Robert E. Howard (Horror Babble): “King of the Forgotten People” by Robert E. Howard.

Gaming (Endymion): The creator of DOOM has suddenly changed his tune claiming we must now come together & stop fighting, only after one side has started to slip in control, Sam Hyde has a thing or two to say about it & Halo officially sucks & Sweet Baby’s newest game debuts to abysmal numbers

D&D (USPS): The U.S. Postal Service will commemorate the 50th anniversary of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, referred to as The World’s Greatest Role-Playing Game and a cultural phenomenon, at the Gen Con Indy 2024 gaming convention.

Streaming (Disparu): Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 trailer was released at SDCC 2024 for Amazon Prime Video. 2024 Comic-Con International: San Diego prompted lots of Rings of Power Trailers, videos and interviews from the cast and showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay. But has the Rings of Power cast learnt from Season 1 marketing.

Fantasy (Sprague de Camp Fan): For today’s de Camp highlight, we turn to Catherine Crook de Camp and the very last of the de Camp-edited anthologies, the obscure Creatures of the Cosmos (Westminster Press, 1977). I’m calling it obscure because, let’s face it, who’s likely to buy it at this late date other than an insane collector like me? If that description fits you as well, or if you’re just up for a nostalgic, fun, oddball, and slightly problematic book, well, read on!

Review (Hyborian Book Reviews): A year or so back I encountered Renegade Swords when I was browsing around for Sword & Sorcery stuff, and at first I thought it was some old books due to their very vintage looking covers and layouts. Turned out that these were new Sword & Sorcery anthologies put together by DMR Books, whom I were a bit familiar with, focusing on what they describe as obscure and overlooked short stories within the particular genre.

Westerns (Fifties Westerns): Joe Kane’s Under Western Stars (1938) is a pretty big deal. It was Roy Rogers’ first film as a star, his first film as Roy Rogers and his first film with Trigger. Plus, it was a huge hit — and landed an Oscar nomination for Best Song. All that’s evidently enough to get it added to the Library Of Congress’ National Film Registry.

Robert E. Howard (Glitter Night): Unlike Shadow of the Vulture, none of the Dark Agnes tales were published during Robert E. Howard’s lifetime. Sword Woman, the character’s origin story, saw print posthumously in 1975, 39 years after Howard’s suicide. The author dedicated the short story “To Mary Read, Graine O’Malley, Jeanne Laisne, Liliard of Ancrum, Anne Bonney, and all other sword women, good or bad, bold or gay, who have swaggered down the centuries, this chronicle is respectfully dedicated.”

Publishing (Fandom Pulse): The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, commonly referred to as F&SF, has long been revered as one of the last century’s most important genre fiction magazines. It’s the one cultural staple that held out the longest against wokeism, actually focusing on great storytelling for much of the 2010s, but it appears as if the magazine may be in trouble or even ceasing publication entirely.

RPG (Jeff’s Gameblog): MERP (Middle-Earth Role Playing) is one of my favorite fantasy rpgs that sits outside the “fully compatible with D&D” space. Don’t get me wrong, you can introduce a MERP PC into a D&D game and make it work, or use a MERP module in your D&D campaign, but it requires more effort than something written for Castles & Crusades or HackMaster or other alt-D&Ds.

History (The Past): Stonehenge is most commonly associated with the sun. The main axis of its ‘final’ design (the stage that saw the erection of its sarsen monoliths and trilithons, taking the form we are familiar with today) is oriented on the summer solstice sunrise and the winter solstice sunset. But, like the moon, Stonehenge has passed through multiple phases, changing its appearance each time – and the monument’s earliest incarnation hints at an initial interest in lunar alignments.

Clark Ashton Smith (M. Porcius): Let’s read more stories by Clark Ashton Smith.  Today’s three tales of madness and death all appeared in 1934; one of them debuted in one of the most famous of science fiction magazines, while the other two were first seen in small press publications and they would not be widely available until decades later.

Popular Culture (Wasteland & Sky): Following on from last week‘s subject, we take a look at what happened to the idea of the standalone story. In the ’20s, unless you’re doing endless sequels and franchises, no one wants to hear about it. It’s either endless product, or nothing. This doesn’t apply to even one industry, either. All anyone seems to want to produce or consume is endless amounts of bland products or content (neither of which is a very good name to describe anything of value, by the way).

Cryptic (Wyrd Britain): Split across five chapters – ‘Beneath the Surface’, Human Habitation and Exploration’, Underwter Worlds’, ‘Imagined Underground Worlds’ and ‘Subliminal Realms’ – this beautiful book explores humanities obsession with what lies below.  Exploring burial chambers and mines, caverns and Charon, Hells, hallucinations, hollow Earth and hermits Ellcock takes us on a fascinating visual journey of everything underneath.

Fiction (Wormwoodiana): Apart from The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), The Three Hostages is the most Buchanesque of John Buchan’s thrillers, with many of the characters and predilections of the author’s work in fine display. The plot of The Three Hostages is swiftly summarized. Richard Hannay, who had made his pile of money in South Africa and served his country well during the Great War, is dislodged from his Cotswolds idyll.

Horror (Nocturnal Revelries): Well, recently, I read James Herbert’s The Rats, a super influential horror novel from 1974 about a bunch of rats that attack London and start eating people. It only took a couple of chapters to realise that this book was the inspiration for the death metal song that got me hooked.

Fantasy (John C. Wright): For the record, here is a summary of the Hans Christian Andersen story. It differs from the Disney version in all but surface features, and has very nearly the opposite theme. I would ask those wishing to discuss this version the tale to leave their remarks here. The Disney Story is a separate story, to be judged on its own terms.

Cinema (Glitter Night): JUST A DAMNED SOLDIER aka One Damned Soldier (1988) – Balladeer’s Blog concludes its look at all ten films of Italian cult action icon Mark Gregory, real name Marco De Gregorio. I know IMDb states that he also appeared in the made for tv movie Rainbow, but I watched that film and he’s not in it.

Old Radio (Comics Radio):  Inner Sanctum: “The Meek Die Slowly” 9/7/52. The caretaker of a cemetery murders a young woman on the same day each year to mark the anniversary of the day his wife disappeared.

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): I wrote last year and have been writing this year about Weird Tales in its first thirteen issues, published from March 1923 to May/June/July 1924. This baker’s dozen can be taken together because all were published by The Rural Publishing Corporation under its co-founders, J.C. Henneberger and J.M. Lansinger, with Edwin Baird serving as editor, at least, as far as we know, for the first twelve issues.

History (Brythonic Pantheon): What can we learn from the images and symbolism on the Gundestrup Cauldron? Discover the story of the Gundestrup cauldron and the real meaning of the images depicted on the cauldron. Discover the relationship between the Gundestrup cauldron and the ancient stories told within of Celtic mythology.

Popular Culture (The Popverse): When it comes to science fiction television, it doesn’t get bigger than Doctor Who and Star Trek. Both franchises have dominated the airwaves since the 60s, propelling audiences into adventures across time and space. Doctor Who features a Time Lord exploring the past and future, while Star Trek features intergalactic explorers journeying through the universe. Those journeys are about to collide, but not in a way you might expect. 

Pulps (Pulp Super-Fan): For PulpFest 2024, we have The Pulpster #33, the convention book. This one comes in at 64 pages. Also, this will be my second year attending PulpFest. This time, the anniversaries are the Spicy pulps and Fiction House, as well as the accompanying ERBFest, focused on the 100th anniversary of hardcover publication of The Land That Time Forgot.

Comic Books (Frontier Partisans): Fargo: Hell On Wheels, is reportedly in the last stages of production, and the creative team has announced a follow-on volume of the graphic novel to be published in 2025. The action is set in 1912, as Theodore Roosevelt tasks soldier of fortune Neal Fargo with stopping a mercenary army determined to sabotage the Panama Canal.

Weird Tales (Dark Worlds Quarterly): “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (Weird Tales, July 1943, also in The Mystery Companion, 1943)  is in some ways Robert Bloch’s first big story. If you look in The Best of Robert Bloch (1977), which is part of a Science Fiction series of collections, this entry is the first in that book. The editors felt everything he wrote before 1943 was junior work. That’s ten years of apprentice tales. And this isn’t entirely wrong. Bloch started as an acolyte of H. P. Lovecraft and most of this early stuff is such.

Review (Black Gate): Two — KEW’s first love, heroic fantasy, was so tarnished by a reputation that

Reviewers were going to treat heroic fantasy as a lowest-common-denominator dreck without bothering to read it: and for most of each year’s new crop of thirteen-year olds, the lowest common denominator was plenty good enough. Modern horror, on the other hand, had a chance of being taken seriously as literature.

I’m going to go on an aside here. Help me get these soap boxes set up while I fetch the high horse.