strong hooks (story and adventure); well-crafted, believable historical fantasy…
The Sorcerer’s Guild announced this week that John C. Hocking’s “The Face in the Sea” (from Black Gate 13) has been nominated for the Harper’s Pen Award (formerly the Ham-Sized Fist Award). The Harper’s Pen Award honors the best Heroic Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery short fiction. The award is sponsored by The Sorcerer’s Guild. The stated goal of the award is “to encourage authors to continue to explore heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery fiction, as well as to…