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Supernatural Spotlight – Season Two and Three Recap

Supernatural Spotlight – Season Two and Three Recap

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supernatural-season21When last we left Sam and Dean Winchester, they’d rejoined their father, John, and confronted the demon that killed their mother (a demon with glowing yellow eyes, named Azazel), but the demon got away. Season one ended with their car being slammed into by a semi being driven by a demon.

Now, allow me to spoil a couple more seasons of the show, before the season 6 premiere on Friday.

Season Two

Season two starts immediately after the accident, with the demon trying getting out of the semi to kill them. Sam, however, is conscious, and he’s able to chase the demon off with the Colt. (Remember, the Colt is a special gun they located which can kill any demon.)

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Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan and the Amazon

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan and the Amazon

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081252493401lzzzzzzzConan and the Amazon
John Maddox Roberts (Tor, 1995)

You may have noticed that in my series of reviews of Conan pastiche novels, I have yet to review an entry from Roland Green.

That is correct. I have not. Noted. Moving on. . . .

Of the authors of the long-running Tor series of novels, which started with Robert Jordan’s Conan the Invincible in 1982 and concluded with Roland Green’s Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza in 1997, with Harry Turtledove’s Conan of Venarium as something of a “coda” in 2004, John Maddox Roberts is the most consistently entertaining. (I love the novels from John C. Hocking and Karl Edward Wagner, but as each man unfortunately wrote only a single book, the sample is much smaller.) Roberts was the first new author to take over when Robert Jordan retired from the series after seven books published over only three years. In the eight novels that Roberts wrote, he shows deft ability with storytelling and action scenes, and a thankful tendency not to overplay his hand and try to ape Robert E. Howard’s style. His first Conan novel, Conan the Valorous, is one of the best of the Tor series, and shows a superior handling of the barbarian’s homeland of Cimmeria than Turtledove would achieve in Conan of Venarium.

However, Roberts had his down moments, and alas he stumbled at the finish line.

Conan and the Amazon is the last of Roberts’s Conan novels. It’s also his poorest, although a plot description, the salacious promise of the title, and a great cover with a super-croc would indicate it has sword-and-sorcery joys aplenty inside.

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part IV)

Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part IV)

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This is the fourth in a series of posts investigating the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy (you can find the first part here, the second here, and the third here). By ‘otherworld fantasy’ I mean a story set entirely in another world, with no framing device to connect it to reality. Traditionally, the credit for inventing otherworld fantasy has been given to William Morris. I have another figure in mind.

You can see her there on the right.

In 1837, Sara Coleridge, the daughter of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published a book called Phantasmion, which was received, and reviewed, as a fairy tale novel. And, at first glance, it certainly seems similar to the German and French fairy tales that were popular at around that time. But I don’t think it reads like a fairy tale, certainly not once it gets going.

It reads very like a high fantasy. In fact, like an otherworld fantasy.

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Mortals, meet Demon Lovers: A review of Goblin Fruit Magazine, Part II

Mortals, meet Demon Lovers: A review of Goblin Fruit Magazine, Part II

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goblin-fruit-autumn2Okay, this is the Age of the Internet, so you’ve probably had this experience.

Say you’ve met a couple of like-minded ladies at a few writing conventions (as described in Part I). Say these conventions were World Fantasy 2007 and WisCon 2008 respectively. Say you’ve set about exchanging a million emails with these ladies, the occasional phone call, friending them on LiveJournal and Facebook, and rediscovering, happily, the merits of snail mail. These ladies just happen to be the two editors of Goblin Fruit Magazine.

Fantastic! You send them your really long rhyme-y poems nobody else wants, and sometimes they even take them, and even when they don’t, they seem to like you anyway. Life is totally Utopian.

You all read fantasy, right? What happens after Utopia?

DOOM!

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Birthdays and Funerals

Birthdays and Funerals

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sh_headStrange Horizons not only pioneered the notion of an on-line “magazine” devoted to speculative fiction, but is still around today to talk about it.  In fact, Strange Horizons is celebrating its tenth anniversary, which also happens to coincide to its annual fund drive. The magazine is somewhat unique in that it operates on a “PBS-like” donation model (without the nature and cooking shows coupled with pop concerts from performers whose better days date back to the 1970s that  your financial support of  somehow makes you a last bastion of “high culture”).  It seems to have worked.  Take a look at its very first issue.

On a more somber note, this just in on the continuing decline of the physical bookstore, albeit the big box model that a few years ago everyone was lamenting was killing off neighborhood independent bookstores.

Whatever the fate of the physical book, the future looks like it might be in the hands of the little guy who can figure out a niche to, if not thrive in, at least be comfortable in. Not such a bad thing,

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Two – “Monsters of Mongo”

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Two – “Monsters of Mongo”

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200px-blbmonstersofmongo“Monsters of Mongo” was the second installment of Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally printed between April 15 and November 18, 1934, “Monsters of Mongo” picked up the storyline where the first installment, “Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo” left off with an unconscious Flash being rescued from Princess Aura by the Lion Men.

Alex Raymond really begins to hit his stride in portraying the diversity of life on Mongo in this second installment. Prince Thun and Dale Arden are prisoners of Ming’s soldiers. Thun’s father, King Jugrid has retaliated by destroying the kingdom of the Shark Men. Ming’s soldiers have, in turn, annihilated much of the Lion Men’s fleet.

monsters-of-mongoJugrid orders Aura’s execution. Flash fights to save her life and the two are rescued by Prince Barin. It is in Barin’s kingdom that Flash is at last reunited with Dr. Zarkov. Flash and Zarkov soon form an alliance with Barin and Aura as the unlikely quartet determine to overthrow Emperor Ming.

Of course, Aura being Ming’s daughter quickly betrays our heroes. The sequence culminates in one of the strip’s iconic images as Barin and Flash power the Electric Mole to burrow their way underground and crash through the floor of Ming’s palace just before he can wed Dale.

The influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ AT THE EARTH’S CORE is heavily felt in the Electric Mole sequence, but it is Burroughs’ JOHN CARTER stories that have the greater influence in Raymond’s sophisticated approach in revealing Mongo’s green god, Tao as a hoax.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Season One Recap

Supernatural Spotlight – Season One Recap

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supernatural-season1If you haven’t been watching Supernatural, then I can completely sympathize. I actually didn’t start watching the show until halfway through season two, mainly because I didn’t care to watch a series that was nothing more than a mindless monster hunting show.

What I didn’t realize was that this was actually one of the deepest monster hunting shows ever on television. (Yes, that includes Buffy and Angel.)

I imagine that the people involved with the show didn’t necessarily always know how deep the show was going to become. The series was probably fairly easy to pitch:

Two brothers, who are demon hunters, travel on a roadtrip, dropping into a different horror movie plot each week.

I wouldn’t think that it would be hard to sell that premise, do you?

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Thirteen Questions for Wyatt Weed – Writer and Director of Shadowland

Thirteen Questions for Wyatt Weed – Writer and Director of Shadowland

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poster3A few weeks back at the Chicago Comic Con, I had the pleasure of meeting the cast of Shadowland, a new indie horror movie written and directed by Wyatt Weed.

Forget the stars were beyond hot and that lead actress Caitlin McIntosh was a beauty queen. Forget my photographer Mr. Disney nearly put a perma-fog on his zoom lens trying to shoot through a crowd that was about six people deep; because in spite of the fact that all normal indicators point toward me having a thorough dislike for this whole crew, I couldn’t help it. I love indie film makers and the passion they have for making something different and “outside the system.”

And since being anti-establishment is part of the whole angst-y persona I’m trying hard to cultivate, I couldn’t wait to interview this lot and find out what drives such an all-consuming level of creativity.

So, since Wyatt soon realized I’d just keep stalking him until he relented (see past Goth Chick entries for proof), here it is.

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Art Evolution 1: Jeff Laubenstein

Art Evolution 1: Jeff Laubenstein

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a2-slavers2I’m a gamer, a lifer, someone who at the age of thirty-nine doesn’t get to roll dice like it did at nineteen, but I still take a week’s vacation every year to hang out with High School friends and revisit campaigns where characters have been on paper long enough to legally drink in the U.S.

My love for fantasy role-playing goes back to middle school. There, I was introduced to Dungeon’s & Dragons, but it wasn’t just the concept that inspired my love affair, it was the art. The first piece of fantasy role-playing art I ever saw was the module A2: Secrets of the Slavers Stockade.

I stared at it for a full hour in History class; flipped through the pages trying to figure out why the cover wasn’t stapled on, and went home convinced this was something I had to get involved in.

Enter the Sears Christmas catalogue and TSR’s D&D Basic Edition red boxed set. Once I saw Larry Elmore’s red dragon and seemingly endless treasure trove, I convinced my mother to order it and began a journey lasting nearly thirty years.

I still buy gaming supplements for art alone, collecting entire genres and systems knowing full well I will never have the time to play them. If you put a great cover on it there’s a good chance I’ll buy, and I devour new talent almost as fast as I’ll snap up a collector’s piece from the seventies or eighties on eBay.

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Imaro: The Naama War

Imaro: The Naama War

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imaro_the_naama_warImaro: The Naama War
Charles R. Saunders (Sword & Soul Media, 2009)

Here we have the long-awaited fourth volume in the “Imaro” series of sword-and-sorcery novels set in a fictional fantasy Africa. Imaro: The Naama War brings to a conclusion the many character arcs and plotlines that have built through Imaro (1981; revised 2006), Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush (1984; revised 2008), and Imaro: The Trail of Bohu (1985; revised 2009). The third book (which was the first written specifically as a novel instead of a collection of novellas and short stories) moves the tale of the Ilyassai warrior Imaro into the territory of the grand epic, threatening to plunge all of the continent of Nyumbani into a battle between the gods and the kingdoms they support, with Imaro as the fulcrum point. The novel ends on a cliffhanger, with the war about to erupt.

Now at last we have that great battle of gods and men, which Saunders started writing back in 1983. And it’s Epic. Big Capital “E” Epic. Charles R. Saunders more than rewards readers’ twenty-five years of patience with the single best installment in the saga of Imaro. This is sword-and-sorcery beauty, filled with bloody rage, bizarre magic, pounding battles, horrific monsters, and intense emotion. It is one of the best fantasy novels I have read over the past five years—and I’m actually glad I came late to reading the Imaro stories, because it means I didn’t have to wait so long to read the last and the best.

Imaro: The Naama War is the sort of fantasy trip I love to take, and I’ll admit that I felt an enormous rush of emotion and nearly came to tears during the thirty page wrap-up, where Saunders refuses to let the reader go from the passion of the story and the characters’ dramatic journeys. The escalation from the beginning to the unexpected conclusion is pitch-perfect. It is almost a textbook for how to build suspense and keep readers reeling with surprises while also maintaining their belief in the story’s inner truth.

So, yeah, this is kind of a good book. (Buy it here!)

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