Horror (Too Much Horror Fiction): I first became aware of Ghouls in My Grave after reading Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s essential 1981 tome of boomer memoir and horror criticism, where he includes it in an appendix of important 20th century horror fiction. For many years I searched for the book, to no avail, and virtually never heard anyone discuss it or author.

Science Fiction (Fandom Pulse): The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is in complete collapse. Over the last two weeks, President Jeffe Kennedy quit, which prompted a message from the board alerting members that many volunteers and paid employees had left SFWA under nebulous circumstances. Now, just one week after Kennedy resigned, interim President Chelsea Mueller quit, and more details emerged showing the club to be in massive trouble.

Warhammer (Fandom Wire): Henry Cavill has been involved with the Warhammer 40,000 live-action adaptation since December 2022. Henry Cavill was last seen as a Wolverine variant in Deadpool & Wolverine, one of the plethora of surprising cameos that made its way to the movie. One of the most notable faces of Hollywood, Cavill has had a stellar career in the industry, with roles on multiple major franchises and one-hits.

Horror (Wormwoodiana): His first such book was A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead (1972), which the author himself described twenty-five years later as “a strange book”–a very personal book of its times with social commentary. Nonetheless it led to him doing The Annotated Dracula (1975) and The Annotated Frankenstein (1977). Both annotated editions were revamped as The Essential Dracula (1993) and The Essential Frankenstein (1993).

Games (Wert Zone): Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is a 2017 space strategy game developed by Black Lab Games and published by Slitherine. It is based the rebooted Battlestar Galactica TV show which aired on SyFy from 2003 to 2010, spanning a mini-series, four TV seasons, three TV/DVD movies and a spin-off show, Caprica, which lasted for a single season. I reviewed the original game in isolation here, but for this review I replayed the original game and then all of the (extensive) expansions.

Pulp (Rough Edges): Jimmy Christoper, also known as Operator 5, the ace of the American Intelligence Service. Only Operator 5 can possibly thwart this impending catastrophe aimed at the destruction of all regular religions and the takeover of the United States.

Science Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): Today, August 8, is the birthday of Jerry Pournelle (1933-2017). He was one of the people, along with David Drake, who helped make military science fiction popular. There were others before him, of course, but Pournelle’s anthology series There Shall Be War and War World helped push the genre to higher popularity. His CoDominium series set a high standard, and he was working  on his Janissaries series when he died.

Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): L. Sprague de Camp was 73 when Conan and the Spider God was published in 1980. This was the fifth book in the Bantam Conan series. Sprague’s turn at writing (or co-writing) original Conan adventures was over. Only one more book bears his name, the novelization of the Conan the Barbarian movie. Lin Carter was no longer a reliable collaborator, so Sprague apparently wrote this novel on his own. However, it is likely that Sprague’s wife, Catherine Crook de Camp, assisted without credit, as she did on the movie novelization.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Atlantean Archive): “The Warlord of Mars” is the third book in the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars or “Barsoom” series, and the final book in the series to feature John Carter as the main character. Picking up immediately after the the cliffhanger ending of “The Gods of Mars,” “Warlord” sees John Carter once again trying to rescue his beloved Dejah Thoris. Even if he is successful, however, Carter and his friends face an uncertain future.

Robert E. Howard (Frontier Partisans): The latest Frontier Partisans Tales of the Rangers Podcast is up. You can find it here or on Spotify and most other podcasting platforms. This one is a little different — it’s an homage to the Texan pulp writer Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Cimmerian, run through Howard’s appreciation of the Texas Ranger Bigfoot Wallace. We touched on the influence of Wallace on the development of Howard’s famous barbarian back in 2019. The podcast goes into some depth on the connection.

Writing (Kairos): A good way to think of genre conventions is as guideposts that help writers and readers navigate the verbal landscape of a story. These conventions are not restrictive rules designed to stifle creativity; rather, they are frameworks that provide structure and clarity to a narrative.

Pulp (Paperback Warrior): The Doctor Death pulp character has a rather strange history. The first incarnation was in the pages of All Detective Magazine where the dastardly Doctor Death appeared in July through October of 1934 and again in January 1935. In these novels, the nemesis is Nibs Holloway, but that character actually debuted a year prior in the pages of Rapid-Fire Detective Stories.

Fantasy (Silver Key): The critics who have dismissed fantasy as juvenile escapism have failed to recognize that fantasy grapples with real and eternally pressing issues, albeit wrapped in metaphor and fantastic trappings. The same critics who worship at the altar of realism and extol the virtues of novels about average people in familiar times cannot admit their darlings have rapidly aged and are fast losing their relevance. While the classics of fantasy remain as fresh today as the day they were written.

James Bond (MI6-HQ): To mark the 60th anniversary of the passing of James Bond’s creator, today Ian Fleming publications revealed the new set of cover designs produced by artist Michael Gillette.

The ‘prestige’ hardbacks will be released in the UK on October 3rd, 2024.

Clark Ashton Smith (Tentaclii): New on Archive.org, a collection of the strongly Lovecraft-influenced ‘Hyperborea’ tales by Clark Ashton Smith. This has the same cover as the early 1970s 95-cent U.S. Ballantine paperback, but this new upload is probably to be avoided. Because I immediately randomly spotted a typo at the start of a story: the German “die” for “the”.

Comic Books (Bleeding Cool): At the Conan panel held by Heroic Signatures and Titan Comics at San Diego Comic-Con, the publisher and creators talked about how the Savage Sword of Conan magazine series would be continuing for another year, but also Conan writer for Marvel and Titan, Jim Zub, stated that one of the creative teams on the issue would be Roy Thomas and Rob de la Torre. Jim Zub credited Roy Thomas with the very fact that Conan comic books existed in the first place. And he does have a point,

Fantasy (Ken Lizzi): The Seedbearers was Peter Valentine Timlett’s first novel. The “About the Author” section at the back states that the book was “prompted by by his interest in the occult.” That much seems clear enough after a read through. The story begins in a sort of proto-grim dark fashion. Timlett leaned into both the grim and the dark; very dark. But after that opening chapter, the tale shifts to world building, politics, intrigue, in-fighting, corruption, and murder.

Pulp (Vintage Pulp Fictions): Dr Death: The Gray Creatures is a 1935 crime/supernatural horror pulp novel written by Harold Ward under the pseudonym Zorro. Dr Death had made his first appearance a year earlier in the pulp magazine All Detective Magazine. He figured in four stories in that magazine. In 1935 All Detective Magazine was renamed Dr Death.

RPG (Monsters & Manuals): But what I especially like about this idea is that it conjures an image of a world that is fresh, and unencumbered by history, in a way which in D&D circles strikes me as genuinely novel. We are used to D&D settings being weighed down by accumulated weight of lore and timelines and ten-thousand-year narratives; OSR settings are generally no different in that they allude to the existence of vast chronology while keeping it largely implicit.

Cinema (Art of the Movies): A meteor storm of sci-fi adventures rained down on theatres, some more obviously inspired by Lucas’s global blockbusters that others, and the influence lasted well into the next decade: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Black Hole, Flash Gordon, Krull, The Last Starfighter, The Ice Pirates, and Spaceballs.

Fantasy (DMR Books): Gene Wolfe in contrast is not as well known. While highly respected in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres he does not get the respect he deserves outside of it (and sometimes inside it.)

Weird Tales (Marzaat): Anthony Breddle is a military pilot on sick leave and recuperating from fighting in India. He goes back to England which is in the middle of the Blitz. He’s described as under thirty, intelligent, observant, a first-rate pilot. Before he begins to relate his tale, he refers himself as only a recorder when he recounts his story to our unnamed narrator. Breddle is decidedly unimaginative.

Crime Fiction (Horror Review): This is the fourth novel in the Jake Slater Private Detective series. Wow! Not only was I impressed by the fantastic dialogue exchanges and the creative action-packed fight scenes where Jake Slater always manages to escape just by the hair on his head, but the thorough research that went into this book is remarkable. It doesn’t hurt that it’s set in glamorous Hollywood during the time when crime boss, Bugsy Siegel was running the crime syndicate and Hollywood was still a place with style and panache.

Cinema (Wyrd Britain): Loosely based around H.P. Lovecraft‘s ‘The Colour Out Of Space’, ‘Die, Monster, Die!’ finds American ‘Stephen Reinhart’ (Nick Adams – ‘Rebel Without a Cause‘, ‘Invasion of Astro-Monster‘) called to the home of his fiance, ‘Susan’ (Suzan Farmer – ‘Dracula: Prince of Darkness‘), in the village of Arkham, where, shunned by all the villagers, yokels and doctors alike, her father ‘Nahum’ (Boris Karloff) is conducting experiments using a meteor that has landed in the grounds.

History (Nocturnal Reveries): I recently enjoyed James Herbert’s Rats books, and I’ve have been planning on reading his Nazi horror novel The Spear for years. It’s been a long time since I read anything about Nazi occultism, and I thought I’d read a non-fiction book on the topic refresh my memory first. I’ve had copies of Francis King’s Satan and Swastika and Peter Levenda’s Unholy Alliance on my shelf for years, both of which I plan on reading at some point, but I also had a copy of Michael Fitzgerald’s The Nazi Occult War on my kindle.

History (Marzaat): First, let’s get some pedantry out of the way. This history mostly covers the span from the early 1930s to the early 1960s. Second, the authors are well aware that there was no Soviet intelligence called the KGB until March 1954, but they use the name as a convenient term for its ten predecessors. The KGB certainly operated in America for as long as the USSR existed, but operating in America became harder in October 1945.

Myth (Irish Myths): While you often hear the two terms used interchangeably, are Irish mythology and Celtic mythology the same thing?  The short answer: No. They’re different

DNA (Jive Talk): A new paper called The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans (2024) reveals that the Proto-Indo-European languages originated in the Yamnaya and Sredny Stog cultures of Ukraine and South Russia. The split of PIE languages from Anatolian languages is revealed to have taken place on the steppe. Sredny Stog DNA is found in Hittite samples proving the real IE people were Steppe herders from Eastern Europe and not an unsampled Armenian population as previously claimed.