Blog Archives

Comic Books (Comics Beat): Conan The Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone is one of the biggest surprises of the year. A bloody, thrilling pulp epic, with a razor-sharp sense of atmosphere and dread, the book has gotten a lot of attention as an explosive example of what Conan stories can do at their best. […]

Pastiche (Screen Rant): Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane will be featured in upcoming novels from Titan Books, and ScreenRant has a first look at what’s to come. Created by Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane first debuted nearly a century ago, with Kane first appearing in a pulp magazine in 1928 […]

Weird Tales (Fandom Pulse): It seems as if skinsuits are a popular past-time of OldPub writers who still haven’t fled the old system. Even legacy magazines from the heyday of the pulp era aren’t safe from crusaders injecting their tired politics into them, which a pulp fiction scholar noticed about Jonathan Mayberry’s revival of Weird […]

Robert E. Howard (REH World): The recent discovery of an unpublished Robert E. Howard letter, announced by scholar Will Oliver, has sparked excitement among Howard enthusiasts. Found in the Forrest J. Ackerman Papers at Syracuse University, the letter is addressed to E. Hoffmann Price and offers fresh insights into Howard’s correspondence, literary interests, and personal […]

Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Science Fiction and Fantasy has always been on a seesaw. At one time it is considered to be worthy of the word “literature” and then suddenly it is not. The seesaw falls and it is called “trash”, “sub-literary” or worst of all “Pulp”. A good example of this is Guy Endore’s […]

Publishing (Don Herron): Ready to order, the book on the Classic Era of Arkham House Ephemera I’ve been promising for years awaits you. 150 Items covered (with 3 playfully hidden away for the readers who like to have a little fun with their ephemera). The back cover blurbage sums it up, I think — you’ll […]

Ghost Stories (Wormwoodiana): The latest issue of the M.R. James journal Ghosts & Scholars is now available. Issue 47 has been guest edited by Helen Kemp, with cover artwork by Loretta Nikolic. Forthcoming (The Obelisk): Bizarchives, Issue 7 will feature stories from stalwarts such as A. Cuthbertson, M.S. Jones, C.P. Webster, and Arbogast. New pens […]

Horror (Silver Key): I’m a big fan of The Shining, book and film. Both work really well, for slightly different reasons. I encountered the book first, discovering it along with many other horror and men’s adventure titles through my grandfather. Fantasy (Ken Lizzi): Look, The Ship of Ishtar is an unusual book. There’s no question […]

Science Fiction (Rough Edges): As author Robert Silverberg explains in his introduction to the 1979 Ace reprint of CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, the story first saw life as a novella, “Spawn of the Deadly Sea”, in the April 1957 issue of the SF digest SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. Games (The Lotus Eaters): Unbisoft’s Downward Spiral. Beer […]

Pastiche (Sprague de Camp Fan): I can’t quite grasp the appeal of El Borak. He doesn’t immediately grab me like a man raised by apes or a barbarian confronting civilization does. Tarzan and Conan seem special, they are unique. Apparently, part of El Borak’s uniqueness is that he is a Texan. I live in Texas. […]

Old Radio (Purple Girasol): Presenting, for your listening pleasure, “Murder by a Corpse“.  A Halloween episode a month early. New (With Both Hands): There are now a number of contemporary short fiction magazines publishing sci fi, fantasy, and weird tales, and Cirsova may be pre-eminent among them. While sales of these little magazines are far […]