Harvey Click's Blog
May 24, 2018
A Traveler from an Antique Land
After years of writing nothing but horror, I’ve written a science-fiction/fantasy adventure novel. It’s now available for preorder:
A Traveler from an Antique Land
That’s the short of it, and here’s the long version. I grew up immersed in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. At the age of eleven, I started subscribing to pulp magazines that published this fare, and I joined a science fiction book club that sent me two new novels each month. Some of my grade-school teachers took my books and pulp magazines away from me, thinking I was too young to read about Cthulhian monstrosities, but the air of taboo only increased my fascination.
Understandably, my first efforts at writing fiction involved spooks or spaceships. I showed the stories to my grade-school chums, and in eighth grade a friend and I put together a magazine of our uncanny tales. During my college years I decided my fiction should be, ahem, more “literary,” but after penning a great many precious little tales in which next to nothing happened, I turned back to my childhood roots and wrote a string of horror novels and stories.
But late last year I decided I’d had enough of the horror genre, at least for a while. After plumbing the subterranean gloom for so many years, I was ready for some fresh air and sunshine. After all, horror isn’t my only root; all those millions of pages of fantasy and science fiction I’ve read from early grade school till yesterday evening have fertilized my imagination even more than Lovecraftian lore.
So I decided to lock the bogyman back into the cellar and try tapping out a different sort of tune on my keyboard. The result is A Traveler from an Antique Land. It’s a fantasy adventure with a sprinkle of science fiction, or maybe a science fiction adventure with a dash of fantasy, but however it’s labeled, the emphasis is on adventure. There’s some satire and maybe even a touch of tavern philosophy, but action is first and foremost. Readers may react to it in any number of ways, but I doubt they’ll fall asleep.
Sword and sorcery has always been my favorite sub-genre of fantasy, and I’ve always preferred Robert E. Howard’s bloody tales or Fritz Leiber’s sardonic Gray Mouser yarns to cuddly elves and talking dragons. I wanted some of that swashbuckling sword and sorcery flavor, but I wanted to place it in a science-fictional setting instead of the usual pseudo-medieval world.
Some friends have warned me I shouldn’t mix fantasy with science fiction, but tell that to Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, or countless other writers who did it quite gleefully in the days before Puritanical purists started guarding genre definitions like fussy old men guarding their lawns from the neighbors’ hooligan children. Robert Heinlein could write hard science fiction with the best of them, but many of his novels were unabashed fantasy with a bit of math thrown in. One of my favorite fantasy novels is Heinlein’s Glory Road, which mixes swords and sorcery and dragons with plenty of cool futuristic science. Tomorrow’s science is called sorcery today.
This novel gestated in my mind for several years. The ideas first came to me in 2014, and I filled the better part of a notebook with them. But at the time I didn’t feel ready to write it, so I wrote Demon Frenzy instead. Several books later, I decided the time was right. By then the characters were clamoring to burst out of my imagination and onto the page.
The story poured out of me like silvery light from a full moon. I’m hoping readers will find themselves immersed in the same spell that captivated me, the silvery enchantment of clashing swords, epic battles, thrilling adventures, non-stop action, and astonishing marvels in a strange world called Notearth.
A Traveler from an Antique LandThat’s the short of it, and here’s the long version. I grew up immersed in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. At the age of eleven, I started subscribing to pulp magazines that published this fare, and I joined a science fiction book club that sent me two new novels each month. Some of my grade-school teachers took my books and pulp magazines away from me, thinking I was too young to read about Cthulhian monstrosities, but the air of taboo only increased my fascination.
Understandably, my first efforts at writing fiction involved spooks or spaceships. I showed the stories to my grade-school chums, and in eighth grade a friend and I put together a magazine of our uncanny tales. During my college years I decided my fiction should be, ahem, more “literary,” but after penning a great many precious little tales in which next to nothing happened, I turned back to my childhood roots and wrote a string of horror novels and stories.
But late last year I decided I’d had enough of the horror genre, at least for a while. After plumbing the subterranean gloom for so many years, I was ready for some fresh air and sunshine. After all, horror isn’t my only root; all those millions of pages of fantasy and science fiction I’ve read from early grade school till yesterday evening have fertilized my imagination even more than Lovecraftian lore.
So I decided to lock the bogyman back into the cellar and try tapping out a different sort of tune on my keyboard. The result is A Traveler from an Antique Land. It’s a fantasy adventure with a sprinkle of science fiction, or maybe a science fiction adventure with a dash of fantasy, but however it’s labeled, the emphasis is on adventure. There’s some satire and maybe even a touch of tavern philosophy, but action is first and foremost. Readers may react to it in any number of ways, but I doubt they’ll fall asleep.
Sword and sorcery has always been my favorite sub-genre of fantasy, and I’ve always preferred Robert E. Howard’s bloody tales or Fritz Leiber’s sardonic Gray Mouser yarns to cuddly elves and talking dragons. I wanted some of that swashbuckling sword and sorcery flavor, but I wanted to place it in a science-fictional setting instead of the usual pseudo-medieval world.
Some friends have warned me I shouldn’t mix fantasy with science fiction, but tell that to Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, or countless other writers who did it quite gleefully in the days before Puritanical purists started guarding genre definitions like fussy old men guarding their lawns from the neighbors’ hooligan children. Robert Heinlein could write hard science fiction with the best of them, but many of his novels were unabashed fantasy with a bit of math thrown in. One of my favorite fantasy novels is Heinlein’s Glory Road, which mixes swords and sorcery and dragons with plenty of cool futuristic science. Tomorrow’s science is called sorcery today.
This novel gestated in my mind for several years. The ideas first came to me in 2014, and I filled the better part of a notebook with them. But at the time I didn’t feel ready to write it, so I wrote Demon Frenzy instead. Several books later, I decided the time was right. By then the characters were clamoring to burst out of my imagination and onto the page.
The story poured out of me like silvery light from a full moon. I’m hoping readers will find themselves immersed in the same spell that captivated me, the silvery enchantment of clashing swords, epic battles, thrilling adventures, non-stop action, and astonishing marvels in a strange world called Notearth.
January 7, 2017
Another interview
This is a bit out of date, since it was done before Night Conjurings came out, but Sanitarium Magazine published it just yesterday.
http://sanitariummagazine.com/spend-m...
http://sanitariummagazine.com/spend-m...
October 8, 2016
Night Conjurings
Night Conjurings: Tales of TerrorI’m very pleased to announce my new book, Night Conjurings: Tales of Terror, is now available for pre-order at Amazon. For a limited time the price is just 99 cents.
This one is a collection of horror stories. I poured my villainous heart and a tremendous amount of time into these tales, trying to make them all very different from one another in tone, premise, voice, and effect. Most of them are not as grisly as my novels, though I warn you two or three of them have some squirm-worthy moments and all of them, I hope, will inspire deep chills even if your thermostat is cranked up.
Short stories aren’t as popular now as they were in the heyday of the pulps. That’s a shame, especially in the horror genre. Certainly it’s possible to maintain suspense and mounting tension in a full-length horror novel, but the overall effect is much different from the concentrated frisson of a well-crafted horror story that can be read in one terrified sitting. Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and so many other horror masters used the short story form to focus their terrors like sharp pins in the tender psyche, but today most horror writers spread their dark tidings over hundreds of pages in sprawling novels. That’s all well and good, but reading a 400-page novel with 20 major characters is a whole different experience from reading a story with two or three characters trapped claustrophobically inside one brief but fearsome drama. To be fair, some horror writers today are working hard to reinvent and revitalize the short story form. A good example is Laird Barron, one of the current masters of horror short stories, and I hope at least a few of my new tales will be allowed to stand with his in the same haunted cemetery.
Some cousins and old friends who knew me as a child like to remind me of how I used to scare the crap out of them by spinning spooky tales when we sat around a campfire with the darkness closing in around us. I hope each yarn in this collection contains at least a spark or two of that campfire. I’m sure they contain some of the same darkness.
Here’s the blurb:
For fans of Clive Barker and H. P. Lovecraft… Ghosts, vampires, demons, serial killers, and other deadly denizens of the dark haunt this collection of chilling short stories by horror master Harvey Click.
• An unhappy and unloved boy summons a substitute mother—with sharp teeth.
• Two teenage boys learn it’s better to leave a spooky abandoned house alone.
• Can ghosts kill? Denise is about to find out the hard way.
• When her creative writing teacher offers to teach Kathy how to write a horror story, she finds herself trapped inside one.
• A man discovers he may be a killer, though he can’t remember the murders.
• A man with a terrible past, a wizard from the dark side of the moon, and a pitchfork perform a dark drama of murder and madness.
• A time traveler attempts to bring his dead fiancée back to life.
• Many people wish to be ageless, but what happens when an immortal woman begins to lose her mind?
• An artist literally draws a dead woman out of her grave.
• An elderly woman seeks to recover her forgotten past, but some things are better left forgotten.
• A petty swindler tries to buy good luck but ends up with the sort of luck nobody would want.
• And finally, a brief fable about a box of very sharp silence.
July 15, 2015
My new novel, Magic Times
I’m happy to announce the release of my new novel,
Magic Times. Kindle and paperback editions are now available.
Unlike my other novels, this one isn’t horror, and in fact it’s difficult to categorize or even describe. It’s a dark comedy that makes fun of intellectuals and idiots alike, but it has moments of sadness and pain and even a touch of the horrific, so maybe it shouldn’t be called a comedy. It involves magic, including a witch and a sorcerer, but there are no elves, dragons, or shape-shifters, so it bears little resemblance to an ordinary fantasy novel. Maybe it should be called magical realism, though it has little in common with One Hundred Years of Solitude or other novels commonly branded as such. It’s a coming-of-age novel, but that label would probably mislead readers even more than the others. I’ve given up on trying to find a neat pigeon hole for it, because this crazy bird won’t fit into any of them. It’s just going to fly around chirping madly and ruffling its wildly colorful feathers while making its own oddball nest that looks like no others.
I set the novel in the not-too-distant past (1979) because I didn’t want its characters to have computers or smartphones. People today enjoy instant connection to the immaterial world of the Internet, and because of this there may be less interest than there used to be in the immaterial world of the mystical. Most of the characters of Magic Times are looking for some kind of magic or miracle to improve their lives; they’re seeking a non-Internet sort of connection to the immaterial, a hyperlink to a supernatural reality. Of course their quest doesn’t necessarily lead to enlightenment or bliss because, after all, this is a Harvey Click novel.
Despite the impossibility of finding any sort of genre to squeeze this book into, or maybe because of the impossibility, I’m quite proud of it, and I think it will please readers who like unusual novels that can’t be pigeon-holed. I can promise a quick-paced yarn with plenty of laughter and surprises, some chills and thrills, and maybe even a hint of demented wisdom flitting around in the madness.
Magic Times. Kindle and paperback editions are now available.Unlike my other novels, this one isn’t horror, and in fact it’s difficult to categorize or even describe. It’s a dark comedy that makes fun of intellectuals and idiots alike, but it has moments of sadness and pain and even a touch of the horrific, so maybe it shouldn’t be called a comedy. It involves magic, including a witch and a sorcerer, but there are no elves, dragons, or shape-shifters, so it bears little resemblance to an ordinary fantasy novel. Maybe it should be called magical realism, though it has little in common with One Hundred Years of Solitude or other novels commonly branded as such. It’s a coming-of-age novel, but that label would probably mislead readers even more than the others. I’ve given up on trying to find a neat pigeon hole for it, because this crazy bird won’t fit into any of them. It’s just going to fly around chirping madly and ruffling its wildly colorful feathers while making its own oddball nest that looks like no others.
I set the novel in the not-too-distant past (1979) because I didn’t want its characters to have computers or smartphones. People today enjoy instant connection to the immaterial world of the Internet, and because of this there may be less interest than there used to be in the immaterial world of the mystical. Most of the characters of Magic Times are looking for some kind of magic or miracle to improve their lives; they’re seeking a non-Internet sort of connection to the immaterial, a hyperlink to a supernatural reality. Of course their quest doesn’t necessarily lead to enlightenment or bliss because, after all, this is a Harvey Click novel.
Despite the impossibility of finding any sort of genre to squeeze this book into, or maybe because of the impossibility, I’m quite proud of it, and I think it will please readers who like unusual novels that can’t be pigeon-holed. I can promise a quick-paced yarn with plenty of laughter and surprises, some chills and thrills, and maybe even a hint of demented wisdom flitting around in the madness.
February 10, 2015
Underground Book Reviews interviews me
A pretty good interview followed by a review of The Bad Box
http://www.undergroundbookreviews.com...
http://www.undergroundbookreviews.com...
October 26, 2014
A glowing video review of Demon Frenzy!
Hey, a glowing video review just appeared on YouTube! The reviewer compares me to Richard Laymon and Bentley Little. Check it out.
http://youtu.be/t1XQ3bvJd34
http://youtu.be/t1XQ3bvJd34
August 19, 2014
June 11, 2014
A couple nice blog posts about THE BAD BOX
Novelist John Monk has some nice things to say about The Bad Box:
http://john-l-monk.com/2014/06/10/ano...
And another nice blog post by novelist Lindy Moone:
http://lindymoone.wordpress.com/2014/...
Many thanks to both Lindy and John!
http://john-l-monk.com/2014/06/10/ano...
And another nice blog post by novelist Lindy Moone:
http://lindymoone.wordpress.com/2014/...
Many thanks to both Lindy and John!
April 2, 2014
New interview
This new interview includes some material from the one I posted back in November, but there's some new stuff as well.
http://www.booksmoviesreviewsohmy.com...
http://www.booksmoviesreviewsohmy.com...
