Blog Archives
sThe Arkham House streak continues with August Derleth as “Stephen Grendon’s” Mr. George and Other Odd Persons. For some reason August Derleth had eleven stories in the mid and late 1940s under the Grendon name. A look at the Jaffery & Cook Weird Tales index shows it was not a case of both a Derleth […]
H. Russell Wakefield (1888-1964) is considered one of the top tier of English ghost story writers. The Clock Strikes Twelve was his sixth story collection. The Arkham House edition from 1946 is an expanded edition of the 1940 U.K. version. Contents: Why I Write Ghost Stories Into Outer Darkness The Alley Jay Walkers Ingredient X […]
I had mentioned last year how Russell Kirk’s story in Dark Forces was one of my favorites from that volume. I have had a copy of the 1984 Arkham House collection Watchers at the Straight Gate lying around unread. I have been rotating around eleven single author story collections since the holidays reading anywhere from […]
In January 1936, F. Orlin Tremaine, editor at Street & Smith for Clues Detective, Astounding Stories, Cowboy Stories, and Top-Notch presented Donald Wandrei with that month’s issue of competitor Popular Publications’ Dime Detective. There were two stories that were imitations of Wandrei’s “Ivy Frost” stories from Clues Detective. One was a non-series story, “Black Widow’s […]
I have been reading Robert Bloch for over forty years. I never wrote to him like I did to Fritz Leiber, Donald Wandrei, Carl Jacobi, and Hugh Cave. I first discovered him in that all so influential anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I still like rereading a story by him from Weird Tales here […]
I enjoy a good weird western. Somehow Richard Matheson’s Shadow on the Sun got past me when first released in 1994. The odd part is I was reading the Richard Matheson westerns and enjoyed them. Journal of the Gun Years was great, The Gun Fight was competent but nothing special, the collection By the Gun […]
Howard A. Jones’ second book in the Hanuvar series has come out. I covered Lord of a Shattered Land in September. City of Marble and Blood is the next book in the series, a November release in hardback, 528 pages. The first book was a fix up of previously published stories. This book is divided into […]
Cosmic horror is a term generally applied to H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. My reading of cosmic horror has been either the Lovecraft circle (Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith) or those influenced by Lovecraft. That segues into William Sloane’s To Walk the Night which I finally set time aside to read. I had heard […]
I read The Best of Manhunt 2 the past six or so weeks. Like volume 1, this is in trade paperback format, 223 pages, 35 stories ranging from 3-4 pages to novelettes. Authors include Fletcher Flora, Richard Deming, Helen Nielsen, Frank Kane, Jonathan Craig, Donald Westlake, Jack Ritchie who were to be found in volume […]
There is a type of adventure story that is an off-shoot of the western set in Mexico in the early 20th Century during the Mexican Civil Wars. Frank O’Rourke’s The Professionals might be the first of those. Originally published as A Mule for the Marquesa in 1964, it was filmed as The Professionals in 1966 […]
Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s The Last Legion is a stand alone novel from 2002. This is a 425 page novel set in the late 5th Century A.D. The novel starts in late 476 in Italy. Warlord Odoacer makes his move to remove the last Roman emperor, the young Romulus Augustulus. Standing in the way is the […]
My introduction to horror fiction was through Robert E. Howard. I began reading his horror in collections such as The Book of Robert E. Howard and The Howard Collector. Then I moved on to H. P. Lovecraft and then the Lovecraft Circle. My horror reading still tends to be Weird Tales centric. Personal favorites include […]