Blog Archives
sCharles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is the usual favorite supernatural/fantastic Christmas story. My favorite is Seabury Quinn’s “Roads.” This story first appeared in the January 1938 issue of Weird Tales. The issue would have been on the magazines racks on December 1st, 1937. Seabury Quinn was one of the most popular writers for Weird Tales. […]
Forthcoming: Straight Out of Tombstone
Thursday , 22, December 2016 Fiction, News, Short Fiction 2 CommentsA visit to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter Nation site had this forthcoming book listed. I am always up for a weird western. The form has pulp roots with stories by Otis Adelbert Kline, S. Omar Barker, and Arthur J. Burks in the pages of Weird Tales and Strange Tales. Robert E. Howard wrote a handful […]
Within the past year, three small press magazines have appeared: the resurrected Weirdbook, Cirsova, and now Skelos. Weird Tales appears to be permanently dead. Modern technology has allowed home publishing, something you could only dream about doing twenty years ago. Skelos takes its name from The Book of Skelos, a forbidden tome mentioned in […]
Of any member of the Lovecraft Circle, Robert Bloch was arguably the most successful. As the author of Psycho and a couple of Star Trek (original series), just about anyone would have some vague knowledge of his work. Bloch sold his first story (“The Secret in the Tomb”) in July 1934 right after graduating from […]
It’s positively baffling how hard it’s become for anyone to make a straight ahead adventure story these days. First classic Westerns like Rio Bravo and El Dorado evaporated and the old school leading man with them. An echo of that sort of thing lived on with Luke Skywalker, Alex Rogan (The Last Starfighter), and Billy […]
August Derleth was a member of the Lovecraft circle from the late 1920s until Lovecraft’s death. He was also one of the first to make use of the Cthulhu Mythos (with Lovecraft’s blessing). He remains controversial among Lovecraftians for his handling of Lovecraft’s legacy and especially for his Mythos fiction. A review of Derleth’s Mythos […]
One of the surprising books of the late 1980s was a Robert E. Howard collection, Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors. This was a Baen paperback published in May 1987. David Drake edited the book. It sold for $2.95, was 247 pages, and had three printings. The cover by Steve Hickman is spectacular. This book […]
SHORT FICTION: “Only a Signal Shown” by L.E. Buis
Thursday , 3, November 2016 Short Fiction 3 CommentsOkay, I’ve been causing a stink lately. It drives me nuts that people act like science fiction began with the Campbellian revolution. Everything I’ve heard about the pulps has turned out to be egregiously wrong. And anything anyone says about the history of science fiction comes off to me like warmed over narrative from three […]
The 2016 H. P. Lovecraft Re-read: The Haunter of the Dark
Sunday , 30, October 2016 Fiction, Short Fiction 5 Comments“The Haunter of the Dark” was H. P. Lovecraft’s last story. He wrote it in November 1935 right after finding out about the sale of At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow Out of Time” to Astounding Stories. It is a relatively short piece of fiction at 9,320 words in comparison to most of […]
The 2016 H. P. Lovecraft Re-read: The Shadow Out of Time
Sunday , 23, October 2016 Fiction, Short Fiction 11 CommentsH. P. Lovecraft wrote “The Shadow Out of Time” in November-December 1934. It is a novella at 25,323 words. This is the other pillar of his cosmic history. There is a sense of déjà vu reading it as he reused some ideas. The main plot concerns Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, an instructor of Political Economy […]
REVIEW: “In the Days of the Witch-Queens” by Donald Jacob Uitvlugt
Tuesday , 18, October 2016 Short Fiction 1 CommentSo you want more old school swords and sorcery fiction in the same vein as Thune’s Vision and The Last Witchking? This is it! I know it’s tough these days. Fantasy is ubiquitous, but the sort of raw barbarism that Robert E. Howard captured is nowhere to be found. In the Days of the Witch-Queens […]
SHORT FICTION: “The Spaces Between” by Pete Rawlik
Thursday , 13, October 2016 Short Fiction Leave a commentI used to look forward to taking in a movie or two every year. Somewhere around the turn of the century, though… it just seemed like everything was a reworking of either the first Star Wars movie (aka “A New Hope”) or The Wrath of Khan. Sure, the computer graphics and special effects improved over […]