Goodbye to Romance: Reflections on Black Sabbath, Back to the Beginning, and the end of the road

This past weekend I was away celebrating the long July 4 holiday. My extended family is fortunate enough to own a seasonal camp on one of the small lakes that dot southern New Hampshire like lapis lazuli under the mountains. We watched fireworks on the beach, puttered around in the pontoon boat, drank spirits, and forgot about life for a while.

But my mind kept wandering. Far away, to Birmingham, England, where an old greying band dressed in black was taking the stage one last time. Saturday was “Back to the Beginning” and the beginning of the end for a band near-and-dear to my heart.  

I’m talking about Black Sabbath, of course.

If you believe Rob Halford and Ozzy Osbourne (who wouldn’t? they are our metal gods, infallible, their word comes from on high), heavy metal’s distinctive sound and look derived at least in part from the sound of clashing steel machinery and billowing fire and smoke of the iron foundries of Birmingham. Birmingham was among the principal engines of the industrial revolution of the mid-18th/early 19th centuries. After the Luftwaffe bombed the shit out of it in WW2—which come to think of it is very fucking metal—it rebounded with a period of economic growth, before beginning a slow decline in the 70s. 

Against this curtain of dirty steel and fire heavy metal was born.

Ozzy was born in Aston, a ward in the city, in 1948, growing up in a row of terraced houses. Not a lovely place to spend your childhood. “Unless your life’s ambitions was to work in a factory, killing yourself with all-night shifts on an assembly line, there wasn’t much to look forward to, growing up in Aston. The only jobs to be had were in the factories,” he says in his 2009 autobiography I Am Ozzy.

From this cauldron of crashing iron, molten steel slag and urban decay came Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, the alpha and omega of heavy metal. And others besides. Ozzy escaped the slaughterhouse in which he worked, and hitched to Tony Iommi his star quickly ascended.

Sabbath is regarded as the first metal band by almost everyone; if you think it was actually someone like Blue Cheer you are more than a little pretentious; if you think it was Led Zeppelin you’re an amateur but us metalheads can work with you, young grasshopper, and get you on the path to enlightenment. Those bands made metal sounds, sprinkled in metal chords, and sometimes wrote metal songs: “The Immigrant Song” is thoroughly metal, for example. But Zeppelin as a whole is not. They are blues-based rock. Likewise Blue Cheer may have made songs with heavy metal elements, but they did not start a movement. Black Sabbath did, by going all in with the sound and the look, consistently, album over albums. Their self-titled album debuted on Feb. 13, 1970, and with it heavy metal was born.

If a band is to be considered heavy metal it must embrace that identity all the way--thematically, visually, and most of all, unapologetically. Without irony, unless you are Steel Panther or GWAR. This describes Black Sabbath. The quartet of lead vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, founder and lead guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward, and bassist Geezer Butler, went all-in with crunching, guitar-forward riffs, demonic imagery and lyrics. To get a sense of his sound and how different Black Sabbath is than say, the Rolling Stones—who rock hard but are not heavy metal—you must listen. Words are inadequate. I recommend pulling up “Into the Void” on Youtube or Spotify. You might at first think you’re stoned; the drawn-out intro is downbeat, slow, murky. Coupled with a trippy album cover you might think you were listening to some obscure act who had their heyday at Woodstock and burned out on acid. But then, suddenly, at the 1:14 mark, the song takes a hard right turn into the primal. A primitive downshift to an entirely new type of thing altogether. If you have a pulse this is guaranteed to cause a few involuntary reactions. Your mouth will harden into a rigid, righteous attitude. Your lips will purse. In short order your head will begin nodding to Ward’s driving drumbeat. You may break out into air guitar, mimicking Iommi’s inimitable guitar tones, or you may air drum, swinging your arms to hit an invisible snare. No one seems to play air bass but if that’s your thing, have at it. Go do this now; I’ll wait here. If you experience no involuntary reaction to “Into the Void” or “War Pigs,” you are not metal and never will be.

Sabbath were the torchbearers for metal from 1970-1976, putting out classic after classic album including their self-titled debut, followed by Paranoid (1970), Master of Reality (1971), Vol. 4 (1972), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), and Sabotage (1975). Sabbath’s distinctive sound came from its tuned down guitars; Iommi needed to loosen his guitar strings after losing the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident (a story that is so metal it has passed into legend, or True Myth). Although they received little commercial airplay Black Sabbath built a massive following with hits like “Paranoid,” “War Pigs,” “Iron Man” and “Children of the Grave.” Their sound would influence subsequent waves of American thrash bands across the Atlantic, including the most commercially successful metal band ever, Metallica. Said Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich during Sabbath’s Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony,:“Bill, Geezer, Ozzy and Tony, if it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be here. Obviously if there was no Black Sabbath, there would be no Metallica. If there was no Black Sabbath, hard rock and heavy metal as we know it today would look, sound and be shaped very, very differently. So if there was no Black Sabbath, I could possibly still be a morning newspaper delivery boy.”

Sabbath was also the first metal band to feel the unending attacks of self-righteous and pretentious critics, who were unable to appreciate this groundbreaking genre of music because they had their heads jammed firmly up the Beatles’ asses. Rolling Stone critic Lester Bangs in September 1970 panned Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut—the same album that launched thousand metal careers and today remains a stone-cold classic—with the following bucket of ice water: “Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath, which was hyped as a rockin' ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like England's answer to Coven. Well, they're not that bad, but that's about all the credit you can give them. The whole album is a shuck.” 

55 years later the laugh is on him. Apparently all 45,000 tickets for the concert sold out in 16 minutes. I was giving the streaming pay-per-view serious consideration but again, family comes first.

I’m on record as saying my favorite incarnation of Sabbath is the Dio years, in particular Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules (though you shouldn’t sleep on Dehumanizer). But I recognize the power, the legacy, and most of all the groundbreaking performance of the original four.

I’m glad I got to see the OG Sabbath a couple times on the Ozzfest tour in the late 90s and early oughts. When I was getting into metal in the late 80s Sabbath were at their nadir. I didn’t understand all the hype… until I started figuring it out with the tribute album Nativity in Black. Their performances at Ozzfest confirmed that the old stories were true. Sabbath was awesome and blew me away.

Sabbath’s last live performance as the original four was at Ozzfest in 2005, although a new incarnation picked up in 2006 as Heaven and Hell (I do consider H&H Sabbath in all but name—Iommi drives the boat, Chief. Not Sharon).

But no original four for a stretch of 20 years. Until Saturday, when they took their final bow. Back in Birmingham, as it should be.

Seated on his black throne Ozzy managed to summon some of his old power and haunting vocals, the unmistakable keening wail. I was pleasantly surprised by their performance, both the Sabbath final set and Ozzy’s solo material prior. Seeing him struggle through “Mama I’m Coming Home” brought a tear to my eye. I think he was struggling because of the words and what they represent, not the effort.

Some of the old guard summoned some great performances, too, pieces here and there I’ve been able to catch. Slayer was great. Steven Tyler was fantastic though he did not perform any Sabbath songs. Metallica rocked (“Johnny Blade”? Are you kidding? Awesome). Jake E. Lee, Nuno Bettencourt, and KK Downing shredded. I was also impressed by some young blood/Yungblud. Whew, that dude can sing. I’ve heard great things about Rival Sons cover of “Electric Funeral.”

I haven’t seen all the performances yet, just what I’ve been able to find on YouTube. I’m sure there will be some special DVD release and I’m looking forward to seeing it in full.

We also had some great recorded performances. Jack Black’s School of Rock version of “Mr. Crowley” made me smile, and nod… and cheer. He played it straight, rare for him. Over the top in an early 80s Ozzy tribute costume, but not straying into buffoonery or mockery, and he sounded great. I’ve already mentioned Judas Priest’s cover of “War Pigs,” which was sort of a separate thing though obviously timed for the show.

I don’t believe another metal band will ever receive this sort of all-star sendoff. Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Metallica are rivals in influence (though I think Sabbath still gets the nod here) and Metallica is more commercially popular, but by the time Metallica retires—they are still in their early 60s and could have another solid decade ahead of them—the old guard will have slipped away, either into musical senesce or their mortal coil. We won’t have Slayer and Steven Tyler to perform; we won’t have Judas Priest to create a video tribute.

Metal is going, boys. Its passage had already begun with the deaths of Ronnie James Dio and Lemmy, but with Sabbath’s departure from the stage we’re truly seeing the beginning of the end.

And it makes me sad.

Classic heavy metal is tied to the romance of my life. Growing up I discovered its magic. For me heavy metal was a release from conformity. When I joined the ranks of metal warriors I wasn’t scared; I was part of something powerful, unique, wild, weird. I wore the denim, and the black.

So I say goodbye to romance.

The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell; a review

“Myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, that you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a good average for that to happen—but actually, in the individual life, it differs greatly. Some people are late bloomers, and come to particular stages at a relatively late age. You have to have a feeling for where you are. You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.”

--Joseph Campbell

Myths—the old great ones—are true. Not because they necessarily happened—though some have, in some form or fashion, even if distorted or exaggerated over centuries and millennia of retelling—but because they convey timeless truths about the human condition. We recognize something of ourselves in them. The wanderings of Odysseus. King Arthur and the quest for the Grail and the fall of Camelot. The Celtic myths and legends, of Cú Chulainn and the Tuatha Dé Danann. These stories endure because they tell us something profound about human nature, both how it is and how it might be different, how we might live better lives. 

I was reminded of everything I love about myth in a recent reading of The Power of Myth. Published in 1988, the book is an extended conversation between Joseph Campbell and television journalist Bill Moyers (who just passed away last month) that took place in 1985 and 1986 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and the Museum of Natural History in New York. Portions of the interview were aired in a six-hour PBS series, which proved wildly popular at the time and led to a Campbell revival. The interviews spanned more than 24 hours and The Power of Myth is the complete edited transcript. 

Campbell passed away just a year after the interview and The Power of Myth serves as a repository of his thinking late in life. I’m glad we have it. I cannot do justice to his unique intellect except to say he understood humanity at a level few have before or since. His great genius was in comparative mythology. Campbell spent a lifetime studying the great myths of all the world and came to find they shared much in common. People across cultures and ages are different, but also struggle with the same concerns and problems—the aimlessness of youth, the difficult transition from childhood to adult responsibility, aging and death. And these common stories become encoded into myth.

The Power of Myth is not Bulfinch’s Mythology. It is not a history of the myths, but instead addresses their metaphysical aspects: What are myths? Why do we need them? How have they come to endure?

The answers lie in the pages of this book, but also Dr. Robert Johnson, a contemporary of Campbell and like him a student of Carl Jung, who said of myth, “People have such a tendency to think that mythology is something that happened way back yonder, but mythology is a current, immediate, living thing. Everybody has his own myth, churning away inside himself.”

This speaks to me.

I spent much of my life walking around in a fog, consuming music, books, porn, social media, whatever. Never turning inward; never attempting to come to grips with my unconscious self that ruled my actions like an unseen hand on the tiller. Myths offer a way out, into a higher plane of existence, because they make you look within, where the answers lie, and where the dragon waits. This is the hero’s journey and one we all must undertake. I have personally experienced it, and see the same story and archetypes and patterns play out again and again in the broader culture. 

Jung and Campbell have somewhat fallen out of favor today. We have a blossoming field of neuroscience plumbing the depths of the human brain at a physical, biochemical level. I suspect the scientific community would consider the idea of a shadow self or the collective unconscious unscientific, speculative, lacking empirical support. But they continue to provide a working model of the human psyche and development that speaks to me, deeply. I have to come to believe in dualism. Mind and body are separate though related. Although concepts like love and honor and pride are not physical objects they exist, and so are of no less import than physical matter. We need abstract symbolic language to navigate the concrete world. Myths offer the roadmap.

The real quest is within, our foe to be conquered is the unexamined life, the un-individuated self. We believe our lives will be fixed if a certain politician gets into office or some bill is passed; we are mistaken.  The hard truth is that no calvary is coming over the hill; we must accept the burden of accountability, which is paradoxically liberating. Says Campbell: 

“Ultimately, the last deed has to be done by yourself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down … Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing.”

As Jung said in The Undiscovered Self, “A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations.” Adds Johnson: “You have to have some sane people as individuals before you can talk about community. Otherwise you have a community of sickness.”

This is not a call for selfishness; it’s a call for living an authentic life and then sharing the bounty outwards. Being curious about other people’s lives; expressing true empathy. This is the truth at the heart of the Holy Grail myth, in which the knights set out each on their own path, entering the Forest Sauvage at their own entry points. Per Campbell:

“The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. And that is what T.S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land … the Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.”

Once we have found ourselves, we help others. That completes the circle. Perceval recovers the Grail only after he formulates the question to the wounded Fisher King: “What ails thee?” 

“The question is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being,” Campbell explains. “That’s the Grail.”

It’s not easy, but life is hard, and has always been thus. But Campbell chose to play it. His lessons are worth reading. "I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera--except that it hurts".

On a bit of a lighter note, if you’re a Star Wars fan The Power of Myth contains some insightful analysis of the film. For example, Campbell describes Darth Vader as an unformed man, undeveloped as a human individual, but is instead a bureaucrat living for an imposed program (Lucas was a big Campbell devotee and Star Wars an homage to his teachings). Vader’s monstrous mask is a symbol; when taken away his “strange and sort of pitiful undifferentiated face” is laid bare. 

We need the myths; without the great stories we lack the models and language to become self-sufficient individuals, susceptible to propaganda and mass subjugation. Fortunately we have Campell’s teachings as a north star to guide us out of our own personal wasteland, if we brave the journey. We must.

War Pigs, Judas Priest

Easy call this Metal Friday. A fantastic Judas Priest tribute to the great Black Sabbath, who are playing their final show this weekend.

Glenn Tipton in there too? Outstanding.

Sabbath is at the end. Priest is nearing the end. At this point all the great classic heavy metal bands are in their twilight.

But I'm grateful to have lived through it--and Priest still sounds pretty awesome here. I hope Ozzy still has a bit in the tank for his final show.

The Shining Wire

They knew well enough what was happening. But even to themselves they pretended that all was well, for the food was good, they were protected, they had nothing to fear but the one fear; and that struck here and there, never enough at a time to drive them away. They forgot the ways of wild rabbits. They forgot El-ahrairah, for what use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy’s warren and paying his price? They found out other marvelous arts to take the place of tricks and old stories. They danced in ceremonious greeting. They sang songs like the birds and made Shapes on the walls; and though these could help them not at all, yet they passed the time and enabled them to tell themselves that they were splendid fellows, the very flower of Rabbitry, cleverer than magpies. They had no Chief Rabbit—no, how could they?—for a Chief Rabbit must be El-ahrairah to his warren and keep them from death: and here there was no death but one, and what Chief Rabbit could have an answer to that? Instead, Frith sent them strange singers, beautiful and sick like oak apples, like robins’ pincushions on the wild rose. And since they could not bear the truth, these singers, who might in some other place have been wise, were squeezed under the terrible weight of the warren’s secret until they gulped out fine folly—about dignity and acquiescence, and anything else that could make believe that the rabbit loved the shining wire.

--Richard Adams, Watership Down

Generative AI = the shining wire.

Still time to escape to a new warren over the hill, if you are willing to brave the journey.

S&S publishing news: Plunder-a-plenty

Lots of swords, lots of sorcery going on.

My friend Ken Lizzi, one of the dudes with whom I split a house rental at 2023 Robert E. Howard Days, is having his Cesar the Bravo fiction collected and kickstarted by Cirsova. Cesar, a sometimes-condottiero and a bravo by trade, has earned a reputation as one of the best swords for hire in the city of Plenum. If you need a foe humiliated before a cheering crowd, he’s your man! 

This collection includes 5 previously published adventures plus an all-new full-length novel! Ken is a good dude and a good writer. Get in on that today.

I'm giving Old Moon Quarterly a shot. I bought one of their issues recently and now am kickstarting issues #9-10. One of these is Arthurian themed which ticks a lot of my boxes. I'm liking the aesthetic of this publication. As I write this entry I can see they've met their funding minimum and now we'll see what else they might unlock. Maybe Excalibur from the stone?

Digging the Celtitude.

Speaking of great aesthetics, DMR Books has published Celtic Adventures, with one of the best covers I've seen. This reminds me I still need to pick up Swords of Steel vol. 4. Some awesome reprints in this one, including the likes of REH and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, whose "Vengeance" in DMR Books' Viking Adventures I could not put down.

I'm also kickstarting David C. Smith's Sometime Lofty Towers. You should too, as its one of the best modern sword-and-sorcery stories I've read. You can read my prior review of this fine title here. This one is just about to fund, you can be the one to put it over the top!

In summary, no shortage of excellent stuff going on these days in S&S. I love the old stuff too but try to support new authors and projects. 

Note: This roundup is far from comprehensive, just a few things that have crossed my transom recently.

More generative AI harm

The result I was anticipating has occurred. A Federal California Judge today ruled in favor of AI giant Anthropic, stating that the company’s training of its large language models on the works of authors without permission constitutes fair use. He did rule that its use of pirated material is theft, but this latter win is quite minor in comparison to the win handed to tech giants.

From 404 Media, “The complex decision is one of the first of its kind in a series of high-profile copyright lawsuits brought by authors and artists against AI companies, and it’s largely a very bad decision for authors, artists, writers, and web developers.”  

It's the precedent for which all the major AI firms were waiting. They can now ingest all your work freely and then sell it back to you for a monthly licensing fee.

 The rich get richer and the rest get ever smaller scraps.

All while gleefully continuing to destroy your jobs and your family’s future. Because, China?

Just a few weeks ago Anthropic’s CEO predicted that their product and its AI ilk will lead to the elimination of 50% of all entry level jobs, and 10-20% unemployment more broadly. 

This is not me playing Boy Who Cried Wolf. The wolf is at your door, and its hungry.

Job losses are already happening. In my work outside of the blogosphere I serve a slice of healthcare. Providence Health Care recently laid off 600 employees amid restructuring and is now heavily investing in AI.

That’s 600 jobs replaced by machines. This trend will grow exponentially.

EVEN IF the end result is something like universal basic income it will be a net loss for humanity. We’re meant to do hard things, not play with ourselves on our fucking computers and lap up the output of machines that have strip-mined humanity’s riches and spoon feed it back to you as slop.

A few other wonderful AI news briefs worth mentioning.

• Unqualified job candidates are flooding inboxes with AI generated resumes tailored to match job descriptions. Companies are using AI to weed out candidates, and in some cases interview candidates with voice AI. AI agents are talking to AI agents. No humans apparently needed. 
• Communication skills are being incredibly degraded. No one can write without a machine, and those that do use machines are getting dumber. Students using ChatGPT to write their papers show vastly lowered brain activity and little to no recall. This is not me blowing gas, it’s an MIT study.

Sometimes progress isn’t. 

I suppose I could just stick my head in the sand and go back to blogging about old books and pulp authors and heavy metal. I’m sure a few of my half-dozen readers would prefer this. No fear, I will blog about these subjects. 

But none of this exists without people. I love looking at works made by people, for other people, not the output of machines. I can’t and won’t stop writing about this issue. 

I continue to maintain that for creative work and deep learning, and possibly our future as a species, gen AI is a cancer.

A little piece of Howard Days wends its way home: God's Blade

One of the cool things you encounter attending Howard Days are many bits of Howard and Howard-adjacent ephemera fans bring to the silent auction or the dealers' tables or just carry as handouts to the one place in the world they know will find an appreciative audience.

One of those pieces made its way back home to Massachusetts where I call home. God's Blade: A Sketchbook by Michael Rollins. Editor Jason Hardy put together this modest but terrific little handmade book and asked me to write a short introductory essay. Which I was proud to do, for a gratis copy. See "Solomon Kane Against Injustice."

The book features some fine poetry by Hardy, Charles Gramlich, Michael Rollins, and Chris L. Adams. At first glance I'm struck by the outstanding artwork by Rollins. Very unique style, dark, lonely, Puritanical in feel. Kane's visage is cast into shadow, suitable for this somewhat complex figure. In the preface to the book Rollins says his art was inspired by the stark trees native to his hometown of Cumbria, England. He notes that when composing these pieces he "rarely began with Solomon, rather placing him in the landscape, which I think accentuated the feeling of his almost hopeless fight against the darkness around him."

Well done.

"Powerslave," Iron Maiden

Iron Maiden is so damned good and has so many damned good songs that I can't listen to them neutrally. I've lost track of the number of times I've found myself sitting next to a friend with a cold beer, and had to stop our conversation mid-sentence.

"So man I've always wanted to tell you something. And never had the courage. It's just that..."

"Wait, hold that thought--you need to hear this. Wait for it..."

And then I launch into how awesome this bit of Maiden-ness is.

The guitar solo in "Powerslave" is one of those moments. Stops me cold every time. Easily in my top 5 Maiden solos, and that's saying something. I'm proud of the work I did capturing the fantastic work of Nikki Stringfield of the Iron Maidens absolutely killing it at Wallys on Hampton Beach. 

I mean, just beautiful. So is the guitar solo.

"Powerslave" brings dry and dessicated ancient Egypt to vivid visceral life through the power of heavy metal. When Bruce Dickinson dons his owl Horus mask (as I saw him do in 2008) the effect is complete. We're hearing the words of an ancient Pharoah, believing he is a god but finding out he is all too mortal, subject to the eternal law of death.

Tell me why I had to be a Powerslave

I don't wanna die, I'm a God, why can't I live on?

When the Life Giver dies, all around is laid waste

And in my last hour, I'm a slave to the Power of Death.

Have a very metal weekend.

I've finally got it: Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves & Things

Pumped for this delivery.

When I was a kid I used to regularly check out Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves & Things (1973, Rand McNally & Company) from my elementary school library. I LOVED this book even though it scared the piss out of me. But when I moved on to middle school that was the last I saw of it.

Until now.

You may recall my prior posts about it here on the blog. Here's the first, A scare from the deep mists of time: Monster Tales, from July 2009. At the time I could not even remember the name of the book, only a few vivid details. A happy Google search struck paydirt. I wrote at the time:

Were you ever seized by the intoxicating memory of reading a much-loved book as a child, only to despair that you'd never remember the title? This happened to me today. From some subterranean depths in my brain came the tale of a boy who exacts revenge on his family's killers by voluntarily taking on the form of a werewolf. I remembered it being a short story contained in a red hardcover book, filled with startling black-and-white illustrations. I remember reading it over and over again in my elementary school library in the 1970s. But that was the extent of my recollection.

I plugged in "werewolf stories for children" and "horror anthologies for children and 1970s" into Google to see what would come up... and eventually came across this marvelous link, courtesy of The Haunted Closet: http://the-haunted-closet.blogspot.com/2008/10/monster-tales-vampires-werewolves.html.

Twelve years later I revisited Monster Tales in a post for the blog of Goodman Games/Tales from the Magician's Skull, Brian Murphy's Gateways to Sword-and-Sorcery. Monster Tales was one of my gateway drugs to S&S, and a potent one. As I wrote in that 2021 blog post:

In hindsight I can see how I was being inevitably steered toward sword-and-sorcery by consuming its various components; historical elements, grit and danger, monsters, tough and resourceful heroes, horror, and the weird. I am grateful to have had access to books that moved me, exposed me to grim struggle, even disturbed me. Here’s a PSA for parents of young children: A few bad dreams are OK if the reward is making a lifelong reader. 

Within a year or so of consuming the titles in this list I would discover Robert E. Howard in the pages of The Savage of Sword of Conan, and my path was fixed. But I have these gateway books to thank for getting me started down that savage trail.

Sixteen years later, I now have a copy of my own.

I haven't been looking with any regularity. No ebay or Google alerts. Just the occasional search... and blanching at the typical $80-100 asking price (I've seen it listed for as much as $120. WTF). But a couple weeks ago I popped it into ebay and saw a copy listed by Thrift Books for $33. Immediately bought it. Today it arrived in the mail, in surprisingly excellent shape.

With patience, you can still get a decent deal. BTW I also tracked down a copy of Fire-Hunter.

Looking forward to a re-read for the first time in a VERY long time.

Tell me these aren't some creepy images for a kid...

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, a review

Lady Gaga would appreciate this romance....

I don’t read much romance. But when I do, I read The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. It’s an old romance, a medieval romance. Definitely not a bad romance.

There is something to old.

Many of today's fantasy authors attempt to replicate the medieval age by slapping armor on a modern talking dude operating within a modern moral framework. Which is not wrong (it’s fantasy; they can do what they will), but it’s also not the past; it’s a contemporary novel draped in the outwear of the archaic. 

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult is old, and feels it. It traces back to the 12th century and likely older Celtic legends. Its soul is medieval. Modern politics are as out of place here as a 9mm pistol. Women are married off to mollify tension between kingdoms; children are taken as chattel slaves; men risk everything to ride to the defense of other lords. Kings make the rules … and they are not all good.

The story is a basic tale of star-crossed lovers. Iseult, an Irish princess, is promised as a bride to King Mark of Cornwall. But she and Mark’s young nephew Tristan fall in love and begin an affair. Conflict ensues. 

What makes it “new” is the deeply medieval moral framework in which the story exists. All the same petty jealousies and betrayals that we recognize today are here but with medieval twists. When Mark discovers the affair he’s pissed and orders the lovers … burned at the stake. No trial, no one riding to their defense. This is pre-bill of rights, pre-courts. I feel like the Old Norse Thing settled disputes far more equitably. We experience a terrible/wonderful tension of illicit love at conflict with fidelity to lord/honor and obligation, each side fairly represented in a classic courtly love which fueled so many medieval romances. Other modern dissonances: Tristan decides for Iseult that she shall marry King Mark (she has no say). Tristan falls for another Iseult, Iseult of the White Hand, marries her, and then leaves her hanging, marriage unconsummated, when he realizes he still loves the OG Iseult. Iseult of the White Hand returns the ill favor a hundredfold in a stunning end that I won’t spoil here (can 1000 year old stories be spoiled)? There is deference to God; Iseult takes a test of purity to prove her innocence, submitting her flesh to a hot brand. 

You don’t see this type of thing being written today. Maybe we do and I’ve missed it.

Tristan and Iseult is part of the Arthurian cycle, occupying the same shared universe, but only peripherally. Arthur and his knights are mentioned in the story but play no significant role. The tale serves as likely inspiration for the Launcelot-Guinevere-Arthur love triangle. There are small incursions of magic, including a magic dog with a bell that distracts its owner from grief, a gift from the mystic isle of Avalon. Most notably it includes a love potion whose accidental ingestion causes Tristan and Iseult to fall madly in love. The potion has been the subject of much debate; was it placed here to remove some of the responsibility for the affair, or evoke our sympathy? Far be it from me to criticize timeless works but it did not feel wholly necessary and may have made more sense to a medieval audience.

I read an accessible modern-ish retelling assembled by French medievalist Joseph Bediere in 1900, translated into English in 1945. It is told with the reference point of a Celtic bard talking to an audience of nobles, breaking of the fourth wall with direct references to the reader. We are a listener in this hall of fire. This device allows the tale to cover a lot of ground but without the detail we’d expect in a modern novel. For example, battles are relayed as events that occurred minus the up-close cut and thrust of Joe Abercrombie. But some are desperate and memorable, including Tristan’s one-on-battle duel on a small island vs. the massive and intimating Irish champion the Morholt (what a menacing name; a possible precursor to The Mountain?) Speaking of the Mountain the combat and the broader story features a liberal use of poison. 

I was moved by the incredibly touching end image, a persistent vine that even when cut continues growing to connect the two graves. Love endures all.

Recommended of course.

Notes

• The tale endures the ages, adapted by Richard Wagner and others. 

• This seems to be the kind of thing Old Moon is reviving and I backed their recent Arthurian/dark fantasy kickstarter here.

• No need to find old books; you can read Tristan and Iseult right now on Project Gutenberg.

Robert E. Howard Days and remembering my 2023 trip

Robert E. Howard Days is here again. The annual gathering to celebrate one of the twin towers of modern fantasy at his home in Cross Plains, TX. And I won't be going. I'm definitely feeling a few pangs of regret and a fair bit of FOMO.

I suppose I'll be there tangentially; David Hardy is bringing a Solomon Kane fanzine in which he asked me to contribute a short essay.

Two years ago I attended the mecca for Howard-heads, staying in a rented home with Deuce Richardson and Ken Lizzi. You can read the sordid tale of our exploits here. If you want more there's an oral history of it here on this episode of the Rogues in the House podcast, where I was joined by fellow guests Jason Waltz and Jason Ray Carney.

I came back loaded up with more loot than a Viking raid of the Irish coast circa 780 AD. 

I do absolutely plan to get back one day, and hopefully soon. One Howard Days is not enough. I'd like to see Howard's home and Higginbothom's again and take in the panels, but also the fantastic human companionship. Shake Will Oliver's hand for example for his herculean task of researching and writing Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. Have a great trip Will! And the Shiner Bock is not drinking itself.

In 2023 I was asked to present a paper at an academic panel. I thought I'd share that here, since I only recited it orally and it has never seen print elsewhere. 

Here is Far Countries of the Mind: The Frontier Fantasy of Robert E. Howard.

2023 Glenn Lord Symposium panel... left to right Dierk Gunther, me, Will Oliver, Jason Ray Carney.

***

Far countries of the mind: The frontier fantasy of Robert E. Howard

When Jason asked me to present a paper at the Glenn Lord Symposium, I wanted to do something that would both be on point with the man of the hour, but also spoke to why we need to seek out new experiences and new landscapes.

This is my first trip to Cross Plains, a far country at least to this son of Massachusetts. 

Any Jack London fans here?

Howard certainly was; he referred to London as “this Texan’s favorite writer,” and boasted that London “stands head and shoulders above all other American writers.” 

London is today best known for his novels The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, and short stories like “To Build a Fire.”

London actually did write some notable fantasy, including a book which held Howard in a particular possession: The Star-Rover.

But compared to Howard, London’s literary corpus was principally set here, in a recognizable historical framework contemporary times. The Klondike, and the South China Sea.

Why?

Born in 1876, three decades before Howard, London was able to experience life in a way Howard could not.

London had a literal frontier to set his stories: The Klondike, Yukon territory up in northwest Canada. London experienced North America’s last frontier first-hand. In 1897, a 21-year-old London took part in the gold rush in search of fame and fortune. His adventures in this vast, unforgiving, awe-inspiring expanse of wilderness informed the remainder of his writing career. It was something akin to magic.

In the last chapter of The Call of the Wild, “The Sounding of the Call,” John Thornton, Buck and their companions embark on a long overland voyage in search of a lost mine, pushing the boundaries of the gold rush into uncharted lands. Here it’s as though the characters have left reality and entered the land of myth. A hunt for treasure in a dangerous, unknown, and fantastic world, not so far from the likes of Conan as you might think. 

London’s language here is heightened, rarefied, almost otherworldly. Indulge me this reading:

“When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.

But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the backbone of the continent.

… on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.”

We’re in Holy Grail territory here, or perhaps the land of the Jewels of Gwahlur. Possibly.

Born 30 years after London, Howard lived in a world in which the frontier, at least in the continental U.S., had closed. In 1906, the west was only recently settled but was settled nonetheless. After Wounded Knee the days of Indian raids were largely over. 

In Howard’s time the “gold rush” was not individuals seeking wealth, but oil companies setting up shop in Texas and pumping the land of black gold, leaving broken bodies and despoiled land in their wake. 

Faced with this unsatisfying reality Howard turned his typewriter to stories set in the world of fantasy, where a frontier of the mind could still be found.

The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of barbaric races.

It was also a place where life had meaning, because it was put to the test.

Back to London, in his story “In a Far Country” two civilized slackers serving as part of an expedition in the Klondike opt to leave their party and hole up for the worst of the winter in a cabin. They succumb to their own sloth and the dark isolation of the terrible cold north. It’s dark and terrible (and wonderful).

From "In a Far Country":

“When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand. This chafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils and leading to various misfortunes. It were better for the man who cannot fit himself to the new groove to return to his own country; if he delay too long, he will surely die.”

This was Howard’s model; these lands were hard, and broke many, but they were a testing ground, where life was vivid and real, and you could emerge from it transformed if it did not destroy you.

Artist credit: Alex Kerr.

Being of Texas Howard has always been a western writer, even if not always recognized as such. According to Glenn Lord (and you knew I had to reference him here), Howard wrote 41 westerns over his career, all but four prior to 1933. These include Weird Westerns like “The Hoofed Thing,” “The Black Hound of Death,” his humorous Breckenridge Elkins stories, and even pulpy historical fiction like “The Vultures of Whapeton.” His “Marchers of Valhalla” takes place in a prehistoric Texas. 

Karl Edward Wagner in Echoes of Valor described Howard’s work a “fusion of Old World Myth and Old West Legend.” Mark Finn has made mighty inroads with Blood and Thunder. 

But mostly he’s known as the Conan guy.

Another Howard scholar who sought to rectify this narrow view was the late great Steve Tompkins. In “How the West Was Wondered” in the April 2005 The Cimmerian journal, Tompkins quipped, “Robert E. Howard’s sense of humor could be plenty dark, and we can but hope that he would have been amused by his status as a perennial absentee, a Nowhere Man of Texas Literature. He has become a figure of world-historical significance in modern fantasy without ever figuring in the literary annals of his home state.”

Tompkins essay includes a William Carlos Williams citation. Williams described America as being the perhaps the only nation capable of flooding the civilized world with “rich regenerative violence” because of its frontier legacy. 

And when we see the Picts flooding over the walls of Valenso’s stockade at the end of “The Black Stranger,” we understand.

Howard had no contemporary frontier in which to tell his stories, like London had. But Howard’s violent fantasy frontiers regenerated reader’s minds that were no longer offered the possibility of somewhere else.

The Hyborian Age became Howard’s Far Country, a place where he could hurl off the shackles of modern courtesies, conformity, and expectation, through larger-than-life figures like Kull and Conan. 

We need a frontier. I sometimes wonder if our lack of unclaimed land is at the root of our current national and international unrest. At least here in the U.S. we don’t do well with restrictions and imposed scarcity. 

We feel the need for frontiers without, and we feel them within. Howard needed them, something beyond the close walls of his Cross Plains bedroom, crying out for individual liberty, the only thing worth a damn.

The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of the barbaric races.  In “Beyond the Black River” a small group of settlers struggle to make a living on the edge of a vast, dark Pictish wilderness, and is essentially a western masquerading as a weird tale. Consciously or unconsciously the west crept into his fantasy, which lent them much of their unique character.

As has been well documented, Howard began to turn away from fantasy, and toward stories of the old west, specifically the history of Texas. Howard often waxed poetically of these bygone times. In a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft he relayed a road trip he and good friend Truett Vinson took to the wild and isolated frontier village of Lincoln, home to the infamous and bloody Lincoln County War. Howard described his arrival as stepping into an elder age where old ghosts stalked its dusty, haunted streets, and of catching a glimpse of the once limitless frontier in the open desert plains west of the Pecos River.

In this old town of ghosts he saw the frontier.

Had he lived longer he would have written these stories; while this assertion involves some degree of speculation his own words layer that assertion with more than a veneer of Truth. I offer this passage from one of his letters:

Well they have gone into the night, a vast and silent caravan, with their buckskins and their boots, their spurs and their long rifles, their wagons and their mustangs, their wars and their loves, their brutalities and their chivalries, they have gone to join their old rivals, the wolf, the panther and the Indian, and only a crumbling ‘dobe wall, a fading trail, the breath of an old song, remain to mark the roads they travelled. But sometimes when the night wind whispers forgotten tales through the mesquite and the chaparral, it is easy to imagine that once again the tall grass bends to the tread of a ghostly caravan, that the breeze bears the jingle of stirrup and bridle-chain, and that spectral camp-fires are winking far out on the plains.

We would have had some amazing western literature from Howard’s typewriter, blending poetic flourishes with realism. Possibly tales about Billy the Kid or John Wesley Hardin, of whose tales he regaled Lovecraft at length. Maybe something as poignant as Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (McMurtry was a Howard fan, by the way), blending virtue and violence and an unflinching look at what a cattle drive might actually look like, when aid was far away and Indians and cattle-rustlers stood in for Picts and Zamorian thieves.

Howard’s mind was in a far country; maybe he tarried there too long. 

Sadly we don’t have his great tale of Texas. But what we do have are his stories of impossibly distant frontier life, in a far country, Beyond the Black River.

Some further thoughts on generative AI art

We’re getting increasingly embedded into machinery. The future is almost certainly cyborg, flesh and circuitry melded together. It is already happening but will occur on a rapid scale.

What about art? Why shouldn’t art be the same? 

We’ve already seen this trend. Even before generative AI, many/most artists were using advanced digital tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Writers were using grammar and spelling checker tools embedded into word processing software.

You can make the case that with gen AI nothing has really changed. Others are already making the case by just doing the thing; putting out art that is obviously AI generated.

I saw a recent post in a sword-and-sorcery Facebook group by an author promoting a new book with the most generic AI cover I’ve ever seen. I’m not going to link to it, but it’s obvious, and terrible. A search of said author’s website reveals everything about it including text is all AI.

Points for brazenness? 

What’s so wrong about generative AI, anyway?

My personal belief is that using AI in heavy quantities no longer makes the art yours, nor you an artist. At some point the credit must go to the machine. And the machines are not a neutral piece of technology. Nor are the companies programming the AIs and their leadership, who make very suspect ethical decisions.

Beyond these very real concerns is an even bigger underlying question: What is the purpose of AI generated art itself?

The question I have for heavy AI users is, do you see the same problem as I? Why do I need to bother reading (or certainly paying) for your art when I can just log into ChatGPT and have it create images and text that I prompt? 

Maybe that is the future of art—we just create our own, staring into our screens and having it create exactly what we want, when we want it. 

I don’t love the thought of this future.

When I view art, part of the experience—for me, it might differ for you—is engaging with the artist, too. What motivated them to create this piece, this way, with this mood, this viewpoint? How did Tolkien’s WWI experience influence The Lord of The Rings, how did the Texas landscape influence REH? 

I like engaging with unique visions from the minds of individuals. The Mad Max films look and feel a certain way, say certain things, because of George Miller.

It makes art unpredictable. Sometimes I don’t like the output, but that’s part of the experience. 

All of this is lost in the slop of a machine, which is a giant aggregator. We’re no longer engaging with a unique individual, or a discrete group of individuals (cast, director, and crew). We’re engaging with machine modeled output and algorithms. 

For all its limitations and mistakes generative AI is a massive leap forward from the tools described above. 

So what of its output?

I don’t like it. If it has a unique character, its soullessness. I will never, ever buy a book using obvious generative AI. If I’m being fully honest, I think less of people that publish it. It is giving me serious pause about buying anything written after 2021, which makes me sad.

It also makes me angry, because it’s an unearned and lazy shortcut.

If you can’t write well, you must learn to do so. If you can’t draw, learn the skill. Or, pay a fellow professional. If you can’t pay them, offer up some service in exchange they can’t perform. Bartering is profoundly human, accepting the output of a machine, Faustian. You’re undercutting the whole enterprise of art when you do this. Because again, art produced so cheap and easily is not worth consuming.

But being kind, and on the backend of a long career in publishing, I also say, YMMV. I might be wrong about this. Perhaps gen AI is bringing a new type of art into being, man-machine art. Perhaps it gives people without the means to publish the ability to do so. Perhaps we all might be using generative AI every day with the same ubiquity as email. 

I have used and continue to use AI for certain tasks in my own work. I know its power, I know its limitations. And I continue to wrestle with the morality of it all. To quote Danny Glover I’m perhaps too old for this shit. To understand it, to embrace it, to appreciate it.

But I don’t think I am wrong. I believe there is something deeply wrong here.

A D-Day reflection

June 6 will forever be D-Day.

I revere Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. But June 6 stands out, perhaps because it’s tied to a specific event and time. A single day. 

The longest day. 

June 6, 1944 was a long one.

Years ago I met a gentlemen on the deck of the decommissioned aircraft carrier U.S.S. Midway, a floating museum in the San Diego bay. Here’s the pic, of he and I. His name was Bob Watson, and he was in one of the first waves to hit the beach on that fateful day.

Bob had with him a photo collage that included handshakes with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, taken on the eve of the debut of Saving Private Ryan. The two legends interviewed Bob as part of their research for the film. 

Spielberg later asked Watson what he liked and disliked about Ryan. "The landing scene was accurate, though not quite as bloody as what really happened that day,” he said.

Yikes. 

In general Bob thought it was an excellent film and a compelling portrayal of the war. His sole criticism? "I told Spielberg: 'Who were these guys (actors)? They're too old. All the guys I knew were almost all 18, 19 years old.'" 

Bob was just 18 when he hit the carnage on the beach. The thought of a bunch of 18-year-olds whose first experience of combat was on Omaha is sobering and horrifying. 

The logistics of June 6, 1944 defy belief. I struggle with creating an email campaign for a webinar; can you imagine planning a seaborne invasion of Europe against an entrenched Nazi war machine? It makes my problems feel … ridiculous. 

My struggles are real but I’m glad I have this struggle, and not the one that confronted the allies that day, long ago. Your troubles are real, and worth solving. But when you look back at June 6 you also realize they’re not really that big, and some of them are not really problems at all.

Walking into withering MG-42 machine gun fire without cover, waist deep in water that is quickly turning to blood? Major problem. The best way to visualize this is to watch the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and the landings on Omaha Beach. 

I also recommend “Band of Brothers” which tells the story of Easy Company, the paratroopers who landed behind the lines shortly after midnight on June 6. Over 18,000 men of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the British 6th Airborne Division were dropped into Normandy, landing about 12:15 a.m.

That was just the beginning of a very long day.

Bob passed away in January 2024. If you know anyone left alive from that day, or WWII more broadly, give them your thanks. 

Sword-and-sorcery pinball machines are fucking cool

That’s the post.

I love the pairing of sword-and-sorcery aesthetic with machines of glass and steel. My idle daydream is to acquire a couple. Given the time and money I’d build a dedicated gaming den, dominated by … Gorgar.

I’ve never played this but chanced upon it in a happy internet search and fell in love with this and a bunch of other games that hold a dim place in my Gen-X memories.

What’s not to love about Gorgar? Hot chick in a bikini on a bloody altar? Check. Skulls. Muscular warriors. And giant snakes everywhere (a meme has been circulating that sword-and-sorcery is when the snakes are big). “Beware of the Pit.”

And of course, Gorgar himself, a red skinned demon with a menacing bass voice. The world’s first-ever talking pinball machine.

Then there’s Sorcerer. Seriously, look at this thing: https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/sorcerer/gallery It’s got that stoned 70s vibe, an image you once saw airbrushed on the side of a van. Hard to rip your eyes away.

Centaur (1981) is absolutely balls-out as well. Take a listen to the voice and sound effects, a robotic “Destroy Centaur!” Incredible.

Even cooler, the centaur isn’t half man, half horse, it’s a half man, half motorbike. Wielding an axe. This can be none more metal.

This dude has it going on with Centaur in his game room (and don’t think I don’t see that collected edition of Captain America).

Apparently player demand for Centaur led to Centaur 2. This video gives a better look at the complex clockwork mechanisms underpinning the game. Pretty freaking cool.

A few others include

Paragon.

Black Knight (1980). 

Seawitch.

Grand Lizard.

(edit) and of course Lost World, which I once highlighted here).

Absent any space restrictions I’d include Hercules, allegedly the world’s largest pinball machine. Which is reportedly lousy to play but sizewise it goes to 11. 

Today everyone is playing fully immersive MMORPGs with photorealistic graphics and novel-quality storylines. I have no problem with this, even though I gave up video games long ago. But there is something about real steel and glass, painted cabinets and game boards and lightbulbs and rubber bumpers. The tactile, analog, reality of these games, that have huge appeal.

Further there is something about the aesthetic of the late 70s/very early 80s games in particular that grip me. The colors have that Frank Frazetta/Jeff Jones muddiness/dun pallor to them, yellows and tans mixed with splashes of bright red and pale gold. As you slide into the mid-and late 80s the cabinets are brighter, a bit more comic book bright and garish. There are still amazing games here but just a little bit outside of what I’m looking for. And while I’m no pinball historian the video game boom of the early 80s dimmed this golden age of the silver ball.

By the way this theoretical S&S game room is not restricted to pinball. I’d have Heavy Metal, Fire and Ice, Conan the Barbarian 1982 and Thundarr the Barbarian playing in a continuous loop on a projection screen. Perhaps Gauntlet in the corner, or Joust. And of course, a bar with a couple kegs of beer tapped 24-7. Which is dangerous … but sword-and-sorcery is not for the faint of heart, and ale must be quaffed in quantity. 

My tastes are simple, Conan with a slight tweak:

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I play pinball, and am content.”

Three things

Walk with me...

Thing 1

I just finished re-reading The Long Walk after a long walk of my own, years and years of life since my last reading decades ago. Some thoughts.

We get no details on why the Walk came to be, just a couple scant suggestions. Like this: “In the old days, before the Change and the Squads, when there were still millionaires, they used to set up foundations and build libraries and all that good shit.” There is a reference to a war fought against a nuclear-armed Germany in 1953. So it’s not set in an apocalyptic future but some alternate history, perhaps one in which Germany develops an atomic weapon before 1945 and greatly extended the second world war. The result is a terrible totalitarian 20th century where the country is so lost and the future so bereft of hope that it turns to horrible death-fueled game shows to forget.

We don’t know, and I like it this way. Given the many chapter epigraph references to the Price is Right, prize fighting, and the Ten-Thousand Dollar Pyramid, I’m sure King was inspired by the game show craze sweeping the nation in the 1970s.

Things haven’t changed all that much. We all seem to be walking around in a fog, distracted just enough by digital spectacle to ignore the real horrors going on around us, as well as our own impending deaths. Just scroll an Instagram feed.

The Long Walk is an extended metaphor on dying. We’re all on the same Walk, two minutes from a ticket out (Walkers who slow their pace get three warnings before they are shot dead). That brief space tracks somewhat closely to what happens when you stop breathing. We’re separated from the other side by a thin margin. So we walk, and everyone around us drops off, one by one, until its our turn.

I know the literal, physical territory of this Walk, I was just on it, yesterday, when my wife and I had a nice dinner in Portsmouth, NH. The Walk starts in Maine, crosses into New Hampshire, and a skeletal handful make it all the way to my home state of Massachusetts. Weird, wild. Between King and H.P. Lovecraft New England takes a back seat to no other region of the United States when it comes to horror.

I really do enjoy King, in particular his old stuff. Say what you want about his long-windedness, his occasional closure whiffs and bad endings, and his lack of philosophical depth (King himself describes his work as the literary equivalent of a cheeseburger). I’d be hard-pressed to think of another writer who can so sweep you up into a story and hold you spellbound until the end. That’s true talent.

Thing 2

I’ve seen a few places—messageboards, articles, reddit threads—refer to the sword-and-sorcery definition I offered in Flame and Crimson as “seven points,” which makes it seem like a cumbersome checklist that must be met.

This is not correct, because it’s not what I wrote. 

What I wrote was, sword-and-sorcery often contains these handful of elements; it does not need all of them nor any precise proportion. But shorn of any it’s hard to picture anyone calling said story S&S.

I kind of like this, it seems to me flexible and elegant, forgiving but not without boundaries. A precise definition of S&S is not really possible, IMO. When you look at how the subgenre evolved it coalesced over three decades and in conversations with authors and a fan community. It has changed and will continue to evolve. So instead of a precise definition I offered up a constellation of tropes. With the caveat that I am just a guy and YMMV.

See some of my other musings here.

But for some reason this seems to be a continued source of confusion and occasionally complaint. Some feel the need to simplify the definition, boil and boil down like maple syrup in some type of purity contest, until the definition of S&S might fit on the head of a pin.

If you must insist…I can’t boil it down to one word but I’ll give you two: Pulp Fantasy.

I am this target audience.

Thing 3

I mentioned Instagram further up; yesterday that platform triangulated me with precision, locked in with unerring heat detecting radar, launched its missile, and hit me with a dead-on bullseye.

The missile: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap. Signed by director Rob Reiner.

How did I not know this existed? The ad hit my feed. I preordered.

The takeaway: Algorithms work, and I too can be reeled in like a fish on a line.