Search Results for: charles Saunders

Horror and Swords & Sorcery

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The air has turned crisp, the sun is dipping below the horizon earlier each evening, and the supermarket candy section seems to have grown exponentially. Halloween is just around the corner and, like many of you, my mind has turned to haunts and frights. Horror is one of the primary elements dividing swords & sorcery from epic fantasy. To quote the Horror Writers Association’s site, horror fiction is that which “elicits an emotional reaction that includes some aspect of fear…

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Noise About Xignals

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I took a break from cutting the grass around the house. It was a hot day, and the chore always took a while. “Look what I found,” my aunt greeted me, as I went indoors and dropped into a chair. She’d been cleaning up, preparing to move into the cottage, and she’d been discovering things tucked away and forgotten long before, as one does. She handed me a copy of Xignals. Years ago, back in the twentieth century, Xignals had…

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Read the Best of Matthew David Surridge in Once Only Imagined: Collected Reviews, Vol II

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Matthew David Surridge is Black Gate‘s most successful blogger, both in terms of critical and popular success (his post “A Detailed Explanation,” on why he declined a Hugo nomination last year, is the most popular article in our history). He’s also one of our most prolific, with 270 articles to his credit, and he’s had more reprinted than anyone else on our staff. Of course, that’s mostly due to last year’s Reading Strange Matters, which collected 24 of his posts, chiefly…

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The January Fantasy Magazine Rack

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In his December Short Story Roundup, Fletcher Vredenburgh gives as eloquent a summary as I’ve seen for the vital importance of short fiction to fantasy, and in particular to sword & sorcery: Before I get into the reviews, I thought I’d say a little about why I’ve made it a major part of my writing to review and publicize S&S short stories. While there have been good S&S novels… the beating heart of the genre has always been short stories….

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December Short Story Roundup

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It’s time for the last roundup of stories from 2015. The year went out in fine fashion. For the second time in only a few months Beneath Ceaseless Skies published a batch of good heroic fantasy. And while we’re in that interim between new issues of of both Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Grimdark Magazine, genre stalwart Swords and Sorcery Magazine made its regular monthly appearance bearing a pair of new tales. Before I get into the reviews, I thought I’d say…

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Book Riot Suggests 9 Books That Will Challenge Your Idea of Fantasy

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Over at book site Book Riot, Troy L. Wiggins has posted an excellent list of fantasy books that venture outside the ordinary. Fantasy recommendation lists are characterized by their safety. Curious newcomers to the genre, having enjoyed their sample of escapist literature, request more stories, more worlds to lose themselves in. More often than not, though, the recommendations that they receive are the same few critically acclaimed authors… My belief is that Fantasy literature is the perfect lens for readers…

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Who Should Be Writing the Cthulhu Mythos Today? Announcing the Winners of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

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Three weeks ago we invited Black Gate readers to win a copy of the new Lovecraft-inspired anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, by suggesting who should be writing Lovecraftian horror today. To make it challenging, all entries had to be a single sentence. We received a near-record number of entries for this contest, too many to print here. But I’ve selected 20 of the more interesting, and reproduced them below. Two winners were randomly drawn from a list of all qualified entries, and those…

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A Look At The Year Gone By – 2014

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By my count, I published forty-two articles here at Black Gate during 2014. I reviewed thirty-two novels and over forty short stories. While most of the books were older ones [e.g. The Eternal Champion (1962) and Year of the Unicorn (1965)], I did manage to sneak a few newer ones into the mix, as you’ll read below. The short stories, all from presently publishing magazines, reinforced my belief that there’s a continuing renaissance in swords & sorcery. There are talented…

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Swords & Sorcery Gold from a Master of Horror: Far Away & Never by Ramsey Campbell

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Ramsey Campbell is considered one of the most important and skilled writers of horror fiction. His earliest stories, Lovecraft pastiches, were collected and published by Arkham House as The Inhabitants of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964) when he was only eighteen. Within a few years he was routinely being nominated for, and often winning, various major awards for his original works of contemporary horror such as The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and The Parasite (1980). He…

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Thongor of Lemuria – Part One by Lin Carter

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If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Lin Carter’s Thongor of Lemuria novels were a deliberate exercise in camp. The first two novels in the seven book series, Thongor And The Wizard of Lemuria (1965) and Thongor And The Dragon City (1966), are so frenetic and exaggerated there are times it’s difficult to believe they were intended to be taken seriously. I struggle to believe that Carter hadn’t meant for me to laugh when I read that Thongor distrusted magic because of…

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