If you just love Rush’s music and go no further, that’s fine. But you can go a lot farther: you can learn from Neil Peart: his ideas, his talent, his character, his career, his journey. For it was a journey of… what? Self-discovery? No, it would be better to call it self-evolution, self-realization.
Read MoreIt’s an interesting exercise to go back a hundred years and observe how Howard himself brought to life the magic-doers in his stories. The vital energy, emotional darkness, and philosophical underpinnings that give Howard’s fantasy fiction its gravity serve both his sword wielders and sorcerers equally well.
Read MoreA. Merritt is no stranger to readers of the DMR blog. In his heyday from the late teens of the nineteenth century to the early 1950s, he was arguably the most popular fantasy author in America. I thought I’d share here some rare paperwork relating to Avon reprints of his books.
Read MoreTo 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.
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