Joshua Reynolds's Blog, page 33

As Sure as Death

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I wrote a brief thing about my forthcoming novel, Soul Wars, for Black Library. It’s over at the Warhammer Community site, if you’re interested in reading it. And just a reminder – there’s a contest going on, with a special edition of Soul Wars up for grabs.

The book will be available as a special edition at Black Library Live, and released as a hardback, ebook, and MP3 audiobook on the same week as the new edition of Age of Sigmar. 

Black Library Live 2018

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Just a reminder that I’ll be at Black Library Live on June 16th. I’ll be signing books, as well as participating in a number of seminars. If you’re in Nottingham on the Saturday, why not stop by and say ‘hi’?

Contest of Souls

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Black Library has announced a new contest and the prize is a copy of the limited edition of my forthcoming novel, Soul Wars. Visit the Black Library Facebook page for all the particulars!

Who is the Royal Occultist?

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Of all the characters I’ve created, and stories I’ve written over the past decade, I’m perhaps the proudest of the Royal Occultist. I’ve written more stories featuring Charles St. Cyprian and his assistant, Ebe Gallowglass, than I ever intended, and their continued popularity with my readers is both gratifying and humbling. I’ve enjoyed writing every single story, from “Krampusnacht” to “The Faceless Fiend”.

A few years ago, I hit on the idea of expanding the ‘Royal Occultist universe’ with regular write-ups about the setting, including information about reoccurring characters like Philip Wendy-Smythe or villains like the monstrous Hound of Mons, as well as a look at places like the house on Cheyne Walk, and even descriptions of the tools of the trade, like the Monas Glyph or Gallowglass’ ever-present Webley-Fosbery revolver. But I’ve never really managed to get it going – until now.

I’ve decided to make the ‘Royal Occultist universe’ a regular feature on this site – hopefully once a week, but at least a few times a month. Check the Royal Occultist Facebook page for updates. You can also click the ‘royal occultist’ tag, to see everything on this site.

Starting things off this week is a look at the main characters of the series – Charles St. Cyprian and Ebe Gallowglass…

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Charles St. Cyprian is a slim man in his early thirties, with a Mediterranean complexion, an Old College, Oxford intonation and an inordinate fondness for the sartorial creations of Savile Row.  He is also the current holder of the offices of the Royal Occultist of the British Empire and its associated territories.

Prior to assuming the responsibilities of the foremost occult office in the Empire, St. Cyprian was, at best, an uninspiring candidate. A stereotypical example of the ‘idle rich’ with an attention span limited to the retention of cricket scores and the occasional bout of auto-polo, a fresh-from-university St. Cyprian became involved with the ‘Cheyne Walk set’ in the year prior to commencement of hostilities on the Continent.

It was during the so-called Gogmagog Incident (1914), that St. Cyprian met Thomas Carnacki, and the former aided the latter in exorcising the titanic spectral monstrosities which lurked in the crypts beneath the Guildhall, London. By all accounts, St. Cyprian impressed Carnacki with his quick-thinking as well as his ability to wield a xiphos.

Following this, St. Cyprian joined Arkwright, Dodgson and the others in Carnacki’s clique; in reality, St. Cyprian was the last addition to the roster for consideration of the position of Carnacki’s assistant. Despite the apparent suitability of several of the other candidates, Carnacki chose St. Cyprian on the eve of war.

From 1914 to 1918, St. Cyprian served as Carnacki’s amanuensis and dogsbody in England and abroad, learning the ins and outs of the duties of the Royal Occultist with commendable speed. With Carnacki’s death at the Kemmelberg during the Fourth Battle of Ypres in 1918, St. Cyprian was given a battlefield commission to Captain and assumed the duties of the Royal Occultist.

After the War, St. Cyprian returned to England and attempted to re-assume his old life with mixed success, establishing questionable ties to the Runcible and Wooster social sets among others, including a number of occult sects. However, not long after taking up residence in No. 427 Cheyne Walk, St. Cyprian first encountered his future assistant, Ebe Gallowglass during the Shooter’s Hill Incident (1919), and began to take his duties seriously.

In contrast to her mentor, Ebe Gallowglass is a short, slender woman of Egyptian descent in her early twenties, with a propensity for dressing like a cross between a Parisian street-Apache and a newsboy.  She is also the (reluctant) (fairly murderous) assistant to Charles St. Cyprian, the current occupier of the offices of the Royal Occultist of the British Empire and its associated territories.  

Little is known about Gallowglass’ life prior to her involvement in the Shooter’s Hill Incident (1919) and her current association with Charles St. Cyprian. But what is known is altogether unpleasant.

She is the daughter of the Irish revolutionary, mercenary and occultist, Donal Gallowglass, and an as-yet unidentified Cairo woman believed to be the high priestess of an outlawed religious sect. Gallowglass’ childhood was spent within the secretive confines of her mother’s cult; of said cult and its high priestess, little is known save that the experience left Gallowglass with a lifelong abhorrence of cats.

Donal, who, in his sordid and violent career, came into conflict with not one, but two of St. Cyprian’s predecessors, was not present for his daughter’s youth and indeed, seems not to have been aware of her until shortly before he met his death during the Britannic Affair (1916). The only keepsake she possesses of the late, unlamented Donal is his signature Webley-Fosbery revolver with the Seal of Solomon on the butt, picked out in ivory. The weapon was delivered to her via courier, prior to her departure from Cairo. Why the reportedly unsentimental Donal did so died with him in the boiler room of the Britannic.

Some time in the closing months of 1918, Gallowglass’ mother was murdered by rivals within her sect, leading to Gallowglass’ subsequent pursuit of said individuals across two continents, before tracking the last of them to London in 1919. This led directly to the aforementioned Shooter’s Hill Incident (1919) and her subsequent apprenticeship to Charles St. Cyprian.

St. Cyprian and Gallowglass have appeared in the following stories:

“The Unwrapping Party”
“The Dreaming Dead”
“Merry John Mock”
“The Maida Vale Mummy”
THE WHITECHAPEL DEMON
“Orbis Tertius”
“Hairy Hands”
THE JADE SUIT OF DEATH
“The Strix Society”
“An Ounce of Prevention”
“The Creeping Man”
THE INFERNAL EXPRESS
“The Door of Eternal Night”
“The Artist as Wolf”
“Deep Red Bells”
“The Fates of Dr. Fell”
“Krampusnacht”
“The Faceless Fiend”
“The Second Occupant”
“Sign of the Salamander”
“Squatter’s Rights”
“The Gotterdammerung Gavotte”
“The Teeth of Winter”
“The Bascomb Rug”
“Return of the Hound”
“Iron Bells”
“The Hunting of Philip Ackroyd”
“Terror on the Links”
“The Coventry Street Terror”
“The Cult of the Horrible”
“The Bells of Northam”
“The d’Erlette Configuration”
“The Wedding Seal”
“Feast of Fools”
“In the Dark and Quiet”
“Wendy-Smythe’s Worm”
“The Jagtooth Lane Horror”
“The Uninvited Guest”
“The Creature from the Abysmal Sea”
“The Riders of St. George”
“The Hungry Stones”
“The Pnakotic Puzzle”
“The Necromancer’s Drum”
“Deo Viridio”
“The Devil of Dog-End”
“Owd Hob”
“Hairy Shanks”
“The Black Brotherhood”
“The Hound’s Daughter”
“The Roaring Ship”
“The Third Death of Henry Antrim”

St. Cyprian has also appeared in the following stories:

“Monmouth’s Giants”
“Hochmuller’s Hound”
“The Charnel Hounds”
“Dead Men’s Bones”
“The Bride of the Hound”

For more on the adventures of St. Cyprian and Gallowglass, as well as past and future holders of the office, take a look at the Royal Occultist chronology on this site, as well as a number of free short stories, available only on Patreon. And be sure to ‘Like’ the Royal Occultist Facebook page, in order to keep up with all the latest news and info on the series!

The Uncanny Ape

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I don’t like things I can’t understand.

-The Ape (1940)

*Author’s note – I originally wrote this a few years ago for a now deceased horror journal. It was to be the first of a series of reviews of public domain horror films, titled ‘Silver Screams’. I got paid for it, but it never, to my knowledge, appeared in print. So I figured I might as well put it up here, for folks to enjoy. Also, if you’d be interested in reading more reviews of this sort, let me know in the comments.*

A shaggy shape prowls the night, hunting for victims. Men and women are slaughtered by simian hands, their spines shattered, the fluid within…stolen. Is it an escapee from the low rent circus that just left town under a cloud of misgivings, or something worse?

The camera draws back. The shape scrambles into view. A hairy mask is torn aside, and Karloff the Uncanny glares at the audience, his eyes wild, face twisted into a grimace of righteous madness.

The Ape (1940) was one of the slew of low-budget horror films that graced cinema screens in the wake of Universal’s success. It’s also one of the several starring Boris Karloff, taking a turn on the other side of the electrodes as the melancholy Dr. Adrian, a mad scientist intent on curing his daughter’s mysterious illness via a healthy application of human spinal fluid.

When an overly-aggressive circus ape breaks loose and goes on a rampage, Dr. Adrian is caught in the middle, much to his detriment. When he makes the mistake of treating the ape’s abusive trainer for wounds suffered during the creature’s escape, he draws the bestial ire of the monster.

It breaks its way into his lab in a surprisingly effective sequence, ripping a window right out of the wall and proceeds to destroy the hapless scientist’s lab. Adrian manages to kill the beast, but not before it ruins his life’s work, and any chance Adrian has of curing his daughter’s illness.

Luckily for the girl (and the audience), Adrian is just cracked enough to hit upon the perfect scheme, namely skinning the ape and wearing it for nightly jaunts out on the town, where he’ll collect more spinal fluid by cracking the backs of handy victims. An unorthodox scheme, but effective, at least until the end. Mistakes are made, things go badly and Adrian is outed and slain, without having cured his daughter.

All told, it’s a cheap effort, but entertaining for fans of Karloff, who does his best despite things. It’s a rough patch when compared to, say, Universals’ The Wolf-Man which came out a year later, with less-than imaginative special effects and a watered down script that drowns what could have been an interesting morality play in standard second-rate horror cheese.

Interestingly, while we’re on the subject of The Wolf Man, the two scripts share a writer-Curt Siodmak. Siodmak would later state that he wrote The Wolf Man with Karloff in mind for the lead role. One wonders whether or not seeing Karloff bound around in an ape costume gave Siodmak the inkling of the idea that would eventually become The Wolf Man.

Regardless, we have Monogram Pictures to thank for Karloff’s turn in said monkey suit. Monogram, one of the so-called ‘Poverty Row’ B-movie studios of the time, churned out a large number of low-budget films between 1931 and 1953. The output was a melange of mysteries, westerns, thrillers and, of course, horror films.

In 1938, Monogram adopted a policy of building films around actors with face-name recognition, including Karloff, who starred in a number of thrillers for the company.

The Ape was the last in the long string of films Karloff took the top-billing in for Monogram. Previously, he had been in the lead as the eponymous Asian detective in the Mr. Wong mysteries, Monogram’s answer to Warner Oland’s more successful turn as Charlie Chan at 20th Century Fox.

By the time The Ape rolled around, however, Karloff was growing tired of the pound-the-pavement pace of working for Monogram (and perhaps tired of playing Wong, an obvious caricature of and on the whole less interesting character than either Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto)and was looking forward to getting out of Poverty Row pictures. Monogram decided that after five relatively unsuccessful Mr. Wong pictures, Karloff’s last film with the company should play to his perceived strengths. Thus, The Ape.

After Karloff’s departure, his slot at Monogram would be taken by another icon-Bela Lugosi. At Universal, Lugosi famously turned down the role of Frankenstein’s brute creation, only to play a hunchbacked second-fiddle to both Karloff and beast in The Son of Frankenstein (1938). He continued to haunt the career of the man he’d inadvertently gifted with stardom, appearing with Karloff in several other films, including The Black Cat and The Raven. If there was ever the slightest fancy in anyone’s mind that poor Lugosi seemed doomed to follow in Karloff’s footsteps, his tenure at Monogram turned fancy to fact.

After 1942’s Bowery at Midnight (ostensibly a zombie film), in 1943 Lugosi appeared in The Ape-Man (which was followed by a sequel in 1944, The Return of the Ape-Man) for Monogram. The Ape-Man was a remake of The Ape, with a few tweaks to get the most out of Lugosi, who had to lope around in yak hair for a bit before getting strangled by a gorilla.

The story elements are slimmed down some, and the Jekyll/Hyde elements that simmered under the surface of The Ape are played for thrills, but it’s still recognisably Siodmak’s script. Later in the year, as if to trap him forever in Karloff’s shadow, Lugosi would don the makeup he had rejected years earlier and appear as Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man.

Monogram continued cranking out films until the early Fifties, when television put a stake in the heart of the Poverty Row film studios. Monogram was absorbed by Allied Artists and disappeared from cinema screens. Nowadays, many of their films are in the public domain and easily found in part, or in whole on the internet for download, if you’re of a mind to seek them out.

Haar’s War

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Just dropping a reminder here that the first two instalments of the Blackshields audio-drama series are available to purchase in both CD and MP3 format. You can listen to excerpts from both on their respective Black Library pages, and download them via Black Library, Audible and iTunes. Click the images above to check them out at the Black Library website.

You can also check out a few reviews, from Mass Movement and Track of Words, as well as this brief interview I did with the latter.

And as ever, if you enjoyed them, please consider dropping a quick review on Amazon or Goodreads, or even on social media.

Reign Over the Earth

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We may be witnesses to a Biblical prophecy come true – ‘And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beasts shall reign over the earth.’

-Them! (1954)

In 1954, the spectre of nuclear annihilation haunted the minds of cinema-goers. Many of the films of the period are pervaded by an existential unease, and none more so than Gordon Douglas’ seminal ‘big bug’ feature, Them! 

One of the first nuclear monster films, Them! spoke directly to the anxieties of the time. Radiation + innocuous wildlife = national threat. A new folk horror, arising from a distinctly modern set of fears. But instead of something from outside imposing itself on reality, the monster is of man’s own making – and worse, unintentional.

The film has always been one of my favourites. Like Godzilla, released the same year, the ants are kept out of sight for a good portion of the film. They’re a barely glimpsed force, seen out of the corner of the eye or heard. The sound is the worst of it – the shrill prickle of noise, an insect hum, echoing across the lonely desert landscape. A signal that all is not well, and a warning to the curious.

Too, the blunt, factual way the story unfolds makes for greater unease. In places, it could almost be an episode of Dragnet, as the diverse characters seek to unravel the mystery. When they at last discover the true nature of the threat facing them, things spin rapidly into overdrive.

The ants are brute children of Progress, much like Frankenstein’s creation. Unlike Karloff’s monster, however, the ants are not simply at odds with the world – they threaten to reshape it. To make it a place where they, and not mankind, have sole dominion. Heedless of all laws or potency, they flourish in the empty places, and spread where they will, all without man’s knowledge. The assumption of insignificance lends them a hideous strength.

While the film has many of the hallmarks of a disaster film, there’s a darker implication, a hint that there’s been a cosmic reshuffling – man is no longer in control. The ants are not simply symbolic of nuclear disaster, but of the loss of certainty that accompanied the splitting of the atom.

The universe is not as we thought it was, and we will pay for that assumption. The little things, the things unnoticed, are almost our downfall. Only happenstance and diligence prevents a greater tragedy.

There is an almost Lovecraftian cosmicism to the story. Humanity is rendered insignificant by a force seemingly beyond comprehension, their bastions of authority made all but impotent. The ants are utterly alien, and the traditional defences of innocence and ignorance are useless against them. They walk where they will, shadow-shapes stalking a monochrome desert.

Worse, as they spread, the world is irrevocably changed in their wake. When a stake is thrust through Dracula’s heart, normalcy returns. But even after their inevitable immolation, the ants leave the world in disorder. The atomic genie has been let out of the bottle, and nothing will ever be the same. If ants can become giants, can spiders? Can men? What new horrors stir, in the shadow of atomic fire?

What rough beast, its hour come around at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

When Man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.

-Them! (1954)

The Sforza Curse

I’ve posted a new Royal Occultist short story over on my Patreon site. “The Creeping Man” finds St. Cyprian and Gallowglass attempting to contain the titular menace before he claims what he’s come for. While the story was originally the opening chapter for the third Royal Occultist novel, The Infernal Express, that book is sadly out of print. As this tale easily stands alone, I figured I might as well pop it up for folks to enjoy.

To that end, I’ve made the story free to read.  If you enjoy it, be sure to check out the other Royal Occultist stories available on Patreon, and maybe hit ‘Like’ on the Royal Occultist Facebook page!

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The Fading Light

My short story, “The Resolute”, is now available as a digital download from Black Library. Previously published in the Legends of the Age of Sigmar omnibus, it finds Felyndael of the Fading Light and his fellow tree-revenants battling against the forces of the Plague God, Nurgle. 

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“The Resolute” also features the Stormcast Eternals of the Hallowed Knights, specifically the Grumpiest Liberator, Aetius Shieldborn, who has a minor role in almost every showing of the Hallowed Knights to-date. The story also features one of the first appearances of the Order of the Fly, the oddly chivalric worshippers of the Plague God. Too, it acts as a semi-prequel to Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden.

So, there’s a lot going on in this one. I hope to return to Felyndael at some point, in the future. Whether I’ll team him up with Aetius again is debatable, but I think he’s a strong enough character to carry a story or three on his own.

“The Resolute” is available to download via Black Library or Amazon and its subsidiaries. If you download it via the latter, and enjoy it, be sure to leave a review, if you can. And if you want more Felyndael stories (or more Aetius stories) be sure to let Black Library know, via their Facebook page!

Red Fief

This past weekend, my second Horus Heresy audio drama, Blackshields: The Red Fief became available for order. A sequel to last year’s Blackshields: The False War, Red Fief finds Endryd Haar and his merry band of psychopaths raiding a World Eater tithe-world, in search of supplies and recruits. But as one might expect, they find more than they bargained for. 

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As the forces of the Warmaster close in on Terra, Endryd Haar leads his warband of renegade Blackshields into battle once more. With his forces battered in the wake of their raid on Xana, Haar finds himself in desperate need of warriors. Answering a distress call from an old friend, Haar seeks out the tithe-world of Duat, intent on plunder. But when he discovers what is hidden there, Haar is faced with a decision that will determine his fate – and perhaps that of Terra itself…

Written by Josh Reynolds. Running time 1 hour and 15 minutes. Performed by Gareth Armstrong, John Banks, Toby Longworth, Andrew Wincott, Tim Bruce, Steve Conlin

As with The False War, I’m quite proud of this one. Endryd Haar is a fascinating character, at odds with both sides in the Heresy, and uncertain of his loyalties. There’s a lot of potential there for future stories, especially as the Siege of Terra draws ever closer. Hopefully, I’ll get to write more with Haar, Vahn and the rest of the crew of the good ship Ruination. 

Blackshields: The Red Fief is available from Black Library as both a CD and an MP3 download. There’s also an excerpt available, if you’d like to listen to a snippet, before purchasing. And if you’re interested in learning more, why not check out this quick interview I did for Track of Words?