I don’t know much about this little artifact; but the moment I laid eyes on it, I knew I had to blog about it. It combines two of my favorite things: Cthulhu and Clocks. Okay, not really. Would you believe Cthulhu and role-playing games? How about Cthulhu and giant clockwork war machines that lumber across the land? Clockwork and Cthulhu is a supplement for the 17th century alternate historical fantasy world Clockwork & Chivalry, one of the most innovative settings…
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LORE is back! You can’t keep a good mag down. [Insert your own zombie joke here] Back in the 90s LORE was one of the coolest independently-produced horror mags to see the light of day, showcasing stellar talents like Harlan Ellison, Richard Corben, Brian Lumley, and the late, great Brian McNaughton, to name only a few. Recently LORE dug itself out of its own musty tomb and returned in an improved “2.0” version. I spoke with the mag’s co-founder Rod…
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Cthulhu’s Reign Darrell Schweitzer, ed. DAW (308 pp, $7.99, 2010) Reviewed by Chris Braak It is unquestionably a challenge to create a sense of drama in a set of stories that all share the premise of “human civilization has been destroyed by invincible monster-gods from space.” Cthulhu’s Reign is an anthology that sets out to do just that, using the theme of H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones – most often Cthulhu and his star-spawn, but not always – returning to…
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Everyone has their heresies. Things they believe, or things they perceive to be true, with which many if not most authorities would disagree. That’s especially so, I think, with readers. Everybody who reads is going to have a list of writers who they feel are unjustly praised or unjustly criticised. Or, in some cases, writers whose work is wrongly praised or criticised; writers accepted as great, for example, but who you think are great for some other reason than is…
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Anticipating CTHULHU’S REIGN (Part 3 of 3) “You made me master of the world where you exist The soul I took from you was not even missed.” –Black Sabbath, “Lord of This World” “The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.” –H. P. Lovecraft At last, the stars are right. The long-anticipated horror anthology CTHULHU’S REIGN finally hits stores this week, and the world of Lovecraft-inspired fiction…
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A strange box covered with cryptic glyphs recently parachuted onto Black Gate‘s rooftop headquarters. It landed near Howard Andrew Jones, who was working on his next Dabir & Asim novel by candlelight in the restricted section of our pulp library. Due to a small misunderstanding with Gordon van Gelder and the staff of Fantasy & Science Fiction over an unpaid lunch bill at Windycon, all unmarked mail here in the inner sanctum is routinely handed over to the Chicago bomb squad for immediate disposal. Doubtless due to the…
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by Ryan Harvey All rights reserved. Copyright 2006 by New Epoch Press. When Robert E. Howard discovered the character Conan in 1932, his writing took on a feverish intensity as the barbarian warrior turned into a literary obsession that allowed his creator’s natural skills and inclinations as a writer to bloom. Likewise in 1932, when Clark Ashton Smith discovered the last continent of dying Zothique, he knew that he had found the ideal setting for his poetic and dark imagination…
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By Ryan Harvey Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. Legend says that after his exile from Iceland, Erik the Red voyaged to a frozen island and settled there in 982 C.E. Deciding not to scare away new settlers with an intimidating name like “Iceland,” he dubbed the place “Greenland.” We can scoff at Erik’s bit of dishonesty-in-advertising, and certainly any homesteaders who fell for his marketing ploy would have felt like cleaving Mr. The Red’s skull with…
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