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October – 2022 – castaliahouse.com

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Gaming (Walker’s Retreat): IIOf course there’s the question of “Can I play this?” and the answer is “Yes.” This is the ruleset that Jon Mollison mentioned in his video that I posted the other day. Review (John C. Wright): Crucifixion Press Resurrects Pulse-Pounding Pulp Action In The New Anthology, ‘Shoot The Devil’: Nearly a century […]

The annual October horror read continues with John Steakley’s Vampire$. Steakley (1951-2010) was not a prolific writer. He had two novels to his credit. The other is the well thought of science fiction novel Armor (1984). Vampires was first a Roc/New American Library trade paperback in late 1990. The mass market paperback followed in 1992. […]

Previously, I discussed Asimov’s three kinds of science fiction: gadget, adventure, and social. And while this trio better describes the wild and wooly mess of science fiction than the binary set of hard and soft science fiction, new sub-genres have cropped up that don’t quite match the categories Asimov created. Now, Asimov’s categories are descriptions […]

Command Authority (The Last Hunter #5) – J. N. Chaney and Terry Mixon Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Commodore Jack Romanoff and his ragtag crew have repaired their ancient battleship, scattered their adversaries at New Copenhagen, and discovered what was really behind the invasion. Now they must make the enemy bleed and begin […]

Art (Steve Holland Book): While working on  my upcoming book ‘Steve Holland: Paperback Hero’, I reached out to Bob Larkin to see if he could help me with a few of the many covers of Steve that he painted over the years. He sent me a gang of illustrations, including quite a few of Steve […]

Gladys Gordon Trenery (1885-1938) as “G. G. Pendarves” had 19 stories in Weird Tales, seven stories in Oriental Stories/Magic Carpet Magazine, nine stories in Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine, three stories in Hutchinson’s Adventure-Story Magazine, and one story in Argosy from 1923 to 1939. She lived in the Liverpool region of England with roots from Cornwall. […]

September 1956’s issue of Amazing Stories held within its pages a short story by Randal Garrett called “The Man Who Hated Mars.” It’s a bit of a morality story, following an inmate, one Ron Clayton, as he tries to flee Mars for the “Green Hills of Earth.” Mostly, he wrecks lives and spacecraft in that […]

Blade and Bone – D. K. Holmberg Sanaron is a city of fog and violence; a place where even the past can disappear. Kanar Reims, an ex-soldier known as the Blackheart, hides a dangerous secret. Exiled from the Realmsguard, he wants nothing to do with the kind of magic that destroyed his life. That is […]

Westerns (Games Radar): whether you’re a frequent flyer or just go to the theater for special occasions, it’s unlikely you’ll have seen a Western on the big screen recently. Why isn’t Hollywood producing them anymore? Well, turns out that there are some rather sad reasons. Firearms (Field & Stream): Throughout history, many different handgun cartridges have been […]

Valancourt Books has published fifteen in it’s Paperbacks from Hell series starting in 2019. I covered T. Chris Martindale’s Nightblood in the series. Lisa Tuttle’s A Nest of Nightmares is another entry in that series. A Nest of Nightmares is a collection of short fiction originally published by Sphere Books in the U.K. in 1986. An introduction to this […]

Blue Saint (St. Tommy N.Y.P.D. #12) – Declan Finn Terrorists destroyed a church by supernatural means. Trans surgery patients have disappeared. Chinese spies have been slaughtered. MS-13 are on the march. A hurricane is coming. This is one storm coming straight for Thomas Nolan. Old enemies want him, his city, and everyone he loves destroyed. […]

Queer Blades/Rick Hollon, editor (Farther Trees Press, 2021): Harry Harrison wrote a fake quote attributed to Dr. Frederic Wertham in Great Balls of Fire (1977): “Conan is a crypto-homosexual and the entire school of sword-and-sorcery reflects this fact.” Harrison was probably paraphrasing from Jan Strnad’s “The Psychological Conan” from Amra V2, #57 (June 1972). Strnad […]