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What I’ve Been Reading: September, 2024

What I’ve Been Reading: September, 2024

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I listen to audiobooks because I can fit them in far easier than I can actual books, to read. But even as my bifocals have to continually work harder, I still enjoy actually reading, be it a physical copy, or on my Fire tablet (I prefer the former, but needs must win out sometimes). So, let’s look at some of what I’ve been reading lately.

THE WATERS OF ETERNITY – Howard Andrew Jones

I’ve been talking more about my Black Gate buddy since he announced he is battling brain cancer. As I mentioned last week, I re-listened to his two Dabir and Asim novels. I prefer the short stories, and this collection of six of them is my favorite featuring the duo. While still being sword and sorcery, with elements of the fantastic, these are more mysteries, which is what I really enjoy about the two.

Howard’s a really good writer, he loves these Arabian fantasies, and they mix sword and sorcery with mystery. And the ebook is dirt cheap. You can’t go wrong with this one.

WOLFE OF THE STEPPES – Harold Lamb

Lamb was a prolific Pulpster in the early 20th Century. A historian as well, his adventure stories are detail-filled thrill-rides. There are eighteen tales of Khlit the Cossack, a gray-bearded survivor on the Asian steppes around the start of the 17th Century.

Lamb was a great influence on Robert E. Howard, and Howard Andrew Jones collected all the Khlit stories in four volumes. There are three more books of Lamb’s adventure tales as well. The first story, which was much shorter than the others, didn’t do anything for me. However, the next two were novella-length adventures and much better. Other than REH, I don’t read Adventure stories, but I am enjoying Khlit and will continue on.

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How Billy Graham’s Conan Art Got Him Fired from Fantastic Magazine

How Billy Graham’s Conan Art Got Him Fired from Fantastic Magazine

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Fantastic magazine, edited by Ted White. August 1972. Cover by Jeff Jones

I read Rich Horton’s Retro Review of the August 1972 issue of Fantastic magazine here at Black Gate, and I remember being excited by what I presumed was the first appearance of Conan in Fantastic, and then realizing just how awful the novelette was, which was made even more disappointing by the fact that this cover was the first time the great Jeff Jones, already known for terrific depictions of Howard’s Solomon Kane, tackled Conan.

Even in 1968, when I read Conan the Adventurer at the age of ten, I noticed that all the best Conan stories were by Howard, but it took me into my early teens to realize just how bad the non-Howard ones were. Yes, De Camp was a much better writer than Carter, but his work lacked the passion and pulp poetry necessary for the character, and something like “Beyond the Black River” (which my penpal Fritz Leiber thought was the best Conan story, along with “People of the Black Circle,” which Fritz liked for its sympathetic villain and capable proto-Indian heroine), was completely outside De Camp’s wheelhouse.

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Conan Well Captured: Conan: City of the Dead by John C. Hocking

Conan Well Captured: Conan: City of the Dead by John C. Hocking

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Conan: City of the Dead (Titan Books, June 18, 2024). Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love

John C. Hocking’s (1960 -) Conan and the Emerald Lotus came along in 1995, near the end of the Tor Conan pastiche series of books. I’d read a lot of pastiches early but by ’95 was burned out on them and stopped picking up the new ones. So I never read Hocking’s entry. Until now.

In 2024, Titan Books published Conan City of the Dead, by Hocking. It contained Conan and the Emerald Lotus, and a second pastiche called Conan and the Living Plague. Hocking had written Living Plague under contract with Conan Properties, but when the ownership changed hands, the book fell into a limbo that lasted some 25 years.

The wait must have been agonizing for Hocking, but the result was a very nice hardcover printing of both his books together, with some neat interior illustrations by Richard Pace. The cover art is uncredited.

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Conan: City of the Dead, John C. Hocking’s Living Plague is Alive Inside

Conan: City of the Dead, John C. Hocking’s Living Plague is Alive Inside

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Conan: City of the Dead, by John C. Hocking (2024, Titan Books. 507p)

It’s June of 2024, and Titan Books has just delivered John C. Hocking’s City of the Dead which contains both Conan and the Emerald Lotus (1995, TOR) and its follow-up Conan and the Living Plague — a book lost in the limbo of publishing craziness for ~two decades! Hocking also wrote a bridging novella set in between these two novels called “Black Starlight” (serialized across Conan comics in 2019, and provided assembled as an eBook in 2023 as Conan: Black Starlight: The Heroic Legends Series).

Since Titan Books & Heroic Signatures had the rights to publish and print “Black Starlight” separately, it seems like a lost opportunity to have it absent from  City of the Dead, but fans are just glad to finally see the Living Plague in print, it is tough to whine about that.

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Hither Came Scott Oden: The Shadow of Vengeance, a Sequel Robert E. Howard SHOULD have Written

Hither Came Scott Oden: The Shadow of Vengeance, a Sequel Robert E. Howard SHOULD have Written

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Conan: The Shadow of Vengeance (Titan Books, January 30, 2024)

Octavia tore her gaze from the grisly noose. Hope fluttered in her breast, for through the guttering smoke from scores of torches she saw the Cimmerian astride his mighty stallion. He stood motionless, a statue hewn from whalebone and gristle — save for his eyes. Even with the breadth of the Red Brotherhood between them, Octavia recognized the death fires kindled in those cold blue orbs.

There is a magic to some writer’s prose; it pulses and pounds, like Robert E. Howard writing about Conan, or has a clever, articulate subliminity in which a bright man finds himself feeling the fool in a genius’s shadow (Doyle’s Watson writing about Holmes), that infuses a character and their canon.

This is part of what makes pastiche such a tricky business to evaluate and review. Some hate the idea of pastiche, in which case, any review is pointless. On the other hand, pastiche — the continuation of an author’s characters in new adventures is a long-established tradition that reaches back to the tales of the pre-Classical world and continues on the reams of unlicensed fan-fic. So, let’s leave that debate for elsewhere, and just assume that you are this far because you love Robert E. Howard, you love Conan, and you want that pulse-pounding, blood-and-thunder sense of adventure you experienced long ago.

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Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing (December, 2023)

Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing (December, 2023)

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Happy Christmas and Merry Holidays!! Whatever works for you, let’s be a little kinder to our fellow humans. This world needs it more than ever. Yeesh.

I really do need to get back to doing a ‘Year-End at Black Gate World Headquarters’ post. The one I completed may be my all-time favorite BG post (which I’ve written). I’ve started two others, but they petered off.

I talked about Fortnite last week, which I really enjoy playing with my son. I’m good – he’s excellent.

Wanted to talk about a couple other games I played this year. I spent more hours on Elder Scrolls Online than anything else. I got burned out and am taking a long break, but it’s easily my favorite MMO, supplanting Age of Conan, with Lord of the Rings Online the other one I really like. All three have terrific lore, but ESO’s game play, and graphics, stand above.

Here are a couple others that might appeal to the Black Gate crowd.

Merry Christmas!! I really do need to get back to doing a ‘Year-End at Black Gate World Headquarters’ post. The one I completed may be my all-time favorite BG post (which I’ve written). I’ve started two others, but they petered off.

I talked about Fortnite last week, which I really enjoy playing with my son. I’m good – he’s excellent.

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The Complete Version of John C. Hocking’s Conan: Black Starlight is Now Available

The Complete Version of John C. Hocking’s Conan: Black Starlight is Now Available

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Conan: Black Starlight (Titan Books, October 17, 2023)

The name John C. Hocking is well known to long-time Black Gate readers. He published several terrific stories in the print version of the magazine, including two tales in his Brand the Viking series, and the opening stories in his popular Archivist series, “A River Through Darkness and Light” and “Vestments of Pestilence,” which was continued in Skelos and Weirdbook. He’s also launched a brand new series, the King’s Blade tales, in Tales From the Magician’s Skull, edited by Howard Andrew Jones.

I was delighted to see that John had been commissioned to write a serialized novella for Marvel’s high-profile relaunch of Conan The Barbarian in 2019. Conan: Black Starlight was published in installments in the first twelve issues of the comic, and now the entire story has been collected by Titan in a single handsome volume.

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Conan has Come Hither: The Book is in Print! (May 1)

Conan has Come Hither: The Book is in Print! (May 1)

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It’s here! You probably know that back in 2019, many of the leading Robert E. Howard experts and fans contributed to a terrific series here at Black Gate on REH’s Conan stories. Prior to that, Black Gate’s own Howard Andrew Jones, along with Bill Ward, had over on his own blog, done a deep dive into each story as well.

Jason Waltz and his Rogue Blades Foundation combined those two series’ and added much more content. Now, Hither Came Conan is a print book that is THE definitive guide to REH’s sword-swinging Cimmerian (Hollywood added ‘the Barbarian’ tag – that’s not REH).

Howard wrote 20 Conan short stories, and one novel. Plus, there’s one unfinished tale (“Wolves Beyond the Border”). Each of the twenty-two stories has an essay from the Black Gate series, as well as Howard and Bill’s blog entry. Plus, there are thirteen new essays related to various stories. Finally there, are eleven additional essays not tied to a specific story.

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Senator, You’re No Jack Kennedy. Continautors – Yes or No?

Senator, You’re No Jack Kennedy. Continautors – Yes or No?

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Official continuators of a literary series can engender mixed emotions. Some folks are happy to see more stories of a character they like – even if the creator has died. Others feel that only the original author should write that character and they should lie in the grave together.

Characters eventually enter the public domain. Though exactly when varies in different countries; and it’s not always clear, regardless. But the rights holders (often the family of the author, or their Estate) contract with someone to continue the series. I have read several official continuations (though I still haven’t gotten around to Ben Black’s Philip Marlowe. And as I recall, Poodle Springs didn’t do anything at all for me). I’m gonna talk about a few, with comments on the concept, mixed in.

Tony Hillerman/Anne Hillerman

Anne Hillerman had previously written some non-fiction when she took over her late father’s Navajo Tribal Police series. The ONLY reason she is writing these books is because she owns the rights. Quite simply, her continuation novels are terrible. And are a bastardization of her father’s books. I wish someone could prevent her from any more of them.

Anne completely transformed her father’s series. She was not interested in writing more books in his style. Expanding from ‘Leaphorn and Chee.’ they are now officially ‘Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito Novels.’ She has completely shifted the emphasis to Bernie Manuelito. Chee is an emasculated husband who would be better off completely out of the books. They’re now like Lifetime movies about Bernie and her issues with her mom and sister, and unhappiness with Chee’s attitude at least once a book. It’s exhausting read them.

Louisa Bourbonette is now so annoying, I wish that Leaphorn (who was actually lobotomized by a gunshot wound in the first two books) would dump her.

Stargazer (the sixth book) is the worst continuation novel I’ve ever read. Well, I actually, partly read. The first five books were bad, and that one was so terrible, I abandoned it part-way through.

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A Must-Buy For Any Howard Fan: Robert E. Howard Changed My Life edited by Jason M. Waltz

A Must-Buy For Any Howard Fan: Robert E. Howard Changed My Life edited by Jason M. Waltz

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Robert E. Howard Changed My Life (Rogue Blades Foundation, June 9, 2021). Cover by Didier Normand

Many of us “older folk” (I’m using that term very broadly) can attest to some experience in their early years — usually somewhere around 13-years old — where some individual, some book or books, some movie, some band or something similar made a huge impact upon our lives, an impact with a positive and profound, lasting influence.

For me, it was probably getting my first basic box set of Dungeons & Dragons (with the Erol Otus cover) for Christmas in 1981. I was only 12 at the time. Thereafter I immediately began to beg for, or scrap together any money I could to buy, any D&D books that I could get my hands on. And probably the most influential D&D book I got shortly thereabout was the hardback Deities & Demigods (again with an Erol Otus cover). This book had chapters on a host of traditional mythologies, each with its own heroes, gods and monsters — provided with D&D stats of course! But Deities & Demigods also contained other “mythologies” that were rooted in the books of authors like Michael Moorcock, H. P. Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber. This opened up a whole literary world for me that, I can fairly say, changed my life in integral ways.

Perhaps you’re old enough to relate to something similar happening to you. Evidently many can claim that the books of Texas writer Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) had such an impact. Rogue Blades Entertainment’s new book Robert E. Howard Changed My Life: Personal Essays about an Extraordinary Legacy gives a whole litany of testimonies to such. How did this interesting book come about?

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