To my 3 or 4 loyal readers :-)

Here's the thing: I am a serial monogamist when it comes to my enthusiasms, whatever that means. What it usually means -- and meant most recently -- is that I'm halfway thru a fairly good (in my opinion) sword & sorcery story, about 8,000 words in, and I just get stuck. Worse than that, I find myself distracted by a book or two from one of my *other* favorite fictional subgenres, in this case noir crime fiction. And so, long story short, I need to work on this new noir blog for awhile, before I get back to the blood and thunder of S & S. (Go to http://www.whiskeybottleoverjesus.blogspot.com for the other blog.)

Thanks a heap!

Sabu

Recently, in a magic carpet kind of mood, I turned to Netflix for something to satisfy the urge. Two somethings, in fact, 1940s "The Thief of Bagdad," with the child actor Sabu as the little thief and Conrad Veidt as the evil Grand Vizier Jaffar; and 1942's "The Arabian Nights," again with Sabu and with Maria Montez as Scherazade.

One of the brightest points of both films is the presence of the child actor Sabu, he of the John Prine song and moves like "The Jungle Book" and "Elephant Boy." He served in WWII as an Air Force tail gunner, but upon returning to civilian life found movie tastes had changed, and his career -- at least for movies like "Thief of Bagdad" -- had come to an end.

Sabu has an innocent charm impossible to duplicate and perhaps outdated in the years after the war -- I can't speak to that, really -- but he is perfect in "Thief" and "Arabian Nights."

These movies have it all -- technicolor sword fights, djinn, flying carpets, acrobats, sleeping princesses ... all I need now is to watch "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" (1944) to round out my flying carpet trilogy.

There is too little Arabian Nights-style sword and sorcery, even today. I would love to read some. I have been acquiring some Harold Lamb, who wrote fiction set in that geography, but since it's historical I won't expect too many djinn.

Perhaps somebody needs to revive the old pulp FLYING CARPET MAGAZINE to focus on more tales of this type. I for one would subscribe.

half elven chaotic neutral fighter thief

I was thinking the other day about D & D. It has been about 27 years since the first time I played, and probably over 20 since I was in a serious game. I posted a note by the elevators of Twin Towers, the dorm where I lived at ASU in Jonesboro, Arkansas, asking if anybody in the building was willing to teach me how to play; I had read about it somewhere but didn't know what it entailed.

Within the hour, two jocular fellows, one tall and skinny and black-headed, the other short and stocky and with a blonde Prince Valiant haircut, had shown up at my door to take me under their collective wings.

We all three flunked out, although not because of D & D specifically. When I saw the lads on campus are about to play their first game this Friday night, I RSVP'd I'd attend. I've never DM'd, but as for playing, it's like riding a bike. All you need is a two-liter of Mtn. Dew and a big bag of cheetos.

I've been reading some of the RPG-based novel omnibuses (omnibii?) put out by the Black Library, based on the fantasy side of Warhammer. I have on hand, in a big stack, the following:

MATHIAS THULMANN: WITCH HUNTER
BLACKHEARTS: THE OMNIBUS
GOTREK & FELIX V. 1
MALUS DARKBLADE V. 1
&
FLORIN & LORENZO

So far so good. So far there haven't been any Fritz Leibers or Robert E. Howards in the stack, but I have a feeling that books like those published from the Black Library are and will be the closest thing on a mass market scale we see to the kind of popularity the pulps had back in their heyday.

That isn't a bad thing. People remember the stars of the field and forget the other 90% of what appeared in those pages, the stories that were a good read but that didn't immortalize their author. There was only one Robert E. Howard, after all.

And Gotrek & Felix aren't bad at all, actually.

This Crooked Way by James Enge

If you love to read, one benefit of being out of the loop for awhile is that when you start paying attention again, there are whole unread series, not just a book here and there, to hold your attention for hours at a time.

Morlock Ambrosius is, as someone else said somewhere (?), one of the few iconic figures to emerge in the current/ongoing Sword & Sorcery renaissance. I read "The Red Worm's Way" in the anthology RETURN OF THE SWORD and ordered the first novel, BLOOD OF AMBROSE, quickly, hoping for more of the same, and got it. What a great book!

So could THIS CROOKED WAY possibly be equal to what'd come before?

It is. It's the same only different. James Enge is an interesting thoughtful writer. You see him do these little things all the time in the writing that show either off-the-cuff genius or a lot of rewriting, no way to know which.

Example? Okay. One of the most fun parts of his writing is when hero Morlock, faced with some impossible task, pulls a magic whatsit out of his pocket and turns it on and the story proceeds uninterrupted. Now, this sort of deus ex machina could get old fast in the wrong hands, but as one example of careful writing and how you get around it, there's a point in THIS CROOKED WAY where the characters have to access a high up window in an unassailable house. So Morlock pulls a magic bean out of his pocket, plants it, and rides up on the fast-growing beanstalk.

It turns out he had 3 more, but he traded them to some guy for his cow. I don't have the book in front of me as I write this, but Morlock's comment on the wisdom of trading the magic beans for the cow is, "But I really needed that cow." So: it isn't just a plot gimmick, suddenly Morlock is the guy from "Jack and the Beanstalk"! And on the story goes.

THIS CROOKED WAY is what's called a picaresque novel (meaning episodic), unlike BLOOD OF AMBROSE, which built and built upon its plot arc until the spectacular ending. (These pieced-together novels also used to be called "fix-ups," a term I believe invented by A. E. Van Vogt for novels made up of previously written short stories, but used by others including the legendary Philip K. Dick, who wrote several and may have gotten the concept from Van Vogt for all I know [he was a huge admirer of his on numerous other levels]).

THIS CROOKED WAY is different than its predecessor also in that it's told from multiple points of view; moreover, multiple first person points of view. As a struggling amateur fiction writer myself for many years, I can tell you getting the voice in the story right is a big deal, and so to deliberately switch it around?

But it works. Again and again, I had that slight bump for a page or two when the new "story" began and the pov character went from a soldier to mother to daughter, etc., inevitably within a page or two I'd forgotten and was wholly into the tale again.

Because of this approach, we get to see Morlock Ambrosius from multiple angles, which only lends complexity/depth to a character whose "obvious" traits become more and more familiar to us as we go along.

(The reference to Morlock as "iconic" makes total sense to me, and will to anyone who's enjoyed the stories. I assume our response is partly due to Enge's comfort with writing the character. He said in one interview he'd been writing about Morlock for thirty years. Anyway, I get it. One has a sense of Morlock after awhile the same as you do reading Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, or Sherlock Holmes, et. al. We get a sense of a stable character, yet the stories continue to surprise.)

I haven't said too much about the plot and won't. There are nasty bug invaders, and the parts told from their pov are particularly well done, reminding me for some reason of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live In Vain." You aren't fed the backstory on these creatures; you get their story from their pov and figure it out as you go. Highly effective; well done.

THIS CROOKED WAY is definitely a keeper. I read it in two days. And now it's going to be a YEAR before the next one comes out. Blah.

L. Sprague de Camp, the Col. Parker of S&S?

I just read an amazing 15-part article over at rehupa.com, starting July 2008, on the influence of L. Sprague de Camp on the development of Conan in the late 1960s and later (I was referrered to it by its author Morgan Holmes.)

It is worth a look. I very well remember the 3 vols of Conan stories Karl Edward Wagner edited (remember the ones with the little pull-out posters? Amazing cover art!) And I knew since then, from reading here and there, that apparently L. Sprague de Camp, who had co-written, edited and pastiched numberous Conan works posthumous and otherwise with Lin Carter, working from fragments of Howard material and even changing Howard non-Conan stories into stories featuring the brawny Cimmerian, I had *no idea* of the extent of de Camp's influence on the Conan "cottage industry," much of it negative. Which included causing the termination of the KEW project after 3 volumes instead of six.

In fact, it reminded me of nothing so much as the stories of Col. Parker simultaneously promoting, vampirizing, and screwing up the career of Elvis Presley. Like Tom Parker, de Camp savagely fought to "corner the market" on the material (and as Morgan Holmes shows in explicit detail, the de Camp/Carter material was almost always quite inferior to the Howard source material), but in later years he actively worked to promote a poorer product, insisting on the "dumbing down" of the pastiche novels written by others after he and Carter finished their series of "canon" books.

I had operated for years under the assumption that if not for de Camp, Conan wouldn't have been re-discovered, and there might well not have been a sword & sorcery boom in the 1960s/1970s. Boy was I wrong. In fact, de Camp had as much as anybody to do with ending it...

Subjective Taste

I hadn't read much sword and sorcery for a long time before starting this blog, except for a few old favorites now and again. No real reason why; I was a teenager 1975-1982, peak years during the last big S&S boom, and read everything I could lay hands on at that time. After that I got into other things.

But reading tastes change, and in the intervening decades my own reading (and writing) have changed a lot. So when I came back to pick up where I left off, I was interested in seeing how much if any of what I loved before could endure my now-jaded tastes.

I'm happy to report so far that none of my old favorites have fallen by the wayside. I opened this blog with a defense of Lin Carter, whom I've always loved, and it's true he was not on the same level with some other writers, but on the other hand he kept me in good books to read for years. What I was afraid of was that I would now find him unreadable (as I do with a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, sorry to say.) Happily such was not the case.

Still, it's not the same. I found myself annoyed by excessive exclamation marks in the Karl Edward Wagner story I was just reading. Kane! doesn't! need! excessive! punctuation! to! be! exciting! And when I re-reading the first few Elric stories a month or two ago, I was mildly surprised not to be more blown away by the prose, which had made quite an impression on me at age 15. I mean, it's *fine* -- Moorcock is a favorite -- but memory is a tricky beast, and I remembered it differently than it was.

And although I have recently purchased the new-ish 3-vol. Conan stories, as well as the Solomone Kane collection, Howard's stuff is in a stack by my chair, yet-unread. I'm kinda afraid to. What if he sucks? What if *I*, therefore, suck?

I'll have to get back to you on that.

My favorite stylist at the moment is James Enge of BLOOD OF AMBROSE and THIS CROOKED WAY, which I began over the weekend. Now that guy can turn a phrase!

"Just now it was early spring; patches of snow lay, like chewed crusts, beneath the hungry-looking trees. The leaves, crooked blue veins showing along the withered gray surfaces, were like the hands of dying men. They rustled irritably in the chill persistent breeze, as if impatient to meet and merge with the earth."

See what I mean?

I have been buying (used) these big thick 3-in-1 Warhammer fantasy anthologies. So far, I am not totally crushed, although they are kinda what I thought: the writers hearts are in it, but sometimes the writing is a little weak.

So how important is it for there to be "great writing" if you're just looking for an exciting/fun read? Do you need a literature degree to have a good time? (No, and you don't need an ideology to knock over a liquor store, to quote Hal Hartley in "Simple Men.")

If the writing gets in the way of the enjoyment, that's a problem. If not, not. I also enjoy pickled eggs and anchovies and other disgusting things. De gustibus non disputandem est.

The later Kane stories

I had an exchange of comment posts following a blog entry I made earlier about Karl Edward Wagner and my fondness for his character Kane. A couple of people responded less than enthusiastically about the small handful of Kane stories set in the modern world -- particularly, "Lacunae" and "Deep in the Depths of the Acme Warehouse" (though most agreed "At First Just Ghostly" is pretty great.)

Anyway, I landed a copy of MIDNIGHT SUN via Interlibrary Loan, the complete Kane short stories, and ... um ... well, guys, you were right.

"Deep in the Depths of the Acme Warehouse" was written for an Elvis anthology, which explains (?) the Elvis penis angle, but as with "Lacunae," I think ... Wagner worked with Kane. Kane was his guy. So when he decided to write these horror stories, he went w/ Kane as the protag. He could have as easily done without and it wouldn't have changed the stories much. Or maybe he just wanted to mess with people's heads, using the character that way. I'm not enough of a KEW scholar to know.

"At First Just Ghostly" is a different case. Horror too, but w/ Kane and his daughter filling in for John Steed and Emma Peel from the Avengers. I rather dug that a lot.

I will say this, too, and possibly it's an unfair comment for me to make, but, okay: when I've been drinking a lot and writing a lot, the characters tend to drink a lot too. I've written entire stories about beer. And I don't think I could've kept up with Cody Lennox in "At First Just Ghostly," though as a creepy story it worked just fine. Likewise the references to Kane's "uber-cocaine" in these stories (and references to "ground coca leaves" made in some of the historical tales: coke's not my drug of choice, but you write about what you know, and given the time period the stories were written, I find that aspect of them very much Of Their Time.

I think the historical Kane tales stand well on their own and the modern ones might best be considered experiments at best, though de gustibus non disputandem est.

Harold Lamb?

Who the hell is Harold Lamb? I mean -- okay, I looked him up, I know who he is...plus his stories have been being reprinted recently, in SAGES AND SWORDS and RETURN OF THE SWORD at least (and hopefully will be available in Rogue Blades upcoming reprint DIY anthology project). But where the hell did he come from?

It's like this. I have been reading s-f, fantasy, mysteries, etc., for at least 40 of my (almost) 47 years. If nothing else, you notice names, even if you never get around to reading them. Case in point: H. Warner Munn. Seen his name, seen the Merlin books, never read 'em. Just read a beautiful interview done w/ him Way Back In The Day by Jessica Amanda Salmonson (who is quite the essayist/interviewer), now I've got his books in my Amazon queue, just waiting for payday.

But Harold Lamb? I swear to god, it's like I've fallen into a parallel universe. Back where I was? No Harold Lamb. He never existed. Never wrote these "sword and sandal" pulp stories, never went on to write these great-looking historical nonfiction books (although I just checked out an obviously oft-read copy of his THE CRUSADES from my university's small but elegant library).

Now the multiverse axis has shifted, and suddenly his name is everywhere. Harold Lamb. Harold Lamb. Why hasn't anybody in S&S given a shit about Harold Lamb the past thirty years? Am I just deaf dumb and blind? Possibly so...

Any thoughts on this?

Sword & Sorcery 101

A good old friend of mine, Randy Griffin, wrote to say he was enjoying this blog and wondered if I would post a list of books, places to start for someone wanting to get into sword & sorcery.

Absolutely. The core, of course, is Robert E. Howard, who mixed the historical fiction of people like Dumas and Sabatini with the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany and maybe even Eddison's THE WORM OUROBOROS to create characters like King Kull and Conan the Cimmerian. Add humor and you've got Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser (all those stories are good, though my favorite remains the one full-length novel, THE SWORDS OF LANKHMAR, reviewed earlier.)

To me, Moorcock rounds out the basic triumvirate of essential Sword & Sorcery authors, though others might disagree. Elric of Melnibone, Moorcock's anti-Conan, is unavoidable. (I'm actually a big fan of Dorian Hawkmoon as well, having just reread the series recently.)

Just reading those three will keep you busy forever, but there are plenty of other places to go. Having championed Lin Carter, I'll have to cast a vote for his Thongor, a mix of Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Henry Kuttner's ELAK OF ATLANTIS stories, and C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY, have been collected numerous times and are great.

I have been on a Karl Edward Wagner kick lately; his Kane is the main evolution in the S&S hero I can think of following Conan, F&tGM, and Elric. Wagner called his stuff "acid gothic" and claimed not to have been influence by Howard; whatever the case, I'm digging it. (NIGHT WINDS -- novellas -- is a winner; I'm halfway thru DARK CRUSADE, which is so-so so far, and haven't read BLOODSTONE yet, though it's perched right here by my elbow.)

All the above is just the tip of the iceberg. You'll have to dig around and figure out what you like. I loved James Enge's BLOOD OF AMBROSE and can't wait for payday so I can order the sequel (one more week!) And I can't pass on mentioning two favorites, Tim Powers' THE DRAWING OF THE DARK and P.C. Hodgell's GOD STALK, which is set in my second favorite fantasy city ever, Tai-Tastigon (second only of course to Leiber's Lankhmar.)

In my to-be-read stack? Charles Saunders' IMARO; David Gemmell's LEGEND; George R.R. Martin's A GAME OF THRONES; and a couple of Warhammer omnibuses that looked pretty good, Nathan Long's BLACKHEARTS and C.L. Werner's MATHIAS THULMANN: WITCH HUNTER. (I am a big Solomon Kane fan, and just saw Vincent Price in "Witch Finder," aka "The Conquerer Worm," so I can see where Werner's headed with this one!)

Anyway, that's it. Any suggestions out there? Randy, does that help?

Monthly Terrors, Lost Writers

A few weeks ago I ran across a wonderful essay by Jessica Amanda Salmonson about an old friend of hers, the late fantasy writer David Madison. Madison (1951-1978) published, from what I can tell, only 18 stories, and only one of those, "Tower of Darkness," appeared in a major publication(it was in SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS III, the excellent series published in the late Seventies by Zebra and edited by the wonderful andrew j. offutt.) The url for the essay I mention is here: (www.violetbooks.com/d-madison.html). In it, Salmonson does a far better job than I could of evaluating Madison's character and work; I didn't know him, of course, and have read only the one story mentioned above; I ordered the book based on her description just to read it. The rest of his stories appeared in numerous small press S&S/fantasy zines which existed in that era and which I, a callow youth growing up in the sticks of northern Arkansas, didn't even know existed -- Dragonfields, Space & Time, the New Fantasy Journal, Astral Dimensions, Wyrd, the Diversifier, and Dragonbane. Salmonson struggled to get out collections of his work without success, after his death. Many of his stories featured a likable and ahead-of-their-time sexually oriented pair of rogues, Marcus and Diana, she being an Amazonian warrior, he being, from my reading of the one story, a witty drag queen. More power to that, says I. Salmonson's essay is also well worth reading because of her pointed and brilliant dissection of the unspoken sex and power politics in the typical S&S tale before and since. His stories are, I hope and imagine, as well worth seeking out and reading as the ones that made it to the big time before he shuffled off this plane at age 26 or 27, despite their obscure publications. The thing is, I wouldn't have known about any of this if not for a passing reference in Salmonson's essay, where she says, "Others have ... begun to use the bibliographic volume Monthly Terrors as a guide to tracking down David's rarest items." Monthly Terrors: An Index to the Weird Fantasy Magazines Published in the United States and Great Britain is is a 601 page index, an unpretentiously bound hardback, edited by Frank H. Parnell and Mike Ashley. It contains virtually every magazine of a "fantasy/weird" nature published between 1919-1983. It is arranged by magazine title and by author, and lists the full contents of each issue, and every story the author published and where. To some people, this will sound dry as fuck, and they are right, but to the rest of us? Sheer paradise! Every zine you've ever heard of but haven't seen and never will? It's here: COPPER TOADSTOOL, MOONBROTH, CHACAL, HORROR SEX TALES :-), NYCTALOPS, SHAYOL, TOADSTOOL WINE, WITCHCRAFT & SORCERY, etc. If you're One of Us, I'm sure you get my point. Not only an indispensible tool for the collector, but for the writer? Next time you're stuck for a title, look no further. There are many suggestive ones in here. All of them, in fact. Well, I've ranted too long for one post -- plus it's time for a run to the beer store -- so I'll stop. Read Salmonson's essay; maybe if enough people holler, the adventures of Marcus and Diana will someday be collected. In the meantime, MONTHLY TERRORS is just cool as shit, and I recommend it unabashedly.

Blood of Ambrose by James Enge

It's difficult to proceed in reviewing a novel that has been so well-reviewed as James Enge's BLOOD OF AMBROSE. It is funny and frightening and gripping. It is a page-turner in a way that most books are not. I read it in a couple days because I couldn't stop. What's it like? It reminded me a bit of Zelazny's Amber books -- I'm sure the comparsion has been made elsewhere -- with the powerful, ancient, de Medici-esque family, the immense back story which works seamlessly into the ongoing front plot. The language is exactly right, and yet Enge has a way of slipping into ... well, in most fantasy novels of this broad type, I'd say a character telling another character "We're screwed" would be out of place, but not so here.

The world is fully developed. The appendices cover geography, religion, even the complex three-moon astronomical system. I haven't read enough of the associated short stories to know if the background so well-detailed is derived from those stories, or if it's all in Enge's head, but the book left me yearning (quickly) for the sequel, THE CROOKED WAY. (There are numerous Morlock Ambrosius short stories available for free online. Here's a link: http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2009/05/interview-with-james-enge-interviewed.html).

Ah, Morlock Ambrosius. The most original character I've read in many a moon. Part Elric (he has a damned sword), part Corwin (though without the amnesia), part Merlin (actually, Merlin's in the book too). Exile, sorcerer, dry drunk...how many alcoholic heroes exist in S&S? Does anyone know? And it *matters* in these stories. (See "The Red Worm's Way" in the anthology RETURN OF THE SWORD.)

And the boy king. A hint of THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, a hint of fairy tale. A bildungsroman. It works.

I like it. Buy it. Read it.

Real Books vs. eBooks

Until just a couple years ago, I wouldn't have bought an eBook for any reason. I hated reading on the screen -- and it still isn't preferable to having a solid book in my hands. My old friend Chad Eby and I held diametrical views on the subject: to him, print was dead and only the words on the screen alive, but to me the screen was only buzzing pixels. The book was what was "real."

So although I now buy and read eBooks from time to time, I'll still have to cast my vote onto the side of tangible books with glossy covers and pages you can turn. (You know, don't you, that the book was as evolutionary a leap in its day as the eBook is for us; before that, all you had was scrolls, and if you wanted to find a certain spot in the story, you had to unroll the scroll till you got there. A book with cut pages was a leap forward comparable to our "find" function with computers. Now we have the best of both worlds, *searchable* scrolls.)

Books have investment value; if your computer crashes, your eBook is a phantom. Books are mobile. Unless you have a laptop, eBooks sit like stones waiting for you to come to them (and most laptops are still slightly more burdensome than the book you can slip into your backpack or back pocket); also, I feel on occasion that books are an endangered species, like some rare South American species of hummingbird nobody hears much about, and so I buy books the way I'd spend a few bucks to protect some endangered hummingbird habitat.

On the other hand, if you're broke as often as I am, eBooks are often if not always a lot cheaper than the hard copy version. Plus no shipping & handling.

Fortunately, most of the recent S&S publications and anthologies offer both formats, so that makes it an aesthetic choice, but not a complicated one.

The Cost of One's Vices

Another nice thing to say about the new anthologies coming from Rogue Blades and etc. is that they're relatively inexpensive. In the course of my S&S book-buying mania, I have mostly managed to slake my unholy thirsts for less than ten bucks a throw (plus s&h, which doesn't count!), and sometimes for as much as $15.

But now I'm venturing into more expensive waters. Reading Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, still, I see there are two colletions out, one of his novels, one of the short stories.

Gods in Darkness: The Complete Novels of Kane is $39.99, used.
The Midnight Sun: The Complete Stories of Kane is $85, used.

Then I see there have been a couple of Kane team-up stories, one of them with Richard L. Tierney's Simon Magus, those stories collected in a beautiful Chaosium collection, Scroll of Thoth: Tales of Simon Magus & the Great Old Ones. But the sucker is $55, used!

One small consolation: I can read the Kane-meets-Elric story in Elric: Tales of the White Wolf for 52 cents.

Well, life is full of choices. Think I'll focus on gathering those crumbly old Kane paperbacks if I can, rather than the shiny new collections. I think I can get the ones I don't have together for...um, let's see...about $60. Gak!

Well, payday's coming.

Onward!

Whatever Happened To Sword & Sorcery, Anyway?

(In my haste I have not done so before, but I should immediately express my gratitude to my friend and brother Kevin Regier for helping me set up this web site. I am no technician, and without his continual aid on every level it would not me a hundredth the blog it is. Thanks, amigo.) Posted on this site are a set of Youtube videos by a trio of sword & sorcery aficionados – David C. Smith, Jake Jaquet, and Joe Banadonna. In the course of this multi-part panel discussion they tackle one central question: Whatever happened to Sword & Sorcery? Why did the genre fizzle out in the early- to mid-Eighties? Historically speaking, S&S was a subset of pulp fiction that arose in the 1930s and 1940s (and thereafter) beginning primarily with Robert E. Howard and WEIRD TALES. Arguably, of course, he had his obvious ancestors, e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the writers in magazines like ARGOSY, etc Point being, the genre had a tremendous resurgence which peaked, roughly, between the late Sixties and the early Eighties. I was there – my favorite and pretty much sole reading matter in junior high and high school was the Conan series edited/co-authored/fabricated completely by Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter, may they all rest in peace. And their imitators. (Go Brak! Go Thongor!) (Lest it be assumed I put myself in the camp, so to speak, of critics of de Camp and Carter for their high-handed dabbling with Howard's work, finishing fragments, rewriting non-Conan stories to include them in the canon, all that junk? Frankly I remain torn. On the one hand, they – especially L. Sprague de Camp turned Robert E. Howard into his own cottage industry, rewriting his books, writing new material under Howard's name, and of course Carter did the same thing, as collaborator. On the other hand, if not for them, relatively few people would even know who Conan was, much less Robert E. Howard – they wouldn't have made the famous film if the books hadn't been so popular -- and S&S might well not have had any resurgence at all. I have heard disturbing rumors to the effect de Camp quashed Karl Edward Wagner's “restored” editions of Howard/Conan material that came out in the late Seventies or early Eighties – remember those cool paperbacks with the little pull-out posters? If true, then de Camp was attempting to preserve his paycheck based on material he may have edited, amended, and pastiched, but didn't really create, and if so it's a sad comment on him. I do know I saw de Camp and his wife Catherine at a convention in San Diego around 1990, and it was like watching the King and Queen of England walking by – they had style, those two. Anyway...) In the excellent Youtube panel reference above, the three authors discuss what more or less happened to old school S&S by the early Eighties. Though they make no definite claims, they make some vastly interesting points. One point is that the surge in popularity of Dungeons & Dragons may well have sucked off the readership of the traditional S&S adventure fiction into a more visceral, immediate form, i.e., gaming. They also make the interesting and possibly/probably true point that the readership for fantasy that evolved after this point may (probably was) affected by gaming to such an extent that their expectations of what good fantasy fiction should offer was markedly different than what came before. Examples? Okay: Classic S&S tended to be based on the short story form (with, always, obvious exceptions); it tended, in the words of the panelists, to be masculine, visceral, bleak, weird, and dark, and with a marked psychological aspect. Okay, this is obviously broad generalization, but there are plenty of examples to support it: Howard's the obvious one, but also Leigh Brackett, Moore's Jirel of Joiry, et. al. (And yes, I realize Jirel of Joiry was not masculine. Wotta woman! Point taken.) Although, in the panel video, David C. Smith (noted author of not only the Oron series, but also half a dozen Red Sonja books and the amazing pirate novel BLACK VULMEA: THE WITCH OF THE INDIES, and many another excellent tale) makes a good argument for the parallels between S&S and the classic western, his cohort Joe Banadonna makes, for my taste, a better argument: Old School Sword & Sorcery is a helluva lot like classic noir. It's dark. It's grim. There ain't a lot of happy rainbow unicorn punchlines. Conan, not to mention his inimitable cranked-up descendant, Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, are grim, to say the least. It's not that hard to imagine a Gil Brewer or Jim Thompson or David Goodis Sword & Sorcery novel – titles come to mind: MY SWORD IS DEADLY; KISS ME, BARBARIAN; THE WARLOCK INSIDE ME; or AFTER DARK, MY SWORDSMAN. It's not that far off. Point is, with noir, while everybody recognizes classic stuff when they read it, it ain't feel good fiction, and if you're looking for happy follow-up readers, you might want to look someplace else, sad to say. So it is that fantasy has followed the Tolkien track, rather than the Howard track: trilogies, massive (not to say bloated) multi-volume series. The panelists discuss the importance, the prevalence of world-building in this scenario. In a good tight S&S novella or short story, not only due to word count but also due to good writing, more is implied than spelled out, and more in dialogue than in info-dump exposition. One is taught that's how you do it, and when you do it well, it works brilliantly. But if, let's say just for purposes of conversation, the reader has cut his/her teeth on trilogies, or even, let's say, one comes from a background of gaming (Dungeons & Dragons or whatnot – and I played many a 12-hour session Back In The Day), the very concept of world-building being an essential part of the game itself, the story itself, takes on a level of importance not only totally absent (on stage) in the story, but almost antithetical. In the Old School stories, you go out of your way to imply rather than spell out. Thus the problem. Or the quandry. I am, at the belated age of 46, just getting into heavy-duty reading of books based on Warhammer, etc. And while I am very eager to do so, I already understand that background forefronted is important. In addition to everything else, given the cost of books, by god if I'm gonna pay $10-20 or something for a book, I appreciate poundage as much as anything. Lest it appear I am making no point at all, I'll say this much: I prefer the well-told tale regardless of length, and was weaned on the shorter form, and am glad it's coming back (if it ever entirely left.) Fortunately the whole situation is not a case of either/or. The multi-volume epic series is so well established at this point it's in no danger of anything, neither criticism nor – well, it's here to stay. (And lest anyone argue that this trend is historically new in S & S or something, let me point out that one of the true Grandmasters of S&S, Michael Moorcock, basically invented the epic series with his Eternal Champion books: Elric is Dorian Hawkmoon is Corum Jan Irsei is Jerry Cornelius is Whoever, and they're all pretty fucking great. All 75 books of them, or however many there are. In a good way.) On the other hand, we've got these new publishers, these new anthologies from Rogue Blades Entertainment, etc., RETURN OF THE SWORD, RAGE OF THE BEHEMOTH – a true return to the short, terse, punchy, grim short story that defined S&S from its beginnings until Whenever Things Got Big. It's all good, I'm not losing any sleep over it. Hope you feel the same.

Solomon Kane

I assume the impending Solomon Kane movie is of more interest to us than anything since the original "Conan the Barbarian," 27 years ago. I have read rave reviews of it and screaming bashes. The previews, of course, look amazing.

There are two ways the movie can go wrong; one is that it isn't true to the original material, and the second is that it just sucks as a movie.

For a certain group of people -- purists -- if a movie doesn't hew closely to the source material, it's wrong. I take it from reviews that the movie gives Kane a sort of redemption motivation lacking in the original Howard series of stories.

Personally, I don't have a lot of problem with that, as presented. Howard's Kane is kind of a static character, described (in the Wikipedia entry on him) as "a somber-looking man who wanders the world with no apparent goal other than to vanquish evil in all its forms." Certainly fine for a short story series character, but one imagines even Howard would have fleshed out his background had he tackled Kane at novel length.

The other way the movie can go wrong is if it simply blows. Maybe it does. The Internet Movie Database gives it 8.5 stars out of 10. Rotten Tomatoes doesn't have a rating yet but the few remarks there were positive.

Prediction: if you're not up on Solomon Kane, you'll dig the movie. If you are a hardcore REH fan, you'll pick it apart. If you have a tolerance for screen adaptations, I'll bet it's great. I will be there as soon as it comes to town, myself.

Karl Edward Wagner (1945 – 1994)

On Saturday, the 17th of October -- next weekend -- a meeting of like-minds will be held at the "ancient and notorious" Patrick Sullivan's Saloon at 100 N. Central St. in Knoxville, Tennessee. It will start at 7 p.m. Its purpose? Planning for a Fall Fear and Fantasy Festival in honor of Karl Edward Wagner. (I'd originally posted this as the festival itself, but John Mayer kindly informs me this meeting on the 17th is not to be the Wagner festival proper, but "only a meeting of like-minded fans, family and a few of Karl’s old drinking buddies for the purposes of putting our heads together and bringing about such a festival."

Such an event is loooong overdue. Wagner and his creation Kane were, to my mind, the writer and creation who come closest to Robert E. Howard and Conan the Cimmerian. Not only in intensity and quality of writing, but in the demeanor of the hero himself. (Actually, having thought about it some since I originally posted this, I'll add that Wagner upped the ante quite a bit with Kane, making him a postmodern Conan, for lack of a better term. In a good way, I mean.)

I wish I could go. It would require a car I don't have, or better yet a magic carpet given the distance from here to Knoxville (620 miles). Anyway, if you *can* go, you should.

I probably didn't appreciate Wagner's Kane as much as I should have when he was alive and writing and I was young and first reading s&s; it was all a big mix of excitement to me, Kane and Conan and Thongor and all the others. I was a kid.

Anyway, years later I got heavily into horror, and there again it was in large part because of Wagner. Those volumes he edited of YEAR'S BEST HORROR were some of the best anthologies of the type I've read before or since; Wagner searched high and low for stories, and not just in the usual places. He discovered and championed new writers and brought a flow of life blood to the genre that changed it for the better.

I admit to being one of those people who get into the writers of the tales I enjoy as much as the stories/books themselves, which goes against the theory that the work should stand alone. Along the way I managed to correspond with and/or meet a huge number of my heroes (and they *were* heroes to me, like rock stars) -- Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, L. Sprague de Camp, Howard Waldrop, Tim Powers, Jim Blaylock, Philip Jose Farmer, George Alec Effinger, Robert Lynn Asprin, Roger Zelazny, Jack Williamson, et. al. And, unlike my experiences with more mainstream literary types (no names here), those guys weren't assholes; in fact, they went out of their way to be kind to a young shy fan who could barely work up the nerve to say hi and who would dance by the mailbox when a letter arrived from one of them.

I never tried to contact or meet Karl Edward Wagner, and I really wish I had. I loved his stuff, Kane as well as the horror stories. When I read the memorial essays for him published in LOCUS when he died, I was entranced and delighted by the person therein described. Except that I couldn't write worth a shit, he reminded me enough of myself that I figured we would get along just fine if we ever did bump paths.

(I remember a description of endless backyard barbecues at his house, and the pile of discarded chicken bones flung into the corner. I don't know why that struck me notably, but I fling a few chicken bones off the porch myself, out here in the woods.)

I digress. So many people have spoken of him so much better than I am doing here now. (Go here, for instance -- www.darkecho.com/darkecho/features/kew.html -- for one such example.) But I am now digging out my tattered old Kane paperbacks now, and trying to track down the ones I don't have, as part of my ongoing Catch Up.

A worthwhile endeavor, I think.

Yes, Wagner partied hard and paid the price for it, dying at the ripe old age of 49. It all seems a part of his "garage band" approach to life, his biker-with-a-typewriter, Hunter Thompson-with-a-sword approach. Sad and iconic, like Robert E. Howard himself.

No way to change the past, but I do wish I'd made a goofy fannish phone call to him, or written a letter, as I was wont to do in those days, just to have the memory of it.

For now, at age 46, all I can do is read the books, and write this, and when I get done here type some more on the new story I have going, and hope one single sentence in it is as good as the sentences in NIGHT WINDS, or DARK CRUSADE, or DARKNESS WEAVES.

On Getting Current in Heroic Fantasy, Pt. II

I was commenting the other day on the surplus number of wonderful S&S anthologies I've stumbled on since a friend and I began a collaborative shared world writing project a few weeks ago, both writing stories set in a fantasy/medieval city with a history and a river and neighborhoods and taverns and all the usual trappings. His background in world building (via D&D or whatever) is less than mine, and mine is quite scant, so our efforts have grown in odd bits and pieces: first the tavern, then the name of the city, then a mountain backed up against it, and so on. And while writing and inventing and noting what I was writing and inventing, I've kept reading new (to me) material, noting those books and writers people clamor about and ordering their books and waiting impatiently by the mailbox every afternoon to see what's arrived – David Gemmell's first novel, or George R. R. Martin's A GAME OF THRONES, or MATHIAS THULMANN: WITCH HUNTER or, just yesterday, James Enge's BLOOD OF AMBROSE – I read and very much enjoyed his “The Red Worm's Way” in RETURN OF THE SWORD and want to read further about his hero Morlock Ambrosius... I am writing this on the front porch of my cabin in the woods, drinking cheap beer and eating liverwurst and onion sandwiches and listening to Bob Dylan, in a perfect mood to tackle my ongoing story, involving an old knight who comes home to die and gets entangled in one last adventure … a bit stuck in the middle, but hopefully once I type it up – I typically write longhand first draft – the scales will fall from my eyes and I can figure out how to head it toward the end. There is something invigorating about this kind of writing, 10 times moreso than any workshop story I ever attempted (I never was very good at those – I kept wanting to throw weirdness into everything I wrote, and neither workshop profs nor fellow MFA writing students deal particularly well with weirdness of the sort I am drawn to). I always wanted to write a fantasy story based on Dylan's “All Along The Watchtower” – don't know if that's ever been attempted. Right now re-reading Tim Powers' THE DRAWING OF THE DARK and then BLOOD OF AMBROSE and who knows what else. (Solomon Kane, whom I've neglected unjustly for decades, and discovering Henry Kuttner wrote some amazing S&S, e.g. Elak of Atlantis.) Feels like a race against time to catch up. At this point nobody's reading this but me and maybe one other person, but it's good to vent in this fashion, even a little... Those anthologies are great. I am glad sword & sorcery (heroic fantasy, whatever) is still alive and thriving. For years I have ignored, too, books written/published that I foolishly regarded as useless crap spinoffs from gaming systems – Warhammer, Forgotten Realms, etc. – but I suspect I have been an exclusionary fool about these things, as usual. I've never read a book by R.A. Salvatore. How can someone claim to love this kinda fantasy and ever read R.A. Salvatore? I am correcting the situation very quickly. Am going to send out info on this blog in hopes I can get some feedback. Help a brother out!

The Swords of Lankhmar

Although I read numerous short stories by the late Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) and had lunch with him on one memorable afternoon in 1989, it wasn't until I read The Swords of Lankhmar, his sole novel-length entry into the long (the first tale appeared in 1939, the final in 1988) and delightful adventures of his famed rogue heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, that I became an ardent fan of the series.

I assume most readers are already well aware of F & the GM -- Fafhrd, the hulking barbarian from the North, based on Leiber himself, and the small, sly, clever thief the Gray Mouser, based on Leiber's lifelong friend Harry Otto Fischer (1910-1986). These stories are different from the fun of the mill sword and sorcery tale, not only in the beauty and depth of the writing -- Leiber was a trained Shakespearian actor and trod the boards in his father's touring company in his youth -- but in their humor.

The stories aren't all funny, and certainly not the frothy sort of pun-based goofy fantasy that has dominated the bookshelves for years, but you might say F & the GM know how to have a good time, love the ladies, love a good drink, and in short love their lives of adventure.

Possibly The Swords of Lankhmar is my favorite because I read it first. Impossible to say now. Too much water under that bridge. But when I re-read it a few days ago, it held up. Lankhmar, the central city of Leiber's fantasy world Newhon, besieged by intelligent rats, the Mouser dallying with the affections of the beautiful-but-deadly (and yes, herself of rattish heritage!) Hisvet, Fahrd's romance with a girl Ghoul (their flesh is transparent, leaving only their skeletons visible!), swordplay, ineffectual overlords, a frisson of S&M, even the Mouser's shrunken foray into the underworld kingdom of the rats: this one has it all! (I quote Wikipedia here, on Leiber's "often dark sense of humour, which ranges from the subtle and character-based to the Pythonesque.")

Buy it and read it. If you like it, there are many more. There won't be any more, though, unless Robin Wayne Bailey, who wrote one authorized sequel in 1998, SWORDS AGAINST THE SHADOWLAND, can be persuaded to do another.

In the meantime, enjoy!

On Getting Current in Heroic Fantasy Part I

I read an interesting post the other day by a thoughtful blogster whose name I cannot now remember and whose post I cannot locate again, who professed his surprise at all the fans of Conan (and Sword & Sorcery in general) who were returning to the fold now, after falling away in the 1980s, after the last Big S&S Boom.

I confess myself one of those folk. I don't know what happened. Life, I guess. There weren't any more new books – or if there were, I didn't see them – and so I drifted on to other things. (I should add that I got my degree in English Lit after that time, and those bastards had no use for genre fiction of any kind, much less the kind of stuff I'd been cutting my teeth on since I learned how to read – e.g. Zelazny, Howard, Fritz Leiber, et. al. Plus I tumbled onto so many other writers -- e.g. the Beats, Bukowski, Henry Miller, and *then* Poetry, in which I immersed myself for several years. But I digress...)

I've been delighted though in the past month or so to see all the new material being produced along sword & sorcery lines (new to me at least). A whole slew of beautiful anthologies: LORDS OF SWORDS, SAGES & SWORDS, RETURN OF THE SWORD, RAGE OF THE BEHEMOTH. It is a wonderful thing. I am reading them all simultaneously and will discuss them here.

I feel ... invigorated is a good word. 18 again, instead of 46. I have the sense that these new editors – Jason Waltz and Daniel Blackston, et. al – believe in what they're saying. They have drunk deep in the Well at the End of the World, just like I did Back in the Day, and have reached the same conclusions I have about the same writers: Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock (who is exactly the same age as my dad), Bob Howard and Clark Ashton Smith and Andy J. Offutt and Lin Carter and Manly Wade Wellman and Henry Kuttner: when it came to sword & sorcery, those guys had it Going On. And so do a whole bunch of guys (and gals) now living and reading and typing up fresh new stories, who read Karl Edward Wagner when he was still writing and alive, and who now read each other, published in these good books.

So I can see with some confidence that we are now in the Third Age of Heroic Fantasy, as one might measure such things, the first having covered Weird Tales and so forth, the second peaking in the 1970. Too many great books to ignore. I am a book-ordering fiend even under normal circumstances. It's a good thing my wife already threw my ass out months ago, because if she hadn't she would now, when she saw the mailbox every day w/ some wonderful tome in it. And on that note...

Why I Like Lin Carter

Linwood Vrooman Carter (1930-1988) was one of the heroes of my youth. In the decades since his death his reputation has wallowed in the aftermath of the Last Great Sword & Sorcery Boom. (He helped start it, with the Conan books he and L. Sprague de Camp brought back into print, edited, and in many cases wrote), as with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series of works he edited and thus brought back into print. (Not adult fantasy as in sex, but adult fantasy as in great classic works that weren't kid stuff). Books by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and James Branch Cabell; title I never would've read in a million years otherwise, but books which shaped the tastes of many another fantasy enthusiast, myself among them.

Despite the vast number of books written in the sword & sorcery genre in the past 80 years, when I found myself again turning an eye toward them, one of the first people I sought out was Carter. I distinctly remember the day, age 13, when I bought his ENCHANTRESS OF WORLD'S END off the spin rack at the Wal-Mart in Harrison, Ark. The bare-bosomed, bright red beauty on the cover caught my eye, as did the unpronounceable names (Northern YamaYamaLand, Dzimdazoul's Deep – not to mention the Ethical Triumvirs of Chx!), and of course the cast: Ganelon Silvermane, muscle-clad hero with the mind of a child, his master the Illusionist of Nerelon, face always hidden behind veil of purple mist, and the delightful, freckled, long-legged and sexy Xarda, Knightrix of Jemmerdy.

Had I known this work, like much of Carter's oeuvre, was derivative – in this case of Jack Vance's Dying Earth books, among others – I might have gone on to read them then, though my access and resources were limited, but I would not have held the imitation against Carter. Did I not do the same myself, every day, scribbling longhand in notebooks as fast as I could write?

He has been critiqued many times before for hewing too closely to his sources, but he was quite open in so doing and in his admiration of them.

I am glad his books remain worth a read, as I have just found out, and while yes there is but one Robert E. Howard, one Edgar Rice Burroughs, one Clark Ashton Smith, there was but one Lin Carter as well, and I am forever grateful that he lived, and wrote.