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Dark Muse News: JANGAR! Beastlord of Muu – #1 and 2

Dark Muse News: JANGAR! Beastlord of Muu – #1 and 2

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Jangar! by Logan D. Whitney, Issues #1 and #2, Cliffhanger Press, 2026. Cover art by Mike Hoffman

Dark Muse News has been a fan of Rogues in the House podcast and their books (i.e., A Book of Blades Vol I and Vol II); one of those rogues is Logan D. Whitney. This June and July, he released the initial entries of an expected six chronicling his lone jungle warrior: Jangar! These are fantastic, compact adventures that somehow balance immediate crazy challenges (i.e., save a princess from a sacrificial ritual, and survive gladiator combat viewed by cannibalistic harpies) with the more chronic concerns (seeking vengeance for the slaughter of family members, and overcoming the decline of civilization).

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Mad Scientists and Rich Bastards: The Din of Celestial Birds by Brian Evenson

Mad Scientists and Rich Bastards: The Din of Celestial Birds by Brian Evenson

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The Din of Celestial Birds by Brian Evenson (Weird House Press, June 19, 2026)

Being a reviewer of regular horror fiction I confess I wasn’t familiar at all with Brian Evenson, a writer working mainly in the area of “magic realism.”

Truth be told I wasn’t aware of that while reading the first section of the present collection, where I especially enjoyed the following tales.

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Poison Pen and Poltergeist: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Poison Pen and Poltergeist: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

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Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers (Avon, 1968)

“Do you know the Guest Room, miss? That would be after your time, perhaps. Well, it’s on the New Bridge, miss, between Tudor Building and the North Annexe where the Cottage used to be, miss, only of course that’s all done away with now and you has to go up by the main staircase past the West Lecture Room, miss, what used to be the Junior Common Room, miss, before they made the new entrance and moved the stairs, and then turn right and it’s half-way along the corridor. You can’t mistake it, miss.”

In Gaudy Night, Sayers returns to Harriet Vane, after showing Peter Wimsey on his own again in Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors. In fact, a large part of Gaudy Night focuses on Vane on her own, while Wimsey is away doing something for the foreign service. The chronology is a little odd; at one point the events of The Nine Tailors, published just the year before, are referred to as three years in the past. Perhaps Sayers wants to make a point of how long Wimsey’s courtship of Vane has been at a standstill. In any case, Gaudy Night finally resolves that issue.

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A Library With a Life of Its Own

A Library With a Life of Its Own

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This is one of six shelves in my study and doesn’t show my multiple floor stacks, three of which are, seriously, as tall as I am.

Hello, it’s my first post in 13 years (since The Before It’s Too Late List, way back in October 2013) and I have to discuss my library again. Obviously.

It occurred to me that my library, the mass of books I’ve spent my life accumulating, has acquired a kind of life of its own.

A few years ago I was reading a history of detective fiction, and it was mentioned that the longest running detective series was the one about Mike Shayne by ‘Brett Halliday’ (originally Davis Dresser but later many ghost writers working under the Halliday name). Damn, I thought, I really ought to try some Mike Shayne. I seemed to recall I had picked up a Shayne novel somewhere, so I checked my shelves. I had two. Which ones? The first and second volumes. My library was prepared to answer my needs perfectly even if I had no recollection of setting it up to do so.

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 11: The Seventh

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 11: The Seventh

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The Seventh by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1966)

What is it?

Volume 7 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels.

The title applies in two ways.

The string Parker joins for the heist is made up of seven criminals, with each of them expecting to receive a seventh of the take. (There’s a clever twist on this at the end, as well.)

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Fresh Blood: Todd Grimson’s Stainless

Fresh Blood: Todd Grimson’s Stainless

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Vampires, of all the residents of the Kingdom of Fright, are uniquely vulnerable to the revisionist impulses of writers and filmmakers. People just don’t turn the same tricks with mummies or werewolves or ghosts that they do with the Nosferatu. I’m not sure why this should be so, but I do think it’s true.

This is a problem for me, though, because with monsters, I’m a traditionalist. (I want a ghoul just like the ghoul that buried dear old dad, as we used to say on the playground.) My stodginess is especially firm when it comes to the undead. When the sun goes down over the Carpathians, give me Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee any day (or should I say, night); I want none of this Near Dark, Lost Boys or True Blood nonsense, and as for Twilight, please – Black Gate is a family-friendly site, and we’re not allowed to use words like that. This is why Salem’s Lot is my favorite Stephen King novel; its steadfast old-fashionedness warms the cockles of my heart, right where the stake would go through. (By the way, what the hell are cockles?)

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Sudden Joyous Turns: Pilgrimage: The Book of the People by Zenna Henderson

Sudden Joyous Turns: Pilgrimage: The Book of the People by Zenna Henderson

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Pilgrimage by Zenna Henderson (Avon Books, 1967)

Zenna Henderson was one of the better known woman science fiction writers of the 1950s and 1960s. One of her early stories, “Ararat,” published 1952 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, became the start of perhaps her best known work, the stories of the People.

The first six of them, all dating to the 1950s, were brought together in 1961 as Pilgrimage. This is a fix-up, tied together with a framing narrative about a young woman whose intended suicide is interrupted by one of the People, and who then witnesses the telling of incidents from the People’s history. But there’s more continuity than the framing narrative; the later stories refer back to the earlier and reintroduce some of their characters.

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 10: The Jugger

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 10: The Jugger

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The Jugger, by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1965)

What is it?

Volume 6 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels.

A “jugger” is a slang term for a safecracker. Interestingly, my research has shown that this was never a term in common use. It seems as if Westlake might have created the term “jugger” himself, and then used it as the title of this book, as well as the description of what Joe Sheer did, back before he retired.

This is sort of the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service of Parker novels. It’s unlike the rest of the series in a number of ways, and was not well-regarded by fans for a while. But, like that Bond film, it has enjoyed something of a renaissance among afficionados in more recent years. Today it’s considered one of the better entries in Parker’s chronicles.

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Remembering Children of the Dragon, by Frank S. Robinson

Remembering Children of the Dragon, by Frank S. Robinson

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Children of the Dragon by Frank Robinson (Avon Books, January 1978). Cover by Sanjulian

The fact that people are not ruled by any god frees them to rule themselves. The fact that fate is blind frees people to take their fate into their own hands. The fact that the race has no purpose frees its individual members to pursue their own purposes. And so, the fact that bare human life is without intrinsic value does not mean human endeavor is pointless. Just as a worthless chunk of stone can be sculpted into a precious work of art, so too can a raw, common life become great by what its owner makes of it. And that endeavor is the key to life — with no god, no other value to existence — a man’s own endeavor is everything.

— from Children of the Dragon, by Frank Robinson

There are no dragons in this novel, as I first thought when I bought Children of the Dragon back in 1978. There are no wizards or witches, no magic, no strange beasts or monsters. This is alternate-world fiction, without any of the usual fantasy tropes. Probably the first or one of the first novels that later would be labeled Grimdark, for this certainly is a grim and dark novel.

Sadly, Robinson wrote only this one “fantasy” novel. He wrote no sequels, no other fantasy. The cover reads “Frank Robinson,” but inside the book his name is Frank S. Robinson, and that is the name under which the book is copyrighted. He also wrote a few other fiction and non-fiction books under that name, but he was not prolific. (His agent was Virginia Kidd, a high-profile agent in her day, to whom he dedicated this novel. She also represented science fiction writer Avram Davidson.)

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Peter Pan by JM Barrie

Peter Pan by JM Barrie

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Hitherto he had thought it was some fiend fighting him, but darker suspicions assailed him now.
‘Pan, who and what art thou?’ he cried huskily.
‘I’m youth, I’m joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.’
This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.
‘To ‘t again,’ he cried despairingly.

from CHAPTER XV ‘HOOK OR ME THIS TIME’

Leaving work yesterday, a friend expressed surprise when he saw my copy of JM Barrie’s 1911 novel, Peter Pan, in my hand. “You’re reading Peter Pan, the kids’ book?” he asked. To which I answered, “Yes. But it’s not a kids’ book, because it’s about a sociopathic twelve-year-old.” An exaggeration, perhaps, but not much of one.

I think most people, if they think of Peter Pan at all, it’s either because of the 1953 Disney movie or the long-running stage productions with first Sandy Duncan and later Cathy Rigby. For them he’s merely the boy who never grows up and spends his time fighting the Captain Hook and his crew of blackguards. Now, those are important elements of the book, but they barely hint at the depths contained between its covers. It is a much weirder, darker book than the Disney version.

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