Goth Chick News: The Woman in Black

Goth Chick News: The Woman in Black

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image0041Anyone who has been reading these entries with any regularity knows that the word “minimalist” will never be used in the same sentence with my name. I seem to be visually starved, needing to be perpetually surrounded by interesting if not strange things to look at. This can easily be proven by the fact I cohabitate with a voodoo doll collection and three German Shepherds.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to Halloween.

I mean, you’ve probably heard people comment on over-the-top Christmas decorations, but I doubt you’ve heard anything but awe-struck admiration for someone who’s gone nutty with their front yard zombie display.

Or maybe my neighbors are just trying to be nice.

In any case, it’s rather odd for me to tell you that one of my all-time-favorite books, which then made it to the top of my theater list — and will eventually, I hope,  make it to my top ten movie list — is anything but visually cluttered. Speaking at least for the book and the play, The Woman in Black derives its horror from its simplicity, and that’s really what a classic fright is about, isn’t it? It’s why no blood-splattered, psychopath training film like Saw or Hostel will ever be as scary as the scare that gets in your head.

Back in 1983, author Susan Hill wrote the tale of a young lawyer summoned to settle the affairs of the deceased Alice Drablow, who had lived on a remote English estate cut off from the mainland during high tide (sounds awesome so far, right?) As he pieces together Alice’s tragic life, the lawyer begins to uncover a tragic family secret and its horrifying guardian, the Woman in Black. It’s a premise just simple enough to make your skin crawl.

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Anthopology 101 dives into classic SF Anthologies

Anthopology 101 dives into classic SF Anthologies

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anthopology-101aSF author Bud Webster informs us that his book Anthopology 101: Reflections, Inspections and Dissections of SF Anthologies, is now available from The Merry Blacksmith Press. Bud tells us:

Anthologies are the core samples of science fiction.  Through their pages, we can not only follow the growth of the genre from its very beginnings, but we can also study the past’s visions of the future.

As author of the always-fascinating Past Masters column, which examines the forgotten work of some of the finest SF and fantasy writers of the 20th Century, Bud should know.

This is one of the most intriguing titles I’ve come across in a while, and I’m really looking forward to getting a copy in my hot little hands.

The book includes an introduction from Mike Ashley, and collects 25 of Bud’s “Anthopology 101” columns  that originally appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction, Chronicle, SFWA Bulletin, and other fine publications.

For anyone else with an obsessive interest in these fascinating and beautiful relics of early science fiction and fantasy (I’m talking to you, Rich Horton), you’ll want to jump over to the Merry Blacksmith website, where they’re offering free shipping on Anthopology 101 until August 21.

ON WRITING FANTASY: Character Is King

ON WRITING FANTASY: Character Is King

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wayofthewizard2
My wizard story "The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria" appears in THE WAY OF THE WIZARD, coming from Prime Books in November.

“A character is not a simulation of a living being.
It is an imaginary being. An experimental self.”
— Milan Kundera

“Each character is a piece of the writer and
the writer’s experience of other human beings, and also a piece of the reader and
the reader’s parallel experience.”
— William Sloane

 “The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth
about what you see.”
— Stephen King

What a character!

This fourth installment of an ongoing series covers the role of “Character” in Fantasy Fiction. (Previous installments covered Originality, Style, and Plot.)

The heart and soul of any story are its characters. Every story, no matter what style or genre, is basically about PEOPLE. Even if these people are aliens, monsters, robots, or talking fish, they still have human personalities. Why? Because the people who write them are human. Therefore, all stories are stories about people, i.e. characters. If you don’t have believable, memorable characters, you’re not going to have a very good story.

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Review: Night of the Necromancer

Review: Night of the Necromancer

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Bela Lugosi's dead.Night of the Necromancer
Jonathan Green
Wizard Books (384 pp, ₤5.99, CAN$12.00, April 2010)

One of the many things I admire about the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks is how little space is wasted establishing the scenario. In Night of the Necromancer, you are a crusader returning home after a three-year campaign against vampires and diabolists when an ambush at the foot of your own castle leaves you slain in a ditch. But the dead shall be raised! A paragraph later you are reborn as a ghost, launching you on a quest to avenge your own murder.

Over the course of a single night, you explore a wonderfully atmospheric English countryside haunted by things worse than you, a landscape that is half M.R. James and half Ravenloft (you may even encounter a ghost hunter named Van Richten). Rather than a linear course, progress is made from crossroads to crossroads, allowing you to explore areas branching from a central nexus, then return to that nexus to investigate other avenues. When you’re ready, you move on to the next node, and so on.

Night of the Necromancer is a new addition to Wizard Books’ reprints of Fighting Fantasy from the ’80s and ’90s, and nearly 30 years of evolution shows in Necromancer‘s sophistication.

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Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan of the Isles

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan of the Isles

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conan-of-the-isle-original-coverSo far in the entries of my informal tour through the Conan pastiches—with a great guest shot from Charles Saunders on Conan the Hero—I’ve focused entirely on the “Tor Era,” the longest and most sustained period of new novels about Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age hero. Because of the sheer volume of books in the Tor line, which ran uninterrupted from 1982 to 1997, as well as most readers’ and reviewers’ indifference toward them, the Tor Era provides fertile ground for fresh criticism. It contains a few gems as well among the factory-line production schedule.

But I’ve neglected the earlier Conan pastiches, from publishers Lancer (Sphere in the U.K., later Ace in the U.S.) and Ballantine. Before Tor started its Conan factory with Robert Jordan’s Conan the Invincible, the world of Conan pastiches rested mostly in the hands of two men: L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. They filled in a “Conan Saga” that they had imagined through a constructed timeline, and this framework extended into the Tor Era as well, although turning more overstuffed and inconsistent as the books piled up and eventually the whole series put itself to sleep and Howard burst back into print.

One of the results of de Camp and Carter’s addenda to Conan’s history is the odd, uncharacteristic, yet hypnotically entertaining Conan of the Isles. Years ago I wrote a detailed review of this 1968 novel for a forum posting. I’ve pulled up that old review and done some dusting, revising, and re-thinking to present the first “Pastiches ‘R’ Us” installment that examines the controversial First Responders of the neo-Conan world.

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Norman Spinrad on The Publishing Death Spiral, Part Two

Norman Spinrad on The Publishing Death Spiral, Part Two

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druid_king2In Part Two of his blog series on the Publishing Death Spiral (read Part One here), science fiction author Norman Spinrad, author of Bug Jack Barron, Child of Fortune, and The Iron Dream, talks about “My Own Death Spiral,” and seeing the cover art for his novel The Druid King the first time:

Knopf’s star art director… had taken photos of some gnarly twigs and photoshopped them into the letters of the book title.  Murky brown against black background, no other illo. Suck City in terms of rack pop. My heart sank when I saw it… To give you an idea of how bad the cover really was, when the book finally came out, Dona and I looked for it in the new books rack.  It wasn’t there! We couldn’t find it.  Major panic! We finally did. It turned out we had looked past it three times without noticing it.  And I was the author.

You can read the complete post, along with lively comments from Jerry Pournelle, Paul Riddell, and Knopf Art Director Chip Kidd, here.

Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

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bglgSixteen of your US dollars. That’s what the latest (monster) issue of Black Gate has cost you in these days of fear and crumbling factories. It’s strange, isn’t it? You’ll spend all that money on a collection of fiction and game reviews when the internet is bursting with so much free content. If you go looking right now, you can find a million Sword & Sorcery stories out there that you wouldn’t even need to pirate: the authors, overcome in a delirium of generosity, are only too thrilled to supply them for free.

And it doesn’t stop with short-stories! There are more novels waiting for you online than any dozen people could read in a lifetime, along with plays, movie scripts, poetry…

Oh God. The poetry.

So, what’s stopping you? I’ll tell you what’s stopping me: I don’t want to be a slush reader. It is mind-rotting, eye-burning work that actually becomes worse the more of it you do. Like some sort of cumulative poison. And for every great story we read in the pages of Black Gate, there have been several hundred at least that would have had any sane person thinking more and more about drinking that bottle of bleach under the sink. Oh yes.

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A whole new meaning to “A Room full of Books”

A whole new meaning to “A Room full of Books”

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bookcellPrague-based artist Matej Kren has created a room made almost entirely of books. It is part of the city gallery of Bratislava.

The giant sculpture, called Passage, also uses mirrors and special lighting to create a “surreal chamber of texts.”

Kren is known for creating a series of gigantic book sculptures. Passage is part of a wider series called “Book cell” — structures and spaces built entirely out of thousands of books.

The photo at left remind us rather strongly of the brick house built by the third little pig (you know, the industrious one). No word yet on just how well it holds up to strong breezes and wolfish intruders.

Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector and His Poetry

Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector and His Poetry

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Battles were fought and won based on the strength and keenness of blades as well as the ability to use them effectively. Bob Howard was not only interested in the various types of swords, he was also fascinated with the history they represented. In his poetry and his stories, he uses his knowledge of weapons, historical people, places and events to give us vivid images of those ages. 

In March 1933, Robert E. Howard wrote to H. P. Lovecraft about his interest in swords:

I envy you your access to the museums you mentioned. I’ve, naturally, never seen anything of the sort, though I remember some very good displays in the museums of New Orleans, especially Civil War relics. Weapons, especially edged weapons, axes, swords, and spears, hold my attention as nothing else can. Long ago I started collecting them, but found it a taste far too expensive for my means. I still have the things I did manage to get hold of – a few sabers, swords, bayonets and the like.  (The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, v. 3, p. 31)

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Faces in the Mirror

Faces in the Mirror

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John Bellairs died in 1991, well-known and well-respected as a writer of odd, gothic mysteries for children; the sort of writer who can come up with books called The House With a Clock In Its Walls or The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, and make them live up to the evocative promise of their titles.

magic-mirrors2But Bellairs was more than that. He was also a first-class fantasist, whose one book for adults, The Face in the Frost, is something unique. Written before his tales for children, on its publication in 1969 it was described by Lin Carter as one of the three best fantasies to have appeared since The Lord of the Rings.

Recently, NESFA Press (NESFA stands for the New England Science Fiction Association) reprinted The Face in the Frost in a volume that also includes the surviving fragment of its uncompleted sequel, The Dolphin Cross, and two of Bellairs’ earlier works, Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies and The Pedant and the Shuffly. The resulting book, Magic Mirrors, is unconventional but perhaps essential.

The Face in the Frost is no epic quest, nor is it grim dark fantasy, though a superficial description makes it sound like it could be either: It’s a tale of two elderly and slightly bumbling wizards faced with a mysterious darkness that’s threatening everything they know, and the journey they must take to unriddle what it is and how to stop it.

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