Weird Tales (Rough Edges): I’ve been meaning to read Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis stories for a long time now, and I’m getting to the age where I’m feeling a bit more urgency about getting around to the things I want to do.

Star Wars (Nerdrotic): The Acolyte is everything Kathleen Kennedy’s Lucasfilm wants and it is truly Disney Star Wars in it’s final form.

Cinema/Firearms (Isegoria): I recently re-watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in decades, and I noticed that the film takes place in 1936 — which got me thinking about the year and what didn’t fit.

Robert E. Howard (Hyborian Reviews): It’s been about a year gone past now since I finished up grand master Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon, the only novel about Conan the Cimmerian that he ever wrote. It has also been published throughout the years under the title of Conan the Conqueror but we’re gonna stick with the original title.

Fiction (DMR Books): July 8th is the birthday of “the Belgian Poe,” Jean Ray. I have written something for his birthday in a (perhaps quixotic) quest to bring attention to him for a couple of years. This year I decided to write out an overview of his works available in English. Well, those easily available in English. There have been some pricey specialty press editions which I do not have.

Science Fiction (Ken Lizzi): The pseudonymous Richard Avery’s The Expendables 1: The Deathworms of Kratos is decidedly an artifact of the ’70s. It is fast, fun science-fiction, replete with action, off-page sex, and a Dirty Dozen-esque cast. These last, the eponymous Expendables, are tasked with determining (“proving”) whether or not worlds light years distant from Earth are safe for human habitation. After reading this one, I’d pick up another if I come across it in a used bookstore.

Robert E. Howard (Paperback Warrior): Robert E. Howard‘s “Red Shadows” story featured Puritan hero Solomon Kane. Howard had initially pitched the story to Argosy but was met with a rejection. Weird Tales paid the author $80 for the story and published it in the August, 1928 issue of Weird Tales (Vol. 12 No. 2, interior art by Hugh Rankin).

Cinema (Swordslore): In last week’s post (linked below) I mentioned this 2014 film as one of the few examples (in the 21st century at least) that incorporates explicit elements of Celticism into a science fiction story. I figured why wait on a review for this movie when I’m already dedicating this month to sci-fi and Sword & Planet?

D&D (Grognardia): It’s well known that, in populating the bestiary of Dungeons & Dragons, Arneson and Gygax regularly looked beyond mythology and folklore for inspiration. Such is obviously the case with the troll, which borrows heavily from the monster’s description in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions right down to its green color and ability to regenerate.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tentaclii): The Lands of Dream wall-map of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, by Jason Bradley Thompson, makes it into the University of Wisconsin Collection. Via their acquisition of the American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection. At their page, ‘open image in new tab’ + zoom, for a larger, readable version of the map.

Cinema (Wertzone): Tsushima Island, 1274. A quiet Japanese island lying in the straits between Korea and Japan is suddenly invaded by an expeditionary force of the Mongol Empire, led by Khotun Khan. Lord Shimura leads a stalwart defence but is captured in battle; his nephew Jin is defeated and left for dead. Rescued by Yuna, a thief, Jin vows to help liberate the island, rescue his uncle and drive the invaders back into the sea.

Actress (Tellers of Weird Tales): In 1989, she created and was executive producer of the TV show Nightmare Classics. There were four episodes in all. Three were adapted from original stories by tellers of weird tales Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ambrose Bierce. Only Henry James out of the four original authors was not in Weird Tales. The Shining was also by an author who was in Weird Tales, Stephen King, though of course he was in a later incarnation of the magazine.

D&D (Walker’s Retreat): Notice that what I have said about the crystal clear signals that SOBS is now independently replicated here.

This is the Killer App for SOBS’ future business model.

Let me lay out what’s going to go down:

• The Tabletop Medium and its related products (print books, etc.) are depreciated. (YOU ARE HERE)

Comic Books (Rageaholic): Batman’s No Kill Rule is Mentally Retarded – A Rant

Writing (Kairos): When new writers come to me for advice, I make a point of asking them one question:

Why are you writing?

Star Trek (Jon del Arroz): I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek as I’m prepping my space exploration series and doing my writing so I can get the feel right for the readers. Because of this, I realized I could start reviewing episodes for everyone. I’ve started mostly with The Next Generation but am also slowly making my way through The Original Series and also going to be detouring to Prodigy since a new season came out on Netflix (which is fantastic, at least in its first season — a hidden gem of TV).

Weird Tales (M Porcius): Weird Tales only published 11 issues in 1939, and the one we look at today is dated June-July 1939 on its contents page.  This issue has quite a lot of reprints in it, and the stories we’ll be reading by Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft appeared earlier in WT or in other venues, but we’ll also tackle a piece by Hugh B. Cave which debuted here in this issue of Farnsworth Wright’s unique magazine.

Fiction (Fantasy Literature): Camp Damascus (2023) starts off as a demonic thriller and ends up as a plucky-kids-fight-humancentric-evil story, in Chuck Tingle’s first non-erotica novel. The author, who had a large audience on X/Twitter, came to the attention of many of us during the 2016 Hugo awards (all scandals aside, don’t say the Hugos never did anything nice for us).

Fiction (Glorious Trash): I’ve been watching a lot of ‘70s drive-in movies lately, and the setup for this one seemed really in-line with those, to the extent that I wondered why someone like Roger Corman didn’t option the rights. In a nutshell, Chrysalis Of Death concerns a contagion in the Arizona desert that turns people into Neanderthals.

Science Fiction (Pulp Fiction Reviews): For the past few years, award winning sci-fi writer, Allen Steele, has entertained lots of us diehard space-opera fans with his new exploits of the classic pulp hero, Captain Future. His last, “The Horror at Jupiter,” seemed to be the series finale what with its resolution of the conflict between Captain Future and his archenemy, the Magician of Mars, Ul Quorn. A fitting and exciting climax indeed but one that still left us readers saddened. Obviously not for long, as this review blatantly indicates.

Horror (Too Much Horror Fiction): Snake-handling, a bizarre cult behavior formed from several lines in the Bible, is ripe for horrific exploitation. While I was working in a Southern indie bookstore in the mid-Nineties we sold lots of copies of Salvation on Sand Mountain, a nonfiction account of the phenomenon. Eighties horror giant John Farris wrote a harrowing scene of it in his book Wildwood. Earlier, in 1976, noted grit-lit groundbreaker Harry Crews gave adventurous readers A Feast of Snakes.

Man Skills (Art of Manliness): The good news is that gators typically don’t go after people. They primarily eat smaller prey like fish, raccoons, birds, turtles, and sometimes deer. If they attack a person, it’s likely a case of mistaken identity; in the above story, the woman’s dog was the original target.

Comic Books (Sprague de Camp Fan): A friend of mine says it’s easier to find a Howard tale that was adapted by Roy Thomas for Marvel’s Conan series than it is to find a tale that was left untouched. The Turlogh Dubh O’Brien stories are mostly in the first category. “The Grey God Passes,” “The Dark Man,” and “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” were all adapted during the early years of Thomas’ run on Conan the Barbarian.