Review (DMR Books): Willard ‘Will’ Oliver’s Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author has been out for a couple of months now. I have read it. It is excellent. Now that I (hopefully) have Internet connectivity that allows more than an hour of online work every few days, I’m going to post my review.

Science Fiction (Fandom Pulse): Screen Rant has reached a new low in its desperate quest for engagement by publishing an article that tells readers to avoid some of science fiction’s most celebrated and influential works. Under the guise of helping newcomers to the genre, the entertainment website has crafted a hit piece against literary classics that have shaped modern science fiction,

Writing (Kairos): By now you’ve no doubt seen the headlines. A number of authors got caught uploading soft smut books to Amazon with chatbot prompts left in the text. Not only that, the blunder exposed at least one of them for feeding another writer’s style into the machine. Are we looking at a series of honest mistakes? Or evidence of something more ominous?

James Bond (MI6-HQ): Raymond Benson is a familiar name to Bond aficionados, not only for hs ‘The James Bond Bedside Companion‘, but also for the novels and short stories he has written continuing the James Bond series. To date, he has written more Bond continuation novels than anyone except John Gardner. His Black Stiletto series is also highly recommended.

Fiction (Spectre Library): Dalrow Publishing released the fourth Phantom magazine on July 1957; this issue marks the earliest known involvement of American supernatural stories reprinted here. The stories likely were sold to Phantom’s editor(s) Leslie Syddall via Forrest J. Ackerman. The cover art is by Ronald W. Smethurst signing (as always) as R.W.S.

Tolkien (Lotus Eaters): How Tolkien Rescued Beowulf From Obscurity

Fiction (Gravetapping): Playback is the last book Raymond Chandler published in his lifetime and, while I haven’t read everything he wrote, I can say categorically this is the weakest entry to date.

The novel opens and closes with Clyde Umney, a lawyer representing some nebulous East Coast concern, stogeying Marlowe into taking a job tailing a young woman for reasons he refuses to explain

Fiction (Wormwoodiana): I believe I first cued in on the name J.C. Trewin for his June 1956 review in The Listener of the radio adaptation on the BBC Third Programme of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, wherein after declaring himself “having been for years President, Honorary Secretary, and the entire membership of my own Arcturus Club,” he goes on to note some of the omissions and alterations in the BBC script yet still praising the radio adaptation overall.

Horror (Too Much Horror Fiction): I’ve written two introductions for two new horror anthologies: one was published at the end of 2024, The Rack: Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks, edited by Stoker Award-winning author Tom Deady, from Greymore Publishing; order here. Also, the brand-new Claw Machine, compiled by an old East Coast pal of mine who now also resides in Portland.

Awards (REH Foundation): Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s REH Foundation Awards!

Comic Books (Dark Worlds Quarterly): ot all the L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter Conan tales are masterpieces. “The Castle of Terror” is such a tale. It is little more than Conan watching a band of Stygian slavers get pulled apart by a Lovecraftian horror. I suspect it was largely written by Lin Carter. It has the hashmarks of one of his Lovecraft pastiches. Despite its flaws, which I can acknowledge, I enjoyed it anyway.

Conan (Cyborg Caveman): Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza by Roland J. Green is a big step up from Conan of the Red Brotherhood by Leonard Carpenter. That isn’t to say Carpenter’s adventure was completely awful. It also isn’t to say this one by Green doesn’t have its flaws. Even so, I responded to this story and the level of its writing far more favorably than I did Conan of the Red Brotherhood.

Tolkien (Tolkien Library): Because Tolkien developed a passion for languages at a very young age and spent so much of his time learning, researching, and ‘creating’ languages, there can be no doubt that there was overlap between his life as an Oxford don and his life as an author of popular fiction. However, scholarly research pertaining to the influence of tolkien’s academic work on his fiction focuses primarily on his incorporation of linguistic details from languages.

Pulp (Pulp Super Fan): But this posting is focused on a new volume from Steeger Books in its Argosy Library series: Marching Sands and the Caravan of Death: The Harold Lamb Omnibus. These are both lost-race stories, which Lamb rarely did. I know he did a third such work, A Garden to the Eastward (1947), that was only published in book form, which I’d like to see, but I am told it’s a little boring.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): Bruce Walter Gardner Lively Stacy Elliott, known as Bruce Elliott, (1914-1973) was a prolific writer of crime-fiction and sci-fi in the pulps. He also worked as a television screenwriter and practiced stage magic. He wrote 15 novels for The Shadow Magazine between 1946 and 1948 and helped edit and publish a number of men’s magazines like Rogue and The Gent.

Myth (The Silver Key): I don’t read much romance. But when I do, I read The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. It’s an old romance, a medieval romance. Definitely not a bad romance. Many of today’s fantasy authors attempt to replicate the medieval age by slapping armor on a modern talking dude operating within a modern moral framework.

Fiction (Ken Lizzi): Several years pass between the end of the second book of John Maddox Roberts’ Stormlands, The Black Shields, and the third book, The Poisoned Lands. Enough years for the sons of the series’ hero, Hael, to have reached a warrior’s age. Hael, in fact, makes no appearance in this volume, apparently busy in the East acquiring firearms. His eldest son, Ansa, takes on the primary role as protagonist, being about the same age as Hael when he left the Stormlands in book one.

Fiction (Open Edition Journals): It was during that decade, the 1890s, that Machen wrote (and published only years later because of the backlash against Decadence after the Wilde trials) the most interesting and representative part of his fictional output, the quality of which he was never able to match later in his life.

Pulp (SF Crows Nest): Author Ron Goulart was told by pulp fiction writer W.T. Ballard that the problem of writing about the pulp magazines was he couldn’t possibly cover everything. Goulart agreed and hence his book, ‘An Informal History Of The Pulp Magazines’, even back in 1972 when he completed it after 18 months is only covering the highlights.

Art (Art of Michael Whelan): AT THE EDGE OF MADNESS Interior illustration for At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft Although interiors weren’t originally part of the commission from Centipede Press, Michael was so swept up in the process that he finished additional pieces.

Folklore (Celtic Source): The Celtic Summer Solstice Part 2: The Neolithic.

Geography (Frontier Partisans): There was a new bookstore in my town. They appear and disappear over the years. So I checked it out. It was mostly new books. Unlike the other bookstore it did not have shelves of old westerns or sci fi. It was not dusty. It did not smell like an old bookstore. So it was disappointing. I did pick up an interesting book: An Atlas of Extinct Countries by Gideon Defoe.

Prehistory (Metatron): Gender Equality in the Paleolithic? They are losing their mind!