The writings of Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961), where do they fit in the square of Romanticism, Dark Romanticism, the Decadent, and Gothic fiction? They certainly do more than open up new worlds, new genres, new modes of writing. Smith’s works are those which are enamored with the wicked, the profane, with the purest, succulent evil that makes humanity what it is.
Read MoreThis week: Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Tanith Lee, Esteban Maroto, Leigh Brackett, Italian SF movies from the ‘60s, and more.
Read MoreMany very familiar characters and locales are featured in these stories, from Barsoom to Lemuria, from Ki-gor to Elak.
Read MoreTwo years ago DMR Books published Byron A. Roberts’ first collection of tales about his barbarian hero, Caylen-Tor. Now the release of the second volume draws nigh!
Read MoreThis week: The Cthulhu Mythos, King Diamond, Jirel of Joiry, Clash of the Titans, Barsoom, a vintage Norse mythology board game, and more.
Read MoreI was on social media a little bit ago and saw somebody wishing everyone a ‘Happy Hollow Earth Day!’. A quick online search didn’t turn up anything definitive, which means nothing. The whole thing could’ve been shadow-banned by Those Who Dwell in the Valley of Silicon with none the wiser. All I can say is, if there isn’t such a thing, there should be.
Read MoreRichard F. Burton exerted a huge influence upon the dawn of the Heroic Age of Exotic Adventure Fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling were among his admirers.
Read MoreThis week: Reviews of Renegade Swords, Ken Kelly, Clark Ashton Smith, sword and sandal movies, Tarzan comics, Robert E. Howard, and more.
Read MoreRichard F. Burton was a writer and a poet, on top of being an anthropologist, an archaeologist, a geographer, a linguist, a mystic, a swordsman, a spy and a sexologist. Writing and poetry, not exploration or geography, are the through-lines to be seen from one end of his life to the other. RFB was a man of the written word, with few rivals during his era when it comes to quality and even fewer when it comes to quantity. He influenced authors from Arthur Conan Doyle to Philip Jose Farmer…and he still inspires authors today.
Read MoreHoward Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was, like that looming spectre of his written works, a master of the Weird, and his driving focus without a doubt was to whet his tools of Cosmicism, which had given rise to his hallmark style, one to which Genre savants of this modern-day might refer as “Lovecraftian Horror.”
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