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Post by MRPs_Missives on Oct 2, 2024 15:15:02 GMT -5
Yes, it's a Jeff Jones cover. -M I almost think I might have seen it used for a different book, but that could just be my imagination or perhaps Jones painted something similar for another paperback. There were a lot of terrible fantasy/sci-fi paperbacks in that era that sported Jeff Jones covers. I have bought a handful of them for the covers, and read them, regretting the experience. There were also some phenomenal books with Jones covers as well. This was one of the most egregious of the bad ones... I think I reviewed in this thread, but the cover blurb about Viking adventure is misleading at best as its Vikings vs. bug aliens who essentially want sex slaves and bodies for breeding grounds if what's left of the plot that I haven't scrubbed form my memory is accurate. -M
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Oct 3, 2024 0:24:32 GMT -5
Reread Red Nails tonight, and Patrice Louinet's Hyborian Genesis III to complete my Cimmerian September journey and to finish the third Del Rey Conan volume. My journey encompassed all 21 Howard Conan stories, the poem Cimmeria, Howard's essay The Hyborian Age, his letter to Shuyler & Clark, all three of Patrice Louinet's Hyborian Genesis essays. John Hocking's Conan and the Emerald Lotus (the first of two pastiche novels by Hocking in the recently released City of the Dead volume-I still need to read the second at some point), and the few issues of Conan the Barbarian and Conan: The Battle of the Black Stone by Jim Zub and friends that came out in September. Now I can turn the calendar to October and start on whatever horror offerings I want to get to in prose, comics and on film that I can (though I might argue that most Conan stories qualify as cosmic horror in the Lovecraftian vein at least, and that sword & sorcery as a genre is a fusion of adventure fiction and cosmic horror), -M
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Post by berkley on Oct 3, 2024 1:43:54 GMT -5
Reread Red Nails tonight, and Patrice Louinet's Hyborian Genesis III to complete my Cimmerian September journey and to finish the third Del Rey Conan volume. My journey encompassed all 21 Howard Conan stories, the poem Cimmeria, Howard's essay The Hyborian Age, his letter to Shuyler & Clark, all three of Patrice Louinet's Hyborian Genesis essays. John Hocking's Conan and the Emerald Lotus (the first of two pastiche novels by Hocking in the recently released City of the Dead volume-I still need to read the second at some point), and the few issues of Conan the Barbarian and Conan: The Battle of the Black Stone by Jim Zub and friends that came out in September. Now I can turn the calendar to October and start on whatever horror offerings I want to get to in prose, comics and on film that I can (though I might argue that most Conan stories qualify as cosmic horror in the Lovecraftian vein at least, and that sword & sorcery as a genre is a fusion of adventure fiction and cosmic horror), -M
Yes, I think the sorcery in 'sword and sorcery' means that horror is never too far away. Even if in some stories it's just part of the background, it's still an integral aspect of the fictional world in which the action takes place. In contrast to, say, the ERB-style planet romance, pretty similar in many ways but you'll never find much cosmic horror in those yarns: they have the sword but not the sorcery. Instead they have science, though a completely unexplained fantasy-science most of the time. It gives those two closely related genres a completely different atmosphere.
Now that I'm getting back to some 20th-C fantasy I think I might soon read some REH myself, maybe one of the things I haven't got to before, like Cormac Mac Art. And since I think I've read almost everything ERB published, I might try Otis Adelbert Kline, one of his planetary-romance imitators, from what I understand. So I might soon be able to refresh my memories of those two genres or sub-genres and see if my impressions still hold.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Oct 5, 2024 16:23:21 GMT -5
Sherlock Holmes: The Stuff of Nightmares by James Lovegrove I was pretty sure of it already, but I've officially decided I'm a fan of James Lovegrove. I read two of his Cthulhu casebooks with Holmes and Watson, and I was expecting this to be similar, since the description mentioned Spring-Heeled Jack. Instead, its more of a steam punk adventure, which is pretty great. Lovegrove's Watson is just the way I want him to be...grumpy and a bit thick but competent and brilliant in flashes. He makes some silly comments, but also some great observations about life. The story was an entertaining one about a series of bombings in England in 1890, which lead into a throwaway line in 'the Final Problem'. Love it when a pastiche writer does that sort of thing. I was particularly tickled when Watson was talking to the readers about inconsistencies in his stories (he mentions he lies about knowing Moriarty on purpose)... especially since this story is definitely not consisted with Lovegrove's Cthulhu books. You could, of course, chalk that up to those being 'secret'... but Watson says several times in this one he's writing it for himself, not for publication, so that doesn't make sense. I don't always like it when authors go meta, but this was unintentional I think (those other books are a couple years away, which makes it very funny. The ending here was surprising and wonderfully ridiculous... while it would have made an amazing cover, I get why they didn't go there. The cover, in fact, does no justice to Baron Couchemar... definitely the worst part of the book. I would love to see him again sometimes (if he survived). I had forgotten Lovegrove had written so many Holmes books ,I'll have to find those at some point... perhaps after his soon to be release Conan book that I'm pretty excited about.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 6, 2024 5:00:06 GMT -5
I attended a few talks held by Lovegrove when he was in Zagreb a few years ago for the local SF convention. He's a really nice and entertaining guy. I'd really like to get around to reading some of his books, but man, my to-read pile is beyond overflowing.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Oct 6, 2024 19:00:21 GMT -5
The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith (who's actually J.K. Rowling). The vagaries of our local second-hand bookstore's inventory mean I'm reading the Cormoran Strike series a little out of order, but that's all right. It's not so much the plots I care about, but rather the relation between the characters. A bit like in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, where I'd have been happy with entire episodes of exchanges between Odo and Quark, Bashir and Garak, or Kira and Dukat.
In this novel, a novelist who wrote a scandalous roman à clef disappears... while Robin Ellacitt is decidedly making poor matrimonial choices, and Cormoran Strike still acts like a selfish bear. But all it's quite engrossing!
Also, do people drink that much beer in England? Sounds like a cool place!
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