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Thongor of Lemuria – Part One by Lin Carter

Thongor of Lemuria – Part One by Lin Carter

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BerkleyX1777If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Lin Carter’s Thongor of Lemuria novels were a deliberate exercise in camp. The first two novels in the seven book series, Thongor And The Wizard of Lemuria (1965) and Thongor And The Dragon City (1966), are so frenetic and exaggerated there are times it’s difficult to believe they were intended to be taken seriously. I struggle to believe that Carter hadn’t meant for me to laugh when I read that Thongor distrusted magic because of his “clean healthy, Northlander blood.”

But I do know better. Much has been written (some of it by me) about Lin Carter’s love for heroic fantasy and his efforts to emulate his favorite writers in his own books. The Thongor stories read like he took Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, smooshed them together with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter novels, then cranked everything up to eleven. But, and this is true of his Lovecraft Mythos fiction too, he mimics the style of his literary heroes without ever conveying the substance that gives power to their work to this day.

To give Lin Carter his due, Wizard of Lemuria is his first published novel and Dragon City his third in only two years. In those ancient times, there was little new swords & sorcery of the mighty barbarian type being written. Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber were tweaking (and tweaking the nose of) the genre and Karl Edward Wagner and Charles Saunders were still kids. The big boom was right around the corner, but it hadn’t happened yet. He took the chance and stepped up to create the sort of stories he wanted to see and that’s something I will always respect.

One of the earliest reviews at my site, Swords & Sorcery: A Blog, was of Thongor And The Wizard of Lemuria (so, yes, for those of you who’ve read it, I have indeed read it a second time). It was harsh and a little intemperate. I’ve since decided that reviews of that sort don’t serve any real purpose. I also don’t want to pick on someone who can’t fight back. I want my reviews to promote the good books and understand why the weak ones fail and encourage better writing.

Like August Derleth and Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter’s too readily bad-mouthed these days (except when the stupendously important Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series is mentioned). I don’t think his fiction is read that much anymore and I feel I owe him at least the courtesy of that. So I’m going to plow through the series and report back to you, Black Gate‘s faithful readers.

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Travis McGee: Hard-boiled Detective with a Dystopian Sci-Fi Imagination

Travis McGee: Hard-boiled Detective with a Dystopian Sci-Fi Imagination

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jdm-Deep-Blue-Good-byI’ve recently gotten hooked on the Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald (1916-1986), reading The Deep Blue Good-by (1964) and Nightmare in Pink (1964) in quick succession. I’m stoked that there are 19 McGee novels awaiting me, but I can already make one salient observation about the main character based on these first two outings: he has the mind of a science-fiction writer. I was not surprised at all, in fact, to learn that several of his creator’s early stories and novels were science fiction.

McGee is a “salvage consultant”: basically, he’s an unemployed (by choice) beach-bum who makes his home on the Busted Flush, a 52-foot houseboat he won in a poker game, which is mostly docked in slip F-18 at Bahia Mar (a site about as well-known to crime-fiction fans as 221B Baker Street). When the funds get low, he takes on a case. He’s a cynical guy; he doesn’t want to get emotionally involved with people, but the problem is he does have a strong sense of honor and integrity (much to his own chagrin, since he sees this sort of romantic chivalry as woefully outdated). So he does invariably get involved and, well, I’ll let him speak for himself: “This emotional obligation did not fit me. I felt awkward in the uncomfortable role. I wished to be purely McGee, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl-finder, that big shambling brown boat-bum who walks beaches, slays small fierce fish, busts minor icons, argues, smiles and disbelieves, that knuckly scar-tissued reject from a structured society, who waits until the money gets low, and then goes out and takes it from the taker, keeps half, and gives the rest back to the innocent.”

He’s an introspective guy, somewhat philosophical in his rejection of industrialized urban society, and for a narrator delivering page-turner suspense, he often digresses into ruminations about society’s failings and his own shortcomings and disillusionment. Far from bogging the story down, these imaginative digressions have made McGee one of the most memorable and celebrated characters in twentieth-century American fiction. And in his creative metaphors, he shows a strong streak of the dystopian mind.

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New Treasures: Haxan by Kenneth Mark Hoover

New Treasures: Haxan by Kenneth Mark Hoover

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Haxan-smallI’ve written a few times now about the terrific finds I made in the Dealers Room at the World Fantasy Convention. I know I’m probably starting to sound like a broken record, but when you have the opportunity to sample the very best new books from the most dynamic and exciting independent publishers in the industry, the need to share is pretty strong. So you’ll have to bear with me a bit until I get this out of my system.

I’ve already covered the treasures piled high on the Valancourt and Hippocampus Press tables, as well as Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine and Lois H. Gresh’s anthology Dark Fusions – Where Monsters Lurk! But I haven’t even mentioned the Chizine table yet, and that’s a serious oversight. A catalog of the agonizing choices would take more time than I have tonight, so I’ll have to content myself with the first book I bought: Kenneth Mark Hoover’s weird western Haxan, the first in a new series.

Thermopylae. Masada. Agincourt. And now, Haxan, New Mexico Territory, circa 1874. Through a sea of time and dust, in places that might never be, or can’t become until something is set right, there are people destined to travel. Forever. Marshal John T. Marwood is one of these men. Taken from a place he called home, he is sent to fight an eternal war. It never ends, because the storm itself, this unending conflict, makes the world we know a reality. Along with all the other worlds waiting to be born. Or were born, but died like a guttering candle in eternal night… Haxan is the first in a series of novels. It’s Lonesome Dove meets The Punisher… real, gritty, violent, and blatantly uncompromising.

The sequel, Quaternity, will arrive March 31, 2015.

Haxan was published by Chizine Publications on July 1, 2014. It is 250 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

“The Distances Between Things”: Patricia A. McKillip’s The Changeling Sea

“The Distances Between Things”: Patricia A. McKillip’s The Changeling Sea

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The Changeling SeaI’ve written a few times about my ongoing fascination with fantasy from the 1980s. That fascination led me to pick up a used copy of The Changeling Sea, a short 1988 novel by Patricia A. McKillip. McKillip isn’t specifically a 1980s writer — her first novel, The House on Parchment Street, was published in 1973, and she’s produced work steadily ever since; her last novel, The Bards of Bone Plain, came out in 2010 and a collection of short stories, Wonders of the Invisible World, was published in 2012. (You can find some reviews of her recent work at Black Gate: here Isabel Pelech looks at The Sorceress and the Cygnet, and here Thomas M. MacKay looks at Harrowing the Dragon). But having read some of her work from the 70s, specifically the Riddle-Master trilogy, I’d hoped to get a sense of how her work had developed through the 80s. And perhaps find the sort of unexpected angle on the fantastic some of the fantasy of that period provides.

And I did; I thought the book was excellent. It’s no surprise at all to see it was a finalist for the 1990 Mythopoeic Award. It’s precisely in the way it evokes the feel of a folktale, the feel of myth mixed with the matter of common life, that the book shines. It’s about love, and loss, and magic, and change. It has something of the feel of what now would be called young-adult fiction, with the specific kind of complexity that form can present: a young person encountering the adult world edge-on, struggling to understand what they’re finding, dealing with things that went wrong a generation ago, and trying to do no further wrong.

On a small island, one of seven making up a kingdom in a northern sea, a fifteen-year-old girl named Peri works at an inn. Her fisherman father has been taken by the sea a year ago, since which time her mother has drawn into herself. Finally, Peri can take it no more and casts a hex upon the sea. A prince becomes involved; and the magic takes a strange twist. A wandering wizard passes by. Things and people change, metamorphose magically and otherwise, and Peri must take a journey into the strange world under the ocean before the fate of land and sea will become clear.

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Self-published Book Review: The Rude Adventures of Trenchfoot by Reuben Dendinger

Self-published Book Review: The Rude Adventures of Trenchfoot by Reuben Dendinger

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. I’ve run short on books that I’ve received in the past year, so anything new has a good chance of being reviewed. I won’t be posting a review in January, since I’ll be spending time with my family over Christmas, and not at all because I’ll be too busy playing Dragon Age: Inquisition.

TRENCHFOOTFrontCover-1I’ve been doing these reviews for the past two years, and this is the first time I’ve had a paperback to review. It’s been a while since I’ve read a paperback of any sort. I’ve grown used to e-books, so it was something of a novelty to read an actual physical copy of The Rude Adventures of Trenchfoot by Reuben Dendinger.

The Rude Adventures of Trenchfoot is described by its author as quasi-satire. That may be underselling the satire somewhat. Whether it’s the horse that chews its way through miles of dirt, the three young men that overload a virility draining machine through the sheer power of their manliness, or the magical fusion of two half-dead people into one fully living and one fully dead person, this is not a book that takes itself too seriously. I may have classed it more as parody than satire, a mocking take on gritty sword and sorcery, with perhaps a bit more grit than you really want.

The hero, Trenchfoot, was born full-grown from the union of the night and the earth, with a destiny to travel from the south pole of his birthplace to the equator and decide the nature of the Cosmic Night. The Cosmic Day of the past 500,000 years is coming to an end, and order must give way to chaos, but whether that will be the (relatively) benign chaos of lunacy or the hellish chaos of nihilism has yet to be decided. That is Trenchfoot’s role.

He is joined on his adventures by his male lover the swordsman Cass, his female lover Hyppa, and the scholar and astronomer Thexeded, who foresees the impending collapse of order and civilization and is all for it. Also joining him is the dirt-eating and wine-drinking horse, Oar, born like Trenchfoot from the night and the earth—who’ve apparently had a lot of children, among them inanimate objects, prophecies, and animals, but no humans before Trenchfoot.

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Support the Six by Six Kickstarter, Containing the Complete Cineth Stories by Martha Wells

Support the Six by Six Kickstarter, Containing the Complete Cineth Stories by Martha Wells

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Six by Six-smallLong time readers will remember Martha Wells’s Cineth stories, “Holy Places,” “Houses of the Dead,” and “Reflections,” which first appeared in Black Gate 10, 11, and 12. They were some of the most popular stories we every published, and they helped put Black Gate on the map.

All three stories feature her characters Giliead and Ilias. “Holy Places” was reprinted in Lightspeed magazine, but the others have never been reprinted — although I’m often asked when they might be available in a more permanent edition. So I was very pleased to hear the following news from Martha this week:

I’m involved in a kickstarter this month… It’s short story collections by six different authors (me, Tina Connolly, Brenda Cooper, Stephen Gaskell, Bradley P. Beaulieu, and Will McIntosh) with reprints and some stories original to the collection. The new short story I’ll have in it is a Nicholas and Reynard story set before The Death of the Necromancer, called “Night at the Opera,” so I thought some Black Gate readers might be interested.

We serialized Martha’s complete novel The Death of the Necromancer here.

We frequently hear about publishing Kickstarter projects, but this one looks very special indeed. Six by Six brings together six terrific fantasy and SF authors, each of whom contributes six stories, for 36 stories in all — including all three Giliead and Ilias tales from Black Gate magazine.

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Book Pairings: Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells and Royal Airs

Book Pairings: Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells and Royal Airs

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Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells-smallAh, a rainy night in December.

I was going to try to augment my blogging-to-raindrops experience by listening to Chopin, but after iTunes had been pianoing at me for a while, I admitted defeat, and realized once more that it’s difficult for me to blog and listen to music at the same time. (Hildegard of Bingen is, of course, an exception to this rule. Sometimes.)

Tonight I am feeling VIRTUOUS and TRIUMPHANT, for I have AT LONG LAST finished Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, followed by a reread of Sharon Shinn’s Royal Airs. I thought these two books would make a fine complementary pair of Gaslamp Fantasies You Might Like To Read.

Let’s start with Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells.

First of all… It took me LONG ENOUGH! Sigh. Have I told you how long it takes me to read an anthology? Any anthology? I think I did, way back in my Welcome to Bordertown blogging days. But don’t worry if you never read those three monster blogs o’ mine (although you should, because they are CHARMING and INFORMATIVE, and also go ahead and read the anthology itself if you haven’t, because that’s GREAT TOO); like Inigo Montoyo, I will sum up.

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New Treasures: Dark Fusions – Where Monsters Lurk!, edited by Lois H. Gresh

New Treasures: Dark Fusions – Where Monsters Lurk!, edited by Lois H. Gresh

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Dark Fusion Where Monsters Lurk-smallA month ago, I was wandering the Dealer’s Rooms at the World Fantasy Convention like a kid in a candy store, finding treasure after treasure. I’ve already written about the great finds I made at the Valancourt and Hippocampus Press tables, and Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine.

But if I’d had to leave the convention with only one book, I think it would have been a pretty simple choice. Lois H. Gresh, author of Blood and Ice and The Twilight Companion, and PS Publishing have teamed up to produce a glorious anthology of “weird tales, dark science fiction, dark fantasy, and pure horror” tales, Dark Fusions, subtitled Where Monsters Lurk!

It was released in a limited edition hardcover last year, but I didn’t set eyes on it until this year. Packed with original short stories by Cody Goodfellow, Darrell Schweitzer, Nancy Kilpatrick, James Alan Gardner, Yvonne Navarro, Mark McLaughlin, Robert M. Price, and many others, I knew I wanted this one the moment I set eyes on it.

Sometimes, darkness is internal, generated by our minds or bodies. Sometimes, it’s due to external devices, such as monsters, shadows, or lurking dangers. A dark fantasy story requires an otherworld, an imaginary realm, a supernatural story requires a creature or event that exists beyond our natural universe, and a dark science fiction story revolves around science gone bad.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer… In the Beginning, Part Five

Blogging Sax Rohmer… In the Beginning, Part Five

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Sax-Rohmer-smallSax Rohmer 2-small“The Secret of Holm Peel” was first published in Cassell’s in December 1912 and was the last story Arthur Henry Ward published under the byline of Sarsfield Ward (having dropped the first initial A.).

Rohmer scholar Robert E. Briney rescued it from obscurity for the 1970 Ace paperback Rohmer collection of the same name. Many years later, Gene Christie selected the story for inclusion in the first volume of Black Dog Books’ Sax Rohmer Library, The Green Spider and Other Forgotten Tales of Mystery and Suspense, in 2011.

The story’s inspiration can be found in Rohmer’s article, “The Phantom Hound of Holm Peel,” which was first published in Empire News in February 1938 and was later collected by Rohmer scholars Dr. Lawrence Knapp and John Robert Colombo in the 2012 Battered Silicon Dispatch Box collection of Rohmer’s articles, Pipe Dreams: Occasional Writings of Sax Rohmer. The article was also recounted by Rohmer’s widow, Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, and his former assistant, Cay Van Ash, in their 1972 biography of the author, Master of Villainy, as well as by the aforementioned John Robert Colombo in his 2014 collection, A Rohmer Miscellany.

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Vintage Treasures: The Compleat Werewolf, by Anthony Boucher

Vintage Treasures: The Compleat Werewolf, by Anthony Boucher

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The Compleat Werewolf-smallI like classic werewolf tales, in much the same way I like old-fashioned vampire stories. Tales of spooky nights, full moons, and ancient family curses are both frightening and warmly familiar.

Along with J. Francis McComas, Anthony Boucher was the the founding editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; he edited the magazine from 1949 to 1958, winning the Hugo Award twice for his efforts. He was equally acclaimed for his mystery novels, including Nine Times Nine (1940) and Rocket to the Morgue (1942), which featured thinly-disguised versions of Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Julius Schwartz, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton and John W. Campbell. He died in 1968. His 1969 collection The Compleat Werewolf is a delightful gathering of SF and fantasy tales originally published in the pulp magazines Unknown Worlds, Adventure, Astounding Science-Fiction, Weird Tales, and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Here’s the book description.

Anthony Boucher was long known as an important book critic and editor, master of languages and successful novelist. He was also a superb short story writer of science fiction and fantasy: inventive, prolific- and always entertaining.

The stories and novelettes in this titanic collection were chosen for the sheer virtuosity of their themes, moods, backgrounds; for their insights; for their laughter. They are wonderfully peopled by moth-eaten little demons, grim interplanetary predators, rebellious androids and dopplegangers; by humans with otherworld talents; and finally, not least, by one very special werewolf.

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