Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Deuces Wild

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Deuces Wild

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The Swordsman II (Hong Kong, 1992)

In our last Cinema of Swords article, we talked about sequels gone wrong, follow-up films to surprise hits that just went off the rails. But sometimes, at the other end of the spectrum, you get sequels done right, movies that take the strengths of the first film in a series and then build and improve on them. As an example of this, I don’t think we can do better than three wuxia films from the early ‘90s, each of which managed to incorporate the good qualities of its predecessor and then exceed them. And it’s no coincidence that all three of these films were produced by that eclectic polymath of Hong Kong cinema, Tsui Hark.

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Reedsy: From the Perspective of an Incorrigible Pantser

Reedsy: From the Perspective of an Incorrigible Pantser

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Good Evenaftermorn, Readers!

Those following along on my own personal blog know that I am waist-deep into a work in progress that I’ve titled The New Haven Incident. It’s a very silly premise – what if a zombie-style plague created hyper-aggressive fairy-types instead of the walking dead? – but I’m loving the characters trapped in this silly hellscape and I’m having an absolute blast writing it. Ordinarily, I don’t really use any tools to write save for a word processor. This time, however, I opted to give one of the many programmes a go to see if it would help my workflow at all. What a better WIP to try it with than something I’m going to offer free on my blog as a serial? So, after a little bit of research, which includes the phrase ‘free’ because I’m a writer and have no money, I settled on Reedsy.com.

Here’s what I think of it thus far.

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A (Black) Gat in Hand – Hammett & Zigzags of Treachery (My Intro)

A (Black) Gat in Hand – Hammett & Zigzags of Treachery (My Intro)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

I went to Pittsburgh’s Pulp Fest 2023, weekend before last. It was a fun time, with lots of cool chatting. I’ve got some pics and I’ll try to do a post next week. Steeger Books awlays rolls out their Summer releases at Pulp Fest. Volume Two of Rex Sackler (D. L. Champion) is out. I wrote about Sackler here – those stories are SO much fun! And the first Bill Lennox (W. T. Ballard) book is out. Lennox was one of my first essays for this series, and I’m a huge fan.

I’m biased, but I was most excited about the first volume of The Continental Op. I wrote the intro for Zigzags of Treachery, and I’m kicking off the new run with it. If you like it, maybe check out the book. The Continental Op is one of the best private eyes in the genre.

It’s got a terrific cover from Henry C. Murphy. Murphy – who died of cancer at only age 45 – drew the well-known image of Sam Spade used for the first installment of The Maltese Falcon. So, here’s my intro. I’m pretty pleased with it.

Black Mask. Dashiell Hammett. Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw. Those three names are inextricably linked together as the bedrock of the hardboiled school of mystery fiction. The October 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask included “Arson Plus,” the first story featuring a nameless detective known as The Continental Op.

Earlier that May, Carroll John Daly’s Three Gun Terry Mack had become the first hardboiled dick, and he was followed a month later by Race Williams. The immensely popular Williams was the prototypical gun-slinging Western cowboy who solved every problem with hot lead, but now wearing a suit and transplanted to the urban setting of city streets. Written in heavy-handed, over-the-top prose, Williams relied on guns and massive amounts of testosterone, leaving the city littered with corpses.

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A Fun Hardboiled Ride with Classic Barron Horror: The Wind Began to Howl by Laird Barron

A Fun Hardboiled Ride with Classic Barron Horror: The Wind Began to Howl by Laird Barron

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The Wind Began to Howl (Bad Hand Books, May 16, 2023). Cover by Mayra Fersner

Laird Barron has been one of most exciting authors and one of the freshest voices in horror literature for several years now. His amazing short story collections include The Imago Sequence (2007), Occultation and Other Stories (2010), The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and Other Stories (2013), as well as novels such as The Light Is the Darkness (2012) and the incredibly creepy The Croning (2012). Barron’s output has been prolific and consistently excellent.

However, like many genre writers, I am sure that Barron has sometimes wanted to break out of being “typecast.” And in 2018 that became a possibility when he released his first hardboiled detective novel Blood Standard with major New York publisher Putnam. This was Barron’s first novel about Isaiah Coleridge, an ex-mob enforcer turned private detective.

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New Treasures: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

New Treasures: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

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The Mountain in the Sea (Picador reprint edition, May 30, 2023). Cover by María Jesús Contreras

Ray Nayler has published dozens of short stories in many of the major genre fiction markets. His debut novel The Mountain in the Sea was published in hardcover by MCD last year and nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. But I ignored it because it pretty much had the most boring cover for a science fiction novel in 2022, and in my experience that’s often a more reliable sign than major awards.

However, Picador published the trade paperback edition in May of last year. And this version does not have a boring cover. No no no. This version features a giant intelligent octopus, and a bunch of intriguing quotes on the front and back that say things like “Superb” (Bloomberg Businessweek), “Planetary science fiction and a profound new kind of adventure” (Robin Sloan), “A taut exploration of inhuman consciousness” (Publishers Weekly), “A creepy eco-dystopian novel” (Buzzfeed), and “The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence.”

Anytime you mix ‘creepy’ with ‘octopus,’ you have my immediate attention.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955. Cover by Ed Emshwiller

It’s been a while since my last Galaxy review, but the best things come to those who wait. This one is for the January, 1955 issue. The cover is by Ed Emshwiller and is titled “Scene: Milady’s Boudoir.” It’s an eye-catching visual of a futuristic bedroom with devices that could replace services from a salon, and the artwork contains interesting colors and shapes for the furniture and electronics. But I’m not really here to get into the artwork, of course, so let’s move on to the fiction.

“The Tunnel Under the World” by Frederik Pohl — Guy Burckhardt wakes up on June 15th, screaming from a dream. In the dream, he felt an explosion that killed him. He continues through his day as best he can. And the next morning awakes on June 15th again, and once again awakes in terror from a nightmare of dying in an explosion. The horrors of the nightmare are alarming, but the deeper issue is the recurring date.

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Goth Chick News: Three Cheers for a New Dracula Comic

Goth Chick News: Three Cheers for a New Dracula Comic

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Universal Monsters: Dracula #1 (Image Comics, October 25, 2023).
Cover A: Martin Simmonds, Cover B: Joshua Middleton

I’ve written in the past about how my Goth Chick origins can be traced back to clandestine viewings of classic monster movies on the local cable access channel with my Dad. Though these events were infrequent, they made an indelible impression, forever making me equate Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney among others, with warm fuzzy feelings. But in between these midnight events, sitting at a distance from the television that would have sent my Mom into fits, I had to get my monster fix in other hideable ways.

And this meant comics.

Living in proximity to six boy cousins, all but one being older than me, I had a near limitless source of contraband, which at nine years old consisted primarily of Warren’s Creepy, Marvel’s Strange Tales, and DC’s House of Mystery. Easily hidden between mattress and box springs, and able to be read by flashlight in the closet, horror comics fed my obsession with monsters and the supernatural – even as they sometimes scared the snot out of me for nights on end.

To this day I’m a sucker for a good horror comic.

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Inspired by the Weird Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith: Castle Amber by Tom Moldvay

Inspired by the Weird Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith: Castle Amber by Tom Moldvay

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Castle Amber (TSR, 1981). Cover by Erol Otus

Castle Amber (aka Château d’ Amberville) by Tom Moldvay (RIP) is a classic D&D adventure that I first enjoyed as a player at age 10 and later as DM. Published in 1981 by TSR, Castle Amber has a wonderful cover by Erol Otus, and excellent interiors by Otus, Jim Holloway (RIP), Harry Quinn, Jim Rosolf (RIP), and Stephen Sullivan (he did the maps, I’m assuming).

I didn’t appreciate it as a youth, but this module was largely inspired by the weird fiction of Clark Ashton Smith — specifically his Averoigne Cycle of stories, which were set in a fictional counterpart of a province of France. Smith called this part of Southern France “the most witch-ridden in the entire country.” Smith has been a huge inspiration to me in my own RPG work, and I never tire of rereading his poetry and fiction.

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Future Treasures: Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

Future Treasures: Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

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Vampires of El Norte (Berkley, August 15, 2023)

Isabel Cañas’ first short story, “The Weight of a Thousand Needles,” appeared in the June 2019 issue of John Joseph Adams’ Lightspeed magazine. Since then she’s published nearly a dozen stories in some of the top markets in the field, including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Fireside Magazine, Giganotosaurus, and many others. Her first novel The Hacienda, a gothic horror set in post-Independence War Mexico, was one of the most acclaimed horror debuts of last year, called “A thing of uncanny, chilling beauty, [with] hauntings, exorcisms, incantations, and forbidden love,” by The New York Times and “the perfect Gothic novel… a brilliant piece of historical fiction and a, ‘Okay, I’m gonna need to sleep with the lights on now,’ horror novel” by Jezebel.

Her sophomore effort Vampires of El Norte, due in hardcover from Berkley Books next week, is one of the most anticipated novels of the summer. Booklist labels it “a lush, supernaturally infused historical romance mixing vaqueros, vampires, and the Mexican-American conflict of 1846–48,” and Kirkus says “The vampires of this tale are incredibly original… There are three different narratives here: a love story, a war story, and a horror story. Each is compelling.”

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Talking Tolkien: Ten Things I Think I Think

Talking Tolkien: Ten Things I Think I Think

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It’s time to wrap up Talking Tolkien. And I thought a Tolkien-themed version of Ten Things I Think I Think would be a fun way to do it. So away we go…

READ THE LEGEND OF SIGURD & GUDRUN

I read this last year, and I intend to write an essay on it, but just haven’t fit it in yet. This is a good book. And you can really see the influence it had on Tolkien. It’s as depressing as a Jim Thompson novel, but still well worth reading. I highly recommend it for fans of The Silmarillion.

After finishing this, I tried to read The Story of Kullervo, but it didn’t really work for me. It’s not by Christopher Tolkien, and the way it was laid out, and read, felt different from Sigurd, Gawain, etc. I plan on powering through it, as it was also influential on Tolkien. But I’m not recommending that one, yet. Definitely check out Sigurd.

I WANT A ‘TALES OF MIDDLE EARTH’

I’m not a fan of how the rights holder of Robert E. Howard’s works is handling new fiction. At all. Not just the barren output – but the whole approach (which has been mostly talk so far).

I’d love to see a collection of short stories based on Tolkien elements. Ideally done by people qualified to write in Tolkien’s style (folks who wrote like Dennis L. McKiernan, Andre Norton, Peter S. Beagle, Terry Brooks – not just big-names to put on the cover).

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