Blog Archives
sThe Return of Dargoll & Other Pulp Stories
Wednesday , 31, October 2018 Short Fiction, Uncategorized 3 CommentsSometimes you get that one person who nurtures interest in a writer in danger of being forgotten. Glenn Lord did it with Robert E. Howard, Howard A. Jones with Harold Lamb, and now Kurt Brugel with Garnder F. Fox. I have affection for Gardner Fox. He wrote for the pulps, comics, and paperbacks. He wrote […]
Wordsworth’s Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural series has been an excellent series of bargain trade paperbacks of classic horror fiction. A friend of mine sent me about five or six years ago E. F. Benson’s Night Terrors and Edith Nesbit’s The Power of Darkness. I was never much of a reader of the English […]
When Everything is Special, Nothing Is
Wednesday , 10, October 2018 Short Fiction, Uncategorized 17 CommentsBeating up on Dungeons And Dragons Official ™ licensed works rightfully has a reputation for playing the literary criticism game with the difficulty set to “I’m Too Young To Die”. The lifestyle brand sells the books, and the community, not the actual prose, and Wizards of the Coast has only rarely made an effort to […]
The days are getting shorter, cooler, and the leaves are changing colors. I generally turn to macabre fiction during October through Halloween (my favorite “holiday”). One collection that I reread portions and finished what I originally did not read is Darker Tides by Eric Frank Russell. I had bought this book as part of four […]
Another Volley in the Long Conversation
Wednesday , 22, August 2018 Short Fiction, Uncategorized 1 CommentBeyond the ephemeral conversations we have in our everyday lives, there lies a longer and slower form of conversation in the written word. The vast connections possible through most social media hold some charm, but the immediacy of the medium that gives it that thrill of contact lacks the deep and ponderous thought of slower form […]
In Schuyler Hernstrom’s “The Movements of the Ige”, we are introduced to an alien species reminiscent of feathered serpents fighting and dying underneath their world’s sun in a mating ritual, For the sterile males, the highest goal is to die, making the most beautiful death throes before their bodies feed the creatures who are later […]
Quick Reviews: Valley of Loss, Hidden Depths, and Phoenix
Thursday , 17, May 2018 Short Fiction 1 Comment“Valley of Loss” is the second volume of Jim Cartwright at Large, a serialized novel bridging The Four Horsemen’s Revelation Cycle series and The Omega War. In Cartwright’s Cavaliers, responsibility and senior NCOs forged Jim from loser to a leader fighting on the battlefield in his own relic of a giant Gundam-style robot. Previosly in Jim […]
The Pulp Swordsmen: Corun of Conahur
Sunday , 13, May 2018 Pulp Swordsmen, Short Fiction 18 CommentsSword and sorcery fiction was a casualty in the pages of Weird Tales magazine when it went bimonthly and had a new editor in 1940. The sub-genre did live on with some entries in Unknown/Unknown Worlds. Less known are some stories that showed up in Fantastic Adventures and Planet Stories. The stories that appeared in […]
E. Hoffmann Price (1898-1988) is remembered today as the guy who met H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith in person. Price had served in the U.S. Army during WW1 in the horse cavalry, with postings in the Philippines and France. He never saw combat. After the war, he attended the U.S. […]
When browsing through SFFaudio.com’s excellent collection of public domain works, I discovered two important aspects to Weird Tales that I had previously glossed over. First, the magazines featured a startling amount of poetry compared to these more prose-bound days. Second, much of it was written by women, and a significant fraction more than the pulp prose works. As […]
I recently came across “The Electric Duel” by Hugo Gernsback while trawling the internet. It’s a short bit of what would now be called flash fiction, written at the dawn of science fiction as a genre, that illustrates the unease the genre has with Gernsback–in addition to his low and late payments to his authors.(1) For it is […]
In January 1939, had you perused the magazines stands, you would have seen a new pulp magazine, Strange Stories. The magazine was published by Better Publications, the company that put out the pulp magazines with “Thrilling “ in the title. Strange Stories was a bimonthly magazine that lasted for 13 issues February 1939 to February […]