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Author: Fletcher Vredenburgh

Horror and Swords & Sorcery

Horror and Swords & Sorcery

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by Virgil Finlay

The air has turned crisp, the sun is dipping below the horizon earlier each evening, and the supermarket candy section seems to have grown exponentially. Halloween is just around the corner and, like many of you, my mind has turned to haunts and frights.

Horror is one of the primary elements dividing swords & sorcery from epic fantasy. To quote the Horror Writers Association’s site, horror fiction is that which “elicits an emotional reaction that includes some aspect of fear or dread.” Horror has been intrinsic to the genre from its earliest days. Robert E. Howard’s heroes, Kull, Conan, Bran, and Solomon Kane all face off against supernatural horror. In general, the worlds of S&S are dark and dangerous. The protagonists, mostly loners, find themselves pitted against an inimical universe populated with carnivorous forces of darkness that sate their hunger on humanity.

Epic fantasy is concerned with things like the fate of the world, the battle between Light and Darkness, or big dynastic squabbles. There may be moments of terror in epic fantasy (e.g. LotR’s Watcher in the Water; A Song of Ice and Fire’s wights), but it’s rarely the main event. Not in every story, but in most of their S&S work, writers like Clark Ashton Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, and C. L. Moore, created tales that were horror first and foremost. They spun nightmares and darkness into thread and, along with strands of adventure and mystery, wove from it something moodier than Prof. Tolkien or his successors.

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September Short Story Roundup

September Short Story Roundup

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oie_413844fthp1nteWe’re still in the midst of a swords & sorcery renaissance that started around a decade ago, and now there’s a broader pulp one going on as well. Between the first issue of Skelos and the third of Cirsova, September saw a hurricane of short stories involving swords, wizards, warriors, pirates, and space pirates. Good times ahead! At least that’s my hope.

I first became aware of Skelos‘ then-impending existence with a flurry of internet activity announcing a Kickstarter this past spring. On the pledge page the magazine was heralded as “A horror and fantasy journal featuring short fiction, essays, poetry, reviews, and art by both seasoned pros and talented newcomers!” I found those words impossible to resist, and kicked in enough money to get myself billed in its pages as a benefactor, and be rewarded with a print copy and a four-issue e-book subscription.

When the print copy of Skelos 1 appeared in my mailbox last month, I was very impressed with its look and feel. The cover is decorated with a nicely creepy Gustav Doré illustration and the inside is filled with great black and white art.

Skelos is edited by a triumvirate comprising Mark Finn, Chris Gruber, and Jeffrey Shanks, but the introduction was written by Finn alone. The co-editors are looking to have an an ongoing conversation with their readers and are “willing to learn as we go, if you’re willing to talk to us about the thoughts behind the words and pictures. We want everyone to walk away feeling like they learned something new, or at least, were heard and understood.” It may be “too ambitious to try and bridge the gap between Classic Weird Fiction and New Weird Fiction,” but where they intersect is what the trio find interesting, and what Skelos intends to investigate. While there are very specific references to authors and artists from the early days of weird fiction (Lovecraft, Moore, Bok, and Finlay), there aren’t any contemporary ones. If that sounds a little vague, I believe it’s deliberate, as Skelos is still a work in progress.

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Return to Enoch: The King of Nightspore’s Crown by Raphael Ordoñez

Return to Enoch: The King of Nightspore’s Crown by Raphael Ordoñez

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“Answers, he wants! Do you really think you can just go out and find the whole story somewhere, complete and cross-referenced, without any gaps or inconsistencies? I’m sorry to disillusion you, my boy, but that’s not the sort of world we live in. It’s a messy place. There are no infallible interpreters walking among the living, no emissaries sent from the blessed realm to dole out bits of lore that move history along and need never be questioned.”

Astyges speaking to Keftu, from The King of Nightspore’s Crown

oie_201222utyzw9lrIt’s a rare fantasy story that really surprises me. Partly, I have read a lot, but often there appears to be a collective dearth of imagination. I know readers — myself included — enjoy and find easy comfort in stories filled with familiar characters and plots, but once upon a time, before fantasy became a mass-market commodity in the 1970s, there seemed to be limitless inspiration in the stories that were told. Contemporary fantasy keeps getting stuck in homage and mimicry. When faux-European settings weren’t the norm, a reader could be transported to worlds as strikingly weird as Hodgson’s sunless Night Land, Burroughs’ dying Barsoom, or the haunted corridors of Peake’s Castle Gormenghast. When there’s no limit to the colors on a fantasy writer’s palette, why do I feel like I keep seeing the same dozen or so?

It was exactly three years ago that I first encountered Raphael Ordoñez’s writing. “The Goblin King’s Concubine” (BCS #129), a captivity narrative set in a deadly, spider- and fungus-infested jungle swamp on the dying world of Antellus, was like nothing else I was reading at the time. I sought out Ordoñez’s blog, Cosmic Antipodes, and spent hours reading his older posts on things ranging from planetary adventure to painting to autism. His love for storytelling unconstrained by the modern expectations of genre fantasy were refreshing. By the end I was ensnared, and watched for new stories with anticipation. Each is strange and unique and couched within a complex cosmogony which is a mix of Old Testament, William Blake, and pulp nuttiness, among other things. It can be read about at length here.

Last year, Ordoñez self-published the novel Dragonfly (read my review here). It brings together several characters introduced previously in short stories. Unlike the discrete events of those tales, the novel is a full-blown epic. Keftu, sole survivor of a desert tribe, thinks he is the only person alive in the entire world, until he espies a glowing city floating above the ocean. He is prevented from reaching the sky-city Narva when he falls into the clutches of the Cheriopt. The Cheripot is the the “semi-divine headless social machine” that controls everything in the crumbling, ocean-encircling megacity, Enoch. He becomes by turns, a famous gladiator, a liberator, and finally, the last hope to thwart the half-goblin Zilla’s nefarious plans to throw Enoch into total chaos.

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The Religion by Tim Willocks

The Religion by Tim Willocks

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oie_1331351pip0pgfdOne of sword & sorcery’s primary inspirations is historical adventure, like that of writers Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. That noble genre continues today in Tim Willocks’ insanely violent The Religion: Vol 1 of the Tannhauser Trilogy (2006), for one, set in the cauldron of the Great Siege of Malta. Into it, Willocks introduces the rogue Mattias Tannhauser, son of a Saxon blacksmith from Transylvania. At the age of 12, Mattias’ mother and sister are killed by Ottoman militia and he is taken captive. Every five years, the Turks would take Christian boys, convert them, and raise them up to be ferocious, elite soldiers, known as the Janissaries.

For thirteen years, Tannhauser served as a true and loyal soldier of the sultan, but eventually he leaves and returns to the West. A dozen of so years later, Tannhauser and a pair of friends, English soldier Bors of Carlisle and Sabato Svi, Jewish trader, have established themselves as important arms and opium dealers in Messina, Sicily.

Now, as the Ottoman tide is ready to break on Malta, Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, lures Tannhauser to Malta. The great powers, Spain and France, embroiled in their own internal problems, have lent only token aid to the island’s defense. De Valette wants every resource he can lay his hands on, and what better than Tannhauser’s intimate knowledge of the Turks he once served with?

In the 16th century, the centuries long struggle between Christendom and the Moslem world seemed to be coming to a conclusion. In the century following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Christian West seemed headed for ultimate defeat. Under the brilliant Suleiman the Magnificent, the Knights of St. John, one of the last remaining military orders, had been driven out of the Eastern Mediterranean when Rhodes was captured in 1522. The knights, also known by their nickname the Religion, had been established in in 1099 to escort pilgrims to the Holy Land.

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Cugel in Golarion: Song of the Serpent by Hugh Matthews

Cugel in Golarion: Song of the Serpent by Hugh Matthews

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The woman looked over at Krunzle, who was making sure no morsel of the meal escaped his needs. “What of you, errand-runner? Do you know much of where we are heading? Or anything, for that matter?”

The thief returned her a level gaze. “I know who I am and what I can do,” he said. “I find that usually suffices.” He arranged a piece of fish on a crumb of bread and popped both into his mouth.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       from Song of the Serpent

I have read only a tiny fraction of Matthew Hughes’ prodigious output. What I have read, his Jack Vance-inspired stories of the Purloiner Raffalon, I like very much (see my reviews here, here, here, and here). Those four stories, plus five others, will be collected and released next year. I can safely write that that will be an immediate purchase for me.

A few weeks ago, when he posted about a novel he wrote back in 2012 for Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales, I was intrigued.

Back in 2008 at World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, I was in the bar when Erik Mona, publisher of Paizo Books, told me he was a great Jack Vance fan and that he liked my work. He asked me if I had a book for him. As it turned out, I was looking for a publisher for Template, my stand-alone Archonate space opera that had been brought out as limited collector’s editions by PS Publishing.

I sent it to him and he brought it out as part of the series, Planet Stories, which (like Template) were decidedly retro science fiction.

Later, Erik told me that he also published novels set in the Pathfinder RPG universe’s world of Golarion, and asked me if I would be interested in doing one. He also said he would really like it if I would do a Cugel the Clever story. I love the Cugel stories and said I’d be delighted.

So we made a deal and I wrote a novel originally called Out of the Blue that was retitled Song of the Serpent before publication in 2012. It told the tale of a thief named Krunzle the Quick who, like Cugel, is fast on his feet – he has to be because, again like Cugel, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.

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Summer Short Story Roundup: Part Two

Summer Short Story Roundup: Part Two

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oie_2363515CoUyIq9mIt turns out there were lots and lots of really good horror and science fiction short stories published this summer. Not as much swords & sorcery as I would have liked, but a bunch of good stories nonetheless. This week I’m going to give you a glance at roundup regular, Grimdark Magazine. I’m also going to take a look at two mags new to the roundup: the recently revived Weirdbook (read about the relaunch here), and newcomer Red Sun Magazine. You can read last week’s reviews of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Swords and Sorcery Magazine, and Cirsova at this link.

Right from the gitgo, I knew Grimdark Magazine #8 was going to be a “disappointment.” In the foreword, Editor Adrian Collins wrote “Issue #8 has a focus on sci-fi fiction, something I feel has been a bit lacking from GdM over the first two years (can you believe it’s been two years?).” It’s not like I hate sci-fi (though I find myself reading practically none at all anymore), it’s just that after last week’s thunderous blast of adrenaline-pumping, sword-swinging, monster-killing action, that’s what I was hoping for more of.

In its short life, Collins has made GdM a consistently exciting publication, and GdM #8‘s two sci-fi stories are not bad at all. The first, “Viva Longevicus” by Brandon Daubs, is about genetically engineered pets going very, very wrong. It’s told by a colonel in the U.S.S. AeroCorps sent to investigate an infestation on a colonial world. A monster hunt on an alien world just isn’t the most original plot, but if it’s told with verve and intensity (and just the right amount of crazy), it can be a blast to happily while away a few minutes on. This is one of those.

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Summer Short Story Roundup: Part One

Summer Short Story Roundup: Part One

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oie_167123Q3w3KW4VA veritable torrent of potent heroic fantasy short stories came out of the interwebs this summer. So many, in fact, for the first time ever I have to break the roundup into two parts. This week I’ll tell you about Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Lackington’s, and Cirsova. All together there are twelve stories and three poems (including the nearly six thousand-word first part of an epic poem). Next week I’ll review Grimdark Magazine, Weirdbook, and newcomer, Red Sun.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #54 kicks off with “The Witch House” by Jamie Lackey. A young girl named Elinor, escaping a forced and bound-to-be loveless marriage, forces herself on the Witch of the Wood as her new apprentice. That’s it. It’s well written, and I’d actually be interested in reading about the characters if the plot went somewhere, but as it stands it’s too insubstantial to merit much notice.

“Time Is a Lady’s Unerring Blade,” by Stephen S. Power, is a nasty piece of work. Erynd, an ex-prisoner, has plotted her revenge against one of the captors who tortured and crippled her.

Anyone can buy a soul. Even the meanest villages have dealers now, and prices remain low, thanks to the border wars five years ago. To buy a specific soul, though, Erynd has to deal with a ghost taker.

Having found her target, Erynd intends to see his soul stripped from him bit by painful bit. Not a lot happens, but there are sufficient hints of a larger context for the story that intrigued me and left me wondering about the story’s larger world and history.

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Return to Balumnia: The Stone Giant by James P. Blaylock

Return to Balumnia: The Stone Giant by James P. Blaylock

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oie_930526XfElVMASix years after the second Balumnia novel, The Disappearing Dwarf, James P. Blaylock returned one last time to the series with The Stone Giant (1989). Instead of continuing the adventures of Master Cheeser Jonathan Bing, Blaylock went back in time to reveal the origins of the scandalous, piratical-looking Theophile Escargot. If the previous volumes seem inspired by the adventures of Mole and Rat in The Wind in the Willows, this one reads Toad all the way. Click on the links to read my reviews of the other two Balumnia novels: The Elfin Ship and The Disappearing Dwarf.

A secretive, conniving fellow in the two previous volumes, here we get a peek into just how Escargot’s mind operates, and what leads him to leave Twombly Town and take to the roads and high seas in search of adventure. Stirred by a fit of pique, he steals a pie his wife had locked in the cupboard. This act of domestic thievery eventually leads him into the path of certain dangerous characters, which convinces him to get out of town as fast as he can.

Escargot’s wife regularly locks all the pies she bakes in the cupboard, doling them out to him only a slice at a time in order to get him to lead a respectable life, get a job, and attend church. Unwilling to do any of those things, one night, while his wife and their daughter, Annie, are sleeping, Escargot breaks the locks and steals a peach pie. He then wanders off for a stroll in the moonlight.

When he comes home the next morning (after a run-in with a pack of goblins), he finds the door to his house padlocked and a note inviting him to never return home. Most of the town, long familiar with Escargot’s approach to life and responsibility, is on his wife’s side, leaving him with nowhere to turn. Living on river squid and apples, he relocates to a drafty, abandoned windmill for shelter while he tries to figure out what to do next.

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Dark Sleeper by Jeffrey E. Barlough

Dark Sleeper by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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oie_265522dm2u1J6BLooking back, I’m not exactly sure what made me buy Dark Sleeper (1998), the first volume of Jeffrey E. Barlough’s ongoing Western Lights series. Perhaps it was the Tim Powers blurb on the front cover, but I’m thinking it was more the Jeff Barson painting of woolly mammoths pulling a coach across a dark, snow swept landscape. Whatever the reason, I’m happy I did, as the book turned out to be a very strange and often funny trip through a weird and fantastical post-apocalyptic alternate reality.

In Barlough’s fictional world the Ice Age never fully ended. With much of its north covered by ice and snow, medieval England sent its ships out around the world looking for new lands. Some of the most successful colonies were planted on the west coast of what we call North America. Devoid of people, it is instead home to great megafauna such as smilodons, megatheres, teratorns, and mammoths.

With great cities such as Salthead and Foghampton (located around the same places as Seattle and San Francisco), the western colonies flourished and expanded. Then, in 1839, terror struck from the heavens: “Then it was a great disaster struck, a tragedy of near-incomprehensible proportions.” Something crashed into the Earth, and almost instantly, all life except in the western colonies, was obliterated and the Ice Age intensified. Now, one hundred and fifty years later, the “the sole place on earth where lights still shine at night is in the west.” For a fuller, more detailed explanation, just go here.

Dark Sleeper opens on a very foggy night; a deliberate homage, I suspect, to the equally mist-shrouded opening of Bleak House.

Fog, everywhere.

Fog adrift in the night air above the river, creeping in through the estuary where the river glides to the sea. Fog curling and puffing about the headlands and high places, the lofty crags and wild soaring pinnacles, fog smothering the old university town in cold gray smoke. Fog squeezing itself into the steep narrow streets and byways, the roads and cart-tracks, into the gutters and shadowy back-alleys. Fog groping at the ancient timbered walls of the houses — the wondrous, secret, familiar old houses — and at their darkened doors and windows, filling the chinks and cracks in the masonry and coaxing the tightly fastened surfaces to open, open.

Not your common ordinary fog but a genuine Salthead fog, drippy and louring…

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To Ride a Rathorn by P. C. Hodgell

To Ride a Rathorn by P. C. Hodgell

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oie_11225225XvvToolIt’s taken me two years, but I’ve finally returned to P. C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath Cycle, with the fourth book, To Ride a Rathorn. A rathorn is a deadly, carnivorous, horned, horse-like animal covered in heavy plates of ivory. For the Kencyrath, to ride a rathorn is to try to do something insane, and our heroine Jame is about to do just that. She has accepted her destiny as a crucial element of the final showdown with Perimal Darkling, a world-devouring force of chaos and evil. At the same time, several forces are arrayed against her: the enemies of her family, the weight of millennia of traditions, and terrible agents of utter darkness. Instead of just crawling away and hiding, Jame has decided to take on all comers, and figuratively — and perhaps literally — ride a rathorn.

Four books in, to say the series is complicated is like saying the sun is hot or the oceans wet. Hodgell has created one of the densest and tremendously detailed fantasy settings, and to even look at this book without having read its predecessors just might make a reader’s brain explode. But as I often ask: have you taken my advice and read the other books yet? Because you should have by now. To get a better understanding of what’s gone on before, you can read my reviews of the first three — God Stalk, Dark of the Moon, and Seeker’s Mask — right here at Black Gate. If you don’t have time, though, here’s a relatively brief synopsis:

Thirty thousand years ago, Perimal Darkling began to devour the series of parallel universes called the Chain of Creation. To fight against it, the Three-Faced God forged three separate races into one; feline-like Arrin-Ken to serve as judges, the heavily muscled Kendar to serve as soldiers and craftsmen, and the fine-featured humanoid Highborn to rule them. For 27,000 years, the Kencyrath fought a losing battle, one universe after another falling to the darkness. Three thousand years ago, the High Lord Gerridon, fearful of death, betrayed his people to Perimal Darkling in exchange for immortality. Fleeing yet again, the Kencyrath landed on the world of Rathilien. Since then, they haven’t heard from their god, and Perimal Darkling has seemed satisfied to lurk at the edges of their new home. Monotheists trapped on an alien world with many gods, the Kencyrath have had to struggle to find their own place and survive on Rathilien.

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