Black Gate

For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for the knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind a only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home.
— from “Meryphillia”

The late Brian McNaughton’s 1997 collection The Throne of Bones is a book I want to on one hand praise and with the other hold it away from myself with a pair of iron tongs. It contains some of the best writing I have ever read in fantasy; by turns tense, dark, grimly funny, and occasionally majestic. And it’s set in a vivid world, parts of which will haunt me for a long time.

On the other hand, many of the characters are by far the most despicable I’ve ever met and their actions among the vilest put to paper. Lots of the characters’ actions are motivated by sexual appetites that are many things — mostly disturbing — but never even remotely erotic. So if this review leaves you curious about McNaughton’s work, be warned: while it’s not sadistic or very frightening, it is strong stuff.

The Throne of Bones contains nine short stories and the novella, “Throne of Bones” itself composed of six intricately intertwined stories. They are set within and on the edges of an old empire slipping into decay: crumbling cities, clashing religious sects, and feuding noble clans. The rich and powerful lead lives of luxury, while the poor live in squalor. Between them a small middle class live in dual fear of the nobility and of falling into poverty.

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The Goddess is dead. The Earth is very old. The fabric of time itself has worn thin. Who knows what might be glimpsed through it? — Opharastes, After Revelation

When the Goddess who reigned over Earth died her body shattered and the pieces, resonating with her power, rained down over the world. Wherever they settled they caused great changes in both the people and the land. In some places new realities were created. In others, images of the Goddess herself appeared and lingered on for years until the dawn of a new age and the emergence of a new deity.

Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder From the End of Time (2012) by Darrell Schweitzer is a collection of eleven stories written over the past thirty five years and set between the earliest days of the Goddess’ death and the last days before the new age.

One of the best things to come out of reviewing books is that I’ve finally read a bunch of the authors that I somehow managed to overlook for years, despite their large catalogs and great reviews. Steve Brust and Andre Norton are two of those recent “discoveries” as is today’s author, Darrell Schweitzer.

It’s hard to fathom that I’d managed to read only two stories (“Those of the Air” in Cthulhu’s Heirs and “The Castle of Kites and Crows” in Swords Against Darkness V) by a man who has written around three hundred of the things, several novels, and numerous works of non-fiction. Nonetheless, for most of my reading life, Schweitzer existed as little more than a name I knew.

Last year, I bought his The White Isle (1980) because it was cheap, there was some mention of a comparison to Lord Dunsany, and the cover looked cool. The novel is a dark (very dark!) take on the Orpheus and Eurydice story. It’s a powerful and bleak story of love and blind obsession set in one of the most despairing worlds I’ve ever encountered. I reviewed it last year at my site and promised myself to keep my eyes open for more of Schweitzer’s work. When Echoes of the Goddess showed up as an e-book, I snagged it at once.

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Poor Lin Carter: perhaps the greatest champion heroic fantasy ever had, an editor with few equals, one of the most knowledgeable fan boys in the world, but a poor writer. I think he would have liked his stories and novels to be remembered more fondly than they are. I believe Kellory the Warlock proves he had the potential to have been a better writer.

Carter remains despised among the Robert E. Howard scholars for his involvement in Sprague de Camp’s Conan projects. As recently as 2008, Morgan Holmes over at the Robert E. Howard United Press Association was giving him grief for his sins against good prose in general and REH in particular.

It’s easy to be rough on Lin Carter’s writing. For my very first review on Swords & Sorcery: A Blog, I really lit into Carter’s debut novel, Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria. It’s derived entirely from Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, which should mean good, pulpy fun, but instead it’s awful with no redeeming qualities. The plot isn’t built well enough to merit being called ramshackle, the characters are thin and bloodless because they’re cut out of cardboard, and the writing is lumpy and turgid. Even the cover stinks.

But his bad prose is overshadowed by the importance of his editing. His most prestigious work was the creation of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (being reviewed one volume at a time here on Black Gate by Keith West). It resurrected many of the forebears of genre fantasy fiction (e.g. James Branch Cabell, H. Rider Hagard) and introduced several new authors to the public (Katherine Kurtz, Joy Chant).

The series also included several books, one being Imaginary Worlds, about the history and evolution of fantasy (though it’s been pointed out by no less a literary figure than Peter Beagle that Carter’s research was poor and his attributions incorrect). Nevertheless, these works represent one of the earliest efforts to provide a critical study of the genre.

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One of the greatest incentives to start blogging about S&S was that it would force me to read more.

For the three or four years before I started my blog, I was reading only a dozen or so books a year, instead of the fifty to sixty I had in the past. If I wanted to have something to write about, I would actually have to read. That part’s worked out very well for me.

Coupled with that was the hope of getting to all those books I’d bought and been meaning to read for years — even decades in a few cases. I would leave used book stores with shopping bags full of books, heady with plans to read them all some day. A lot of the S&S books I hoped to blog about had been in those bags.

One was The Dragon Lord, David Drake’s tale of an Irish adventurer in the days of King Arthur. Last week, after ten or fifteen years, I pulled it from its dusty purgatory on the bookshelf.

According to the ISFDB, Drake has written seventy novels and over a dozen collections of stories. I’ve read my share of his fiction over the years, including the early Hammer’s Slammers stories and the horror collection From the Heart of Darkness. A few years ago, I read and reviewed his stories about Vettius, a legate in the late Roman Empire. While I thoroughly enjoyed those stories, I had no plans to read Drake again any time soon.

For me to choose to read a David Drake book at this point means that something hooked me. It’s nothing against Drake, but at my age I’ve got stacks of other books picked out. I need a reason to pick out a back row book. In the case of The Dragon Lord, the impetus was a picture from Wayne Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy.

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History provides us with real life characters who seem to have stepped straight out of myth. The scale of their ambition or power seems beyond the reach of mortals. Their successes verge on the unbelievable. And yet they are real. Bohemond de Hauteville, Prince of Taranto, was one of those people.

Alfred Duggan’s posthumous 1965 novel Count Bohemond presents the first half of Bohemond’s life: his rise to fame and victory set against the background of the faltering Byzantine Empire and culminating with the near miraculous victories of the First Crusade. This dense and captivating book covers the thirty-five years from Bohemond’s childhood to the height of his success and the capture of the fortified city of Antioch in 1098.

Though she disliked all Normans, and Bohemond in particular, Anna Komene, daughter of Emperor Alexius described him quite laudably in the Alexiad, a history of the Byzantine Empire in the 11th and 12th centuries:

Now he was such as, to put it briefly, had never before been seen in the land of the Romans (that is, Greeks), be he either of the barbarians or of the Greeks (for he was a marvel for the eyes to behold, and his reputation was terrifying). Let me describe the barbarian’s appearance more particularly — he was so tall in stature that he overtopped the tallest by nearly one cubit, narrow in the waist and loins, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and powerful arms. And in the whole build of the body he was neither too slender nor overweighted with flesh, but perfectly proportioned and, one might say, built in conformity with the canon of Polycleitus… His skin all over his body was very white, and in his face the white was tempered with red. His hair was yellowish, but did not hang down to his waist like that of the other barbarians; for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair, but had it cut short to the ears. Whether his beard was reddish, or any other color I cannot say, for the razor had passed over it very closely and left a surface smoother than chalk…

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