Browsed by
Category: Reviews

Vampires, Shoggoths, and the Monsters of the Suburbs: The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVI, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Vampires, Shoggoths, and the Monsters of the Suburbs: The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVI, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Comments 4 comments


The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVI (DAW Books, October 1988). Cover by J.K. Potter

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: XVI was the sixteenth in the lineup and the eighth volume edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (d. 1994). This book was copyrighted and printed in 1988 and represents the best short horror in the field for 1987. After twelve straight covers with Michael Whelan’s art, we now have a new cover artist, American illustrator J. K. Potter (b. 1956).

If this were published today, I’d think we’d suspect the cover was AI-generated. It looks almost photographic; but rather than being scary, it seems a little silly to me. But it’s still a horrific scene and was also on the cover the convention booklet in 1986 for the 12th World Fantasy Convention (see below). I’m sure in the mid-1980s it was quite original.

…

Read More Read More

A Science Fiction Film Noir: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

A Science Fiction Film Noir: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Comments 2 comments


Lord of Light (Avon Books, January 1969). Cover by Ronald Walotsky

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god.

Roger Zelazny was considered to be one of the major New Wave writers of the 1960s. But where many of those writers found inspiration in naturalism, modernism, or even surrealism, much of Zelazny’s work was inspired by mythology, somewhat in the style of poets such as Yeats or Eliot.

Early novels in this mode included The Dream Master (expanded from the novella “He Who Shapes”), This Immortal (originally titled And Call Me Conrad, which I think is a much better choice), and Lord of Light, which I’ve long considered his single greatest literary achievement.

…

Read More Read More

In the Summertime: The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare

In the Summertime: The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare

Comments 4 comments

This news, which is called true, is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion.

Second Gentleman, Act V Scene ii

Over the past several years, I’ve written about three of Shakespeare’s plays; The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. All are steeped in the magical and wondrous. Part of the whole point of this column is to force myself to read some things I haven’t already. With plenty of the his plays left unread, I turned once more to his works. While no more of his works are as overtly supernatural, I knew there were elements to be found in at least one or two more. Perhaps, the most obvious is Hamlet, wherein a dead king’s ghost spurs his mopey son on to action. As I’ve read and seen it performed numerous times, I dug around a bit and came upon The Winter’s Tale. While in the end it’s doesn’t near the three first mentioned plays in mystical content, there is some, and, more importantly, it’s a fascinating and strange play.

First published in the First Folio in 1623, the exact date of the play’s composition remains uncertain. Nonetheless, most authorities consider it one of his latter works, probably written around 1610. It’s catalogued among his problem plays, a term first used by critic F.S. Boas to describe All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. These are plays that veer from the tragic to the comic, not sticking to a single major tone as do his comedies and tragedies. Later, The Winter’s Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice were added to the list by others. Boas felt the plays allowed the exploration of complex themes in unique ways. That The Winter’s Tale veers from the terrible and tragic to the comic and pastoral before achieving reconciliation can definitely be seen in this light.

The title implies we are going to hear a story, one that might be told around the hearth on a cold winter’s night. Filled with implausibilities, it will draw us into a tale both tragic and comic, but in the end, provide us with a happy ending (more, or less) that we want to hear.

…

Read More Read More

A Gender Fluid Future on the Moon: John Varley’s Steel Beach

A Gender Fluid Future on the Moon: John Varley’s Steel Beach

Comments 5 comments


Steel Beach (Ace Books, August 1993). Cover by Todd Cameron Hamilton

My hot take for 2026: books are ephemeral.

Old news, perhaps, but did any spec-fic writer know this better than John Varley?  In 1992’s Steel Beach, he positively revels in his own unimportance while offering blistering, adroit editorials on everything from indolence to anatomy. But who remembers this book today? And how many remember the name John Varley?

I first encountered Varley’s Nebula-winning short, “The Persistence of Vision,” on a 1988 cross-country camping trip. The Terry Carr-edited Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #1 was and is chock-full of good material, but it was Varley’s story that haunted me, in part because it tacitly asks readers whether they would put out their own eyes for love – and I must confess that I didn’t like the question, much less my reflexive, fully sighted answer.

…

Read More Read More

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 4: The Hunter

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 4: The Hunter

Comments 3 comments


Parker’s first appearance: The Hunter (Pocket Books, 1962)

What is it?

Parker begins!

He’s angry. He’s determined. He’s out for blood. And he’s got big hands!

He’s walking across the George Washington Bridge into New York, scaring motorists who glimpse him out the window as they drive by.

Later he will decide he wants the money that was taken from him. At the moment, however, he just wants revenge.

…

Read More Read More

Severed Arms and the Angel of Death: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Severed Arms and the Angel of Death: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Comments 7 comments


The Year’s Best Horror Stories XV (DAW Books, October 1987). Cover by Michael Whelan

It’s been awhile, but given a nudge from John O’Neill I’m back with the ongoing perusal of DAW’s Year’s Best Horror series.

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV was the fifteenth in the lineup and the seventh volume edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (d. 1994). This book was copyrighted and printed in 1987 and represents the best short horror in the field for 1986. Michael Whelan’s art appears for the twelfth time as a cover for the series. Whelan’s art here depicts a gruesome scene of a severed, but wrapped, human arm in the meat drawer of a refrigerator. A sign of horror trends in the mid- to late 1980s?

…

Read More Read More

From Woking to Ansby: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

From Woking to Ansby: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

Comments 3 comments


The High Crusade (Berkley Books, October 1983). Cover by Tom Kidd

The High Crusade is one of the earlier novels in Poul Anderson’s long career: serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in the summer of 1960 (just as it was changing its title to Analog), published in book form that same year, and nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961, though it lost to A Canticle for Leibowitz. It remained popular and is still in print. In a lot of ways the story is a romp, but it also has themes that Anderson returned to more seriously in later books.

The High Crusade starts out as an alien invasion story, of a form going back to H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds: A spacecraft lands in England, and mysterious beings emerge from it, wielding advanced weapons and killing people to show their power. We have the same contrast between human and alien military technologies. But in this story, Anderson plays a trick he loved to do, especially early in his career (in stories such as “Journeys End” and “The Man Who Came Early”): he reverses the expected outcome from earlier stories.

…

Read More Read More

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

Comments 16 comments
Payback (Paramount Pictures, February 5, 1999

In the first two installments of this series, we looked at the master criminal known as Parker, and at his creator, Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E. Westlake used when writing spare and stark but hard-hitting prose.

Now let’s look at some of the many attempts to bring Parker to a wider audience.

The novels are extremely popular with a segment of the population, and so studios and directors have come calling from time to time, with attempts to adapt the character and his stories to film.

But they never quite get Parker right.

…

Read More Read More

A New Beginning: Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

A New Beginning: Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

Comments 4 comments

It all started because I wanted to draw a kid bowling with corpses

Mike Mignola

Maybe it was John Fultz who mentioned them on Facebook. He’s always mentioning things that lead me to acquiring more books. Maybe it came to me in a dream. I’m not really sure. Either way, I discovered that Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, the World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator ®, had drawn and written (colored exquisitely by Dave Stewart) two collections of dark fantasy stories; Bowling With Corpses (2025), and Uri Tupka and the Gods (2026). I bought them almost at once.

Bowling With Corpses is a collection of stories, some fairytale-inspired and some detailing the setting’s complex cosmogony, opens with the following dedication:

For all those who transported me to lands unknown way back when — Howard, Smith, Lovecraft, Dunsany, Leiber, Moorcock, Lee and Kirby. And so many others. I realized now this book was inevitable.

From the first page all those influences are apparent, though I think Dunsany’s dreamlike stories such as those I reviewed from At the Edge of the World. Some follow fairytale logic, and others, dream logic. Mignola’s dark and shadow-filled art brings them to life, or death, as the case might be. In the later years of Hellboy, Mignola’s art took on a very stylized look. His work here has stepped back from that towards the more detailed style of his older work. In the afterword, Mignola describes himself as semi-retired until he realized:

“The hell with this. I love drawing comics so I’ll just keep drawing comics.”

 

…

Read More Read More

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 2: Parker the Barbarian!

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 2: Parker the Barbarian!

Comments 12 comments
Richard Stark’s Parker by Darwyn Cooke

Last time we discussed the character of Parker, Donald E. Westlake’s master thief and heist planner.

This time, we’ll look at why we’re talking about Parker at all, here in the hallowed spaces of this fine magazine.

Parker might seem like an odd fit. Allow me, however, to draw some parallels that will help to illustrate how and why the master criminal Parker fits in with classic sword and sorcery characters like Conan the Barbarian. For these two gentlemen have far more in common than one might guess.

…

Read More Read More