Black Gate – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Cimmerian September: Five Things I Think I Think – REH Edition

Monday, September 28, 2026 Bob Byrne Comments 2 comments

Welcome back to the final week of Cimmerian September. I realized that I’ve never done a Ten Things I Think I Think for REH. Now THAT seems remiss of me. So, we’ll ease into that with Five Things.

1) CONAN IS A ROGUE

Of course, “Rogues in the House” (which I wrote about for Hither Came Conan) is a favorite story among fans. It’s right there in the name. I’ve been re-reading some Solomon Kane lately, and I revisited El Borak last month. Those two are honorable men, fighting for justice, or nation, or to vanquish evil. Conan has his barbarian’s sense of honor. But he’s after wine, women, and money. He does ‘noble’ things, but that’s not what’s driving him. He’s a lusty sword swinger out for an adventurous life.

Sometimes I see the makings of a Conan story while I’m reading Kane and El Borak. But the character motivation is usually different. Doesn’t make it better or worse, but it does make the heroes different.

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Weird Times 6: Journalism and Politics

Sunday, September 27, 2026 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

This is the sixth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?

And what might you hear? Cars, of course, and maybe the buzz of conversation around you. But perhaps you’ll hear the voice of a boy on a streetcorner, holding up a newspaper and crying out a still-famous phrase: Extra! Extra! Read all about it! For this is a time when newsboys are still a feature of urban life.

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Thoughts on Designers & Dragons: Origins

Saturday, September 26, 2026 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

*Designers & Dragons: Origins*, by Shannon Appelcline. Covers by Lorne Colt

This is emphatically not a review of Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons: Origins, although if you have an interest in 1970s and 1980s OD&D, D&D, or AD&D, you should grab a copy. Rather it is a collection of personal reflections having read the first two volumes and part of the third for reasons that will be made clear later.

I started playing D&D in 1980 with the Holmes box and the included module In Search of the Unknown. Someone else in the group wound up with a copy of The Keep on the Borderlands. My group quickly moved on to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, leaving the box set behind. When we began, one of us bought the Monster Manual, one bought the Player’s Handbook, and I bought the Dungeon Master’s Guide (I remember riding my bike home from Klipper’s hobby shop with the book in my backpack). Eventually we all filled out our collections. We made our way through our own worlds, but also through Greyhawk, once it was released and I had the folio version of Darlene’s map attached to a wooden board.

Reading these books made me understand why we were never going to see details of Greyhawk the way we eventually did of the Forgotten Realms, and why it would be impossible for Gary Gygax’s “real” Castle Greyhawk to be published.

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Forgotten Authors: Robert Arthur

Friday, September 25, 2026 Steven H Silver Comments 5 comments

Robert Arthur, Jr. was born on November 10, 1909 at Fort Mills on Corregidor in the Phillipines to Robert Jay Arthur and Sarah Abbie (nee Fee). His father was a Lieutenant stationed there at the time. As his father was stationed in various places, Arthur grew up on the movie, in Massachusetts, Michigan, Kansas, and Virginia. He attended Hampton High School in Virginia and was elected Senior Class President.

Although accepted to West Point, Arthur chose not to follow in his father’s footsteps, instead enrolling at the College of William and Mary. After his sophomore year, he transferred to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1930. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an editor for Munsey Publications before returning to work toward his Master of Arts in Journalism, which he received from Michigan in 1932.

After earning his Master’s, Arthur moved to Greenwich Village and began writing stories for the pulp magazines, appearing in Wonder Stories, The Shadow, Argosy Weekly, Unknown Worlds, Black Mask, and more. He also worked for Dell Magazines as an editor and as an associate editor for Photo-Story.

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Dark Muse News: An Introduction to Warhammer Quest – Darkwater

Thursday, September 24, 2026 SELindberg Comments 4 comments

**Games Workshop’s *Warhammer Quest: Darkwater,* *Agents of the Order Azyr* expansion, and *White Dwarf* Issues #520 and #527 (featuring expansion material)**

Delving into the drowning Jade Abbey

This January, Dark Muse News began preparing for Warhammer Quest: Darkwater. Back then, I had just finished clicking the miniatures together (link to post). Finally, this post follows to cover an introductory foray into Warhammer Quests: Darkwater (2025) the latest cooperative dungeon crawler in Games Workshop’s lineup.

The original was released in 1995, and the series had a resurgence with Silver Tower in 2016, then Shadows Over Hammerhal (2017), Blackstone Fortress (2018), Cursed City (2021): and Lost Relics (2022). Unlike the skirmish and mega-battles that Warhammer is known for, these Quest games are cooperative (i.e., all players are on the same team fighting together against the game board). They have pre-generated character cards with stats and asymmetrical/unique actions. Expect lots of dice rolling and flipping of map tiles during exploration phases to reveal the sprawling dungeon.
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Stop the Madness: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 markrigney Comments 12 comments

A Canticle for Leibowitz (Bantam Books reprint edition, August 1976). Cover by Lou Feck

In Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the humor is bleak, and the future worse. First published as a series of three stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1955-57, and then assembled into a fix-up novel in October of 1959, Canticle is a novel pinned like a helpless butterfly to the Cold War terror of nuclear annihilation – a notion that was then fresh and febrile, but has now faded into the background, as Miller predicted, to our sorrow, that it would. The book itself remains a damning, furious read, yet it comes across, mostly, as contained – peaceful, even – as bucolic as any given warhead, up until it’s armed.

Miller’s dismay at humanity’s trajectory spills across every page, but this is no screed. He’s a story-teller, and a thoughtful, crafty one, and so he buries his polemics inside a cautious tri-partite structure, along with enough Latin to make this non-Catholic take to his on-line translator (a trick that Miller, in ‘59, could only dream of).

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 8: The Mourner

Tuesday, September 22, 2026 Van Allen Plexico Comments 0 Comment

*The Mourner* by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1963)

What is it?

Volume 4 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels. It is also the first book in the series in which Parker goes on an entirely new heist, unrelated to the previous books. There is, however, a connection back to Bett Harrow, one of the supporting characters in the third book.

What that means is, we now have proof of concept. Parker doesn’t only work in one big, multi-part revenge story, as with the first three books. He’s also great in a more episodic sort of format where he finds a job, puts together a team and goes on a mission. This will remain the pattern for most of the succeeding novels.

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Feminist Icon in a Chain Mail Bikini: Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues by Gail Simone and Walter Geovanni

Monday, September 21, 2026 Cynthia Ward Comments 5 comments

Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues (Dynamite Entertainment, March 4, 2014). Cover by Jenny Frison

If you saw the cover of Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues which accompanies this review before you started reading, your eyes probably popped with shock or narrowed with anger. The odds of either reaction went up if you were unhappy because it sported a cover controversially featuring a chick in a chain mail bikini.

Your reaction to the cover of Red Sonja: Volume 1: Queen of Plagues might not be entirely negative if you grew up reading the 1970s comics which featured the original chick in a chain mail bikini: the indomitable swords and sorcery character Red Sonja, the She-Devil with a Sword. In those years, I thought her chain mail bikini was the stupidest-looking costume ever to appear in a comic book (where there’s never a shortage of competition). Yet I was also inspired. I wanted to learn fencing, and she was supreme with a sword. And, even when an artist sexed her up, Red Sonja was the strongest female character I encountered with any regularity in my teen years.

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Cimmerian September – Conan and The Lost Valley of Iskander

Monday, September 21, 2026 Bob Byrne Comments 0 Comment

Welcome back to week three of Cimmerian September.

Now, El Borak rivals Conan for my favorite REH character. I REALLY enjoy those stories. And I like Kirby O’Donnell, and I’ve covered those three tales, here at Black Gate. “Sword of the Hills”/”The Lost Valley of Iskander” is one of my favorites. It’s more like a Conan tale than any of the others. In fact, back in the days before Heroic Signatures started pushing out lots of new pastiches (some good, some less so), I started turning “Lost Valley…” into a Conan pastiche.

It was just for fun, whereas I’ve been very serious about my Sherlock Holmes, Solar Pons, and Nero Wolfe fiction. But if I were going to ‘do Conan,’ it would be with this story. Here’s the opening, which mirrors the El Borak original.

Whatever you may think of this fragment, you absolutely should check out El Borak, if you haven’t. Dave Hardy wrote a killer essay about ‘The Swift’ for Discovering Robert E. Howard (he also wrote the Del Rey intro). So, read on!

The skittering of a stone broke the stillness and instantly awoke Conan, sleeping in the shadows of a rocky crag. With almost inhuman quickness, his right arm shot up and grasped a wiry wrist, halting the descent of a curved knife that glinted not in the starless sky. Corded muscles flexed, and the newcomer hissed between his teeth as he struggled in vain to push the knife through to its destination. The attacker’s weight held the Cimmerian on his back, but Conan brought his left hand up in a fist and smashed it into the side of his attacker’s head, barely noticeable pain bursting through his knuckles as they connected with the man’s skull.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, May 1923 (Volume 1, Number 3) Part 2

Sunday, September 20, 2026 Matthew David Surridge Comments 6 comments

The new format Weird Tales adopted for its third issue reached right into the table of contents, which dropped from two pages to one, with of necessity a more cramped layout. One extremely short story isn’t listed, but the magazine makes sure to promote “Nineteen Thrilling Short Stories” along with “Two Complete Novelettes.” That’s actually an increase over the last issue, which had sixteen short stories and two novelettes. So, having discussed the format in a previous post, let’s now look closely at this issue’s fiction.

And it is necessary with this issue to talk about race in Weird Tales, starting with the first story in the magazine (so this post will include quotations and mentions of period racism). “The Moon Terror,” by A.G. Birch, is promoted by a cover blurb; it’s 30,000 words long, 20,000 of which appear in this issue, with the conclusion in the next month’s magazine. It’s a textbook example of Yellow Peril racism, in which sinister East Asians menace white people and the Western world. In this case, the villains are a secret Chinese society who threaten the planet as a whole with increasingly powerful earthquakes.

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