Jason Christopher Tarpey and DMR Books have a long history together. His story “Vengeance of the Insane God” appeared in the very first DMR release Swords of Steel back in 2015. At that time his band Eternal Champion had only recorded a two-song demo. Six years later, their second album Ravening Iron was hailed as an instant classic upon its release, just like the debut The Armor of Ire. As an accompaniment to Ravening Iron, DMR Books released Tarpey’s long-awaited novella The Godblade, which chronicles the characters and events mentioned in his lyrics in greater detail. Jason took the time to answer my questions about his music, his fiction, and his career as a blacksmith.

You’re best known as the vocalist for the band Eternal Champion, whose second album Ravening Iron was just released. What previous experience do you have as a musician? I know you were in Iron Age and Graven Rite, but were you in any other bands before them? Did you write the lyrics for all of these bands?
Yes, I’ve been playing music (badly) since middle school. I got a hand-me-down nylon string guitar from my grandfather when I was ten or eleven and then my parents bought me one of those Lotus Strat knock offs when I expressed interest sincerely. I learned a few riffs, “Enter Sandman,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” etc. and I learned a few chords well enough to start our own band. My friend Matt Harlan sang and played guitar very well (he’s a natural and is now a professional musician in the Houston area and has been for years) so he was the frontman, our friend Brandon Gallagher who later died in an accident after high school played lead, and I played an unnecessary rhythm third guitar. We played our middle school talent show in 1994, we did a cover of Afghan Whigs “What Jail is Like,” which was way too mature for us at that age, and another cover, “Twisted” by Fretblanket. I was a shy kid, that was my first time on stage and I did not like it. We won though and maybe it gave me the bug. Then in high school I picked up the guitar again to form a hardcore band. I had just gone to my first shows in 1995, mostly heavy alternative bands like Seed, Helmet, Hum, etc., then this tour came through: Into Another, Life of Agony and Type O Negative at Sunken Gardens Theatre in San Antonio. I still consider it my first hardcore show, because after that gig I dove into each band’s history and found Carnivore, Underdog, and the LoA demos, and then I found out about the more underground bands. That’s when I started going to gigs every weekend if I could. The band we started was called MISRULE, it was chugging ‘90s metallic hardcore that was the rage at the time. I loved metal as an adolescent, but the immediacy of hardcore pulled me in, and the DIY ethic meant we could start booking shows right away, regardless of our lack of talent. This lineup of MISRULE dissolved after a few months of practicing. I had gotten into early and late ‘80s HC by this point, so I sped up the songs, moved to vocals because I couldn’t find a singer, and we started playing shows in 1998 under the new name Far From Breaking. This was my first time writing lyrics. I was 17, getting into a lot of trouble both in school and with the law (this kid I went to high school with became a cop after he graduated, pulled me over and took me to jail for having weed a week after I turned 17), so I continued my streak of bad decision-making and dropped out of school to take music seriously and began booking shows locally in San Antonio to learn how to do it and then for my own band around the state. We started doing full US tours in 99-2000 and we did that until 2003, then in 2004 my friends and I started IRON AGE.

Eternal Champion has accumulated quite a following of devoted fans in a short period of time, which is especially impressive in underground heavy metal. Most bands would kill for such a fanbase. What sets Eternal Champion apart from other bands that also deal in sword-and-sorcery themes?
I’m glad my first bands were hardcore bands for this reason - we could write music that wasn’t difficult, even bad, and tour on it and learn our hard lessons that way. Most heavy metal bands don’t get a chance to write bad songs and release them, and have people still give them a chance over and over. As a band, especially a heavy metal one, once you have a few releases that aren’t great it’s very hard to gain any momentum. This is a long way of saying you need TRACKS. Right out of the gate you need good songs. So take all the time you need in the beginning to write your bad songs, release them or don’t, play your bad gigs to 20 people like I did, and then when you’re ready to do the band you were meant to do, you’ll be ready. Doing my first bands taught me to do things for myself, taught me to be a confident frontman, and it taught me one final lesson when we started Iron Age, we needed tracks. So by the time Eternal Champion began I already knew what had to be done: no bad songs, no bad lyrics, no bad gigs, no bad art, no compromises. And that’s been EC’s philosophy this whole time, focus on the songs, pay attention, and the rest will follow.

Ken Kelly was the perfect choice to paint the cover of Ravening Iron, since he’s done work for metal bands like Manowar as well as covers for books by fantasy authors such as Robert E. Howard and Tanith Lee. What was it like to work with him? Did you give him a brief description and he took it from there, or was there a lot of back and forth communication?
A dream come true. I only had one correspondence with Ken, in the very beginning when No Remorse Records got in contact with him, he asked for my ideas. So I sent him my ideas for the scene. It is one featured in The Godblade towards the end of the story. I sent him a terrible drawing of stick figures and the setting drawn very poorly. So he made some adjustments and suggested we lose the warrior (Rænon), and focus on the woman in the center on the throne, that is what seemed to be his strong opinion for the setup so we went with his vision. That was all the correspondence I had with him. He would send us sketches and progress shots of the painting as he worked on it and would ask how we felt about certain things, all we would always respond with was “all good, keep it!” We were getting very psyched to see the painting come to life. Still can’t believe Ken Kelly painted something from my brain.

Your first published story, “Vengeance of the Insane God,” appeared in the first volume of Swords of Steel in 2015, and was considered by many to be one of the best tales in the book. Had you ever written fiction before this?
Never written a thing. As I said earlier I had a bit of a rough time in school, never liked teachers at all, and since I dropped out I don’t have much more than a 10th or 11th grade English class under my belt. I’m as perplexed as anyone else about how I’m doing what I’m doing.

Your stories (as well as some of your song lyrics) are set in a world called Arginor. Did you originally create the various peoples and gods of this world simply as subject matter for your lyrics, or did you always intend to use them for prose fiction?
Yes, I invented it as subject matter for lyrics. I got deeply into writing about cosmic horror and dark fantasy during the Iron Age Constant Struggle LP sessions. Without giving many proper names to the places other than in my lyric notebook I wrote “A Younger Earth” in 2006-2007 then “Sleeping Eye of the Watcher.” In these songs I was laying the groundwork for Brakur and the Over-Gods in my pantheon. Then when Iron Age recorded our last release, a demo of our unfinished final LP that was to be called Fate in the Shadow of Eluvimal, I had all of it worked out, the places, the names, the gods and what they were like. We called this tape The Saga Demos and the songs take place on the island of Baruken off the southeast coast of Arginor, on a peak called Eluvimal. Iron Age broke up after that and I continued the lyrics in Graven Rite with the song “The Summoner’s Pit” which also takes place in Arginor. After EC released our demo, you contacted me about writing some fiction and that was the first time it occurred to me to try, so thanks for that!

Rænon, the main character from “Vengeance of the Insane God,” returns in your new book The Godblade. You have something in common with him: you’re both blacksmiths. You incorporated your knowledge in this field into The Godblade with the concept of pyre-forging, which is crucial to the plot of the book. Tell us about this concept and how you came up with it.
Yes, the concept of the pyre-forge is the first thing that came to me before I started writing “Vengeance…” so it came before I even had the character Rænon. In fact, he was essentially built around the pyre-forge and that is the main reason he is a blacksmith, so that I could have someone that can implement this ancient, mystical process. At the time I began to think about the pyre-forge I brought the idea to my professor at Austin Community College where I was taking some metalsmithing classes. I basically wanted to know if the carbon from a dead body could be the carbon that turns iron into steel and makes it harden-able. He said, “Yeah, I guess you could?”, probably wondering why I was asking such a question. So then I went to work thinking about how I can get the carbon out of the body and into the steel and that’s what you can read about in The Godblade. The process is similar to what we now call case-hardening, but I mystified it a bit of course.

Have many fans of your band become interested in the sword-and-sorcery literature that inspired you? For people unfamiliar with the genre that are looking to dive into it, which books and authors would you recommend?
Yes, some people have reached out and told us that we have got them reading some of these authors that inspired us to write these songs, and that’s a great feeling to share with people and then they can understand why we wrote them. If you are looking to dive in start with Robert E. Howard, then Lovecraft is my advice, then you have a whole world opened up to you. Some of my favorites are Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Lieber, David C. Smith, Michael Moorcock, T.E.D. Klein, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, Michael Shea, Lord Dunsany, Gene Wolfe, Thomas Ligotti, John Norman, and Brian Lumley. I recommend reading Karl Edward Wagner’s books Darkness Weaves, Bloodstone and Dark Crusade for the best dark fantasy for your dollar. And a facet of the genre that really inspires EC is the golden era of anthology magazines like Epic Illustrated, 1984, 1994, Star Reach, Eerie, Ring of the Warlords, characters like Frank Thorne’s “Ghita of Alizarr,” Richard Corben’s “DenSaga,” Frank Brunner’s “Dragonus,” and most recently Tim Vigil’s “Cuda.”

Here’s one from the peanut gallery: What brand of steroids do you use?
It’s a new drug called Chlorohydrone Diaxophane, on the street it’s called CD’s or, C Deez NUTS.

Any final words?
Thanks for the support Dave, and for the opportunities you’ve given me.

Check out Eternal Champion on Bandcamp. More information on The Godblade can be found here.