Blog Archives
sGaming tie-in fiction is something I had actively avoided for years. I read the anthology Realms of Valor (1993) set in the Forgotten Realms universe which I thought was overall bad. I thought the R. A. Salvatore story much better than the other fiction. As a result, I just avoided gaming tie-in fiction. I never […]
Howard A. Jones’ For the Killing of Kings is a fairly recent fantasy novel. I have known Howard for around 23 years when he first contacted me. I was the Official Editor of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association at the time and he told me he wanted to be to Harold Lamb what […]
August Derleth is probably best known to the readers here for his Cthulhu Mythos stories, often billed as by H. P. Lovecraft. I am not a fan of his Mythos fiction. I do like his weird stories that appeared under the “Stephan Grendon” byline in Weird Tales. He also had some Gothic stories set in […]
Mixing up the reading with a return to hard-boiled crime fiction this week. Donald Westlake wrote a series of novels about Parker. Parker specializes in heists. From Donaldwestlake.com: “When he sat down at his typewriter in 1962 and started writing The Hunter, using the name Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake thought he was writing a […]
I wrote about Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell almost four years ago. There are now some reprints of horror paperbacks as a result of that book. Valancourt Books started a Paperbacks from Hell reprint series. I had heard about T. Chris Martindale’s Nightblood and had planned on ordering it. I stopped at the local Barnes […]
My favorite Jerry Pournelle series are the John Christian Falkenberg stories and the Janissaries books. I reread The Mercenary a few years back when I picked up a new copy at a library book sale. I had originally read it back in 1988. I knew The Mercenary was a fix up of a novella and […]
This has been a productive year for the small press. The Big 5 publishers ignore areas of genre fiction to their loss. Technological change has allowed an inspired fan to produce a professional publication that would have been a dream a generation ago. The latest small press offering crossed off from the to be read […]
The 1990s were a great decade for vintage crime anthologies. There were some bargain hardbacks of pulp magazine detective fiction – Hard Boiled Detectives and Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames. There was the Oxford Press Hard-Boiled. Trade paperbacks were represented by The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction and American Pulp. I have been reading horror […]
It’s Halloween and as I wrote last week, my reading habits shift towards horror in October. Not so much horror, how many “horror” stories really scare us? Possibly the scariest book I ever read was William Forstchen’s One Second After and that is not a horror novel. Horror/weird/supernatural is what we are talking about. H. […]
The days get shorter and cooler (if not colder) in October with the leaves turning colors and falling. These seasonal changes put me in the mood for reading horror fiction in the lead up to Halloween. Last year I read Richard Laymon’s The Traveling Vampire Show and Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest. I had issues with […]
The ability to create your own book has lead to an explosion of small press publishing. Genres such as sword & sorcery are seeing a recrudescence after decades of shunning by the big publishing companies. One new anthology from this year is Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords #6 from Timaios Press. Timaios Press “publish thought-provoking, […]
I mentioned last week that I have read way too much 1950s science fiction this year. Philip K. Dick and Science Fiction Adventures made up the bulk of it but a few other items sneaked in. Edgar Pangborn’s West of the Sun was an impulse buy at a Half-Price Books back in February. The back […]