To Walk on Worlds, a review

I dig this nostalgic cover art (Mike Hoffman).

Sword-and-sorcery occupies a small space in writing and publishing and so you probably already know the name Matthew John. He wears many hats. Host of the Rogues in the House podcast. Conan game contributor/designer. Does an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation that could be taken on the standup comedy circuit.

What about Matthew John the writer?

I set out to find more by picking up his To Walk on Worlds, a 2024 publication of Rogues in the House Presents. It’s a 250-odd page collection of 11 short stories, each of which stand alone but are connected by the land of Pathra, a loose chronology, and through the recurring appearance of a mysterious wizard Maxus who has the power to walk between worlds. As a result, it is something of a fix-up novel, akin to what Ray Bradbury did with The Martian Chronicles or Charles Saunders with Imaro. 

To cut to the chase: I enjoyed To Walk on Worlds. It is a cut above (pun intended) much modern sword-and-sorcery. I’ve heard good things about it, I try to support modern S&S, and I can recommend it.

John shines with his depiction of tough, terse, no-nonsense barbarian warriors and opaque wizards. Lachmannon is Conan like but also reminded me more than a little of Logen Ninefingers, which comes as little surprise given that John’s biggest literary influences are Robert E. Howard and Joe Abercrombie. Maxus cuts an intriguing figure, not evil but not even close to good. He’s self-centered and amoral, a wizard out of the pages of Jack Vance or Merlin pre-Disney moving in mysterious ways.

I like that the collection includes both of these characters in something of equal proportion, which speaks to both sides of the S&S equation: Its brawny, heroic, Robert E. Howard-esque side, and the weird, eldritch, Clark Ashton Smith-ian strain.

S&S (and S&P) fans will recognize its hallmarks. Low gravity leaps and interplanetary travel. Weird towers of green stone of an unknown origin beneath alien, multicolored skies. A page that has both “ziggurat” and “thews” on it (bold choice, Cotton). Another with the famous Abercrombie construction “let it be said that Lachmannon can find the humor in any instance.”

There is a risk here of becoming generic S&S, but what elevates it is John’s style and heart. His writing style is quite visual. He does dialogue well. He uses humor well, a dark and sardonic brand that can make you smile (grimly). A pit is described as “an agreeable pit as far as pits go.” I liked that; I laughed. And in a good way he wears his influences plainly, it makes the stories familiar and resonant. For example “Cries From A Sleeping City” reads like a cross of “Worms of the Earth” and Ridley Scott’s Aliens. It is a fine example of suffocating subterranean horror. “A Fate Worse Than Exile” was perhaps my favorite. It has echoes of both “Red Nails” and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal with a persistent “dragon” that has much of a T-rex in him. What makes it work is the interplay of the two protagonists, the Conan-like Manus and the squirrely, loose with the truth rogue Quent. This was particularly well-done. The stories generally are propulsive with very little flab to them.

As with every collection I’ve ever read there were a couple stories that did not land, but these were greatly outweighed by the good. I’m not exactly sure where the broader story is going, I probably could have used a few more details to hook me on vol. 2 of the Maxus Cycle, Within the Weeping Eye. It feels like a bit of a prologue rather than a complete work in and of itself, even though the stories each have a beginning, middle and end, save for the last, which serves as both coda and teaser.

But sword-and-sorcery is supposed to be mysterious. The motivations of wizards are notoriously veiled. Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories did not need anything connecting them to some grand narrative beyond cool things happening in a cool setting. There are a few hints dropped that lead me to believe Matt has something interesting planned for future volumes and the fate of Maxus.

One final word about the presentation. To Walk on Worlds is graced with great cover art, some neat and unexpected black-and-white interior illustrations, and a throwback pocket-sized format. All of which makes for a nice package (resisting, and failing, the urge to add “that’s what she said”).

Weird Tales of Modernity: Elevating the artistry of the Weird Tales Three

Pulp and other forms of genre fiction have become not just an accepted form of entertainment, but an acknowledged outlet for meaningful artistic expression. But this is a relatively recent phenomenon. For more than a century literary critics shunned pulp, categorizing it as cheap entertainment for coarse consumers, junk food devoid of value. Some actively discouraged its consumption.

Today literary elites no longer dictate broad cultural tastes—or if any do, they certainly wield less power and influence than the likes of Harold Bloom, Edmund Wilson and William Dean Howells once did. At least from my limited perspective.

But one result of this century of neglect is comparatively few literary studies. Only recently have we seen a steady uptick with the likes of Jonas Prida’s Conan Meets the Academy (2012), Justin Everett and Jeffrey Shanks’ The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales (2015), Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2017), Bobby Derie’s Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others (2019), John Haefele’s Lovecraft: The Great Tales (2021), and Stephen Jones’ The Weird Tales Boys (2023). We have plenty of catching up to do, which makes Jason Ray Carney’s Weird Tales of Modernity (McFarland, 2019) a welcome volume. It’s a work that certainly deserves more attention. I recommend it strongly, with a few caveats.

The first caveat is price. McFarland describes itself as a leading independent publisher of academic and general-interest nonfiction books, but academic publishers typically charge more due to their small print runs, and McFarland, though cheaper than some academic presses, is still pricey. This book runs nearly $40 new at just under 200 pages.

The second is accessibility. Weird Tales of Modernity is a challenging read. It took me a while to get into the flow due to the denseness of Carney’s language and use of academic jargon. I have a degree in English and have read (and even appreciate) academic writing, but it’s been a while since I tackled such material and needed to shake off a little rust to get back into that headspace. It probably also assumes a little too much familiarity with literary modernism.

But once I acclimated to the language I both enjoyed Weird Tales of Modernity as an entertaining read, and for the compelling case it makes for the literary merits of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. Carney’s central thesis is that the “Weird Tales Three” were not just producing entertainment, but contributing meaningfully as original artists writing in reaction to literary modernism.

This would be a good time to explain that particular term. 

Literary modernism was an experimental mode of fiction in vogue from roughly the late 1800s to the early 1940s, peaking in the interwar period (1920-39)—roughly concurrent to the literary output of Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith. It was a time marked by profound disillusionment in institutions and doubt that universal truth and human progress were possible. Rapid changes in technology and industrialization coupled with the carnage of World War I made old certainties a shifting sand.

Amid these rapid changes artists such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulker, and Virginia Wolfe adapted modes of literary expression to match, abandoning old traditions and pioneering new prose and poetry techniques--slice of life, introspection, emphasis on realism, abandonment of meter and rhyme in poetry. As the old sureties in life were slipping away, they sought to achieve immortality through “art in amber,” even if just in limited, fragmentary glimpses. A chief example is Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a dense and sprawling work which depicted the events of 24 hours in the life of Leopold Bloom.

Carney argues that Smith, Lovecraft, and Howard were aware of this movement, but instead of engaging in it produced stories of shadow modernism, “strange art, artists, and experience of art created in reaction to modernity.”  Howard’s decaying cities and corrupt civilizations and Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones and uncaring, indifferent cosmicism were symbolic representations of the terrible ephemerality that lurked behind the seeming consistency of our day-to-day lives—the inevitable march of time and the subsequent corruption and decay of all human endeavor. The Weird Tales Three saw through this veil and understood the ephemerality of life—the “ephemerality of the ordinary” as Carney repeats in an oft-used phrase.  “Irrespective of tribe, race, clique, or coterie, we are all ephemeral forms trembling in strange stasis destined for formlessness.” 

Capturing the ephemerality of human endeavor required more than the language of literary modernism could provide. It required fantastic and extraordinary literary techniques married to the techniques of the Gothic novel—hallmarks of the Weird Tales Three. Writes Carney, “After many creative iterations honed over several stories—e.g., Pickman’s demented art, Malygris’s sorcery, the fell mirrors of Tuzun Thune—this shadow modernism becomes an inhuman form of technology that, functioning like a cognitive prosthesis in the virtual world of fiction, thereby reveals the secret truth of history: history is a cruelly accelerating process of deformation. The ordinary is ephemeral. History is the interplay of form and formlessness with formlessness terminally ascendant.”

Carney does an impressive job supporting his thesis with multiple references from the literature, both from mainstream modernist writers and from Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith. I found his arguments original and convincing, offering new insights and perspectives I hadn’t previously considered. If you take these writers seriously it’s a book you ought to seek out.

In addition to his scholarship Carney has done much of note for sword-and-sorcery and the broader field of pulp fiction. His efforts building the online Whetstone discord community (which recently shut down after a notable run of some five years), initiating the Trigon awards and associated conference, organizing academic panels at Howard Days, and of course establishing the Whetstone Amateur Magazine of Pulp Sword-and-Sorcery, served an important function for many. We’re all on the same path of dissolution and formlessness, which makes any efforts to make sense of the art we enjoy while offering warmth and community for other like-minded souls deeply appreciated and sorely needed. Weird Tales of Modernity and Carney’s broader oeuvre serve as a bulwark against the ephemerality of the ordinary.

This review also appeared on the blog of the Rogues in the House podcast.

The 13th Warrior in the House, with Rogues

You think upon what is to come, and imagine fearsome things that would stop the blood of any man. Do not think ahead, and be cheerful by knowing that no man lives forever.

--Eaters of the Dead, Michael Crichton

The latest episode of the Rogues in the House podcast is out and I'm in the guest seat, talking the 1999 film The 13th Warrior with Matt and Deane.

Listen (and subscribe) here.

I have to say I'm not a huge fan of the film. It has its rousing moments, awesome pre-battle speeches, and a couple epic scenes, but drags in other places. It has a bit of a "talky" introduction, too much telling and not enough showing, though this works better in the 1976 novel on which its based, Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead. The filming was beset with difficulties; Crichton came on for a script rewrite and took over as director, firing John McTiernan—but reportedly was happy with the end result. McTiernan disputes much of this. 

The film was a financial flop but has earned a bit of cult status, especially among fans of sword-and-sorcery. 

I liked the film well enough upon rewatch but remain a bigger fan of the book, which IMO does a better job addressing the theme of the past as a different place.

We have two schools of thought: One is that people are people, and only the times and technology and education, etc. are different. And I do think there is such a thing as a fundamental human nature—that we are social, that we are fundamentally good, curious, etc. 

But a second school says that the past (especially the deep past) was a different country.

As I state at one point in the podcast I think some modern S&S and other writers get this aspect wrong, with characters behaving like a 21st century man or woman would in certain circumstances. And I get it; these are fantasies, so historical verisimilitude is not necessarily the main objective. But if for example you believe that fate is inexorable, that there is a Valhalla awaiting the brave you will behave much differently than Joe Schmoe walking down Broadway in 2024. Death in the Viking Age was not nearly as traumatizing and all-encompassing as it is today. Death in combat was a celebration; young women willingly submitted to ritual execution by an “Angel of Death” to accompany a fallen chieftain on the other side. 

Their general acceptance of death so fully and without remorse, and disdain of fear, explains why the Northmen could go a-Viking, and kill and pillage and take slaves and hold their own lives lightly.

Today we recoil from such behavior but it makes for truly fantastic writing (i.e., displacement from the real).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the episode.

Going Rogue(s) with another 2023 Howard Days recap

This week I was invited to join the wonderful sword-and-sorcery podcast Rogues in the House to continue the discussion about Robert E. Howard Days 2023. You can listen to the episode here.

Joining me were Jason Waltz (publisher, Rogue Blades Entertainment) and Jason Ray Carney (publisher, Whetstone) a pair of fellow attendees whom I met for the first time last week in Cross Plains.

The show as always was a blast. Give it a listen, if for no other reason than to hear host Matt John deliver "Cimmeria" in his dead-on Arnold imitation. This had me in stitches. Dude should take this act on the road.

In addition to Howard Days recaps we also talked about the ongoing sword-and-sorcery revival. Jason Waltz and I served on the S&S panel organized by Deuce Richardson at 2023 Howard Days, while Jason Ray Carney was one of our avid front-row listeners. We get into some of the same territory here on the podcast, covering recent S&S history as well as current venues, authors, and trends. Good stuff.

(Other) stuff that got me into S&S: Rogues in the House leftovers

The RitH Army wants you!

Last night I guested on Rogues in the House, one of a handful of podcasts dedicated to all things sword-and-sorcery—or at least sword-and-sorcery adjacent. * The episode was on our origin stories, the events/media/incidents that set us down the path of sword-and-sorcery fandom and general lifelong nerdity.

This was my third guest appearance with the Rogues and as before, I had a blast. Co-hosts Matt John and Deane Geiken are great dudes, very easy to work with, and always run a good program. The show is up and you can listen here.

Even though we ran an hour and 38 minutes it was not enough time to cover all of the many childhood and adolescent influences that fueled my love of S&S. So, what follows is a more comprehensive list. I’m quite sure I’m missing a few, either forgotten to time or buried deep in my subconscious, driving urges I can no longer articulate. But this must suffice, for now.

These are the notes I was working off for the show so I’m leaving them as notes.

Toys including plastic medieval knights, little green army men, etc. Later Star Wars toys, D&D action figures, etc.

Saturday morning and after school cartoons particularly Thundarr the Barbarian and The Herculoids. Also Transformers, GI Joe, and of all things, the Gummi Bears (this became a running joke on the show).

Kids/adolescent books including The Hobbit, Fire-Hunter by Jim Kjelgaard, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Monsters by Crestwood House, Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves and Things. The Chronicles of Prydain/Lloyd Alexander, Dragonlance, Susan Cooper’s Over Sea and Under Stone, the Narnia books, illustrated Crusades stories, etc. 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.

Land of the Lost TV show.

Comics: Savage Sword of Conan, and other direct S&S titles (color CtB, Arak Son of Thunder, occasional issue of Heavy Metal). Also John Carter of Mars, Weird War, and Tarzan.

The comics led me to the Conan Saga Lancer paperbacks with their Frazetta covers.

Time Life Enchanted World series.

Adolescent films including Rankin-Bass Hobbit, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer, Krull, The Dark Crystal. Even something like Goonies, for the spirit of adventure and treasure-seeking it evoked in me.

These films inevitably led to more adult movies: Conan the Barbarian (1982), Heavy Metal animated, Excalibur, LadyHawke, The Terminator, Blade Runner.

Tabletop gaming: Tom Moldvay basic D&D (D&D in general, but this edition specifically). White Dwarf magazine, which had fiction, entertaining articles, and great artwork. Artwork in general was to be prized, prior to the internet. It sparked ideas for gaming, and my imagination in general. I later migrated to other RPGs including Runequest, Top Secret, Star Frontiers, etc. And Wargaming (Wooden Ships and Iron Men, Axis and Allies, etc.)

Computer games: Atari, which led to the early CRPGs (Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, Wizard’s Crown)

Heavy metal and its associated imagery (Iron Maiden, Manowar, Judas Priest)

Halloween—I dressed up as a viking one year, a knight another. My favorite holiday, still is.

Stephen King, including the likes of The Stand, Cycle of the Werewolf, the Long Walk, Salem’s Lot, Eyes of the Dragon, etc.

* I also recommend the likes of The Appendix N Podcast, So I'm Writing a Novel, The Cromcast, and the Dark Crusade for their coverage of sword-and-sorcery material.

In the house, with Rogues in the House

The latest episode of Rogues in the House is out, with me joining the crew for a panel session on the current state of sword-and-sorcery. Alongside stalwart S&S authors Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden, Matt and Deane and I discussed questions like:

• What is the current state of sword-and-sorcery? Where is it strong, where is it not?
• Sword-and-sorcery in gaming
• Is the subgenre involved in a renaissance, and do we want it to be or are we better off staying off the beaten path?
• What perception does the label have in publishing circles, and is it a help or hindrance to getting a work published?
• Does it need a rebrand/new name to escape its past?
• How does it differ from the more popular "grimdark" strain of hard-edged fantasy?
• What do we hope to see in the future, and what does it need to continue to grow?

I had a lot of fun with this one, as always. The best part for me might have been seeing one of the co-hosts' legit armory pre-show. We're talking swords of all stripes, including replicas from The Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian (1982), working crossbows, halberds (bec-de-corbin!), handcrafted chain mail armor, WWII armament, on and on. As I mentioned to Deane, I know where I'm going if the zombie apocalypse breaks out, or if I start seeing parachutes coming down Red Dawn style. 

You can listen to the episode here.

A few notes I jotted down prior to the show... sword-and-sorcery today is a very small niche in an incredibly popular broader fantasy genre. Below are some of the interesting things going on it, but added up, it’s still quite small.

· A few good but niche publishers (DMR Books, Rogue Blades Entertainment, Pulp Hero Press, etc.).

· A good magazine (Tales from the Magician’s Skull).

· A swelling number of amateur publishing outlets (Whetstone, Flashing Swords, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, etc.).

· Some watering holes (Whetstone Discord, a small Reddit group, various small groups on REH websites, Facebook, etc.).

· Some publicity on Black Gate, blogs like my own/Silver Key, DMR Books has a great blog, as is the blog of Tales from the Magician’s Skull.

· Some new anthologies. Swords and Sorceries (Parallel Universe Publications has 3 volumes), Savage Realms. Blood on the Blade (Flinch Books)

· It’s supported by one good podcast—Rogues in the House. Cromcast has at times supported S&S, occasional episodes from likes of Elder Sign. Oliver Brackenbury’s So I’m Writing a Novel explores S&S. Appendix N Book Club covers a fair bit of S&S.

· Some good authors—Scott Oden and Howard Andrew Jones, James Enge, Schuyler Hernstrom, Adrian Cole. Keith Taylor is still writing and Michael Moorcock is still with us, with an original Elric story due to publish next year and reportedly “definitive” Elric editions coming out.

· But, it’s still a widely misused and misunderstood term, which is what I tried to help repair with Flame and Crimson. Still used synonymously with “fantasy.”

· It’s not a genre that major publishers want to take a chance on, and therefore not commercially viable.

Latest Rogues in the House podcast is up: Deathstalker 2, and Flame and Crimson too

The Ultimate Sword-and-Sorcery podcast

The latest episode of the Rogues in the House podcast is now available for your listening enjoyment. The cast and crew of Rogues were kind enough to ask me on the show, and I have to say I had a BLAST. I mean, I spent last Thursday evening drinking a couple beers and talking sword-and-sorcery, Deathstalker 2, and the zaniness of the 1980s in general. 

We had way more fun than we had any right to, but if you can't laugh watching Deathstalker 2 you were obviously born without a sense of humor.

Check out the episode here. We also talked Flame and Crimson quite a bit as well.

Rogues in the House: Deathstalker 2!

You won't find this level of beefcake ...

Any fans of this fun podcast, the only program wholly dedicated to sword-and-sorcery? I’m one of them, and tonight I get the pleasure of guesting on an episode.

 

The topic? Deathstalker 2: Duel of the Titans.

 

Somehow I had never watched Deathstalker 2. I look back upon my many years of renting the most exploitative videos I and my high school buddies could find, idle time spent scrolling YouTube, the additional (painful) video research I conducted for Flame and Crimson, and I wonder how this one eluded me. The only explanation I can come up with is that Deathstalker 1 is so outrageously awful, near irredeemable, that I wanted no further part of the series. 

 

In addition, I’ve consciously avoided the S&S films of the 80s. It got too depressing to see a subgenre that gave us Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, The Dying Earth, Conan and Kull, Elric, etc. handled so badly on the silver screen.

 

But, in recent years I’ve made peace with sword-and-sorcery films. I view them now as a cornball corner of pop culture history to enjoy as guilty pleasures. And, I’m already glad I got the opportunity to guest on Rogues because Deathstalker 2 is fun. Sword-and-sorcery fans will find their subgenre treated with about as much subtlety and reverence as Animal House did for undergraduate education. I would describe it as objectively a bad film, but subjectively awesome. It knows what it is, and while not a true parody like Men in Tights for example it is entirely a tongue-in-cheek take on S&S. 

 

Make no mistake, this is by any measure a bad movie. Really bad. The acting is below the level of a soap opera, the plot barely a thread, the script full of holes, and the sets and props are cheap and flimsy and entirely recycled. It lacks proof of having been backed by anything resembling a budget; in fact, there really wasn’t one. If there was, it was spent by the cast and crew in Argentinian dive bars. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a poor man’s Army of Darkness.

 

You can currently find Deathstalker 1 and 2 on Tubi, a free movie service. My advice: Skip the first and head straight to the sequel. And look for our insights and analysis of this fine film on an upcoming episode of Rogues in the House.