Stephen King's Cujo, a review

I believe that, whenever he pens his last novel and his complete literary corpus can be properly appraised, Stephen King will go down as more than just a shock horror author with popular appeal.

King does nasty shocks well—see “Survivor Type” for the ultimate example—but there is more going on in most of his stories than mere horror and spectacle. And a lot more authorial skill. King understands what makes people tick, both internally and in interpersonal relationships, and makes people come alive on the printed page. 

While he may lack the grand ideas of an H.P. Lovecraft or the atmosphere and style of an Edgar Allan Poe, King is a superior character writer.  We understand his universe of fear, even at its wildest, and we feel the same emotions as his characters, because we recognize ourselves in them.

Sandwiched between The Dead Zone (1979) and Firestarter (1980), The Running Man (1982) and The Gunslinger (1982)—stories of protagonists with supernatural mind powers, some set in far-flung futures or postapocalyptic other worlds—Cujo (1981) is in comparison earthly and corporeal, with only traces of the supernatural creeping in at the edges.

The story is set in Castle Rock, King’s finely-wrought fictitious small town in Maine that is home to all manner of horror. But Cujo is not just small-town horror, it’s small-time horror. A story of a rabid dog, and the damage human weakness can wreak on a family.

Horrors sneak up on us when we least expect them. When everything looks fine, and settled, and placid, boredom sets in. We seek novelty, excitement. The opportunity presents itself, and we take it.

Innocence is shattered.

We can try to trace back the reasons why, but often it’s just ill luck.

Or it seems to be.

A married woman, bored and looking ahead at a prosaic and unfulfilling life as a housewife, falls for a transient tennis instructor in a chance meeting.

A massive Saint Bernard sticks its snout into a hole connected to an underground cave and disturbs a bat, and suffers a bite on its snout. Says King, “He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.” Interestingly however Cujo seems to become more than just thoughtless animal inflicted with disease; his eyes are red and full of rage, possessed of something like malice, a murderous intent.

These (random?) events set in motion four days of terror and a relentless finish to the novel. On a placid, hot week in August it all comes to a head as Cujo begins a murderous rampage, dripping foam and blood. A car mechanic and a cop fall victim to his deadly jaws.

Cujo is a fine, tightly plotted little novel and packs some genuine scares, many of them lurking in the closet of four-year-old Tad Trenton. These scenes reminded me of King’s “The Boogeyman,” for my money one of his most terrifying short stories. I recall being terrified of the dark as a kid, and seeing strange shadows move in the light cast by my feeble nightlight, and shivering under the covers. I felt them again here.

I enjoyed the return of Frank Dodd, a serial killer/sexual predator cop who is identified by Johnny Smith, the clairvoyant protagonist of The Dead Zone. Dodd commits suicide before he can be brought to justice, and his ghost continues to haunt Castle Rock in the pages of Cujo. This adds a bit of interesting inter-novel world building to the book.

Tad has premonitions of Cujo/Dodd in the shapes in the recesses of his closet, but he also senses there is something wrong within his seemingly idyllic family. Tad’s father, Vic, pens his son “Monster Words” to keep away the bad dreams and reads them to his son nightly in a totemic ritual.

But words aren’t enough to keep away the real monsters.

Donna and Tad are trapped in a Pinto in the blazing August heat as Cujo waits them out (good thing the 200-pound dog didn’t ram the rear-end of the car, else it would have exploded). Donna she watches her son slowly slip into convulsions from dehydration. Eventually it comes down to it—she must emerge from the confines of the car to wage a hopeless battle against her deepest fear.

Donna’s final showdown with Cujo in a dusty driveway armed with a taped and splintered bat approaches the showdown of Eowyn and the Witch King on the fields of Pelennor. I love this bit of epic description by King; “high wine and deep iron” was unexpected:

Donna cried out in a high, breaking voice and brought the bat down on Cujo’s hindquarters. Something else broke. She heard it. The dog bellowed and tried to scramble away but she was on it again, swinging, pounding, screaming. Her head was high wine and deep iron. The world danced. She was the harpies, the Weird Sisters, she was all vengeance—not for herself, but for what had been done to her boy.

What has been done to her boy… is it Cujo or her own domestic horror come home to roost?

Opening up to the Weird

Despite my lifelong interest in all things fantastic I’ve always been extraordinarily skeptical of the supernatural.

I scoff at ghost stories. I have explanations for everyone else’s unexplained phenomena. I have a hard time believing in the existence of a Christian God or pagan gods. I’ve heard others talk about their experiences and listen politely, while internally knocking holes in their stories and wondering what trauma or defect led them to said belief. 

I still have my doubts. Perhaps cold hard materiality does reign, and all else is illusion. But lately I’ve begun to open up to possibilities of something more.

This is no big revelation caused by a life-changing event. I didn’t see a ghost in my hallway this Halloween, or a zombie rise from a moldering grave. 

It’s just the slow awakening of some new sense in me that I’ve been missing something vital.

I believe, in some undefined, abstract, still to be explored way, in the supernatural. Because I think without it, we’re missing something vital.

I’m not talking about chain rattling ghosts or UFOs, but something spiritual that is innate to humans and probably necessary for our functioning.

The work of Carl Jung has been my catalyst. We all of us operate with an unseen system, the unconscious. Beyond that, a collective unconscious, archetypes encoded in our brain and nervous system, inherited from millennia of memory.

There is a reason why the Heroes Journey persists across vast gulfs of time, transcends cultures. It’s inexplicable as a physical phenomenon but it’s no less real. We feel its power.

Art cannot be reduced to its component atoms. A scientist can study a fleck of paint, or a letter or a word, but the artists’ whole finished art is something categorically different than its components, subjective, irreducible, ineffable. Stories are real, they have power.

That is a form of magic that is real.

I used to believe in something more than the physical, as perhaps most children do. Then I stopped, perhaps somewhere around high school. School and life and work, failures and disappointments (and deadlines and commitments, to quote one Bob Seger) wrung that out of me.

I’m letting it back in, after nearly four decades. But just a crack. I’m not throwing open the doors of rationality--there is no chance of that happening. I am just admitting that some aspects of life are irrational, that the universe cannot be explained by the movement of subatomic particles.

Here I am, at 52, open to irrationality and accepting the possibility of the weird. Faintly embarrassing but that’s my old sensible self talking. I never saw this coming… which I find wonderful and weird and inexplicable in and of itself. 

The Call of Halloween

Carved Sunday, ready to light up the night...

Halloween always has been and still remains my favorite holiday. Christmas gives it a hell of a run but ultimately loses to Samhain.

Why?

There are zero expectations with Halloween. No dinner parties to host. No gift-giving or spending inordinate amounts of money. I would like to spend more on candy but we get no more than 20 kids visiting our home, located on a relatively isolated cul-de-sac. So I’m "forced" to eat the candy we annually overbuy.

Horror is celebrated. The weird is celebrated. Being weird is welcomed, for at least one day a year.

You can put on a costume and become someone else.

I always find myself experiencing a familiar stir about mid-September: The call to horror. I read a lot—though not as much as I’d like—and one secret to reading is cutting out television. But on Halloween I always up my movie quotient with the macabre.

As mentioned I watched Black Sabbath. I watched the old 1979 ‘Salem’s Lot. A recent film, Oculus (2013).

Last night I watched Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. 

I loved it. I’ve never seen this one before, based on the title I assumed it was going to be wildly over the top, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was over the top… but 70s British reserved, slow-paced by our modern standards, over the top. Very Hammer, gothic, moody, fun, and sexy. Caroline Munro is a smoke show.

I loved the non-formula, the awkwardness, even the objective spots of poor film-making, because it’s blessedly different. The vampire formula is tweaked a bit, with the blood suckers leaving their victims an aged husk, beautiful young women reduced to corpses of crones. It’s got some great sword-fighting, an interesting sword-and-sorcery/Solomon Kane-esque protagonist with a fun hunchback sidekick. And some well-placed humor, including this sexually charged quip delivered with an over-the-top non-nuance that had me laughing out loud. Forgive the poor quality.

I’m reading horror too, Stephen King’s Cujo. A classic monster story of a harmless Saint Bernard gone mad after a bat bite on the snout infects him with rabies. I haven’t read this one since I was probably, oh, 13 or so? So while I know the basic beats, it feels new to me. I had forgotten about Donna Trenton’s affair, and to King’s credit this adds a complexity I hadn’t seen before. I think Cujo and the monster in the closet are symbols of the monster in us, something terrible that can be awakened in the right (i.e., wrong) circumstance. Tad can sense something in his wrong in his idyllic home that he can’t articulate.

I love decorating for Halloween, too.

I added a new skeleton to my front porch this year, given life with a black cloak and a shepherd hook. Hanging there beside the stairs it might touch your arm with a bony finger as you ascend the stairs … or maybe that was the wind.

I carved jack-o-lanterns with my daughter on Sunday. At age 23 she still maintains the tradition of humoring her old man, though I know she enjoys it. And it keeps away the evil spirits when the veil is at its thinnest.

I cannot express how much joy this brings me and how lucky I am to have a loving family.

I’ve got Hannah reading Pet Sematary. She is a budding horror aficionado who insisted I watch The Haunting of Hill House TV series earlier this year. I think it was started by her teenage obsession with Stranger Things, another show she encouraged me to watch (and I enjoyed; more on that here).

Hannah was later inspired to read Shirley Jackson’s novel and now I’ve given her the gift of her first King. Maybe movies can inspire readers, though she’s always been one.

We can read horror any time we want, we can recommend films and books on any given Tuesday, but Halloween gives me an excuse. And I love it. 

I will break out some Poe, the master, before and/or on Halloween itself. Until then here’s one of my favorites.

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee--

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love--

I and my Annabel Lee--

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven

Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,

Went envying her and me--

Yes!--that was the reason (as all men know,

In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we--

Of many far wiser than we--

And neither the angels in heaven above,

Nor the demons down under the sea,

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

And so, all the night-tide, I lay down by the side

Of my darling--my darling--my life and my bride,

In the sepulchre there by the sea--

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Strange Ways, Ace Frehley

Easy choice this week ... in honor of the eternal memory of Ace Frehley, buried this week in Brooklyn. "Strange Ways" appeared on KISS' second album Hotter Than Hell. 

Ace wrote it, and I love it.

I've heard him play this one many times in concert, including as it turns out his second to last ever performance (Tupelo Theater, Derry NH, Sept. 4, 2025) which I was proud to have attended. 

Moral of the story: Don't ever skip the opportunity to see your aging rock heroes when they come around, because it may be your last chance.

I have not heard this particular recording prior, live with Peter Criss 1995, post first KISS breakup. Cool.

Seems impromptu. A bit rough around the edges.

Definitely awesome. Especially his solo starting around 3:15.

RIP Spaceman.

Addendum: Seems you have to click through to Youtube to watch this. Which I recommend. But in case you're feeling lazy I'm also posting the fine studio recording.

We need tastemakers

When I first started getting into sword-and-sorcery fiction, the internet was a fledgling, creaky, place. Charming, but impractical. Think bare-bones HTML websites and USENET and bulletin boards. Interesting, but not much help in finding what you were looking for, save by happy accident. Encyclopedias still had a place in this world. 

So, I read the introductions of books, written by real people.

I found L. Sprague de Camp’s Swords & Sorcery (Pyramid, 1963) and read the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. I sought them out, and in so doing found authors like Poul Anderson and Jack Vance.

Lin Carter, champion S&S enthusiast.

The best of these early tastemakers was probably Lin Carter, whose glowing and enthusiastic (and occasionally erudite) introductions to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series led me down many a merry chase. Carter (June 9, 1930 – February 7, 1988) was long deceased, but was posthumously leading me toward many other fine authors like Lord Dunsany and E.R. Eddison and William Morris.

As the internet began to bloom I found the likes of Steve Tompkins at The Cimmerian and articles by Howard Andrew Jones at Flashing Swords and Black Gate. I read about authors like Harold Lamb and Karl Edward Wagner in their essays and sought them out. 

In hindsight I was lucky. I was steered by people who knew what they were talking about. 

In recent years I’ve been steered toward new finds by the likes of Morgan Holmes and G.W. Thomas and Deuce Richardson. Today I try to do that here and carry on the tradition. I am always very pleased when I read comments like this one, which I just got on a recent post about Darryl Schweitzer’s We Are All Legends. 

I love hanging around this blog, for several reason but especially for a post like this. I had never heard of Schweitzer or seen his works in the wild until now. Seeing a "new author" to me is always exciting. Immediately ordered from Schweitzer's Ebay store.

We need people we know and trust and respect to give good recommendations. 

One person who understands this better than most is marketing guru Seth Godin, who I can’t recommend enough for works like The Purple Cow (look, I’m playing tastemaker!). Godin views tastemakers and curators as leaders who define culture by selecting and combining experiences for a specific audience, helping to build trust and navigate an overwhelming flood of content. In his view, tastemakers and curators stand in contrast to algorithms and mass platforms, which tend to promote a race to the bottom by simply surfacing what is popular. 

I love this. Algorithms push us toward an average and mean, and who wants to be average, or mean (as in, not nice)? 

Curation and tastemaking is a place where editors of S&S publications can step up. Set the direction. Show some taste. Differentiate yourself from AI slop. Give me the names of authors and artists whose work has moved you, and tell me why. You might convince me to give them a try.

I don’t want ChatGPT or Instagram algorithms steering me dully, without thought, toward whomever and wherever their programming tells me to go. Which is probably toward cat videos and thirst traps.

Give me odd, weird, and sympatico people.

We need tastemakers.

Who are yours? 

Of Black Sabbath (film) and Ace Frehley

With the Halloween season upon us I had the urge last night to settle in and watch some horror. I spent the better part of 10 minutes scrolling through hundreds of titles on demand before landing on Black Sabbath (1964).

I like modern horror but my preference is the older stuff. Not so much the classic black and white Lon Cheney films, but rather 60-80s, Hammer and on up. I enjoy the slow pace, the gothic visuals, the garish colors, the practical special effects and real props. Black Sabbath had it all thanks to the talents of director Mario Bava.

This turned out to be a pretty good little trilogy of films wrapped up in one production, woven together with Boris Karloff as narrator. I love Creepshow and Tales from the Crypt and their ilk, in collections of shorts you’ll often find more creativity, unexpected twists and bad ends often not possible in a feature length film.

Black Sabbath is full of nasty little shocks. All three shorts were good. The first, “The Drop of Water,” is the creepiest and features a corpse with a truly terrifying frozen death-mask face, but the third, a nice little vampire story, was my favorite. I enjoy it when the monsters sometimes win. I too would not have resisted the beautiful female vampire of "The Wurdulak,” which seems to have inspired at least one scene from ‘Salem’s Lot. The film is visually stunning with beautiful and eerie landscapes and gothic set pieces, like this:

After watching the film I did a bit of research and discovered the Americanized version was neutered of some of its bloodier elements, and the middle story, “The Telephone,” badly altered to remove the main character’s backstory as a prostitute in a lesbian relationship. The Italians were a lot less prudish in the early 60s, it seems.

In hindsight these elements make the plot hang together far better so I’ll probably seek out the original at some point.

Recommended.

***

As I was writing this the news hit that Ace Frehley passed away.

I’ve seen Ace in concert many times, including twice this year alone. He was diminished as all 70s rockers are but still putting on good performances and rocking to the end. Ace was the most charismatic member of the band and its most talented musician. He wrote a few of their classic songs (“Cold Gin” and “Parasite," among others), lent the band an early swagger that made KISS so badass in the 70s, and of course, was responsible for many classic solos delivered with an inimitable, unique style. Loose and jangly, big rings banging off the guitar, but always fitted to the song itself.

Ace was a notorious drinker and drug user and nearly died back in the early 1980s in a car wreck while driving under the influence. He was not the best bandmate and later got into pissing matches with Paul and Gene that lasted to the end of his life. But most fans loved him. I count myself in that group. Watch KISS’ classic interview with Tom Snyder, Ace steals the show with his one-liners and trademark cackling laugh. I also recommend his autobiography No Regrets. How he lived this long is a mystery; the stories of him being driven around New York in the back seat of a limousine with John Belushi and spilling out into club after club for one drunken escapade after the next are legend.

My favorite Ace memory is seeing him in 1994 at The Underground in Lowell after pounding a 12-pack of Zima with my buddy Wayne. We were hammered and so was Ace. I later told this story to my very amused friends at work, left for a long weekend, and returned to find my office plastered with cutout pictures of Ace and Zima bottles. 

Ace would have approved.

You may not like KISS but you cannot deny they did their brand of party rock better than anyone. The number of hits they wrote dwarf the output of most rock bands. Dozens of talented guitarists admit that Ace was the guy that got them to pick up their axe in the first place, among them Slash and Dimedag Darrell.

Say a prayer for his soul and his family and loved ones.

Ace Frehley lead guitar! The coolest.

Addendum: For anyone feeling nostalgic for a lost Ace, I HIGHLY recommend this great interview… he talks about The Elder, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, his relationship with the band members, getting into music, alcohol use, and none of it is mean spirited. He’s full of laughter in it:

The 70s were weird, man: Darrell Schweitzer’s We Are All Legends

Sometimes the 1970s seem not so far away. Photos from my childhood confirm I was there; my old albums and books are a tangible affirmation. I can still see and touch that decade, I can smell it when I riff through the pages of my old first edition Dungeon Masters Guide (1979).

But the 70s are also a different, distant country. Things were Weirder then, or at least seemed that way. I don’t believe in ascribing magical properties to arbitrary 10-year windows of time other than to say that if the 60s were the decade of rebellion, the 70s, freed of shackles, were a decade of expression and experimentation.

With the demise of censorship codes and the rise of talented young directors we got some of the best films ever made in the 1970s. Record labels gave unpolished artists the financial freedom and a lengthy creative leash to experiment. The result was heavy metal, punk, … and disco (mistakes were made).

Fantasy fiction was likewise Weird. We had yet to become Sword of Shannara-fied and reading endless series of identical epic quests.

I was listening to a recent episode of the Geeks’ Guide to the Galaxy podcast discussing Flame and Crimson and the history of sword-and-sorcery. Somewhere around the one-hour mark one of the guests—a co-creator of the fine rotoscoped animated S&S film The Spine of Night—observed that the 70s and 80s were possessed of quality where it felt the “guard rails were off” and a reader or viewer felt that anything might happen.

I admire this quality. 

Give me Weird. 

S&S has a streak of this. Weird fiction predates sword-and-sorcery, originating with Edgar Allan Poe and carried on with Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft. But it was married to swordplay, probably, with the likes of Lord Dunsany, then continued in works by A. Merritt and Clark Ashton Smith, and on into Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, and Michael Shea. Today you’ll see it in John Fultz and Schuyler Hernstrom, and others.

It’s always been in S&S’ DNA. Howard’s Kull of Atlantis stories, in particular “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” and “Striking of the Gong,” are in this tradition. Weird, brooding, dark, unsettling, introspective. They are the heritage of Weird Tales, the magazine from which S&S was born. If you abide by even a floor definition, its name, S&S needs swords (or a general medieval/pre gunpowder level of tech) and sorcery. Sorcery is not magic. It’s wild, dangerous, malevolent, often catastrophic to user as much as target. Think of a Neanderthal handling a hand grenade and trying to figure out whether to throw pin or charge; that’s sorcery. That’s Weird.

In that era a series of weird S&S stories appeared across publications now largely lost to time. Whispers. Void. Alien Worlds. Fantasy Tales. Weirdbook. These died out in the 80s as high fantasy rose to ascendancy, magic replaced sorcery, and the short story fell out of favor, replaced by epic quest. But for a time weird stories about weird characters drifted through these lost pages, including a wandering knight named Julian.

Darrell Schweitzer’s We Are All Legends collects 13 short stories published between 1970 and 1981. It’s a weird, wonderful little book. The stories take place in medieval Europe but of an uncertain date and place, with permeable borders. Magic has not left the world. It’s studded with Arthurian references, of wounded fisher kings and Merlin and Excalibur, even though its decidedly S&S. It’s dark, both in tone but also subject matter. Julian is haunted by his past sins. He believes he is beyond redemption, his faith in God irrevocably shaken, possibly shattered. “God” if there is one appears to be gnostic demiurge, a flawed, limited, and possibly malevolent creator:

I knew that if God is mad, and the signs show that he is, his Foe is mad also, and there can be no hope for the world between them, for creation is but a battleground for two maniacs in their death struggle.

We Are All Legends ticks a lot of my boxes. Obviously S&S, but also King Arthur, horror (some of these stories appeared in DAW Year’s Best Horror). Stories of anti heroes, even ostensibly peerless knights, grappling with a loss of faith and their own brokenness:

“When I was a child I heard about a man, a very, very old man, whose father had been a werewolf. So they took him, the son, whose father had been a werewolf, and shut him up in a tower. He remained there always, never knowing love, never knowing life. I, too, live in a tower, only mine is invisible and I carry it around with me. Its walls are just as strong though.”

“Are you a werewolf then?”

“Only in my heart.”

Purple and awesome.

Schweitzer would have been in his mid-late 20s writing these stories, which is remarkable. He is very underrated, by me and the community at large, though this YouTuber is a huge fan of the book.  

Schweizer confirmed on a Facebook post by Charles Gramlich that the two biggest influences on these stories were Ingar Bergman’s 1957 film, “The Seventh Seal,” and “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” a 14th century travelogue (reportedly true) of an English knight into the middle and far east. It doesn’t seem The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis is among its influences, but We Are All Legends feels something like Clemence Housman’s fine, near forgotten little tale, and its damned, forsaken, wandering knight, a tragic hero. I also noted the influence of Michael Moorock; a possible reference to Corum and the Hand of Kwll. Julian’s wanderings resemble something of a tormented Elric seeking the equilibrium of Tanelorn.

Fabian...

In addition to a fine series of stories the book is blessed with Stephen Fabian illustrations. These are terrific, both the wraparound cover and the wonderful black and white interior accent work. Weaknesses? It is tiring to read all at once; while I am happy having all the Sir Julian stories in one volume, some collections need to be dipped into and sampled from rather than read entire; eating too much rich food or red wine can spoil the effect. Perhaps too much repetition of theme, tone. Some of the stories are perhaps a little too weird for my tastes, untethered to the ground. I feel like this book could have used some more internal character work.

… but that is not what Schweitzer was after. He is of the belief fantasy is examining internal conflicts through explicit, external struggles against real-world demons. From an interview on Black Gate: 

In your estimation what are the elements that make truly great fantasy fiction? Truly great horror? Is “weird fiction” more than simply a co-mingling of these two genres?

The point of much fantasy is to deal with mythic elements directly, rather than through symbol and metaphor only. You could, for example, write a story about someone who “sells his soul” and makes a “Faustian bargain,” i.e. he sacrifices his personal integrity in an irretrievable manner for some dubious goal-say, success in the Mafia, or in Hollywood, or in politics. It needn’t have any fantastic content, and the Faust symbolism would resonate. But the fantasist’s approach is to bring the actual demon on stage and deal with the material directly.

Schweitzer is a former Weird Tales editor, living elder scholar, and longtime champion of the weird, you can find more of his observations here. Here’s a bit of his learned commentary on the weird and my response.

Of genre categories:

These categories are ultimately marketing tools. Horror is what is published as horror. Fantasy is what is published as fantasy. It’s all about labels and which shelf in the bookstore a book is displayed on. Aesthetically, the distinction is not particularly meaningful.

Believe it or not I an S&S historian agree with some of this. Genre categories began as marketing tools and probably function best that way, less so than tools of analysis. However, I do think having genre parameters or aesthetic template to follow, bend, or break, can produce surprising results and possibly great original art. As can deliberate mixing of genres. 

Of the greatness of Tanith Lee (agreed here; we need more Tanith Lee in this world):

Tanith Lee strikes me as the perfect Weird Tales writer, which is probably why WT has published more by her than anyone else. Her work is poetic, sensual, scary, imaginative, erotic if it needs to be. She’s got everything. 

And a final hell yeah; I could not agree more with his assessment of the winner take all state of publishing, death of the midlist author, and our need to cultivate more readers:

Forty years ago, you could assume anything in SF/fantasy would sell more like thirty to fifty thousand copies in mass-market paperback without even trying. Just slap the right kind of cover on it and it would sell this acceptable minimum. Well, maybe the ceiling on genre fiction has come off, and today you get an Anne McCaffrey or a Stephen King who can sell millions of copies, but we have also lost the floor, which protected us. Now the major publishers are only interested in writers who have the potential to be the next McCaffrey or King, not the interesting mid-list writers who are worth publishing for what they are, even if they never will sell a million copies — the Davidsons and Laffertys. We have lost our innocence. Once it was demonstrated that SF/fantasy/horror could go to the top of the bestseller lists, anything that doesn’t is now viewed as a failure by those faceless, impersonal Suits who control corporate publishing.

… The U.S.A. has a population of three hundred million. Two thousand copies is not a lot. We have a reading public the size of Luxemborg’s. What any genre needs to stay healthy is more readers and a means of reaching them.

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap

Tap crossed that line... which way?

There is a picture of me going to see KISS on their hotly anticipated, sold out 1996 reunion tour. In it I’m standing on my parents’ front lawn with two friends and my brother. All four of us are in KISS makeup.

I’m wearing a Spinal Tap t-shirt.

I love KISS, they’re a fun band who have written some rocking hits. But I also recognize them as ridiculous.

If you've read any of my metal posts here you know I’m a fan. I love the music, I take it seriously. But I also laugh at it. Metal is sometimes awesome, sometimes terrible. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes dumb. Powerful, but sometimes just too damned loud.

Hard rock and metal can be mocked. They should be mocked. Mockery and the ability to absorb it is the sign of a healthy genre, and rock and metal can take it.

Some genres and their fans take themselves too seriously. I see this sometimes in sword-and-sorcery circles; call John Jakes’ Brak or Lin Carter’s Thongor or Gardner Fox’s Kothar what it is—derivative and often dumb, though fun and something I will read and enjoy—and panties get bunched.

But we need good-natured mockery. Parody is a sign of respect that you’ve made it. S&S can take the likes of Mention My Name in Atlantis, and heavy metal can take Spinal Tap. Spinal Tap took the piss out of metal better than anyone before or since in their 1984 mockumentary. And metal bands (most, anyway) love them for it.  We all could use a little more laughter in our lives. Even if the world is ending (it’s not, though one would think so scrolling any social media app) the remedy is laughter.

I just finished reading A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap, and experienced quite a few chuckles. Laughter is rare to pull off in the written form, I have found. This book made me laugh. But I also learned a lot. I love the film, and when I saw there was a memoir coming out penned by director Rob Reiner I knew I had to have it. Published by Gallery Books, my copy at least came signed by Reiner himself, complete with certificate of authenticity. Cool to have a signature of the man who not only gave us the best metal mockumentary ever, but also The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, and a Few Good Men, among others.

Reiner’s signature is not the only cool and unique feature of the book: It’s also double-sided, like the old Ace Doubles. Flip the book over and “book 2,” Smell the Book, is 60 pages of “interviews” conducted by director Marty DiBergi with band members Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls--an oral history of the band in their voices. Which is pretty funny. You get lines like this:

David: I was at Sacred Sacrament. My mom was a big Catholic.

Marty: Religious?

David: No, five foot ten.

Or old album titles like “Jap Habit” and “Bent for the Rent,” the latter a British expression for what you do for the landlord when he’s bugging you and you can’t pay him, so you do him a favor…

But the meat of the book is the memoir portion. A breezy but well-told history of how the principals came to meet each other, make the film, its reception, and lasting legacy. It offers an illuminating, behind the scenes look, and I learned several things I did not know. For example:

• Spinal Tap barely made it to the screen. The studios to whom Reiner pitched the film did not know what to make of it, just about everyone passed on it.
• It made very little money upon its release and Reiner and co. made almost no money even on licensing until a lawsuit spearheaded by Harry Shearer was able to wrest the rights to the film back and amend missing royalty payments. One city in which it was well-received right out of the gate, I’m proud to say, is Boston, in which it played continuously for a solid year.
• Spinal Tap played real shows before the movie came out to sharpen their playing, including at Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip—with opening act Iron Butterfly. No one knew who they were or suspected that they were a parody act (this is circa 1982-83, pre-film, and new metal acts were showing up in the scores.) Spinal Tap was just another unknown metal band.
• Reiner refers to several hilarious-sounding scenes that didn’t make the final cut, as 40+ hours of film was ultimately reduced to a lean 82-minute run time. There were often 3-4 versions of a given scene. Apparently some of these deleted scenes are on a special edition that I need to seek out (my copy is believe it or not VHS). For example, originally the band had an opening act called the Dose, who had a beautiful and easy female lead singer; her dalliances with Tap explain the famous scene where the band has unexplained cold sores on their mouths during a record launch party. But this subplot was left on the cutting room floor.
• The dialogue is almost entirely unscripted and improvised. Reiner, Christoper Guest, Shearer and Michael McKean scripted scenes and had the outlines of the movie plotted, but the actual dialogue was ad-libbed, and many of the verbal jokes utterly spontaneous expressions of the characters they created. Even a young Fran Drescher, then 25, fell into her role and extemporaneously came up with “Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.” That’s talent.

Spinal Tap 2 is just hitting and I’m a little worried. I know someone who got invited to an early screening and he was underwhelmed; he described it as just OK, certainly not terrible but lacking the punch and wit of the original. I will see it for myself, but regardless of whether it holds up as a worthy sequel we’ll always have the OG. The ultimate documentary, if you will, rockumentary, of the world’s loudest band.

Atom and Evil, Black Sabbath*

A day late on Metal Friday but today a close look at Ronnie James Dio’s lyrics for “Atom and Evil,” the opening track off The Devil You Know (2009). These are sufficiently abstract that interpretation is required.

Blue skies, once upon a dream

All eyes, never in between

We all once looked to heaven for answers, not to this middle earth.

Then into the garden came the spider

“I’m here for you,” said the spider to the fly

And when I’m through, you can open up your eyes to see

Eden corrupted by the spider/serpent, offering honeyed poison as “truth.” We’ll be masters of the world if we just follow him.

Your world on fire, and the liar won’t let go

Atom and Evil

Atom is an allusion to the biblical Adam but also atomic energy, the development of weapons of Armageddon. And perhaps technology more broadly. The world is on fire as technofascist overlords develop AI Agents to unburden us from grocery lists.

One more promise

We can tame the sun

And then we’ll shine forever

The old promise, of Marx and Ray Kurzweil, that technology will fix all our problems, and we’ll have utopia. Also a reference to the scientists (many of whom were pacifists) who built the bomb, whose release was described as brighter than a thousand suns.

Someday you can cry for everyone

We’ll burn when you were clever

The technologists build bunkers; they’ll shed crocodile tears and count their money as we burn.

Expand your mind, we’ve got a place for you

Just make believe that one and one are always two

Science has all the answers, just “expand your mind bro” and listen to its words. The physical world is all there is, technology doesn’t require governance, or principle.

When into the parlor comes the spider

Just say no!

Atom and Evil

Don’t fall for the sale, the deadly pitch.

Falling’s easy

Rising will never be

So we must rise together

Here are the changes

Powerful harmony

But then there’s no forever

Atom and Evil.

It’s much easier to bend and accept “progress” (which leads to the fall) than to reject it, stand for principle, preserve and protect what is good, live by values. “But then there’s no forever” is a hard lyric to come to grips with; does rejecting atomic technology mean we reject the possibility of man-made utopia/singularity? Is there no way out? Unless…

Maybe if we cry together

Maybe if we cry as one

The tears will fall to chill the fire

And keep everyone from 

Atom and Evil

… we unify.

Dio’s vocals are awesome BTW and I love the heavy doom of this track.

A fun aside; surely Dio must have been aware of the presence of another “Atom and Evil,” a gospel song performed by Golden Gate Quartet in 1946. It too is about the dangers of atomic war. “We’re sitting on the edge of doom” never sounded so harmonious and be-bop friendly: 

I'm talkin' 'bout Atom, and Evil

Atom and Evil

If you don't break up that romance soon

We'll all fall down and go boom, boom, boom!

*Yes, Black Sabbath, not Heaven & Hell, because that’s what this band is. 

Top 5 horror movie babes of the 70s and 80s

I'm howling...

I was born in 1973 and by the mid-80s developed a taste for horror films. It was a time when werewolves and slashers were the rage, monsters, mayhem, murder, prevalent--and the babes, beautiful.

Werewolves were my thing, for whatever reason. Maybe I, powerless but with a powerful hunger, felt the urge to shed my weakness and transform. I will leave the psychoanalysis to the more qualified. The best of the werewolf flicks was and remains An American Werewolf in London. The original Howling wasn’t bad either, and watching that led me to The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. Which is, charitably, a flawed film. The male lead is one of the worst I’ve ever seen, so wooden you could build a bridge out of him (joke rental courtesy Monty Python). The plot barely hangs together, though somehow it manages to be entertaining. It’s saved by a time-machine 80s vibe, the great Christopher Lee (the film’s entire acting budget must have been spent on him), and by Sybil Danning. The Howling II is basically an excuse to get her on film, a vehicle for her display, and for good reason. She's smoking!

The Monsters, Magic, and Madness podcast* recently hosted the B film actress for an interview. Danning genuinely loves the film as well as her other roles in immortal sexploitation classics like The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried (1971). I’m cool with that. I love weird B cinema too, even if the Howling II makes one howl (and wince, and cringe). I love 80s metal and S&S and so can cast no stones. We need not take life so seriously. 

Danning in Howling II spends most of her time in a wild powersuit, half sci-fi, reflective silver and black, topped with 80s shoulder pads. It shows plenty of skin--exposed hips and wide open from neck to navel. Danning chews scenery like a blood-hungry werewolf. Which she is. Sorry for the spoiler.

And then like a thunderbolt I realized it was time for my top 5 hottest horror movie babes of the 70s and 80s. With a couple honorable mentions thrown in.

I’m going deeper on these selections, so no Jamie Lee Curtis (beautiful, but safe and predictable) or Heather Langenkamp (everyone had a crush on her, but too teen normal and staid). My choices lean into full on sexy, wild, and B movie offbeat.

1. Sybil Danning. I grew chest hair the first time I saw her de-robe and transform into a she-wolf. Here is something to watch.

2. Amanda Donohoe. The Lair of the White Worm is a cult classic in every sense (ancient snake cult exists in the British Countryside), and a lot of tongue-in-cheek fun. I love this film unreservedly but Donohoe’s turn as Lady Sylvia makes it. She’s funny, wicked, drop-dead gorgeous, and sexy as hell, and the best realized character on this list.

3. Caroline Williams. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 has some parallels to The Howling II. Both are campy, comic albeit packed with carnage and scares. And each is bolstered by a hot female lead. Williams as the harassed DJ Stretch is irresistible in blue jean shorts.

4. Ingrid Pitt. What can I say about Pitt that hasn’t already been said? The late Polish actress (1937-2010) and Nazi concentration camp survivor was absolutely stunning. She’s probably best known for her roles in a pair of classic Hammer horror films from the early 1970s—The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula. Time stops when she’s on screen.

5. Linnea Quigley. If you’ve ever seen Return of the Living Dead (1985) you know the show-stopping dance. Quigley earned “scream queen” status for a string of horror movies in the 80s but RotLD alone would put her on this list.

Honorable mentions

Adrienne Barbeau. Always loved her toughness and edge (and fantastic body, TBH). Underrated actress. But I felt like she could break me in half then (and now). Can she really be 80? 

Catherine Mary Stewart. Major crush on her as a kid (and perhaps now?). Only makes honorable mention because Night of the Comet is arguably SF, and she ventures into too popular/safe territory with roles in Weekend at Bernie’s and The Last Starfighter.

*Recommended BTW. Monsters, Madness, and Magic has stayed in my rotation with its eclectic lineup of semi-obscure celebrity interviews you don’t get anywhere else.

Ingrid Pitt

Caroline Williams

Linnea Quigley

Amanda Donohoe

Disconnect

“Jeremiah, maybe you best go down to a town, get outta these mountains.”

“I've been to a town Del.”

--Jeremiah Johnson

Technology has taken a wrong turn. Smartphones and algorithms and social media have stoked political division, stolen our attention, and sewn intrapersonal division and conflict.

I approve cancelling your favorite digital channels. I approve cancelling it all including ChatGPT. I don’t hold out much hope of any of this happening. I’ve seen people boycott Facebook and Twitter and now BlueSky and then return a day later. Or hop to the next platform of promised peace and civility where it all happens again.

I have faith in individuals. I suspect they’re out there, people who have made the silent choice. I don’t have faith in society at large.

It’s sad that we’re so angry and riven that we can’t even pause to acknowledge death. Our news cycle of endless hot takes won’t allow it. 

Robert Redford passed this week. Ironically he is now remembered by a meme.

But maybe that’s not so bad if it leads you to the source. 

In “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972) Redford plays a man who decides to go into the woods and live off the land. Looking for a suitable place to trap, a man tells him:

Ride due west as the sun sets. Turn left at the Rocky Mountains.

No GPS needed.

It was hard to watch this film. It is so anti 2025. The pace is slow. The dialogue is minimal, the shots long and extended. I found myself reaching for my phone, and the urge to look at … what? Pushed it away. And kept watching.

Soon it became nice to watch this film. The scenery was beautiful, the slow unfolding of the story, real cinema. The sparse dialogue is memorable, and no wonder, because John Milius wrote it.

Then it became meditative to watch this film. I was reminded what real hardships are (this isn’t a film of escape; terrible things happen). I was reminded of what beauty is. 

I’ll remember this film… I’ve already forgotten the 30 second reels on LinkedIn.

The ONLINE world is on fire. The real world is not. You don’t need an primeval forest or unexplored frontier to escape. The answer is the title of this post.

You just have to turn it off.

Which way you headed, Jeremiah?

Canada, maybe. I hear there is land there a man has never seen.

Well, keep your nose in the wind, and your eyes along the skyline.

Of pastiche and John C. Hocking’s Conan and the Living Plague

These dead are unquiet...

I don’t mind pastiche … which is I suppose a bit of a lukewarm way of saying I support it.

Nonetheless it’s how I feel.

I’m on record as loving SSOC and Roy Thomas stories and even (gasp) some of the old Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp Conan stories. I’m not a purist, as long as we have unadulterated Howard somewhere in print I’m good with new stories and interpretations. The Del Reys stand, so bring on the rest.

No one will ever match Howard at his own game, because he himself was of course in every story. Unless you have access via medium to his soul, or his ghost visits your shoulder like Conan did Howard and compels you to write, there will never be another REH.

While I used to indulge in Conan pastiche it’s not something I seek out anymore. I don’t read much of it these days … but once in a while I dip back in. I’ve bought the first half dozen SSOCs. I’ve read Scott Oden’s The Shadow of Vengeance and S.M. Stirling's Blood of the Serpent. I still feel a dim stir when I see the name of “Conan” in new art and stories.

What do I think makes for a good Howard pastiche? I have a few boxes I like to see checked. Here they are, and as with everything I write, YMMV.

The first and faraway most important: The story must be good, above all else. This almost covers for breaking any of the subsequent rules that follow.

The character should closely mirror the original. Conan should feel like Conan, act according to the broad parameters of his established nature. If not, why write him? That said, if a pastiche writes an immature Conan or an aged Conan reflecting on his deathbed, I would expect some new ground to be broken.

The world should feel that way too. I don’t think you should eliminate Hyborian Age countries or distort the literal map Howard laid down. The same goes for its peoples; Cimmerians should be mostly brooding and fierce, Picts savage and Pict-y. But I’m OK with adding to what is there, exploring a new island in the Vilayet or a dark and forgotten corner of Stygia, creating outlier characters and so on.

Here's what I don’t care about.

Established timelines. Because pastiche isn’t canon there is no need to connect up all the history. There is no way Conan could pack in all the adventure from every pastiche into one lifetime, so we can assume that pastiche operates independent of other pastiche—and even the originals. I don’t care how or when pastiche fits into the established storyline, even Howard’s chronology. Telling me that Conan couldn’t have done something because he was 27 at the time and a pirate might be technically accurate, but it also makes me yawn. YMMV.

Writing style. I admire when someone like Scott Oden can mirror Howard’s prose, but I don’t find it necessary. When someone covers a song I actually prefer hearing their own interpretation. Bruce Dickinson covering Sabbath Bloody Sabbath on Nativity on Black is not trying to be Ozzy … and its awesome and still honors Black Sabbath. Likewise Rob Zombie put his own unique Charles Manson inspired spin on Children of the Grave and Yungblud is fanastic covering “Changes” with his very different voice, albeit the same lyrics. Honor the original but do something new. It can sound different, whether musically or on the ear of a reader. The style should be appealing of course but it doesn’t have to sound like REH’s prose. YMMV.

***

This is a big roundabout way of saying that author John C. Hocking checks my boxes with Conan and the Living Plague, one of two complete novels published in the recent Conan: City of the Dead by Titan Books (2024).

I’m not a fan of plot summaries and I don’t feel like doing one here. But here’s what I liked about it:

Conan feels like Conan. I really like when we get to see how strong Conan is in non-combat situations. There’s a great early scene of him wielding a log-like wooden “sword” that leaves  hardened mercenaries with their mouths agape; we see him lifting stone doors of crypts that baffle other strong men, on and on. Fun. But he also comports himself with the same rough barbaric code of honor, the same ferocity in battle but not recklessness, and so on.

The writing, which includes some really fine turns of phrase and metaphor. Hocking is an underrated stylist even within the small circle that is S&S but I really enjoyed passages like this:

Pezur saw Conan bare his teeth in an unconscious snarl of defiance and felt a surge of kinship with the barbarian. He knew the Cimmerian felt the rigid touch of those distant eyes as keenly as he did.

Indeed, Conan sensed the unnatural scrutiny as well as if the dim figure had reached out across Dulcine and laid a cold hand upon his breast. The undulled instincts of the barbarian sent the same thrill along his nerves that he might have felt confronting a lion in a jungle grove. Though he could not give it a name, he knew there was danger here, a danger born of black sorcery.

“What are you, devil?” growled Conan.

It’s not Howard’s style but it doesn’t have to be.

The fast pace. The chapters are short and end on something of a cliffhanger, the action  almost unrelenting. Yes, we do have other characters, a small cast, which you need in a novel that doesn’t spend time inside the characters’ minds. But it’s still recognizably S&S, nothing like A Game of Thrones or its epic fantasy ilk. It reads fast.

A few particularly memorable scenes. A harrowing trip through dank underground crypts pursued by a horde of ghouls, and later an encounter with waves of plague infected living that attack in mindless zombie like hordes and whose touch brings death, are suitably hair-raising and stick with you.

Nice fights with mini-bosses. No spoilers but Conan has a nice mano-y-mano with a towering armored plague knight that was really freaking cool, a sorcerer wielding dangerous spells, and so on.

The sword-and-sorcery easter eggs (don’t think I didn’t see these, John). Two paired soldiers hold Conan at crossbow point, one named Rald and the other, Duar. A spell ripped right out of Jack Vance. Nice little nods there to the S&S faithful. And there’s also Lovecraftian menace and oblique reference, including the likes of the Hounds of “Thandalos.”

Little dashes of humor. Conan engaging in a bit of self-deprecation over his (very) short career as a sorcerer. A mercenary mutters that a sword weighs as much as his wife. And so on. It’s OK to have a little fun in S&S.

Rare 2019 Perilous Worlds edition... it's mine! mua-ha.

The plague and the characters needing to mask anticipates the COVID-19 pandemic. Prescient but happenstance because the novel was written pre-COVID (I have a rare copy of a limited printing from 2019), but it nevertheless serves as prospective commentary and evokes memories of the real-world outbreak.

I noticed a few wobbles (a side character is given a backstory late for no reason; perhaps too much description of architecture and rooms and the like, one of the big bads, a demon, is set up well but removed from the stage too quickly), but these are minor and hardly worth noting. 

What Conan and the Living Plague is not, is REH. It never will be, nor can be. And that’s OK. It’s still a hell of a lot of fun and a worthy S&S novel.

Bruce Dickinson at the House of Blues, Boston MA Sept. 11, 2025

If all Bruce Dickinson had was his solo career he’d still be remembered in the annals of heavy metal. Bruce’s best solo efforts—Accident of Birth, Tyranny of Souls, and The Chemical Wedding—comprise a power trio any metal band would be proud to have in their catalogue. 

And oh yeah, he did that Iron Maiden thing too.

I got to see Bruce solo for the first time last night at the House of Blues in Boston. My buddy Scott and I battled through brutal Boston traffic to get in but it was worth it. We met up with another friend for dinner and a couple beers before meandering in.

Bruce means a lot to me for a number of reasons and he did not disappoint. Even at age 67 he was still bringing the fire, and his air raid siren voice.

Here’s the setlist. Yes, I got see him perform the “Star Bangled Banner” (which Bruce is performing at the Pittsburgh Steelers game this weekend) and “Flash of the Blade,” a deep cut off Powerslave. Unexpected and fun. I deliberately stayed away from any reviews so as not to be spoiled, and was pleasantly surprised by it all:

1. Accident of Birth

2. Abduction

3. Laughing in the Hiding Bush

4. Shadow of the Gods

5. Chemical Wedding

6. Star Spangled Banner

7. Flash of the Blade

8. Resurrection Men

9. Rain on the Graves

10. Frankenstein

11. The Alchemist

12. Book of Thel

13. Road to Hell

Encore:

14. Tears of the Dragon

15. Gods of War

16. The Tower

I’m semi-embarrassed to admit I’ve barely listened to Bruce’s new album The Mandrake Project, released last year. But I greatly enjoyed “Rain on the Graves” and “Resurrection Men” and will work to rectify that.

Bruce is a very creative, musical dude. Last night he at turns played drums and an instrument called a theremin, which is played without touch, detecting hand movement only. Weird, and fun.

Here is a little bit of probably my favorite Bruce solo song (though “Jerusalem” and “Return of the King” are in the running), “Tears of the Dragon,” off Balls to Picasso, recorded on my cell phone. It's tinny as all cell phone recordings are but you can still get a sense of his power and presence:

I owe Bruce’s solo stuff a proper essay. When I look at the lyrics of “Chemical Wedding” and “The Alchemist” he’s telling us a story about the nature of human existence, and the possibility of transformation.

And so we lay

We lay in the same grave

Our chemical wedding day

Also I'm 99% certain I saw Jeff Talanian, creator of the Hyperborea RPG. Jeff if you're reading this let me know if you were there.

Conan and the Living Plague

I'm reading John C. Hocking's Conan and the Living Plague for Cimmerian September. 

Nothing else to add at the moment except that it's quite enjoyable after three chapters, with fell wizards and foul plagues and Conan in a fine demonstration of jaw-dropping strength.

I will write a full review later this month. 

This is the second of two short novels packaged together as Conan: City of the Dead, released in a single volume by Titan Books in 2024.

Reading is in trouble … what are we going to do about it?

Reading is in trouble. How deeply? There’s evidence it may be in a death spiral.

A new study published in the journal iScience found that daily reading for pleasure plummeted 40% over the past 20 years. The data was taken from a study of more than 236,000 Americans, no small sample size. Study co-author Jill Sonke called it “a sustained, steady decline” and “deeply concerning.”

Another study found if you read or listened to only one book in 2023, you read more than 46% of Americans. 

Another 20 years like this and we might have to turn out the lights. Books will be viewed like Laserdiscs or a Betamax tape, a curious and dead relic.

I’m disappointed … but not surprised. Anecdotally the data checks out; half the people I know or hang out with don’t read. A few that do read a lot. This steep decline may not be apparent if you spend all your time in insular groups. I belong to a couple sword-and-sorcery Discord groups and another S&S watering hole on Reddit where people love talking about reading and their favorite books and showing book porn.

But these places aren’t normal. If you’re reading this you’re probably like me, not “normal” either. I’m what’s known as a whale, I’ve got 1200 books or so in my library and that’s not counting digital titles and comics and the like. But we don’t need whales, a whale might buy a shit-ton but a whale is only going to buy one copy of a work (maybe super deluxe collector’s editions too, but you see my point). 

For reading to grow we need lots of people buying books and enjoying reading for pleasure. It needs to become ubiquitous and normal. People used to do this. They used to buy mass-market paperbacks off wire spinner racks. They read magazines with circulations in the hundreds of thousands or millions that supported the authors who wrote for them. 

Today they’re watching television and watching YouTube and scrolling social media. 

I do these things too but I carve out time for reading. It’s a habit like exercise that must be cultivated. Phone scrolling is unfortunately 10x easier. YT videos have 400x the views of blog posts (this is me griping).

Reading is never going to go away entirely, but it may never again hold a prominent place among pleasure activities. 

What are the consequences of this relatively recent shift?

A loss of knowledge, paradoxically at a time when we’re drowning in information. All the information you seek is readily available by asking ChatGPT … but you’re never going to remember it. Reading generic machine output about the importance of community and bravery and faith is not going to transform you like reading Watership Down.

Information does not equal understanding. We might absorb data but we make sense of it by telling stories.

I learn through sustained attention and absorbing multiple perspectives. Reading and then writing about what I’ve read. Lose that ability and we risk losing our future to others.

We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

— E. O. Wilson

But beyond utility and understanding the loss of reading also means a loss of a unique form of entertainment. As I’ve noted before books offer a different experience and reward than movies or other visual media. I hate to think of a future where no one walks the labyrinthine halls of Xuchotl with Conan, sword in hand.

What do we do about it?

If you have children, read to them, study authors say. “Reading with children is one of the most promising avenues,” said Daisy Fancourt, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and epidemiology at University College London and co-director of the EpiAtrts Lab. “It supports not only language and literacy, but empathy, social bonding, emotional development and school readiness.”

Get creative with marketing books. Here’s an example of a $1M kickstarter for a book that put its backers in its stories. 

Recommend books. Support authors that continue to write, outlets that promote writing and reading. Promote old books too.

Write. If you can master its craft and discipline you’ve mastered a skill fewer and fewer possess. Good writing requires you to read. No way around that. Hey at least your stuff might get ingested by an AI and live on that way.

And above all don’t give up. We are the hopelessly outnumbered defenders on the walls of Minas Tirith, fighting against the dark and praying for the dawn. Perhaps we will hear the unexpected sound of horns.

TL;DR, Keep reading and sharing what you love. Support other writers. Keep writing. Fight on.

Hell on Earth, Iron Maiden

Senjutsu has been out four years (Sept. 2021), long enough that I feel confident in selecting a favorite song.

That song is "Hell on Earth."

"Darkest Hour" and "The Writing on the Wall" are fantastic, but "Hell on Earth" is truly special.

When you get to be an old fart you get disgusted by the eternal hell we keep delivering unto ourselves. Steve Harris’ lyrics reflect this sad reality.

We’re unfortunately never going to have a heaven on this earth—I don’t think it’s possible, even though I think we could be doing far better as a species. We know how to live ethical lives; we have the wisdom of the ancients at our hands.

Yet we don’t bother to acknowledge it, let alone strive to learn it or live by it. 

You dance on the graves who bled for us

Do you really think they'll come for us?

Knowledge and virtue, taken by lust

Live on the edge of those that you trust

You think that you have all the answers for all

In your arrogant way only one way to fall

Burning a lamp that is fire in your hands

Taking you further from these lands

We still have children waging wars for old men’s ambitions, vanity.

Despite its bleak outlook it’s a beautiful song. The composition is fantastic; at more than 11 minutes it takes you on a journey. It features some of Bruce’s most inspired singing of the album (“Lost in anger, life in danger”). And it offers hope that one day we’ll see our loved ones again, after death. We sense there is something better beyond, from our past, deep in our memories… far away from this hell on earth.

I wish I could go back

I'll never be the same again

Bled for all upon this hell on Earth

And when I leave this world

I hope to see you all again

On the other side of hell on Earth

Upon the eyes of good

I'm following the light again

In between the dark of hell on Earth

On the other side, I'll see again in heaven

So far away from this hell on Earth

Celtic Adventures wrapup and on into Cimmerian September

Worth your 10 cents...

I just closed the cover on DMR Books’ latest release, Celtic Adventures, and had to say a few words about the final entry collected therein: “Grana, Queen of Battle,” by John Barnett.

Because it’s damned good. 

Were it anthologized amid a dozen modern S&S/historical adventures it would not be out of place—except it would likely be the best story in the collection. And it was written in 1913 for The Cavalier. That’s pre-World War I for those keeping score at home, and yet it is in no way dated. In fact, it is burning with life in these pages.

“Grana, Queen of Battle” is a novella comprised of six chapters and 94 pages. Each chapter is a standalone story with minor reference to the preceding chapter, the same type of thing Howard Andrew Jones was doing with the first book in his Hanuvar series. Clearly this is the stuff from which sword-and-sorcery would be made. Short, episodic stories building on one another, action-packed, relatively small stakes (save to Grana herself of course).

Grana O'Malley is a badass S&S style heroine. Per the introduction she was a real person, a formidable Irish pirate whom the English dubbed Grace O’Malley. She comes alive in these pages thanks to Barnett’s skill. REH dedicated “Sword Woman,” his story of Dark Agnes, to Grace and a few others.

In the barest space imaginable—the first three pages—we meet a dying Irish chieftain, Dubhdara. Sonless, his lands and castle must pass to his daughter Grana. We meet Grana’s sidekick, a rawboned and lean fool in motley named Bryan Tiege, deadly with a sword. And we meet Grana, “a woman whom Fate restricted to a petty stage, but who might have ruled a kingdom. A woman who mastered men, whom men followed because she was stronger, bolder, and more daring than themselves.” And we get the setup for the conflict of the first chapter, a brewing coup by Red Donell, who with his lord on his deathbed schemes to take the castle for himself--even as Dubhdara breathes his last, and Grana offers her dying father a few comforting final words.

All of this is done with incredibly deft strokes of detail and emotion in just three pages. The economy is worth studying for anyone writing this stuff.

It’s positively wonderful and reminds me why I read S&S and classic historical adventure.

***

It’s Cimmerian September, the equivalent of the high holy days for sword-and-sorcery and all things REH.

I don’t typically participate but the enthusiasm I’m seeing feels around the interwebs is contagious. I might have to get in on it, either with something by Howard or a Conan pastiche. Or both. 

What are you planning to read?

Celtic Adventures: Of Conan, a chasm, and “People of the Dark”

This cover makes me want to drink Guinness and fight.

When I read I don’t go looking for symbols … but sometimes they just hit me in the face. Or in the case of Robert E. Howard’s “People of the Dark,” plunge me into their depths.

DMR’s Celtic Adventures has been a good read so far. I’m a poem and a few stories in, having finished the poem “The Druids” by Kenneth Morris, “The Devil’s Dagger” by Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, and Fiona MacLeod’s “The Harping of Cravetheen” … plus a long overdue re-read of Howard’s story.

Howard wrote “People of the Dark” in 1931 and it was published in the June 1932 Strange Tales. It’s been reprinted a few times since, including in DMR Books’ new anthology, which collects six old-school short stories and two poems (all published between 1895-1948) about swashbuckling tales of adventure and magic set in old Ireland.

So far all of have been good but it’s hard to top REH. Here’s the major beats of the story: A modern man, John O’Brien, enters Dagon’s Cave (portentous name) where he plans to kill Richard Brent. Brent has won the heart of O’Brien’s love, Eleanor; O’Brien, jilted, learns Brent is en route to the cave and pursues with a revolver in his pocket and vengeance in his heart. But this is no ordinary cave; it was once known as the Cavern of the Children of the Night, reportedly once home to the (now extinct?) ancient race of Little People that lived in the underworld of Ireland and Britain, preceding the Celts.

The story takes a major twist when O’Brien falls down a flight of ancient stairs, strikes his head heavily on the stone floor, and awakes to find himself… Conan. Not Conan of Cimmeria, but Conan of Eireann, the Irish Reaver. Deuce Richardson, who contributes a colorful introduction to the anthology, places the tale at roughly 100 BC—millennia after The Hyborian Age. Conan of Eireann however is not very far removed in mien from Howard’s greatest creation—muscular, black-haired mane, wields a sword, swears by Crom. Even more strange, O’Brien remembers being Conan, so has apparently awakened some ancestral memory.

Nearly 2000 years before Conan of Eireann entered this very cave in pursuit of his lost love, Tamera, who has fallen in love with the blonde Gael warrior Vertorix. Vertorix and Conan bury their quarrel as they find themselves confronted by a blood-mad horde of the Little People.  A great combat ensues, and Conan is separated from Vertorix/Tamera. And here’s where it gets heavy.

Conan is pursuing something he cannot grasp, in darkness. So far beneath the earth he passes underneath a river, water dripping overhead. Then back up the stairs and out, into daylight. And finds himself standing on a precipice, staring down into an impassable chasm.

On the other side, Vertorix and Tamera, confronted by horror.

The contrast is striking. The chasm is positioned in the story immediately after Conan emerges from labyrinthine, shadowed tunnels. Below is Howard’s subconscious thinking; above in the light an insurmountable barrier, a clear vision of his own life. He describes it as both a cleft and a gorge; a narrow valley of sheer rock walls, at the bottom of which is a rapid river, the source of the great carving.

A chasm is a primordial image, literally and figuratively. Deep time because water has carved it out, over millennia. But a chasm can also represent spiritual and moral divides, an insurmountable gap in relationship or experience. This chasm is both a gulf between modernity and the past, time that we cannot bridge, and the relationships we cannot consummate. “Howard” on one side, unrequited love on the other. 

Read that as you will; characters aren’t always the author, and of course Howard wrote “People of the Dark” three years before he’d meet Novalyne Price Ellis (and lose her to Truett Vinson). But of his own admission he was a man born out of his time.

This thought exercise and striking (to me at least) literary symbol prompted me to dig a little deeper. At reh.world I found a link to an essay by Ståle Gismervik noting that Howard composed two drafts of “People of the Dark.” In the revision Howard added a depth and richness not in the first draft, which was a barer bones, straightforward, and incomplete adventure. 

Perhaps he sensed something more profound lay in its stark outlines.

“People of the Dark” was adapted by Roy Thomas and Alex Nino in Savage Sword of Conan #6 (April 1975) … which I happen to have. Images follow. Pretty awesome … but the story has been “freely adapted” (aka., heavily modified) from Howard’s original. Instead of Conan the Irish reaver, the narrator John O’Brien wakes to find himself transformed into the real deal, Conan of Cimmeria. The change is drastic but I suppose reasonable given that this is Savage Sword of Conan, although the mag did do faithful non-Conan adaptations. The ending (which I won’t spoil here) is also quite different than the prose story, with a different outcome for our narrator.

Maybe Howard himself would have anticipated Thomas had he written the character prior to 1932. At the time of “People” Conan was a nascent figure, almost ready to evolve from Kull and Conan of Eireann, and whatever other combination of prize fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers and honest workmen with which he had come in contact. Conan of Cimmeria eventually stalked fully formed into the Dec. 1932 Weird Tales, in “The Phoenix on the Sword.” But his ghost is here in “People.” Conan the Irish Reiver separated from his full becoming by a chasm, ready to be bridged.

TL;DR, read Celtic Adventures for wild Irish adventure and more.

The chasm...