"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
--H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
