STRANGE MONSTERS OF THE RECENT PAST

By Howard Waldrop

Howard Waldrop seems to be an expert on everything just so he can write about it. It’s a bit like encountering a strange eclectic encyclopedia where the entries come to life and hold a booze party in the subconscious.

In this case the entries include Monster movies as seen from the point of view of the last survivor of humanity. A pair of travelers journey through a landscape created by Heironymous Bosch. There’s a loving tribute to the publishing empires of Onitsha, Nigeria (I’m not making that up either). The icing on this cake is “A Dozen Tough Jobs” detailing Hercules’ adventures in rural Mississippi. Strange Monsters is about as weird and weird fiction can get and highly enjoyable.

-Dave Hardy

GW THOMAS & DARK WORLDS

It has been a while since I mentioned the talented GW Thomas. Here's a few links to his fiction & poetry online: http://www.gwthomas.org/stories.htm. Mr. Thomas is definitely worth spending some quality time with.

Don't forget that you can still get Dark Worlds #4 not to mention #1, #2, & #3. And of course Dark Worlds Adventures and much more.

Over on Kings of the Night there is a crop of new stories: "The Obsidian City" by James Lecky, "THWACK, the Last Arrow's Tale" by Peter J. Welmerink, "Brock Strangebeard and the Towers of Matterkill" by Robert E. Keller, and "The Crypt of the Cobra" by CL Werner.

Finally Swords of Fire will be coming soon! In the tradition of Lin Carter's Flashing Swords anthologies, Swords of Fire is a quadruple dose of Sword & Sorcery fiction, novellas of heroes and magic, featuring: "The Temple of Rakshasa" by David A. Hardy,"The Deathmaster's Folly" by G. W. Thomas, "Two Fools for The Price of One" by C. J. Burch, "Pieces in the Game" by Jack Mackenzie, and cover art by MD Jackson.

-Dave Hardy

DIES ATER DRACONIS ONLINE

My latest story is now online in the October 2009 edition of Static Movement, it is "Dies Ater Draconis." It's a short-short story in the steampunk manner, but using the Late Roman Empire instead of the Victorian era. I wrote it after seeing a documentary about the rediscovery of a lost work by Aristotle. The story is less about Aristotle than about a world where Hero of Alexandria's steam powered inventions became a force to be reckoned with.

In other news I've been a topic of interest in the British fanzine Ansible. David A. Hardy the space artist is a bit non-plussed to find that I write under the name David A. Hard. From the September Ansible:

Outraged Letters. THE David A. Hardy dissociates himself from a David A Hardy who writes stories for Dark World magazine. 'A fake David A. Hardy? I've had this name for 73 years; who is this pretender? Can any of your readers throw any light upon this travesty?' (Your editor's Cosmic Mind is quite able to imagine a real David A. Hardy II. The net is littered with other David Langfords.)

My reply in the October Ansible:

• David A(llen) Hardy assures us his name is authentic. 'It is true that I've only had it for 42 years (one less than David A. Hardy has been doing freelance art), but I've gotten attached to it in the interval. [...] If it will help prevent confusion, I am prepared to swear that I, the David A. Hardy who writes for Dark Worlds, can't draw anything more complex than stick-figures.'

Good thing my parents didn't name me Harlan Ellison.

-Dave Hardy

THE GHOST PIRATES

By William Hope Hodgson

The third of Hodgson’s trilogy of weird tales (Boats of the Glen Carrig and House on the Borderland were the first two), The Ghost Pirates is also about survival when the very boundaries of reality are under attack.

If you are expecting a stoned, metrosexual freebooter, be warned. Hodgson’s Ghost Pirates is more like H.P. Lovecraft as re-written by Joseph Conrad than Keith Richards meets Blackbeard. The narrator tells of how he shipped aboard the Mortzestus, trying to get back home from ‘Frisco to England. The Mortzestus is a Jonah, an unlucky ship that few man sail in twice. The narrator soon learns why. Shadow-men climb from the sea aboard the ship at night. Sailors report unexplainable and deadly happenings in the rigging. Soon the vessel is under siege.

Hodgson gives way to far more technical sea-jargon (perhaps necessarily) than in previous stories. However that artlessness gives the story a bit more verisimilitude: it is told as a sailor would tell it. The Mortzestus is essentially a haunted house at sea. The “ghosts” are no more explicable than the creatures that beset Hodgson’s other narrators. They come from somewhere else, wreak havoc and vanish.

While the story is slow paced, it does have much of Hodgson’s strange and creepy imagery. Perhaps the best image I retain is the glimpse of shadowy masts and a hull, seen backlit by a sinking sun at sea, slowly turning to stalk the doomed ship. Read this one when the lights are dim and the wind is howling off the sea.

-Dave Hardy

THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND

By William Hope Hodgson

Nowadays critics like to talk about the “New Weird”. Me, I’m still getting a handle on the Old Weird. A good place to grab it seems to be at The House on the Borderland.

The book is the second of William Hope Hodgson’s trilogy of dislocation, survival, and doom. The first was The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Like its predecessor, House on the Borderland also employs a first person narrator. But instead of being castaway in a boat at sea, the narrator is trapped in his own home adrift in time itself.

The nameless narrator tells how he came tot he house to live with sister in a remote part of Ireland. He soon finds that he has terrifying experiences. Whether they are dreams, insane delusions, or real journeys is never quite clear, but the narrator finds himself hurled through space and time to an amphitheater under the last dying sun. Giant forms of animal headed gods watch as the narrator battles hideous pig-beings, the last human fighting for survival in front of his home which has traveled too.

Just as quickly the narrator is whirled back to his own time where the pig-beings have broken through to besiege his home. While his sister is mysteriously absent, the narrator and his faithful dog Pepper battle the pig-beings on our own plane. Then things get really weird.

The narrator explores the cellars of his home and a strange pit on his property, all the while he is subject to attacks of time-slippage where he lives millions of years seemingly in a moment. The end of the Earth becomes a familiar sight.

House on the Borderland is a very strange story. Often Hodgson’s love of bizarre imagery overwhelms the pace of the narrative. Critics will find a cornucopia of material for Freudian, Jungian or other forms of analysis. But readers do get to some memorably weird places, which is the point after all.

-Dave Hardy

THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG

By William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson was a sailor who left the sea to run a physical fitness and health food store before he took up writing. His stories are filled with deeds of action, physical courage, and adventures at sea.

Boats of the Glen Carrig tells the adventures of a boat of castaway sailors shipwrecked near the Sargasso Sea in 1757. The narrator is a passenger of the Glen Carrig. He gives a dead-pan recitation of the strange events that befell the unfortunate seafarers. They find a rotting hulk in a creek on a nameless island where strange and unnatural things roam at night. It’s a place to make a ship-wrecked sailor long for the sea.

The castaways escape only to find themselves trapped in a continent of floating seaweed locked tight about another island. They battle monsters that creep about the forests of fungi at night. Around the island are more hulks of vessels entombed in the seaweed. Led by the clever and courageous boatswain, sailors fight tooth and nail to survive the horrors the encounter.

Boats of the Glen Carrig is a unique sort of book. It is crammed with Hodgson’s deep nautical lore and told in an Eighteenth-century style. The result is sometimes awkward and sometimes a bit overloaded with nautical terms. But for all that it may work a bit better, for it avoids the contrived style of a professional writer making up a crazy story and sounds like an old sailor telling a crazy story. At times I felt like I was hearing an echo of a Ray Harryhausen script channeled by an old salt. At other times I thought of the wildly improbably D&D scenarios of teenagers whose imaginations were fired with Coke and Doritos. The story has a naïve love of wonder and action that ranges from Lovecraftian horror to Howardian blood-lust.

Hodgson was a favorite of H.P. Lovecraft, I expect that Robert E. Howard would have liked his work too. Myself I truly enjoyed it. The story has a freshness that overcomes the occasional amateurishness. It is also part of a trilogy of sorts that includes The House on the Borderland and The Ghost Pirates. Boats of the Glen Carrig is a delightful, creepy, action-packed monster-story of a kind that you just don’t see anymore.

-Dave Hardy

KINGS OF THE NIGHT

There's a new webzine dedicated to Sword & Sorcery in town. It's Kings of the Night, a mix of fiction, art, and genre history from the talented G.W. Thomas.

There's this marvelous cover art by M.D. Jackson:



To go along with the Frazetta-worthy art is superb Sword & Sorcery action:

Jack Mackenzie's Mark of Gennesh. Sirtago & the Poet undertake a dangerous mission that must balance the driving urge to save a loved one with a red-lust for revenge!

G.W Thomas' The Fount. Torel the Hunter finds a lost baby in this mythic quest for treasure.

An my own The Huntsman's Pack. Varronia and Morvran Tegd flee the fury of Saxon pirates only to find more deadly dangers lurk in Britain's haunted forests.

Take a look and let me know what you think!

-Dave Hardy