S.E. Lindberg's Blog, page 13

Tanith Lee and Sword & Planet: Sword & Sorcery Group-read Topics May June 2022

 

The Sword & Sorcery Group on Goodreads
The 2022 May June Groupread Topics have been selected and the discussion folders are set.Please join us!


(A) Tanith Lee
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

(B)Sword and Planet
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Banner Credits
Tanith Lee Night's Master, art by Melvyn Grant, 1981
Tanith Lee Empress of Dreams, DMR Book 2021, art by Lauren Gornik
The Tides of Kregen (Dray Prescot, #12) , art by Michael Whelan, 1976 (Dray Prescot) Alan Burt Akers

  

Sorcery Against Ceaser (and Scroll of Thoth byt Ricjard L. Tierney ; Review by S.E.

RICHARD L. TIERNEY’S SORCERY AGAINST CAESER; REVIEW AND TOUR GUIDE OF SIMON OF GITTA’S SICA & SORCERY!

 Original Post: Sunday, April 10, 2022  SELindberg on Black Gate

Sorcery Against Caesar: The Complete Simon of Gitta Short Stories (cover art by Steven Gilberts) Pickman’s Press, 2020, 405pages.

Greg Mele recently paid tribute to Richard L. Tierney at Black Gate. That memorial post covers the author’s life and bibliography very well, so check that out; Tierney co-authored books with David C. Smith will be echoed here. The Goodreads S&S group is hosting a two-month group read of his work presently (March-April 2022), which spurred me to read Scroll of Thoth; Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones.

That book lingered way too long on my shelf. It was packaged as horror influenced by history, with a mage protagonist; however, having read it now, I argue that it is more Fantasy than Horror or Historical Fiction. If assigning genre categories floats your boat, then Sword & Sorcery is more accurate.

As the post title indicates with “Sica and Sorcery,” Simon often fights with a Thracian long-dagger/short-sword called a sica, and evil sorcery abounds. With cover art by H. E. Fassel (below), Scroll of Thoth has all twelve Tierney-written, short stories tracking Simon of Gitta with comprehensive essays from Robert M Price for each; he covers both the actual history drawn from, as well as the Lovecraftian and Howardian (REH) mythos call-outs. The collection was published by Chaosium in 1997 and inspired (or augmented) their Call of Cthulhu role-playing game; in 2009, the Cthulhu Invictus campaign (6th ed) released, and that, in turn, spawned a 2015 collection of similar “Sica and Sorcery” (Tierney did not contribute, but Robert M. Price did).

With Sorcery Against Caesar: The Complete Simon of Gitta Short Stories (cover art above by Steven Gilberts, Pickman’s Press 2020), readers are treated to all 12 stories and essays in Scroll of Thoth (with an abridged version of the introduction), plus 4 more tales that are pastiche or co-authored tales (also with contextual essays). Pickman’s Press also released a novel-length Simon of Gitta adventure penned by Tierney called Drums of Chaos (originally published in 2008, available now with cover art by Zach McCain, published 2021), which would have been too big to include with the short stories. In short, both Sorcery Against Caesar and Drums of Chaos are available in print and electronic form. This review covers the short stories, but Drums of Chaos is included in the tour guide below.  According to the essays by Price, even more Simon of Gitta stories were planned but, unfortunately, are left in limbo.

Sorcery Against Caesar: The Complete Simon of Gitta Short Stories, official blurb:

A REBEL AGAINST ROME.

Simon of Gitta, an escaped slave turned magician, roves the Roman Empire battling dark magic and demons, all the while pursued by Caesar’s soldiers. Join Simon as he flees across the ancient world evading cultists and Legionaries, outwitting sorcerers and Centurions, and fighting gladiators and gods, even the deities of the Cthulhu Mythos. Yet all these foes cannot prepare him for his greatest challenge: the pursuit of his lost soul-mate Helen, a love so deep even death can’t stand in its way for long.

Who is Simon of Gitta?

For the non-history and non-religious folk, Simon is actually a biblical character. The Christian Bible’s Acts of the Apostle presents him as a Samaritan magus. Tierney presents Simon similarly, a mage hailing from Tyre (modern-day Lebanon), but has his heroic origins emerge from being an enslaved gladiator. Essentially, Tierney rebranded Simon as genuinely as Karl Edward Wagner did the biblical Cain (with his Kane tales); in fact, Tierney emphasized this by having the characters meet in the “The Blade of the Slayer” story.

Having excelled at fighting, Tierney’s Simon is skilled at the sica and hand-to-hand combat. The first tale “The Sword of Spartacus” has him escaping the pits and starting his studies as a mage. Frankly, he casts few spells himself.  He does ally with many other active mages (his mentors), and he applies his knowledge of the arts frequently (low-level actions like casting illusions and enhancing disguises, letting his companions do the heavy spellcasting). Even though a mage describes his character well, he is much more of a rogue gladiator/fighter. Simon’s companions are more sorcery-focused and include the mages Dositheus and Menophar, and even a raven named Carbo.

“…I studied the arts of the mages at Persepolis, but before that I was trained as a gladiator — sold into the profession by the Romans, who slew my parents in Samaria because they could not pay the taxes imposed on them by a corrupt regime. I escaped, after two years of fighting for my life — of spilling blood for the Roman mob —!”  The character Simon explains

Simon is completely fascinated with two goals: (1) seeking revenge against Rome, and (2) seeking out his love named Helen. The villains are usually Roman Emperors like Tiberius, Claudius, and Gaius (aka Caligula), or they are subordinates or Senators seeking more power. The antagonists are constantly summoning eldritch gods with grand rituals that are completely over the top, and wonderful (we are talking’ coliseums full of sacrifices’ and ‘mating rituals with Star Gods’!). As Simon ventures, he learns his True Spirit has existed beyond/before his current life and that he is always paired with the same female companion who also pervades time; this approach reminded me of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion with a love interest. Even though each short story is stand-alone, these two themes persist across all.

Style

Sorcery Against Caesar really is a splendid mashup of history from Ancient Roman times, with lore from Judaism, Zoroastrianism, polytheistic Etruscan & Egyptian religions, and more… all equally weighted with Lovecraftian Mythos, Robert E, Howard’s Hyborian Age history, and even lore from David C. Smith’s Attluma cycle. For most readers, there will be instances in which determining which gods are based on historical deities or fictional ones will be difficult (for me it started right away with the summoning of Tuchulcha in the first story; that daemon is based on Etruscan myths, not a Lovecraftian Elder). Like Lovecraft, Tierney reinforces a pseudo-real mythos by referencing faux books like the Necronomicon with reverence; here we have the Sapientia Magorum written by Ostanes, the titular Scroll of Thoth, and the Tomb Texts of Ani.

For the Howard fans, you will enjoy entire stories that build on Conan’s first story “The Phoenix on the Sword.” Both the Ring of Set mentioned therein as well as the Phoenix on the Sword get full stories; also for the Kull of Atlantis fans, delight in the “The Dragons of Mons Fractus” tale that features Pontius Pilate exhibiting Vlad the Impaler vibes along with Valusian serpent people. “The Scroll of Thoth” reinforces the Pain Lords from the Red Sonja Books (co-authored by Tierney and David C. Smith).

Even though there is a ton of sorcery, most of it is redirected toward evil Emperors, Simon usually is not the sorcerer. He is a fighter who hangs out with friendly sorcerers while taking down the evil ones. The fight scenes and action reminded me of Howard’s action-packed Sword & Sorcery. Anyway, don’t expect dry history or old-style, meandering pre-pulp gothic horror. Expect (a) bloody melee, (b) fantastical sorcery, and (c) links to Howardian and other fictional mythos. Excerpts below the Tour Guide reinforce these.

Roman-inspired adventure by Chaosium and related Call of Cthulhu content

 

Table of Contents (and Chronological Tour Guide of Simon’s Tales)

* content in Sorcery Against Ceaser (i.e., not in Scroll of Thoth). All stories by Richard L. Tierney unless noted.

“Sword of the Avatar” Introduction (by Robert M. Price); the unabridged version is in The Scroll of Thoth.

“The Sword of Spartacus” first published in  Swords Against Darkness  #3 (Zebra Books, 1978).

“The Fire of Mazda” first published in  Orion’s Child  #1 (May-June 1984).

“The Seed of the Star-God” first published in  Crypt of Cthulhu  #24 (Lammas 1984).

“The Blade of the Slayer first published in  Pulse-Pounding Adventure Stories  #1 (December 1986).

* “The Throne of Achamoth” by Richard L. Tierney & Robert M. Price, first published in  Weirdbook  #21 (Autumn 1985).

Drums of Chaos is a separate novel-length, Simon of Gitta adventure by Tierney (originally published in 2008, available now via Pickman’s Press 2021, 415pages) that occurs chronologically after “The Throne of Achamoth.” Here’s the blurb (cover below):

CAN A HANDFUL OF HEROES STOP AN APOCALYPSE CENTURIES IN THE MAKING?

Escaped gladiator-slave Simon of Gitta returns to Judea — during the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth — on a mission to avenge the deaths of his parents, seeking revenge in blood against the Roman officials who committed the murders and sold Simon into slavery.  But as Simon travels the Holy Lands with his mentor Dositheus and their students Menander and llione, they gradually become entangled in a complex occult plot designed to call down a monstrous alien entity to herald a new aeon on Earth. The mysterious time traveler John Taggart (from Tierney’s The Winds of Zarr) also becomes involved with Simon as their separate quests converge toward a common goal of saving all life on Earth from extinction.

But can a handful of travelers really thwart a covert scheme backed by the power of the Roman Empire? As the apocalyptic supernatural events slowly unfold, Simon and his allies are in a race against time to prevent the devastation of the world. Using mystery cults and early Christian Gnosticism as his vehicle, with meticulously researched Roman history and Biblical scholarship, this is author Richard Tierney’s magnum opus: an epic Lovecraftian alternate history dark fantasy novel that features Tierney’s most famous characters, Simon of Gitta and John Taggart. This novel will appeal to fans of historical fantasy and sword & sorcery fiction in the vein of Robert E. Howard, and the elements of cosmic horror and the Cthulhu Mythos will satisfy many fans of H.P. Lovecraft.

* “The Emerald Tablet” by Robert M. Price; first published in  Strange Sorcery  #24, Rainfall Books (August 2017).

“The Soul of Kephri” first published in  Space & Time  #66 (Summer 1984).

“The Ring of Set” first published in  Swords Against Darkness  #1 (Zebra Books, 1977).

“The Worm of Urakhu” first published in  Weirdbook  #23 (December 1988).

“The Curse of the Crocodile” first published in  Crypt of Cthulhu  #47 (Roodmas 1987).

“The Treasure of Horemkhu” first published in  Pulse-Pounding Adventure Stories  #2 (December 1987).

* “The Secret of Nephren-Ka” by Robert Price, published first in The Mighty Warriors (Ulthar Press, 2018).

“The Scroll of Thoth” first published in  Swords Against Darkness  #2 (Zebra Books, 1977).

“The Dragons of Mons Fractus” first published in  Weirdbook  #19 (Spring 1984).

* “The Wedding of Sheila-Na-Gog” by Richard L. Tierney & Glenn Rahman, first published in  Crypt of Cthulhu  #29 (Candlemas 1985).

 “The Pillars of Melkarth Vengeance Quest” first published in  Space & Time  #78 (Summer 1990).

* “Vengeance Quest” poem, originally published in  The Cimmerian  #7 (October 2004).

More Simon of Gitta from Tierney?

Robert M. Price writes in the essay for “The Pillars of Melkarth” this context hinting at an unpublished, but already written, novel, and several other tales that likely were never finished:

Readers may notice a large time lapse between the events of “The Pillars of Melkarth” (spring equinox, A.D. 50) and those of the previous story set in A.D. 42. This is because those years were taken up with the events of the novels Path of the Dragon (forthcoming from Pickman’s Press) in A.D. 42 and The Gardens of Lucullus (Sidecar Preservation Society, 2001) in A.D. 48. Other stories were planned during this time period as well. Richard Tierney intended some German adventures in A.D. 46 – 47, as well as entertaining another collaboration with Glenn Rahman on a pair of novels set on the western Roman frontier, one centered on the Claudian invasion of Britain, the other involving the Picts in Scotland. Sadly, none of these stories were ever written — yet.

Drums of Chaos (cover art by Zach McCain) Pickman’s Press, 2021

 

Excerpts. Expect:

A) Lots of “Sick” Sica Melee

Simon roared and struck out; his fist cracked sharply against the face of the nearest guard, who flopped to the cobbles without a cry. Quick as a panther he crouched and whirled, barely in time to avoid a murderous blow from a second guard’s staff; his sharp-bladed sica, already in hand, shore through the guard’s neck as Simon completed his whirl, and the man went down with a dying gurgle.

and…

The door was only large enough for two abreast and Simon met the first two with steel, expertly parrying, slashing, stabbing. One collapsed mortally wounded from a sword-thrust in the guts; the other leaped back, suddenly fearful, but was pushed forward again by the surging mob — to die instantly on the point of the sica. Simon howled with mad rage, swinging and thrusting; a bludgeon glanced heavily off his left shoulder and a knife-point nicked his flank, but three more of his enemies went down with blood gushing. A pike ripped his tunic and gashed the side of his ribcage; he roared and smote in return, cleaving a snarling face with his sword. Fierce exultation suddenly filled him; if he must die, this was how he preferred it, fighting and slaying Romans to the very end —

 

B) Unraveling Emperor Plans to Meddle with Cosmic Sorcery

“I think I know what you learned. Tiberius’ purge of his enemies is no secret, and Carbo recently brought me another message from Senator Junius, who has been recalled from exile in Lesbos to house arrest in Rome. The senator told me about Prodikos and his daughters, and I have learned much more here in Ephesos.”

Simon stopped eating. “What have you learned of Prodikos?”

“Much, Simon, but mainly that in this city renowned for its sorcerers, he is the most powerful and feared of them all.”

A serving-girl entered with an amphora of wine, and Dositheus ceased speaking. When she had gone Simon filled his goblet. “Go on,” he said.

“Prodikos had several children by various slave women, but all were sons save Helen and Ilione. These sons he long ago sold into slavery, but his daughters he kept — for an evil purpose, as it turns out. Simon, it is no mere incestuous lust that drives Prodikos. He means to force Ilione to join with him in a monstrous ritual that shall release forces this world has not seen since it emerged from the last great darkness of the All-Night.”…

… “The rite of the Impregnation and the Slaying — an act of sympathetic magic that shall cause the seed of the Star-god to unite with the Great Mother, thereby generating a horrendous spawn that will overwhelm this world.”

Simon gripped his goblet tensely. His scalp tingled as he recalled reading of just such a black ritual in the Sapientia Magorum of the ancient Persian magus Ostanes. “Gods of Hades! How could the girl’s own father even think of such perverse madness —?”

Dositheus drew a deep breath. ‘‘He may no longer be her true father, Simon. Have you not read of Sakkuth, King of Night, and his evil Master?”

Simon felt the tingling extend down his spine. Sakkuth the King, servitor of Kaiwan the Star-god — both evil beings cursed by the ancient prophets yet still furtively worshipped by sorcerers in his own native Samaria…

“The wizards of Acheron and Stygia and even older civilization cycles knew them by other names,” Dositheus went on. “To the nations of primal Attluma they were Kossuth and Assatur. It is said that every thousand years Sakkuth attempts to destroy civilization, and that he succeeds unless powerful magic is used to stop him. It was he who plunged the world into the All-Night after the Atlantean and Hyborian cataclysms. And to initiate such times, his master Kaiwan, who dwells amid the stars near the Eye of Taurus, sends to earth his seed to unite with the Great Mother, thereby enabling her to spawn the Thousand Abominations that will overwhelm the world.”

 

C) An Abundance of R.E. Howard Hyborian Age References

Instantly the sword hilt in his hands shrilled with a supernatural energy, and a blade of golden light sprang forth — a blade that must, Simon somehow knew, be equal in length to the sword blade when it was first wielded ages ago by the Aquilonian King!

“The Phoenix!” gasped Nephere, falling to his knees. “The soul of civilization — the hope of mankind…”

The great bird — if bird it was — had wheeled about and was now settling down, flapping its wide and glittering pinions, coming to rest atop the ancient pyramidal stone behind the flaming altar. It perched there and folded its wings, gazing down upon the flames where — so Nephere had said — its parent had just been cremated.

Simon could only stare in awe. He suddenly realized that he had never known true beauty before. He had seen vast mountain landscapes that had taken his breath away, and many fire-emblazoned sunsets, and had known a number of beautiful women — even one that had shared with him and the fallen gods his own soul-nature. But never, until now, had he felt the presence of the very Soul of Beauty.

Yet, despite the mood that was upon him, despite the lingering chords of celestial music in his heart, he could still see actual, objective features of the being. It was about the size and shape of a large eagle, and this fact had doubtless formed the basis of the legends that had surrounded it. But it was no bird, Simon knew — nor any creature of earth or its environs. Those scales or feathers, gleaming like a thousand luminous gems, only slightly resembled the scales or feathers of earthly creatures; that gently curved bill, glowing like translucent pearl, only resembled something between the beaks of ibis and eagle; the golden spray of filaments about its head and throat only resembled the inferior crowns and gorgets of earthly kings and queens. And the great eyes, round and limpid and swirling with obscure colors, bright with transcendent life and supermundane intelligence — these resembled nothing he had ever seen…

 

 

Richard L. Tierney

Richard L. Tierney (1936 – 2022) was a poet, author, and editor of adventure fiction, mainly in the realm of dark fantasy. Since his mid-teens, he had been both a fan and scholar of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other great names from the pulp fiction era. In 2010, he was nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grandmaster Award. In 1961, Tierney earned a degree in Entomology (Iowa State College) and served for many years with the U.S. Forest Service in several of the western states and Alaska. A haunter of archaeological ruins by instinct, he had traveled widely, especially in Mexico, Central, and South America. Many of the ideas and images that he employed in his stories were inspired by his extensive travels. His major works include Collected Poems (1981, Arkham House), The House of the Toad (1993, Fedogan and Bremer), Sorcery Against Caesar: The Complete Simon of Gitta Short Stories (Pickman’s Press, 2020), The Drums of Chaos (2008, Mythos Books, 2021 Pickman’s Press), and Savage Menace and Other Poems of Horror (2010, reprint 2021, P’rea Press).

 

DMR Books & Doug Draa PresentsTerra Incognita, S.E. Lindberg tale included

 

DMR Press Release for Terra Incognita April 2022Follow the link for the full announcement.  Here are highlights:
In May DMR Books will release the anthology Terra Incognita: Lost Worlds of Fantasy and Adventure. This project was masterminded by Doug Draa, editor of Weirdbook Magazine. Doug assembled an all-star team of writers, including David C. Smith (author of Oron, The Sorcerer’s Shadow, and the Red Sonja series), Howard Andrew Jones (editor of Tales from the Magician’s Skull and author of the critically-acclaimed The Desert of Souls), Adrian Cole (author of numerous series, including The Voidal, The Dream Lords, and War on Rome), and John C. Hocking (author of Conan and the Emerald Lotus.)

Terra Incognita will appear in May in trade paperback and digital formats. The cover art was created by Lauren Gornik, whose work has appeared on other DMR titles such as Tanith Lee’s The Empress of Dreams, Manly Wade Wellman’s Cahena, and Harry Piper’s The Great Die Slow.
Table of Contents:“Shadow of the Serpent” (a tale of Akram, hero of The Sorcerer’s Shadow) by David C. Smith“The Place of Unutterable Names” by Adrian Cole“One Hive. Two Queens.” by S.E. Lindberg“The Siege of Eire” by J. Thomas Howard“Warriors of Mogai” by Milton Davis “Necropolis Gemstone” by John C. Hocking“From the Darkness Beneath” by Howard Andrew Jones
For more updates on Terra Incognita, join the official Facebook group.

Tales From the Magician's Skull March 2022 Round-Up 2

 

Tales From the Magician's Skull Blog  Mar 2022 Round-Up-2

 Post Links & Blurbs, Championed by Bill Ward

 

Apr 1:  Look at Henry Treece’s The Great Captains by Fletcher Vredenburgh

When Treece turned to fiction, an endeavor that would eventually put an end to his poetry writing, he found his voice in historical fiction, in particular in legendary events and characters, and in providing a realistic basis for them. Among his most notable works is the Celtic Tetralogy. Chronologically, the first, The Golden Strangers (1956) is about the conquest of Neolithic Britain by bronze-wielding invaders. The Dark Island (1952) and Red Queen, White Queen (1958) recount the doomed resistance by British leaders Caractacus and Boudicca, respectively, to Roman rule. In The Great Captains (1956), Artos and Medrodus, descendants of the invaders from The Golden Strangers, fight a doomed battle against a new race of intruders. Together the four books recreate ancient Britain, its forests haunted by spirits, portents looming in every strange occurrence. In his novels he presents events that perhaps lie at the center of the mythic heart of Britain. Alongside Paul Kingsnorth’s Buckmaster Trilogy, it’s one of the great poetic works about Britain’s history, its land, and its people

 

Mar 29:  Ballantine Adult Fantasy: William Morris

One of the most significant figures in the cultural life of Victorian England, William Morris (1834-1896) was everything from a poet, translator, and writer of medievalist fantasy, to a political activist, printer, champion of building preservation, and a renowned innovator in textile manufacturing and interior design. When Lin Carter oversaw the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line (1969-74), he brought many of Morris’ out-of-print fantasies back into print in affordable paperback editions.

 

 

Mar 25: Fueling the Fire of Fantasy Fiction: Gaming’s Influence on Today’s Writers by Brian Murphy

After taking a bit of a controversial stance last week with my piece on the possible detrimental effects of gaming on sword-and-sorcery, I will now take the opportunity to rebut … myself, and offer the opposing side a chance. And discuss the net positives that role-playing and, in particular, Dungeons and Dragons has had on fantasy fiction. As I mentioned in my prior piece, gaming can, and in many instances has, inspired gamers to take up a pen and launch successful careers as fantasy authors. Before they were writers, the likes of China Mieville (author of Perdido Street Station), Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), and Joe Abercrombie (First Law trilogy, The Heroes) were slinging dice at the game table. George R.R. Martin is another notable author who sings the praises of role-playing, though he had started writing in 1971, prior to the invention of D&D.

 

 

Mar 22: Classic Covers: Dragonlance

It might be fair to say that the Dragonlance series — initially a trilogy of novels written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman in tandem with a group of D&D modules from TSR — is The Lord of the Rings of media tie in fiction: massively best-selling, appealing to a broader fanbase than conventional wisdom dictated, and prompting an entire industry of imitators. In Dragonlance one can see the beginnings of not only an explosion in shared worlds based on popular media, but also the genesis of Young Adult fiction as a force punching well above its weight class in publishing.

 

Mar 18: Dungeons & Dragons: Friend or Foe of Sword-and-Sorcery?   by Brian Murphy

I’m a long-time D&D fan and ex-gamer who may again pick up the dice bag. D&D is an awesome game, has given me countless hours of unadulterated joy, and I will unequivocally state that the world is a better place for it. But, I don’t think it has necessarily been a uniformly positive influence for subsequent generations of writers. Specifically, it may have played a role in the downfall of sword-and-sorcery.  Note: The following bit of speculation is not an indictment of what goes on at the table during D&D games, which at their best are cauldrons of creativity. But rather, the impact D&D may have had on sword-and-sorcery and subsequent fantasy fiction.

 

Mar 15: Where to Start With Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

Aside from Conan the Cimmerian, there can be no more iconic image in all of sword-and-sorcery fiction than the dynamic duo of “the Twain.” Fafhrd, towering Northern barbarian, and Mouser, weaselly little thief, form a wonderfully visually complementary whole, and that’s even before you get to their actual personalities. Bawdy and reckless, bantering and adventurous, these two lovable rogues have traveled the length and breadth of a nowhere place called Nehwon, with many of their most memorable escapades taking place in the city of Lankhmar.

FROLIC ON THE AMARANTHYN BY CHASE A. FOLMAR

 Posted on Black Gate : 

NEW TREASURES: FROLIC ON THE AMARANTHYN BY CHASE A. FOLMAR

 Monday, March 28, 2022  SELindberg 

Frolic on the Amaranthyn (Sable Star Press,4/6/2022). Cover art by Goran Gligović

Frolic on the Amaranthyn will be published by Sable Star Press on April 6th, 2022. It is 130 pages, priced at$7.99 paperback and $2.99 in digital formats (available soon from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others).  Cover art by Goran Gligović. This post announces the release and previews excerpts.

Chase A. Folmar has been demonstrating his command of Weird Fiction, Sword & Sorcery (S&S), and the English language in various short fiction entries (primarily via Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Sword & Sorcery & Witchhouse: Amateur Magazine of Cosmic Horror online magazines). This novella, Frolic on the Amaranthyn, seems to be his print debut. If you are not familiar with his previous work, you may misconstrue the contents from the title as being a fantasy romance (which it is not; and, you can check out his stories in Whetstone #1 #2 #4 or Whitchhouse #1).

If you are familiar with his works there, you will need to read Frolic on the Amaranthyn. Chase A. Folmar (CAF) style is very reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith (CAS). Clark Ashton Smith was a contemporary of the Father of S&S, Robert E. Howard, and Father of Cosmic Horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (most of CAS’s fiction is online, as well as his nonfiction like his essay on Atmosphere in Weird Fiction). In short, do not expect fantasy romance; expect an engaging, literary adventure.

Official Book Summary:

Channeling the artistic stylings of weird fantasists such as Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance, Chase A. Folmar utilizes lush prose and archaic vernacular to craft a wholly otherworldly setting for readers to explore in this, his debut novella. We follow within the duo Uralant and Emrasarie, brigands who employ their respective talents of swordsmanship and seduction in the pursuit of precious coin. After the spoils of an orchestrated heist are lost to them just as success seemed assured, the pair’s misfortune only increases when, stranded in a strange city neither are familiar with, it is revealed that their target had also been pursued by a sorcerer of the worst and most dreaded kind, and that all his attention has now been directed towards them. In order to escape the severity of his vengeance, they are forced to comply with his fanatic whims and take part in a theft that will hopefully strike clear the debt he has placed upon them. But that same theft will lead them towards a dark secret behind the city’s beautiful façade, a secret tied to a mysterious ark that travels down the waters of the Amaranthyn River on certain nights, and upon which takes place what is known only as the Frolic.

Style & Excerpts

“My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. You attain a black magic, perhaps unconsciously, in your pursuit of corroborative detail and verisimilitude.” — 1930 letter to Lovecraft, by Clark Ashton Smith

Within Frolic on the Amaranthyn dialogue is sparse and the narrative is filled with obscure, abundant vocabulary. It is surprisingly easy to read. As per the teaser quote above, CAF follows CAS’s approach by stringing together words & feelings as if casting a strange spell, a cadence, that will enthrall you. So, he’s sort of a thaumaturgist. He’s on the radar now to corner about his thoughts on Beauty in Weird Fiction (that’s a series of interviews we run here on Black Gate (link to interviews).

Frankly, the title and blurb do not convey the intentional weirdness you will experience. The literary prose-poetry will appeal to weird fiction fans, and the vivid melee will appeal to Sword & Sorcery readers. Check out these excerpts:

Poetic Prose

…and soon did Emrasarie find herself surrounded by a flock of revelers similar to those she had earlier left. They had paraded up the same hill as she, and now fell playfully to the grass about her, as if flower petals cast aside by an infatuate pondering the affection carried their way by the one whom they so ardently desired.

Emrasarie had not the strength, nor indeed the will, to retreat this time. She simply watched as arms fumbled lazily through the air, legs entwined with one another, and faces alight with the unearthly fire overhead coalesced like streams of wax dripping from a weary candle. The other face, so prevalent in her mind’s eye only a moment ago, had completely disappeared. With it went the name it carried, and the affection she had felt towards it. Nothing remained in the void of its absence. Nothing but beauty seeking to smother her in its embrace. Beauty so much more preferable to all that was ugly, coarse, and unforgiving in the world beyond…

Weird Melee

…Uralant spied several that had veered aside and were instead making towards Emrasarie. Leaping with furious bounds, he hurled himself across the distance separating them, and thrust like a battering ram his sword at the nearest threat. Its length plunged clear through the enemy’s torso, releasing a heavy spume of embers from its back as it crumpled from the blow and collapsed.

Quickly pulling his weapon free, Uralant noted a thick, glistening fluid of purest black now coated its tapered edges, bearing a gaseous stench that lingered even as he leapt clear from a subsequent attack. More talons cut through the air in a whirlwind of steel, and as Uralant dodged about and kept the slashing monstrosity at bay, he realized no other sounds came from any of these approaching demons. No roars or shrieks of fury, no grunted breaths from exertion, no muttered curses or vows of vengeance for its fallen companion; just the tearing of its hands through empty space, and red eyes glaring at him, bright as the blood they were so desperate to spill.

Spying an opening, Uralant took the chance and swung high. He felt the shattering of steel beneath steel, and the subsequent tear as a rigid neck was severed through. When the head finally fell and crashed near his feet, the eye set within it dimmed to a vacant black, and did not ignite again…

 

Expect More Folmar

Without spoiling, it is clear that Uralant and Emrasarie will have more adventures to chronicle. The epilogue works in a mysterious, angelic sorceress that begs for more attention as do the fates of some rare, papyrus magic scrolls.

Chase A. Folmar Bio:

Chase A. Folmar is a writer of speculative fiction, especially in the vein of weird fantasy and horror. He is one of the associate editors of Witch House: Amateur Magazine of Cosmic Horror, and a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Hampton Roads writing group. A graduate of English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Chase has pursued his writing ambitions ever since, having been published in several online magazines and amateur zines. Inspiration for his writing comes from all across the literary spectrum, as well as the music he listens to and art he invariably stumbles upon. He currently lives in Virginia with his wife and their ever-growing horde of rescued pets.

www.chaseafolmar.com; Twitter: @stranger_lands; CAF on Instagram

S&S Group Read Topic Poll - May-June Selections

 Sword & Sorcery Group on Goodreads 

Poll May-June 2022 Group Rad Topic Poll; usually top two topics get a two-month spotlight. Feel welcome to write-in options
Sword & Planet: for example... Thundar: Man of Two Worlds or Swords of Talera or Transit to Scorpio (Dray Prescot, #1)
Sword & Gun? or "Solitary Gunman" (Solomon Kane?) The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane
Tanith Lee
The Blood of Roses Volume 1: Mechail, AnilliaThe BirthgraveEmpress of Dreams ,
Sword and Sea: some swashbuckling adventures like Waters of Darkness or Sea of Quills...or The Mark of Ran or dare I say: Conan the Buccaneer
Kagen the Damned by Jonathan Maberry (due out in May 2022)comments and details· show results· invite friends

Tales From The Magician's Skull -Mar-2022 Round-Up 1

 

Tales From the Magician's Skull Blog Mar 2022 Round-Up-1 Feb-24: Adventures in Fiction: Arkham House, Ithaqua, and In-Jokes: The Influence of August Derleth  by Bradley K. McDevitt

Most of you probably know the name H.P. Lovecraft, but do you know August Derleth? Bradley K. McDevitt reminds you that you have a good reason to remember him. Without August Derleth (1909-1971), you probably wouldn’t have that Cthulhu bumper sticker on your car, that Cthulhu for President poster, and certainly not that Plushie Cthulhu you have staring down at you from your geek-memorabilia shelf.  Not that Cthulhu would not exist, but he (it?) would be just one more forgotten character in a series of stories by an author unknown except to the most ardent of horror literati. Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s greatest creation and most if not all of his fiction would have passed into obscurity if not for August Derleth’s founding of Arkham House publishing.

 

Feb-25: Classic Covers: Arkham House

When one thinks of legendary pulp publishers, names like Weird Tales, Black Mask, and Planet Stories leap to mind — beautiful magazines as sadly transitory as the era of popular literacy they defined. But it was for an indie book publisher to emerge as one of the leading lights of preservation for the best in the weird and fantastical horror of the age, and add its own legendary name to the rolls of honored pulpsters: Arkham House.

Mar-3: Appendix N. Archaeology: Arthur Machen by Bradley K. McDevitt

This article is part of a series where the spotlight shines on some authors that inspired the writers we acknowledge today as influencing the creation of Dungeons and Dragons. For those unfamiliar with his fiction, the late Victorian era Welsh author Arthur Machen was admired by contemporaries like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and William Butler Yeats. Further relevant for this article, his work is an acknowledged influence by Appendix N authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft even cheerfully admitted appropriating details like the god Nodens and reality-destroying language Aklo from Machen to be parts of the Cthulhu Mythos.

 

Mar-4: A Look at Andre Norton’s Witch World by Fletcher Vredenburgh

Born in 1912, Alice Mary Norton worked as a teacher, a librarian, and finally a reader for Gnome Press before becoming a full-time writer in 1958. By then she’d already had a dozen books published, including such classics as Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D. and Star Rangers. Based on their easy style and simpler characterizations, most of her early books would probably be classified as YA today. It was with 1963’s  Witch World that Norton first wrote a full-fledged sword-and-sorcery book steeped in pulp gloriousness. Sadly, for one of the most successful and prolific women to write fantasy and science with a career that last over fifty years, her books seem sorely neglected today.

 

Mar-8: Classic Covers: Andre Norton

Alice Mary Norton — best known to the world by her pen name Andre Norton — was the author of over a dozen series in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, as well as a host of standalone works, including everything from young adult stories and historical adventures to wild science-fantasy mashups and sword-and-sorcery. Her best known and most enduring work is Witch World, itself consisting of story cycles running the gamut from portal fantasies incorporating science fiction to straight up high fantasy. Her long and varied publishing career would influence many a future writer, result in Norton being honored as the first woman to receive the SFWA Grand Master Award, and, of course, inspire dozens upon dozens of evocative book covers.

 

Mar-11: Jack Vance’s Influence on Dungeons & Dragons

Did you know that ‘Vecna’—he of the disembodied hand and eyeball—is a deliberate anagram of ‘Vance?’ Gary Gygax made no secret of his love for the work, and person, of Jack Vance, and Vance’s Dying Earth stories in particular were often cited (see Appendix N) by Gygax as a major influence on the genesis of Dungeons & Dragons. Most prominently, of course, in what came to be known as the ‘Vancian magic system’—a term that emerged from the world of RPGs rather than any literary fandom—but there are many other elements, and indeed a prevailing tone, in D&D that are inspired in whole or in part by the works of Jack Vance.

 

 

BEAUTIFUL AND REPULSIVE BUTTERFLIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH M. STERN

 BEAUTIFUL AND REPULSIVE BUTTERFLIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH M. STERN

originally posted on Black Gate.com 

 Photo Credits: H. Lindberg[/caption]

We have an ongoing series on Black Gate discussing “Beauty in Weird Fiction.” We corner authors to tap their minds about their muses and ways to make ‘repulsive’ things ‘attractive to readers.’  Recent guests on Black Gate have included Darrell Schweitzer, Anna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg, Stephen Leigh, Jason Ray Carney, and John C. Hocking. See the full list of interviews at the end of this post. This one covers emerging author M. Stern who writes weird/horror fiction and sci-fi. He has had stories appear in Weird Book #44, Startling Stories#34, and Doug Draa's clown anthology Funny As a Heart Attack. There's some strange and complicated beauty to be found in all of those. He also has published in several other markets including  Lovecraftiana: The Magazine of Eldritch Horror and flash fiction that deals with aesthetics and transgression in Cosmic Horror Monthly #19.

SE: How do you define Beauty that appears to be repulsive (weird/ horrific)?

MS: Beauty in general is one of those concepts that gets harder to define the more you think about it. Of course, this is why there’s a whole wing of philosophy that has dealt with this type of thing for 2,500 years or so, on and off. But just thinking about it in my own personal experience without invoking an overarching theory of aesthetics, I find myself sometimes asking – why does a particular face or personality or characteristic strike me as immediately beautiful when another one doesn’t? How can someone be completely unremarkable when I enter a room but be beautiful when I leave it? And what does the way I experience beauty in the real world have to do with the beauty I recognize or appreciate on the page, in film, music, photography, painting or elsewhere?

Despite all the navel-gazing I’ve done throughout the pandemic I don’t know that I have clear answers, but who does? I guess you could say I believe beauty is one of the most important things in life, even though I can’t really explain what it is. I think a number of my favorite authors – inside and outside of genre fiction -- have ascribed this type of mystical quality to beauty in their way.

Vladimir Nabokov used to say that he believed the beauty of butterflies to be proof of the existence of God, because their variation in color pattern served no evolutionary purpose and thus illustrated a metaphysical plan of some sort – that it was an example of nature furnishing us with things meant solely to satisfy our sense of aesthetics. 

It just occurred to me though that if you really get face-to-face with a butterfly, down looking at the non-wing part which is the most important part from the butterfly’s perspective, it’s sort of revolting. 

It seems like under the right circumstances if you put a butterfly on a little kid, the kid would probably scream. In fact from what I understand there is a class of antimalarial medications that people sometimes take that make them see human-sized butterflies and the first instinct upon seeing one is to jump out the window to get away from it. I think that says something, though I am not exactly sure what. But it does get us to the question of the relationship between beauty and repulsion, horror, disgust, weirdness, etc. in fiction and defining it, which is an even more difficult thing to do than just defining beauty as, I suppose, whatever is intuitive about beauty is less immediately obvious in its disgusting iterations.

M. Stern's Partial List of Weird Beauty

This seems like a perfect time to implicate my wife and share some of her butterfly photographs, including the feature image. Beyond butterflies, can you categorize "Weird Beauty" in art & storytelling?

Running down a quick and not-at-all exhaustive list of types of beauty that come to mind when I think of beauty in horror/horrific art might help me define it. But I’m just riffing. Some of these categories probably overlap, and I don’t mean this to be a restrictive, be-all, end-all list. People can get too crazy with categorization sometimes. Anyway, we’ve got:

A) OPPRESSIVE GRANDEUR: Grotesque, repulsive, or otherwise intense images so superlative in doing what they do... that they overwhelm us in a way that hits the same mental and emotional notes as beauty.

Something like a repulsive or horrifying version of “grandeur.” I think of this as being most in line with the “Burkean Sublime,” though I know I have sometimes used this term to refer to other types of repulsive, visceral beauty (there are some other adjacent philosophical concepts this one might relate to as well).

For the reader… Edmund Burke is the author of the 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. My interpretation is that Burke proposed that scary things that are clearly out of our control, like severe weather or earthquakes, offer vivid perspectives that can feel strangely good: daily minutia and grievances pale in the comparison of large-grandeur events.

For sure – and we see this one in some of the earliest modern weird/horror fiction, some of the stuff that influenced Lovecraft. William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderland is page after page of it; dead suns and ominous dark landscapes lit by green stars and all types of other descriptions of things destabilizing and inconceivable.

B) DISSONANT IMAGERY: Images that stage or orchestrate repulsive or violent acts with a degree of artistically intentional stylization... that we would normally see applied in works that are traditionally beautiful.

I think of this as being the kind of beauty you find in the most auteur-driven of the classic Italian gore films – expressionistic blood splatters (for instance various blood sprays on white backgrounds in Dario Argento’s Tenebre, or at the beginning of Joe D’Amato’s somewhat vile classic Anthropophagus when we follow the film’s star cannibal walking up the beach by the drops of blood dripping off him into the sand), stylized eye gouges (the most notorious being in Lucio Fulci’s Zombi) and so on. In horror literature, the ending of Clive Barker’s short story “The Skins of the Fathers,” which appeared in the second volume of Books of Blood, jumps out at me as an example:

The men whose faces were buried but whose limbs, or parts of bodies, still broke surface, were dead of asphyxiation by now. Only Eleanor Kooker, Davidson and two other men survived. One was locked in the earth up to his chin. Eleanor was buried so that her breasts sat on the ground, her arms were free to beat uselessly at the ground that held her fast. Davidson himself was held from his hips down. And most horribly, one pathetic victim was seen only by his nose and mouth. His head was tipped back into the ground, blinded by rock. Still he breathed, still he screamed.

Eleanor Kooker was scrabbling at the ground with torn nails, but this was not loose sand. It was immovable.

-- Clive Barker

This scene strikes me as having a very painterly, stylized feel to it. I also wonder if it owes something to a scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s classic film Teorema, in which a character buries herself up to her eyeballs and we see her tears pooling in the mud.

This brings to mind the controversial 1971 film A Clockwork Orange (link to 1975 trailer). Stanley Kubrick meshed operatic symphonies with some wildly violent/weird scenes (based off the black comedy novel by Anthony Burgess). Many considered such depictions to be a “glorification of violence” or “condoning of evilness” rather than a statement about violence/evil (or whatever). The movie craft is well done, cinematography well-composed, etc.…but the content deplorable and hard for many to watch.

To your point here Seth, I definitely agree about Clockwork demonstrating this type of beauty – certainly, Kubrick was as style-conscious a director as ever there was and it is on full display in Clockwork – and I think the stylization probably does play a role in the controversy surrounding it as you mentioned, though the film also opens up a different can of worms I think, with respect to realistic violence and what a mainstream audience vs. a genre/transgressive cinema audience is willing to tolerate. But I think another element worth thinking about here is something I saw Paul Schrader mention in an interview in which he discussed Robert Bresson’s The Pickpocket and its impact on the screenplay of Taxi Driver. He pointed out that an audience begins to identify with the main character of a movie after a certain point, no matter what the character is doing. And so I think with Clockwork, a certain kind of viewer – perhaps the viewer looking for a straightforward morality play – feels uncomfortably implicated. Because they’re along for the ride watching the “cool kids” in the cool costumes speaking in the weird cryptic pidgin-Russian slang beat the tar out of people with canes and so on. Which is perhaps one big point of the movie. I think someone like Slavoj Zizek would probably have more insight on the aesthetics of violence and so on in this respect.

This is a dangerous strategy to pursue as an artist, since (although evocative) it confuses glorification vs. depiction of intense action

I don’t know if I personally would call it dangerous exactly, in that I think it really depends on what an artist is going for, though I agree that it can alienate particular audiences or draw criticism. What we mean by “glorification” is also an interesting thing to look at here – I think an argument could be made that the “okay” violence of action movies does more in the way of glorifying it than something like Clockwork does, though I might be getting too far afield of discussing beauty here. The irony of Clockwork, I think, is that it actually has a moral center, though the film doesn’t get to it as clearly as the book. Not that I believe entertainment needs to have a moral center, but in this case there is one to be found there. When I watched it, then read it, in high school, I didn’t understand the big hubub about the exclusion of the 21st chapter from the film; the chapter in which Alex as an adult encounters the old gang and they’re all sort of banal. You reach a certain age, though, and you realize that life really is sometimes like that. You remember a kid who used to get into all sorts of crazy stuff and you look him up and the guy is now an insurance salesman with six kids. Not because he was subjected to some effective program of social correction, but because selling insurance is what old people do.

By making the brutality more “beautiful” it seems to many as less acceptable (i.e. vs the “okay” violence in superhero or action movies).

 Screenshots from the original trailer of A Clockwork Orange (1975) [/caption]

C) LINGUISTIC ART: Descriptions of horrible things that are particularly evocative through being lyrical and skillfully use language to evoke disgust, or are beautiful on the sentence level even though they describe things that are disgusting or disturbing.

Patrick Sueskind’s Das Parfum, which I read in the original German, is a more recent example I’ve read of this.  For Das Parfum, it’s hard for me to pick out one particular example because the first couple of pages demonstrate this kind of beauty and I can’t really pick it apart. It’s a description of French cities in the 18th century and it’s just this gorgeous, ongoing lyrical description of how much everything stank. It’s this list of stinky characteristics of one thing after another and it sort of makes you want to puke. After this onslaught of imagery, the first character you meet is the main character’s mother, who has a near-miscarriage in a pile of fish guts.

Looking for an example of this in Poe, I went back to the one everyone knows, "The Telltale Heart", and found this passage – in which the narrator/killer describes his perception of what the guy he’s about to kill is thinking.

He had been saying to himself — ‘It is nothing but the wind in the chimney — it is only a mouse crossing the floor,’ or ‘it is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp.’ Yes, he has been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel — although he neither saw nor heard — to feel the presence of my head within the room.

- Edgar Allen Poe

So you’ve got this artfully rendered account of this horrifying situation. There is, of course, nothing we would consider natively beautiful about a home entry with an intent to commit a murder. But the elegant description of an insane narrator imposes a beauty on it through the strength of the language, drawing you into his lurid fantasy of what’s going on in his victim’s head. I think there’s especially something to how he finishes it out with a florid depiction of looming dread, the “mournful influence of the unperceived shadow.” 

D) QUIETLY DISTURBING EVOCATIONS: Images/descriptions that are not necessarily grotesque, but never-the-less haunting, chilling, nightmarish ... images that seem to come from somewhere deeply rooted in us and in our fears, and that seem to say more than they say.

Like the Danse Macabre scene at the end of The Seventh Seal (1957). For those who are not familiar with it, The Seventh Seal is an art-house classic by Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman. It’s about a knight, Antonius Block (played by Max von Sydow) in Europe during the time of the Black Plague, who finds himself playing a chess game with Death. This is, of course, an existential allegory. Block lives as long as the game keeps going. Audiences of a certain generation might remember the character of Death in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, which was a reference to this movie.

 Danse Macabre scene at the end of The Seventh Seal[/caption]

E) SUBLIME EVOCATIONS: Concepts that do the same sort of thing, but aren’t directly tied to a particular image or description

Such as Clive Barker’s whole concept of an afterlife built around aesthetic transgression in "The Hellbound Heart"/Hellraiser I & II.

It strikes me that what the Hellraiser series – meaning the novella and the first two movies, where Barker still played some role and they weren’t just using repurposed scripts – is getting at, is a horror-fied take on what was discussed in certain quarters of French philosophy as the “limit-experience.” An experience of sensation that blows all your gaskets and seems to hint at transcendence. German philosopher Schopenhauer observed that things like pleasure and happiness are impossible to maintain. If you had a pill that made you perfectly happy and took one every day, you’d eventually adjust to it and get bored and want a super-happy pill to cut through the first happy pill. A story like Hellraiser, I think, presents a vision of busting through that limit and being able to up the ante on sensation indefinitely. Happy pills all the way up until you’re walking around with nails in your face and ripping people up with chains.  And so I think the conceptual beauty Barker is aiming for is the boundlessness of it. The idea that you could have a kind of pleasure so outside the bounds of what is human that it would exceed mere transgression and scan as unending, unchecked horror. There are of course other readings of what he was going for and where he was coming from with this concept of Hell, which may be valid, but regardless I think there’s a sort of beautiful anti-beauty to it. Frank in the movie, and the doctor guy in the second one, both see first hand the disparity between “beauty” in the conventional sense and a beauty that elides the distinction between pleasure and suffering. They think they’re freaky but get in over their heads. It’s interesting, too, that Stuart Gordon – who I think of as being very much a philosophical filmmaker – released From Beyond around the same time, a splattery and grotesque Lovecraft adaptation which deals with similar themes. 

F) CONTRASTING IMAGERY: Then we have beautiful things in horror... that aren’t directly related to the horrific element

For instance, beautiful or serene scenes, or beautiful sentiments, that follow or precede horrible things to strengthen the impact of both.

This is a technique you find all over the place in horror movies (and literature, too) – but the place I remember it being pointed out, in particular, was in a film commentary track by Tim Lucas on a Mario Bava movie, I think Blood & Black Lace. I think it probably does occur more frequently in Italian giallo (proto-slasher) films as well as the wave of gore films that came after them, as those directors were very focused on technique, even if the storytelling was sometimes convoluted or incoherent. But watch any one of those movies and if you look for it, you’ll notice a serene nature scene after a grisly murder somewhere. 

And finally, I think uniqueness and the extent to which an image, description, or scene “sticks out” may also play a role. Though I think I’m getting into more territory that’s difficult to define. Is anything really “unique”? Do we remember things that are beautiful or are things beautiful because we remember them? I haven’t read much about it but memory, like consciousness itself, is probably one of those things that our minds just sort of do and it’s not abundantly obvious what it’s there for. 

I think in some sense all the scenes, images, and descriptions I’ve mentioned so far have an element of this. It gets us back into undefinable territory sort of – what makes something “memorable?” What makes it “unique?” How “unique” can anything really be? A couple more scenes come to mind immediately, though, when thinking about this. In a Euro-horror flick from the ‘70s called Alucarda done by a director who I believe was Jodorowsky-adjacent named Juan Lopez Moctezuma, there is a scene with a woman in a coffin filled with blood.  

Beauty is all over the place in horror if you think about it – but then of course there is still plenty of stuff to be found in horror, across sub-genres, that is not at all beautiful and does not aspire to beauty, and is merely horrific or shocking or repulsive. That’s probably the larger part of what happens in the genre, and that’s fine – I love it all. “It’s a nugget if you dug it,” as they say.

Do you find beauty in your weird fiction? Dissect an example.

Sure! Though I think the reader has the final say on if there’s something beautiful in there or not, I do try to create aesthetically resonant, memorable images, and I hope some of them come out as beautiful. People have pointed out that I like “big” endings to my stories, which I think is probably true in some sense of all the stories I have had published so far. Even my small endings could probably be characterized as big. It just seems natural to me that you’re going to want a horror (or dark science fiction) story to go out in a big way that finishes things out effectively in terms of the narrative but also leaves the reader with an arresting image to think about. This is not to say I end every story with a world-ending (or world-altering) thunderclap. I have finished a few stories that way however, including the one in this first example.

The first one that comes to mind is the ending of “Birth,” my story which appeared in Weirdbook Magazine #44. I think there are actually a few aesthetically striking scenes in that story. I think it gets sort of intense at points, but that’s not to say that I think the story is salacious or excessive. I actually had planned to go further with some of the imagery – more descriptively and fully fleshing out particular rituals where things are only hinted at in the published story. I decided that bringing some of the visceral, psychosexual stuff into “extreme” territory would make it too much about that and I would lose the point of the story and make it more about how far I could push it. 

But as to the particular image that comes to mind, at the end of Birth there is a scene in which an angelic figure, having been delivered into existence through a rather bizarre and explosive form of transubstantiation, meets the person responsible for bringing her into being. She utters a single word in Biblical Hebrew, and the choice I made to go with that is a whole story in and of itself. The character who encounters her is, himself, so overwhelmed by her presence and its beauty, and the reality-flexing shriek she lets out, that his body and mind can’t handle it. He is biologically unequipped to absorb the aesthetic experience of encountering a being this beautiful. He melts down physiologically. Blood starts pouring out of his eyeballs. I think we’ve all been there once or twice, right? Maybe I’m just a bit of a romantic. The creature cradles him with a motherly gesture. The character, his mind burned to a cinder, responds with an infantile reflex. The reader is left with what I think of as an image that feels a bit esoteric and transcendent.

I also find a kind of beauty in narrative symmetry. In my cosmic horror-comedy Gus, for instance, which is in the clown-themed horror/noir anthology Funny As A Heart Attack, it begins with an image of a bustling, joyful, carnivalesque sort of atmosphere. Lots of happy things all going on at once. The story’s final scene starts with a scene in the same place, only after the world has spiraled into chaos. The same types of images you see as happy, innocent ones at the beginning are perverted into over-the-top cruel ones at the beginning of the third act. In a story that I think is, among other things, about idealization and romanticization and decay. I think there is a kind of beauty in those types of layers. There’s a lot of other stuff like that in the story as well; Easter eggs where occurrences or images or references match up at different points in the story, some more obvious and some less so. Though as I dig deeper into this one I start to wonder if I am discussing aesthetics or just “craft.” But I do hope that if people notice that stuff they get a kick out of it.

What scares you? Is it beautiful?

There is a whole universe of things to be afraid of out there and I have worried about all of them at least once. When I was a kid I was so anxious I used to worry about things like leprosy, even though by the time I was born leprosy was easily curable and (in the developed world) could only be contracted through intimate contact with an armadillo. Some of my fears might have beautiful elements to them but the absence of beauty figures into a lot of my fears.

Does any formal training or experience motivate your writing?

Not directly but I think possibly. There was a time a few years ago when I was writing a tremendous amount of other stuff on a very rigorous schedule. In particular, stuff for which it was important to be conscious of word count. I suspect that a couple of years of that did translate into my having more control of how I write fiction on the nuts and bolts level. There are some other explanations I sometimes point to as possibilities for why I have been able to write stories much more regularly, more clearly, and without the same degree of crushing agony over the past few years than in the previous decade or two. But I suspect at least part of it comes from thinking about writing as a way of organizing information, within the context of a word count, to meet the expectations of an audience. All the artistic, conceptual, imaginative, bizarre and – since we’re talking about beauty -- beautiful stuff is still absolutely integral, but that stuff can only really come to fruition within an organized framework. Otherwise, you’re just sitting there waiting for a story to put itself together for you.

Any current or future endeavor can we pitch?

I’ve got a story slated to appear in Lovecraftiana: The Magazine of Eldritch Horror at the beginning of 2023 about which I am very excited -- I think it’s sort of a lumbering beast of a story. I heard Gavin Chappel say in an interview that his favorite stuff from Lovecraft was the dream cycle stuff and that he digs the weird far-out Moorcock stuff. The Dancers at the End of Time is one of my favorite series, so I went into it with that mindset -- sending him something that would have characteristics of his favorite type of weird fiction, but doing very much my take on it. So it’s very narrative/character-driven but it gets bonkers. I’m looking forward to seeing that one in print. And I’m always working on stuff, but I am too superstitious to talk about what I’m working on.

 

Interview List Regarding #Weird Beauty on Black GateDarrel Schweitzer  THE BEAUTY IN HORROR AND SADNESS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DARRELL SCHWEITZER  2018Sebastian Jones  THE BEAUTY IN LIFE AND DEATH: AN INTERVIEW WITH SEBASTIAN JONES  2018Charles Gramlich  THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE REPELLENT: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES A. GRAMLICH   2019Anna Smith Spark  DISGUST AND DESIRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNA SMITH SPARK   2019Carol Berg  ACCESSIBLE DARK FANTASY: AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROL BERG  2019Byron Leavitt  GOD, DARKNESS, & WONDER: AN INTERVIEW WITH BYRON LEAVITT  2021Philip Emery  THE AESTHETICS OF SWORD & SORCERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP EMERY   2021C. Dean Andersson  DEAN ANDERSSON TRIBUTE INTERVIEW AND TOUR GUIDE OF HEL: BLOODSONG AND FREEDOM!  (2021 repost of 2014)Jason Ray Carney SUBLIME, CRUEL BEAUTY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JASON RAY CARNEY (2021)Stephen Leigh IMMORTAL MUSE BY STEPHEN LEIGH: REVIEW, INTERVIEW, AND PRELUDE TO A SECRET CHAPTER (2021)John C. Hocking BEAUTIFUL PLAGUES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN C. HOCKING  (2022)interviews prior 2018 (i.e., with John R. Fultz, Janet E. Morris, Richard Lee Byers, Aliya Whitely …and many more) are on  S.E. Lindberg’s website

 

S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor at Black Gate, regularly reviewing books and interviewing authors on the topic of “Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction.” He is also the lead moderator of the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group and an intern for Tales from the Magician’s Skull magazine. As for crafting stories, he has contributed five entries across Perseid Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series and has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies.  He independently publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction; short stories of Dyscrasia Fiction have appeared in Whetstone and Swords & Sorcery online magazines.

B.J. Swann Reviews Helen's Daimones

Author B.J. Swann Reviews Helen's Daimones (link from Goodreads)BJ Swann writes splendid bizarre adventure (Aeon of Chaos series, featured on Black Gate), so it is an honor he delved into Dyscrasia Fiction. He also reviewed Lord of Dyscrasia and Spawn of Dyscrasia, and the set offers a comprehensive review of the series (which sill evolves).

Here's his review:

"A worthy sequel to a work of epic weirdness.

It’s hard to articulate what it feels like to visit the world of Dyscrasia fiction. It’s weird in the extreme but also eerily familiar. The visuals are especially striking. Here we have grotesque and apocalyptic images interwoven with visions of ethereal beauty. The constant gothic themes of decadence and fathomless antiquity serve only to enhance the reader’s sensations of awe. The world of Dyscrasia fiction also has it’s own peculiar laws, its own sorcerous rules, which possess the irresistible emotional logic of folklore and fairy tale.

There were a lot of vivid moments in this book that felt intensely cinematic and really stuck in my head. The two young heroines, Helen and Sharon, wandering through an apocalyptic wasteland, coming face to face with a hideous dyscrasia-ridden mutant building a nest of dead bodies and filth...the tragic Lady Sabina, preserved in a state of hideous and beautiful undeath, her womb a honeycomb of horrors...and of course, the vision of fiery sprites coming alive from a pyre of children’s dreams and nightmares. Lindberg’s intensely visual style creates a hallucinatory reading experience.

There are some notable differences between HELEN’S DAIMONES and LORDS OF DYSCRASIA, the first book in the series. LORDS was epic in scope, detailing the course of an apocalyptic conflict. HELEN’S has a more intimate focus, dealing with the foundation of a settlement now that the Ill Age has ostensibly ended. The two new central characters, Helen and Sharon, are sympathetic and relatable, and their simple humanity provides an excellent anchor point amongst all the weirdness of their world. My only real criticism of LORDS was that its weirdness sometimes made it alienating, but HELEN’S has the human touch throughout, and is always grounded in the emotions and needs of its protagonists. On a similar note, there also seems to be a superior balance in place between the wealth of visuals on offer and the internal realities of the characters. Because of this, HELEN’S feels more grounded and less abstract, whilst still being as relentlessly weird as the original. This feels like an impressive achievement. Structurally the book is somewhat meandering and episodic, which is by no means a bad thing. Perhaps the only downside is that HELEN’S lacks the epic, apocalyptic conclusion of its older sibling. Indeed there is no real conclusion, only the setup for the third book in the series, which I will naturally be reading very soon."

Tales From The Magician's Skull - Issue #7 Round-Up

 

Tales From the Magician's Skull Blog Early Feb 2022 Round-Up

PRE-ORDER #7. What's in it? Seven tales, and all have previews on the TFTMS blog! here are the quick links:JAN 31 A preview of John C. Hocking’s “The Gift of a Poison Necklace”

Benhus returns once again to the pages of Tales From the Magician’s Skull to confront the mystery of a necklace that kills. When his patron, the Lady Thale, survives both an assassination attempt and the follow-up robbery to recover the deadly jewelry sent by her enemy, Benhus must investigate a twisty trail of murder and intrigue in “The Gift of a Poison Necklace.”

Fans of John C. Hocking’s long-running series will know that this is the seventh King’s Blade tale to appear in our magazine—one in every issue! Once again the young swordsman Benhus is in over his head and beset on all sides—good thing he knows a thing or two about swordwork . . .

Let Stefan Poag’s double-page, tavern-smashing illustration further whet your appetitive for sword-and-sorcery action while you await the full story in our soon-to-be-released next issue!

 

FEB 5 A Preview of D.J. Tyrer’s “Death Stalks the Night”

Horror-powerhouse D.J. Tyrer marks his first appearance in Tales From the Magician’s Skull with an eerie tale of bone-stealing nightwalkers and sinister magic. All is not well on the night-shrouded veldt, and only the warrior Ini-ndoga and his diminutive companion Mbeva can thwart a potent evil in “Death Stalks the Night.”

Chris Arneson’s mistily mysterious double-page illustration sets the stage for this tale of dark forces and heroic deeds — and our downloadable preview is sure to whet your appetite for the full story in our soon-to-be-released next issue!

FEB 8 A preview of C.L. Werner’s “The Snake in the Fold”

Fans of Tales From the Magician’s Skull and Warhammer Fantasy alike need no introduction to C.L. Werner, who returns once again to the pages of our magazine with a tale of his wandering samurai, Shintaro Oba. On a mission to free the soul of his late master from a demon’s clutches, Oba’s encounters with spirits, monsters, and foul magic are fast-becoming the stuff of legend — join him as he once again braves damnation in “The Snake in the Fold.”

Randy Broecker’s iconic double page illustration of samurai versus snake demon embodies eastern style and pulp power, the perfect match for Werner’s Oba! Our downloadable preview is sure to whet your appetite for the full story in our soon-to-be-released next issue!

FEB 11 A preview of Mark Rigney’s “Dara’s Tale” 

Mark Rigney’s story of a remote village beset by scurriers — and perhaps fouler things besides — is his first foray in the pages of Tales From the Magician’s Skull. Young Dahnica, her head full of stories and a knife in her hand, may be all that stands between her people and a dark evil in “Dara’s Tale.”

Peter Mullen’s creepy-crawly illustration will surely have you scurrying after TFTMS#7 — and our downloadable preview is guaranteed to whet your appetite for the full story in our soon-to-be-released next issue!

 

FEB 15 A preview of Scott J. Couturier’s “Interred With the Worm”

Scott J. Couturier hits the pages of Tales From the Magician’s Skull for the first time with this tale of a powerful amulet and a forbidden tomb narrated by . . . well, let’s just call him a “tomb-robber of old.” Marvel as he brushes the cobwebs from his ancient story in “Interred With the Worm.”

And just in case you were thinking the title referred to a garden-variety ‘worm,’ let William McAusland’s hyper-detailed rendering of Couturier’s unquiet tomb dissuade you of the notion — just as our downloadable preview is sure to whet your appetite for the full story in our soon-to-be-released next issue!

FEB 19 A preview of Nathan Meyer’s “Beneath a Scarlet Moon”

Hardboilded wordslinger Nathan Meyer explodes onto the pages of Tales From the Magician’s Skull with Issue#7’s cover story: “Beneath a Scarlet Moon.” Join the grim warrior Auric and some unlikely companions as they journey across a poisonous landscape beneath a bloody glaring moon in this doom-laden tale of pain and sacrifice.

Chris Arneson frames the horror of a thousand-legged attack in his incredible interior illustration — and our downloadable preview is sure to whet your appetite for the full story in our soon-to-be-released next issue!

 

FEB 22 A Preview of James Enge’s “Beasts of the Bluestone Hills”

Fan-favorite Morlock Ambrosius stumps up that crooked way once again and into the pages of Tales From the Magician’s Skull for the seventh time! But lucky number seven may not prove to be so boonful as Morlock and his fiery avian companion travel across bizarre lands confronting chimeric creatures in “Beasts of the Bluestone Hills.”

Samuel Dillon’s brooding art captures the look of the seasoned adventurer and hints at the oddities in this, Morlock’s latest tale — and our downloadable preview is sure to whet your appetite for the full story in our soon-to-be-released next issue!