Cimmerian sighting: Bidding farewell to the heroic heart of Steve Tompkins

The news has begun to spread that Steve Tompkins of The Cimmerian passed away on March 23 after suffering a heart attack. As usual, real life has a lousy way of intruding on the fantastic.

I won’t sit here and tell you that Steve and I were friends. I’ve never met him face-to-face. But we had exchanged a dozen or so e-mails since he asked me in February to contribute weekly pieces to The Cimmerian. This news has hit me pretty hard and I feel like I’ve lost a comrade in arms, the trusted man to my left in the shield wall of those fighting to preserve Robert E. Howard’s legacy and promoting fantasy fiction as a whole. Steve’s shield was broader and he wielded a more skillful sword than most who answer the martial call of defending swords-and-sorcery and weird fiction.

Steve was a brilliant individual with an unquenchable passion for Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Edward Wagner, George R.R. Martin, Charles Saunders … the list goes on and on. He had a remarkable insight into the works of all these diverse authors, an amazing recollection of miscellanea and facts stored in the arsenal of his mind, and an uncanny ability to cite reference upon reference and work them, intelligently, into indefatigable essays. I’m not being self-deprecating when I say that Steve’s knowledge of the fantasy genre dwarfed my own.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Cimmerian sighting: Unearthing David Drake's "The Barrow Troll"

“You Northerners believe in trolls, so my brother tells me,” said the priest.

“Aye, long before the gold I’d heard of the Parma troll,” the berserker agreed. “Ox broad and stronger than ten men, shaggy as a denned bear.”

—David Drake, “The Barrow Troll”

One of my haunts for used books, Webhead Enterprises in Wakefield, MA, seems to house more than its fair share of exceptional short story collections (I’ve scored copies of Prime Evil, Dark Forces, and Revelations in Webhead, to name a few). It was there I purchased the excellent anthology Whispers, whose contents include “The Barrow Troll,” a terrific short story by David Drake.

“The Barrow Troll” was originally published in 1975 in Whispers magazine, a former periodical specializing in dark fantasy and horror. Drake, a former assistant editor for the magazine, wrote a nice piece about Whispers on his personal Web site.

Starting in 1977 editor Stuart David Schiff released the first of six best-of collections from the magazine in a book series also entitled Whispers. “The Barrow Troll” appears in the first of these anthologies.

In his introduction to the story, Schiff describes “The Barrow Troll” as “a brutal and shocking piece.” That about sums it up. It’s a wonderful fusion of horror and fantasy, probably my favorite entry in what is an almost-uniformly excellent collection (though Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” is also an absolute gem). Whispers’ table of contents reads like a who’s who of legendary horror/fantasy authors, as it includes stories by Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Dennis Etchison, Hugh B. Cave, Richard Christian Matheson, Robert Aickman, Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ramsey Campbell, among others.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

More Battle of Five Armies goodness

While writing my recent post on J.R.R. Tolkien's Battle of Five Armies I spent some time googling for a few accompanying photos. In so doing I stumbled across a few related items that I felt compared to share. These include:

A Battle of Five Armies live-action role-playing event. I personally have never LARPed, nor really felt the urge to do so (except after several drinks). I'm not going to sit here and ridicule LARP, since I play tabletop RPGs and that would be more than a little hypocritical on my part. But something about LARP just rubs me as ... going too far. It's just not my thing.

But you know what? This event (to be held August 14-16, 2009) looks pretty cool. I'm impressed that five individual units, each with their own Web site and forum, have agreed to meet up and participate. I just might get in on this event. Put me in the vanguard of Dain's army, or let me play one of the bodyguard of Bolg. All that I need are a foam sword and cardboard armor and shield. And a few stiff drinks.

On second thought, I'd be willing to watch this, perhaps.

The Battle of Five Armies boardgame by Games Workshop. Now this is more my speed. Tell me that the cover of this game does not rock.

I'm not a big wargamer but I used to play Axis and Allies quite a bit, which come to think of it was a battle of five armies of sorts (albeit those of Germany, Japan, Great Britain, Russia, and the U.S.). But I would definitely be willing to take this game for a spin. These painted miniatures and terrain look pretty groovy, too.

Cimmerian sighting: Howard and Hemingway

Read enough Robert E. Howard and you start to see him everywhere, particularly in the works of his contemporaries. Case in point: I recently listened to an audio version of Ernest Hemingway’s non-fiction treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, and my Howard-addled brain began to piece together tenuous, but perhaps not entirely unfounded, connections between the disparate authors.

Hemingway and Howard are alike? Didn’t one write about traumatized and/or impotent war veterans named Nick and Jake, and the other about unstoppable, larger-than-life heroes from impossibly ancient times with names like Conan and Kull? I’ll admit that if the only Hemingway you’ve read is The Garden of Eden or A Moveable Feast, you’ll find little in common with these tales and Howard’s Hour of the Dragon or “The Vale of Lost Women.” But Death in the Afternoon is a very different animal than Hemingway’s softer stories. It’s a raw, unflinching look at a sport many consider barbaric and cruel, but which Hemingway admired very deeply. And then it struck me: What is Death in the Afternoon if not heroic fantasy? What are the Spanish bullfighters of Hemingway’s work if not modern-day gladiators, heroes with swords? Wealth, fame, and great heights are theirs for the taking, but are entirely dependent on their bravery, grace, and skill with cape and sword.

Could Howard have derived some inspiration from Death in the Afternoon and/or Hemingway’s stories in general? We know Howard read Hemingway. According to the REH Bookshelf, an invaluable resource painstakingly compiled by Howard scholar Rusty Burke, Howard had a copy of “Winner Take Nothing” on his bookshelf. This collection contains “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and “A Natural History of the Dead” (this latter must-read vignette also appears in Death in the Afternoon), among other short stories. Given his prodigious appetite as a reader Howard may very well have read Death in the Afternoon. Although he didn’t have it on his bookshelf at the time of his death, Howard’s sensibilities are splashed on its pages like the blood of a soft, city-bred Nemedian on a Pictish axe.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

My top 10 fantasy fiction battles: Battle of Five Armies

6. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
Battle of Five Armies

“Dread has come upon you all! Alas! it has come more swiftly than I guessed. The Goblins are upon you! Bolg of the North is coming, O Dain! whose father you slew in Moria. Behold! The bats are above his army like a sea of locusts. They ride upon wolves and Wargs are in their train!”

—Gandalf, from The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

The Battle of Five Armies from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is perhaps the first large-scale fantasy battle scene that I can recall reading, and to this day it remains one of my favorites, firmly rooted in my top 10 fantasy battles of all time. Guillermo del Toro had better do it justice in the planned 2011 release of the film, else he risks invoking my not-insubstantial wrath. It would take a truly artless director to screw up the Battle of Five Armies, given how much great material Tolkien has supplied.

At first reading I sympathized with Thorin’s stubborn defiance when the Elvenking and Bard come to claim a share of Smaug’s treasure. It’s highly doubtful that Tolkien intended this reaction, as we’re supposed to recognize the selfishness of the dwarves and chastise Thorin for his greed. I do, but I suffered along with the dwarves on their dangerous journey from Bag End to the Lonely Mountain, and I couldn’t help but feel the same stubborn, suicidal pride that consumes Thorin in my own breast. Don’t give it to them, Thorin. Tell Bard and the elf and their armies to take a walk. Heck, part of me still feels this way.

I cheered when Dain’s people came down from the mountains to Thorin’s rescue, the great, grim hosts wielding two-handed mattocks and armored head to toe in coats of cunningly-wrought dwarf mail. They may be outnumbered, I thought, but I wouldn’t want to tangle with this crew.

The two sides are about to meet—dwarves vs. elves and men—when Gandalf steps between the advancing armies, his timing as impeccable as ever. Gandalf issues a warning that the goblin hordes are upon them. The goblins are accompanied by an enormous bat-cloud; a foreshadowing of the unnatural darkness that accompanies the hosts of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings (though personally I think bats are cooler than darkness). Counseled by Gandalf, the allies draw up a quick battle plan: They will funnel the goblins into a narrow space between two great spurs of stone running down from the mountain where the goblins cannot bring their greater numbers to bear—provided that they aren’t in sufficient numbers to overrun the mountain itself, Tolkien ominously warns us.

The allies don’t have to wait long. The enemy vanguard appears, goblins mounted on wolf back. It’s a great image, as is the first glimpse of the army. “Their banners were countless, black and red, and they came on like a tide in fury and disorder,” writes Tolkien.

The Battle of Five Armies is not as detailed as most of the others in my list of top 10, but it’s as skillfully written as any, and more emotionally powerful than most. Bilbo plays no part, though I enjoy Tolkien’s remark that it was the “most dreadful of all Bilbo’s experiences, and the one which at the time he hated most—which is to say it was the one he was most proud of, and most fond of recalling long afterwards.” Given Bilbo’s run-in with the spiders, trolls, and Smaug, it's a good indication of the ferocity of the encounter.

The battle is both terrible and beautiful. Tolkien recounts that the elves were the first to charge, their hatred for the goblins, “cold and bitter. Their spears and swords shone in the gloom with a gleam of chill flame, so deadly was the wrath of the hands that held them.” The goblins reel from the elves’ fury and the onslaught of the dwarves and men. Their lines begin to waver until a sizeable contingent manages to gain the high ground, streaming down on the defenders to attack from above. “Victory now vanished from hope,” Tolkien writes.

Next occurs my favorite sequence in the book, Thorin and co’s unexpected sally from Lonely Mountain. The goblins have regrouped in the valley and with them the bodyguard of Bolg, “goblins of huge size with scimitars of steel.” All hope seems lost, until Thorin, forgotten by this reader in the excitement of the battle, emerges from the mountain, a crowned king resplendent in war-gear of old, a vision to make tears spring to your eyes:

Suddenly there was a great shout, and from the Gate came a trumpet call. They had forgotten Thorin! Part of the wall, moved by levers, fell outward with a crash into the pool. Out leapt the King under the Mountain, and his companions followed him. Hood and cloak were gone; they were in shining armour, and red light leapt from their eyes. In the gloom the great dwarf gleamed like gold in a dying fire.

Thorin cuts a swath through the enemy, wielding his axe with mighty strokes as arrows and hurled stones ring harmlessly off his mithril coat. He scatters goblins and wargs alike, and the battle seems turned once more in favor of the allies—but the bodyguard of Bolg is as a sea-wall, and he cannot pierce their ranks. Thorin’s attack is overextended and the goblins counterattack, hemming the dwarves in. Bodies lay strewn on the field, including “many a fair elf that should have lived yet long ages merrily in the wood.”

Many have criticized Tolkien over the years for his overuse of the eagles as deus ex machina, either as close air support (as here in The Hobbit) or medevac helicopters (i.e., Sam and Hobbit plucked from the side of Mount Doom). But I’ve never had a problem with the eagles. They don’t negate Thorin’s bravery. And it is not they who turn the tide of battle, but Beorn, who arrives in bear form, an unstoppable, terrifying foe like the berserkers from northern myth. “The roar of his voice was like drums and guns; and he tossed wolves and goblins from his path like straws and feathers,” Tolkien writes.

Beorn plucks Thorin gently from the field, this great bear of a man who once treated the dwarves with suspicion. After he bears the mortally wounded dwarf from the fray, Beorn returns to smash the bodyguard of Bolg and pull down and crush the great goblin himself, effectively ending the battle.

Thorin’s death-scene tugs at the heartstrings. He lives long enough to wish Bilbo a pagan farewell as he departs for “the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed.” Very Ragnarok-esque. He also expresses regret for his selfishness and gold-lust:

“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”

The battle has played out like a great tragedy and The Hobbit, which began so much like a children’s book, has become something quite different by the end. Sounding very much like a battle-weary combat veteran, Bilbo looks upon the corpse-choked, desolate battlefield and reflects on his own longest day:

“Victory after all, I suppose!” he said, feeling his aching head. “Well, it seems a very gloomy business.”

Note: The amazing photo at the top comes from the blog of artist Justin Gerard. It's easily the best rendition of the battle I've ever seen.

Cimmerian sighting: A new market for swords and sorcery emerges

If swords and sorcery is to stage a comeback—and let’s face it, the genre is not only languishing these days, it’s barely got a pulse—there must be paying markets to furnish an incentive for budding writers. So I was pleased to recently stumble across what appears to be a promising, albeit yet-to-debut publication in the S&S space, and one that also offers cash upon publication: Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

From a description on the HFQ Web site:

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is an ezine dedicated to publishing short works of heroic fantasy. More than that, through both prose and poetry we hope to hearken an older age of storytelling – an age when a story well told enthralled audiences. Traits of great oral storytelling survive the ages to influence treasures of literature, the pulps, radio plays, late-night game sessions, and now Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Our favorite storytellers, a few ancient and a few not, deliver action, reaction, and repercussion – and rarely divulge the thought processes that guide a character. These storytellers know that sometimes an audience just wants to see what happens next, that sometimes it’s more interesting to watch a person open a box than to hear about why he or she decided to open it in the first place.

Not being too hung up on the divisions within fantasy (save the broad, unmistakable strokes of high fantasy and swords and sorcery), I’ll admit to being a little fuzzy on the differences between “heroic fantasy” and swords and sorcery.

Note: To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Thinner: Vintage King gets new life on audio

I put off reading Stephen King’s Thinner for the better part of two decades. The dust jacket description—lawyer runs down gypsy and is cursed to become, well, thinner—seemed like a decent short story stretched out into a novel. The premise just didn’t grab me.

As it turns out, my fears proved ill-founded. Thinner is an entertaining little novel that is, at its heart, about big concepts, including guilt, the dangers of not accepting responsibility for one’s actions, and the ruinous, generation-spanning cycle of destruction wrought by revenge. Thinner is positively short by King standards (about 300 pages), moves quickly, and contains a couple nasty little shocks that keep you on your toes and leave you feeling unsettled.

I’ve stated before that Stephen King was, in his early career, batting very nearly 1.000 as a writer. If you take a look at his work from 1973’s Carrie through 1987’s Misery and The Eyes of the Dragon, King was consistently great. I submit that The Tommyknockers (1988), written at the height of his drug and alcohol problems, was the first true misstep in King’s career. Now that I’ve finally read Thinner (released in 1984), I find that my rule holds true. It’s a fine book from King’s classic period.

Thinner tells the story of Billy Halleck, an overweight lawyer who gets distracted while driving home (his wife is giving him a handjob) and accidentally runs down an old gypsy woman crossing the street. Halleck avoids what should have a manslaughter conviction because the judge is an old golfing buddy and lets him off the hook. But Halleck can’t escape the scales of justice. The ancient father of Halleck’s victim curses Halleck by laying a scaly finger upon him and uttering the single word, “thinner.”

In the coming weeks, Halleck’s weight begins to drop alarmingly. When the doctors rule out cancer, Halleck realizes that the gypsy’s curse has taken root. The rest of the novel features Halleck chasing down the gypsies to get the curse lifted as his weight plunges from a high of 252 pounds to half that.

King has the problem of trying to convince the reader that a steadily weakening lawyer from a wealthy Connecticut suburb is capable of exerting enough pressure on a stubborn gypsy clan to lift the curse. He neatly sidesteps this problem by introducing the character of Richie “The Hammer” Ginelli, a minor mafia boss and a former client of Halleck’s. Ginelli assists Halleck by lending his unique and persuasive “services” learned in the hard-knock school of organized crime.

There’s a lot to recommend in Thinner. Taduz Lemke, the old gypsy with the power to curse, is a wonderful character, an ancient soul (over 100 years old) from the old world, the last of the Magyar chiefs. Although he’s initially unlikeable, King renders Lemke and the rest of his gypsy clan sympathetic. Though they are dirty and uneducated, and routinely skirt (and cross) the boundaries of the law, the gypsies are treated with open hostility from the hypocritical communities that they visit. Men like Halleck view the gypsies as an unwelcome disease in their safe and pure suburban communities, which are actually corrupt at the core with their unequal systems of justice, “old boy” networks, and inherent prejudices. When Halleck claims that Lemke’s daughter is equally at fault for the accident, since she didn’t look before crossing the street, he shows his unwillingness to accept responsibility for his own actions. Worse, Halleck took advantage of an unfair system of justice and never had to pay for his (and his wife’s) carelessness. Lemke’s curse is a painful lesson in admitting one’s guilt: “There is no push, white man from town,” Lemke says, again and again throughout the story. “No push.”

If you’re a Generation X-er you’ll appreciate the 1980’s time machine that is Thinner. In it you’ll find references to Apples and TRS-80s, Thunderbirds and Novas. Halleck’s family physician casually blows cocaine during a checkup and it doesn’t seem out of place here, given the period. Halleck’s daughter is mentioned as playing a year long game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Thinner contains very little horror until the end and is more accurately classified as a thriller, which may be why King adopted his (unsuccessful) pseudonym Richard Bachman during the book’s initial release. In Thinner, King was attempting something a bit outside his reputation as a horror author.

Veteran actor Joe Mantegna provides the narration for Thinner and he is magnificent, particularly in his portrayal of Ginelli (no surprise here, given that Mantegna has appeared in various gangster films). I’ve previously railed against the inclusion of music in audio books, but this version by Penguin makes excellent use of it, in particular its use of a chilling, off-putting theme whenever the gypsies—or Halleck’s alarmingly plunging weight—are mentioned.

This review also appears on SFFaudio.com: http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=4640.