New Treasures: The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories by Robert Hichens

New Treasures: The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories by Robert Hichens

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The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories (Stark House, November 1, 2023)

Stark House has performed an extraordinary service for lovers of classic weird fiction with their excellent line of Stark House Supernatural Classics, which has returned forgotten tales by Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, and many others into print in handsome and inexpensive paperback editions. They’ve produced more than a dozen titles over the last seventeen years, with no sign of slowing.

Stark House doesn’t specialize in supernatural fiction. Their bread and butter is their Black Gat Book line, which includes dozens of classic crime novels. They also have a terrific Film Noir Classic imprint, Stark House Crime Classics, and an extensive Stark House Science Fiction catalog, which includes titles by Mike Ashley, Storm Constantine, Barry Malzberg, Bill Pronzini, and many others.

These days I tend to be interested in overlooked writers, and recently that includes the prolific Robert Hichens, who wrote primarily in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and who produced a great deal of celebrated weird fiction. Stark House has produced three collections of his short work, including The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories, published just last week.

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Goth Chick News: Things Are Looking Bad in Jerusalem’s Lot

Goth Chick News: Things Are Looking Bad in Jerusalem’s Lot

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The juggernaut that is Stephen King material being made and remade for big and small screens continues to plow forward with varying degrees of quality and success: thumbs up for IT (Part 1; 2017), thumbs down for Part 2 (2019), up for Mr. Mercedes (2017), down for the remake of Carrie (2013), up for The Shining (1980) and way WAY down for Doctor Sleep (2019), and on and on we’ve gone since the original Carrie in 1976.

A quick online perusal turned up no less than thirty-two King adaptations in the works, including additional runs at Carrie and Christine. Honestly, as my admiration for King’s source material is equally split between love it and hate it, I only pay attention to production news on the books I really liked, though that has been far more heartbreaking than not.

One of King’s stories which I regularly revisit is Salem’s Lot, which as vampire stories go, is a classic. Though the 1979 made-for-TV miniseries with David Soul was pretty cool for its time, and the miniseries remake in 2004 starring Rob Lowe was its own kind of hell sans Rutger Hauer as a far sexier vampire Barlow, I always thought this story was screaming for a big-screen (and big budget) take. I was therefore initially excited when in 2019, New Line Cinema announced Gary Dauberman was set to write a Salem’s Lot screenplay and Executive Produce the movie.

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The Sorcerer and the Novelist: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

The Sorcerer and the Novelist: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

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Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley, poet, mountaineer, religious mystic and self-proclaimed prophet, member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, drug addict, braggart, sexual adventurer, the self-named “Beast 666” and, according to the popular press, “The Wickedest Man in the World,” was one of the most notorious and controversial figures of his era and remains so even today, three quarters of a century after his death.

W. Somerset Maugham, physician, world-traveler, wildly successful playwright (at one time he had four plays appearing in London’s West End theaters simultaneously) and sometime British secret agent, prolific short story writer and novelist, author of such acclaimed works as Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor’s Edge, was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century.

These two very different men may seem an unlikely pair, but Maugham met Crowley in Paris in 1905 and (like virtually everyone who encountered the man) was strongly impressed by him. In Maugham’s case the impression was a highly negative one, though he did concede that the occultist had some unique qualities, so much so that he made a thinly-disguised Crowley the central figure in his 1907 novel, The Magician.

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OLD MOON QUARTERLY Issue V Review plus a Kickstarter for VII and VIII

OLD MOON QUARTERLY Issue V Review plus a Kickstarter for VII and VIII

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Old Moon Quarterly magazine, Issue #5 (138p). Cover art by Derek Moore

Old Moon Quarterly is a magazine of dark fantasy and weird sword-and-sorcery. In the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, Tanith Lee and Karl Edward Wagner, it contains stories of strange vistas, eldritch beings, and the bloody dispute thereof by both swordsmen and swordswomen. Old Moon Quarterly emerged in 2022 led by Editor-in-Chief Julian Barona, flanked by Assistant Editors Caitlyn Emily Wilcox and Graham Thomas Wilcox. This May 2023, Black Gate reviewed Issue #3 (with an overview of #1 and #2).  True to what the editors promise, the magazine consistently delivers strong doses of weird Sword & Sorcery.

This post reviews Old Moon Quarterly Issue V; shared below is the table of contents with summaries of each story and excerpts (these were selected to avoid spoilers while conveying the feel of each).  As with previous issues, expect stories that push the boundaries of uniqueness, blending poetic writing with horror and adventure. If you read tropes they’ll lean toward the twisted or bizarre.

But first a quick call out to the ongoing Kickstarter for Issues VII & VIII;  This campaign runs now through Nov 31st, 2023 and, if successful, would fund two more issues paying contributors professional rates!

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Paul Bishop on The Fists of Robert E. Howard

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Paul Bishop on The Fists of Robert E. Howard

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I am currently working on a couple essays. A very positive one about The Caine Mutiny as a book, big screen movie, TV movie, stage play,  and radio play.  And a friend called the latest Hercule Poirot movie, A Haunting in Venice, “amazingly good.” That’s exactly the opposite of what it is. I’ll be expressing my disappointment with that one soon.

I’ve already re-shared a couple of the excellent Pulp-related essays that were a part of Black Gate’s terrific Discovering Robert E. Howard series. Knowing I was completely unqualified to write one on REH’s boxing stories, I contacted the current czar of boxing fiction, Paul Bishop of Fight Card Books.

Fight Card is a Pulp style series of boxing tales.  See what Paul has to say about Howard’s boxing works. And if you get a chance to visit Howard Days in Cross Plains, TX, make sure you attend the boxing lecture at the old ice house, co-hosted by Mark Finn and Chris Gruber. It’s a real highlight.

The minute I stepped ashore from the Sea Girl, merchantman, I had a hunch that there would be trouble. This hunch was caused by seeing some of the crew of the Dauntless. The men on the Dauntless have disliked the Sea Girl’s crew ever since our skipper took their captain to a cleaning on the wharfs of Zanzibar – them being narrow-minded that way. They claimed that the old man had a knuckle-duster on his right, which is ridiculous and a dirty lie. He had it on his left.
~ Robert E. Howard, “The Pit of the Serpent”

Although best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, and other sword and sorcery characters, Robert E. Howard had a lifelong interest in boxing, attending fights and avidly following the careers of his favorite fighters. Even though as a child he was bookish and intellectual, in his teen years he took up bodybuilding and eventually entered the ring as an amateur boxer.

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Vintage Treasures: Tales By Moonlight edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Vintage Treasures: Tales By Moonlight edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

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Tales by Moonlight, volumes One and Two (Tor, January 1985
and July 1989). Covers by Mark E. Rogers and Jill Bauman

Jessica Amanda Salmonson has produced only a handful of anthologies, but they are all highly regarded. Her first, Amazons!, won the World Fantasy Award in 1980, and the two Heroic Visions volumes she edited in the mid-80s are still enjoyed and discussed today, with an original Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella by Fritz Leiber, plus terrific sword and sorcery tales by Jane Yolen, Phyllis Ann Karr, F. M. Busby, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Silverberg, Joanna Russ, Michael Bishop, Keith Roberts, Ellen Kushner, Avram Davidson, Manly Wade Wellman, Grania Davis, and Thomas Ligotti.

Salmonson’s held in such high regard that I recently decided to investigate her two Tales by Moonlight anthologies, published by Tor in the late 80s, and I’m very glad I did. They contain a rich assembly of talent, including Thomas Ligotti, Ruth Berman, H. P. Lovecraft, Janet Fox, Steve Rasnic Tem, W. Paul Ganley, Spider Robinson, John Varley, Charles L. Grant, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jayge Carr, W. H. Pugmire, Ramsey Campbell, Joseph Payne Brennan, Phyllis Ann Karr, Eileen Gunn, and many more.

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Call of the Sea: Cosmic Conundrums

Call of the Sea: Cosmic Conundrums

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You begin your adventure on the white shore of a beautiful Tahitian isaland.

Call of the Sea is the first title for Out of the Blue, a new game company working out of Madrid, Spain. It had a limited release at the end of 2020, and went worldwide across all consoles in 2021. For a debut game, Call of the Sea is an impressive achievement, and Out of the Blue have set themselves a pretty high bar to follow.

Billed as a puzzle game with adventure elements, Call of the Sea evokes the head-scratching joys of Myst, Quern or The Talos Principle, and flavors the brew with Lovecraftian elements that take the form of Easter eggs rather than eldritch horrors that have to be engaged. In fact, there is no confrontation at all in the game, you will be utterly alone for the entire experience save for some flashbacks and the occasional glimpsed beastie in the waves. Despite the origins of the story, the game is relatively horror-free, relying instead on an atmosphere thick with dread and some excellent sound design, so this is a recommended outing for the more timid game players among us (myself included).

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I Was A Teenage Abomination from Another Dimension: The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell

I Was A Teenage Abomination from Another Dimension: The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell

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Original Arkham House cover

Dear Mr. Campbell,

I have received your stories, but I have had time to read only one or two of them. I don’t want to comment on them in extended fashion until I’ve read all, but I do think them competent. However, there is one alteration I think you should definitely make; Mr. Wandrei would insist on it, and that is to remove your stories from the Lovecraft milieu. I mean, keep the Gods, the Books, etc., but establish your own place. This would give the stories vastly more authenticity as an addition to the Mythos rather than pastiche pieces, and it might then be possible for us to consider their book publication in a limited edition over here.

What I suggest you do is establish a setting in a coastal area of England and create your own British milieu. This would not appreciably change your stories, but it would give them a much needed new setting and would not, in the reader’s mind, invite a direct comparison with Lovecraft, for in such a comparison they would not show up as well as if you had your own setting and place-names for the tales.

August Derleth to Ramsey Campbell, 6 October, 1961

Inspired by HP Lovecraft’s stories to write his own tales of cosmic horror, at the age of fifteen, Ramsey Campbell was encouraged by friends to submit them to August Derleth and Arkham House. He did, and the rest was horror fiction history. Taking Derleth’s advice to heart, he created his own version of Lovecraft Country; a drear and haunted region of the Severn Valley wedged between the cities of Bristol and Gloucester and the western edge of the Cotswolds.

The Arkham House collection, originally titled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants was released in 1964 when Campbell was eighteen. They may not be the best Lovecraft-inspired stories, and they’re definitely not Campbell’s best stories, but they are good fun and well worth a read.

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Goth Chick News: Something To Sooth My Halloween Hangover…

Goth Chick News: Something To Sooth My Halloween Hangover…

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Fresh off my extended holiday, along with an unwanted souvenir in the form of Covid, I tested negative just in time to greet the trick-or-treaters, most of whom rightly decided not to brave an early Chicago snowstorm. So, here I sit with approximately two pounds of fun-size candy bars and a serious case of the blues. Never in my history have I been away from home for most of my favorite month of the year, missed out on nearly all the local haunted attractions, and attended zero parties dressed in an elaborate costume. Yes I did it to myself, and I agree that boo-hoo’ing over three weeks in Europe is probably downright evil (and not in the good way). But though every day is Halloween around here, October is the centrum around which the entire Goth Chick News year revolves, and that said, there is only one thing to do.

Start counting down to next year of course.

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Terror at Sea, Nightmares on the Beach: The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Terror at Sea, Nightmares on the Beach: The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV (DAW Books, October 1986). Cover by Michael Whelan

The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV was the fourteenth in the DAW Year’s Best Horror series and the seventh volume edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (d. 1994). The book was copyrighted and printed in 1986. This volume marked Michael Whelan’s eleventh cover for the series, which presents a pretty horrifying monster-in-the-closet, something out of any 11-year old’s worst nightmares! The cover layout is the most marked design change yet in the series. The format and font are very different from previous volumes, and the colon and word “Series” have been dropped completely. Why? Briefer I suppose.

Volume XIV contains nineteen different authors. All male but one. Eleven were American, six were British, and there is again the returning Canadian author, Vincent McHardy and returning German-born but American author, David J. Schow. Thirteen of these stories came from professional magazines. Three came from anthologies, one from a fanzine, one from a convention program, and one from a chapbook.

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