Search Results for: How to put the sword in sword and sorcery

DEMONS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND: Call of the Cambion (The Cambion Journals — Book Two) by Andrew P. Weston

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Augustus Thorne is a Cambion — a human/demon hybrid. Cursed with a hunger he can barely control, it’s been a struggle to retain his humanity. All he’s ever wanted to do is enjoy what everyone else takes for granted. To lead a normal life. Fall in love. Start a family. Alas, such things are denied him because of what he is. Fated to feed off humans, he has channeled his self-loathing into a quest for revenge. For over two hundred…

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Flood Monsters and Ghost Riders: The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VIII (DAW, July 1980). Cover by Michael Whelan The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VIII was the eighth volume in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories, copyrighted and printed in 1980. This was the first volume edited by horror author and editor Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). Artist Michael Whelan (1950–) appears for a sixth time in a row on the cover. I have been very impressed with Whelan’s variety. The covered and walking corpse is…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The Barbarian Boom, Part 5

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Red Sonja (1985) The Barbarian Boom has now arrived at 1985, the trough at the low point of the arc, the rotten apples at the bottom of the barrel. What can I say? These are stinkers. At least the first two, Lost Kingdom and the notorious Red Sonja, have got parts that are so jaw-droppingly dumb that you can have fun pointing at them and hooting. However, Barbarian Queen is a movie that genuinely offends Your Cheerful Editor, which isn’t…

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Exploring Modern Pulp: Royal Road and the Web Novel

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Image courtesy Royal Road “Web novels?” you say. “What are those?” They’re exactly what you think they are; novels written and published on the internet, free to read. They’re more common than you think. What may surprise you about this community of writers and readers is not only the writers themselves, but the abundance of readers who support them financially. I think many folks here have probably heard of places like Wattpad, the web publishing platform where writers post their…

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Neverwhens, Where Fantasy and History Collide: Tanith Lee’s Cyrion

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Cyrion (DAW, 1982, cover by Ken W. Kelly) The Empress of Dreams I hardly need to sing the praises of the late Tanith Lee (1947 – 2015).  A two-time World Fantasy winner, Horror Grandmaster, Hugo nominee, yadda yadda yadda, she rose out of nowhere writing sword & sorcery (generally a male-dominated field) with the Nebula-nominated The Birthgrave, and went on to pen 70 novels, 300 short stories and create a style of lush, dark fantasy perhaps best represented by her…

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Vintage Treasures: Heroic Fantasy edited by Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt

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Heroic Fantasy (DAW, 1979). Cover by Jad If you were a sword & sorcery fan in the 70s and 80s, there wasn’t a lot to get excited about. Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords anthologies. Andrew J. Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness, naturally. And the occasional Conan pastiche and Lancer paperback. And there was Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt’s one-shot anthology Heroic Fantasy, which came out of nowhere, never had a sequel, but was packed with terrific original stories by Charles Saunders,…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The Barbarian Boom, Part 4

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The Warrior and the Sorceress (Argentina/USA, 1984) Barbarians don’t get no respect. The fantasy films released in the wake of the unexpected worldwide success of Star Wars (1977) were all over the map, varying widely in approach and quality, but the barbarian lookalikes that followed the first Conan movie (1982) stuck to a formula, in quality plunging straight to the bottom of the barrel and mostly staying there as the barrel bumped along the cheapie exploitation circuit for the next…

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Vintage Treasures: Swords Against Darkness edited by Andrew J. Offutt

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Swords Against Darkness (Zebra Books, February 1977). Cover  by Frank Frazetta Sword Against Darkness was a seminal five-volume sword & sorcery anthology series edited by Andrew J. Offutt in the late seventies (1977-79). It published original fantasy by some of the biggest names of the era, including Andre Norton, Tanith Lee, Keith Taylor, Charles de Lint, Charles R. Saunders, Orson Scott Card, Simon R. Green, David C. Smith, Robert E. Vardeman, Darrell Schweitzer, Diana L. Paxson, and many others. The…

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Beautiful and Repulsive Butterflies: An Interview with M. Stern

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We have an ongoing series on Black Gate discussing “Beauty in Weird Fiction.” We corner authors to tap their minds about their muses and ways to make ‘repulsive’ things ‘attractive to readers.’  Recent guests on Black Gate have included Darrell Schweitzer, Anna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg, Stephen Leigh, Jason Ray Carney, and John C. Hocking. See the full list of interviews at the end of this post. This one covers emerging author M. Stern who writes weird/horror fiction and sci-fi. He…

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