Notice: Undefined offset: 1 in /home/linweb28/c/castaliahouse.com/user/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/page-theme/pageTheme.php on line 31

Deprecated: Methods with the same name as their class will not be constructors in a future version of PHP; wpTBLang has a deprecated constructor in /home/linweb28/c/castaliahouse.com/user/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/wptb-language/class.main.php on line 3
Before the Big Three – castaliahouse.com - Page 4

Blog Archives

s

RETROSPECTIVE: “The People of the Pit” by A. Merritt

Thursday , 25, February 2016 Jeffro Appendix N, Before the Big Three Leave a comment

After reading “Through the Dragon Glass”, this one is a real disappointment. A. Merritt’s lush prose is completely appropriate in describing mysterious otherworldly women and strange, nightmarish landscapes. But the former is completely absent here while the latter is only given a brief treatment here. It’s compelling, though… and it’s stunning to realize that people […]

RETROSPECTIVE: “Through the Dragon Glass” by A. Merritt

Monday , 22, February 2016 Jeffro Appendix N, Before the Big Three 2 Comments

When I read The Moon Pool, Creep, Shadow, Creep!, and Dwellers in the Mirage last year, I noted such a difference between his first novel and his later ones that I mistakenly assumed that A. Merritt’s writing must have improved drastically over the course of the 1920’s. I could not have been more wrong. Everything […]

RETROSPECTIVE: Behind the Curtain by Francis Stevens

Thursday , 11, February 2016 Jeffro Before the Big Three 4 Comments

This story had the potential to be a masterpiece. The pacing, the cascade of hints that gradually snap into focus, and most of all, a character that really does come across as the “very apotheosis of hatred”– wow! As I was reading it I wanted to compare it to Edgar Allan Poe, even. Then I got […]

RETROSPECTIVE: Part Two of “The Citadel of Fear” by Francis Stevens

Monday , 8, February 2016 Jeffro Before the Big Three 2 Comments

For all the flack H. P. Lovecraft gets for being a terrible wordsmith, the guy was not dumb. He knew exactly what makes for a good story. He not explained how to do it in a 1920 article for the United Amateur Press Association, but he also put his ideas into practice so well, he […]

RETROSPECTIVE: “Friend Island” by Francis Stevens

Thursday , 4, February 2016 Jeffro Before the Big Three 3 Comments

In this short story published in All-Story Weekly in 1918, Gertrude Barrows Bennett depicts an imaginary future where women have become the “world’s ruling sex”. If the story hadn’t spoken of an “elder time when woman’s superiority to man had not been so long recognized”, I would have been inclined to say that this was […]

RETROSPECTIVE: Part One of “The Citadel of Fear” by Francis Stevens

Monday , 1, February 2016 Jeffro Before the Big Three 6 Comments

This is a truly weird piece of fiction. It pretty well has everything: pulpy adventurers, remote and exotic locations, a mythical city that is a plausible real world Elfland, monsters, terrors, encounters with gods, and– finally!– a mysterious moth-girl worthy of a particularly lurid pulp cover. This is light years ahead of Francis Steven’s first […]