…And on the day two hundredThere it stood white to the skyThe house of the God of the crossBig enough to take two dragon ships insideAll of Asa bay did watchThe wonder raise to the skyNow must the God of the cross be pleased satisfiedJust outside the circle of the crowd
The Shadow Cycles by Philip Emery (Immanion Press, August 2011) This continues our interviews on “Beauty in Weird Fiction” with previous topics being: THE BEAUTY IN HORROR AND SADNESS: AN INTERVIEW with DARRELL SCHWEITZER THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE REPELLENT: AN INTERVIEW with CHARLES A. GRAMLICH DISGUST AND DESIRE: AN INTERVIEW with ANNA SMITH SPARK ACCESSIBLE DARK FANTASY: AN INTERVIEW with CAROL BERG GOD, DARKNESS, & WONDER: AN INTERVIEW with BYRON LEAVITT Are you haunted, perhaps obsessed, with Sword & Sorcery?…
January 1st Dear Diary,I have decided that my new writing project will be a classic swords and sorcery epic! To that end, I have reams of research on the particulars of many ancient and medieval weapons, and a few pages of notes outlining the magic of this new world. This is the extent of my preparation for this, as I want it to be spontaneous and fresh as I write it. No pesky outline for me this time! I’m going…
Lin Carter is above all else good company. He’s looking back one generation to what is now our genre’s Heroic Age, a wild and woolly era of unbounded creativity separated from us by a gulf of a century — I am reminded of when, as a teenager, I bought a drink for an elderly jazz musician, who in turn told me about going out on the town with Fats Waller, and the perils of playing for Jelly Roll Morton.
Savage Scrolls, Volume One, edited by Jason Ray Carney (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Cover by Jesus Lopez When I was working on the introduction to Savage Scrolls, I re-read all of Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords introductions. Something caught my attention: Carter starts Flashing Swords 1 with an epigraph, a stanza from William Morris’s six-stanza poem, “Prologue of the Earthly Paradise.” It is a beautiful apologia of fantasy literature. The speaker, Morris, attempts to comfort his reader, a weary, disenchanted worker,…
The 4-volume Quark anthology series, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker(Paperback Library, 1970-71). Covers by Russell FitzGerald, Ira Cohen, Roger Penney, and Martin Last These four volumes of Quark came out in 1970-71. The publisher killed the Quark enterprise after a year mainly because they weren’t selling, but also because of a really ill-thought-out review that Ed Bryant, who had a story in the first issue, wrote about the journal, in which he praised Marilyn and me, but…
Cover by Duncan Kay I’ve had my eye on Gaie Sebold ever since I bought her brilliant and funny short story “A Touch of Crystal” (co-written with fellow Brit Martin Owton), the tale of a shopkeeper who discovers some of the goods in her New Age shop are actually magical, for Black Gate 9. She’s been well worth the watch. Her debut novel Babylon Steel (described as “Sword & Sorcery for the girl who wants to be Conan”) kicked off…
Today, I’m going to write about James Lee Burke and Dave Robicheaux. It’s not going to be like my look at Tony Hillerman and his Navajo Tribal Police series, where re-read the first nine books and dug into his autobiography. This column is due in about 36 hours. But I put Burke back on my radar Friday night, and I’m glad I revisited him. Two days after my birthday in 1987 (giving you the opportunity to do some research, find…
Today I’m going to finish up my 2-part article on Hercules (Part 1 covered his origin, his “twelve labors”, and his growing wisdom). Once again, I will quote from Bulfinch’s Mythology (a series including The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes), by Thomas Bulfinch; God, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece, by W.H.D. Rouse; and Mythology, by Edith Hamilton. For this second part, I’ve also sourced Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book IX. As I mentioned in the…
One of the greatest and probably the most famous hero in Greek mythology is Heracles, whom the Romans called Hercules, the name I first heard, thanks to certain films, when I was a kid. Some scholars call him by his original Greek name, others by the Roman version. Forgive me if I bounce back and forth between the two. A while back, I decided to revisit three films which had a great impact on me when I was a kid,…