Search Results for: Captain Blood

New Treasures: Blood Riders by Michael Spradlin

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Okay, I admit I’ve been on a weird western kick recently. It started with the Bloodlands novels of Christine Cody, Lee Collins’s She Returns From War, and Guy Adams’s The Good The Bad and The Infernal and the sequel Once Upon a Time in Hell; then I moved on to Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill’s Dead Reckoning, and The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher. For those of you keeping up at home — congratulations. We should form a book club. Michael Spradlin’s Blood Riders is the latest, and…

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The Great Captains by Henry Treece

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They were great men, yet to see them only as men, stripped of their doom-driven greatness, is to represent them on too trivial a scale. To draw them as massive heroes only would be to recreate them as inhuman cyphers. from the preface to The Great Captains The Great Captains (1956) is Henry Treece’s brutal and gripping version of the King Arthur story. Treece has pruned away the romantic embellishments that have obscured the old legend and returned it to the…

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Adventure on Film: Flesh and Blood

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Flesh and Blood (1985) is neither high art nor Paul Verhoeven’s best film, but it does contain flashes of genuine magic and an exceptional eye for the grime and grit of Medieval Italy. It also carries its fair share of star power thanks to the presence of Rutger Hauer, Verhoeven’s frequent co-conspirator, as mercenary soldier Martin. The plot in a nutshell: Martin and his band of trouble-making friends are part of Hawkwood’s Army (though which of Hawkwood’s many armies is allowably…

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Heroic Historicals: Robert E. Howard, Harold Lamb, Poul Anderson and James Clavell

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I define Heroic Fantasy (HF) as a type of fiction in which a heroic (bigger than life) figure uses a combination of physical strength and edged weapons (swords, axes, spears) to face bigger than life foes. The hero may be either male or female, but the focus is primarily on personal conflict between the hero and various villains. I divide Heroic Fantasy into four categories: Sword and Sorcery, Sword and Planet, High Fantasy, and Heroic Historical. I’ve already discussed/defined S&S…

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Tarzan and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part II

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Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Playboy Paperbacks, August 1981 and July 1981). Covers: uncredited, Ken Barr Read the first half of this article, The World of Tiers and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part I. Continuing our examination of Farmer’s pastiches, Farmer soon gave up the Grandrith and Caliban names and went full on with the characters in two fictional biographies called Tarzan Alive (1972) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973), both from Playboy’s Science Fiction line….

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Remembering Carl Jacobi

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Revelations in Black by Carl Jacobi (Jove/HBJ, January 1979). Cover uncredited D.H. Olson delivered this eulogy for Carl Jacobi on Friday, August 29, 1997 at Lakewood Chapel in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was included in Masters of the Weird Tale: Carl Jacobi, published by Centipede Press in May 2014. Our deepest thanks to D.H. Olson for permission to reprint it here, and special thanks to Jerad Walters at Centipede Press for providing the text. When R. Dixon Smith asked me to…

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Horror and Beauty in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Work: An Interview with Robert Allen Lupton

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We have an ongoing series at Black Gate on “Beauty in Weird Fiction,” where we corner an author and query them about their muses and methods to make ‘repulsive things’ become ‘attractive to readers.’ Previous subjects have included Darrell Schweitzer, Anna Smith Spark, Carol Berg, C.S. Friedman, John R. Fultz, and John C. Hocking (whose Conan and the Living Plague novel is finally due out this June 2024, so you should read that too to get psyched). Anyway, see the full list of interviews…

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Lawrence Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords Arrives Next Week

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Cinema of Swords by Lawrence Ellsworth (Applause, June 15, 2023) Next Thursday is a big day in the Black Gate offices, as the most anticipated book of the year finally arrives: the hardcover edition of Lawrence Ellsworth’s monumental Cinema of Swords. What’s in this great beast of a book? Every one of Lawrence’s informative and entertaining Cinema of Swords columns from Black Gate — Over four hundred movies and television shows featuring swashbucklers: knights, pirates, samurai, Vikings, gladiators, outlaw heroes…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Boarding Party Bingo

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Captain Horatio Hornblower (USA, 1951) The Age of Sail lasted almost three millennia until wind power was replaced by steam in the late 1800s — a time that, in the mid-twentieth century, was still within living memory. Swashbuckling sea stories are still with us, but as a subject for big-budget movies, they peaked in the early Fifties. Like Westerns, many of these sea stories followed formula, and while some were great, most were considerably less than that. Let’s look at…

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Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Goblins, Giants and Blacktongued Rogues Abide! The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman

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The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman (Tor Books, May 2021). Cover by Marie Bergeron “Christophe the Insulter” was for years the single funniest performer at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin, with one of the best cons… er…. shows: Pay me to insult your friends in front of an audience. The more you pay, the more I roast them. It was dark, it was brutal, it was wickedly funny and everyone went away feeling good — even the victims. Interestingly,…

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