Vintage Treasures: Deathweave and Darkloom by Cary Osborne

Vintage Treasures: Deathweave and Darkloom by Cary Osborne

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Deathweave and Darkloom (Ace Books, 1998 & 1999). Covers by Royo

I bought a collection of vintage paperbacks on eBay a while back (I do that a lot), and buried in the mix was one I knew nothing about, a midlist ACE SF adventure titled Deathweave by Cary Osborne.

Now, I love midlist paperbacks. They’re basically an undiscovered country. If you’re an entry-level author, the theory is that if you work long enough, like countless writers before you, you’ll eventually build an audience large enough to break out of midlist and start hitting the bestseller lists. Of course, the vast majority of writers never make it, which means that most midlist titles vanish after a few months in the sun, never to be seen or mentioned again. There are many, many talented writers who never had the good fortune (or perseverance, or celebrity connections, or whatever pixie dust it takes) to break into the front rank, and toil away in undeserved obscurity their entire career.

What does all this mean? It means these eBay lots I buy are littered with undiscovered gold, that’s what it means. Which means that when Deathweave finally fell into my eager hands 24 years after Ace first published it, I treated it as exactly that. Especially when I found out it had a sequel, Darkloom, which I tracked down a few weeks later.

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Mars Missions, Vengeful Djinn, and Haunted Dolls: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1952, a Retro-Review

Mars Missions, Vengeful Djinn, and Haunted Dolls: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1952, a Retro-Review

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The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1952 (Mercury Press). Cover by George Salter

In its early years, one of the most notable characteristics of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was its regular use of reprints — fantastical stories from outside the genre, often by very well-known writers, given exposure to SF and Fantasy readers. Another notable characteristic was covers by its art director, George Salter.

Both aspects are features of this issue — indeed, this seems almost a comically pure exemplar of the Boucher/McComas era. I’ll highlight the non-genre history of some of the writers in the issue. (As for Salter, I enjoy his delightfully weird art quite a bit.)

Here are the stories. There is also one feature, “Recommended Reading,” by the Editors.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes – Holmes Shelfies (#1)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes – Holmes Shelfies (#1)

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So…I found a kinda cool group over on Reddit. And it wasn’t LotR_on_Prime – yeesh. R/bookshelf is a subreddit where people post their shelfies. With over 2,000 books on 90-ish shelves/cubes, that appealed to me!

I started with my Jack Higgins shelf, and then my Clive Cussler one. I’ve done a couple fantasy shelves, but mostly I’ve been sharing pics of my over-500 Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle books. And I’ve been adding a comment, talking about some of those pictured. Its’ been neat.

So, I thought for this week’s entry, I’d bring back The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes again, and share the shelfies and comments. So far, anyways.

Holmes Shelfie #1

Titan Books has two lines of Holmes pastiches. The colorful ones on the left, are traditional stories in the Doyle style. They were originally reissues of hard-to-find volumes by folks like Philip Jose Farmer, Fred Saberhagen, Manly Wade Wellman, and David Stuart Davies (my editor at Sherlock Magazine). Then they started adding new novels by Davies and a few other authors.

The other line, with the covers like the ones on the right, are all new novels, and horror-ish / steampunk / gothic. Not traditional Doyle. They continued this line through the Pandemic. If you want some horror-ish Holmes, this is a good place to go. I like James Lovegrove quite a bit. And I think Caravan Scott was pretty good.

I have 38 of the Titan books, I think. Here’s a review I wrote of a couple of the early ones from George Mann.

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Merry Christmas from Black Gate

Merry Christmas from Black Gate

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Things have finally calmed down in the O’Neill household. Presents have been opened, snacks are munched, and hordes of Chaos Space Marines have been defeated in a family game of Dawn of War (I would have been exterminated if Tim and Drew hadn’t rushed to my base to assist. But we delivered the Emperor’s justice in the end.)

It’s been a trying year. We experienced intermittent site outages as we continued to adjust to our new service provider. At the day job, I had to fire a hard-working employee, and five months later was fired myself. I started two new writing projects, and accepted a full-time writing gig for the first time in my career. My wife retired. My kids started new jobs. And I read a lot of great fiction — but not nearly as much as I’d hoped to.

Black Gate, for me, continues to be a place where I share my love of fantastical literature and, through the depthless generosity of the loyal community it has attracted, I constantly discover new books, films, and writers. Far more than that, I find my own love of the genre deepened and expanded, as I learn to appreciate writers — many of whom I’ve been reading for decades — in brand new ways. That’s all down to you, our loyal readers, and the joy, enthusiasm, and amazing insights you bring.

So once again, as we close out another year, I’d like to thank all the BG readers who drop in with a book suggestion, a thoughtful comment, an encouraging word. It means a lot. You make the effort we put in every day worthwhile. On behalf of the vast and unruly collective that is Black Gate, I would like to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Continue being excellent — it’s what you’re good at.

Monsters, Mechs, and a Multi-Book Saga: Nightwatch Over Windscar by K. Eason

Monsters, Mechs, and a Multi-Book Saga: Nightwatch Over Windscar by K. Eason

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The novels of The Weep: Nightwatch on the Hinterlands and Nightwatch Over Windscar
(DAW, October 2021 and November 2022). Covers by Tim Green/Faceout

I’m pretty much an impulse buyer. When I pick up a book and it mentions monsters, interstellar Confederations, extra-dimensional horrors, subterranean ruins, witches, and decommissioned battle mechs — all in the first two paragraphs — I’m usually sold.

That’s exactly what happened when I read the inside jacket copy for Nightwatch Over Windscar, the new novel by K. Eason. I paid for that damn thing and had it home before I even finished the third paragraph of the jacket copy.

If I’d paid even the teeniest bit of additional attention, I might have also noticed that it’s the second book of The Weep, a two-book series set in the world of Eason’s popular science fantasy Thorne Chronicles, which opened with How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse and continued in How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge. Doesn’t look like you need to read those books to enjoy The Weep… good thing, because tracking down the first book, Nightwatch on the Hinterlands, is effort enough. I was looking forward to riding out this massive winter storm and Christmas break with what I have on hand.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai Stocking Stuffers

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai Stocking Stuffers

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Master Swordsman Hirate Miki (Japan, 1951)

If you’re just getting into watching older samurai adventures movies, you can’t go wrong picking those directed by Akira Kurosawa or starring Toshiro Mifune and/or Tatsuya Nakadai. However, eventually you’ll run through all those, and then where do you look?

Fortunately, in the ‘50s through ‘70s, chambara action films were as common in Japanese movie theaters as Westerns were in America, and a lot of the very best samurai features are available with fairly decent English subtitles. This week we’re going to look at four lower-profile samurai films from the 1950s, the first three of which, though obscure, are well worth the trouble of seeking them out.

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Goth Chick News Classics: Ray Bradbury’s “The Wish” Has a New Meaning This Year

Goth Chick News Classics: Ray Bradbury’s “The Wish” Has a New Meaning This Year

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The Book

For the last few years, as my last post of the year, I have reposted an article I wrote about Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Wish.” It is a Christmas tale of loss and love and magic which Bradbury penned following the death of his father. When it first appeared in Women’s Day magazine in 1973, my Dad was deep in his own grief having lost his own father, my beloved Grandpa, earlier that year. The story I told in Black Gate was how “The Wish” helped ease my Dad’s grief and led to my lifelong love of all things Bradbury.

That article led to my meeting and becoming friends with Bradbury’s editor Peter Schneider from Hill House Books, who published the only standalone hardcover of “The Wish.” He presented me with one of the numbered copies, signed by Bradbury, which is one of my most prized possessions.

Two weeks ago, as I prepared for the holiday festivities, I was suddenly faced with the loss of my own father. He was 94 and his health hadn’t been the greatest for a few months, so maybe his leaving us peacefully in his sleep should not have come as the shock that it did, but the sense of loss was crushing.

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Random Review: “The Theft of Destiny” by Josepha Sherman

Random Review: “The Theft of Destiny” by Josepha Sherman

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Cover by Jean-Francois Podevin
Cover by Jean-Francois Podevin

The other day I was talking about writing with someone who began pointing out the similarity of ideas behind a variety of books. I pointed out that the idea wasn’t always the important thing, what an individual author did with the idea was important. Two authors who come up with the same basic idea would write extremely different stories.

Josepha Sherman’s “The Theft of Destiny,” which first appeared in the Margaret Weis anthology Legends: Tales from the Eternal Archives is certainly not based on a new idea. In fact, Sherman’s story is a retelling of an ancient Mesopotamian myth concerning Enlil, Anzu, and Ninurta. However, Sherman relates the legend in a way that is more resonant with the modern reader.

Over the course of only a few pages, Sherman presents three different viewpoints, beginning with Enlil, who has custody of the Tablets of Destiny. Sherman follows the tablets when they are stolen by Anzu, and, by extension, begins to look at Anzu’s motivations in the theft. Ninurta, Enlil’s son, comes into the picture when his father informs the gods of the theft and his underrated son sees an opportunity to achieve something and make a name for himself.

Without delving too deeply into the mythology behind the two gods, the demon, or the Tablets of Destiny, Sherman works to provide each of them with very realistic and understandable motives for their actions. Anzu doesn’t steal the Tablets merely to set the action of the story in motion and Ninurtu chases after Anzu because he feels the need to demonstrate that he is as capable, or more capable, than the more establish deities.

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The Return of Lone Wolf by Joe Dever

The Return of Lone Wolf by Joe Dever

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Lone Wolf Definitive Editions, Volumes 1-3 (Holmgard Press). Covers by Alberto Dal Lago

Joe Dever started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1976, barely three years after the first copies appeared in game shops in Lake Geneva. In 1984 he published his first Lone Wolf solo fantasy game book, Flight from the Dark; it became an international bestseller and launched a publishing phenomenon. By Dever’s death in 2016, the Lone Wolf series had been translated into 18 languages and sold over 12 million copies.

Unlike most other fantasy solo gamebooks — such as Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s classic Fighting Fantasy titles, Steve Jackson’s fabulous Death Test and its sequels, Tunnels and Trolls adventures like City of Terrors, George Dew’s excellent Legends of the Ancient World, and others — the Lone Wolf books could be played separately or back-to-back, as individual chapters in an epic solo campaign spanning 32 books.

Before his death Dever substantially rewrote the opening book Flight from the Dark, expanding it from 350 to 550 sections. The publishing company he founded, Holmgard Press, has now reissued the first five titles in hardcover Definitive Editions in the UK, and will be releasing paperback editions of the original gamebooks with brand new cover art — and all the original interior art by Gary Chalk — in the US on January 3.

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Creeping Dread and Strange Melancholy: Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies by John Langan

Creeping Dread and Strange Melancholy: Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies by John Langan

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Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies (Word Horde, July 5, 2022). Cover by Matthew Jaffe

I consume a lot of literature from a lot of genres: everything from the vibrant, mystical fantasies of Tolkien to the grim blood-and-thunder of McCarthy, and more besides. But it is with horror fiction that I find myself at both my pickiest and my most ravenous. The horror I enjoy, I love. The horror I do not enjoy, I hardly stomach. So, when I find a horror author I consistently enjoy, I try to read their works in the manner a man stranded upon a lee shore might parcel out his last bits of hardtack and beef: a piece at a time, savoring each moment, drawing it out as long as possible.

John Langan’s work does not afford me that parsimony. A veteran of horror and other speculative genres since the publication of his first story, “On Skua Island,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2001, I devour his words wherever and whenever I find them. His latest collection, Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies continued this long tradition of literary gluttony.

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