Search Results for: john C. hocking

Beautiful Plagues: An Interview with John C. Hocking

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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…

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John C. Hocking’s Conan Pastiches Emerald Lotus and “Black Starlight”

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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”…

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Hither Came Conan: John C. Hocking on “The Scarlet Citadel”

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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….

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “Vestments of Pestilence” by John C. Hocking

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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…

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The Sorcerers Guild Interviews John C. Hocking and John O’Neill

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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…

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John C. Hocking’s “The Face in the Sea” wins The Harper’s Pen Award

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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…

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John C. Hocking’s “The Face in the Sea” nominated for Harper’s Pen Award

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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…

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Black Gate 14 Sneak Peek: “The Bonestealer’s Mirror” by John C. Hocking

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Brand and his shipmates face dread sorcery on a strange isle in John C. Hocking’s “The Bonestealer’s Mirror,” the sequel to “The Face in the Sea” from Black Gate 13. We searched the labyrinth of sea-caves for hours, finally emerging in early afternoon, wet, hungry and tired. Asbjorn decided to return to Mord’s steading to collect Vali and Asdis, and to ask if the isle had more sea-caves in which the demon might lair.       We knew something was amiss as…

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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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Black Gate Online Fiction: The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

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Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz, the new fantasy novel from the author of the Books of the Shaper trilogy. A second mountain sat atop the first. Yet the second mountain was made of glowing gold, beaded with shimmering crystals set in weird designs. The second mountain had been carved into slim, pointed spires like tremendous teepees of gold. Giant domes of sparkling stone…

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