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Author: Nick Ozment

Oz loves Godzilla, middle-school G.I. Joe (not old-school, not new-school; middle-school, spooky stories, trees, and really too many other things to list here.
Vintage and New Treasures: Oz’s Bag of Holding: John Sandford’s Prey Series; Stephen King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy

Vintage and New Treasures: Oz’s Bag of Holding: John Sandford’s Prey Series; Stephen King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy

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rules of prey king-audio-small

I have here a bag of holding. I am now going to pull some things out of it…

This past fall, since I do a lot of commuting to work and had become too depressed to follow my daily routine of news radio, I began listening to books on CD.

I’ve now digested 5 books in John Sandford’s popular Prey series (following detective Lucas Davenport), read by Richard Ferrone, and the first two of Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy (following retired detective Bill Hodges and his friends Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney), read by Will Patton.

Sandford, a retired Minneapolis journalist, began writing the Prey books back in the ‘80s. The series now has 27 installments, with an additional 13 spin-off books! Looks like I’ll be spending time with Lucas Davenport in my minivan for a long time to come.

Having brought these out of the bag, I’d like to discuss two specific areas of appeal of a series like Prey. First is place. Second is chronological progression (following characters as they age). Then I have an afterthought about genre “classification.” I’ll also  address “audio” vs. “printed page.” And I’ll have a few things to say about King’s foray into hardboiled detective fiction along the way.

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Modular: Oz’s Bag of Holding: Breaking Out Basic D&D for the Next Generation

Modular: Oz’s Bag of Holding: Breaking Out Basic D&D for the Next Generation

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D&D_Basic_Rules_1981I have here a bag of holding. I am going to pull some things out of it now…

Well, I’ve gone and done it. I’ve broken open the floodgates and moved my children on from Dungeon! The Board Game to the real deal.

This is fortuitous timing, as M Harold Page has launched a new series of posts (READ HERE) on Black Gate about introducing kids to tabletop role playing (which I have been reading with newly-relevant interest).

My daughter and son will soon be turning 8 and 6 respectively. Bringing the son in on things might have been a bit premature — he’s more apt to grab the miniatures and fight with them like action figures than to sit and patiently listen to a Dungeon Master try to paint a scenario in his mind’s eye.

To introduce these acolytes, I dug out my 1981 D&D Basic set (1981 edition). After decades of d20, revisiting this chestnut three decades later is kinda hilarious. D20 is so elegantly simple in concept: Hit a monster with AC 18? Roll a d20, add modifiers, and get an 18 or better. But with old-school D&D, no! You look at the monster’s AC and then have to consult a chart (I confess I’d forgotten what THAC0 even stood for). Cross-reference monster’s AC with character’s level to see what you have to roll. Basic? No, not really. Pretty damn cumbersome!

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Oz’s Bag of Holding: Stephen King Edition featuring A Brief Guide, Fear Itself (with an essay by Fritz Leiber!), and Danse Macabre

Oz’s Bag of Holding: Stephen King Edition featuring A Brief Guide, Fear Itself (with an essay by Fritz Leiber!), and Danse Macabre

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danse-macabre-originalI have here a bag of holding. I am going to pull some things out of it now…

First up is:

A Brief Guide to Stephen King: Contemporary Master of Suspense and Horror by Paul Simpson (2014)

Funny how I came across this one. I was perusing the bookshelves in The Dollar Tree — all those overstocks and remaindered copies now relegated to the fate of being sold for a dollar.

Every once in a while I make a “find,” but on this occasion, it was looking like there was good reason none of these books had sold for their original double-digit cover prices. The thought actually went through my head, “Too bad you never come across a book by Stephen King in here.” A moment later, King’s name caught my eye! Turns out it was a book not by but about King. Still, it was too much of a sign to ignore, so I bought it.

A Brief Guide is as advertised: a brief, workmanlike bibliography of all King’s work through 2014, with synopses of each. Opens with a short bio. Not a must for shelves of diehard King fans, but I actually found I had plowed through the whole book in two sittings — so it succeeded in its professed purpose as a succinct overview of the author’s career. Every King book, film and TV adaptation, and comic book is covered (indeed, even tie-ins like video games are included). While the synopses are quite short, the author livens it up a bit by including tidbits here and there relating a work to events in King’s own life at the time or King’s opinion or the reaction of critics.

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Oz’s Bag of Holding: An Introduction

Oz’s Bag of Holding: An Introduction

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bag-of-holdingI have here a bag of holding. I am going to pull some things out of it now…

This is my introduction to an occasional series of blog posts under the heading “Oz’s Bag of Holding,” in which I will briefly comment on random books and films I draw from my bag’s interdimensional space (it is, for detail wonks, a Type I bag; it can hold up to 250 pounds and 30 cubic feet of material but will never weigh more than 15 pounds).

Call it a bit of housecleaning: Books I’ve recently read, films I’ve watched, about which I might have a thought or two but not enough to string them together into a full-fledged review. I’ll share my impressions in the casual way one might in the course of a broad-ranging conversation with friends predicated by the question “So what have you been reading/watching lately?”

With the help of my Bag of Holding, I think this approach will be liberating for me. I absorb so much media, so many stories; and every time I close a book or eject a Blu-ray, I think, “Well, I should write up a review of that for Black Gate.”

But they pile up, falling out of focus as they recede in the rear view mirror, superseded by the latest book or film or comic or game I’m visiting. This way I can blurt out a pithy opinion or two about a work before it fades completely into the background in my cluttered head. No more guilt about having not reviewed something — instead I’ll grind out grist for multiple threads of comment and conversation.

What piques your interest as it emerges from the bag? You can skim, pick and choose — That’s just fine, because we are all afflicted with a touch of ADD out here in this world of cyber.

My first installment of “Oz’s Bag of Holding” will follow this introduction in a second post. Two posts today, to keep the Intro separate. Incidentally, I happened to notice that this marks my 116th post to Black Gate. Man, I wish I hadn’t let post 100 slip by without some sort of hoopla!

Well, here’s to 116 more. And, hopefully, they’ll come more frequently now that I have this trusty Bag of Holding by my side.

An Experiment in Gor: What Are John Norman’s Books About, Really? The Hidden Secret of the Counter-Earth Saga is an Over-Abundance of…

An Experiment in Gor: What Are John Norman’s Books About, Really? The Hidden Secret of the Counter-Earth Saga is an Over-Abundance of…

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tarnsman_of_gor_vallejo_coverI’m positive that I read the first book in the [Counter-Earth Saga/Tarl Cabot Saga/Chronicles of Counter-Earth/Gorean Cycle/Gorean Saga/take your pick], sometime back in junior high. That would be Tarnsman of Gor, first published in 1966 by Ballantine, which recounts how Earth professor Tarl Cabot is mysteriously transported to our solar system’s hidden tenth planet orbiting the sun in a position exactly counter to Earth’s. There he encounters a Barsoomian-inspired sword-and-planet environment. He quickly adapts, becoming a Gorean swordsman and assimilating into the culture of his adopted planet.

If I read any of the sequels, I can’t recall — although I remember enjoying the first book, at least the first part of it recounting Talbot’s strange experiences (involving a mysterious package, I believe) and subsequent relocation to another world. As The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), a huge tome sitting here on my bookshelf, notes, the first Gor books were passable Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches, and that’s the impression I came away with too. As a boy, I was a huge fan of ERB’s John Carter of Mars stories and was looking for something else along those lines.

The Encyclopedia goes on to condemn later volumes in the series (which now total 34), noting that they “degenerate into extremely sexist, sadomasochistic pornography involving the ritual humiliation of women, and as a result have caused widespread offence.” DAW, which published the series from volumes 7 through 25, apparently dropped Norman for this reason (Naughty Norman!), and the subsequent 9 volumes are only available in e-book editions.

As a collector and purveyor of vintage sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, I happen to have several Gor books sitting in a pile here beside my office desk. I will be posting them to eBay soon. I have, on occasion, picked one up and opened it at random to read a paragraph or two.

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Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. Also Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, and a Tangent on Modernism

Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. Also Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, and a Tangent on Modernism

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Astro_City_A_Visitors_Guide_Vol_1_1This is mostly an homage to Kurt Busiek and Astro City, and to one story in particular, but buckle in because we’re going to cover a lot of rambling ground getting there in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way, taking in stuff by random association — sort of like the streets of Astro City itself…

Kurt Busiek’s Astro City is one of my favorite superhero comics. It consistently delivers brilliant, funny, poignant, human stories in a colorful, wonderfully idiosyncratic comic-book world. It is Busiek’s magnum opus — like Bendis’s Powers, it towers above his other work for the big publishers using their branded characters. He brings the sensibilities he honed in the groundbreaking Marvel miniseries Marvels to his own universe and, beneath all the ZAP! BANG! POW!, weaves tales you will never forget.

What Marvels did that was so fresh in 1994 is it “lowered the camera” from the god-like supers knocking each other through buildings and focused in on the ordinary humans down here at street level, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, watching it happen. What impact did the existence of such powers have on their day-to-day lives?

In Astro City the camera is completely unfettered, ranging to the heights to reveal very human dramas among people who have the power to level cities and then zooming down to the alleys to follow a day in the life of a two-bit petty thief who is really a pretty ordinary, decent human being (with the exception that his skin is covered with a steel alloy). Through the course of following Carl Donewicz, aka Steeljack — in the classic story “The Tarnished Angel” — we come to sympathize with and like him, and even find ourselves rooting for him: just once, could one of his heists go off without a hitch and not be foiled by The Jack-in-the-Box? And in Astro City, where narratives don’t always follow the comic-book formula, he does have his day. A fun, feel-good story, that one.

And then there are Astro City stories that rip your heart out. “The Nearness of You,” I contend, is among the great American short stories of the late twentieth century, and I think it could be anthologized as such. (Wizard Magazine does rank it number 6 on their list of “100 Greatest Single Issue Comic Books Since You Were Born.”) Publishers these days would have no problem formatting a four-color comic story into their prose collections. But should they? It is, after all, a comic book.

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Interview With James Stoddard: To Tour Evenmere, The Night Land, and Other Exotic Locales

Interview With James Stoddard: To Tour Evenmere, The Night Land, and Other Exotic Locales

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james stoddardJames Stoddard made his first short-story sale to Amazing Stories in 1985, under the pen name James Turpin. His first novel, The High House, published by Warner New Aspect in 1998, made an impressive debut. Publishers Weekly enthused, “In his first novel, Stoddard tells a thrilling story that features not only a unique and powerful family but a magnificent edifice filled with mysterious doors and passageways that link kingdoms and unite the universe.”

Cynthia Ward concurred:

“The modern armies of Tolkien clones have vanquished the diversity of high fantasy, with few exceptions: Little, Big by John Crowley, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, Clouds End by Sean Stewart — and now The High House, an astonishingly imaginative, individual, and assured first novel by James Stoddard.”

What would prove to be the first book in the Evenmere Chronicles was followed up two years later by The False House. And then the House went dark.

Loyal fans waited years — 15 years, to be exact. But on December 9, 2015, Stoddard fulfilled their wishes without help of a major publisher, releasing Book 3: Evenmere (Ransom House, available through Amazon for $12.89) and completing the story of Carter Anderson and the strange house that goes on forever, the house with a dragon in its attic and monsters in its basement and countless wonders in between.

In the decade-and-a-half between visits to the High House, Stoddard also took readers on a tour of William Hope Hodgson’s strange future nightmare vision in The Night Land, A Story Retold (2010). He also returned to shorter forms, producing highly-regarded short stories and novellas for magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction.

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More Mogollon Memories: Jack Kirby’s Monsters and the Mogollon Monster Live on the Rim

More Mogollon Memories: Jack Kirby’s Monsters and the Mogollon Monster Live on the Rim

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kirby monsterMy Grandad claimed he saw the Mogollon Monster once, when he drove up the Rim to visit the land they’d bought to build the cabin. He had pulled to the side of the road, let his dog out to run, and the dog got wind of something that upset him.

I don’t know more of the story than that — Grandad’s no longer around to fill the gaps and, anyway, maybe he’d embellish just to get a rise out of us.

When we were young, he and Nan drove us up to visit the land, and my Grandad was a very quiet man while Nan chattered away keeping us entertained.

But at one point, when we’d gotten way up as near the sky as you can get in Arizona, where the snowdrifts were two feet deep, Grandad pulled to the side of the road, without a word, got out, came around back of the truck, opened the tailgate, grabbed each of us, methodically, and tossed us into the snow.

We laughed fit to burst, then Nan dusted the snow off our pants, loaded us back up, and we were on our way.

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Sci-ficionados: Our Insatiable Hunger for Stories, and What it Means for the Human Race

Sci-ficionados: Our Insatiable Hunger for Stories, and What it Means for the Human Race

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third eyeFans of science fiction and fantasy tend to have an innate curiosity, one that is not sated simply by day-to-day life and the world as it is. They cannot content themselves with the rote script written for them.

There are people all around who are content simply to go to school, get a job, have a family, raise kids to follow the same formula, retire. And some of these people are well informed — they read the news to see what’s going on. They have hobbies. They like to be entertained — they watch sitcoms to have a laugh at the status quo. They may even watch some of those movies with zombies and giant robots and superheroes to let a little bit of their imagination off the leash: what if this predictable old world were shaken up by something like that?

But the real sci-ficionados, they aren’t content with an occasional, half-winking excursion into the game of what-if before settling back down onto the landing pad of Reality. Because they recognize, deep down, that this is not the only possible world, and that this so-called reality is also utterly strange. They want to know about nano-tech and parasites and the Inquisition and how and why homo sapiens developed a larger prefrontal cortex and what the hell are dreams anyway? And a hundred, a thousand, a million other things. Why is this society the way it is, and is it foreordained that we must follow this script?

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Small-Scale Epic Childhood: Memories of Playing at the Cabin on the Mogollon Rim

Small-Scale Epic Childhood: Memories of Playing at the Cabin on the Mogollon Rim

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Mogollon-960x371Some of my fondest memories are days spent at my Nan and Grandad’s cabin in Heber, Arizona, up on the Mogollon Rim nestled in the largest ponderosa pine forest on the continent. Surrounded by that fantastic landscape, it was easy to let one’s imagination run as free as the Mogollon Monster…

The Woodpile

The “woodpile” behind my Nan and Grandad’s cabin was mostly dirt, left over from when part of the lot was first cleared to make way for the trailer (the cabin was a large trailer home, actually, with a deck built on). The wood came from the pine trees that had been cut down, their trunks buried under the heaping dirt mound, giving the woodpile its foundation and shape.

It wasn’t so big, really, but to my cousins and me it was our own private mountain fortress. How many times did we flop down on it for cover as Injuns shot arrows at us, and then return fire over its crest with our wood-knot guns? Or, other times, the wood-knots were machine guns and we were out there fighting Nazis.

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