Blog Archives
sBaen’s “Hell” series edited by Janet Morris ran for seven anthologies and four novels from 1986 to 1989. I remember the series and resisted reading or buying them when they came out. The idea did not appeal to me. The idea is sort of like Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riverworld” series that when a person dies […]
Charles Henry Cannell (1882-1947) is a writer better known for some lost race novels as “E. Charles Vivian.” He also wrote eight novels in the “Gees” series as “Jack Mann” published from 1936 to 1940. Maker of Shadows is the fifth novel in the series. Originally published in the U.K. as a hardback in 1938, […]
I have a weakness for Atlantis novels. I first read of the lost continent in the first volume of the Golden Book Encyclopedia. Love the illustrations in those volumes. I think the first fictional piece I ever read set in Atlantis was Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis in “Spawn of Dagon” in the paperback The […]
Time to read a modern thriller after all the horror anthologies I knocked off this past winter. I was alerted to Kurt Schlichter’s The Attack by a friend. I checked out the premise, read the first pages that were part of free preview. I have heard Kurt Schlichter filling in on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show […]
One of my favorite Louis L’Amour quotes is: “The idea that poverty is a cause of crime is a lot of nonsense. It is one of those cliches that is accepted because it seems logical. Crimes are committed by people who have some money and want more. More often they are committed by somebody who […]
This is a guest post by Richard: A SCENT OF NEW-MOWN HAY was the first of twenty-eight enviro-thrillers/science-factions/quasi-horror novels – call them what you will – that the prolific English author John Blackburn produced between 1958 and 1985. If those descriptions seem uncertain or ambiguous then it is because Blackburn’s work is notoriously difficult to […]
Cold Print is not an Arkham House book but two thirds of the contents were originally published by Arkham House. Ramsey Campbell was another of August Derleth’s discoveries. Cold Print is a collection of Campbell’s “Cthulhu Mythos” stories from 1962 to 1985. Cold Print was first a Scream Press hardback from 1985. Tor reprinted it […]
The Arkham House streak continues with August Derleth as “Stephen Grendon’s” Mr. George and Other Odd Persons. For some reason August Derleth had eleven stories in the mid and late 1940s under the Grendon name. A look at the Jaffery & Cook Weird Tales index shows it was not a case of both a Derleth […]
H. Russell Wakefield (1888-1964) is considered one of the top tier of English ghost story writers. The Clock Strikes Twelve was his sixth story collection. The Arkham House edition from 1946 is an expanded edition of the 1940 U.K. version. Contents: Why I Write Ghost Stories Into Outer Darkness The Alley Jay Walkers Ingredient X […]
I had mentioned last year how Russell Kirk’s story in Dark Forces was one of my favorites from that volume. I have had a copy of the 1984 Arkham House collection Watchers at the Straight Gate lying around unread. I have been rotating around eleven single author story collections since the holidays reading anywhere from […]
In January 1936, F. Orlin Tremaine, editor at Street & Smith for Clues Detective, Astounding Stories, Cowboy Stories, and Top-Notch presented Donald Wandrei with that month’s issue of competitor Popular Publications’ Dime Detective. There were two stories that were imitations of Wandrei’s “Ivy Frost” stories from Clues Detective. One was a non-series story, “Black Widow’s […]
I have been reading Robert Bloch for over forty years. I never wrote to him like I did to Fritz Leiber, Donald Wandrei, Carl Jacobi, and Hugh Cave. I first discovered him in that all so influential anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I still like rereading a story by him from Weird Tales here […]