Pulp (Rough Edges): Many, many years ago I read one or two novels by Otis Adelbert Kline and remember enjoying them, but I couldn’t tell you exactly which books I read. I do know, however, that TAM, SON OF THE TIGER wasn’t one of them, because I just read it and I’m certain I’d never read it before.

Cinema (Nerdrotic): Top 5 Woke Hollywood DISASTERS of 2024.

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): I finished up last year by writing about the one-hundredth anniversary issue of Weird Tales, published in 2023. I will have more on that issue and some ideas connected to it, but I would like to write about other things for a while and get away from that dreary parade. The first issue of Weird Tales was published in March 1923, thus the first calendar year of “The Unique Magazine” was not a full one.

Cinema (Jon del Arroz): The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim was a complete disaster in the box office and now is already headed to prime video after just two weeks in theatres. Sonic 3 and Mufasa destroy it.

Radio (Old Time Radio Researchers Group): The Sealed Book was a radio series of mystery and terror tales, produced and directed by Jock MacGregor for the Mutual network. Between March 18 and September 9, 1945, the melodramatic anthology series was broadcast on Sundays from 10:30pm to 11:00pm. Each week, after “the sound of the great gong,” host Philip Clarke observed that the mysteriously silent “keeper of the book has opened the ponderous door to the secret vault wherein is kept the great sealed book

Forthcoming (DMR Books): 2025 marks the 10th anniversary of DMR Books. To commemorate this momentous milestone, we’re going back to where we started and reviving the Swords of Steel series! SOS was a groundbreaking fantasy anthology series, in that all the authors were members of heavy metal bands.

Fiction (Black Gate): He’s one of my favorite authors. He isn’t quite Sword & Planet but has a series that is adjacent with lots of S&P elements. It’s called The Lost Regiment and ran to 8 books. He later wrote a 9th book that took place 20 years after the end of the original series, but has not written any more. All were published by Roc Science Fiction. Sanjulian is credited with the covers for books 6, 7, and 8, and if he did those I’m pretty sure he did all the previous ones as well, which clearly have the same style.

Popular Culture (Kairos): A recent exchange online captured a recurring tension in the debate raging around entertainment and consumer culture. One side argues that people don’t actually want good products—they want easy products. Ease of access governs most consumer decisions, which is why streaming services, retail giants, and movie franchises dominate the market.

Conan (Paperback Warrior): Author John Maddox Roberts took his first swing at Tor’s Conan pastiche novels in 1985 – Conan the Valorous. Many consider Roberts contributions to the Tor line as the most enjoyable, and thus far I would agree. I enjoyed his novel Conan the Bold and wanted to try his very first experience with the character. Conan the Valorous is stationed between the L. Sprague de Camp/REH story “The Blood-stained God” and “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”.

Tolkien (Lotus Eaters): Tolkien Hated Motorbikes and Loved Housewives.

Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): H. Rider Haggard’s novel The People of the Mist was published in 1894 by which time he was just about the most popular writer in Britain. Haggard largely invented the Lost Civilisation genre and The People of the Mist definitely falls into this category.

Comic Books (Conan Chronology): This leads me to the chronology of Roy and Barry’s Conan. I picked up the Titan Comics omnibus of the first 26 issues and was very interested in how it both mirrors and diverges from the usually-accepted chronology of Conan’s life. In some places, it is remarkably similar, or even expands beautifully on throwaway lines from Howard’s original stories. In other parts, it changes large aspects of Conan’s history,.

Games (Wormwoodiana): It is now fairly well established that Tarot cards were first created as a game in the courts of Renaissance Italy and it was not until early 19^th century France that they began to be invoked for use in fortune-telling and ritual magic.

Pulp (Pulp Super Fan): For the last few years, Will Murray has been writing new Spider novels under the Wild Adventures of The Spider line from Altus Press through the Adventures in Bronze website. At present, he has done four novels, and I recently was sent the fourth novel: The Hangman From Hell.

Robert E. Howard (Frontier Partisans): There’s a lot more to Howard than Conan, though — a remarkably wide output across a range of genres and characters, all accomplished in a few, short years before his suicide at age 30 in 1936. A portion of that output was Western tales, a genre he was more and more drawn to in the last couple of years of his life. Howard was a Texan, who imbibed deeply of the frontier history of his state

Comic Books (50 Year Old Comic Books): In June, 1974, my sixteen-year-old self was well-primed for the debut of a comic book series based on the Planet of the Apes media franchise.  True, at the time I’d seen only two out of the five extant movies — Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), both of which I saw in theaters (to this day, I have no idea how or why I missed catching the fifth film, 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, at the movie house, but there it is). 

Science Fiction (Comics Old Time Radio): The December 1936 issue of Astounding Stories features an atmospheric and bizarre time travel tale written by the great C. L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore. We immediately meet Eric Rosner and get his backstory–by the time he’s 30, his life as an adventurer has left him feeling as if he’s done everything.

Fiction (SFF Remembrance): After all, genre SF, or indeed science fiction as a codified genre, did not exist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lifetime; and yet he, along with a few contemporaries, contributed massively to what we now call science fiction. Hawthorne is one of the undisputed canonical American authors, and he was also one of the first, having been born on July 4th, 1804, at a time when the US had not even started really to foster its first generation of “canonical” literature.

Authors (Rogue Blade Presents): G.W. Thomas (pronounced TAW-muhs) has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines, ezines and podcasts from WRITER’S DIGEST to CTHULHU NOW! He blogs at Dark Worlds Quarterly (https://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas…., and you’ll find dozens of his essays covering the glorious history of pulp heroics across the internet.

Fiction (Grim Dark Magazine): Lair of the Crystal Fang deals with Andy having gotten his employment terminated after his attempt to sell his story with insufficient evidence. He’s now reduced to cleaning up dirty apartments in the worst part of the city. His former associate, Jake Williams, has lost one of his legs and is struggling to recover as a former adventurer.

Soundtracks (Isegoria): The Romantic Era, however, is still going strong. […] Though they’re rarely performed live, billions of people enjoy them on screens big and small. I’m speaking, of course, of soundtracks. And while it’s tempting to dismiss them as insufferably low-brow “background music,”

Horror (Skulls in the Stars): It doesn’t take me very long to read anything new by Ramsey Campbell — assuming I am aware that something has been released! As longtime readers of this blog are probably aware, Campbell is my favorite horror author, and one who in my opinion really demonstrates the literary potentials of horror. His writing is precise and subtle, and he is a master at conveying a mood with a careful choice of words. So when I saw Fearful Implications, his latest compilation of short stories, had been released in 2023, it didn’t take me long to get it.

Fantasy (Glitter Night): ROLAND BATTLES MOROCCAN CORSAIRS – The Paladins recently freed by Astolpho from the prison of the sorcerer Atlantes all hastened to rejoin Emperor Charlemagne’s army. The war against the Muslim invaders from colonized Spain and North Africa was still raging. 

Fiction (Booktrib): Tomb of the Black Pharaoh by Christopher Michael is a heart-pounding mix of Lovecraftian horror and historical espionage that will captivate fans of cosmic terror and WWII thrillers alike. The book, which continues the author’s “Danforth Eldrich Tales of WWII” series, immerses readers in a world where ancient gods and modern warfare collide in a fight for ultimate power.

Review (Pulp Super Fan): I had previously read and reviewed RazörFist’s first two novels in his Nightvale series. When I saw that he was doing a crowdfunding campaign for a pulp-inspired western comic, I had to commit. I recently got my copy, a black-and-white edition of Ghost of the Badlands, with art by George Alexopoulos. As RazörFist is a fan of The Shadow, Franco-Belgium comics (aka bandes dessinées), and Westerns (both American and “spaghetti”).

Cinema (Grumpy Wizard): I didn’t see many films in the theater in 2024. The very last day of 2024 revealed that Nosferatu was the best of that handful. Directed by Robert Eggers, Nosferatu was one of the few movies I was looking forward to this year. I enjoyed his first two films The Witch, and The Lighthouse. His third film, The Northman, convinced me that whatever Mr. Eggers directed was something I wanted to see. Nosferatu only reinforced that feeling.

History (The Conversation): Archaeology excels in giving insights into the everyday lives of people in the past. It is only very occasionally that we get those spine-tingling moments when we can connect the artefacts and structures we excavate to very specific people and events – such as the massacre of Glen Coe.

Star Trek (Tentaclii): A few readers may be interested in my recent revisiting of Star Trek (Original Series, Kirk and Spock etc). My viewing was only a sampling of the best, as I didn’t want to slog through it all. I also avoided those ‘make the characters act out-of-character’ and ‘time travel to the Earth in the past’ episodes that you tend to get in long TV sci-fi series.

History (Frontier Partisans): Most of the Boer frontiersmen were avid and skilled hunters, and many had fighting experience gained riding in militia units known as Commandos in the nearly constant frontier wars against the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape.

James Bond (MI6-HQ): Significant reporting on the state of the James Bond film franchise was published today by the Wall Street Journal. Citing interviews with over 20 people including friends of the producers, studio executives, and industry insiders, the main headline is that Amazon and EON are at an impasse and no progress has been made on Bond 26. Candidly, Broccoli is reportedly refusing to make a film with the studio.

Cinema (Rip Jagger Dojo): I don’t think there has ever been a movie star with the allure and romance of Errol Flynn save perhaps for his predecessor Rudolph Valentino. He was dashing, handsome, and communicated a sense of devil-may-care that illuminated any room he walked into.

Public Domain (Dark Worlds Quarterly): January is here and that means a new crop of books entering the Public Domain. You probably heard about The Great Gatsby but for fans of Pulps and genre fiction there are other books that can now be downloaded for free. Here’s my picks from over 6000 new public domain volumes. Because of the way copyright laws work in the US, the new books are from the year 1929.