Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend

Comments 4 comments

So, last month, I joined fellow Wolfe Pack members for a long weekend at The Greenbrier Resort, in West Virginia. It was the fifth trip there for the group, though my first. It’s only a four hour-plus drive, which isn’t much for a Midwestern guy who also lived in Colorado and Texas.

Too Many Cooks is the fifth Nero Wolfe novel. I think it’s better than the four prior ones, and it’s the first where the series really starts to take off. It was followed by Some Buried Caesar. I think those two together, mark the beginning of excellence for the Wolfe Corpus.

Wolfe and Archie travel to Kanawha Spa, where a chef is murdered. Kanawha is the Greenbrier, which is why the Wolfe Pack sojourns there. It’s a VERY fancy resort, known for it’s golf courses (it was on the PGA tour before a flood wrecked things a bit), and for having a Cold War bunker for White House officials. It was never used, but you can take a tour of it now (I did not).

Here’s the Toast to Nero Wolfe I gave at the first dinner.

…

Read More Read More

Horror and Beauty in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Work: An Interview with Robert Allen Lupton

Horror and Beauty in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Work: An Interview with Robert Allen Lupton

Comments 2 comments

We have an ongoing series at Black Gate on “Beauty in Weird Fiction,” where we corner an author and query them about their muses and methods to make ‘repulsive things’ become ‘attractive to readers.’ Previous subjects have included Darrell Schweitzer, Anna Smith Spark, Carol Berg, C.S. Friedman, John R. Fultz, and John C. Hocking (whose Conan and the Living Plague novel is finally due out this June 2024, so you should read that too to get psyched). Anyway, see the full list of interviews at the end of this post.

This interview focuses on the legendary Edgar Rice Burroughs and an aficionado of his work, Robert Allen Lupton. The latter has published an amazing 2000 articles on www.erbzine.com, the Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site. Robert Allen Lupton is also a writer of 200 short stories, four novels, and six collections of adventure fiction, so this forum serves as a great opportunity to learn about past and present storytelling with a touch of horror in it.

…

Read More Read More

Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part III

Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part III

Comments 18 comments

The first two installments in this series are here:

Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part I
Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic, Part II

As I mentioned in the first two articles in this series, I’ve read a LOT of Andre Norton. Here are just a few pics from my collection that I haven’t yet discussed. Most of these have little to do directly with Sword & Planet fiction but they still contain Norton’s patented characters and action.

1. The Last Planet, which is a variant title for Star Rangers. (Two copies here: Ace 1974 — no cover artist credited although could this be a Whelan?, and Ace 1955 — Harry Barton cover).

…

Read More Read More

A to Z Reviews: “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer,” by S. Ivan Jurisevic

A to Z Reviews: “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer,” by S. Ivan Jurisevic

Comments 0 Comment

A to Z Reviews

An interesting coincidence occurred when I hit the Js. The first author in my collection was Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, whose story “The Haunted House on Rocketworks Street” appeared in an anthology put together in honor of Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland. The final author in my collection in S. Ivan Jurisevic, whose story “Captain Starlight and the Flying Saucer” appeared in Interzone issue 146, which proclaims that it is the “Special Australian WorldCon issue.”

Although this is Jurisevic’s only story listed in the Internet Science Fiction Database, the about an author blurb at the end notes that he previously published a story about Captain Starlight in the magazine Omega. In any event, this story is a typical tall tale about a folkloric character. It reads as if Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill had relocated to the Australian outback and helped form the landscape.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Now It’s The Fly’s Turn to Crawl Out of the Vault

Goth Chick News: Now It’s The Fly’s Turn to Crawl Out of the Vault

Comments 12 comments


The Tingler (Columbia Pictures, July 1959), and The Fly (20th Century Fox, July 1958)

Though I have previously described how my Dad first introduced me to classic horror, Mom would likely be mortified to know I credit her as well. Though there is one lone, totally fabulous drive-in movie theater left in Chicagoland, Mom used to tell me how there were a dozen or more ‘back in the day.’ She explained how, when she and Dad were dating, there was no finer way to spend a summer evening than seeing the latest film under the stars. What seemed strange to me about these stories were the titles of the movies they used to see. Apparently, in her youth, Mom also liked horror.

I remember listening with rapt attention as she described a scene from The Tingler in which the disembodied spinal cord crawled up over the front seat to attack a couple at the drive-in. She said this was the scariest thing she had ever seen as she and Dad were watching The Tingler at the drive-in. Mom also talked about The Fly (1958), starring David Hedison, Patricia Owens, and Vincent Price. Apparently, Vincent Price’s performance gave her nightmares.

…

Read More Read More

H. Bruce Franklin, February 28, 1934 — May 19, 2024

H. Bruce Franklin, February 28, 1934 — May 19, 2024

Comments 2 comments
H. Bruce Franklin

I was sad to learn that H(oward) Bruce Franklin, emeritus John Cotton Dana endowed Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark and author of numerous books, essays, and exhibitions related to science fiction, died at the age of 90 on May 19.  On a personal note, in grad school I took his seminar in science fiction studies, which reignited my interest in science fiction and prompted me to start writing about it. So, for better or worse, I probably wouldn’t be posting here were it not for Dr. Franklin.

During the 1960s, Dr. Franklin was fired from Stanford despite being tenured supposedly for inciting student anti-Vietnam war protests. A former Air Force navigator and intelligence office in the Strategic Air Command, he also resigned his commission in protest of that war.

While his range of published work ranged from Melville studies to prison literature to fish ecology, he frequently used science fiction as a lens to comment upon American history, particularly as it relates to Vietnam and the forever wars that extended to Iraq and Afghanistan.  He was awarded a number of honors, including the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) Pilgrim Award and Pioneer Award, as well as an Eaton Award. He was a Distinguished Scholar for the International Association for Fantastic in the Arts, and was a Guest Curator for the Star Trek and the Sixties exhibit at the Smithsonian and Hayden Planetarium. From its inception up until 2002, Dr. Franklin was a consulting editor of Science Fiction Studies.

…

Read More Read More

Besties: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by R.F. Kuang

Besties: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by R.F. Kuang

Comments 3 comments

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023
(Mariner Books, October 17, 2023)

Perhaps the most overused title for short story anthologies beings with “Best of.” In genre fiction, the heavyweight (in terms of both size and breadth of coverage) was the Gardner Dozois-edited The Year’s Best Science Fiction Stories that ran for 35 years until his death in 2018. And there are a whole slew of similar “Best of’s” for horror, dark fantasy, speculative fiction, you name a subgenre and there’s a “Best of” collection.

If “Best of” is overused for survey anthologies of a year and/or genre, and recognizing that someone’s “best” is someone else’s “meh,” it is probably because a more accurate title of This is Kinda What the Editor Liked More than Others For Whatever Subjective Reasons doesn’t go over well with publisher marketing teams.

…

Read More Read More

Sometimes It’s Exhausting Being a Gamer

Sometimes It’s Exhausting Being a Gamer

Comments 4 comments

Good Afterevenmorn!

I know that greeting is nonsensical, but I do love it, so it’s staying. it’s a whimsical kind of thing… and I need that whimsy right about now. You see, I’m exhausted. It’s not just that I’m working several jobs while trying to get a creative career off the ground. But it’s also having to deal with some kinds of people that have flooded one of my favourite pastimes. Every so often, like when a new game trailer drops, for example, they rear their terrible little heads and with their full admittedly pigeon chests bellow at the top of their lungs that they were once again not centred and they’re boycotting said game because it’s gone “woke.” Whatever that means.

…

Read More Read More

Diving Deep (again) into the Wonder that is Terry Pratchett

Diving Deep (again) into the Wonder that is Terry Pratchett

Comments 9 comments

I am working on a post about my trip to the Greenbrier Resort, with the Wolfe Pack. It was a neat time, and I’ve got a ton of pictures. What I do not have is a completed essay yet. So, I should have that next week.

Today I’m gonna talk a little more about Terry Pratchett.

A few months ago, I decided to start re-reading – and listening to – some Discworld books. I’ve been a Pratchett fan for decades, and I occasionally grab something off the shelf for a mental breather. I’m usually reading for purposes of a Black Gate post. Or an actual work product, like a new intro for Steeger Books. Discworld is always a fun break.

The book I most often ‘randomly grab’ is The Last Hero. It’s such an exquisite work of art. It is probably the most thoughtful, beautiful, book which I own. The story, of course, is classic Pratchett. But the only reason this book is such a wonderful item, is because the people behind it, wanted it to create something of beauty. It’s more than just a book. It’s something to be cherished.

 

…

Read More Read More

Neil’s Horror Corner: The Weird, Weird West, Part III

Neil’s Horror Corner: The Weird, Weird West, Part III

Comments 1 comment


The Dead and the Damned (Mattia Borrani Productions, 2010), The Pale Door (Shudder,
2020), and The Magnificent Dead (Broom Closet Video, 2010)

The Dead and the Damned (2011) – Tubi

Stand-off with six guns?

Lots of unconvincing shootin’.

Uncomfortable chaps?

Rubbish zombies.

Any good?

As with some previous entries, it gives me no pleasure to rip into this film.

…

Read More Read More