Bertram Mitford’s 1891 novel The Weird of Deadly Hollow recounts a legend of a blood curse. Mitford was a contemporary of H. Rider Haggard and worked a similar vein with adventure thrillers set in the frontier lands of southern Africa.
Read MoreToday being REH’s birthday, I thought it fitting to review David C. Smith’s Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography.
Read MoreSword-and-sorcery offers alternatives to fantasy doorstoppers, those ponderous epic quests to save The Land. It’s a unique expression of our desire for personal freedom, to explore new frontiers, and to resist the mantles of stifling custom and conformity. And most of all, it’s entertaining as hell.
Read MorePulp magazines are just plain awesome. Those periodicals were important stepping stones for many authors in the fields I best love--science fiction, sword and sorcery, horror. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edmond Hamilton, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith… and one of the guys I most enjoy collecting--A. Merritt.
Read MoreH.P. Lovecraft made no secret of his reverence for Edgar Allan Poe. An under-examined influence of Poe on Lovecraft lies in the notion of what Lovecraft called cosmic horror.
Read MoreThis week: Ki-Gor, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, The Witcher, Jirel of Joiry, Jim Steranko, and more.
Read MoreThere have been many various editions over the years of the works of Virgil Finlay… but none, my friends, precisely like this one.
Read MoreThe stories and rumors surrounding Thundar, Man of Two Worlds are as fascinating as the novel itself. Some articles suggest a connection between the novel and the cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian, while others suggest that the novel was a re-working of Bloodstone’s earlier, unpublished (and unauthorized) novel, Tarzan on Mars.
Read MoreAn idea struck me to organize a collaboration with my two friends and heavy metal fantasist brothers-in-arms, Byron A. Roberts and Howie K. Bentley. I thought of an idea to do something with a ‘sword and sorcery meets Hammer Films’ kind of vibe.
Read MoreHooked by the sixth paragraph of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, I devoured page after page and came at last to the Museum of Man, where in my imagination I stood with young Guyal of Sfere and Shierl, his lovely companion, gazing with horror upon a gigantic, hideous face that protruded from a wall. It was the demon Blikdak, and his intentions were dire.
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