Black Gate – Page 876 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Ghost Stories and Stranger Tales: Couching at the Door by D.K. Broster

Wednesday, December 3, 2014 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Thomas Parker’s article on Ghost Stories for Christmas yesterday inspired me to look through my own collection for Victorian era ghost stories. I was intrigued by his suggestion to revive the ghostly tradition of Christmas past, by reading classic ghost stories out loud to my kids around the fireplace on the cold evenings of December.

Of course, my children are all teenagers. Which means they’ll be checking their smartphones, playing games on the iPad, and generally rolling their eyes when I suggest a 100-year old family entertainment. They don’t even like to watch movies from the 1980s. Or technology of any kind released before 2010.

Well, that’s parenting. You need to endure a little eye-rolling before they come around. I think I’ll start with W.F. Harvey’s “The Clock,” from The Beast with Five Fingers, which John C. Hocking called “a masterful short piece… Truly one of the finest examples of what H.P. Lovecraft called ‘spectral fear’ ever put on the page.” Or maybe a ghost detective story from Mark Valentine’s The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths. Or a Sherlock Holmes pastiche from The Game’s Afoot.

Of course, all three of these books have one thing in common: They’re all part of Wordsworth’s Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural (or TOMAToS, for short). It’s the perfect line of books if you’re looking for great Victorian horror tales…. or great ghost stories, period.

I need a book that will keep them on their toes, an author who mixes supernatural mysteries with even stranger weird tales. And after looking through my Wordsworth collection, I think I have just the thing: D.K. Broster’s Couching at the Door.

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Ancient Worlds: The Way of All Flesh

Tuesday, December 2, 2014 Elizabeth Cady Comments 2 comments

Gilgamesh was not the first man to lose a friend. But he was the first epic hero to lose one.

Enkidu and Gilgamesh had been inseparable in their short friendship. They fought the monster Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven together. But the consequence of their actions was Enkidu’s death. And with that loss, Gilgamesh discovers his own fear of death.

The issue of Enkidu, my friend, oppresses me,
so I have been roaming long roads through the wilderness.
How can I stay silent, how can I be still!
My friend whom I love has turned to clay.
Am I not like him? Will I lie down, never to get up again?

Gilgamesh mourns long and hard, and refuses to even bury Enkidu until decay sets in and a maggot falls out of his nose. After he gives in to the need to let go of even his friend’s body, he leaves behind his kingdom and wanders, obsessed with the question of his mortality.

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The Doom That Came to Lovecraft

Tuesday, December 2, 2014 James Maliszewski Comments 6 comments

I turned 45 right before Halloween and once again I feel the cold claws of senescence tighten their grip around my throat. I used to pride myself on my memory, which, while not truly “photographic” – assuming such a thing even exists – was always extremely keen. Note that that I said “was.” Lately, I’m finding it harder and harder to keep the details of my wasted youth straight in my mind.

A good case in point concerns when I first encountered the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. I know for certain that it was after I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons, but before Chaosium released its Lovecraft-inspired RPG, Call of Cthulhu. That suggests, then, the likeliest date is sometime in 1980, since, by then, I’d not only have acquired a copy of Gary Gygax’s masterwork, the Dungeon Masters Guide, whose Appendix N cited HPL as one of “the most immediate influences upon AD&D,” but had also made the acquaintance of older players who frequently extolled the virtues of pulp literature to my friends and I.

What I do remember is that, at the time, the very name “Lovecraft” sounded fantastical to me. I almost couldn’t accept that it was a real name, since I’d never heard of anyone with such a moniker before. This probably contributed greatly to the reverence in which I’d later hold his writings, a reverence that has only increased as I’ve grown older and had occasion to read and re-read his stories countless times.

What I also remember was that, not long after learning about the Gentleman from Providence, I rushed to my local library to find copies of his “books,” not yet realizing that most of his output consisted of short stories. What I found were battered copies of some of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy collections, along with the Scholastic Book Services edition of The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror. The latter had a lasting effect on my imagination, thanks to its creepily comical depiction of a spectral inhabitant of the titular New England town. From then on, Lovecraft’s creations struck a powerful chord with me and, as I later learned, with so many of my fellow gamers. They were the epitome of horror.

How times have changed.

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Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh… and Ectoplasm?! Ghost Stories for Christmas

Tuesday, December 2, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 2 comments

Now that we have passed the point of no return (also known as Thanksgiving), we have plunged irrevocably into the Christmas season, that time of the year which is richest in traditions, be they old or new, religious or secular, serious or lighthearted, shared with millions worldwide or kept hidden behind closed doors and reserved for the private humiliation of those we hold dearest.

Decorating a tree with lights and ornaments, kissing under the mistletoe, hanging stockings, singing carols — these widespread traditions are the instantly recognizable emblems of the season, while other rituals are restricted for a select circle. For one household the season’s signifier may be listening to Dad read the nativity story from the Gospel of Luke, for another group it may be gathering around the television to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, while for yet another family it may be nervously edging away as Uncle Carl begins his annual Yuletide disquisition on America’s inexorable slide into socialism.

Traditions come and traditions go, however. An observance that has largely faded from view is the once-widespread custom of reading ghost stories on Christmas Eve. As with many Christmas traditions, this one began in Victorian England. Of course long before the Victorians, Christmas was associated with the miraculous and the supernatural, but during those middle and later years of the nineteenth century, the season became explicitly linked with the overtly ghostly as well.

The Victorian era was the high-water mark of the traditional ghost story, which was a staple of the magazines and inexpensive books that vied for the attention of an expanding and prosperous middle class. These publications were hungry for content, and ghost stories helped fill that need. Some of the form’s greatest masters — Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Amelia Edwards, Mary Braddon, Edith Nesbit, and M.R. James, among many others — wrote during this period.

However, it was Charles Dickens who was, more than any other person, responsible for the identification of one particular time of year — the Christmas season — with the explicitly ghostly. Dickens loved a good ghost story; he had, in the words of his friend and biographer, John Forster, “something of a hankering after them.”

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The Classic Games of Metagaming: Ogre

Tuesday, December 2, 2014 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Last week, I wrote about discovering early Metagaming advertisements in copies of Analog and Asimov’s SF, as well as other science fiction magazines I read in the late 1970s. The ads — for tiny science fiction games I could carry around in my pocket — fired my imagination.

I was already gaming with my friends over lunch at school and the thought of playing games featuring giant robot tanks and wizard duels instead of another round of chess was too much to resist. I mailed off my check and waited impatiently for my treasures to arrive.

Now, ask most young folks how they felt when the magical item they ordered from the back of a comic or magazine finally came in the mail and you’ll hear some pretty sad stories. Those X-ray spectacles? A crushing disappointment. That family of sea monkeys? In reality, tiny frozen shrimp. And don’t even ask about the Polaris Nuclear Submarine.

But Metagaming microgames were not disappointments. Quite the opposite.

Microgame #1: Ogre was one of the first games I ordered from Metagaming. It was not the last. I still remember the first trial games I played with my brother Mike; the thrill of moving my Ogre cybertank relentlessly across the heavily cratered map board. Ogre was a wonderful game — brilliantly simple in design, easy to set up, and lightning fast to play.

It became, in fact, one of the most successful science fiction board games ever published, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It went through numerous editions, and is still in print and available today — in both a no-frills reprint of the original 1977 edition and a limited edition deluxe version with multiple giant mapboards, more than 500 oversized full-color unit counters, and 3-D models, which will run you over $150 (if you can find a copy).

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New Treasures: Jala’s Mask by Mike and Rachel Grinti

Monday, December 1, 2014 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

This is something of an unusual cover for Pyr. They’re known for their heroic fantasy and sword & sorcery, and their covers have reflected that — with colorful action set pieces usually illustrating a dynamic narrative moment (Check out a few of the Pyr covers we’ve showcased in the past few months, such as James Enge’s The Wide World’s End, or the Nebula Awards Showcase 2014.)

Not so for Jala’s Mask, which shows a couple in dull islander garb standing on a beach, doing… well, not much of anything, really. Not what I usually expect from Pyr. Good to see some racial diversity on a fantasy cover — Lords knows this industry could use it — but would it kill you to throw in a sword, or maybe a gratuitous sea monster? I’m just sayin’. At least there’s a dude in a mask floating behind the title to menace up the proceedings a bit — that’s something, anyway.

Fortunately, I’m intrigued by the back cover blurb, which introduces us to a woman who must steal the face of a god in order to save her people.

For two hundred years, Jala’s people have survived by raiding the mainland. By shaping the reefs around the Five-and-One Islands into magical ships, they can cross the ocean, take what they want, and disappear. Or so they have always believed. On the night after Jala becomes queen, a tide of magical fog sweeps over the islands, carrying ships from the mainland. Inside are a desperate people, driven half-mad by sorcery and looking for revenge.

Now Jala — caught between her family’s unending ambitions, the politics of the islands thrown into turmoil, and her unexpected love for the king — must find a way to save them all if she can.

But there are greater powers at work, and the politics of gods are more terrifying than she could have imagined. To save the Five-and-One Islands she may have to leave them behind.

Mike and Rachel Grinti are also the authors of Claws. Jala’s Mask was published by Pyr on November 4, 2014. It is 285 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital version. The cover art is by Marc Simonetti.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes for Christmas

Monday, December 1, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 2 comments

Of the sixty Sherlock Holmes tales penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, only one is set during the holiday season. “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” takes place two days after Christmas and involves a worn bowler hat and a goose worth more dead than alive.

That story doesn’t actually have a whole lot to do with Christmas; it just happens to occur shortly afterwards. However, there are a few books in my Holmes library that definitely qualify as Christmas adventures.

One of my favorite anthologies is 1996’s Holmes for the Holidays, which includes fourteen Christmas-themed adventures. Any Holmes anthology is likely to be a mixed bag. However, I consider this to be among the better of the multiple-author collections on my Holmes bookshelf.

Loren D. Estleman’s (author of Holmes pastiches featuring Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde) “The Adventure of the Three Ghosts” is a sequel to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Texan Bill Crider (give his Dan Rhodes mysteries a whirl) also continues the Scrooge story with “The Adventure of the Christmas Ghosts.”

William DeAndrea’s “The Adventure of the Christmas Tree” is a neat piece of Christmas-themed espionage. While Anne Perry’s “The Watch Night Bell” is one of my favorite Holmes holiday stories.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in October

Sunday, November 30, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Sometimes people critique Black Gate by looking over the site, noting our focus on books and magazines, and proclaiming us “books snobs.”

That’s not true at all, I argue calmly. Look — you know what the most popular article on the Black Gate website was just last month? It was Scott Taylor’s Art of the Genre post, “The Top 10 Dragon Magazine Covers of the 1970s & 80s.”

You see? We’re not merely book snobs. We’re also art snobs.

This is Scott’s second month at the top of the charts — back in September, he claimed the top spot with his article on the Top 10 TSR Cover Paintings of All Time, a nostalgic look at the finest artwork from the Golden Age of roleplaying. Scott certainly knows his stuff when it comes to fantasy art — and our readers love him for it.

The next few articles at the top of the charts don’t do much to help my thesis that we’re not book snobs, however. The #2 article for the month of October was M. Harold Page’s “Four Books on Historical European Martial Arts.” Hard to argue that you’re not just all about books, when your most popular posts are all about books.

The #3 article for the month was my look at The Fantasy Roots of Fan Fiction, an argument that the modern fan fiction phenomenon grew largely out of the tradition of the pastiche novel, and especially the long-running success of the Conan pastiche, and the success of writers like Lin Carter, who wrote pastiches for most of his career.

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Avatars of Wizardry

Sunday, November 30, 2014 John R. Fultz Comments 0 Comment

More often than not, the best art comes from the indie side of any field. Case-in-point:

AVATARS OF WIZARDRY from P’rea Press is one of the best works of pure dark fantasy I’ve read in a long time. This superb collection of poems inspired by the work of Clark Ashton Smith and his mentor George Sterling offers one fantastic, phantasmal head trip after another, transcendental goth romanticism with shades of cosmic sword-and-sorcery.

I’m not usually someone who seeks out poetry. I teach it often, but fantastic poetry is something of a rarity in academic texts. Reading this collection (with some Pink Floyd, Kyuss, or Monster Magnet rumbling softly in the background for good measure) takes me right back to the “wonder years” of my early reading life. From the ages of 9 to 12, I discovered the amazing fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other great fantasists. Reading AVATARS OF WIZARDRY sends me back to those days when fantasy was still dangerous, mysterious, and full of strange wonders.

One of Smith’s greatest poems “The Hashish Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil” was inspired by George Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry.” Both of these poems are celestial odysseys of fantasy perfection. They begin AVATARS OF WIZARDRY back-to-back and are followed by eight poems from more contemporary writers: Alan Gullette, Wade German, Michael Fantina, Richard L. Tierney, Liegh Blackmore, Bruce Boston, Earl Livings, and Kyla Lee Ward. The result is an epic fantasy experience like none other. The words “psychedelic” and “phantasmagorical” are barely enough to describe it.

These poems aren’t for the shallow-minded 160-character world that we live in today. Each one is an epic adventure beyond space and time, directly into the center of eternal imagination, rife with cosmic transcendence. This is spirit-freeing fantasy in the best sense of the word, literary escapism as psychological catharsis. It’s some of the best damn poetry I’ve ever read, which makes it some of the best fantasy I’ve ever read, period.

You don’t have to be a poetry expert (or fan) to take this cosmic ride. Just get yourself a copy before they’re all gone.

Astounding Science Fiction, February and March 1953: A Retro-Review

Sunday, November 30, 2014 Rich Horton Comments 4 comments

I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at John Campbell’s Astounding, from the early ’50s, after its dominance of the market had been shaken by Galaxy and F&SF. So here are two 1953 issues.

I bought these two issues because the March issue has John Brunner’s first story for a major market, “Thou Good and Faithful.” I noticed that that issue also has the second part of a Piper serial that I hadn’t read, so I bought the February issue to get part 1.

Details, then. The February cover, for H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire’s serial “Null-ABC,” is by H. R. Van Dongen, a pretty good one with a skull on a reddish background (flames and smoke, I think), and books and test tubes in the foreground.

The March cover, for “Thou Good and Faithful,” is less to my taste. It’s by G. Pawelka, an artist with whom I am unfamiliar, and it features a robot with a monkey-like creature on his shoulder, holding a globe of sorts — a very accurate depiction of a scene from the story, but not a picture I fancy much.

The features in each issue are the usual: Campbell’s editorial (“Redundance,” about information theory, in February; and “Unsane Behavior,” about war and the naivete of both those who think it works very well, and those who think stories of Atomic Doom will prevent it, in March); In Times to Come, The Analytical Laboratory, Brass Tacks, and P. Schuyler Miller’s review column.

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