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Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars

Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars

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skulls-in-the-starsBack in October, I featured the Robert E. Howard collection Solomon Kane: The Hills of the Dead, the second of two Bantam paperbacks published in the late 70s. The first was Skulls in the Stars, released in 1978.

The Solomon Kane tales are some of my best-loved Howard fiction. “The Skull in the Stars” was one of the first Robert E. Howard tales I ever read, and for many years it was my favorite of his short stories.

He was the Puritan, who flinched not from the gates of Hell. Tall, gaunt, hollowed-eyed in his opposition to the forces of darkness, he defied the devil himself. Kane, cold, steely-nerved duelist, snatched his long rapier from its sheath and thrust it into the heart of evil. Ghoulish laughter follows him. Foul horror haunts his way. Kane, a man whose blood quickens with adventure. Kane, a man more dangerous than a famished wolf.

These slender paperbacks both have fold-out cover art (click on the image at right for the full version). The art is uncredited for this volume, but some sources claim it is Jeff Jones, and the style seems right to me. While the contents aren’t pure Howard (both books contain fragments completed by Ramsey Campbell), it’s a pleasure to see both the poetry and Cambell’s introductions. Here’s the complete TOC:

“The World of Solomon Kane” by J. Ramsey Campbell
“Skulls in the Stars”
“The Right Hand of Doom”
“Red Shadows”
“Rattle of Bones”
“The Castle of the Devil” (Completed by Ramsey Campbell)
“The Moon of Skulls”
“The One Black Stain” (poem)
“Blades of the Brotherhood”

Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars was published in paperback by Bantam Books in December, 1978. It is 178 pages, with a cover price of $1.95.

New Treasures: American Gothic Tales

New Treasures: American Gothic Tales

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american-gothic-talesI’ve had my eye on this collection for a while, but it was Matthew David Surridge’s fascinating four-part series on Joyce Carol Oates’s Gothic Quintet that finally nudged me over the edge. I ordered it last week, and have been enjoying it ever since.

To be honest, while I was prepared for a survey of American horror, my brief perusal of the contents before I laid down my money led me to believe it was slanted towards modern writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, and Stephen King. And while they’re all represented, the book doesn’t neglect the classics either.

They’re all here: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Herman Melville’s “The Tartarus of Maids,” Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Ambrose Bierce’s “That Damned Thing,” and many more.

How does it manage that? By being nicely huge: the trade paperback is 546 pages.

Something else I appreciate is the nice selection from modern authors who aren’t usually represented in horror anthologies: Paul Bowles’s “Allal,” Robert Coover’s “In Bed One Night,” E. L. Doctorow’s “The Waterworks,” Don DeLillo’s “Human Moments in World War III,” Raymond Carver’s “Little Things,” Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Temple,” and Steven Millhauser’s classic “In the Penny Arcade.”

And if that’s not enough for you, there’s also a varied selection from horror writers more associated with the genre, including Thomas Ligotti, Nancy Etchemendy, Bruce McAllister, Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg, Katherine Dunn, John Crowley, and Lisa Tuttle.

It’s not perfect — where are Fritz Leiber, Frank Belknap Long, Hugh Cave, or Dan Simmons? — but it’s damn close. American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, was published in trade paperback by Plume in December, 1996. It is $21 for 546 pages; there is no digital edition.

Saturday Round Up: Talk to the Hand

Saturday Round Up: Talk to the Hand

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bluetooth-handset-glovesLast Saturday, I posted the Black Gate Christmas Gift List, crammed with gift-giving ideas for the discerning fantasy fan. For the last week, I’ve been receiving additional suggestions from readers.

By far my favorite comes from Todd Ruthman, who pointed me to the Bluetooth Handset Gloves offered by ThinkGeek, shown at left. For only $69.99 you can talk to your loved ones just by extending your thumb and pinky. Described as “warm and comfortable capacitive-touch gloves with a Bluetooth headset built in,” they seem ideal for impressing friends and passers-by. I love this gift idea more than I can say. If the right-handed glove comes with a wall-climbing feature, two of my childhood dreams will have totally come true.

George Dew at Dark City Games points out that DCG products make great stocking stuffers, and that unscientific studies (conducted by watching episodes of The Big Bang Theory) show that the amount of time that families spend playing board games is inversely proportional to the chances of children getting involved in drugs, alcohol “and anything else bad.” I’m a believer. You can find Dark City’s splendid catalog here.

Finally, a few readers complained because the number two item on the list, Howard Andrew Jones’s The Bones of the Old Ones, was not yet on sale. Our tireless team of minions have reported that it is now, in fact, on shelves all across the country. In other BotOO news, the esteemed Mr. Jones tells us that a major studio has optioned The Chronicles of Sword and Sand (AKA the Dabir and Asim novels), and the hunt is currently on for a screenwriter.

Last-Minute Kickstarter Alert: The Game of Books

Last-Minute Kickstarter Alert: The Game of Books

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azj-and-rothfussToday, with finally a free minute between holiday commitments and work deadlines, I took a minute to hop over to Patrick Rothfuss’s blog, because I had not yet donated to the Worldbuilders charity and, as you can see on the right, Rothfuss and I (and my wife) are all pretty tight … and contemplative.

Anyway, so I go to donate to Rothfuss’s charity, only to be sucked in to a completely different fundraiser! Like Rothfuss, I need another project (or even another way to spend money!) like I need a hole in the head, but this one seems extremely worthwhile, so here it is …

The Game of Books

There’s a Kickstarter project for The Game of Books, created by the Book Genome Project. As of this moment, it’s about $20,000 shy of its goal with only 56 hours left to go.

Why do I care? Because I have two sons, and I suspect that this project will help them find books that they love as they get older.

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Pro Se Presents – the Eclectic Voice of New Pulp

Pro Se Presents – the Eclectic Voice of New Pulp

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psp15Pro Se Press is one of several New Pulp specialty small presses that have sprung up over the past few years to give voice to new writers. While Pro Se publishes pulp novels like their peers, they have largely set themselves apart in the field by also publishing a monthly print magazine, Pro Se Presents. Issue 15 was just published and presents five diverse examples of New Pulp from five very talented writers. The periodical is also published as an e-book each month and is affordably priced in keeping with traditional pulp titles of decades past – something most small presses are unable to otherwise do thanks to the economics of print on demand or small print runs.

208894_334665373281612_920378856_n1Sean Ali’s striking cover art and moody interior illustrations do an excellent job of capturing the unique feel of each tale. The magazine’s stellar editorial staff [Tommy Hancock, Lee Houston, Jr., Frank Schildiner, Barry Reese, and Don Thomas] has done an excellent job of capturing the mix of genres that were found under the pulp banner in the heyday of the 1920s and 1930s. From a modern standpoint, there is a bias to favor the superhero prototypes (such as Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, etc.) or the more famous offshoots of the pulps, the hardboiled detective and the sword & sorcery barbarian hero. This tends to shortchange the many boxing stories, westerns, romances, and humorous tales that were also staples of the pulp world. Happily, Pro Se Presents restores this balance.

Issue 15 gets underway with David White’s “Doc Panic.” While the title may recall Doc Savage, White has crafted more than the simple knock-off it might suggest in this clever blend of pulp archetypes and Japanese martial arts. Phineas Montgomery is the man behind the mask. An heir to a fortune, Montgomery grew up scarred as a witness to his Satanist parents’ murderous rituals involving the human sacrifice of abducted children and derelicts. A Japanese servant stole young Montgomery away from his parents’ house of madness and smuggled him to Japan, where the boy was trained in the arts of Ninjitsu and Akido. Along the way, the young man also picked up an addiction to certain illegal powders that help him manage his pain. White has achieved an interesting balance between the masked vigilantes of the Golden Age and the Men’s Adventures paperback originals of the 1970s with their mix of martial arts and gritty urban crime. There is little doubt that this is only the first of many appearances for the character. White has stumbled upon a winning formula here that makes Doc Panic a character worthy of commanding the cover slot for his debut.

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Goth Chick News: Troll – Rise of Harry Potter

Goth Chick News: Troll – Rise of Harry Potter

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image0021Honestly, I don’t know where to start with this news.

Back in 1986, Sonny Bono, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Noah Hathaway (who played the lead character “Boxy” in the original TV version of Battlestar Galactica and “Atreyu” in The NeverEnding Story), got together in a cinematic train wreck called Troll. This film, such that it is, is not to be confused with Troll 2, called “the most beloved-best worst movie of all time,” which was released in 1990 and had zilch to do with the plot of its namesake.

In Troll, the sister of Hathaway’s character (played by ex Charlie’s Angel Shelly Hack) is possessed by an evil wizard in the form of a troll.

Hathaway’s character in Troll was “Harry Potter Jr.”

Since JK Rowling first published her famous book series about a boy wizard in 1997, I rather doubt she stole the character from John Carl Buechler’s wretched film (or even saw it for that matter). But the people behind Troll do have a claim on the name Harry Potter; and we are in the middle of a remake craze…

Can you guess where this is going…?

If you guessed a remake of Troll called Troll: Rise of Harry Potter, you’d win. You’d also likely win a lawsuit from Rowling and Warner Brothers Studio.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: More on Writing, and Teaching, on Your Feet

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: More on Writing, and Teaching, on Your Feet

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To my surprise, I got a bunch of emails asking for more details about the weird teaching gig I described in last week’s post. How exactly did it work, teaching creative writing while kicking a soccer ball around my student’s basement?

This student was so blocked about writing in most areas of his life that, unless I was right there with him, he rarely wrote anything on his project–as much as he loved it. The first thing we did when we got to our work space was run around kicking the ball back and forth for five minutes or so while he talked his way through what he wanted the next scene to do. As soon as he reached the point where he had some proto-sentences in mind and a paragraph’s worth of ideas about how he wanted to string them together, I’d say, “Okay, now write that down, quick!” We were trying to catch the thought before it got lost. He’d tinker while he got the words on the paper, and sometimes take out his hard copy of the manuscript so far and check details or make small changes to integrate the new material. I pressed him to keep at the pen-on-paper step for a minimum of five minutes; sometimes he wanted to go on far longer than that when he was on a roll. When he ran out of steam for his longhand work, we were up and running again.

In some ways, it was not so different from the office hours I held when I taught freshman composition at a big state university. I learned early in the freshman composition gig not to let the anxious or reluctant writer leave my sight before s/he put some words on paper, or else by the time s/he got back to the dorms, all the ideas we had discussed would have evaporated. In content, though, the texts could not have been more different.

The soccer kid and I read Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea together early on. He decided the story would have been much cooler if Ged had continued down the dark path of arrogance and folly.

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Book Launch Week (Plus Giveaway)

Book Launch Week (Plus Giveaway)

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bones-of-the-old-ones-contest-win11First, I want to point everyone to a book giveaway at Reddit. Until the end of the week, you can drop by, write what your favorite fantasy setting, world, or culture is (and why) and be entered in a drawing to win a signed copy of both The Bones of the Old Ones and its standalone predecessor, The Desert of Souls.

Second, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about what a book launch week is like. Long time visitors to Black Gate may remember that I promised to take you with me  as I crossed over from regular bloke side of the street to man with a book contract side.

If you peruse the articles I wrote about signing my book deal with the St. Martin’s Thomas Dunne Books imprint, my glee practically drips off the screen (1. How to Get a Book Deal. 2. Signing the Contract. 3.  After the Book Deal). Finally, after decades of trying, my words were going to be in a real live (well, dead tree) book, in bookstores nationwide. I felt like Charlie at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when Willy Wonka asks him what happened to the boy who got everything he wanted. “He lived happily ever after,” says Willy with a smile.

It turns out that when you actually get through that door, what you’re doing is becoming an artist who is also a small business owner, for one of the things you absolutely must do is promote your work, er, product. There is a lot of work, and not so much chocolate. I got pretty busy, and I forgot to tell everyone here at Black Gate what was going on.

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Tangent Online on “The Trade”: “Marvelous Tale. Can’t Wait for the Next Part”

Tangent Online on “The Trade”: “Marvelous Tale. Can’t Wait for the Next Part”

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mark-rigney-smallLouis West at Tangent Online reviews the latest original fiction from Black Gate, published here on Sunday, December 9:

Mark Rigney’s “The Trade” immediately drew me into this world with powerful depictions of Gemen and his two companions… Together they are unstoppable. Individually? That is part of their mystery. Hints of background story leak through for each, not enough to explain but enough to tantalize, to [make you] want to read on and know more.

The pace is fast. They arrive in Andolin late in the spring, quickly dispatch several bandit attacks, then are in the far north of Andolin at Tynnefast Reach where Gemen finds a magic mirror. Since the locals refuse to trade for it, he takes it, wakening the wrath of a guardian stone golem. But stone is slow. More than enough time for Gemen’s trio to make it to Corvaen, swap the mirror for knowledge about the Cryptlord’s grave and leave before the stone golem arrives to fetch back the mirror.

However, things don’t go as planned in the crypt, revealing much more about how fragile the bonds between the three may be.

Marvelous tale. Can’t wait for the next part.

“The Trade” is the first installment in an exciting new heroic fantasy series. “The Find,” which explores Gemen’s past and reveals more of his mysterious quest, will be published here next year, followed quickly by the third installment.

You can read the entire review at Tangent Online, and the complete 7,000-word short story free here.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by C.S.E. Cooney, Donald S. Crankshaw, Aaron Bradford Starr, Sean McLachlan, Harry Connolly, and Jason E. Thummel, is here.

Red Sonja 1

Red Sonja 1

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red-sonja-1-coverFinally, after four years of guest appearances and Marvel Feature auditioning, Red Sonja gets her very own title. And judging from the cover, it’s going to be some opening story. We’ve got a wizard, a giant snake that’s about to bite her leg (even though its head’s already been cut off and guts are spilling out of its neck stump), a giant dead spider, some little gray goblin-looking guy in the background, and a unicorn. And Sonja herself is walking past her own title banner, seemingly ready to step out of her issue, bloody sword in hand, to kill YOU. “To the death” is always a good bad-ass line for an action hero, so we’re ready to see everything on this cover that isn’t Red Sonja dead by issue’s end.

Well, first of all, there’s no giant snake. There’s no giant spider. There’s no goblin. It’s just a mean-looking wizard and a unicorn. Just so you know.

The story begins with Sonja having to kill her horse after it breaks a leg. She’s still feeling pretty bad about it a few hours later when she stumbles on a group of men with torches surrounding a horse, apparently intent on killing it. Coming closer, she realizes that they’ve cornered a unicorn. Seeing a mob abusing a “helpless proud creature” bothers her to the point that she starts cutting through a dozen men to free it. Jumping on the unicorn’s back, the two of them ride away. During the struggle, the unicorn’s horn was broken off, so that it just looks like a horse with a head injury; but Sonja’s quite happy to have the beast as her companion.

So, for those who are reading Red Sonja on a subtextual level, the woman who’s sworn a vow of de facto chastity rushes to help the mythic representation of purity only after its phallic symbol is removed. Of course, there’s no reason to read any symbolism in a naked woman and a symbolically castrated beast bathing together, sleeping together, or leaning against one another in a picaresque sunset. And there’s certainly nothing about the nervous creature growing a new horn, “even more beautiful than the other,” as it gets to know Sonja. Nor is there anything to the bitter old man inciting ignorant villagers into a fury over the unnatural union of Red Sonja and the unicorn.

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