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Oz Revives The Screaming Skull!

Oz Revives The Screaming Skull!

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screaming skull coverA few years back, I had the pleasure of reviewing B-movies on a page hosted by Nathan Shumate’s Cold Fusion Video Reviews. Yes, I was part of his cabal of Cold Fusioneers — not to be confused with early scientific researchers into the elusive possibilities of cold fusion. Until a “catastrophic server failure” wiped out the main site and all the ancillary sites it hosted, Cold Fusion had been one of the longest-running review sites on the Internet.

Nathan decided to retire Cold Fusion and pursue other popular web projects he has launched, but I still have my reviews safely stored on a hard drive, the only place they currently exist…until now! As part of my October “five weeks of frights,” I’ve dug up my review of The Screaming Skull (1958), a fun film to watch this time of year. Some Black Gate readers will also take note that this film allegedly was inspired by a short story of the same name by classic weird-story author F. Marion Crawford.

[And if you wonder “What’s up with this David guy?” with whom I co-hosted the review, stick around to see my explanation at the end of the post.]

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DAVID: This is a Manning’s Manly Movies review that reaches its climax in shocking horror. Its impact is so terrifying that it may have an unforeseen effect. It may KILL you! Therefore the reviewers feel it necessary to provide free flowers to anyone who dies of fright while reading THIS REVIEW!

OZ:  What are you doing?

DAVID:  A-ha! About time you pulled your head up out of your books long enough to review another movie with me, professor!

OZ:  What were you doing?

DAVID:  I’m borrowing an idea from the producers of this week’s movie. When The Screaming Skull was screened in theaters back in the fifties, the movie opened with a voice-over narrator as a casket lid slowly opened, revealing a burial contract inside…

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Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1951: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1951: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951-smallThe May, 1951 issue of Galaxy featured the first installment of a new novel, two novelets and two short stories.

By this point, I would think readers would be thrilled by this magazine. It’s amazing to consider how many of its stories were later reprinted, and how so many authors became legendary in the field (if they were not already so).

“Bridge Crossing” by Dave Dryfoos — Roddie grew up among androids and is the only human left within the city of San Francisco. There are other humans who live outside the city and raid it for supplies; Roddie views them as enemies. One night, he finds one and decides to act friendly to the woman to learn more about his enemies. Despite their commonality, he is determined to remain allied with his android friends.

Dave Dryfoos had over 20 published stories between 1950 and 1955. And that was it. He didn’t die until 2003, but I can’t find information on why he seemed to stop writing in 1955 (if that’s in fact what happened).

At any rate, “Bridge Crossing” is an interesting tale and I only had a feel for where it was going, not a definite sense (which kept it tense). And it had a great last line.

“Mars Child” (Part 1) by Cyril Judd — Mars is colonized by pioneering humans, some of whom feel like Mars is a second chance to populate a planet without all of the pollution on Earth. The Sun Lake colony depends on trade with Earth to thrive, but the colonists hope to one day sever ties with Earth — to be completely independent. Dr. Tony Hellman, one of the colony’s council members, delivers a newborn to eager parents, but his main duties include assessing the radioactive levels of their exports.

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Its [It’s] Q: The Winged Serpent on Blu-ray!

Its [It’s] Q: The Winged Serpent on Blu-ray!

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Q Winged Serpent Blu-ray CoverQ (1982)
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen. Starring Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, Candy Clark, Richard Roundtree.

You want to know something that rocks? Actually, two things that rock, at least in my little world:

1. The Chrysler Building

2. Giant Monsters

So when you have a movie about a giant flying monster nesting in the Chrysler Building, you have something that rocks so hard it makes Van Halen sound like One Direction. Again, at least in my little world.

Video distributor Shout! Factory continued its stellar series of classic B-movie releases on Blu-ray in September with the HD debut of Q. This 1982 sleeper hit, concerning the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl (or a non-god of the same name) appearing in New York City as a humungous flying snake that likes to snap the heads off window washers and topless sunbathers, was always crying out for Shout! Factory to pluck it up.

The company has packaged the film with its alternate marketing title, Q: The Winged Serpent, and repeated the original tagline over the Boris Vallejo artwork: “It’s name is Quetzalcoatl… Just call it ‘Q’… that’s all you’ll have time to say before it tears you apart!” However, Shout! Factory fixed the original poster’s grammatical error, correcting It’s to Its. That is one of the few disappointments I have with their presentation of this nifty low budget flick; I know Shout! Factory doesn’t want to seem careless on the cover for their product, but that grammatical glitch adds charm to the story of a clueless low-life criminal/jazz pianist who holds New York hostage with a winged snake.

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Spotlight on Fantasy Webcomics: The Dirt on Ursula Vernon’s Hugo Award Winner, Digger

Spotlight on Fantasy Webcomics: The Dirt on Ursula Vernon’s Hugo Award Winner, Digger

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Digger Volume 1 Ursula Vernon
Cover of Digger Volume 1 by Ursula Vernon from Sofa Wolf Press

I read a lot of webcomics. Back when I was writing Cowboys and Aliens II for Platinum, I started reading a bunch of the comics that were up on the now-defunct Drunk Duck and I got hooked.

What happens when you start reading webcomics is that you often follow links to other webcomics, until your bookmarks bar is full of comics you’re following on a regular basis and your inbox is full of recommendations from friends of the comics you should be following. That e-mail from a friend is how I discovered Digger by Ursula Vernon, which was the Hugo Award Winner for best graphic story and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner, both in 2012.

It starts with an anthropomorphic wombat named Digger who, by page 6, has met a statue avatar of the god of wisdom Ganesh. Wombats being a race of logically minded architects and engineers, they don’t care much for gods and magic — but Digger is thrust into the middle of a story that has both. Magic has deliberately interfered with her tunnel, something no wombat takes kindly, and her sense of direction is askew, meaning she can’t get home until Ganesh helps her figure out just where home is from where she’s ended up.

While researching a trip home might seem like a harmless endeavor, it’s not as simple as it sounds, and soon Digger is up to her ears in strange characters: a young healer known only as the Hag, a shadow child who might or might not be a demon, an unnamed hyena exile who Digger calls Ed, a female warrior monk who is probably insane, and a whole tribe of hyena people who might want to eat her.

This might sound like a lot of silliness in one webcomic, and Digger has its share of humorous moments. But what happens between the words, the art, and the story is the stuff of magic — quite possibly the kind that Digger herself would approve of.

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Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

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oie_6554332ckBTZkt Daughter of the Bright Moon (1979) by Lynn Abbey has been sitting on my swords & sorcery to-be-read pile for a long time. One of the main goals I set for myself when I started blogging was to read all the classic era S&S I could. Not only does DotBM date from S&S’s golden age in the 1970s, its hero, Rifkind, is one of the earlier sword-swinging women. This was a book that demanded a look.

Even with all that going for it, I didn’t get to it until last week. Every now and then, I felt like it was staring at me, admonishing me for not having read it already. I mean, I’ve known about it since I read a fun write-up on Rifkind in the Giants in the Earth column in Dragon Magazine #57 and my dad actually had a copy in the attic.

I even started it last year, but stopped after a chapter or two. I don’t know why… I liked it, but maybe something shiny caught my eye.

Warrior women characters have been around forever. There are the myths of the Amazons and the valkyrie. In real life, of course, there was Joan of Arc.

Jirel of Joiry was the first swordswoman to star in her own stories. C. L. Moore created her kick-ass French noblewoman in 1934, but for decades after that you really had to dig to find fighting women as the lead protagonists.

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Self-Published Book Review: Mistress of the Dancing Bones by Thomas Alexander

Self-Published Book Review: Mistress of the Dancing Bones by Thomas Alexander

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Dancing-Bones-CoverThis month’s self-published book is Mistress of the Dancing Bones by Thomas Alexander.

Four hundred years ago, the Deathlords threatened to destroy all of humanity. It was the nephilim who saved the human race. Thus was the Code Sanguine founded: humans swore to serve the nephilim, and if required, give them their blood, while the nephilim swore to protect humanity, and raise the best of the humans to nephilim themselves. For before the Code Sanguine, the nephilim were known by another name: vampires.

Ashia is the daughter of a nephilim warlord, Marcel Boucher, and his human wife. This does not make her a nephilim, or even part nephilim. She is fully human until embraced by the nephilim. She is also, thanks to her mother, Dahraki, one of the dragon-blooded, and that gives her access to another kind of magic, the necromancy of the Than Khet. Unfortunately, the servant who secretly tutored her in Than Khet magic neglected to tell her that it is incompatible with becoming nephilim. Should a Than Khet be embraced as a nephilim, she would go mad as the two parts of herself warred.

When he discovers what has happened, Ashia’s father is furious. All his dreams for his daughter have come crashing down. But larger problems plague Ashia’s family. Renegade vampires are plaguing Marcel’s territory and the family’s enemies are placing the blame squarely on Marcel and his willingness to embrace barbarians rather than civilized Avensh as nephilim. In order to discover the truth, Ashia agrees to accompany the legendary nephilim witch-hunter Dusang and his demon-cat-fey ally, Tama, in tracking down the renegades and discovering the truth behind a conspiracy that involves not only renegades and political enemies, but the Deathlords themselves.

I am generally not a fan of vampire novels. I prefer my vampires as antagonists rather than as love interests. And for the love of God, sunlight better burn, or at least weaken, them, not cause them to sparkle. So I was taking a chance on this novel, but I’m glad I did.

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Appendix N: Carrying on the Flame

Appendix N: Carrying on the Flame

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Runequest Sixth Edition-smallAs recently posted here at Black Gate by James Maliszewski in his article “The Other Appendix N,” the very first Appendix N bibliography of inspirational reading ever printed in a roleplaying game was actually in the 1978 edition of Chaosium’s RuneQuest; a year before Gygax released his own homage in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Whilst it merely followed the time honored convention of academic publications, few remember nowadays that it was RuneQuest which started an institution in roleplaying that still continues to this day.

Surprisingly, the differences between the two bibliographies are quite stark. RuneQuest’s list, rather scholarly, incorporated a lot of ancient history texts, books of military warfare, and Nordic sagas; whereas AD&D’s was more devoted to fantastical fiction, especially the less well-known authors of the genre. Central to both bibliographies, however, are some familiar names: Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, and JRR Tolkien. Other than that, there was little overlap between the two.

Whilst these recommended reading lists reveal each game’s designers’ interests and objectives, it also highlighted that every writer is heavily influenced by the literature they read, and by implication, those stories available to them at the time.

For Gary Gygax, a man turned forty by the time he wrote the Dungeon Masters Guide, the early works of fantasy authors such as Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, Fox Gardner, Andre Norton, Jack Vance, and Roger Zelazny were readily available in bookshops, hot off the press. Indeed, almost all of the books on his inspirational reading list would have been as easy to pick up as purchasing a copy of A Game of Thrones is today.

Although the combined authors of RuneQuest were less than a decade younger, their drier bibliography somehow never matched the mystique of Gygax’s subsequent list, despite the fact that the game itself gripped my imagination with a far tighter hold. This fascination was more due to the Classical style of its illustrations combined with Greg Stafford’s wondrously magical world of Glorantha, with its roots firmly grounded in diverse mythologies – alas, unlisted in the first Appendix N.

When Lawrence Whitaker and I set about refining and re-launching RuneQuest as a quality roleplaying game, we too were influenced by our own youthful reading.

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The Series Series: Naomi Novik’s Latest Novel of Temeraire

The Series Series: Naomi Novik’s Latest Novel of Temeraire

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Blood of Tyrants-small“Series fantasy,” said John O’Neill when I asked him what he’d like my new blog column here to focus on. “It’s the most popular form of fantasy, and we virtually ignore it — especially the early stuff.”

What do you call a series about series? Series is a word with no plural, or, depending on how you look at it, a plural word with no singular form. If I can talk about the peoples of the earth, I should be able to talk about the serieses of fantasy novels, but I can’t quite bring myself to do it. No wonder the publishing industry is so fond of words like trilogy, tetralogy, saga, and so forth. Maybe you have a brilliant idea that solves this problem, a genre equivalent of the invention of the word “y’all.” My comment thread awaits.

Meanwhile, welcome to the Series Series.

You know people who won’t start reading a series until the last volume is published, because they don’t want to invest their hearts in a story that might never reach its end. You may be one of those readers.

Me, I used to say I’d try anything once. It turned out not to be quite true, but I’m still willing to try almost any book for a few pages. If it keeps me reading, I don’t worry about whether the author’s going to live long enough to complete all the plot arcs, or whether the market will allow the series to go on.

I also don’t mind putting a book or a series aside if it stops hitting the sweet spot for me. A wildly successful and highly skilled author I will not name has a few series out. I read the first volumes of each, recognized their excellences and the reasons most of my friends loved them, and I never picked up any more volumes. Not my sweet spot. Sorry.

At some point, a stream of review copies of debut novels and first volumes of fantasy series will start flowing from BG to my mailbox. I wanted to start, though, with the two series I can’t put down, the ones that have driven me to break my no-buying-new-books-until-I’m-done-moving rule. For my last post, I wrote about James Enge’s new novel of Morlock the Maker, Wrath-Bearing Tree. This week, it’s Naomi Novik’s Blood of Tyrants, the eighth novel about the naive but brilliant dragon Temeraire and his human, Captain William Laurence.

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My Favorite Fantasy Movies

My Favorite Fantasy Movies

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conan-the-barbarian-poster2-smallI love a good fantasy movie, and love to goof on bad ones, too. Fantasy is a genre that didn’t always translate well to the big screen, until the recent advances in CGI technology allowed studios to capture creatures such as dragons and Balrogs in all their glory.

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Classic Schwarzenegger. Although this adaptation departs from the style (and story) of Robert E. Howard’s books, it retains the grit and raw muscular power of Conan in a way that the newer incarnation (sorry, Jason Momoa) couldn’t begin to match.

James Earl Jones was a masterstroke of casting as the villainous wizard Thulsa Doom. This film contains some unforgettable scenes: Conan growing up pushing that big mill wheel, the witch who had sex with Conan and then tried to kill him, breaking into the Temple of Set, the Tree of Woe, and of course the awesomely bloody climax where Conan cuts his way through legions of fanatics to eventually take the head of his enemy.

Conan, you taught us the riddle of steel, and for that we thank you.

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The Series Series: The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin by L. Jagi Lamplighter

The Series Series: The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin by L. Jagi Lamplighter

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Don’t start with the cover, or the blurb, or the elevator pitch. Don’t start with which other books The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin resembles.

To get into the right mood for the story and its intriguing implications, consider Pollepel Island, a ruined fantasy landscape in the Hudson River. Many times I’ve taken the train north from New York City and looked forward to the few minutes’ glimpse of the Bannerman Castle. It’s a story magnet.

L. Jagi Lamplighter is not the first fantasy author to use the island as a setting, but she may be the first one to capture how much it feels like a misplaced island, like a chunk of dream-Scotland lifted by giants from another continent–if not another universe entirely–and deposited randomly in America. Lamplighter’s version of Pollepel Island is an illusion that hides in plain sight the floating island of Roanoke. Yes, the Lost Colony’s Roanoke, navigated around the world by sorcerers who built there a sanctuary and a school.

All roads lead to wizard school. Don’t let it get you down. Lamplighter is doing several unexpected things with the wizard school trope.

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