Goodafterevenmorn, Readers!
I had an interaction online that took me aback a little bit, and I really need to talk about it. I realise that I’m largely preaching to the choir here, but I am feeling a little like I need a sympathetic ear, so apologies. But I must give some context, so here we go:
1996 was 30 years ago. And it was quite the year for movies. Big-screen extravaganzas dominated the box office, and some movies outside the Top 10 still more than resonate today.
On July 3, Independence Day dropped. Man, that was a huge hit. EVERYBODY I knew saw, or was talking, about it. And smooth crooner Harry Connick Jr. became a lot more popular. With a US gross of $306,156,000 ($644,338,000 in today’s dollars) on a budget of $75 million, it was a smash hit.
Big-screen action continued the trend of domination, with Twister ($241,721,000) second, and The Rock ($134,069,000) fourth.
And at number three saw the birth of a mega-franchise that seven hit follow-ups and which only wrapped up last year: Mission Impossible. That first movie was an homage to the original series, and I really liked it. Then John Woo turned it into special effects cotton candy and I never watched another installment.
Neil R. Jones was born on May 29, 1909 in Fulton, New York, the youngest for four children. He has stated that the first science fiction novel he read, in 1918. Was Will N. Harben’s The Land of the Changing Sun, a lost world novel, which led him to the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
His first published story, “Vengeance of the Ages” was published in his high school yearbook in 1926, with a second story, “The Meteor of Fate” appearing the following year.
“The Death Head Meteor,” was his first professional publication, published in the January 1930 issue of Air Wonder Stories and is believed to contain the first appearance of the word “astronaut.” He had previously sold the story “The Electrical Man,” but it didn’t appear until May of that year in Scientific Detective Monthly, earning him his first cover.
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Arcane Arts and Cold Steel (Pulp Hero Press, December 24, 2025)
In 2019, Pulp Hero Press published Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, which was notably covered by David C. Smith (link to review) and John O’Neill (link) on Black Gate. O’Neill highlighted that Brian Murphy was one of the earliest contributors to Black Gate, from way back in 2012! Six years have passed since the publication of Flame and Crimson; whereas the subtitle and focus of that was a history of Sword & Sorcery (S&S), Pulp Hero Press just followed with a sequel focused on writing it, penned by David C. Smith with a foreword by John O’Neill.
This post covers the complementary book Arcane Arts and Cold Steel: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction (Pulp Hero Press 2025, 298 pages). Greg Mele recently posted a Black Gate article on how this book is The Literary Sorcerer’s Toolkit; read that to learn more about the author.
Mark Frost co-created, co-wrote, and co-produced, Twin Peaks. That includes the 2017 reboot (which I abandoned early on. I’m a huge fan of the original series, but the restart did nothing for me.
He also wrote the two Fantastic Four films with Jessica Alba (which I said here, are better than people give it credit), as well as 42 episodes of Hill Street Blues, which was an extremely influential cop show in the eighties.
Frost wrote the dark James Spader movie, Storyville after Twin Peaks ended. And he also wrote a novel, which came out in 1993.
The List of 7 came about because Frost is a Sherlock Holmes fan. Not only is the novel’s protagonist none other than Arthur Conan Doyle and bits of his life are scattered throughout, but there are Holmes-isms aplenty. Thus, the book is a type of pastiche, though darker than any straight Holmes tale I’ve read.
A struggling young doctor who hasn’t yet created Holmes, Doyle receives a mysterious summons to what turns out to be a séance. Really creepy stuff happens, people die, a mysterious rescuer appears, and Doyle spends the rest of the book on the run from a dark conspiracy. Turns out that his completely fictional novel submission, The Dark Brotherhood, exactly mirrors a real group. And as you can guess by the name, it’s a really evil secret organization. Man, don’t you hate it when that happens!
Peter Schuyler Miller was born on February 21, 1912 in Troy, New York. He earned a Master of Science from Union College and worked as a technical writer for General Electric and the Fisher Scientific Company.
Miller had a lifelong interest in archaeology and was a member of the New York State Archaeological Association.
His first published short story “The Red Plague,” appeared in the July 1930 issue of Wonder Stories. Based on the cover of the magazine’s January issue, it was the first winner of a contest Wonder Stories ran, earning Miller publication and $150. Sam Moskowitz described the story as “more of a well-written plot synopsis for a novel than a short story.”
Miller participated in multiple collaborations. In the early 1930s, he wrote two stories with Walter Dennis and Paul McDemott: “The Red Spot of Jupiter” and “The Duel on the Asteroid.” These two stories were the only fiction Dennis and Dermott published, but Dennis was the co-editor, with Raymond A. Palmer, of The Comet, often cited as the first fanzine.
Good afterevenmorn, Readers!
Everyone has a preference, right? Preferences show up all the time; in food, in friends, in partners, in art, films, and books. I, for example, like my food relatively spicy. My father will take it so damned hot any normal person will hallucinate pink elephants for hours. Not my preference. Sharing an Indian meal with him is sometimes a challenge. I prefer whiskey to most other alcoholic beverages, though I’ll happily have a rum and coke on occasion. I am a huge fan of surrealism in art, and find expressionism a little dull (controversial take alert). And when it comes to my books, I do not like first person perspective narratives, or LitRPGs, and I’m very particular about my humour.
Well, there are two books/series now that have absolutely slapped me in the face and called me a liar. And I’m here to admit I have (joyfully) been proven so very wrong.
I’ve posted before that Fortnite is my kind of shooter. Fast-paced, high action games like Marvel Rivals, and Call of Duty, aren’t fun for me. And I pretty much just die. Fast and often. I’d rather go play a Solo RPG or something. I had been stuck since finishing Grim Dawn (which I wrote about here). I tried a couple games, including getting into Red Dead Redemption II (which I like, it just hasn’t grabbed me like LA Noire did). I false-started a half dozen games.
My son likes Star Wars: Battlefront II, which I briefly tried. Died repeatedly. Quit. But I decided to give it another go. It’s got a single player campaign mode, with multiple missions, as well as a few other solo options. But it was developed as a Multiplayer shooter, reminiscent of Team Fortress 2.
There was a huge controversy upon release in 2017, regarding micro transactions, and Electronic Arts stopped new content and support, in 2020. But the game has had a couple of resurgences and hit an all-time high in concurrent players last Summer. The game is what it is, and there’s a lot of content for the frequent $3.99 sale price.
Thomas Anstey Guthrie was born in London on August 8, 1856. He attended King’s College School and studied at Trinity Hall in Cambridge. Over the course of his career, he used multiple pseudonyms, including Hope Bandoff, William Monarch Jones, and the one most associated with his genre work, F. Anstey. He had meant to publish under his first initial and middle name, but a typo rendered the initial F and he elected to keep it.
Anstey studied law and briefly practiced beginning in 1880, but gave it up to write, with numerous short humorous pieces appearing in Punch. He was also known for writing humorous novels, the most famous of which, Vice Versa, originally published in 1882, was adapted into a play by Anstey in 1883. He similarly adapted several other of his novels and short stories into plays, as well as adapting multiple of Molière’s works into English.
I LOVE the movie, Eddie and the Cruisers. I’ve seen the flick, about a short-lived Jersey bar band, at least a dozen times. And it’s got a terrific soundtrack by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band. I like Cafferty more than I do the much more famous Bruce Springsteen, who he kinda sounds like. To each their own.
Eddie and the Cruisers was the #110 box office film of 1983. With a budget of $5 million, its domestic gross was $4.7. It was Embassy Pictures’ first ever try at distribution, and they pulled it from theaters after only three weeks. Needless to say (though I’m saying it anyways…) there was no international release. Pretty damn poor choice by producer Martin Davidson, who admitted he selected them – knowing they had zero experience – because they offered the most money.
Then it ran on HBO in 1984 and became a cult classic. I was part of that happening. On the Dark Side had charted at #64 when the movie came out. The HBO success prompted a re-release and it hit #7 on the Billboard 100 – and #1 on the mainstream charts. For a movie that nobody saw in the theaters, for the next three+ decades, EVERYBODY knew Eddie and the Cruisers. It was only in the past ten-ish years that I have started running across folks who have never heard of it. Truly a cult classic.
It’s adapted from P.F. Kluge’s novel of the same name. Kluge also wrote Dog Day Afternoon, which became a smash hit movie in 1975 (it made about 25 times its budget at the box office). A few weeks ago, I finally decided to read the book. I finished it in two days – and I worked on both days.
This was my first Kluge. There’s a lot more to this book than there is in the movie. Keep in mind I love that flick, so I’m not disparaging it. But they massively changed the tone of the novel. There’s a very different vibe. And I get why: it wouldn’t become a hit movie, ‘as written.’ Unless I specify otherwise, I’m talking about the novel from here on in.
The book is told from Frank ‘Wordman’ Ridgeway’s point of view: Tom Berenger’s character in the movie. He and the other characters are far more developed, which is essential to the story.
First off: this is much darker than the film. There’s murder. There’s a world-weary cynicism to Frank which reminds me a little of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. As in the movie, time shifts between the present and the past. And that’s thematically at the center of Frank’s narration. That summer on the Jersey shore, was a moment. There was a road of fame and accomplishment and…a life, ahead, for each of them. But a flaming car crash (no bridge involved in the book) detoured all of the Cruisers to back roads and other paths. Not shiny (a little Firefly for you, as I’m immersed in that ongoing story), Hallmark ones, either.