Neverwhens: World Building in a Shared Universe– Cormac Mac Art and The Isle of Swords
When Titan and Heroic Signatures announced they were bringing back Robert E. Howard pastiche, not just of Conan, but of many others of his rich panoply of heroes, I sacrificed many a reading night to take a deep-dive into the first year’s worth of stories, and chronicled the results at Black Gate. You can read about that descent into Cosmic Pastiche Horror here.
The truth was that, like most pastiche — assuming one excepts the value of pastiche at all — the results were mixed. Most was admirable attempts by authors who clearly had fond memories of REH, but didn’t really remember what made HIS fiction (not their memories of it, not their memories of it via Marvel comics, film, or even other pastiche) work. A few, namely the work by Scott Oden, John C. Hocking and James Lovegrove, “got” the characters they were writing (Oden can even sound like Howard), while an equal number could only be called… well… not worth the paper they weren’t printed on.