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Alone at the Edge of the World: The Witch

Alone at the Edge of the World: The Witch

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The Witch - Thomasin haunted-small

Have you ever considered the possibilities that would open up if certain common modern inventions had appeared much earlier than they actually did? (If you haven’t, humor me for the next few minutes and pretend that you have.)

Imagine, for example, that some starch-collared, black-hatted pre or proto-Edison had invented motion pictures some three hundred years before that technology really did arrive. What sort of films would have resulted? What kind of movies would have been made, for instance, by the dour puritans of New England?

Somehow, I don’t think that particular group would have been big on romantic comedies or caper pictures, and their 50 Shades of Grey would have been a sober documentary on the winter landscape of Massachusetts instead of… well, you know. Scary movies, on the other hand — they might well have gone in for those, and if you had gotten the corn shucking and butter churning done early some Saturday night in 1660, and had hopped on the family mule to trot into town to the Salem Cinema 6 to see a horror movie, you might have seen something very like The Witch.

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Dungeons, Dragons, and Vampires: Curse of Strahd

Dungeons, Dragons, and Vampires: Curse of Strahd

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Cover of the Curse of Strahd adventure supplement. (Source: Wizards of the Coast)
(Source: Wizards of the Coast)

The newest Dungeons & Dragons adventure supplement, Curse of Strahd, hits the stands at gaming stores around the world and brings the classic Ravenloft gothic horror setting alive for the 5th edition.

The game is built around the classic 1983 Module 16: Ravenloft adventure, written by Tracy and Laura Hickman. Ravenloft centered on the land of Barovia, one of the Domains of Dread that has been pulled from its home world and now exists in a cross-dimensional form within the Shadowfell region of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. One key aspect of this is that any world, any setting, can have contact with Barovia, as the barrier between the “normal” world and this dark gothic realm become weak. Adventurers become lost in a bizarre mist and find themselves in Barovia, the village that is home to Castle Ravenloft and the realm’s mysterious ruler, Count Strahd von Zarovich. This makes Curse of Strahd a potential resource for any campaign.

Curse of Strahd is really a mix of setting manual and adventure module in one, with a storyline that is extremely open-ended, with endings that (assuming the players survive) allow for continued adventures centered around the consequences of the players’ actions in Castle Ravenloft.

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February Short Story Roundup

February Short Story Roundup

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oie_1541359R5APPf00This past February was a weak month for new swords & sorcery short stories. In fact, I have only three stories to review: two, as usual, from Swords and Sorcery Magazine, and another from Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was a month, from a story reviewer’s perspective, that just fell into the gaps. Both Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Grimdark Magazine published issues last month (reviewed here already), and Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Fantasy Scroll were bereft of anything that fit the bill. Any other periodicals that might possibly publish something that at least sort of qualifies as S&S were quiet as well. That’s okay, though. It lets me spend a little time explaining why I prefer heroic fantasy in short story form to novel.

Swords & sorcery is action seasoned with darkness, with only one or two protagonists. A S&S short story, by its very nature, is forced to focus on the action and the hero. There’s no room for protracted descriptions of feasts or lengthy discussions of magic systems. Done right, it’s all short, sharp, shock. What I’m looking for from S&S is a jolt of escapism and I find it best delivered in small, adrenaline-rich doses. Think of the greatest classic S&S characters: Conan (“Red Nails”), Jirel (“Black God’s Kiss”), Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (“Bazaar of the Bizarre”), Kane (“Reflections for the Winter of My Soul”). Their greatest tales, their best remembered adventures, are in short stories, not novels.

From S&S I want crazy ideas and unflagging plot momentum, things that don’t always hold up for five hundred, let alone a thousand, pages. I want to see the world through one daring character’s eyes. The genre’s roots are in pulp fiction; the same melange of adventure and violence that gave rise to tough gumshoes and six gun-wearing cowboys. It’s simple (not simplistic) and direct: hard men and women doing hard things in a hard world. In S&S’s case, with monsters.

This doesn’t mean long form S&S isn’t good or can’t work. Of course it can. Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon and Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer show how. It’s just that most long form fantasy tends to be about the epic, the world-endangering events, and the struggles of whole nations starring casts of dozens, not a single hero. It gives the author the room to build the world he or she wants from the ground up, and fill page after page with lovingly detailed descriptions of any and everything. And that’s great and good when done well, but it’s not what I want from S&S.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: SH – Consulting Detective

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: SH – Consulting Detective

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SHCD_CoverLast week, we talked about the Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Game line. Today, we shift to something a bit more in line with this column’s title. Back in 1981, Sleuth Publications produced Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective (SHCD). Expansions, containing additional cases followed and it was also turned in to a PC game. I never played any of these games. Which might make you wonder why I’m doing a post on it now. Well, if you’ve visited this column before, you know that I don’t let little things like that get in my way. However, I have played the 2015 reprint of SHCD and that’s what we’re looking at today.

In the game, you are one of the famed ‘Baker Street Irregulars,’ the ragged street urchins. I’ve read in reviews that you play Wiggins, but that’s not quite the case. But that makes no difference to the game: just wanted to point it out. Holmes is too busy (and presumably Watson is too clueless) to deal with some unsolved crimes, so he sends you (and Wiggins) out to do his job for him. Really, that’s what’s going on.

The game box contains five components. First is a very slender rulebook. There’s also a map of London with quadrant and building numbers. There is a London Directory that tells you where to find people and places on the map. This ID system ties back to the Casebook, which briefly describes the crime (this is where Holmes gives you your marching orders) and contains all the leads you will follow to try and solve the case. And there are some replica newspapers that contain mostly chaff, but there is also a little bit of wheat to be sorted out.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

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2011 Hugo Award-smallThe top article at Black Gate last month wasn’t even a BG piece, strictly speaking. It was a brief link to Matthew David Surridge’s essay The Great Hugo Wars of 2015, at Splice Today. Based on the overwhelming traffic to that article, and the high number of comments, it seems our readers are still more than casually interested in the Hugo Awards.

Number 2 on the list was M Harold Page’s look at Fool’s Assassin, and How Robin Hobb Writes Lyrical Fantasy Without Being Boring. As always, never underestimate the power of a great title. It was followed by our obituary for BG contributor and author Bud Webster.

Rounding out the Top Five were Matthew Wuertz’s piece on a 60-year old scandal, the Galaxy Science Fiction $6,500 Novel-Writing Sham, and Donald Crankshaw’s review of D. P. Prior’s second self-published fantasy novel Carnifex, the sequel to his popular debut The Nameless Dwarf.

Also in the Top Ten for February were Doug Ellis’ historical essay on the Great Pulp Gathering at Mort Weisinger’s House in 1937, Marie Bilodeau’s review of season one of The Flash, Fletcher Vredenburgh’s detailed look at Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Illearth War, our sneak peek at Salomé Jones’s new anthology Cthulhu Lies Dreaming, and Violette Malan’s look at Agent Carter.

The complete list of Top Articles for February follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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Superhero TV: Arrow

Superhero TV: Arrow

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The Arrow. I’ve been told by the ladies that he is easy on the eyes.

Over the last several weeks, a Canadian cadre of Black Gate‘s bloggers have formed an Alpha Flight of super-bloggers to right the wrongs of the world, especially where such wrongs take the form of you not knowing about every superhero TV show we can talk about.

This is going to be my last post in this huge comic event, and to cap off my contribution, I wanted to dig into the CW’s Arrow which has been running since 2012 and is into its fourth season. It has the same producers as The Flash and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (also running on CW) and CBS’ Supergirl, and they occupy the same universe (multiverse in the case of Supergirl).

Green Arrow is not a new DC property, dating back to 1941. Green Arrow was a Robin Hood-themed character cast in the same mold as Batman, so much so that he also started as a millionaire, had a kid sidekick, and an Arrow Car and an Arrow-Plane.

In fact, there wasn’t much to separate him from Batman for much of his early years, which begs the question of, if you’re looking for Batman, why not just buy a Batman comic?

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A Pearl Among Emeralds: The Alhambra Palace

A Pearl Among Emeralds: The Alhambra Palace

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Alhambra towerAccording to at least one source, Granada’s Alhambra Palace is the most visited tourist attraction in Spain. I’m sure the people in Barcelona would argue that their Sagrada Familia actually holds that honour, but the fact is that people have been going to visit the Alhambra since it became a Moorish royal palace in 1333. Or at least since Washington Irving wrote his Tales of the Alhambra in 1840.

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The Castles of Gondar, Ethiopia

The Castles of Gondar, Ethiopia

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The palace of Fasiladas, Gondar, Ethiopia.
The palace of Fasiladas, Gondar, Ethiopia.

The building in this photo looks a bit strange. It appears European but also has a style uniquely its own. One might be excused for thinking that this is European Colonial architecture in some far-off colony, but in fact it was built by one of Ethiopia’s most anti-colonial emperors.

The Emperor Fasiladas reigned from 1632 to 1667 and was a strong ruler right from the start. Like the Merovingian kings and the Moroccan sultans, Fasiladas had to contend with powerful noble families who had close connections to their local tribes and clans. Ethiopian emperors would spend much of their time in the saddle, going on “visits” to their provinces with large armies in tow.

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Big Magic in a Business Suit

Big Magic in a Business Suit

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Marshall Versus the Assassins-small
12th century and mystic conspiracy stuff — Go!

So I am doing a historical project for a client. I’ve done this before several times now: “12th century and mystic conspiracy stuff —  Go!”

How does this chime with Elizabeth “Eat, Love, Pray” Gilbert’s Big Magic that was all about; “Be serious about having fun being creative but don’t burden it or yourself by taking it too seriously or expecting too much from it”?

What happens when your creativity becomes a serious thing because (a) people are paying you for it, and (b) you are using it to pay other people (like shops that sell food your children eat)? What happens when you are (c) doing it to order?

In my case we’re talking writing fiction. In other cases it could be sword fighting (I know several people who do this professionally), writing, costuming, dancing, burlesque…(we know who you are).

How do you play for money?

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The Lost Level by Brian Keene

The Lost Level by Brian Keene

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oie_62316zU0eMAQ8Lost worlds, pocket universes, dimensional traveling: these are things that warm my heart. Barsoom, the World of Tiers, and the Land of the Lost are places I want to see. A sword-swinging hero and warrior princess, well that’s pretty great by me. If your reactions are like mine then you are Brian Keene’s target audience for The Lost Level (2015), his love song to a certain kind of glorious pulp adventure that there aren’t enough of anymore. On the acknowledgements page he spells out explicitly the artists whose works helped inspire The Lost Level: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Sid and Marty Krofft, Roy Thomas, Joe R. Lansdale, Mike Grell, John Eric Holmes, Karl Edward Wagner, Otis Adelbert Kline, Carlton Mellick III, and H.G. Wells. A tantalizing roll call of pulp genius. I am definitely this book’s target.

See that cover to the left? Even before I read a glowing review from Charles Rutledge, someone whose opinion I trust, that cover (by Kirsi Salonen) bellowed “BUY ME!” so loud and clear I knew I couldn’t hold out for long. Briefly, The Lost Level is the tale of a man from Earth lost in a different dimension, and his adventures alongside a warrior princess and a furry, blue alien. Now that I’ve read it… well, I really love the cover.

Brian Keene is best known as a prolific writer of gonzo horror (38 novels and 10 story collections over 13 years). His first novel, The Rising is credited with helping spark the current zombie craze, but I think it’s too good to merit the blame. I’ve only dipped a toe into his vast body of work but it’s been fun, if a little bloody. His established talent, coupled with that eye-popping cover, led me to have high hopes for the book.

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