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Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun was the first non-Ian Fleming James Bond novel (1968). Glidrose Productions, the rights holders to James Bond, wanted a continuation novel to retain certain rights. Amis had already written The James Bond Dossier (1965) and The Book of Bond (1965). Colonel Sun was listed as by “James Markham.” The novel starts […]

I like reading books about books. Paperbacks From Hell covered paperback horror from the sixities through the early nineties. Mike Ripley’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang cover British “thrillers” from the early 50s (Casino Royale) to the late 70s (The Eagle Has Landed). I picked up the trade paperback edition from 2019. The hardback was first […]

The Earth is Flat by Tanith Lee is a new collection from DMR Books. This was just published in March. The book is 274 pages containing fourteen stories, five from her “Flat Earth” sequence. The other nine stories are in a section called “Tales from Elsewhere.” Contents: Story Original Appearance The Origin of Snow Tanith […]

I like to read natural history now and then. A favorite book as a kid was William E. Scheele’s The First Mammals. A book I would love to have now but unwilling to pay the going rate. Prehistoric mammals don’t get the love that dinosaurs do but illustrations of saber-tooth tigers, mammoths, ground sloths etc […]

A very recent Baen Books’ anthology is Worlds Long Lost edited by Christopher Ruocchio and Sean CW Korsgaard. This is the description: ALL-NEW STORIES OF ANCIENT ALIEN ARTIFACTS FROM TOP NAMES IN SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY The universe is older and more alien than we can ever understand. We were not alone. The farther we […]

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. […]

Sgt. Hawk: Tiger Island is the fourth novel in the series. Originally published by Leisure Books in 1982 and just reprinted by Rough Edges Press. The Marines have landed on the island of Rechnung but the push inland is halted. There are rumors that a company of Marines have disappeared altogether. The Japanese are testing […]

Leslie Turner White (1903-1967) started out writing for the pulp fiction magazines in 1930. He wrote mostly for the detective pulps in the 1930s, appeared in Argosy, Adventure, Short Stories, and Blue Book in the 1940s. He did manage to place a few stories in the slick magazines Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and Country […]

Who likes to watch Shark Week on the Discovery Channel? A lot of people do. Maneaters: Killer Sharks in Men’s Adventure Magazines from New Texture is a recent offering in their fine line of books. Maneaters is an anthology of sixteen pieces culled from men’s adventure magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s. Some were […]

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) is a figure that still casts a shadow. I discovered him in 1983 when Warner Books reprinted the five Kane paperbacks and also the horror collection In a Lonely Place. I have fond memories of reading Wagner, Michael Moorcock, and Fritz Leiber in the summer of 1983 while listening to the […]

I wrote that William R. Forstchen’s One Second After was the scariest book I ever read. Dies Irae: Day of Wrath, a novella from 2014 by Forstchen is right up there. In the introduction, Forstchen writes: “I did not want to write this [book], but, as I expressed to friends, I feared that if I […]

Cosmic horror is one of the forms of horror fiction. It is also often cliched and hackneyed. The Brain Leakage blog alerted me back in January to Matthew Pungitore’s The Report of Mr. Charles Aalmers and Other Stories. I am usually up for good cosmic horror and ordered this book when available upon publication. The […]