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Andrew Offutt’s Greatest Contribution to the Genre: Swords Against Darkness

Andrew Offutt’s Greatest Contribution to the Genre: Swords Against Darkness

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The complete run of Swords Against Darkness (Zebra Book, 1977-1979).
Covers by Frank Frazetta, Larry Kresek, Greg Theakston, and Luis Bermejo

In my opinion, Andrew Offutt’s greatest contribution to literary history is the five book anthology series he edited called Swords Against Darkness. They were simply called I through V and published between 1977 and 1979, all by Zebra.

I’ve got them all and have read them all. They knocked my socks off. I was just beginning to write around the time the series ended and one of the first pie-in-the-sky goals I had for myself was to write something good enough to be included in the series. The series ended before I got close to making it, or even submitting.

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Goth Chick News: Here Comes Your 2023 Reading List…

Goth Chick News: Here Comes Your 2023 Reading List…

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Gather round friends – it’s once again time to don the footie pajamas, pour a steaming hot-toddy and hunker down until spring with the most awesome reading list of the year: namely the annual nominees for the coolest award ever.

The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA).

Several members of the HWA including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse such writing awards, fearing it would incite competitiveness rather than friendly admiration. The HWA therefore went to great lengths to avoid mean-spirited competition by specifically seeking out new or overlooked writers and works, and officially issuing awards not based on “best of the year” criteria but for “superior achievement,” which allows for ties.

Which is lovely and all, but I believe I would not be above doing something mean-spirited if not downright evil to get my hands on the award itself, a haunted house whose front door opens to reveal the category and winner.

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The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz released by Rogues in the House: Read the Foreword and Interview

The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz released by Rogues in the House: Read the Foreword and Interview

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The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz. The Rogues
in the House Podcast (2023). John Molinero cover art.

The Rogues in the House Podcast, publishers of the Sword & Sorcery anthologies A Book of Blades Vol I and Vol II, now bring us a re-release of John R. Fultz’s The Revelations of Zang (available now in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover).

John R. Fultz is no stranger to Black Gate having published in the hardcopy magazine and hosting his Skulls graphic story plus two of his short stories on our website. We recently highlighted a 2017 interview with the author on his approach to creating weird worlds that are both beautiful and dark (reposted on Black Gate Dec. 2023). I was honored to provide the Foreword and Interview for the re-release, and share those here to reveal what you should expect, and why you should read, The Revelations of Zang!

John R. Fultz has a burgeoning library. His published novels include Seven Princes (2012), Seven Kings (2013), and Seven Sorcerers (2013), as well as The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015) and Son of Tall Eagle (2017). His short stories have appeared in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Weird Tales, Black Gate, Weirdbook, That Is Not Dead, Shattered Shields, Lightspeed, Way of the Wizard, Cthulhu’s Reign, and plenty of other strange places. His story collections include World Beyond Worlds (2021), Darker Than Weird (2023), and The Revelations of Zang (re-released now, 2023)!  Now, we will reveal to you the secret arcana of that last volume…

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Vintage Treasures: Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury

Vintage Treasures: Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury

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Courtship Rite (Timescape/Pocket Books, September 1983). Cover by Rowena Morrill

I still remember the buzz of excitement in Ottawa fandom when a young local writer named Charles de Lint sold his first novel to Ace Books. Riddle of the Wren wasn’t particularly groundbreaking —  not like the breakout books soon to come from Charles — but everyone read it, and it was passed around and enjoyed with the kind of hometown pride that quickly catapulted Charles into literary stardom, at least on the local Ottawa scene.

The kind of thing didn’t happen often in Ottawa in those days. In fact, the only thing like it was the fuss made about Donald Kingsbury, a math professor at McGill University in Montreal, who burst out of the gate in the late 70s with a series of major award noms for his early fiction. His first novel Courtship Rite won the Locus and Compton Crook Awards for Best First Novel, and was shortlisted for the Hugo Award. In 2016 it won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. That’s the sort of thing that got Canadian fans worked up — and that hasn’t changed much over the years.

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Neverwhens: Hannibals’ Ghost(s) roams a City of Marble and Blood and a Genre is Reborn

Neverwhens: Hannibals’ Ghost(s) roams a City of Marble and Blood and a Genre is Reborn

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The Chronicles of Hanuvar: Lord of a Shattered Land and The City of Marble and Blood
by Howard Andrew Jones (Baen, August 1, 2023 and October 3, 2023). Covers by Dave Seeley

Friends, Carthaginians, Dog-Brothers, I come to praise Howard Andrew Jones, not to bury him…

That was a lot of mixed-metaphors, but Howard’s mixed a lot of themes, tropes and reached back into the very roots of early heroic fantasy in his Chronicles of Hanuvar to breathe new life into what was considered a dead sub-genre, so perhaps appropriating Marcus Antonius’s funeral oration for Caesar and mentioning the Republic’s greatest rivals is appropriate.

Howard Andrew Jones is the leading Sword & Sorcery author of the 21st Century, and the growing saga of Hannuvar of Volanus (promised to be a five-volume series by Baen books) is his masterwork. The saga is the story of Hanuvar, the aging, last general of Volanus. Once a great city-state and naval power, Volanus has fallen to the legions and sorcery or the aggressive Dervan Empire.

Determined to make Volanus an object lesson to other nations, Derva leveled the city, scattered its stones, and carried its remaining survivors away in chains. But Derva has not reckoned with Hanuvar.

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A World Built on Atrocity: Damon Knight’s “Down There”

A World Built on Atrocity: Damon Knight’s “Down There”

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New Dimensions III, edited by Robert Silverberg
(Signet/New American Library, February 1974). Cover by Charles Moll

One of the writers who strongly influenced me when I was learning to write fiction was Damon Knight.

Although he founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, co-founded the Milford Writers’ Workshop, made the Clarion Writers’ Workshop the force that it is in the development of speculative fiction, edited the influential anthology series Orbit, and wrote one of the first significant critical works on science fiction, In Search of Wonder, his fiction is little remembered today.

Knight was a brilliant writer of short stories. He also wrote some damn good novels; his last one Humpty Dumpty, An Oval, published in 1996, is sui generis. But I want to talk about one of his most obscure stories, “Down There,” which appeared originally in the anthology New Dimensions 3 in 1973. It’s also available in The Best of Damon Knight.

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New Treasures: The Soulfire Saga by Matthew Ward

New Treasures: The Soulfire Saga by Matthew Ward

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The first two books in The Soulfire Saga: The Darkness Before Them and The Fire
Within Them (Orbit, November 7, 2023 and June 11, 2024). Covers by Joe Wilson

I spent the Christmas break working on a number of projects, and not doing any of the catch-up reading I promised myself. I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, but I did grit my teeth on January 1st and resolve to read more this year. Especially books from new writers.

I have a break coming up as I complete a big writing project, and as a reward I have my eye on the new fantasy series from Matthew Ward. He’s the author of the Legacy Trilogy, and this new project — featuring a thief caught up in a failed heist, on her way to the capital to be turned into an animated skeleton — sounds like just what I need. Adrian Collins at GrimDark Magazine says it’s “full of action, heart, betrayal, and set in a dark, engaging world,” and that’s all the recommendation I need.

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Learn the ABC’s of Horror with Mark Morris

Learn the ABC’s of Horror with Mark Morris

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The first four volumes of the ABCs of Horror anthology series, edited by Mark Morris
and published by Flame Tree Press. Covers by Nik Keevil and Flame Tree Studio

I miss the days of the paperback horror anthology. The great horror anthologists of the late 20th Century — Peter Haining, Sam Moskowitz, Charles L. Grant, Karl Edward Wagner, David Hartwell, and others — curated dozens of volumes of top-notch fiction that kept me thrilled and entertained many a late night, and introduced me to countless new authors in the process.

Mark Morris has been working hard to recapture that old-school magic with a brand new series of anthologies, all of which feature new work from the top names in horror today — including Ramsey Campbell, Grady Hendrix, John Langan, Simon Strantzas, Nathan Ballingrud, Christopher Golden, Seanan McGuire, Steve Rasnic Tem, Alison Littlewood, Josh Malerman, Tim Lebbon, Angela Slatter, Michael Marshall Smith, Simon Bestwick, Robert Shearman, Stephen Volk, Catriona Ward, Paul Finch, Priya Sharma, Aliya Whiteley, Lisa Tuttle, Lynda E. Rucker, Nina Allan, Brian Evenson, Peter Atkins, Mark Gatiss, Simon Clark, Helen Marshall, and many, many more.

Mark Morris posted his first article at Black Gate on Sunday (a rave review of the Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher, which he calls a masterpiece,) and while we were chatting I asked him about his inspiration and plans for the series. His response was interesting enough that I thought I’d share it with you here.

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More Tales of Twilight and Borderlands : Time of Passing by John Gaskin

More Tales of Twilight and Borderlands : Time of Passing by John Gaskin

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Time of Passing by John Gaskin (Tartarus Press, August 20, 2023)

This is the fifth and apparently the last collection of short stories by John Gaskin, an excellent author of ghostly tales who has been entertaining and fascinating his readers for more than twenty years. Most of his books have been published by the independent British press Tartarus Press. An elegant, classy imprint for an elegant classy writer.

In the present volume Gaskin reproposes a few of his previous stories in a revised version.

“The Gathering “ is the masterful report of the dramatic last reunion of a group of friends during a frightening storm, while “Avernus” is a dark, unsettling story revolving around a mysterious and dangerous amulet.

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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

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If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Ebenezer Scrooge

 

A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, published first in 1843, is nearly two hundred years old, and nothing remains to be said about it, it would seem. Charles Dickens’s fairy tale has become one of the great secular staples of the Christmas season. It’s been filmed many times; both wonderfully as in the Alastair Sim 1951 and George C. Scott 1984 versions and less wonderfully in the Reginald Owen 1938 film and the 2010 Jim Carrey motion capture monstrosity. Furthermore, there have been animated adaptations, musicals, and comics. It’s an isolated person, I suspect, who doesn’t know at least the basic setup: the uplifting story of a cold-hearted miser who turns to the good after the visitation of a trio of ghosts representing the spirit of the season. All I can do is comment on the bits that stood out for me while liberally quoting from this mordantly funny novel and Gothic fantasy of redemption.

The story is told by an omniscient narrator who intrudes on the story constantly, digresses from the narrative, and questions the reader at every turn. The opening words of A Christmas Carol, or at least a fair gloss on them, are well-known, particularly the seventh sentence: “Old Marley was a dead as a door-nail.” It’s a blunt matter-of-fact statement that lets the reader know where things stand. The narrator, though, immediately continues with something else.

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