Author Archives: Keith West

Saxon’s Bane is a Harrowing Visit to the English Countryside

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saxons_bane_250x384Saxon’s Bane
Geoffrey Gudgion
Solaris Books
mass market US $7.99 CAN $9.99
ebook $6.99 Kindle Nook

I’d intended to have this posted by Halloween, but dayjobbery derailed me. It’s a perfect Halloween read, but don’t let the fact that the holiday is past stop you. It’s worth the time. I’d like to thank Micheal Molcher for providing me with the review copy. He sent it at the end of the summer, and I apologize for taking so long to read it. Like I said, it looked like a good read for the Halloween season, but I didn’t finish it in time.

Very much in the tradition of The Wicker Man, Saxon’s Bane is the story of Fergus, who is injured in a car wreck outside the village of Allingley. His coworker Kate is driving, and before he’s rescued, Fergus sees a Saxon warrior stroking Kate’s hair. Clare is an archaeologist called in to excavate a man found in a drained mill pond. Or more specifically a Saxon who was murdered and buried in a bog.

After he finally gets out of the hospital, Fergus discovers that his life has changed and he can’t go back to his high pressure sales job. It’s more than survivor’s guilt over Kate’s death. He returns to Allingley, where he gets a job at a stable, hoping to continue healing. Clare, on the other hand, has begun to have disturbing dreams about the man she’s studying. Vivid dreams that become nightmares as the events of each dream move closer to the Saxon’s death.

Fergus and Clare don’t realize they have a deeper connection to the events of the past, and that those events are impacting the present.

I’ve been a fan of British television, mainly comedies and science fiction, for years. And while I haven’t had time to watch much in recent years, this book reminded me of why I enjoyed some of the shows I did. Saxon’s Bane made me want to live in a close knit British village. Just not this one.

Gudgion assembles a diverse cast of characters, from the vicar of the local church to the pagan who runs the stables to the leader of the Satanic cult that’s targeted the local church. He builds the menace and dread slowly, then when you think you know what’s going to happen, he goes in a different direction. He also manages to make even the minor characters unique individuals.

The dream/flashback scenes are well done and ultimately properly bloody, and Gudgion gives enough technical data on the history, customs, and language of the Saxons without overwhelming the reader with the amount of research he’s done. I’d love to see his try his hand at historical fantasy.

I really enjoyed Saxon’s Bane. For a first novel (I think it’s a first novel), it’s more polished and smooth than you would expect. Gudgion shows the potential to be a writer to watch. I intend to read his next book.

NaNoWriMo

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I’ve added a page for NaNoWriMo 2013.  You can find the link at the menu up top.  Rather than bore the people who read this blog with regular updates, I’m going to place updates and the occasional excerpt there.  That way if anyone is interested in reading about the experience, you can find it there.  I will post at least once a week (hopefully more often), but I don’t think it will be the same day every week.  I’ve got too much traveling to do to be that consistent.

Happy Halloween

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Copy of 20131031_153400

Brains. They’re what’s for dinner.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

I started the day by passing out exams wearing a grim reaper hood.  Quite appropriate, I thought, considering what some of the scores were.  When I took the hood off, about a dozen of the women in the class asked me to put it back on.  They said they wanted pictures, so I’ll take them at their word.  Some of them even had cameras out.

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Mmm, Mmm, good.

A number of members of the department dressed as zombies.  They even served brains.  I’m not sure where they got them since brains seem to be in short supply on our campus.

I had hoped to have some more Halloween themed posts done, including looking at Robert E. Howard’s “Pigeons From Hell”, but I’ve had too many other things going on.  I’ll post a couple of things as Halloween leftovers over the next couple of weeks.

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The Grim Reaper says “Have a Happy Halloween.”

For what’s left of it, have a Happy Halloween.

I Look at the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series

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bk_dream-quest_lovecraftI started to refer to this project as Sooper Seekrit Project Number 3, but it will go public too quickly to really have that title.  Number 1 was the Amazing Stories gig.  Number 2 has been put on hold indefinitely, and will thus remain secret for a while longer.

John ONeill asked me about a month or six weeks ago if I would consider doing some posts for Black Gate.  After a brief back and forth, this is what we settled on.  I said I would be glad to do it, but it would have to wait until October was over.  He agreed.

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Lin Carter

So here’s the deal.  I’m going to be reviewing the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series edited by Lin Carter.  The first post will be a brief overview of the series, placing it in its historical context.  Then I’ll start reviewing the books.  I’m going to take them in order of publication at first, but at some point I’ll start jumping around.  Some of the titles I find the most interesting were published later in the run.

KhaledFor those of you who might not be familiar with it, the Adult Fantasy Series was a series of books published by Ballantine Books in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s.  Edited by Lin Carter, the series included a number of works written in the 1800s or early 1900s, many of which had fallen into obscurity or were unfamiliar to American readers.  The books had gorgeous wraparound cover art and are highly collectible today.

I’m not going to be on a regular schedule, at least not for a while.  My intention is to get about one post a month done.  I’m still doing a weekly post for Amazing Stories, and that will continue through the end of the year.  Then I’m going to cut back.  Trying to review an independent work every week is starting to put more of a strain on my schedule than I want.

At the Edge fo the World

NaNoWriMo 2013

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I’ve been debating this for a few weeks, and I’ve finally decided that I’m going to give NaNoWriMo a try this year.  I participated two years ago and managed to finish a novel, although it’s not in any shape to be seen at the moment.  I gave the program a pass last year because I had too much on my plate.

I suspect that’s the case this year.  I’m seriously behind on some review commitments, and there are some blog posts I need to write that require some research.  Plus there’s a blogging announcement in the post that immediately follows this one.  But I don’t want to limit my writing to blogging.  Don’t get me wrong.  Blogging is a lot of fun, but I want to write fiction as well.  Writing a blog post is a lot easier than writing fiction, though, and I tend to take the easy way out when I’m tired or there are too many interruptions.  Participating in NaNoWriMo will force me to make fiction writing a priority.  I hope.

I’m going to deviate from the stated guidelines in NaNoWriMo, though.  You see, the problem is that I don’t have a novel ready to go.  I’ve got a crime novel I want to write, but it’s still in the gestation stage.  I need a secondary plot to screw up the schemes of the main characters, and that hasn’t come together yet.  I could write the sequel to the novel I wrote two years ago, but I need to work out some details of the worldbuilding that will become problematic in the second installment.  Plus, I just need to clean up the first draft.

So what I’m going to do is write a novel’s worth of short fiction.  For NaNoWriMo, I recall that being 50k.  I tried to check a few minutes ago, and the site was down for maintenance.  Anyway, I’ve got a list of short story ideas that could fill a book.  I need to get started on them.

There have to be some ground rules, though.  To keep from violating the spirit of the program, all stories need to be completed in November, start to finish.  In other words, works in progress aren’t allowed.  Otherwise, I’d just work on the deep space disaster novel.  Any progress I make on something I’ve already started will be in addition to what I do for NaNoWriMo.

The advantage of writing short fiction is that if I get stuck, I can just work on something else for a while.  I’m something of an organic writer to begin with, so this approach works for me.  I may not make it, but I’m going to try.  I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “Black Canaan”

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Howard HorrorThe Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paper $18.00
ebook 12.99 Kindle Nook

When accusations of Howard being a racist are trotted out, this story is often one of the ones that’s given prominent display to back up those claims. And there are definitely aspects to the story that will be offensive to many modern readers, as well they should be.

But is that reason not to read the story? The answer to that question is going to vary from one reader to another. I can only answer it for myself.

Here’s the basic plot. Sometime after the Civil War, but no later than the late 1920s/early 1930s, probably not that recently, Kirby Buckner is summoned from New Orleans back to his home in the region known as Canaan. It’s an isolated region, surrounded by river and swamp. He’s attacked on the way there by a black woman he’s never seen before and three black men who are unknown to him. He manages to fight them off. Coming upon some of his friends, he is informed that a man named Saul Stark has taken up residence in an old cabin. Since he came the blacks in the swamp have been stirred up and the ones who live in town have fled. The whites fear an uprising.

This story is long enough that I won’t try to summarize all the details. It turns out that Stark is a conjure man. The voodoo he does is powerful, and he intends to use it to set up his own kingdom in Canaan. The woman who led the attack on Buckner places him under a spell that will draw him to his doom. There are people who’ve been turned into aquatic swamp monsters. There’s a dancing skull.

There’s also the frequent use of a certain racial slur that begins with the letter “N”. Buckner uses it, as do most of the whites who have speaking parts in the story. But Buckner seems to be of a more noble character than his companions. When some of the men catch a black man spying on the town and he refuses to answer their questions, they are going for the bull whip when Buckner intervenes. The man had worked for Buckner’s family, and Buckner reminds him they’ve always treated him fairly and assures him they’ll protect him from Saul Stark.

Howard was a product of his time, and that time included attitudes that are considered racist today. Furthermore, he was writing about a time and place in this story in which the attitudes were certainly racist by any reasonable standards. Howard always strove to give his stories a sense of authenticity, regardless of whether they were set in historical times or times that never were. To write about race relations in the deep South and not include the racist attitudes present would go against everything he strove to be as a writer.

The key to interpreting the racial aspect of this story, at least for me, is to look carefully at the attitudes of Buckner. While he would be called a racist today, he appears to respect and sympathize with the blacks in the story. He certainly treats them more nobly than the other whites. I realize this won’t matter to some who only see race through the lens of the twenty-first century. That’s their choice. I prefer to try to put myself in the mindset of the author as much as I can, even when I don’t always share the same views as the author. I found the use of a certain racial epithet disturbing, and much of my family is from the South, so it’s not like I didn’t grow up hearing it.

“Black Canaan” isn’t going to be for everyone. If you can put up with the racial attitudes some of the characters express, then give it a try. If you don’t think you can, then this is one you’ll probably want to pass on.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux”

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Howard HorrorThe Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paper $18.00
ebook 12.99 Kindle Nook

This probably isn’t one of Howard’s better known horror stories, and I think in part it’s because it wasn’t published in Weird Tales or any of the other pulps his supernatural tales appeared in. It was published as “The Apparition in the Prize Ring” in the April 1929 issue of the short-lived Ghost Stories.

One of Howard’s life long passions was boxing. He wrote serious and humorous boxing stories, and even in this case, a supernatural boxing story. The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press is currently in the process of publishing Howard’s complete boxing stories in 4 volumes.

This isn’t a particularly scary story, but the ghost angle is central to it. It’s narrated by the manager of boxer Ace Jessel. Jessel is an up and coming fighter, but he doesn’t have the killer instinct to be a great boxer. This is one of Howard’s stories where race is a factor. Jessel is black, as are Tom Molyneaux, the boxer from the previous century he worships, and Mankiller Gomez, the boxer he fights.

There is a clear contrast between the wild Senegalese Gomez (named after the Mexican promoter who first brought him to the ring) and the civilized Jessel. In fact the only use of the N-word is by Jessel in reference to Gomez. To say that Howard engages in the racial stereotypes of his day is to oversimplify his portrayal of race in this work.

Jessel is slated to fight the heavyweight champ when Gomez comes on the scene and takes the title. Soon everyone is trying to get the two men in the ring. Eventually it happens, even though it’s intuitively obvious even to the most casual observer that Jessel doesn’t stand a chance.

Jessel has a life size painting of Molyneaux. The manager comes across Jessel standing before it and asking Molyneaux for help in the upcoming fight. So unbeknownst to Jessel, he takes the painting to the fight. When Jessel is about to go down for the count, he holds it up where Jessel can see it. The painting shakes, and a cold wind blows through the arena, and especially in the ring. Jessel gets up and whips Gomez, winning the title. Only the ref, Jessel, and the manager can see Molyneaux’s ghost.

I know I’ve made the ghost aspect seem trivial and have brushed off the boxing, but I can’t do this story justice in a description. Howard is at the top of his game as he describes the boxing match. The thunder and conflict we see in Howard’s sword and sorcery are all on display. There aren’t a lot of scares in this one, but that’s not the point. The ghost is just the McGuffin that propels the boxing story. This is a different side of Howard many fans haven’t seen. If you’re not familiar with Howard’s boxing stories, this is a good place to start.

Two Items of Halloween Interest

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I’m buried under a mountain of grading, so there won’t be any post on Robert E. Howard’s horror stories tonight.  Tomorrow doesn’t look too promising, but I’ll see what I can do.

HalloweenMagicMysMacabre-500I did, however, want to make you aware of a couple of items of seasonal interest.  First, I’m reading Paula Guran’s Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre  from Prime Books.  The review is for Amazing Stories (TM) and will go live on Monday.  It’s the sixth installment of a series I’m been running over there I’m calling Six Weeks of Scares.  I’ll be sure and post the link here when the review goes live.  I’m about halfway through the book at the moment, it’s quite good.

ShiversVIIThe other item is one from Cemetery Dance.  It’s the latest installment in the Shivers anthology series edited by Richard Chizmar.  I received a copy of the ARC through Cemetery Dance’s ARC club earlier this year.  I’ve read a few of the stories, and the ones so far are top notch.  There are a couple of rare stories in this one.  One is “Weeds” by Stephen King, which hasn’t been reprinted since 1979.  The other is a story by Clive Barker that was originally published in the New York Times on October 30, 1992.  I haven’t read those yet.  I’d hoped to have this collection finished by Halloween, but I probably won’t make it.  I will review it early in November if things go as planned.  They rarely do, but I can dream.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “Dig Me No Grave”

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Howard HorrorThe Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paper $18.00
ebook 12.99 Kindle Nook

Today’s story is a shift away from the weird westerns we’ve looked at the last two days.  Howard is best known for the series characters Solomon Kane, Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and Conan of Cimmeria.  In more recent years, he’s also gotten recognition for El Borak, Sailor Steve Costigan, and Breckenridge Elkins.  But there were other characters who appeared in multiple stories, and two of these were John Conrad and a man simply called Kirowan.  They were experts on the occult, and seem to be Howard’s attempt to try his hand at the occult detective yarn.  These stories are part of Howard’s Mythos tales.  Yog-Sothoth is mentioned in passing in this one.

In “Dig Me No Grave”, the story is narrated by Kirowan, an approach Howard abandoned for the later stories, in which he kept the first person perspective but had an unnamed narrator.

Kirowan is awakened by Conrad in the middle of the night.  Conrad has just left the side of John Grimlan, who has died in a most unpleasant manner.  Years earlier Grimlan had made Conrad swear to follow the instructions in a sealed envelope after his death.  Conrad was to follow these instructions no matter how much Grimlan might change his mind. As he was dying Grimlan begged Conrad not to follow the instructions but to burn the envelope.

The instructions say Grimlan is to be laid out on the table in his library with seven black candles placed about his body and an incantation in a second sealed envelope read.  Fearing what the envelope contains, Conrad has sought Kirowan’s aid.  Grimlan was a follower of the cult of Malik Tous, who is rumored to be an incarnation of Satan.

The men go to Grimlan’s house, which has no electricity or gas lights.  (This story was published in Weird Tales in 1937 but was certainly written years earlier; it wasn’t unusual for isolated houses, as Grimlan’s is described, to have only lamps or candles for light.)  As they approach the library upstairs, light comes from under the door.  The men enter to find Grimlan’s body laid out on the library table, covered with a robe.  Seven black candles are burning about the body.  In the corner is an old Oriental man in a yellow robe, upon which is embroidered an image resembling a peacock, the symbol of Malik Tous.

The man bids Conrad  to begin reading the incantation.  The incantation is long and written in an archaic form of English mixed with some other language.  Part of the text describes Grimlan’s pact with Malik Tous, which included an additional two hundred fifty years of life for his soul, which will be damned to Hell on his death.  As Conrad reads, the candles go out one by one of their own accord.

When the final candle is extinguished, the men hear a blood chilling scream.  Conrad manages to find and light a candle.  The body of Grimlan is gone as is the Oriental man.  Conrad and Kirowan flee the house as a fire begins somewhere upstairs and completely engulfs the structure.  After they are out, they turn and see a dark shape resembling a peacock rising from the flames carrying the body of John Grimlan.

I’m not sure when this story was written, but I’m guessing it was in 1930 or 1931.  Other stories featuring Conrad and Kirowan were published about that time.  Howard hadn’t yet written some of his more famous horror stories such as “Black Canaan” or “Pigeons From Hell”.  I intend to look at both of those in this series.  The prose in “Dig Me No Grave” gets a little purple in a couple of places.  Still, a Howard horror story, even if it’s not one of his best, is still a good horror story.  The strength in this one lies in the atmosphere Howard imbued in the story.  There’s not as much action as you might expect from Howard, but not everything he wrote was blood and thunder.  He understood creeping terror as well, and it’s on display here.

I might look at another one of the Kirowan/Conrad stories in this series.  I certainly want to examine another of the Mythos tales.  I’m about to hit some time constraints, so I’m not sure how many more of these posts I’ll get in before Halloween.  There will be at least two more, “Black Canaan” and “Pigeons From Hell”.  Beyond that, I can’t say for sure.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “The Horror From the Mound”

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Howard HorrorThe Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paper $18.00
ebook 12.99 Kindle Nook

This is another of Howard’s weird westerns, and although published a year and a half before “Old Garfield’s Heart” (May 1932 vs. December 1933), it’s a more mature tale.  This one concerns a former cowboy, now farmer, named Steve Brill who notices that an old Mexican laborer named Juan Lopez avoids a mound on Brill’s property.  Lopez cuts across a corner of Brill’s pasture when going between his work and his shack.

Brill detains Lopez one evening and inquires as to the reason for this behavior.  Brill thinks it’s because Lopez is superstitious and the mound is an old Indian burial mound.  Lopez assures him there’s more to the situation than that, but that he isn’t free to tell.  The story has been passed down in his family from one of his ancestors who came through with the conquistadors.  Lopez has taken a sacred oath not to tell anyone but his first born son.  Since he has no children, the secret of the mound will die with him.

Brill convinces Lopez to write out what the secret is since his oath only prohibits him from telling the secret.  Lopez agrees and hurries off to his shack before the sun sets.  Brill decides not to wait but to excavate the mound by lantern.  He suspects there’s a hidden cache of gold in the mound, and he wants to get his hands on it.

Brill finds evidence of the mound being an Indian burial mound, but there it appears to have been disturbed at some point in the past.  He unearths a stone lid over a burial chamber.  Hearing rustling and fearing a den of rattle snakes, he heads off to his cabin to get a lantern.   (He’s been working by moonlight, too impatient before now to get his lantern.)

He comes back and discovers the lid is now in the burial chamber.  A figure is visible going over the hill to Lopez’s shack.  Naturally Brill suspects Lopez has beat him to the gold.  He heads towards Lopez’s shack to get what he views as his property when he hears a ghastly scream.  He finds Lopez dead, papers scattered around him.  The final sheet Lopez was working on is still clutched in his hand.  The only sign on Lopez’s body are puncture marks on his neck.

Brill returns to his cabin to find his horses have been scattered.  Wanting to avenge Lopez but not wishing to tangle with one or more killers in the dark, he barricades himself in his cabin and reads what Lopez wrote.

During the days of the conquistadors, a small expedition rescued a lone survivor from a ship.  The survivor claimed the crew and the rest of the passengers died of plague.  He accompanies the expedition to what would become Texas.  Then the men start dying, bodies left by the side of the trail drained of blood.  Eventually, they find the vampire sleeping in the brush.  He’s the survivor.  Afraid of waking the creature, they bury it in an old Indian burial mound.  Lopez was a descendant of one of the survivors of the expedition.

Brill finishes reading to discover the vampire watching him from the window.  The creature breaks down the door.  While Brill fights for his life, the lantern falls from the table and shatters.  Brill manages to impale the vampire on a broken table leg and flees the burning cabin, letting the fire finish killing the creature.

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Robert E. Howard

“The Horror From the Mound” was criticized when it appeared in Weird Tales because it contained “no less than four flagrant breaches of accepted vampire tradition”.  It was the first of the regional horror stories Howard would write, and it’s one of the best, even if it didn’t respect “vampire tradition”.  Howard blazed his own trail even there.  Howard adds a level of verisimilitude by mention historical figures such as Coronado and real locations such as Palo Pinto, which is both a town near Howard’s birthplace as well as the county in which he was born.

One thing I do want to point out, and that’s Howard’s use of race.  Howard is often considered a racist in some circles because he doesn’t hold 21st Century views.  But consider how Lopez is portrayed.  While Brill does express some racist sentiments, especially when he thinks Lopez has robbed him of a treasure, his attitude towards the Mexican is largely one of respect for the man, if not for some of his beliefs.  He certainly intends on avenging the man when he discovers Lopez’s body.  These were not typical white attitudes towards Hispanics in the time and place Howard was writing nor were they typical attitudes for the setting of the story.  The respect and desire to avenge don’t fit easily into the racist label that’s often applied to the author.

“The Horror From the Mound” is one of Robert E. Howard’s best regional horror tales.  It’s easy to see why.