To cut straight to the one-line review: Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy (Palgrave McMillan, 2015) is a must-read if you’re at all interested in how the popular genre now known as “fantasy” came about. Even if it’s a little difficult to obtain and get into.
Read More“Two Suns Setting” has held a grip on me for a couple of decades now. The dichotomy of the city of Carsultyal, that being progression built on the conservation of cultural fundamentals, is expressed throughout the story in the relationship between Kane and Dwassllir. Furthermore, it is the harmony of this duplexity that has drawn me to “Two Suns Setting” from the start. But why?
Read MoreThis week: Lots of articles on Robert E. Howard, plus A. Merritt, Poe, Northwest Smith, Arthur Conan Doyle, and more.
Read MoreFor those of you who have read my work, you know the importance that rune magick has on the themes expressed in my tales. In this article, I’d like to talk about how I came to bring this concept into my work.
Read MoreI went shopping with my mom one Saturday in 1977. I spent the rest of the weekend completely engrossed in Lin Carter’s tale of a mysterious wandering green-skinned wizard named Oolb Votz and his slave girl, Ooo, as they traveled through a world that at the time was totally alien to me.
Read MoreBertram 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.
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