Stuff I Like: A Blog

Tuesday, November 10, 2026

Chaosium Mythos Fiction: Shub-Niggurath Cycle: She Who Is To Come, edited by Robert M. Price

It's been a long time since Lin Carter killed my interest in reading and reviewing Chaosium's Cthulhu Mythos fiction series, but it's Halloween, so what the heck (I actually wrote this several Halloweens ago, but, hey, sometimes things work out). The fourth installment in the series, Shub-Niggurath Cycle, edited by series editor, Robert M. Price, is a mixed bag. Like in other volumes, Price attempts to show Lovecraft's mythology as an evolution of already existing horror themes. This time around, I found the stories written outside of HPL's influence better than the majority of those explicitly inspired by his mythos.

Pt. I

According to Price's lengthy and informative introduction, Lovecraft first introduced Shub-Niggurath, her name inspired by "Sheol Nugganoth", a god in Lord Dunsany's story, "Idles Days on the Yann." Lovecraft's creation is just a name at first, appearing in the revision, "The Last Test" (1928). It's only later that she garners the classic epithet "the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young" (added in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1932)).

In the revision story, "The Mound," she's described as the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named-One and called a "sophisticated Astarte." The latter description, Price believes, in linking Shub-Niggurath to the Semitic mother goddess she's implicitly connected to the Anatolian mother goddess, Cybele, the Magna Mater mentioned in "The Rats in the Walls" (1924). And that's pretty much it. Lovecraft rarely went in for the sort of systematizing and specification of his extra-solar entities like August Derleth and Lin Carter would do after his death.

Price has this to say:

Though the precise nature of the link Lovecraft intended between the name Shub-Niggurath and the epithet Goat with a Thousand Young is not quite clear (see below), the goat image is at least often associated with Shub-Niggurath, an we may believe that here Lovecraft was inspired by the traditional depiction of the Baphomet Goat, an image of Satan harking back to the pre-Christian woodland deity Pan, he of the goatish horns and shanks. The Satanic goat is a device of much spectral fiction, as when in Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out the Archfiend's epiphany takes goat-headed form

I don't think it's a bad take and it does give Price a jumping-off point for this collection.

Pt. II

The first three stories in the collection are good examples of the demonic goat motif and I like them all to varying degrees.

Lewis Spence, a founding figure of modern Scottish nationalism and author of numerous books on assorted occult topics (ex. The Evidence For Lemuria From Myth And Magic, Occult Causes of the Present War), penned "The Horn of Vapula" in 1932. The narrator rents a house in an isolated moorland village to study its folklore and finds himself confronting a goatish entity haunting an ancient Norman church.

"The Demoniac Goat" (1947), by M.P. Dare, finds a pair of intrepid investigators of the supernatural traveling to Derbyshire in search of an Anglican priest and the Anglo-Saxon hoard he discovered. Again, badness ensues when a goat makes its appearance. Of non-Mythos stories, this is my favorite.

J.S. Leatherbarrow, an Anglican canon inspired by M.R. James' ghost stories, took to writing his own. In "The Ghostly Goat of Glaramara" (1979), presented as a tale within a tale, an Anglican canon runs into the titular beast and its evil mistress. I like this one well enough, but it feels less at home in the book than either of its two predecessors. The story feels distinctly Jamesian, unlike the more weird and creepy vibe of its two predecessors. As such, despite liking it, it feels a bit of a stranger in the collection.

Lovecraft's influence makes its first appearance in Ramsey Campell's "The Moon-Lens" (1964). One of his early pastiches, it manages to be more than just a crazy monster story (though it's definitely that). I've written before, what separates Campbell's pastiches from those of Lin Carter and other less-than-stellar writers is his understanding that it's the atmosphere, a sense of unease, that makes this stuff work.

The Moon-Lens
by Randy Boecker
In the years since I started this article, I reviewed Campbell's The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants at Black Gate in 2023. I still like "The Moon-Lens" and wrote these additional words about it.

The concluding story, “The Moon-Lens” is the most over-the-top, insane, and wild in The Inhabitant of the Lake. Again, Campbell took his inspiration from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book. It opens with one Roy Leakey seeking help from Dr. James Linwood, a man best known for advocating for euthanasia. Leakey is hoping the doctor can help him die before his life gets any worse. It seems he had the misfortune to get stranded in the town of Goatswood, Campbell Country’s Innsmouth analogue.
To give himself time to think, Leakey left the station and went for a meal at the Station Cafe opposite. The meal — sausage, egg, and chips, all over-raw — were barely palatable, but he would not have enjoyed a better meal. The faces of the other customers were too grotesque, and he felt that under the bulky suits and long dresses might lie the most revolting deformities. More, for the first time he was served by a waiter wearing gloves — and by what he could make out of the hands under them Leakey thought they were deservingly worn.
Like in Innsmouth, in Goatswood, the citizens are terrible human-monster hybrids and worship an alien god. Poor Leakey, a man who only got off at Goatswood to change trains, has the terrible misfortune to encounter that deity in all its terrible and transformative power.

In "The Ring of the Hyades" (1989) by John Glasby, trans-dimensional explorers go out "beyond the gulfs," and run into wicked things that serve Shub-Niggurath. While nothing special, I like the way the story conveys a titanic sense of scale to the spaces traveled by its protagonist.

Robert Price's own "A Thousand Young" tackles just what the horrid rites alluded to by Lovecraft in his stories might actually look like. I didn't love the story, but I think he succeeded in reaching his goal; a terrible mess of appendages and tentacles entwined in places you'd rather not see them.

I'm on record not liking Richard Tierney's Simon of Gitta stories (see my review of The Scroll of Thoth). About this collection's included tale, "The Seed of the Star-God," I wrote:

"The Fire of Mazda" and "The Seed of the Star-God" are both around forty pages of a confounded Simon, long, dry exposition, followed by a dull plodding, determined Simon.

Remembering that, I did not read it this time around. Nonetheless, the stories are very popular among the S&S cognoscenti, so you might like them.

Glen Singer's "Harold's Blues" takes us down into the Deep South and the world of juke joints. Instead of the Devil, a wannabe blues guitarist sells himself to Nyarlathotep. Shub Niggurath figures in the background. Not a bad story at all, but nothing especially special.

"Dreams in the House of Weir" is the best Mythos story by Lin Carter that I've read. On top of that, it's actually a decent bit of work. Price says it serves as a sequel to "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" by HPL and Frank Belknap Long.

An American couple move to an old mansion in England that was built on top of the obligatory pre-Roman construction. It's well-trod material, but Carter actually manages to build an unpleasant feeling of unavoidable doom.

A central element of the previous story is a mysterious document titled Visions from Yaddith. Price discovered Carter had actually written out a version of it when he was going through his papers after his death. It's no worse than any of the poetry Carter wrote included in The Xothic Legend, but it isn't any better. You should probably take that as a warning.

In "Prey of the Goat" by Margaret L Carter, an Episcopal priest and his wife fall victim to a very bad inherited talisman. No surprises, but it is unsettling. The story had been purchased by Lin Carter for a planned publication, but he died before completing it. Price thought the story was too good to be forgotten.

"Sabbath of the Black Goat" by Stephen M. Rainey feels like one of those evil cultist movies from the seventies like "Race With the Devil." That's a good thing, if you're not sure.

"The Curate of Temphill" by Peter H. Cannon and Robert M Price is set in Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley and is an unsavory brew where it's shown the Templars were really as bad as their enemies claimed.

I'm furious that I only learned last night that David Kaufman's "Grossie" is not a standalone tale, but the finale to a short cycle about the town of Garlock's Bend. Furious also because of all the newer stories I've read in the Chaosium books, it is my favorite.

The problem with too much Mythos fiction is that it sucks. It leans into monsters and worn-out tropes instead of doing something different, if not downright original. This story, the recollection of an old woman about the disappearance of one of her friends when they were young, is very unsettling. Despite having read it several times, each reread still leaves me feeling like something uncomfortable could be just on the other side of things.

The finale, "To Clear the Earth" by the late Will Murray, is the first of Cryptic Events Evaluation Section and one of his first Mythos stories. It serves as a parallel tale to his other story, "Black Fire," which is in the later Price-edited The Cthulhu Cycle. He collected all his Mythos stories in a series called

Members of the CEES, including one with the surname Pickman, are sent to investigate a terrible event in Antarctica. On its own, it's a good little story. The way it ends is perfect.

Pt III

The Shub-Niggurath Cycle: She Who Is To Come is not a bad book, and most of the stories are decent to good, with two, "The Curate of Temphill" and "Grossie," being excellent. The problem is it never feels as coherent or as Lovecraftian as The Hastur Cycle or some of the others in the series. It's not Price's fault. Even he say regarding one of the stories of dubious Mythos merit, Shub-Niggurath stories are easy to come by.

For the most part, what connects the early stories is the goat motif and what connects the later stories is the name Shub-Niggurath. Only Price's two stories and Margaret Carter's story really play into the idea of the Black Goat With a Thousand Young as some sort of warped fertility figure. They're the most

physically unsettling stories and left me like something unpleasant had entered the room with me. As much as I like "Grossie," there's nothing to it that links it to the rest.

So, not one of the outstanding volumes in the series, but not a bad collection to have. Most of the stories are worth reading and Price's foreword and story notes are all valuable to any Mythos student.

Next Time: The Book of Iod: The Eater of Souls & Other Tales by Henry Kuttner

Monday, August 10, 2026

Back To Darkest Los Angeles

Discovering James Ellroy some thirty-seven years ago was a big deal for me. Starting with The Black Dahlia , in quick succession, I read his seven extant books in a couple of weeks. I picked up, by chance, LA Confidential on my last day in Albany during my first year in grad school and finished half of it on the train ride home. I quickly became an Ellroy proselytizer, pushing his books on anyone I could. I remember my friend, George, got his wife to read them. She was furious with him, and by extension me, for convincing her to read The Big Nowhere and witness the fate of one of its main characters. I got her outrage. To this day, that character's fate remains one of the most emotionally brutal fictional ends as I've ever read.

White Jazz, the final book in the original LA Quartet blew me away, but American Tabloid, the first part of the Underworld USA trilogy, broke me from reading him for years. I ended up giving my hardcover original of the book and the short story collection, Hollywood Nocturnes, to my cousing.

I've dipped my toes back in here or there over the decades, but I just started Perfidia, the first book in a new LA Quartet, set five years before The Black Dahlia. So far, I'm digging it, but even by Ellroy standards, it's bonkers. It's not as sharp as the original books were, but it's fascinating, giving the reader insight into the rise of the main characters in Dahlia, as well as glimpses of numerous others who show up in the later volumes.

Ellroy is a fascinating character. His public persona is intense, over-the-top, and wildly self-promoting. It's a shtick, but a brilliant one. I don't know if still shows up on tv anymore, but he seemed everywhere back in the nineties. He's definitely still doing plenty of print interviews, and he remains the crazed, wild-eyed guy who wrote things like "Cougar Blood Boil!" on a friend's balloon at New York Is Book Country. He's an arch reactionary, but one who claims he doesn't pay attention to politics. He doesn't own a computer or smart phone and exists deeply ensconced in his fictional pre-Watergate America.

Ellroy's biography is a tough one, from the murder of his mother to his own criminal and misspent youth. Along the way, not surprisingly, he became an intense moralist. None of his main characters are free of sin and corruption, but many of them are still able to stand against the darker, true evil that permeates his vision of America. Going back to the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy, a series he's essentially disowned, you have a racist, reactionary character, but is driven to enforce some sort of justice.

If he's able to finish the books he has planned, Ellroy will have created a massive thirteen-volume secret history of Los Angeles and postwar America, from Dec 6, 1941 through 1973. Along the way, he'll have exposed the 'truth' behind such terrible real life events as the Sleepy Lagoon murder, the murder of Elizabeth Short (aka, the Black Dahlia), the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the assassination of JFK. For a man who loves this country, Ellroy has a despairing view of what it's become and who its citizens are.

When I first read Ellroy, his way-beyond-cynical attitude appealed to me. As a know-it-all grad student, it seemed to match my view of the world. Later, as I aged and began to dismiss cynicism as lazy, I soured on him. It's definitely part of my antipathy to the majority of grimdark fantasy. Now, I find myself coming back to Ellroy, because I've changed again, as much as some nostalgic memories of how much I liked his books. I'm still no longer sold on easy cynicism, but as the corruption in this nation, the loss of standards, the loss of redemption, the loss of civic virtue, have all increased in the past thirty years, I find his mix of reaction and outrage appealing.

I also love his psychotic style, his lunatic plots, his monstrous villains and sin-tarnished heroes. As long as it's been since I've reread the entire LA Quartet, there are scenes and characters that have been scorched into my brain, never to fade. These are crime books like no other crime books. Andrew Vachss' vision of the world might have been as dark, but his books are essentially Doc Savage as hardboiled fiction. Chandler is far more poetic. Hammett is probably the closest, but never crosses into savagery like Ellroy. Forgetting any questions of literary merit, his best books are wild, mind blowing reads.

If someone actually tried to do a straight translation of his work to film, it would be closer to to David Lynch than John Huston or Roman Polanski. Brian DePalma tried, but his effort to convert The Black Dahlia to film was ruined by his own stylistic weaknesses and some bad casting. In the end, it probably can't be done. The film LA Confidential succeeded by dropping most of the book's narrative in exchange for a story about three hard men finding some sort of redemption. It's a great movie, as a recent rewatch reiterated, but it's only a portion of the novel.

Ellroy's books are overwhelming, ridiculous, monstrous, sentimental, terrifying, hopeful, and often moving. In a interview in The Guardian when Perfidia was released, he said he wanted to write for America like Tolstoy and Balzac had written for their homelands. I've only read a little Tolstoy and no Balzac, but I suspect he's nothing like them stylistically or even thematically. Nonetheless, I suspect a century from now he might be seen as getting as close to the dark side of our shadowed soul as anybody ever will.

The LA Quartet

The Black Dahlia

The Big Nowhere

L.A. Confidential

White Jazz

Underworld USA Trilogy

American Tabloid

The Cold Six Thousand

Bloods A Rover

LA Quintet

Perfidia

This Storm

The Enchanters (see below)

Red Sheet (see below)

Fred Otash

Widespread Panic

The Enchanters (see above)

Red Sheet (see above)

Previous Ellroy Posts

James Ellroy: Grimmer Than Grim, Darker Than Dark

COUGAR BLOOD BOIL! James Ellroy's First L.A. Quartet

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Daily Comics

I grew up surrounded by daily comics. My dad had boxes full of Wizard of Id by Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, Beetle Bailey by Mort Walker, The Family Circus by Bill Keane, Dennis the Menace by Hank Ketcham, and Andy Capp by Reg Smythe, along with tons of other paperback collections. Of those, The Wizard of Id and Dennis the Menace hold up the best, but I still have a soft spot for the rest.

He also had some Peanuts books. Charles Schulz' strip was one that seemed to have transcended the medium. Beyond the daily strips and the animated specials, there was Peanuts merchandise everywhere when I was a kid. I had a friend who loved anything with Snoopy in his aviator gear. The luminous Mrs. V's mom got her a Peanuts lunchbox. There was even a Peanuts telephone. It was only as an adult that I learned how much the strip had drifted from a somewhat bleaker setup to what it became in the seventies with its emphasis on Snoopy.

the first Peanuts

At the same time, newspapers printed comics daily, and on Sundays there were whole comics sections, printed in glorious color. In my house, that meant the Staten Island Advance and the New York Daily News. Mostly, there were funny strips like the ones above, some soap opera strips such as Mary Worth, and a few lingering-on adventure strips like Brenda Starr and Steve Roper and Mike Nomad. I devoured those daily strips for decades.

Daily humor strips tend to be three- and four-panel gag-a-day strips. Continuity, back then, except in the broadest sense, was not a thing. Characters had a shtick and stuck with it. Decades, and decades (and decades) later, most of these strips haven't changed very much. A lot of them weren't the work of a single artist, but a dedicated team of artists, draftsmen, and gag writers. Most of them slipped into irrelevance a long time ago, and it speaks well of later artists who knew when it was time to close up shop, no matter how successful they were.

My dad also had a large collection of magazine cartoon collections, including most of Charles Addams' books. There were also numerous books filled with ones from The New Yorker, Look Magazine, and assorted artists like Peter Arno and William Steig. These are a very different sort of beast and would require their own article. Suffice it to say, though, I grew up surrounded by cartoons, from the idiotic to the sublime.

William Steig's Small Fry: juvenile urban warfare

When I started college in 1984, I started buying my own collections. That was right in the midst of a daily comics renaissance. Bloom County and The Far Side started in 1980, and, for me, more importantly, Calvin and Hobbes debuted in 1985. I saw my first Far Side comic taped to the side of a cash register in Jim Hanley's Universe. Looking back on it some forty years later, I think it was up there as much because it was funny as because there was a guy who worked there who till this day greets people with "Howdy, howdy, howdy." Still, it made me laugh, and it still does. Walking a line between traditional and outrageousness (see the one with a daycare center built next door to a dingo ranch)

Calvin and Hobbes, though, was something else. For the uninitiated, the strip's conceit is a boy and his stuffed tiger have adventures. The boy, Calvin, is self-centered, reckless, and insanely imaginative. In his eyes, his tiger, Hobbes, isn't a stuffed toy, but a fully alive companion. Hobbes, is the realist of the pair, with a jaundiced view of humanity, seemingly justified by Calvin's actions.

the first Calvin and Hobbes, 11/18/85

As the strip went on, becoming increasingly popular, Calvin and Hobbes evolved into something wondrous. Inspired by classic newspaper strips like Little Nemo, the Sunday comics became elaborate and wilder than anything else. When the newspapers began reducing the space for comics, he refused to back down and let some papers drop the strip instead. He also rejected almost any merchandising of his creation save a few calendars and a book for teachers. All those pissing Calvins you see on cars just made money for crooks.

There were tons of other widely syndicated and successful strips in the eighties and nineties. Some, like For Better or Worse, were humorous family dramas. Others, like the largely autobiographical Cathy, by Cathy Guisewite focused on the life and times of young professionals. I do not like Cathy, but I wasn't a young woman in the eighties. It had actually started in the mid-seventies, but really seemed to hit its stride in the eighties. The strip was huge and Guisewite was a guest on late night talk shows.

There were tons of other strips, including FoxTrot, The Neighborhood, and Rose Is Rose, all of which I enjoyed. Even as newspapers started their death spiral, several new strips came on line in the nineties and aughts, three of which in particular I really like; Mutts by Patrick McDonnell, Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis and Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley.

Earl, Mooch, Guard Dog, and Shtinky Puddin' (aka, Jules)

For the longest time, Mutts was my favorite comic strip. Largely, it's the lives and adventures of Jack Russell terrier Earl and housecat Mooch and their owners and friends. It ranged from hilarious to poignant. The art is simple and clean, with McDonnell lavishing his Sunday strips with elaborate title blocks.

I stopped reading it at some point because it just started spinning its wheels. Sweetly sentimental and
pleasingly drawn wheels, but still spinning wheels. Nonetheless, I think the first decade or so of Mutts remains one of the very best daily strips. I've sold off most of my cartoon books, but I've held onto all of my Mutts books. I've got all ten original annual books, several larger color collections, and, another gift, the over-sized The Art of Patrick McDonnell. The only cartoon art I've ever owned is a print my sister bought me as a present one year and the only characters I've ever had on a t-shirt are Earl and Mooch. When my first shirt wore out, the luminous Mrs. V went out of her way to find a replacement. I even have a set of PVC characters.

Even though the daily strip glory days are long over, two newer strips have caught my eye. The first is Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson. It premiered in 2004, but didn't attain national syndication until 2007. It's a brilliant strip, focused on 4-year Alice Otterloop and her 4-year old brother, Petey. Alice is wild and rambunctious, given to temper tantrums and bossiness as well as moments of kindness and understanding. Petey is afraid of almost everything and, ranked, the 14th pickiest eater in the world. With its focus on how the world is perceived by kids, even though it's very different in feel or style, Cul de Sac is the only comic that feels like a successor to Calvin and Hobbes. Sadly, it ended in 2012. Thompson was earlier diagnosed with Parkinson's and it led to his early death in 2017. The two complete collections of Cul de Sac belong on the same shelf as those early Mutts and Calvin and Hobbes.

The final newer strip I like is Wallace the Brave by Will Henry. It's not as original as either Calvin and Hobbes or Cul de Sac, but its elaborate and fanciful tales of kids adventures is both charming and funny. The fearless Wallace, his fretful best friend Spud, the criminally-minded Amelia, and the prodigy, Rose. It started in 2015, and hasn't shown much evidence of slowing down.

I love comics. There are about half a dozen daily strips I still read each day, none of them in a newspaper, however. The comic syndicates have online sites carrying their strips to more people than newspapers do anymore. I go to Arcamax.com and GoComics.com. I think it was Berke Breathed of Bloom County who said something along the lines of, 'when I licensed my characters, it was like they drove a dump truck of money up to my house." I can't imagine anything like that happening anymore. Sadly.

I say sadly, but it's the way of the world and popular culture. It's what happens; it changes. Always has and always will. Still, I'm glad to have grown up with daily comics and that I still have access to some of my favorites. In fact, many classic strips, like Popeye and Dennis the Menace, have been made available in hardcover collections. The medium may be fading, but the best of it is still out there, ready to be enjoyed.

Finally, there's a site called Comics Curmudgeon. The blogger roots thru the best and worst of the legacy comics and adding his own very funny observations on them. Over the years, he's managed to make awful soap strips like Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G hilarious as well as convince me that The Lockhorns is one of the most wonderfully miserable strips of all time.

The Lockhorns, annotated by Comics Curmudgeon

Thursday, July 9, 2026

Leigh Brackett: “The Last Days of Shandakor”: An Archived Discussion with Howard Andrew Jones, Bill Ward, and Fletcher Vredenburgh

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Leigh Brackett: “The Last Days of Shandakor”

Bill Ward and I had been meaning to get back to our re-read series at some point last year, but we both got busy. And so we decided to start the new year with a read of one of my favorite Leigh Brackett stories, “The Last Days of Shandakor.” It was the third read for me, but Bill was new to the tale, and so was Fletcher Vredenburgh, who we invited aboard.

Brackett, of course, was an adventure fiction pioneer and one of the main reasons that the pulp Planet Stories is remembered today (although this particular tale originally appeared in the magazine Startling Stories). She was writing grand space opera/sword-and-planet/science fiction/fantasy back in the ’50s and ’60s and continued doing so right until the end of her life, and sometimes it seems like that footnote (that she completed a first draft of The Empire Strikes Back) has overshadowed everything else she did. It shouldn’t, though. She was writing about complex characters who could easily have rubbed shoulders with Han Solo or Mal Reynolds decades before those two were ever invented. All of her tales are infused with a real hardboiled grit and… well, heck, maybe I should stop introducing and just get onto the discussion.

Howard: As always, I’m caught by that first paragraph. Someday I hope to write openings so finely, but I may hope in vain. Consider it again: “He came alone into the wineshop, wrapped in a dark red cloak with the cowl drawn over his head. He stood for a moment in the doorway and one of the slim dark predatory women who live in those places went to him, with a silvery chiming from the little bells that were almost all she wore.” It so perfectly paints the images with only a few words, complete with exotic atmosphere and the suggestion of mystery. Who is that stranger and why is he looking around? And that woman — a lesser writer would have mentioned her curves or exposed skin. Brackett evokes her dangerous, beguiling sensuality altogether more skillfully.

Fletcher: Brackett is someone who has been recommended to me in the strongest terms for years now. Except for her post-apocalypse novel, The Long Tomorrow, I have read nothing else by her until now. Even before I finished “The Last Days of Shandakor,” I knew I was reading something very good.

You’ve said almost exactly what I’d planned to say about those first few paragraphs. I even underlined the “slim dark predatory” bit myself. With prose like that, Brackett engulfs the reader with a sense of danger and mystery right away. As the stranger, whom people “simply refused to see,” weaves his way through the crowd, I was as captivated as the yet unnamed narrator.

Bill: Interesting how a room full of people not looking at someone has the opposite effect on the audience — we look! I think the opening of “Shandakor” is a terrific example of the power of a short story to accelerate from a dead stop to full speed ahead in just a few lines, and Brackett sure seems to be a natural at it. By the time our narrator is talking to the mysterious stranger, I realized I was already hooked.

Some of these stand out elements remind me of Robert E. Howard’s strengths, though Brackett adds a spareness of phrase more on the order of the hardboiled school. But her evocation of the exotica of Mars is straight from the REH playbook with words like “Barrakesh” and “Shunni” being close enough to our real world lexicon of places and people to suggest their meaning to the audience without ever actually needing to go into detail. Combine that with precise and active word choices, and a compelling central premise and you’ve got an opener that grabs you completely — even in the absence of a compelling or interesting protagonist. I suspect a lot of critical readers would fault this story — and much of pulp fiction — for its narrator/protagonist John Ross, but I think you could also argue that Brackett keeping the narrator almost as mysterious to us as the other elements of the piece really underscores several of the key elements of the story. What do you guys think about Ross?

Howard: Ross serves as an everyman. We can relate to him and even, come the end, despise him a little, just as he despises himself, but he mostly serves as our vehicle to observe Shandakor’s mystery and people. He’s reasonably clever, fairly competent, learned, and fears and loves in all the right places for all the proper reasons. He offers no surprises, but then, as I wrote, the story’s not really about him.

I also have to point out that I think you’re definitely on to something with her hardboiled style. REH could do that himself, of course, but it’s more marked with Brackett, who spent long years working with mysteries. I’m not sure that there’s anyone of her era that quite brought that same style to space opera/sword-and-planet/science fiction (whatever it was, quite, that she was writing that was combination of all of those with fantasy thrown in besides).

Fletcher: The only real trait of Ross’ we learn about is his ambition for a university chair. Without any real nuance to him, he comes across as driven and somewhat selfish. Both those traits point toward some of the story’s themes as well as its sorrowful ending. Essentially, though, he’s a blank, left to be filled in by the reader and serve as our eyes to take in the wonders of Shandakor and the melancholy of its last days.

Which brings me to the real heart of the story. As terrific as Brackett’s pulp-style setup and narrative are, it’s the elegiac nature of the story that effected me most, as I imagine she intended. Once he enters the city, the story becomes a death watch. We are given visions of Shandakor’s glorious past, but it’s all illusion provided by wonderful pulp-style superscience. Then, we are forced to watch its final moments, but only after suffering through a prolonged and steady march towards oblivion as the city’s supplies dwindle to nothing.

Like the best of REH or Moore, Brackett’s writing more than “mere” pulp, but relying on its tropes and bending them to her will. It’s fascinating to study and try to understand how she did it.

Bill: And wouldn’t you just love to give this story to someone that thinks pulp is nothing but plotlines and punch-ups? There is hardly an action scene in the entire tale, and what is there is over and done with in a heartbeat. Instead we get an almost parable-like tale about a dying civilization living out its final days in an illusion of the past — an illusion our protagonist destroys out of ignorance and greed. Here is where keeping the character as vague as he is really paid off — he is just relatable enough that the audience ends up somewhat complicit in his crime, because we ourselves would like to escape the city and save the life of Ross’s young Shandakorian guide. It’s only after he destroys the crystals that give life to the “memories of the stones” that we fully comprehend that Ross’s ambition and vanity makes him little better than the barbarians that besiege the city though, unlike them, he does comes to understand just what has been lost.

Howard: Brackett has an amazing talent for evoking lost grandeur and fading glory. I don’t know that any fantastic Mars has ever been quite as lonely and stunning as hers, although perhaps in the hands of her close friend Ray Bradbury there’s a similar aesthetic.

Do either of you have favorite moments? I think the most powerful for me may be when Duani refused him — although that heart rending conclusion is a close second. Did you have any favorite parts? And what did you think of Duani?

Fletcher: The very end, when Ross, years after the fall of Shandakor, is still filled with despair over what he did and all his success is but a mouthful of ashes, was my “favorite” part of the story. I use quotes because it’s one hard, bitter-tasting ending that I won’t soon forget. It’s brilliant and haunting.

I love Duani and what Brackett does with what could have been a thin, stock love-interest character. On the one hand, she really is the fairy tale princess Ross sees her as, but a distinctly alien, inhuman woman on the other. As much as she seems to love Ross, she treats him with the kind condescension of her people toward humans to the very end. Her embrace of Shandakor and its peoples’ fate seems downright alien as well.

I’m glad you brought up Bradbury. I was reminded of him as soon as I understood what was going on here. As much as I like Bradbury, though, I think I’m more drawn to Brackett’s less deliberately literary style.

Bill: Bradbury does come to mind, which only makes sense when you consider that his Martian stories are almost all concerned with loss, though I suspect the comparison wouldn’t really suggest itself when reading Brackett’s older Mars stories since Bradbury never wrote adventure fiction.

Howard: Let me jump in here with an odd fact — Bradbury did write adventure fiction, and in collaboration with Leigh Brackett herself. Brackett wrote about half of the story “Lorelei of the Red Mist” and then got asked to go to Hollywood to help write the screenplay of The Big Sleep (with William Faulkner, no less) so she turned the text over to Bradbury, who wrote the last ten thousand words with nary an outline or direction. And it’s a damned good adventure tale.

That sense of the lost and forgotten and the end of things, with its atmosphere of hardboiled grit crossed with fantastic exoticism, is present in nearly every one of Brackett’s Mars and Venus stories, and some others besides (like “The Veil of Astellar” which goes down even smoother when you read it if you imagine the voice of Humphrey Bogart as narrator.)

Sorry — back to you, Bill!

Bill: I think my favorite part, too, is the end. Specifically Ross’s selection of just one piece of the treasure of Shandakor — a small figure of an alien girl. It’s the proof that Ross has grown, that he isn’t an anti-hero. The barbarians treated him with awe when they found him, and in a slightly different story Ross could have ruled the city, kept the crystals and their record of the past, truly achieved some godlike dream of his. But this Ross destroyed the crystals — literally erased the thing he wanted more than anything — in an attempt to save Duani, and then begged to be allowed to die with her. I don’t know if you could say he loved her, certainly they were incapable of loving each other or, perhaps, whatever they felt for one another would never be enough to change the reality of their situation. But that is what redeems Ross in the end — though it’s also what kills Shandakor.

Duani, I think, is the most important character in the story. Of course we absolutely need her for the climax to happen — she’s the reason Ross is in charge of the memory crystals, and also his motivation for destroying the crystals rather than just waiting for the city to die. I’d say, though, she’s also a stand in for her entire people. When we are introduced to her, she is childlike and innocent. Ross doesn’t even think of her as anything but a child until he’s spent time with her. She could have been a nubile alien temptress that decided to keep Ross as a plaything, or even a mature woman that protected him in a more maternal way, but instead she is a juvenile who has grown of age at a time when her people are already near-death, and who has no peers to pair up with, not so much as a friend. She might even be the last child of Shandakor.

Howard: Nicely said, and I thought your observation about his growth as a character was brilliant.

Ross thinks of Duani as a child until he’s spent time with her. I wonder how old she truly is? She looks very young, but I had the sense that she was older than her appearance. Certainly she has a maturity of presence and manner. And I’m pretty sure that Ross is making love with her between the scene breaks, especially the one after he picks her up and carries her away. By then she has just begun to look upon Ross as a woman in love might… until he arranges to destroy the illusion of their city.

Bill: The leader of the city tells Ross that the Shandakorians were able to create the great things of the past because they embraced reason. He goes on to respond to Ross’s assertion that Earthmen, too, have reason by saying that humans assume reason operates automatically, and so they mistakenly use it to justify all the emotional and superstitious decisions they make. Ross is an anthropologist who never makes a discovery in the story without considering how it will further his career and yet who, when he has the greatest discovery ever made on Mars in his hands, destroys it. He was fascinated by the alien stranger and he becomes infatuated with the alien girl, but both make it clear that their world is not for him. He ends up killing both (though Duani’s murder is a spiritual one) because he will not turn back where he is not wanted, where he doesn’t and cannot belong.

He isn’t, however, an unsympathetic character, because we share his faults. Even though Ross is essentially given everything he was ostensibly looking for (a complete and vivid record of a lost people), it isn’t enough. Certainly the context of his imprisonment mitigates his actions to a large extent — he is, after all, kept in chains by aliens while a barbarian horde waits just outside to sack the city he is in — and I think that is a smart play by Brackett to back him into a corner and, thus, keep the audience on his side, otherwise we wouldn’t be sharing in the sense of loss at the end of the piece, but condemning the protagonist. And I think that’s what’s really effective about this story — plenty of other stories evoke the exoticism of lost civilizations or the doom of dying races, but here we have one where the protagonist is complicit in the loss without him being some sort of amoral anti-hero like Cugel the Clever, but a capable scientist, a basically decent fellow, but one who confuses his own desires for reason.

Leigh Brackett and Edmund Hamilton

Fletcher: I don’t really have much to say after that, Bill. I think you’ve dug deep into all the important parts of the story. I agree that Brackett was very sharp to keep us on Ross’ side and the ways in which she did it. Ross brings on the end of Shandakor and its people from the best of intentions. I remained sympathetic to him, even as his actions infuriated me (it’s obvious what Duani’s reaction will be). He only accelerated the eventual end and nothing he could have done would have averted it.

Ross’ actions lead me to one last thing. In a broad sense, it reminded me of Clifford Simak’s City, also written in the shadow of atomic war after WWII, when he had lost faith in humanity. Like Simak, Brackett seems to have a dark and resigned view of us. Ross is told human reason teaches “no difference between fact and falsehood” and we fight “the bloodiest wars for the merest whim.” Ross’ furious reaction to these charges as well as his final, misguided act, only seem to prove the charges. Ross is definitely a different sort of protagonist than the take-charge Campbellian hero.

I’m so glad you suggested this, Howard. This conversation has been great fun and I’m glad to have been part of it. That I’ve reached 50 without having read any of Brackett’s short stories seems unbelievable. On the other hand, I do have a ton of new-to-me stories to look forward to (as well as the Skaith trilogy). Even with a TBR stack that seems to have reached infinite proportions, I’m about to start a Brackett binge.

Bill: Fun indeed. And you’re not alone in not having read Brackett, I’ve barely scratched the surface. But between the Baen ebooks and what I have of her from the Paizo Planet Stories line, it looks like I’ve got plenty to explore!

Howard: She was a great writer. Alas, it’s a finite resource, and you’ll quickly reach its end. I think you’ll find that the Skaith novels are grand in their way but that they have a feel of “after glow” to them in that while they’re good pulp adventures they’re not quite as compelling overall as the very best of her short stories. They feature Eric John Stark, of course, her one serial character, who’s also found in three short stories, one of which, “Enchantress of Venus,” is among my favorite adventure tales of all time.

Monday, July 6, 2026

Non-Black Gate Writing

While the vast majority of pieces I've written over the past thirteen years have been for Black Gate, a few other places asked me to write for free, or, in the case of Tales from the Magician's Skull, paid me, to write essays and reviews.

The first I can recall, was for Mario Lebel's Shared Universe Reviews site. I can't remember where we encountered each other online, but we'd had a few conversations and he asked if I'd like to write something for the Halloween season. I said yes, and landed on rereading T.E.D. Klein's terrifying version of the NYC blackout of 1977. I first read it in Dark Forces, Kirby McCauley's horror take on Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. It mixes urban decay, racial fear, aging, and Lovecraftian nightmares into one hell of a story. Klein, with the publication of his novel, The Ceremonies (1984) and the collection Dark Gods (1985), should have become a major horror writer. Unfortunately, writer's block derailed things, and he only published one or two more stories and a few reviews and essays.

Horror Week 2016: “Children of the Kingdom” by T.E.D. Klein

Deuce Richardson, following my Black Gate article about Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three, asked if I would write a piece about Alexander. I promptly replied "Yes." Below is the result.

Lloyd Alexander 1/30/24-5/17/07: High Bard of Prydain

When Tales from the Magician's Skull under Howard Andrew Jones' remains one of the greatest achievements of the recent S&S renaissance. There was no question that the stories it carried were actually S&S, unlike so many collections. The cover and interior art was unabashedly pulpy. Goodman Games' ownership meant there were stats and maps at the back for the monsters and locales in the stories, something I absolutely loved. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but the magazine was sold off to another company and the site stopped publishing reviews. Since then, there's only been one further issue.

Howard's friend and fellow author, Bill Ward, was in charge of the magazine's website and asked me to write monthly reviews. Even before he told me I'd make $30 a pop, I said yes. Some months I picked what I wanted, other months, Bill or Goodman Games had a theme or author they wanted featured. I have no idea if anyone ever read the pieces and the whole site seemed buried away on the larger Goodman Games sites, which is a shame, because some of them were pretty good.

Writing these pieces was very different than anything else I've done. Except in the beginning, John O'Neill's been a hands off editor. As the luminous Mrs. V, on the other hand could be a ferocious butcher of terrible syntax and brainless paragraphs.

Bill, on the other, served as an editor for me as well as the site. It meant he gave me direction, and, while he didn't ever do anything drastic to my work, did, well, edit it. That's something I can always use.

The thing was, the only feedback I ever got was from Bill. Now, Bill, is a good writer and a highly knowledgeable in the field, and I appreciated good comments and insights from him. Unlike Black Gate, the Goodman Games site had no comments. This meant I had no idea how anyone reacted to them, let alone if anyone even read them. I've really come to appreciate and look forward to the comments on Black Gate. Oh, well. Here are the twenty articles, mostly reviews, written over two years, from June 2021 to June 2023

Note: The Black Gate article about REH's "Pigeons form Hell" was repurposed from one originally written for this site. Goodman Games had gotten some heat for racists things said by someone at a company they dealt with. It meant anything with any sort of racial component was not going to go live on the site. Fair enough, and it meant I didn't have to write something for Black Gate.

Saturday, July 4, 2026

BLACK GATE WRITINGS - THE RETURN 2019 THRU TODAY

A Slight Return

I got pulled back into writing a little bit for a pair of posts in 2019, both on behalf of the late Howard Andrew Jones' Ring-Sword Trilogy. I reviewed the first book, For the Killing of Kings and interviewed his son, Darian, about an animated trailer he made for the second book, Upon the Flight of the Queen. I didn't know Howard really well, though we wrote a joint piece at Black Gate about Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood series. I collaborated on one or two story discussions with him and Bill Ward on Howard's site, which, sadly, seems to no longer be live. We corresponded a bit, and he hooked me up with writing reviews for the Tales from the Magican's Skull website, edited by Bill. I don't have the same sort of stories about him as many do, but I liked him and was blown away by his the depth and breadth of his knowledge of historical adventure, swords & sorcery, and crime fiction. His like is rarely seen and he's much missed.

For the Killing of Kings by Howard Andrew Jones

Upon the Flight of the Queen by Howard Andrew Jones: a Trailer

When I stepped back from reviewing at Black Gate (almost two years ago — holy shlamoley!) I knew there could always be something to lure me back. Clearly, John O’Neill knew what that something was when he saw it. He e-mailed me a copy of Barbarians at the Gates of Hollywood, I scanned it and immediately knew I had to read it. It opens with a solid history of sword & sorcery and closes with a brief explanation of why the film genre died. The heart of the book are synopses of dozens, if not all, of swords and sorcery movies of the eighties. If you’ve ever had any interest in movies like Thor the Conqueror or how Richard Corman came to produce such fare as Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans in Argentina, this is the book for you.

Yeah, John pulled me back in. He must have known I'd have such a blast writing about terrible barbarian movies, I'd want to keep writing. And I did, just not as often as before.

Barbarians at the Gates of Hollywood by P. J. Thorndyke

A New Era

So, I came back to Black Gate on the cusp of 2020 & 2021. My goal was to write only once a month and focus on older fantasies that I'd either never read or only so long ago my memory of them was fading. So far, I've pretty much stuck to that. There've been one or two special reviews, but for the most part I've stuck to my original plan.

And I'm mostly happy with how it's turned out. I've done a few special things, including getting a Shakespeare play in most summers, along with works of mythology. The one bad thing is, even though I have a whole month to read and write, I tend to do it at the last minute. Even worse, I've dispensed with the services of my editor, that is, my wife, the luminous Mrs. V. She needs some sort of organization if she's going to spend the effort needed to edit my writing. It's meant I've had to be a better self-editor, but it doesn't compare. On Facebook, I said I never won arguments with her, but she reminded me I did, but she made me defend my choices, something that definitely paid off.