Black Gate

NOTE: Regular readers of this blog will notice I’ve been somewhat absent of late…the reasons for this are several, mainly the fact that I’m working to finish the revisions on a new novel. But tonight I’m so excited that I just had to share this post from my personal blog with my Black Gate pals…

Oh, my brothers and sisters. There comes a time when all the Rock Dreams and Psychedelic Fantasies of your life emerge and blend with a shifting reality paradigm that manifests something truly Great and Special. There is a time when the Cosmos opens its starry mouth and smiles at us, spitting glorious glowing meteors through transistorized frequencies. There comes a time when the Sonic Threshold dilates and gives birth to a continuum of swirling planetoids and the Music of the Spheres resonates like colliding asteroids to thunder in the chambers of the mind with the pulsing of rogue supernovae…and we must open our ears and let the Big Beautiful Universe spill into our consciousness on waves of Almighty Sound…

That time has come around again…the time of a brand-new album release from the gods of psychedelic space-rock, the great and powerful MONSTER MAGNET. In an age of declawed radio, corporate-manufactured psuedo-rock, and the celebration of mediocrity that is mainstream music, the MONSTER rises once more from its crucible of dead stars to light up the cosmos with a new dose of sonic fury.

The new album is called MASTERMIND. The first single is “Gods and Punks”, and the video tells a lurid tale of a down-and-out supervillain roaming the back alleys of Los Angeles trying to recapture his lost glory.

Check it out right here.

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“The city is a different place in the daylight, bright banners waving from towers, houses likewise bright with hangings and with designs painted on walls and roofs. The ships of the river unload by day, and the streets are filled with the babble of tongues, while traders and officials and barbarians and city wives all haggle together. It is a place of sharp fish smells and strange incense and leather and wet canvas and unwashed rivermen who bring outlandish beasts from the villages high in the mountains, near the birthplace of the river.”
        — Darrell Schweitzer, MASK OF THE SORCERER

“I have never seen a city in the world so beautiful as Merimna seemed to me when I first dreamed of it. It was a marvel of spires and figures of bronze, and marble fountains, and trophies of fabulous wars, and broad streets given over wholly to the Beautiful. Right through the centre of the city there went an avenue fifty strides in width, and along each side of it stood likenesses in bronze of the Kings of all the countries that the people of Merimna had ever known. At the end of that avenue was a colossal chariot with three bronze horses driven by the winged figure of Fame…”
        — Lord Dunsany, “The Sword of Welleran”

“Beyond the forest opened a feral country, where many things grew, but out of control and out of a pure determination to be born. Here the huge-thorned roses bloomed spotted as cats on the briars, the apples were salt, and the fruit of the quince tree was like wormwood. Bright birds lived in the thickets but they had no song. The native beasts were savage, but they did not often hunt men, for men did not often come there to oblige them.”
        — Tanith Lee, DEATH’S MASTER

Where in the world are we?

When it comes to Fantasy Fiction the importance of a unique and original Setting cannot be overstated. Every story has to take place SOMEWHERE…and the Where of a story often determines every other aspect, including Who, What, and Why. Instead of relying on a re-creation of the “real world,” fantasy writers must create new worlds, which demands a whole new set of skills.

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The following letter was originally sent to author Jeff VanderMeer on July 21, 2006, after I finished reading his groundbreaking and superbly weird “mosaic novel” CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN. After reading last week’s review of this modern classic (and the two stunning sequels that have appeared since then) I thought it would be interesting to post this message that I was compelled to write after finishing the first book of the Ambergris Trilogy.

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Dear Mr. VanderMeer,
 
Tonight I finished reading CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN. I discovered the book quite by accident…while gliding listlessly through the staid environs of the local Big Chain Store (as I often do, wishing there was something worth buying on the fantasy shelves). I was about to leave with the taste of a familiar disappointment filling my mouth. But…something caught the corner of my eye…or my soul…and I turned toward a random shelf without any particular reason for doing so. 
 
There sat a book that drew my hand toward its spine, and before I realized what I was doing, I was looking at the cover to CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN. Something in the back of my mind rose (squid-like) to the surface. I read the comments on the back of the book, and on the first few pages. There was something here…something I’d been looking for. To my amusement, the book itself validated my thought seconds later as I read the quote from Mr. Moorcock: “It’s what you’ve been looking for.”
 
Now, I should explain that this has happened to me before. I have a sort of mystical relationship with exceptional fantasy books…a radar sense, if you will…the bright works, the ones worth reading, the pillars of gold standing among the rotting piles of formulaic drivel, they sometimes call out to me. I can explain it no better than that. While I can’t stand to read much of “modern” fantasy and sci-fi, I seem to have this uncanny talent for finding the books that are true works of genius. But my theory is this…the books find me.

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Great stories never get old.

Back in 1990 DC Comics launched WORLD WITHOUT END, a “mature readers” miniseries by Jamie Delano and John Higgins. It was everything comics have the potential to achieve…a psychic thought-bomb of words and pictures that blew my mind to bloody smithereens. Twenty years later it still leaves me in awe.

Delano is a gifted British comics writer who at the time was known best for writing DC’s HELLBLAZER title. Artist Higgins had done a lot of work for England’s 2000 A.D. and worked as colorist on Alan Moore’s landmark WATCHMEN series. When Karen Berger and her assistant editor Tom Peyer put Delano and Higgins together, they were mixing gasoline with fire. Delano and Higgins make these pages glow with volatile brilliance. I’m not being hyperbolic…this book was (and is) THAT good.

The first thing that catches the eye is Higgin’s painted artwork. Every single panel is a fully painted masterpiece, in all six issues. Higgins also painted the spectacular covers himself. Handing a virtuoso painter/storyteller like Higgins to a literary madman like Delano was a stroke of genius. Did I mention already that Karen Berger is a genius? She went on to form the legendary VERTIGO imprint a few short years later.

Delano’s concept was epic, a vast story set millions of years in the future, in a world that literally grew over the old one. A world made not of earth, stone, but of LIVING FLESH. Instead of seven seas, the “chemotion” churns with typhoons of acidic corrosion. The global continent is a colossal organism, dead and rotting at its edges, ripe with gangrene swamps and jagged mountains of bone; yet its center pulses with sunken rivers of lifeblood and hordes of bizarre living beings.

At the center of this seething world-organism lies BEDLAM: “That proud city, whose taut towers have bountifully reared and nurtured the parasitic multitudes through scuttling millennia of zealous growth.” Bedlam is a grotesquely beautiful mass of bone-carved towers inhabited by a race of male beings called Gess.

Everything female in Bedlam is suppressed and dominated here…but the moon rises over Bedlam, shining with a dangerous glow of femininity upon this hive of masculinity. The rigid structure of this society is being threatened by mutates, abominations led by a mysterious female presence called Rumour. Here’s the back cover copy from issue #1, “The Moon Also Rises,” which says it all:

“IN A FUTURE WORLD GROWN ENTIRELY OUT OF FLESH, THE ULTIMATE MAN AND THE ULTIMATE WOMAN FIGHT THE FINAL BATTLES OF THE SEX WAR–AND PUSH GHASTLY VIOLENCE AND CORRUPT SEXUALITY TO THEIR RIDICULOUS EXTREMES.”

That “Ultimate Man” comes along in issue #2. He is Brother Bones, a “genetic supercommando” sheathed in an ebony metallic armor. He is masculinity personified, a destroyer of flesh, a brutish warlord of unstoppable means. Brother Bones leads armies of the Gess in a war against the female presence that has been “poisoning” Bedlam. When he speaks, his dialogue is a collection of symbols and strangely altered letters that slows the reader down just enough to evoke the character’s towering inhumanity.

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“He conquered love and death…
now he walks the winds of eternity.”

Some movies have the power to sweep you away into a fantastic world and take you on an adventure that you will never forget. These films are legends in and of themselves, enduring visions that you want to revisit again and again. They are pure magic.

When I was about 11 years old (circa 1980), I entered a small-town theatre in Kentucky and discovered a film that transported me through space and time into the lives of a Cheyenne family struggling to survive in a savage world of stunning beauty.

The film was Kieth Merrill’s WINDWALKER. It starred Trevor Howard, James Remar, and Nick Ramus. Recently I obtained a copy of this masterful film on DVD. Once again I took a journey into the primal world of two centuries ago, and once again I was mesmerized, moved, and thrilled by its powerful story, vivid characters, and sheer cinematic beauty. WINDWALKER is a film of quiet genius that never truly earned the praise it deserved, and if you’ve never seen it, you have a rare pleasure awaiting you.

The film hit theatres the same year as George Lucas’ THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, one year before Steven Spielberg’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and two years before John Milius’ CONAN THE BARBARIAN. It came at the tail-end of 1970s cinema, one of the most creative and vital periods of American filmmaking. Three years earlier, STAR WARS had changed the Hollywood landscape by breaking all the records for box office success and setting a premium on pure movie bombast and the blockbuster “formula.” Perhaps that’s why a more subtly magnificent fantasy like WINDWALKER soared gracefully under the radar. In the 30 years since its release, the movie’s masterpiece status has been largely recognized by experts and critics.

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