Browsed by
Author: Fletcher Vredenburgh

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Two – The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Two – The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

Comments 17 comments

‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way.’

Frodo from The Council of Elrond from The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

I never saw it, but once upon a time, some hippies and ancillary types were given to emblazoning FRODO LIVES on bedroom walls and the backs of denim jackets. The Lord of the Rings, the literary creation of a conservative Oxford University professor of English Literature and Language, had somehow hit a chord with the nascent counterculture after its publication in 1954/1955. I imagine, in fact, I know, there are all sorts of popular and academic works purporting to explain why this was. I’ve never been interested in them, preferring the books themselves to present the professor’s ideas.

I have my own, if not particularly original, theories. First, it’s a great adventure story featuring a small, ineffectual-seeming hero who stands up to his world’s greatest force of evil. Second, it came to be seen as a sort of rallying cry against the dark powers of the modern world. I don’t know Prof. Tolkien’s politics, though I suspect he was a small-c conservative. It’s clear he viewed the loss of tradition and the dark Satanic mills blotting out the green and pleasant England of his youth were a terrible assault on civilization (this anti-modernist attitude is an important element of Michael Moorcock’s disdain for him). Third, the counterculture’s love for anything pastoral and ante-technological was probably the most important reason for its breakout into the mainstream’s consciousness.

I never discussed it with him, but I feel confident when writing that my father liked The Lord of the Rings primarily for the first reason and somewhat for the second (he was very much a BIG-C conservative) a bit. He most definitely did not like it for the last. When I first read it all that mattered to me was that first reason. With every revisit over the ensuing decades, I’ve discovered something new. That has carried on with my most recent reread.
…

Read More Read More

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One

Comments 54 comments

I’ve been trying to remember when I first read The Lord of the Rings and it must’ve been when I was ten or so, meaning in 1976 or early 1977. I say this because my dad bought me The Silmarillion for Christmas and it was published in September 1977. That means I read The Hobbit when I was nine or so. Coming up on 59 next year, it means I’ve been reading Prof. Tolkien’s work for nearly fifty years.

Rankin & Bass Bilbo and Gollum

I assume I came across The Hobbit on my dad’s shelf next to his living room chair. It’s where he kept the various books he was reading at any given time. His habit was to stay downstairs till midnight or one, reading and listening to WQXR, the New York Times’ old classical station. I’d definitely read it before November 1977 when the Rankin & Bass The Hobbit premiered. As a side note, my dad tried to get our first color TV before it aired, but he wasn’t able to.

I didn’t read LotR right away, but when I did, I found myself in competition with my dad to finish them. With only the single set of books in the house, we read them in tandem. I remember rushing home from church to see if I could grab The Fellowship of the Ring before my dad had finished reading The New York Times that morning. Even though some days I got the book before him, he read faster and more often and finished several days before me. Hey, I was only ten.

…

Read More Read More

A Game of Kings and Things:TSR’s Divine Right

A Game of Kings and Things:TSR’s Divine Right

Comments 5 comments

original box cover - Ghost Riders of Khos descending on forces of MuetarIn the summer of 1981, my friend Alex R. had moved into a big, new house not far from the Staten Island neighborhood where most of my other friends lived. As his parents were rarely home and summer was beginning, we spent all our days and most nights there, watching movies and playing D&D. Things changed significantly when George K. showed up one day with a copy of TSR’s fantasy wargame, Divine Right.

Designed by brothers Glenn and Kenneth Rahman, it’s from the time just before D&D had fully exploded into some approaching mass popularity and TSR was still connected to its board and wargaming roots. The Rahmans developed Divine Right from an earlier, unpublished game of theirs called Your Excellency. There were earlier fantasy wargames, White Bear and Red Moon and Elric from Chaosium and Swords and Sorcery from SPI, but for whatever reason, this is the one we encountered first and immediately fell in love with.

That first summer, we became obsessed with Divine Right. We’d start playing by noon and usually finish around dinner time. Half the days we ended up back at Alex’s for a second round. By the end of the summer, we started doing what I’ve since discovered lots of players did and made up our own house rules and new counters. We never actually put any of them into play for all sorts of reasons (primarily laziness, though), but we kept playing the game regularly for about a decade. Only when careers and families put an end to our gaming days did Divine Right get boxed up and tucked away in a cabinet in my basement.

These days, about once a year, I manage to get in a game with my friend Jim D. and his sons up in Connecticut. I am happy to report that a recent game reassured me, that even while I got murderized by Jim’s oldest son, I still play with the same take-no-prisoner approach and went down swinging. This is a game where victory is determined solely by one’s martial success, with points being awarded for sacking cities and capturing or killing monarchs.

…

Read More Read More

Enter the Prince of Darkness:Dracula by Bram Stoker

Enter the Prince of Darkness:Dracula by Bram Stoker

Comments 7 comments

“Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!”

Dracula to Jonathan Harker

I’ve heard tell my generation had nightmares about nuclear war, worried someone was going to press the big red button and trigger the annihilation of the world.

Not me. I was scared of vampires.

Heck, some nights I didn’t even have nightmares because I was too scared to sleep, convinced they were hiding behind the mottled sycamore trees that lined my block. I’m not sure where it came from. Probably from watching The Night Stalker TV movie (1972, dir. John Llewellyn Moxley) in which vampire Janos Skorzeny ravages sleazy seventies Las Vegas. It introduced the world to monster-hunter, Carl Kolchak and I saw it when I was seven or eight (thanks, Mom!). That fear disappeared quickly enough, but I was left with a taste for vampire stories.

I must have read some vampire stories in the various horror anthologies I bought regularly, though none spring to mind. I saw tons of movies and read stacks of horror comics featuring the bloodsucking fiends. It was two novels, though, that cemented my taste for the Central European monsters: Salem’s Lot (1975, Stephen King) and They Thirst (1981, Robert McCammon). They’re both big books, packed with characters and inventive takes on the idea of a master vampire trying to take over somewhere, a misbegotten Maine town in the first book and all of Los Angeles in the second.

…

Read More Read More

Southern Horror: Pigeons from Hell by Robert E Howard

Southern Horror: Pigeons from Hell by Robert E Howard

Comments 3 comments

“Voodoo!” he muttered. “I’d forgotten about that—I never could think of black magic in connection with the South. To me witchcraft was always associated with old crooked streets in waterfront towns, overhung by gabled roofs that were old when they were hanging witches in Salem; dark musty alleys where black cats and other things might steal at night. Witchcraft always meant the old towns of New England, to me—but all this is more terrible than any New England legend—these somber pines, old deserted houses, lost plantations, mysterious black people, old tales of madness and horror—God, what frightful, ancient terrors there are on this continent fools call ‘young’!”

This exclamation by Griswell, the protagonist of Robert E Howard’s racially fueled horror tale set among the piney woods of the Louisiana-Arkansas border region, always struck me as a bit of a “take that!” to the old gentleman of Providence, HP Lovecraft. I think Howard was on to something as “Pigeons from Hell,” published posthumously in 1938 is a riveting tale of well-earned revenge, voodoo, and the walking dead. Two young travelers from New England decide to spend the night in an abandoned plantation mansion. The balustrade is covered by a flock of pigeons. Its oak door sags on broken hinges, and the interior is dark and dusty. After they fall asleep, they are ensnared by events set in motion many years ago.

“Pigeons” opens with Griswell (no first name), waking up from a troubled sleep on the floor of a dilapidated plantation mansion. He had dreamt of a “vague, shadowy chamber” wherein “three silent shapes hung suspended in a row, and their stillness and their outlines woke chill horror in his soul.” In the corner crouched a “Presence of fear and lunacy.” As his eyes open, he spies something crouching at the top of a flight of stairs.

…

Read More Read More

The Scottish Play: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

The Scottish Play: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Comments 17 comments

All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!

Macbeth, ACT I, SCENE III

Looking back on my second time around here at Black Gate, I saw that each for the first two summers I’d undertaken the enjoyable, if somewhat pointless task, of writing about a Shakespeare play (for what can I possibly bring to such an effort). First, there was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then The Tempest. I skipped last summer because a sense of inadequacy for the task had me struggling to finish my piece about T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (pt. 1, pt. 2).

Having already missed last month’s installment of my column due to an ongoing run-in with a  5 mm kidney stone, I decided getting back to Shakespeare might be just the thing to get me moving. But what to read? I’ve only read fourteen of his thirty-nine plays, so I don’t know which of them have fantastical elements. And, then, it smacked me on the head, Macbeth. Not only is it my favorite of the plays I’ve read, but it’s suffused with magic, all black and malign. Then, there are all the movie versions, including a recent one starring Denzel Washington and France McDormand. So, let me begin. …

Read More Read More

Back Among the Kencyrath: “The Gates of Tagmeth” by PC Hodgell

Back Among the Kencyrath: “The Gates of Tagmeth” by PC Hodgell

Comments 12 comments

One of the earliest reviews I wrote for Blackgate was of P.C. Hodgell’s 1982 sword & sorcery classic, God Stalk. It’s the story of Jame, a relative innocent at large in the very Lankhmarian city Tai-Tastigon on the world of Rathilien. She’s a High Born, the ruling race of a tripartite race called the Kencyrath (the other two are the Kendar — warriors and artisans — and the Arrin-ken — the lion-like judges of the three races).  She’s also a Shanir, a subset of her people gifted — or cursed as most have come to believe — with strange abilities. In her case, it’s retractable claws on her fingers.

The Kencyrath have been consecrated by their Three-Faced God to battle Perimal Darkness, a great evil that’s been devouring one world after another in a chain of parallel worlds for millennia. Every time, they’ve failed at their duty, having to retreat to one world or another. As of God Stalk, they’ve been on Rathilien for three thousand years. They escaped there following the Fall, a moment when the High Lord betrayed the Kencyrath and two-thirds were killed, their souls offered up to Perimal Darkness.

After a year in Tai-Tastigon Jame set off into the West in search of her twin brother Torisen and the Kencyrath homeland — well, at least the homeland they took possession of three thousand years ago. Over the following six books, Jame, forever a square peg in a round hole, emerges as a wild card in the political games between the various Kencyrath houses. Unwilling to adopt the cloistered and regulated life of most High Born women, Jame eventually finds herself a candidate in the Kencyrath military officer’s school. Along the way, she learns she is more than likely the prophesied incarnation of the destructive aspect of the Three-Faced God. She also discovers more of the supernatural underpinnings of Rathilien, how the Kencyrath’s arrival disrupted it, and that the final reckoning with Perimal Darkness is near.

…

Read More Read More

The Red Magician by Lisa Goldstein

The Red Magician by Lisa Goldstein

Comments 2 comments

In the town where Kicsi grew up there was a rabbi who could work miracles. It was a small town, and borders — Hungarian, Czech, Russian — ebbed and flowed around it like tides. Once, Kicsi remembered, she went too far from home and came to a place where the people spoke a different language. In the distance, on the horizon, stood the mountains, fat and placid as cows.

The Red Magician (1982) by Lisa Goldstein is a young adult, magical realist novel about a Jewish girl, during, and after the Holocaust. The author, herself the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, won a National Book Award for paperback original. The book, while short by today’s dreadful standards, is a compelling meditation on willful blindness in the face of great horror, misplaced vengeance, and the harrowing effects of survivor’s guilt.

Kicsi, which means little in Hungarian, lives with her family in a small town completely isolated from the evil smothering much of Europe. We meet her as she listens in on a conversation between her father, Imre, and the town’s rabbi. The rabbi threatens anyone who doesn’t remove their child from the town school with a curse. The school, in defiance of traditional belief, teaches Hebrew. The language, the rabbi insists:

will be spoken only when the Messiah comes and we return to the Holy Land. That is to say, when God wills it. Until then Hebrew is to be spoken only in prayer.

As punishment, the rabbi curses anyone connected to the school to be tormented by forty demons for forty days and nights. Imre insists that he isn’t scared of any curse and that his daughters will continue to attend the school Fortunately, a stranger arrives in the town, first appearing in the synagogue on Friday night.

…

Read More Read More

Immaculate Scoundrels by John R. Fultz

Immaculate Scoundrels by John R. Fultz

Comments 0 Comment

Every job needed a crew.

from Immaculate Scoundrels

I keep revisiting the earliest days of writing about contemporary swords & sorcery lately. Last month I read and reviewed Rogue Blade’s fantastic new anthology, Neither Beg Nor Yield. Now, I’ve just finished John R. Fultz’s return to bash and thrash of the genre with Immaculate Scoundrels (2024).

Fultz was one of the first authors I encountered back in 2011/2012 when I started blogging about S&S. He was one of the writers I discovered through the electronic pages of Black Gate, along with James Enge, Howard Andrew Jones, and Ted Rypel in particular.

Between his collection The Revelations of Zang (2013 – I read it after winning a free copy in a giveaway here at Blackgate!) and The Books of the Shaper series, Fultz staked out a claim to being one of the best new voices in S&S.  These works were heavily inspired by Clark Ashton Smith’ and Lord Dunsany’s strange and often psychedelic fiction ladled over with more blood and thunder. If you think I’m maligning him, rest assured I am not. Anybody daring enough to take Smith as an inspiration and make it more violent, well, that’s not a bad thing.

Instead of more S&S, Fultz followed up with a Native American-themed sword & planet duology. I reviewed both The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015) and Son of Tall Eagle (2017) here. I might have been a little disappointed he hadn’t written more stories like his previous ones, but these are good books and Fultz isn’t one to sit around spinning the same tales again and again.

In the intervening years, he’s written enough short fiction to fill two collections. The first, World Beyond Worlds (2021) brings together his fantasy stories from the period. The second, Darker Than Weird (2023) contains fourteen straight-up horror stories. Now, with Immaculate Scoundrels, it’s back to swords & sorcery, but not like in any of his previous books.

…

Read More Read More

Neither Beg Nor Yield, edited by Jason M. Waltz

Neither Beg Nor Yield, edited by Jason M. Waltz

Comments 8 comments

Sword & Sorcery is a clenched fist thrust into the sky, a raised middle finger in the face of the Unknown, an epithet spat into the dirt through a rictus of bared teeth. S&S demands an attitude of not merely surviving but of dominating living, all else—everything else—be damned. The heroes of S&S continue living deeply until there are no more breaths to take. The only -ism S&S promotes is LIVE!-ism. Absolutely a rebellion against meaninglessness, it also fully embraces an I-don’t-give-a-damn-if-it-is-all-meaningless creed. “I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.” Robert E. Howard, through Conan, again saying it best in “Queen of the Black Coast.”

Jason M. Waltz from “It’s Not Gentle,” the foreword to Neither Beg Nor Yield

I reviewed Return of the Sword: An Anthology of Heroic Adventure over at Stuff I Like: A Blog (called Swords & Sorcery: A Blog back then) twelve years ago. I had discovered the book by way of a mention here at Black Gate, which I had discovered while on the hunt for contemporary sword & sorcery. This book, more than anything else, convinced me there was a wealth of new and, more importantly, good S&S writing being done.

I had created my site to focus on ensuring the classics of S&S weren’t forgotten in the face of the seemingly irresistible tide of grimdark fiction that was new back then. Waltz’s book forced me to direct an increasing portion of my efforts toward the new stories. Howard Andrew Jones, James Enge, and John Fultz were all authors I first encountered in that period. There are also dozens of writers I found reviewing hundreds of new stories right here on the pages of Black Gate.

…

Read More Read More