"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
I've heard it referred to alternatively as hair metal, glam metal, sometimes by the less charitable, butt rock. Whatever.
I've come to love it.
It really all started with Quiet Riot's Metal Health, which made history by becoming the first metal album to reach no. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. Then you had Pyromania and Shout at the Devil and it was on. Dudes with big hair and tight pants playing heavy but radio friendly-ish heavy metal, dominating the air waves circa 1983-91.
Dokken is one of the best examples of this sort of thing. Their first album, 1983's Breaking the Chains, was considered a commercial flop, and they needed a big sophomore effort. They got it with Tooth and Nail, released in September 1984. It had several strong tracks, "Alone Again" probably the most popular and recognizable, but I like this one best.
God I love these ridiculous videos... zero subtlety, near zero artistry, zero fucks given.
I've come to love George Lynch. He's an incredibly talented guitarist who writes killer licks and makes this band what it is. Guitar-forward, great hooks, great for blasting as you drive down the seaside in a convertible Iroc-Z or Camaro Z28.
You might be seeing a bit more of this type of music on Metal Fridays through September, for reasons that will soon become clear.
Can sword-and-sorcery be quiet, thoughtful … philosophical?
Not typically … but Robert E. Howard was anything but typical.
If you want to know why Howard lasts while so many of his barbaric descendants have not, gaze into "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune."
But not too closely. You might not be able to rip your gaze away.
***
“Mirrors” starts with an epigraph by Edgar Allan Poe, placing the reader into the proper headspace for the story to come. Poe wrote stories of psychological disorientation and spirals into madness.
The stuff of “Mirrors.”
Not much actually happens plot-wise. Kull is king but unsatisfied with reality, weary of life, and unable to hear the sea-songs of Atlantis of his youth. It has the same melancholy, disenchanted feel of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key” (Feb. 1929 Weird Tales), even though Howard wrote the story considerably earlier and that could not have been an influence. Must have been something in the inter-war air.
A slave girl with an ulterior motive recommends Kull seek out Tuzun Thune, a wizard who holds the secrets of life and death. And he does.
But this story isn’t about plot, or character. It’s theme, the exploration of life itself, and how strange and ephemeral this thing called “reality” is. When you get right down to it the relationship of reality and consciousness are incredibly complex, and uncertain, prone to dissolve if you look at them too closely.
Is there reality if no one is there to observe it? Does the observer therefore create reality? And if so, can we create and inhabit worlds of our own making, every bit as “real” as this one?
Howard frames this strangeness through Thune and his probing questions. When Kull asks the wizard if he can create wonders, Thune replies, Is it not a wonder that flesh obeys the thoughts of our mind? That we can talk with the dead by talking with another person—who are already dead because they were born?
Skeptical of slippery sophistry, Kull nevertheless accepts Thune’s offer to gaze into his mirrors. And there finds the origins of man, a “dream of the gods,” and learns the truth of mankind’s ephemeral existence, that all our glories will fade like smoke on a summer sea.
Kull is soon lost in a hall of mirrors that seem real but may be a metaphor for his own tortured and bewildered metaphysical thinking.
Is his world real, or the world inside the mirror real?
Does it matter, if reality is only in our heads, the product of our highly individual consciousness? Is life merely a dream?
The line between fantasy and reality blurs as Kull himself begins to fade; he threatens to vanish entirely into the world in the mirror until his Pict friend, Brule the Spear-Slayer, kills Tuzun Thune and shatters the glass.
But this is no heroic finish. Unease remains. Kull is left to ponder, was it Thune’s witchery changing him to mist, or had he stumbled on to a secret? Maybe there are worlds beyond worlds, ones we can access.
Conan would famously reject such mirrors and place his gaze firmly upon this world. He scorns such bottomless and possibly destructive philosophizing (“Let teachers and priests 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."). Perhaps both he and Howard came to discover that the only truth we can ever truly know is our own.
Though even Conan’s words can be interpreted with ambiguity; after all he never admits he knows the truth, only that he will let others brood upon its nature, and that the illusion is real, to him.
A few additional notes
“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” originally appeared in the September 1929 Weird Tales and has been reprinted and adapted widely since. In print, too numerous to mention, but some notables include Skull-Face and Others (Arkham House, 1946), The Coming of Conan (Gnome Press, 1953), and King Kull (Lancer, 1967).
***
The story was adapted for Savage Sword of Conan #34 (Oct. 1978), with script by Roy Thomas and art by Mike Ploog. I have this. It’s pretty cool even though two of the pages are transposed. The images from this essay are taken from that.
It contains one of my favorite Howard passages, a prose-poetry which made Howard so special.
“There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester's bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky, and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.”
This passage was heavily adapted for the screenplay of Conan the Barbarian (1982) and voiced by Max Von Sydow.
***
Is Kull a proto-Conan? You can make the case for yes and no.
Yes: Conan was borne out of a rewritten Kull story and so contains his literal DNA. Both are powerful, massive, untamed, fierce fighters, barbarian outsiders sitting uncomfortably on the thrones of civilized kingdoms.
No: Howard was in a different place in his life when he wrote these stories, and the characters are therefore different. Kull has his own distinct characteristics: Brooding, reflective, relatively chaste, philosophical, prone to dreaming. In his essay “Atlantean Genesis” included in Kull: Exile of Atlantis (Del Rey, 2006), editor Patrice Louinet shares some passages from letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith at the time of the writing of “Mirrors,” and they are rife with the same sort of philosophical/psychological inquiry.
***
Can a story about the nature of reality be categorized as sword-and-sorcery? I don’t want S&S minus the Clark Ashton Smithian-weird strain. And it’s got a warrior and a wizard in it.
I am a big fan of modern medicine. I like my car, I need electricity, I even (mostly) enjoy the internet. I could do without my television … but watching a good movie (on the DVD player) makes the glass teat worth owning.
I mourn the fields and sighing pines that are now condos, and the state of my attention before the omnipresent pocket screen. I miss the world pre-9/11, life in the middle before extreme political division. I miss local bookstores and reading culture, when everyone seemed to be holding a mass-market paperback.
I am not a purveyor of nostalgia, though nostalgia is genuine human emotion and has evolved with us for a reason. I do realize that we’ve come a long way baby, and even the decades of my youth—the 70s and 80s—had pockets of shittiness we’re better off without.
But I’m also not a blinkered techno-utopian.
I miss Google search before it became “enshittified” and definitely life before generative AI. Slop and outsourced thinking is a problem; not having a reliable way to know if something is true is worse.
Progress is just change, and change is sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Great things are gained with breakthroughs, something is inevitably lost along the way. There is no unseen digital hand, no Prometheus of circuitry and silicon, steering us ever forward to “better.” This belief is a myth.
The myth of progress does not only apply to technology. It applies to social progress, and the progress of a life.
As we grow older we gain wealth, wisdom, strength, autonomy, influence.
We lose innocence, wonder, malleability, potential. And if I’m getting dark, we lose everything at the end. Maybe we progress to some paradise of the afterlife, but there is no assurance there.
Unfortunately there is no magical formula for getting this balance right.
What can we do?
Slow the fuck down. Encourage and celebrate measured, incremental progress. Be thoughtful, as humans can be, and strive to make more of these changes the positive sort.
Be kinder, stop killing each other for a few minutes.
Celebrate our past, preserve and honor what is great about it.
Understand the tradeoffs that inevitably come with technology and efficiency and the sprawl of development.
Talk like adults about all this, rather than behave like children striving to win a game that never was one to begin with.
I realize I sound a bit like an old man shouting at clouds, without hope.
But I am hopeful we can figure this out, and discover the peace that comes with balance.
I also got in some quality time with my friend Tom Barber, who left me a mighty gift: 10 classic paperbacks, most published by Zebra in the 1970s, all with his cover art.
In return I gave Tom a ride on the pontoon boat on a beautiful, 10/10 afternoon.
Metal Friday typically steers away from bands that are hard rock/borderline metal (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, etc.) with some exceptions. Or when Gordon Lightfoot died or I felt like talking about 80s KISS.
Not every Metal Friday is a song; sometimes I covered the metal news of the day, concert reviews, etc. With that in mind, here is your Metal Friday 100 post setlist; pretty good listening here IMO.
How has Megadeth not made a Metal Friday? Let’s fix that now with what is probably their best song.
1.Valkyries, Blind Guardian
2.Light Comes Out of Black, Rob Halford
3.Jerusalem, Bruce Dickinson
4.Falling off the Edge of the World, Black Sabbath
5.NM156, Queensryche
6.Hail and Kill, Manowar
7.Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Metallica
8.Beyond the Realms of Death, Judas Priest
9.Raining Blood, Slayer
10.Left Hand Black, Danzig
11.The Evil That Men Do, Iron Maiden
12.The Clairvoyant, Iron Maiden
13.Night Winds, Parasite
14.Queen of the Black Coast, Manilla Road
15.Man of Sorrows, Bruce Dickinson
16.Satsuma covers Ratt's "Lay it Down" and Judas Priest's "Hellion/Electric Eye"
17.Take Hold of the Flame, Live in Tokyo 1984, Queensryche
18.Armageddon Clan, Battle Beast
19.The Hunt, Sepultura
20.Darkest Hour, Iron Maiden
21.Heart of a Lion, Judas Priest
22.Sing a Last Song of Valdese, Eternal Champion
23.Between the Hammer and the Anvil, Judas Priest
24.I, Black Sabbath (with incredible Conan imagery)
25.Judas Priest! … and Gordon Lightfoot?
26.British Steel on the docket tomorrow night
27.Defending 80s KISS (A Million to One)
28.Orgasmatron, Motorhead
29.Nativity in Black (Black Sabbath tribute album)
30.Master of the Wind, Manowar
31.Wild Child, WASP
32.Master of Puppets, Metallica
33.Necropolis, Manilla Road
34.The Crue, Poison, Def Leppard, Joan Jett
35.Emerald, Thin Lizzy
36.Ace Frehley lead guitar! (Fractured Mirror)
37.Blood Tears, Blind Guardian
38.Rockin’ Again, Saxon
39.Headless Cross, Black Sabbath
40.A very metal week: Judas Priest/Queensryche, Iron Maiden (Halls of Valhalla)
41.The Clansman, Iron Maiden
42.Sea of Red, Judas Priest
43.Thunder Road, Judas Priest
44.Flaming Metal Systems, Manilla Road
45.Theater of Salvation, Edguy
46.Bible Black, Black Sabbath
47.Top 5 Manowar Songs
48.Show Don’t Tell, Rush
49.Kill Devil Hill, Bruce Dickinson
50.Let it Go, Def Leppard
51.Beginning of the End, Meliah Rage
52.Stranger in a Strange Land, Iron Maiden
53.En Force, Queensryche
54.Caught in the Middle, Ronnie James Dio
55.Traitor’s Gate, Judas Priest
56.RIP to Canada’s finest singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot
57.Edge of Thorns, Savatage
58.If Heaven is Hell, Tokyo Blade
59.Curse My Name, Blind Guardian
60.As Heavy as I’ll go (Sepultura, Slayer)
61.Worms of the Earth, Eternal Champion
62.Force of a Storm, Sumerlands
63.Orion, Metallica
64.The Battle of Evermore and the timeless nature of fantasy
65.Resurrection, Rob Halford
66.Start the Fire, Metal Church
67.Season of the Witch, Grave Digger
68.Where Eagles Dare, Iron Maiden (for Nicko)
69.Cold Sweat, Thin Lizzy
70.Sign of the Southern Cross, Black Sabbath
71.The Rage, Judas Priest
72.Cauldron Born, Born of the Cauldron
73.Sixteenth Century Greensleeves, Rainbow (RIP Ronnie James Dio)
74.Gods of War, Def Leppard
75.Powerslave, Iron Maiden
76.War Pigs, Judas Priest
77.Goodbye to Romance: Reflections on Black Sabbath, Back to the Beginning, and the end of the road
78.Mystification, Manilla Road
79.Hell on Earth, Iron Maiden
80.Bruce Dickinson at the House of Blues, Boston MA Sept. 11, 2025
81.Atom and Evil, Black Sabbath
82.Strange Ways, Ace Frehley
83.Of Blind Guardian and the Quest for Tanelorn
84.The Sentinel, Judas Priest
85.Stonehenge, Spinal Tap
86.Computer God, Black Sabbath
87.Judas Be My Guide, Iron Maiden
88.Desert Plains, Judas Priest
89.Heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery, the Outsider ... and Iron Maiden's “Drifter”
90.Among the Living, Anthrax
91.Revelations, Judas Priest
92.The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, Arkham Witch
93.Mountains, Manowar. RIP Ross the Boss
94.Defender, Manowar
95.Darkside of Aquarius, Bruce Dickinson
96.Don’t Break My Heart Again, Whitesnake
97.The Thin Line Between Love and Hate, Iron Maiden
(Note: The following is the lead item in this week's Arcane Arts. I also cover REH, Jane Yolen, 70s horror, and Mike Grell's Warlord. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox)
Metal is vast. Metal is diverse. Metal is sprawling. The number of subgenres is staggering … more than 70, are you kidding? And to be honest, a little stupid. Drone metal. Funeral doom. Djent metal. Some of the finer points make sword-and-sorcery vs. heroic fantasy look like high school debate club.
And so I don’t think it’s possible to write an absolutely definitive history of heavy metal. And even if you could, who would be interested in such a thing? If you like doom are you likely also a fan of funk metal or Christian metal?
This past weekend I finished reading an attempt at a comprehensive history, Andrew O’Neill’s A History of Heavy Metal. I’d describe it as breezy, entertaining, fairly well written. But also, quite biased and therefore incomplete. An ostensible history shouldn’t ignore bands that the author does not like. O’Neill hates glam metal, so we get 10 pages of why it sucks … except for maybe Appetite For Destruction. He also has little use for Anthrax and Megadeth (Dave Mustaine’s nasally voice grates on him) so they’re largely ignored too, despite their considerable footprint.
For what it’s worth I recommend A History of Heavy Metal as a breezy, sometimes entertaining read that filled in a few corners for me. Black and death metal, mainly, and a lot of bands I’ve never heard of.
What he wrote was fine… but it’s not what I want to read. Or write. I’d rather go deep than broad. Curated instead of encyclopedic.
This is a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up writing a heavy metal memoir. We have histories. We’ve got Sound of the Beast and Louder than Hell and O’Neill’s book. We have information: Videos, podcasts, even, a map. We’ve got a million stories of the bands and performers themselves.
We don’t need another Flame and Crimson for heavy metal.
So, I wrote something quite different. A story from one fan’s perspective—my own. My life, with heavy metal as the backdrop.
My memoir will only focus on the handful of metal genres I like. But I’m not writing a history. So if you’re looking for a treatise on Unblack Metal (a real subgenre, by the way) you’ll need to look elsewhere.
But if you’re looking for one fan’s utterly unique story, maybe you’ll like this. August is getting closer.
I was driving my John Deere around my lawn last weekend... cutting the grass of course, not just driving it around, though just driving around on a John Deere is a perfectly valid activity. I had queued up some old thrash song from the 80s and the Spotify app continued to play like songs from its omniscient algorithm. Which led me to this wonderful little rediscovery. "Medusa," off of 1985's Spreading the Disease. I hadn't heard it years, and had been missing it.
Spreading the Disease is Anthrax's sophomore effort but the first appearance by vocalist Joey Belladonna. He's kind of an odd fit for a thrash band with his traditional metal/high octave/operatic style of singing, but it works with the band--especially on this song. He sounds fantastic. And the main riff is absolutely killer.
Interestingly, executive producer Jon Zazula has songwriting credit for "Medusa," his only such contribution for Anthrax. The lyrics are fun if very much on the nose, not sure how Medusa would stare at you were it not with her eyes, but there you go:
Medusa, she's staring at you Medusa, with her eyes Medusa
In addition to the thrill of nostalgia from the song itself, my search for an accompanying visual led to this horrific, fantastically rendered scene from Clash of the Titans (1981).
This sequence genuinely creeped me out as a kid, and I still find it effective today. The unnatural jerkiness of Harryhausen's stop-motion animation only adds to the medusa's horrible otherness. Her eyes are particularly well-done, and I love the addition of the Naga-like tail.
Say one thing of H. Rider Haggard: Say he wrote with range.
When we think of Haggard, we typically think of the man who gave us King Solomon’s Mines, She, and Eric Brighteyes. A writer of two-fisted adventure.
So thought I as well, until I read Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Stories.
This is a “new” collection of 10 short stories assembled by Stark House for their Adventure Classics line. And it opened my eyes to Haggard as a writer of greater breadth and sensitivity than I anticipated.
In the first half of the collection there is nary a saber drawn nor a shot fired. Five stories of interrupted romances, lost loves, or marital strife. Jilted lovers, wounded husbands, grieving widows. And no wonder. Per Wikipedia, Haggard as a young man apparently lost the love of his life:
At about that time, Haggard fell in love with Mary Elizabeth "Lilly" Jackson, whom he intended to marry once he obtained paid employment in Africa. In 1878, he became Registrar of the High Court in the Transvaal, and wrote to his father informing him that he intended to return to England and marry her. His father forbade it until Haggard had made a career for himself, and by 1879 Jackson had married Frank Archer, a well-to-do banker.
I know very little about Haggard the man (I have an unread biography by Morton N. Cohen sitting on my shelf, another brick in the wall of my groaning TBR) but such an event cannot fail to leave a mark. My guess is these stories have something of the biographical in them. They hit hard. Don’t think the lack of blood and thunder means a lack of drama or tension. We get plenty of that from Haggard even as he reveals a sensitive side to his art.
Putting on my English degree nerd hat for a minute, Haggard (1856-1925) bridged the Victorian and Edwardian eras of English literature but is generally placed within the latter school. We get in his stories something of a fading of empire and critiques of old institutions. Strict religious doctrine cracking in the face of Darwinian evolution, and social critique amid the rise of increasingly independent women.
These stories are rich with the air of the era: quiet stories seasoned with supernatural elements and exotic locations, romance and visions of heaven contrasted with period realism, consumption and death. In “Little Flower” a hard-headed Christian missionary is portrayed as unthinking and obstinate next to an evolutionist, and is ultimately shown up by a Zulu witch-doctor.
In “The Blue Curtains” a woman declares her undying love, but her “faithfulness” proves skin-deep; she turns to other men for surer income and a more comfortable lifestyle.
Haggard could write, which is a big part of the reason why he endures, and so many others who toiled in the pages of Adventure and other popular magazines of the day have faded into history. This sequence of the jilted ex-lover Bottles discovering his old flame is suddenly widowed, and available, after 14 years, and making his way to her home, in the driving rain, swept up in the romance, took my breath away:
“He crossed over to the other side of the street, and looked up at the house, but could scarcely make it out through the driving rain. There was no light in the house, and no sign of life about the street. But there were both light and life in the heart of this watcher. All the pulses of his blood were astir, keeping time with the commotion of his mind. He stood there in the shadow, gazing at the murky house, heedless of the bitter wind and pelting rain, and felt his life and spirit pass out of his control into an unknown dominion. The storm that raged around him was nothing to the convulsion of his inner self in that hour of madness, which was yet happiness.”
In the title story of the volume, “Smith and the Pharaohs,” James Smith falls in love with an image of an ancient Egyptian queen, raises money for an archeological dig in search of her tomb, and discovers her resting place—and much more. Love runs deep, spanning the ages in this ghostly little historical romance.
“Only a Dream” is a powerful little shocker of a story, almost like something Roald Dahl might have written. This time it is a wife, deceased, who … returns to her husband on the eve of his second marriage.
There are literal trips to heaven and the return of deceased souls to earth. It is the stuff of romance, of fancy, and beauty.
What about my adventure bro?
Keep it in your pants, lovers of adventure: the second half the collection delivers on the action. We get four short stories of Alan Quatermain, the famous hunter and treasure-seeker. Although these are technically prequel stories of a character well-established in King Solomon’s Mines, these are largely told from the perspective of an older Quatermain. They had just a bit of flavor of the tall-tale stories of Commander McBragg (remember that pith-helmeted dude from Saturday mornings, fellow Gen-Xers?), save that Quatermain is reserved, and his stories, real. Yet like McBragg his exploits are so incredible everyone is left spellbound—including us, the reader.
Haggard is a fantastic storyteller and his considerable talents are on display here. It’s no wonder Robert E. Howard was among the millions of readers and dozens of famous writers that fell under his spell. Haggard’s influence on Robert E Howard is plain, IMO. A couple lines jumped out at me; hard to say if these are a direct influence, especially “sere and yellow leaf,” which also appears in Macbeth, but Howard used that line in a conversation with Novalyne Price and I was surprised to see it also appear here:
And this one:
“Mashune was, I think, one of the bravest men I ever knew in the daytime, but he had more than civilized dread of the supernatural.”
Haggard is truly in his element these Quartermain stories, conveying the tension of big-game hunts, the palpable danger of hungry lions on the prowl. It pulls you straight in.
Again in reference to Howard, Haggard’s description of lions’ blazing eyes just outside the camp firelight reminded me of Howard’s descriptions from "The Tower of the Elephant."
Speaking of elephants … we get elephant hunting, tusks harvested for trade, Zulu servants, and the “n” word making appearances, so be prepared for all of this.
The last story in the volume is worth mentioning, as is the introduction.
“The Mahatma and the Hare” is unlike any of the preceding entries and at least at the moment I probably would call it the best of the lot. It is something great; something of the Grail is in it. Think Watership Down condensed into 45 pages, focused on a single rabbit rather than a troupe, with more period horse and hound hunting and a clearer vision of heaven and divine judgement. It contains much truth about human cruelty and ignorance of the “other.” It really is a fantastic little story and you can read it in full here, free on Gutenberg. But do support the publisher, too.
Finally, Deuce Richardson provides a wonderful introduction to the volume, “H. Rider Haggard: Imagination, Death and Immortality,” summing up Haggard’s influence, the big picture of his literacy legacy, and a thematic tie-in to all the stories that follow.
In short, highly recommended. These stories are old, but startlingly imaginative and vital and graceful. While Haggard died more than 100 years ago, he has much to teach any modern writer—and can still bind the modern reader with a potent spell.
I mentioned in a previous issue of Arcane Arts that I was asked to participate on a Robert E. Howard-themed virtual panel hosted by The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies.
First Panel, 10:00–11:30MST: ‘Forging Sword and Sorcery: Scholarly approaches to REH’; moderator: Rhys Lomas
Laura Shubert
Jonas Prida
Brian Murphy
Jeff Shanks
Looks like a fantastic event, with the likes of Sara Frazetta, Rusty Burke, Jim Zub, Jeff Shanks, and others, and it's been put together largely by college students from MacEwan University in Alberta, Canada.
Cool.
Secondly, the latest Arcane Arts hit inboxes yesterday (see, if you were a subscriber you would have already avidly read the issue). This was a good one, with links to some great YouTube videos including the complete Ronnie James Dio documentary "Dreamers Never Die" and a presentation by Tom Shippey on H. Rider Haggard's Eric Brighteyes. Plus other fun stuff.
This week's Metal Friday brings the hair... an awesome track from 1986's Night Songs. My favorite song and album from the mighty Cinderella.
I choose this track due to proximity. I just heard it live, about a week ago, at the Hampton Beach Ballroom Casino. Nowlet me tell you (to paraphrase a lyric), Tom Keifer still sounds awesome. He was playing solo, opening act Buckcherry, and he was great. Played all the Cinderella hits. My longtime buddy Wayne and I have seen Tom several times at this venue and were quite pleased. It's a beautiful 25 minute drive from my home, right to the ocean.
You can thank me in advance for this fan-cut video. Whoever made it deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for obvious reasons. Watch and enjoy over beer this Metal Friday.
Is the theme of this week's Arcane Arts: Dispatches From The Silver Key. I cover news about H. Rider Haggard, new sword-and-sorcery, and the passing of longtime Fantastic editor Ted White.
Sign up if you haven't already. No better way to stay in touch than email due to algorithmic whims. Also I might be doing some giveaways in an upcoming issue for loyal followers.
As noted I don't have much time for substantive posting here on the blog due to the heavy metal memoir. Just finished inputting the edits on chapter 5 (of 11) this morning. Progress is steady.
I cannot wait to share the book.
One other bit of interesting news. Below is a snapshot of my recent blog traffic.
What warrants such a massive hockey stick of a spike to the right? Must be my awesome recent post on Iron Maiden's "Thin Line Between Love and Hate"? Thousands of fans flocking to sign up to Arcane Arts?
Sadly, no. You can probably guess the answer. Very obvious patterns of AI training going on here. I can see where the traffic is coming from and 80-90% of it is not from humans.
In an ironic twist my company is paying for subscriptions to both ChatGPT and Claude. Yes, the very companies that pillage and plunder--ahem, train on--content from their betters, i.e., creative humans--to build their products, will gladly sell their product back to you for handsome monthly subscription fees. And then nail you with steadily increasing fees from the new "token" usage limits that will allow them to prop up their inflated stock prices and rake in billions.
If you're a creative you should be outraged. Unfortunately too many enjoy licking the boot heels of rich men who want you to buy "intelligence" from them like a utility--intelligence that has been strip-mined from people who actually have it.
The latest issue of Arcane Arts--my weekly-ish email newsletter covering all things sword-and-sorcery, heavy metal, personal, and random shit that crosses my transom which I find interesting--is out.
Issue #14 covers Queen of the Black Coast, a new Geddy Lee interview, and more.
Iron Maiden's Brave New World came out 26 years ago.
Twenty-six years. I remember it very well ... I feel like it was just yesterday. But of course it was not.
Only 20 years separate Brave New World (2000) from Iron Maiden (1980). It blows my mind that I've been listening to this album longer than Maiden had been in existence when it first appeared (!) WTF.
Brave New World is full of bangers and is integral to the heavy metal revival that put an overdue stake in grunge. Rock in Rio was recorded on the supporting tour and is up there with Live After Death as Maiden's finest live performance captured on film.
Anyway, enough old fogey-ness (fogginess?) and onto the song at hand.
I've been thinking a lot about thin lines, and the choices we make. Spinal Tap said there's a fine line between stupid and clever, which is fantastically funny. But there's also a world of grey that makes important choices difficult--yet we are free to make them, for good or ill. And these choices can make all the difference. Maiden weighs into that truth here:
There's a grey place between black and white
But everyone does have the right to choose the path that he takes
I never pass up an opportunity to talk about Bruce Dickinson and his voice soars in "Thin Line", especially this verse. I give huge credit to Blaze Bayley for stepping in manfully during Bruce's absence, and the two albums he participated on are quite good in hindsight, but this song is a reminder of what was missing. Bruce sings as though he's channeling a soul in flight to the other side:
I will hope
My soul will fly
So I will live forever
Heart will die
My soul will fly
And I will live
Forever
With the release of "Burning Ambition" and the creep of advancing age I feel like we're getting near the end of Iron Maiden as a recording and touring force. But they will live forever.
I’m done with the re-read, and had a few final thoughts on this very big book.
Where does Stephen King stand (ahem) on the big questions? The existence of God? Fate vs. free will?
We can’t say for certain from reading The Stand in isolation. It is an error to think that an author’s depiction of anything in a work of fiction must be what he/she believes. It is also an error to think that a work conceived in 1978, and updated for an uncut 1988 re-release, is a still-living author’s last word. I have not read much of recent King; I have not read what most consider his magnum opus, The Dark Tower, for example. Any of these works surely may reveal a very different take on these sizable questions.
But, is interesting how much of a moral universe we get in The Stand … and how closely it aligns with that of J.R.R. Tolkien.
We may be able to attribute this to a simple cause. Stephen King was heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings at the time he wrote The Stand. So much that not just its trappings—dark lords and epic quests and character echoes—but Tolkien’s themes and worldview permeate its pages.
These might be King’s too, or King circa1978.
A few examples.
Stephen King is not a fan of the state. By the end of the book people are leaving even the seemingly idyllic Free State of Boulder because too many cooks leads to conflict, and corruption. As Glen Bateman (perhaps the closest we get to a stand-in for King) says: “Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.” This is a Howardian theme, too. And Moorcockian… the quest for Tanelorn continues.
King believes in good and evil. There are evil forces at work in the world in tangible, Manichean form, but also in the hearts of the characters. There is objective right and wrong, and there is temptation that makes the struggle difficult and complex.
King believes in free will of some sort. Harold Lauder had chances to turn back. Reading Fran’s diary was a choice, as was his choice to take in Nadine and commit the ultimate act of sabotage. Each time his choices escalated until he hit a point of no return. But, King offers complexity. Making a choice is easier for some. Harold was bullied as a child. He did not have his sister’s social savvy or good looks. His choices were therefore going to be harder, and influenced. Biological determinism and environmental factors play a part, fate plays a part… but ultimately we have a choice (I think this is where The Stand gets its name).
King shows us that evil is a destroyer, not a creator. Randall Flagg is a demonic-like force, the equivalent of Sauron, or if not quite that powerful, some combination of Balrog and Ringwraith. But while the forces of good set about rebuilding, Flagg puts his followers to work reactivating the machinery of war. His true power is in fear and manipulation and preying on people’s weakness, destroying them from within.
Returning to the mistake of equating fictional story with authorial belief, if you read all of this in a vacuum you might conclude that King = conservative Catholic. We know this not to be true. But I think party affiliation is a very crude and incomplete tool for understanding a human being. We share more in common than we think.
Likewise I think The Stand has something for everyone.
If you had a bad experience with King reading the inevitable clunker somewhere in his vast corpus, I wholeheartedly recommend you give him another try—and make that book The Stand. It is perhaps his magnum opus (even considering The Dark Tower and IT). It offers a grand adventure. And even though it is clearly Tolkien inspired, it is a model of how an author can wear his/her Tolkien influence on their sleeve while still creating something new. Set in the modern era, after the fallout of plague virus, a myth for America instead of England, The Stand qualifies. It is no Lord of the Rings, but so what? No other work is either.
Arcane Arts: Dispatches from the Silver Key went out yesterday, covering heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery (including Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, a cool fanzine I'm a part of, and an academic panel on REH I'll be speaking on).
It also included something important I want to talk about in a bit more detail: The heavy metal memoir.
The Silver Key went dormant from 2013-2019, not coincidentally the same time I went to work on Flame and Crimson.
The good news is: That's not going to happen with the latest WIP. It's fully written, reviewed by a couple close friends and my wife who all appear in it. I rewrote it until I couldn't look at it anyore.
But on Friday/Saturday it came back from a contracted line editor. And, I have some work to do.
I plan to have it done by July-early August. I need to have it done by then. I’m giving myself a little wiggle room, but not much. I’m hosting a heavy metal party with a live band in mid-Septemer, at which I’m handing out a few free copies of the book.
It must be done by then. And so the big, difficult, final push is on.
Posting here will be less frequent and less substantive.
Stephen King had … things to say about Robert E. Howard and sword-and-sorcery. He mostly liked the former … not so much the latter.
If you own a copy of the Del Reys and their pure Howard texts, you've probably seen this positive, forceful quote placed prominently on display:
“In his best work, Howard's writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks.”
This is an excerpt from King's1981 survey of horror and dark fantasy Danse Macabre. In it King references Howard with praise, though has no use for the subgenre he spawned.
King calls sword-and-sorcery a mediocre branch of fantasy that catered tales of power and wish-fulfillment for the powerless, “stories of strong-thewed barbarians whose extraordinary prowess at fighting is only excelled by their extraordinary prowess at fucking.” Added King, “This sort of fiction, commonly called ‘sword and sorcery’ by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it’s the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R.” King mentions no individual works or authors of sword-and-sorcery in his savage broadside, save Howard, who he also praises as “the only writer who really got away with this stuff. … Howard overcame the limitations of his puerile material by the force and fury of his writing and by his imagination.”
You can find more King commentary on REH here on the blog of Gary Romeo, who examines a flawed piece from King that appeared in the Jan. 1978 issue of the men’s magazine Oui. Though I must say King’s “mama’s boy” commentary sounds suspiciously like something he would have picked up from a DeCamp intro. Romeo gives us the full Danse Macabre quote from King, which is decidedly more of a mixed opinion of Howard:
“In his best work, Howard’s writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks. Stories such as “The People of the Black Circle” glow with the fierce and eldritch light of his frenzied intensity. At his best, Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy, and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out. Yet his other work was either unremarkable or just abysmal….The word will hurt and anger his legion of fans, but I don’t believe any other word fits.”
All this comes up here because as I continue to work my way through the The Stand I’ve encountered another REH reference. Harold Lauder, a troubled Gollum-like figure who hovered on the edge of “good” and might still have become that way, is jilted by Frances Goldsmith, gives in to his worst adolescent impulses, and ultimately throws his lot in with Vegas and Flagg and the wicked West.
Pre-superflu Lauder was once a reader of adventure fiction … then gave it up for the (imagined) company of girls:
At age sixteen he had given up Burroughs and Stevenson and Robert Howard in favor of other fantasies, fantasies that were both well loved and much hated—not of rockets or pirates but of girls in silk see-through pajamas kneeling before him on satin pillows while Harold the Great lolled naked on his throne, ready to chastise them with small leather whips, with silver-headed canes. They were bitter fantasies through which every pretty girl at Ogunquit High School had strolled one time or another.
Ah Harold, you shouldn’t have read Frannie’s diary…no turning back from that.
King is a king of pop culture references. Howard-heads, are you aware of any other REH references?
I find Stephen King’s The Stand to be comfort food. I’m not sure what that says about me … but there it is.
A devastating plague accidently leaks from a top-secret U.S. Department of Defense biological weapons laboratory located under the California Mojave Desert. Extremely contagious and extraordinarily deadly, the plague, nicknamed Captain Trips (also Tube Neck and the choking sickness) suffocates its hosts in pleurisy and mucous, eliminating most of the world’s population.
There are survivors but many suffer far worse fates.
Unimaginable horror … but comforting to me, nonetheless. Perhaps because there is something of The Lord of the Rings in it, a novel to which I also return to again and again for familiarity and relief. King has stated on a few occasions that he was attempting with The Stand to write an American Lord of the Rings, and all the broad strokes are there: troupe of heroes banding together, an epic quest of good vs. evil that stretches from coast-to-coast in which Boulder serves as Minas Tirith and Vegas, Mordor. Maine is a sort of Rivendell.
Randall Flagg, the Walking Dude, an American dark lord.
The second way in which I find The Stand comforting is its nostalgia. It takes me back to a different time and place in my life, enveloping me like a warm blanket. I think I read the original 1978 version sometime in the late 80s, when my King obsession was in full swing. I used to own this version, and was a fan of the depiction of Flagg’s cold and menacing eyes. I’m saddened to learn that at some point I parted ways with it.
When The Stand was re-released in 1991 for the first time complete and uncut, I bought the first edition Signet paperback, which I still own, and read it voraciously. Here it is.
My cherished, first edition paperback.
I graduated high school in ’91 and at the time my buddies and I were all mainlining thrash metal. Anthrax’s “Among the Living” (song and album) was the ultimate complement to this re-released uncut version of The Stand, which several of us read and chatted about. It was a glorious time. The period in which the events of the original novel is set--the late 70s--is the time of my early youth.
It's a vibe man, one I dig.
Like LOTR The Stand is about loss and the Fall. King says in Danse Macabre that he was inspired to write the book after America’s early 1970s backslide—the disgrace and resignation of Richard Nixon, the divisive and fruitless Vietnam War, inflation, and the 1970s energy crisis. “The America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my feet,” King said. “It began to seem like an elaborate castle of sand and unfortunately built well below the high tide line.”
The Stand is absolutely fantastic in its depiction of rapid societal collapse. If we had any doubt how quickly our own bindings could come undone the events of 2020 made that clear. We disintegrated pretty damned quick. Rather than rally together the pandemic and its response drove a wedge in this country.
The Stand is entirely reframed post-COVID-19. It no longer feels so fantastic. Though we don’t know (and may never know) its ultimate origins, Covid probably escaped from a Wuhan Lab; perhaps an infected Chinese scientist escaped quarantine and went on the run with his family before the outbreak could be contained.
Let’s hope we’ve seen the worst and will be better prepared next time. Maybe we should all read The Stand and remember what is at stake.
Postapocalyptic novels offer clarity and simplification. Office politics and tax rates and school budgets are wiped away, replaced by simple survival. With fewer choices, our minds are unburdened. We imagine how we’d do in that situation.
We hope good people would still come together in the end.
King is in a very small handful of the most recognizable and read authors of our generation, and not without cause. Re-reading The Stand (I’m on page 272 of this 1,141 page monster) I’m reminded why.
He’s a creative genius.
I haven’t read The Stand in perhaps 20 years and as I revisit it now I'm finding the number of small strokes of imaginative detail staggering. The cold-blooded Elder, an icy-eyed assassin in a hazmat suit who at the last hour will make sure Stu Redman doesn't survive to tell the tale. The wild-eyed Monster Shouter, a mad prophet who roams a barren New York landscape declaring that the monsters are returning. He's right.
King’s second authorial gift is bringing characters to life. The Stand introduces us to an broad and diverse cast, yet King renders each uniquely memorable. At this point in the book I’ve been reacquainted with the deaf-mute Nick Andros, laconic, blue-collar Stu Redman, troubled, budding rock star Larry Underwood, pregnant and free-spirited Frannie Goldsmith, petty crook Lloyd Henreid, and the creepy and nerdily awkward Harold Lauder. Each time it’s like meeting an old friend.
And then there’s Randall Flagg, the Dark Man, a half-man, half-demon, charismatic, mad, and full of evil design.
King’s third gift is his ability scare the shit out of you. You don’t forget Underwood’s crawl for freedom through the Lincoln Tunnel in a terrifying, pitch-black sequence. Or the cool hand that slides out and around Stu’s ankle in the dark stairwell in his final escape from a Vermont CDC lab. Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful…
Imagination, characterization, fear… The Stand combines all this with an epic storyline and so is one of King’s best. I’m not sure if it’s his best book—take your pick of IT, The Shining, Pet Sematary, 11/22/63, Salem’s Lot, Misery, a few others—but The Stand is in that conversation.
The Stand has been adapted for television twice, as recently as 2021, which I haven't seen, and apparently is not very good.
I watched the 1994 miniseries at college when it debuted and enjoyed it for the most part, though it still fell far short of the high bar set by the book. The opening sequence remains effective; I can no longer hear Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” without thinking of dead scientists in lab coats slumped over lunch tables.
I’m sure I’ll share a few more thoughts as I finish, but it’s a long way to Vegas. Better get on my walking boots.
Let's get that out of the way first. If you only know Whitesnake from "Still of the Night" or "Here I Go Again," here's one to broaden your horizons. It's a deep-ish cut, very early 80s, with a bit of 70s keyboard hangover clinging on.
Which is great.
I am tired of conversations about genre. I shouldn't be I suppose, considering I wrote a book about one ... but I am. I just can't wade into anymore conversations about what is or isn't sword-and-sorcery.
This song is something of the reason why.
Is Whitesnake heavy metal? I mean, maybe? Maybe not?
It doesn't matter.
What matters is, is the song good. Does it rock? Does it get your head nodding?
Answer--yes. David Coverdale is killing it.
What matters about a story is, is the story good? Does it move you and keep the pages turning? Get that down first, let geeks like me sort out where it falls.
Genre is a vague signpost. If someone is a Bon Jovi fan or a Scorpions fan, Whitesnake is pretty dialed in to that. Very safe referral.
But even for Maiden and Priest fans like me, this is awesome. Which means, don't write to genre spec. Because you never know what genre fans will fall in love with. Throw in some science. Take out the bruising barbarian. Be an artist, not a paint-by-numbers follower.
Issue no. 10 of Arcane Arts hit inboxes this AM. I've been nailing this every week, like clockwork on Wednesday morning, though as noted in this week's issue next week might end my streak (I have to travel to Chicago on business).
This week we covered:
The holy grail
Robert Plant
My new author page on Facebook
L. Sprague de Camp controversy
Poul Anderson's The Last Viking
If you haven't signed up yet, throw your email in the widget at right. My subscribers are ticking up but its slow; if you know someone who might like what I cover in the newsletter forward them an email or send them here to sign up.
