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1970s Horror Comics, Old and New: Eerie and Bloke’s Terrible Tomb of Terror

1970s Horror Comics, Old and New: Eerie and Bloke’s Terrible Tomb of Terror

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Eerie 52-small

In time for coincidence with Hallowe’en, a friend recently pointed me at Bloke’s Terrible Tomb of Terror, a magazine walking in the path of such 1970s Warren horror magazines as Creepy and Eerie. I picked up a pdf copy just before the etsy store went on a bit of a break while The Bloke (Jason Crawley) moves house and shop. (30 October, 2017: The Bloke’s site is back up and I just bought two more issues at the online shop.)

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I was really only a superhero guy and a light Marvel horror/monster guy (Son-of-Satan (blogged about here), It, Strange Tales) when I was 10-15 years old, so the Warren style wasn’t really my bag back then.

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In Search of a new Weird Tales: An Interview with Joseph Goodman, Howard Andrew Jones, and the Talking Skull!

In Search of a new Weird Tales: An Interview with Joseph Goodman, Howard Andrew Jones, and the Talking Skull!

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Tales from the Magician's Skull-small

Recently Goodman Games announced a Kickstarter campaign to fund the launch of Tales From the Magician’s Skull, a magazine of all-new swords & sorcery fiction in the classic pulp style. The first issue is a delight for Black Gate readers, with tales from popular BG contributors James Enge, John C. Hocking, Howard Andrew Jones, Chris Willrich, Bill Ward, and others. And best of all, Goodman has invited Howard Andrew Jones on board as editor, guaranteeing a top-notch product. The spectacular success of the Kickstarter campaign — more than quintuple its goal, with more than a week to go — demonstrates just how well the creators have read the market demand for a true sword & sorcery publication. I sat down with Joseph Goodman, founder and publisher of Goodman Games, and Howard — along with their undead master, the mighty Magician’s Skull — to find out more about one of the most exciting magazine launches in a decade.

My first question is for Joseph… why a magazine? How does that fit in with your laser-like focus on classic gaming?

Joseph: Thanks for the interview, John! To answer your question, I have to start with Appendix N. In the 1982 edition of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, the creator included an obscure bibliography. It was Appendix N, the 14th appendix in the book, where he listed the works of fiction that inspired him to create D&D. That list has since become notorious. It is now a de facto “required reading list” for diehard fans of the game.

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October 2017 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

October 2017 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

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Nightmare Magazine October 2017-smallIf you’ve never tried Nightmare magazine… well, let’s face it, what better time than October? The latest issue has a nice assortment of creepy tales, including Joanna Parypinski’s “We Are Turning on a Spindle,” a short fable about a traveler who tirelessly searches the universe for a very particular castle, with a legendary resident. The universe, it turns out, is downright lousy with castles.

After years of searching, he found the castle on a remote forgotten world in an abandoned corner of the unknown universe. Castles littered the cosmos like dead stars, relics of the ancients…

What is our hero doing way the heck out here?

There was no beauty left in the known cosmos, as far as he could see, and so he had ventured to the unknown cosmos… These are strange worlds that lie on the fringes, so old they may have existed before physics settled down with its proper rules.

Parypinski has a real gift for turning a phrase (“The interior of the castle was likewise ruined and decrepit, its diseased antediluvian stone like a scabbed wound”), and the tale is short, about 2,400 words. While the prose is sparking and new, the tale is a very old one indeed, and the ending isn’t hard to predict. That’s sort of the point, I think, and the horror of the climax isn’t diminished by our ability to see it coming. Check it out here.

The October issue of Nightmare also contains original fiction from Cassandra Khaw, and reprints by Brian Evenson and Robert Shearman.

There’s also an editorial from John Joseph Adams, with all the latest news on upcoming titles from John Joseph Adams Books, including the Hugh Howey collection Machine Learning, and Molly Tanzer’s second novel Creatures of Will and Temper, plus the latest installment of “The H Word,” in which Kristi DeMeester shares her thoughts on horror. There’s also author spotlights, and a feature interview with Josh Malerman.

The complete contests of the issue are listed below.

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October Short Story Roundup

October Short Story Roundup

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GdM13_500x375Things were a little thin on the ground for swords & sorcery this past month. Only  Grimdark Magazine crossed my radar this month with new tales of adventure, and three out of three in the latter publication weren’t S&S.

Grimdark Magazine #13 is packed with three stories and the usual spate of interviews, reviews, and commentaries on the subject of grimdark. If anyone will ever convince me that grimdark is a real, definable sub-genre and not just a marketing ploy, it will be the magazine’s editor, Adrian Collins. His choice of stories and non-fiction is solid and consistently presents grimdark as something far more than just gory rape and murder. In his magazine, there’s room for much subtlety and nuance.

The non-fiction is the usual magazine mix of good and poor. Though I disagreed with much of what he said, I enjoyed the interview with Nicholas Eames, author of Kings of the Wyld. Deborah A. Wolf has a fun article titled “How to Land a Rockstar Agent in Ten Excruciating Steps.”

Normally, I don’t write much about magazine’s non-fiction, but article in particular needs to be pointed out. In “Barbarians or Philosophers?,” Matthew Cropley and Victoria Bridgland make an argument that grimdark readers are a more discerning group than those who prefer more traditional fantasy. It’s more complex than that, drawing on things said by authors, as well as psychological studies, but that’s its general conclusion.

In the debate between those who love grimdark, and those who hate it, there is, I’ll concede, some evidence for either side. For those who claim that grimdark fans read because they enjoy the thrill that comes with depictions of violence, there’s some research, as noted above, to back this up. However, there seems to be much more recent evidence that supports grimdark fans gaining a deep fulfillment and enhanced personal well-being by engaging with grimdark fantasy. The dark and violent aspects of grimdark help it reflect the human condition in all its complex glory, whereas heroic fantasy is limited to an idealized portrayal of good and evil. Lack of material rewards and the unfairness and violence of grimdark worlds mirror our own, and help us see that the true rewards in life are increased wisdom and understanding of the nature of reality. Grimdark fans like the sub-genre because its anti-heroes share their high regard for justice and righteous vengeance, and that disposition means that the violence common to grimdark doesn’t detract from deep engagement with exploration of humanity, in all its glorious shades of grey.

I could spend an entire post unpacking the various claims made in that statement, but I’ll skip it that today. Suffice it to say, I disagree with most of what they say. Much of what passes for “increased wisdom and understanding of the nature of reality” is no more than easy cynicism and affected world-weariness. The only time I find humanity reduced to “shades of grey” is when I deliberately choose to filter out all the other colors of the spectrum.

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Weird Sea Adventures: A Review of the Archipelago Kickstarter Reward Magazine

Weird Sea Adventures: A Review of the Archipelago Kickstarter Reward Magazine

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First there was the Weird Tale, which hit the mark. Then there was the Weird Western, which hit the mark for many, but not all. Now there is the Weird Sea…

The advent of Archipelago came to my attention on Black Gate via Brandon Crilly’s post post earlier this year, which included some cool art and a teaser story – “The Ur-Ring” by Charlotte Ashley.

As a longstanding fan of maritime literature, specifically the Richard Bolitho stories by Alexander Kent (pseudonym of Douglas Reeman) and C.S. Forrester’s Hornblower stories, my ears figuratively pricked up when I saw Brandon’s article. Maritime adventure combined with fantasy… what more could one ask? Hmm, a Cylon Base Star perhaps, but we won’t go there…

For those who haven’t read Brandon’s original post, the basic premise of Archipelago is that of a Shared World, where people from earth’s 17th century have come across various ocean based portals to another world. To quote the Kickstarter:

Four hundred years ago, when control of the world came to depend on naval power as never before, a courageous few set off on journeys of discovery and conquest that would alter the fates of nations in ways no-one could imagine.

But once they’d sailed the seven seas, what if they found another?

ARCHIPELAGO is a historical fantasy serial with multiple new episodes appearing every month. Imagine a blend of Moby Dick, Pirates of the Caribbean, Master & Commander and Game of Thrones — with Lovecraftian monsters lurking beneath the surface!

Looking at the Archipelago Kickstarter it became evident that they did not require a massive contribution, more just seed funding to get their project going. The rewards were interesting, insofar as one could — as was a common practice way back in the British military establishment — purchase a commission. The difference being that instead of buying a rank in the navy, one could purchase a custom mention in a future story, which I thought was pretty cool. As they state it:

Archipelago isn’t just about storytelling, though. Readers will have the opportunity to influence events as the adventure develops, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes devastating.

I was hooked and proceeded to participate in the Kickstarter.

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October GigaNotoSaurus Features “To Us May Grace Be Given” by L.S. Johnson

October GigaNotoSaurus Features “To Us May Grace Be Given” by L.S. Johnson

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GigiNotoSaurus

GigaNotoSaurus got my attention back in July with Daniel Ausema’s long Sword & Sorcery novelette “The Poetics of Defiance.” Here’s what Ausema said about the story at his website, Twigs and Brambles.

“The Poetics of Defiance” is one of the longer stories I’ve had published. It’s a fun one that I’m very proud of. It started with an idea to come up with the two most unlikely jobs for a traditional sword & sorcery story, and I came up with an alchemist (I’ve liked the idea of a traveling alchemist ever since I was into D&D back in high school) and a poet. It ended up straying from the S&S idea somewhat… I had a lot of fun with creating the snippets of poetry for the attack poet.

This month GigaNotoSaurus features a brand new 15,507-word Weird Western by L.S. Johnson, “To Us May Grace Be Given.” Here’s Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews.

October’s GigaNotoSaurus brings a sort of paranormal Western longer novelette, with a whiff of ash and the taste of blood and coming violence. It’s a storm of a story, sweeping through the life of the main character and leaving nothing untouched. It’s a piece that explores the vast frontier that the American West used to represent, the potential or at least the hope of renewal and forgiveness. And yet it was all built on murder, and exploitation, and blood, and the story paints this place as incredibly dark, perilous, and toxic. It’s a wonderful take on the setting and genre…

Read the story free here, and read Charles’ complete review here.

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The Expedition Into the Black Reservoir: A Dungeon Adventure at Greyhawk Castle by Gary Gygax

The Expedition Into the Black Reservoir: A Dungeon Adventure at Greyhawk Castle by Gary Gygax

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The Expedition Into the Black Resevoir Gary Gygax

The early days of D&D have been chronicled many times, in Shannon Appelcline’s excellent Designers and Dragons books, Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination, David Kushner and Koren Shadmi’s Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D, and a rapidly growing corpus of gaming history texts. When an era you lived through in your teens now has its own shelf in the history section, you’re getting old.

Still, there are plenty of unchronicled tidbits of gaming history out there, and I stumbled on one this weekend. In 1974 Gary Gygax, strapped for marketing cash for his just-released adventure game Dungeons and Dragons, agreed to contribute two articles to issue 12 of El Conquistador, a Chicago small press magazine devoted to play-by-mail Diplomacy leagues and general wargaming, in exchange for a full-page D&D ad. The first article was “Postal Brotherhood,” a short piece on play-by-mail gaming, a pastime that was already dying (and was fully dead less than two decades later).

The second was vastly more interesting: a four-page story that’s believed to be the first Greyhawk tale ever published.

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The October Fantasy Magazine Rack

The October Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Apex Magazine October 2017-small Beneath Ceaseless Skies October 12 2017-small Black Static September October 2017-small Clarkesworld October 2017-small
Grimdark Magazine 13-small Lackington's Summer 2017-small MAGAZINE OF HORROR 36-small Shimmer September 2017-small

One thing I cherish about the zines in this genre is their endless diversity. We have gritty SF and fantasy (Grimdark magazine), literary adventure fantasy (Beneath Ceaseless Skies), Canadian speculative fiction (Lackington’s), contemporary horror (Black Static), pulp replicas (Magazine of Horror #36), and much, much more.  Best of all, we have writers capable of crossing all those boundaries — such as the amazing Natalia Theodoridou, who appears in no less than three magazines this month (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and Shimmer). Here are the magazines that grabbed my attention in October (links will bring you to magazine websites).

Apex Magazine — Issue #101, with new fiction from Dennis Danvers, Lavie Tidhar, Annie Neugebauer, and others
Beneath Ceaseless Skies — Natalia Theodoridou, Emily B. Cataneo, plus a podcast and a reprint by Samantha Murray
Black Static — with creepy tales by Carole Johnstone, Tim Lees, Ray Cluley, and Stephen Hargadon
Clarkesworld — new fiction from Jack Skillingstead, Natalia Theodoridou, Xia Jia, Genevieve Valentine, and others
Grimdark — fresh fiction from Richard A. Knaak, S. Andrew Swann, David M. Hoenig
Lackington’s — “Diseases” Issue, with stories by Evelyn Deshane, Nin Harris, Dayna K. Smith, Adrian Simmons, and Kat Weave
Magazine of Horror #33 — a reprint of the classic magazine from 1970, with fiction by Clark Ashton Smith, Paul Ernst, Arthur Styron, Rachel Cosgrove Payes, Robert E. Howard, and others
Shimmer — great new stuff from Sonya Taaffe, Brian Holguin, Maria Haskins, and the ubiquitous Natalia Theodoridou

Click any of the thumbnail images above for bigger images. Our late September Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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Fantastic Stories of Imagination, January and February 1964: A Retro-Review

Fantastic Stories of Imagination, January and February 1964: A Retro-Review

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Fantastic Stories of Imagination January 1964-small Fantastic Stories of Imagination February 1964-small

These issues are significant in that they include the serialization of a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella — but not just any novella: this includes the first and nearly only contribution to the series from Leiber’s original collaborator, and supposed model for the Mouser, Harry Fischer.

Each cover is by Ed Emshwiller, and they both illustrate the serial. The interiors in January are by Emsh, Lutjens (first name perhaps Peter?), Dan Adkins, Lee Brown Coye, and Virgil Finlay. In February they are from the same folks except for Coye.

The editorials concern, in January, Harry Fischer’s role in the creation of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and in February, serious research in both the US and the Soviet Union into telepathy. There is a brief book review column in January, by S. E. Cotts, in which she praises Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial very highly, and is somewhat more reserved on R. DeWitt Miller’s Stranger Than Life, one of those books about “unexplainable events.” The February issue includes a lettercol, According to You, with letters from Bill Wolfenbarger (praise for Schomburg, and for the more horrific side of fantasy), E. E. Evers (much disdain for the November 1961 issue, even for the Le Guin story), and Norman Masters (hated Sharkey’s “The Aftertime,” likes Le Guin).

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Old School Steampunk: Reading The Steam Man of the Plains (1883)

Old School Steampunk: Reading The Steam Man of the Plains (1883)

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In the days before television, movies, or even pulp magazines, readers who wanted exciting fantastic fare read dime novels. This style of popular literature lasted from about 1860 to 1930, before the pulps finally killed them off. In those 70 years, countless series and titles were published — mysteries, Westerns, historical dramas, romances, and even steampunk.

Yes, steampunk goes right back to the age of steam. I recently read one of the most popular titles, the 1883 edition of The Steam Man of the Plains, published by the Five Cent Wide-Awake Library, a series directed specifically at adolescent boys. You can read it online at Northern Illinois University’s excellent online collection of dime novels.

Warning: spoilers follow!

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