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The Thin Veil: An All Hallows Eve to Remember

The Thin Veil: An All Hallows Eve to Remember

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Werewolves, witches, vampires, ghosts, goblins and demons are de rigueur for American Halloween celebrations. The creepier and scarier, the better. Homes are decorated with skeletons, spiders, eerie lights, webs and dark passages. Candles in carved pumpkins reflect grinning smiles and pointed teeth. Dracula, Frankenstein, zombies and orcs guard the doors. In the background wolves howl and the screams of the undead echo through the yard waiting for brave trick or treaters. Small children in their Pixar or super hero costumes approach warily, receive their treat and exit holding even tighter to mom or dad’s hand.

Ridgeway Grandfather Clock built in 1981 St. Michael’s Chime
Ridgeway Grandfather Clock built in 1981. St. Michael’s Chime

But not all the world shares our American Halloween traditions. There are cultures that celebrate All Hallows Eve as a night of magic believing at midnight the veil between the world of the living and that of the dead gets thinner.

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Six Sure-to-Succeed Sword and Sorcery Costumes

Six Sure-to-Succeed Sword and Sorcery Costumes

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Barbarian cosplay 2-smallI love Hallowe’en. Little gouls running alongside little bumblebees, all demanding spoils from their neighbors… it truly is a magical time. But, as in any great holiday, the trick is not to become too complacent. There are no tiny Conans or Red Sonjas, or at least no critical mass of them. They certainly couldn’t take down the army of Iron Men and princesses. LET US CHANGE THIS! Bring back some trick-or-treating sword and sorcery cheer to this candy-laced night by wearing a classic and notable costume!

The Bloody Villager
The bell rings. Your neighbor opens it, smile wide, bowl of candy clasped in hand, when suddenly they spot a bloodied, soiled dude dragging himself to their door, begging for a piece of food, any food, while raving about attacking marauders. You neighbors won’t expect it. They might give you something better than candy, like a sandwich! They might just call the cops. Thing is, you won’t know until you try.

Chainmail Bikini Kevlar Mash Up
Kevlar-mail Bikini. Need I even explain why this is so cool? (For those in the more northern regions: frozen skin shade would go lovely with blue-tinged bikini.)

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Goth Chick News: Pride, Prejudice, Zombies and Seth Grahame-Smith

Goth Chick News: Pride, Prejudice, Zombies and Seth Grahame-Smith

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies poster-smallAs you probably know by now, the author-side of Seth Grahame-Smith is fond of taking classic tales and turning them into horror stories. And if you’ve ever read one of those stories you might be of the mind that he’s a better screen writer / producer than he is an author.

Or at least I am.

Case in point: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was one of those books I couldn’t get my hands on fast enough back in 2010, having been previously gifted with a copy of SGS’s book How to Survive a Horror Movie (which to this day never fails to make me chuckle). But in spite of the fact it debuted at number four on the NYT’s Best Seller List, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter felt a little like SGS had conscripted a public-domained biography of Abraham Lincoln and stuck in some paragraphs here and there about vampires.

No – it actually felt a lot like that.

Which is primarily why I never backtracked and read SGS’s previous foray into this reworked genre, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Published in 2009, the idea for the novel came from SGS’s editor at Quirk Books. Using Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice as a platform, it was suggested that SGS mix a zombie plot into the novel; which is precisely what he did, comparing the entire creative process to doing “microsurgery” on Austen’s original text.

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Short Speculative Fiction: “Tragic Business” by Emil Ostrovski

Short Speculative Fiction: “Tragic Business” by Emil Ostrovski

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https://www.blackgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Lightspeed-October-2015-small.jpg

Today’s column is devoted entirely to Emil Ostrovski’s short story “Tragic Business,” published in this month’s Lightspeed. You can read it for free here. To entice you to click, behold the opening sentence:

“Once, an apple named Evan fell in love with a hummingbird, as moldy apples lying in irradiated playgrounds are sometimes wont to do.”

There now. You can’t possibly resist reading a story with that opening line, can you? At only 2,369 words, it’s brief and witty and zips by in ten minutes or less. In its surrealistic, witty logic it reminds me most of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. From here I’ll delve into spoilers, so go read your Ostrovski and then come back for the full discussion.

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Mindjammer Returns

Mindjammer Returns

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mindjammer1Longtime Black Gate visitors and readers might remember a time, long ago, when  I gushed about a great new FATE powered science fiction role-playing game, Mindjammer. Back then, it was an expansion for the excellent space opera setting Starblazer Adventures.

Now it’s an animal on its own, and was nominated for two Ennies (the role-playing award handed out each year at GenCon) just this year. I can see why.

I was already impressed with Mindjammer. Back in 2010 Sarah Newton did a fabulous job creating strange new societies and making the far future gameable, including the concepts of neural implants, synthetic humanoids with thanograms (deceased human personalities), sentient starships, and other impressive ideas.

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Down These Mean Streets the Obsessive Biographer Must Go

Down These Mean Streets the Obsessive Biographer Must Go

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NOTE: The following article was first published on February 28, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

Long EmbraceChandler catLiterary biographies can sometimes prove to be a peculiar form of torture. I suppose their purpose is to see if the reader is still capable of mustering the same affection for the author’s work after reveling in every personal flaw the biographer was able to uncover. Biographies are the ultimate way of evening the score with those whose talent we will never equal. They reassure us that the gifted individuals who gained immortality through their work were certainly no better and frequently even worse human beings than those of us who admire them. Thanks to literary biographies, many view the father of sword & sorcery as a clinically depressed mama’s boy angry at the world and the father of hardboiled fiction as…well, let’s face it… there was nothing you could ever say about Hammett he didn’t already tell you about himself. This article concerns itself with Judith Freeman’s biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace.

I would not say that the book is unworthy of attention. Judith Freeman is an exceptional writer. She traces Chandler’s footsteps (even though it has been more than half a century since his death) by visiting every place he lived, worked, and vacationed and describes what she finds in a voice that Chandler fans will frequently recognize. It is a voice that is as evocative of Chandler’s work as the book’s title. The trouble is that Freeman isn’t writing a new Philip Marlowe mystery so much as transposing herself in Chandler’s shoes as a fellow author and kindred spirit. As the book unravels, she comes to share Chandler’s devotion to his wife and muse of over thirty years. The result is a bit like watching Otto Preminger’s classic film noir, Laura (1944) in that The Long Embrace shifts its focus and unfolds into a growing love story between a living person and a dead woman the narrator never met. Some readers will find the result enchanting, others will just find it creepy.

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The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

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oie_2654127zETQGQbIIn his 1978 essay “On Thud and Blunder,” Poul Anderson pointed out that heroic fantasy was “overpast for drawing inspiration from other milieus — Oriental, Near Eastern, North and Black African, Amerindian, Polynesian.” While I’m still looking for Polynesian swords & sorcery, Black Gate alumnus John R. Fultz, has written the first full Native American novel of heroic fantasy that I’m aware of: The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015).

I must admit I’ve corresponded and debated with John several times about heroic fantasy. He’s as deeply conversant with the history of S&S as anybody I know. He brings that knowledge plus a deep love for the genre to his writing. I recommend his collection The Revelations of Zang as well as his Books of the Shaper trilogy — both are wildly inventive and fun. So I went into his new book expecting good things and I was not disappointed.

Fultz’s novel is a wonderful throwback to the golden days of swords & sorcery of the 1970s. In only 324 pages, Testament recounts the adventures of Tall Eagle, a young man of a Great Plains Indian tribe in the days just before the introduction of horses to his people. It’s possessed of a straightforward narrative that’s as lean and fierce as a wolf. Instead of the Clark Ashton Smith-like prose of his previous books, much of Testament reads like a brutally realistic historical saga of 17th century Plains Indian life… until the monsters show up. And they do, in great, slimy droves.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Wrath of Fu Manchu, Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Wrath of Fu Manchu, Part Two

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Tom Stacey Wrathdaw_fu_manchuWhen Rohmer scholar, Dr. Robert E. Briney compiled a posthumous hardcover collection of the author’s rare and previously uncollected short fiction in the early 1970s, he included three short stories that were first published in This Week magazine in between Rohmer’s last two Fu Manchu novels. The stories were subsequently reprinted in sequence in Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine between January and March 1966 where the latter two stories were retitled. The hardcover collection, The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other New Stories was first published in the U.K. in 1973 by Tom Stacey. A U.S. mass market paperback edition from DAW Books followed in 1976. The collection was subsequently reprinted in 2001 as part of Allison & Busby’s Fu Manchu Omnibus – Volume 5. Titan Books will reprint the original collection as a trade paperback in March 2016.

“The Eyes of Fu Manchu” was serialized in two installments in This Week magazine on October 6 and 13, 1957. It first appeared in book form when Dr. Briney added it to the 1970 Ace paperback collection, The Secret of Holm Peel and Other Strange Stories. The story opens with Sir Denis Nayland Smith attending a lecture at the Sorbonne by an American scientist, Dr. Gregory Allen. Dr. Allen is a specialist in the possible chemical means of halting or even reversing the effects of aging. Sir Denis correctly believes Dr. Allen’s research will draw him to the attention of Dr. Fu Manchu. He makes plans to attend Dr. Allen’s upcoming lecture at King’s College in London with Dr. Petrie who is flying in from Cairo.

Rohmer mines one of his own life’s episodes when he encountered and began an extramarital affair with a young bohemian woman while on a voyage to Madeira. Here, Gregory Allen meets a young bohemian woman named Mignon while crossing the English Channel. Mignon is an artist and, upon learning Gregory abandoned his study of art for science, she makes some pointed remarks about his abandoning the bohemian life of freedom and truth for one of compromised values as part of the Establishment. Her words seem to sting Dr. Allen as much as her beauty and youth charm him just as Rohmer, the former bohemian turned established bestselling author and husband must have felt when he began his own affair with a younger free spirit on his voyage to Portugal years before.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes, the Police & Scotland Yard

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes, the Police & Scotland Yard

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SY_MoranThe most common official police force encountered during Holmes’s sixty cases was Scotland Yard. One can safely say that Doyle’s portrayal of the men of the force was somewhat less than flattering. None ever outsmarted Holmes (though one came pretty close) and most of them are adrift until Holmes reveals all at the end of the story.

Scotland Yard was actually the descendant of an earlier police force in London. In 1748, Henry Fielding succeeded Thomas de Veil as Court Justice for Middlesex and Westminster, with headquarters on Bow Street. Fielding hired nine men to go out and catch criminals. This was, in essence, the first police force in London.

These ‘Bow Street Runners’ wore red vests and carried pistols. For eighty years, they were the only thief takers in London. Since there were never more than fifteen at a time, they were slightly outnumbered by the criminals.

In 1829, backed by Home Secretary Robert Peel, the Metropolitan Police Improvement Bill passed, creating an Office of Police for metropolitan London. It did not, however, include the one-square mile City of London, bounded by the ancient Roman walls. ‘The City’ retained that independence, which did not prove useful during the Jack the Ripper killings.

A nightstick and a rattle for summoning help were standard issue; guns were not. They were servants of the public and their power was to be based on the respect of the people, not fear.

It’s Elementary – ‘Peelers’ and ‘bobbies’ are nicknames for the London police and come from Sir Robert Peel’s name.

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The Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava, October 25, 1854, Part I of II

The Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava, October 25, 1854, Part I of II

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Hell Riders-smallIntroduction

At 11:10 a.m., on October 25, 1854, one hundred sixty-one years ago, the almost seven hundred men of the Light Brigade stood waiting. The Brigade moved forward when the officer’s trumpeter sounded the “Walk.” It was immediately taken up by the regimental trumpeters to the right and left, so that it could be heard by the whole body of cavalry. When the first line was clear of the second, the order came to “Trot.” The bugles sounded again and the regiment increased its pace to about eight miles an hour. The more experienced cavalry men were adept at judging distances and knew at this pace, it would take them at least seven minutes to reach the enemy.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of volumes have been written about the events during and leading up to that seven minutes. An in-depth analysis of the battle is beyond the scope of this article. The story for this anniversary is told as much as possible in the voices of the men who rode down that valley. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes and facts are from Hell Riders The True Story of the Charge of the Light Brigade by Terry Brighton (2004). This is possible because the author, Terry Brighton, a British military history, using his unique access to regimental archives, draws on twenty years of research to tell the story of the survivors, in their own words. Only a small portion of their stories can be told here. This fascinating book is available online and is highly recommended.

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