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.
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.
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.
VolumeXIV 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.
Alien Island (Ballantine Books, January 1970). Cover by Carol Inouye.
Here’s my latest look at a little-remembered 1970s novel, T. L. Sherred’s Alien Island, which appeared in the very first month of the 1970s. These days T. L. Sherred is remembered for a single story, his SF Hall of Fame novella “E For Effort.” It’s a great story, and a deeply cynical one, so much so that there are those who claim that it was not chosen by John W. Campbell for Astounding, but by someone else in Campbell’s absence. (I’m skeptical myself — Campbell was a VERY hands-on editor, and he also chose to reprint “E for Effort” in The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology. And he was definitely known to publish good stories that seemed to run counter to his own ideology.)
Sherred published three other stories in the early 1950s: “Cure, Guaranteed,” “Eye for Iniquity,” and “Cue for Quiet,” and then fell silent (save for a story, “See for Yourself,” in Escapade in 1961, that I have not seen) until the 1970s. The novel at hand was published in 1970, and in 1972 Harlan Ellison included “Bounty” in Again, Dangerous Visions; and “Not Bach” appeared in the very well-regarded fanzine Outworlds.
Back in June, Will Murray donned his deerstalker and showed that Dashiell Hammett was not the author of “The Diamond Wager.” He’s back again this week with his magnifying glass out and looking into the origin of the title to Hammett’s novel, The Glass Key. Read on! And if you’ve not read The Glass Key (which is also a terrific movie starring Alan Ladd), you’re missing out on one of the best hardboiled novels written. The game is afoot (again)!
Back in the 1980s, I knew a pulp writer named Charles Spain Verral, who was perhaps best known for writing the Bill Barnes, Air Adventurer Magazine lead novels as George L. Eaton. Chuck told me an illuminating story about Dashiell Hammett that was circulating in the New York City literary scene during the 1930s.
Hammett needed an advance from Black Mask magazine, which editor Joe Shaw was willing to give on the basis of a title alone. Hammett came up with “The Glass Key.” And was stuck with it because in those days the magazine cover was printed a month or more in advance of the interior of the magazine, and The Glass Key was to be the cover story of the next scheduled issue. Compounding the problem, the serial was announced by that title in the issue preceding the one where it was cover-featured. Hammett was to write the novel in installments, with the first one appearing in print before he finished the work.
Conan: Black Starlight (Titan Books, October 17, 2023)
The name John C. Hocking is well known to long-time Black Gate readers. He published several terrific stories in the print version of the magazine, including two tales in his Brand the Viking series, and the opening stories in his popular Archivistseries, “A River Through Darkness and Light” and “Vestments of Pestilence,” which was continued in Skelos and Weirdbook. He’s also launched a brand new series, the King’s Blade tales, in Tales From the Magician’s Skull, edited by Howard Andrew Jones.
I was delighted to see that John had been commissioned to write a serialized novella for Marvel’s high-profile relaunch of Conan The Barbarian in 2019. Conan: Black Starlight was published in installments in the first twelve issues of the comic, and now the entire story has been collected by Titan in a single handsome volume.
The first eight Dray Prescot books (DAW Books, 1972-1975). Covers by Josh Kirby, Tim Kirk, Jack Gaughan, and Richard Hescox
As I started collecting and reading the Dray Prescot series of Sword & Planet novels, I tried to find out more about the author: Alan Burt Akers. The early books, published by DAW books starting in 1973, had no description or details of Akers, although they had ample details on Dray Prescot, who supposedly had recorded his adventures on tapes, which Akers then transcribed.
At the time I was sure Alan Burt Akers was a real person. It was many years before I learned the truth. Akers was a pseudonym for Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1921-2005). I don’t know why he chose that particular pseudonym, although I noted that it included all three parts of the name, and I was sure this was an homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline.
I first heard of Mariana Enriquez in Adam Nevill’s 2022 Black Gate article, Five Great International Horror Collections, in which he celebrates “a sense of encountering original, innately weird creative visions for the first time” in the work of Luigi Musolino, Anders Fager, Attila Veres, and two collections from Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Here’s the paragraph that grabbed my attention.
Argentinian Mariana Enriquez has been celebrated the world over, and I can see why from the quality of her writing. But I am surprised because her work is weird, not at all mainstream. How often does that kind of success come to a writer of quality weird? Almost never (because how many traditional publishers ever get excited about it?). I am heartened that it is possible. “Adela’s House” from Things We Lost in the Fire became an immediate favourite. Disturbing, sensory, unpredictable stories.
Enriquez’s fourth novel, her first to be translated into English, Our Share of Night, was published in hardcover by Hogarth this year, and I think the time is finally right for me to jump on board this train.
A Darker Shade of Noir (Akashic Books, August 22, 2023)
Among the plethora of new anthologies of horror stories continuously produced by little-known editors, minor authors and obscure publishers, where very few tales are worth reading, here’s finally an above average anthology. Devoted to so called “body horror” and including only women authors, the volume is edited by Joyce Carol Oates, a well respected, famous writer herself, who certainly demonstrates her good taste in her selection of the stories.
Her insightful and detailed Introduction is a sort of commentary on the material, but for the purposes of this review I’ll focus on the tales that especially impressed me.
Wuxia, which roughly translates as “chivalrous martial heroes,” is the term for armed historical martial arts adventures, fantasy tales with a history in China dating back to early medieval times. Wuxia stories were adapted to film in China as early as the 1920s, but they were never a major genre until revived in the ‘60s and ‘70s in Hong Kong cinema by directors King Hu and Chang Cheh. Wuxia movies were eclipsed by the kung fu explosion in the early ‘70s but they never really went away, and when producer-director Tsui Hark had breakout hits with his Chinese Ghost Story and Once Upon a Time in China trilogies, the Hong Kong movie machine responded in emulation.
From 1991 through 1995 an avalanche of crowd-pleasing wuxia movies burst from the Hong Kong studios. A lot of these films were low-budget quickies made to formula, but that formula could be stretched to include a great variety of approaches. The three movies covered here illustrate how eclectic the Wuxia Boom was at its height. In the late ‘90s, wuxia movies returned to occasional and irregular productions, but the eclecticism of the boom years remained a hallmark of the genre, one that continues until today.
