Blog Archives

Fantasy (Aeon): Tolkien articulated his anxieties about the cultural changes sweeping across Britain in terms of ‘American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass-production’, calling ‘this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying’ and suggesting in a 1943 letter to his son Christopher that, if this was to be the outcome of an Allied Second World War win, he wasn’t sure […]

Tolkien (The Guardian): A previously unpublished collection of writings by JRR Tolkien, exploring the world of Middle-earth in essays tackling topics ranging from Elvish reincarnation to which characters had beards, is to be published next summer. The new collection, which is authorised by the Tolkien estate, will be called The Nature of Middle-earth, and will […]

Publishing (Kairos): The Strand is far from the only bookstore to fall on hard times this year. Barnes & Noble, the last big book retail chain, faces mounting pandemic-related difficulties compounded by their own bad decisions.     I loathe Amazon as much as the next person who relies on it. But on recent visits to […]

Lovecraft & Games (Fictiontalk): If you are a fan of horror you’ve heard of HP Lovecraft at some point. His works of fiction from “Shadow out of Time” to “The Call of Cthulhu” have influenced many science fiction and horror writers alike. Videogames are no exception. If you’re a die-hard Lovecraft fan or just looking […]

Horror (Dark Herald): The reason is simple enough, before the Enlightenment, people believed in the supernatural. It wasn’t a matter of ignorance, it was a matter of everyday life. If you believed in the Bible, you believed in the supernatural. It was filled with the stuff. Games (Walker’s Retreat): Around the end of 2013, a […]

Lovecraft (At the Villa Rose): What interests me most is Lovecraft’s literary doctrine, this definitive refusal of realism rooted in a no less definitive refusal of reality. Lovecraft, Houellebecq says, found both the modern world and life in general to be boring and repellent, and antithetic to artistic creation. Hence the radically abstract character of […]

Cinema (Shuker in Movie Land): Tonight [26 September 2019], I finally got around to watching another one from my ever-expanding collection of crypto/monster B-movies on DVD. Directed by Sean Cain and first released in 2015, this one was Terror Birds. As its title suggests, Terror Birds is all about reclusive zillionaire Harvey Sullivan (played by […]

Gaming (Black Gate): Back in the day, I used to play a lot of computer games. And to be honest, I still spend a fair amount of time each week playing, though these days it’s pretty much limited to Lord of the Rings Online. I started out in the late 1970’s on the Apple II […]

Authors (Paul Semel): It’s either a really good time to be a fan of writer Larry Correia…or a really bad one. Not only has he just released Destroyer Of Worlds (hardcover, Kindle), the latest book in his Saga Of The Forgotten Warrior series, but the paperback version of his short story collection Target Rich Environment […]

Forthcoming (Cirsova): We’ve just received Schuyler Hernstrom’s foreword for Endless Summer, and we thought it was too good not to share:   Discussing stories is a complicated business.  Buried somewhere underneath layers of criticism, commerce, and identity you might find some deep understanding of Misha’s work. But I worry that careless digging will disturb the landscape. […]

Authors (The Silver Key): Andrew J. Offutt was a complex, deeply flawed man. A resident of rural Kentucky, Offutt was a husband and a father who supported his family with a successful insurance business, a job which he did not love and ultimately abandoned to make the bold leap into full-time writing. He was at […]

Fiction (Goodman Games): Jack Holbrook Vance was summoned into this world just over a century ago in San Francisco on August 28, 1916. A writer of multiple genres, he is best known to fans of Dungeons and Dragons for his Dying Earth novels, one of the inspirations for the magic system, often called ‘Vancian’, in […]