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Talking Over the Drowning City: An Interview with Christopher Golden, Co-Author of Joe Golem, Occult Detective

Talking Over the Drowning City: An Interview with Christopher Golden, Co-Author of Joe Golem, Occult Detective

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Joe Golem Occult Detective-smallI’ve been e-interviewing different comics creators (indie comics guys Mirror Comics and graphic novelist-turned-TV producer Jay Odjick) as well as comic book editors (Xander Jarowey, Heather Antos, Jake Thomas, and Daniel Ketchum, all from Marvel Comics).

This time out, I wanted to chat with Christopher Golden, a best-selling author and one half of the writing team (along with Mike Mignola) on the 5-issue series Joe Golem: Occult Detective, from Dark Horse. Issue #1 comes out in November, but Dark Horse was kind enough to share an advanced view with Black Gate for this interview 🙂

Click on any of the artwork in this article for bigger versions.

Hey Christopher. Thanks for the chance to chat. I read a review copy of Joe Golem, Occult Detective, and really enjoyed it. I hadn’t seen the world of the Drowning City before, but it was compelling.

Glad you dug it. Mike and I spent a lot of time crafting this world, making sure all the weird pieces fit, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what readers think.

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Destroying Your Garden of Victory

Destroying Your Garden of Victory

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Even princes make the time to destroy their gardens.
Even princes make the time to destroy their gardens.

Winter is coming. Not in an unspecified amount of time, either. It’s coming, like, soon (ish). The days grow shorter, the winds howly-er, and the nights demand duvets. There’s not denying it, people. It’s time to Destroy your Garden of Victory.

… why destroy it? BECAUSE OTHERWISE WINTER WINS! If you do not burn your own house, and your neighbor burns it for you instead, does that neighbor then not win? But if you burn it first, and you stand beside it like a badass warrior, then you, my friend, win. You built the garden! Now you must destroy it!

So don’t wuss out – destroy your garden now!*

1. Have a Final Outdoor Battle

Nobody likes winter battles, let’s face it. They’re cold, blood gets all frozen, swords don’t wobble as effectively and the dangers of pneumonia are real. Plus, winter armor is heavy and uncomfortable. So, invite your neighbors for that final battle now! Be imaginative in how you taunt them to battle – remember, this is your last battle for probably half a year. Steal their sheep and sheer your flag into their side. Paint their fences an ugly color. Raise flags bearing insulting taunts. Just make it clear that the battle must take place in your garden and the winner gets the Victory Goat for the next six months. (Bonus: blood is great fertilizer for when you prepare next year’s Garden of Victory!)

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Armored Rampage!

Armored Rampage!

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SVT 256
“Write what you know”, they said.

Somebody yells, “Form a wedge! Form a wedge!”

This is my last chance to experience something I’ve craved since reading Ronald Welch’s Sun of York back when I was twelve. I love my plate armor, but I’m now in my forties, a dad, and my days of hitting the road with my armor are numbered. (“Write what you know”, they said. So I had set out to know what I wanted to write about.)

“Let me go first!”

I take my place at the front of the knot of my friends in armor from different periods. Everybody jostles around and, without the benefit of NCOs, forms a rough triangle with me at the point.

Ahead, the Viking ranks stiffen, dress their shields. Locals mostly, and many of them students, so there’s a lot of quilted armor and even some linen shirts.

I grin into my visor. We’re older, heavier in build. One-to-one we outweigh them and we’ve concentrated our weight into a human battering ram…

…and yes, it’s a small multi-period medieval faire at St Andrews, Scotland. The weapons aren’t sharp. It’s not real.

But read on, because the experience was illuminating…

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A Few Thoughts on Jack Cady’s The Off Season

A Few Thoughts on Jack Cady’s The Off Season

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The Off Season Jack Cady-smallI have not read all of Jack Cady’s novels (one is socked away in a cache of books meant for a time when I can enjoy more leisure reading), but I’ve read most of them and The Off Season is my favorite.

One reason is because I edited the book and twenty years later, I have only good memories of the experience. Perhaps the file for the book, somewhere in the basement of the Flatiron building in Manhattan, is full of contentious correspondence, but if so, those memories are buried deeper than that basement. I don’t remember any difficult negotiations, no spats over editing the book or the cover design. The Off Season was not a book that made anybody rich, but the experience of publishing it was one of many small joys.

(I do, by the way, remember a wonderfully cranky letter Jack sent me concerning copyediting. He said something to the effect of, “I’ve gone on the record of saying how much I hate the city of Chicago. Hate the weather, hate the architecture. When I was driving, I’d go miles out of my way to avoid that city. But my feelings for Chicago pale in comparison with my hatred for The Chicago Manual of Style.” I’m pretty sure, however, that Jack sent me that letter in regard to another work.)

There are other reasons why The Off Season is my favorite, but first, let me tell you a bit about Jack.

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DRACULA THE UNDEAD by Freda Warrington

DRACULA THE UNDEAD by Freda Warrington

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NOTE: The following article was first published on January 22, 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.

draclargeDracula The UnDeadDracula the Undead by Freda Warrington is a true rarity – a sequel to a literary classic that doesn’t pale in comparison. Warrington is a respected British fantasy and horror author with a loyal following in the UK. Her prose is worthy of greater acclaim. Dracula the Undead was first published as a paperback original in the UK in 1997 to coincide with the centennial of Stoker’s classic. The book gained some decent reviews but never made it across the Atlantic and seemed doomed to fade into obscurity.

Flash forward to October 2009 and the publication of Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s “authorized” sequel, Dracula the Un-Dead. Their book received a great deal of media attention and was displayed prominently in retail bookstores. It was the sequel I wanted to love as a Stoker fan, but I’m afraid I am far too much of a purist to embrace it. However, I did note that Severn House (a British publisher that started out in the mid-seventies recycling titles from another British bargain-priced reprint specialty press, Tom Stacey) was bringing the Freda Warrington book back in a hardcover edition to capitalize on the attention granted the nearly identically-titled Stoker/Holt sequel. I was aware of the Warrington book and since my book shelf already contained a few Severn House titles from decades past, I was happy to see they had now acquired US distribution so I made a point of picking the book up.

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A Meditation on Writer’s Block

A Meditation on Writer’s Block

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And the route was wide open just hours before
And the route was wide open just hours before

Lights-out had come two hours before, but I couldn’t sleep with the deadline looming. Rising from the squeaky metal cot, I left my cubicle and padded through the darkened corridors of the Black Gate writer’s bullpen. From all sides, the satisfied snores of my fellow writers echoed in the cavernous space just below the boiler rooms. Further up the narrow passage, I saw light spilling from one of the cubicles, and recognized with relief that it was the cell belonging to Ryan Harvey.

Creeping quickly along the narrow passages between the darkened cubes, pausing only to avoid the searchlights that raked the area from above, I ducked through the bead curtain that separated Ryan from his fellows. In the center of the cubicle, atop a small cushion on a richly woven rug, was the man himself. His eyes were nearly closed, his legs crossed, his fingertips gently touching, the very picture of serenity. At the faint rattle of the beads, his eyes opened fully.

“Mr. Harvey, sir?” I ventured.

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said, gesturing to a nearby cushion.

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It Is A Busy Omniverse: The Sword of Shadows: The Voidal Vol. 3 by Adrian Cole

It Is A Busy Omniverse: The Sword of Shadows: The Voidal Vol. 3 by Adrian Cole

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Tyrandire, the Palace of Pain, moves secretly and silently through unseen tunnels between the many dimensions of the omniverse, traversing any of them that its grim master wishes to visit. A minute moon, perfectly circular, colder than terror, Tyrandire speeds on its way like light, sometimes lingering like a biting frost. The energy that charges this oval missile is greater than that of any sun, indeed greater than the energy contained within an entire universe, for it is the will of the outlaw god, Ubeggi the Deceitful. Where Ubeggi seeks to go, his Palace of Pain takes him. He has many missions, all of them selfish, all of them corrupt, for the Weaver of Wars exists solely for his own amusement and he delights in knotting together the workings of more thoughful gods or undoing their orderly tapestries of fate. All the gods know of Ubeggi, and when his Palace of Pain nears their own haunts in the omniverse, they curse him, knowing that his mischief will be upon them.

                                                                                                                from Part One: The Weaver of Wars

And so, with The Sword of Shadows, we come to the end of the Voidal’s saga. For a series I have already called favorably “a study in sensory overload,” and “excessive, over the top, and incredibly phatasmagorical,” author Adrian Cole ends things as madly and wildly as a reader could hope.

Three of its eight chapters, were published previously as short stories: “The Weaver of Wars,” “At the Council of Gossipers,” and “Dark Destroyer.” Unlike the two previous books, this one reads more like a coherent novel than as a fix-up.

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Dracula: The Definitive Edition

Dracula: The Definitive Edition

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NOTE:  The following article was first published on January 17, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these first 20 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.

Drac Def EdDracula by Bram Stoker is the subject of my very first article as a blogger. I follow several book review blogs, but had mixed feelings about starting my own. Blogs serve no useful purpose save providing a few minutes of distraction from the mundane. As a result, they are fairly inconsequential in the Grand Scheme of Life, but infinitely more useful than a politician.

Dracula is slowly gaining acceptance in literary circles as more than just a genre classic and deservedly so. Of course, mass acceptance for a novel that has never been out of print in its 118 years on the planet means that there are literally hundreds of public domain copies to choose from for the unwary consumer. The focus of this review is on Dracula: The Definitive Edition available from Fall River Press. This edition is recommended not only for Edward Gorey’s fine illustrations and Marvin Kaye’s impressive essays and notes on the text, but it is also affordably priced.

This gets my nod over the many annotated editions out there for the simple fact that Mr. Kaye gives the modern reader all they need to know to enjoy the novel in the context it was written without getting bogged down endlessly in railway timetables and notes on Transylvanian culture, cuisine, superstition, or topography. Nor does he become sidetracked in speculation on Stoker’s marriage, sex life, or physical and mental health. Mr. Kaye provides the salient biographical details and expounds on details that are relevant to better appreciating the text and nothing more. His essays are a model of efficiency and stand on the strength of their factual accuracy above the more verbose and salacious theories one comes to expect with literary classics.

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Adventures in Spellcraft: Rope Trick

Adventures in Spellcraft: Rope Trick

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Calling all old-school gamers, the folks who cut their teeth on the Players1st-edition-players-handbook Handbook, the Monster Manual, or even those long-lost oddities like Eldritch Wizardry and Greyhawk. For those of us still standing, which I do hope is the majority, I’d like to take a quick stroll down Memory Lane.

Don’t worry, it’s only a block or so away, just past Green Town, Illinois, and not so far from my last (highly opinionated) write-up on the ill-behaved sorcery known as Chain Lightning.

Great. Now that we’re walking, let me ask, do you remember that clever little escape hatch spell, Rope Trick? Very handy for “taking five” in the midst of a battle not otherwise going well. Very useful for getting undisturbed shut-eye while camped overnight in hostile territory. Very helpful when the goal of your particular role-playing adventure is to drive the GM bats.

The basics, for those who may not recall, is that the casting of a Rope Trick causes a length of rope to suspend itself vertically in mid-air. Anyone shinnying up the rope will disappear, arriving in a pocket of extra-planar space. The Players Handbook phrased it this way:

The upper end is in fact fastened in an extra-dimensional space, and the spell caster up to five others can climb up the rope and disappear into this place of safety where no creature can find them.

(I’m on page seventy-one, second level magic user spells, for those of you following along on the app.)

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Peril on the Purple Planet

Peril on the Purple Planet

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purple planet 1With NASA announcing astonishing news about the red planet, I thought it high time to talk about the purple planet, and the perils therein.

Maybe YOU were clued in, but despite a widely advertised Kickstarter campaign the impending release – nay, even the existence – of the purple planet completely passed me by until I swung by tenfootpole.org and read an enthusiastic review of a splendid sword-and-planet setting. I determined then and there to lay my hands on the product and learn about those perils myself.

purple planet 2My verdict? If you love sword-and-planet you need it. Even if Dungeon Crawl Classics isn’t your role-playing system of choice, you need it. Hell, you might even need if if you like sword-and-planet and don’t intend to game, because it’s just a blast. And I can highly recommend getting the boxed set. In his own review at tenfootpole, Bruce Lynch laments that it could be even cooler if there are more locations, because he read only the basic adventure. Voila, there ARE, within the set.

For once, the hype on the back cover copy delivers on all that it promises. If this sounds good to you, go ye forth and buy it: “The Purple Planet: Where Tribes of man-beasts wage an endless war beneath a dying sun. Where might death orms rule the wastes, befouled winds whistle through ancient crypts, and forests of fungi flourish in the weirdling light. Where ancient technologies offer life… or a quick death.” If that doesn’t sound interesting, I won’t bother trying to convince you to look within.

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