REHupa

Street & Smith had some of the best looking pulp covers by the middle 1930s–The Shadow and Doc Savage led the way. Astounding Stories was still a few years off from the steel jawed engineers of the future covers by Hubert Rogers. One magazine that had some very cool covers from this time was Top-Notch. How can you go wrong with a guy obviously in a berserker fury manning a machine gun?

Subterranean Press has announced an upcoming Fritz Leiber collection entitled Strange Wonders: A Collection of Rare Fritz Leiber Works due in October. The book is edited by Benjamin Szumskyj aka Ben Zoom, a figure near mythic for his waterboarding of the English language or as Steve Tompkins used to put it–English as a pseudo-second language.

The book itself appears to be a shoe-horning of unpublished flotsam and jetsam that Leiber could never originally sell along with a poetry section of the book. Leiber was a good writer, no doubt on that. He had a hard time with the pulp magazines as he was almost too smooth.  Farnsworth Wright would not buy his fiction, Dorothy McIlraith bounced a number of stories, John W. Campbell used to grumble about buying Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser stories. He eventually found acceptance with post-pulp magazines such as Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Leiber was one of the early writers of sword and sorcery fiction going back to 1939 in the pages of Unknown fantasy magazine.

During the whole “I hate Weird Tales, Lovecraft, and Howard” period from the 1940s to the 1970s, Leiber always got a pass. More than once, some science fiction writer would write that he didn’t like sword and sorcery but did like Fritz Leiber. Part of this is due to Leiber’s writing, part of it due that Leiber was an immensely likable dude. Plus, Leiber was writing for the science fiction magazines during this time.

Leiber did stand apart from all these science fiction writers. He was a darned good critic in addition due to his unerring spot on assessments. Leiber was out there in the cold making the case for Robert E. Howard while L. Sprague de Camp was using the now famous “maladjusted to the point of psychosis” line. Leiber’s reviews in the pages of Fantastic Stories are what ought to be collected.  Leiber at one point had intended on writing a book that would be a survey on fantasy fiction. Unfortunately, his recurring battle with alcohol claimed that project as a casualty. What would you rather have–Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds or L. Sprague de Camp’s Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers or a book by Fritz Leiber? I know what my answer is.

I have to admit that I don’t reread the Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser stories much. My preference is for the earlier rougher pulp stories.  I don’t care much for “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” which is often cited as a favorite. Howard’s fiction gets you in the gut, Leiber’s fiction sometimes aims for the heart, other times it misses completely. Fritz Leiber was a beneficiary of the sword and sorcery resurgence of the 1960s. His stories didn’t jump-start the revival but got reprinted once it was underway. Ace Books dropped the Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser series sometime in the mid or late 1980s. The stories have been reprinted once by another publisher that I can think of. His fiction has been out of print for the most part for years. Now he is slipping back into the realm of the small press. Reviving interest in a fading author is always difficult though Leiber has enough good stuff to pull off a modest return. The sword and sorcery stories probably will get reprinted periodically for one reason–Leiber’s fiction is a huge influence on Dungeons & Dragons type gaming. His imaginary world is a blue print for all those dungeon masters out there. More than any other writer mentioned as an inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons, Fritz Leiber is first and foremost. Gaming companies will be his bulwark against obscurity.

The question remains: Will people spend $40.00 for Leiber fragments, drafts, and poems? Will they pay $60.00 for a leatherbound copy signed by Ben Szumskyj?

The Information Page for Robert E. Howard Days (June 11-12, 2010) in Cross Plains, Texas has just been updated by Yerz Trooly. Just click on the “REH DAYS 2010” bar at the top of the page here for Everything You Need to Know About REH Days!

Well, not quite, as I will be doing updates (some of the Panel Info will need to be filled in) and I know a number of youse mugs and mugettes will remind Ol’ Indy of something he’s forgotten, or ‘what the heck does THAT mean?!’, but the solid, basic information is there, and it’s plenty for you get to planning your trip to Texas in June.

For all you REH Foundation members out there, be sure and slide over to www.rehfoundation.org and cast your ballots in the REH Foundation Awards by the end of March. The Awards ceremony presented at Howard Days on June 11th will double up this year with awards for both 2008 and 2009. Hmm, looks like I’ve just reminded myself to post this info in the Info Page.

Very well, carry on. Don’t smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, because they’re not good for you. Indy has spoken.

Lost cities are a theme that runs through a number of Robert E. Howard’s stories, notably those featuring Conan, Solomon Kane, Turlogh O’Brien and El Borak. Some scholars even believe the last story Howard was writing prior to his death was “Nekht Semerkeht,” which is a lost city tale set in the Southwest United States during the time Coronado was searching for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold.   He did not live to complete his final weird tale.

There is one real life drama that parallels some of Howard’s lost civilization themes which became one of the great mysteries of the 20^th century.  Recently a book on the final, ill-fated expedition of British explorer Percy Fawcett was published. “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of a Deadly Obsession in the Amazon” by David Grann explores the expedition and subsequent attempts, many of them fatal, to find the lost city and the missing Fawcett; here is Author John Grisham’s overview of the book:

In April of 1925, a legendary British explorer named Percy Fawcett launched his final expedition into the depths of the Amazon in Brazil. His destination was the lost city of El Dorado, the “City of Gold,” an ancient kingdom of great sophistication, architecture, and culture that, for some reason, had vanished. The idea of El Dorado had captivated anthropologists, adventurers, and scientists for 400 years, though there was no evidence it ever existed. Hundreds of expeditions had gone looking for it. Thousands of men had perished in the jungles searching for it. Fawcett himself had barely survived several previous expeditions and was more determined than ever to find the lost city with its streets and temples of gold.

The world was watching. Fawcett, the last of the great Victorian adventurers, was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London, the world’s foremost repository of research gathered by explorers. Fawcett, then age 57, had proclaimed for decades his belief in the City of Z, as he had nicknamed it. His writings, speeches, and exploits had captured the imagination of millions, and reports of his last expedition were front page news.

His expeditionary force consisted of three men–himself, his 21-year-old son Jack, and one of Jack’s friends. Fawcett believed that only a small group had any chance of surviving the horrors of the Amazon. He had seen large forces decimated by malaria, insects, snakes, poison darts, starvation, and insanity. He knew better. He and his two companions would travel light, carry their own supplies, eat off the land, pose no threat to the natives, and endure months of hardship in their search for the Lost City of Z.

They were never seen again. Fawcett’s daily dispatches trickled to a stop. Months passed with no word. Because he had survived several similar forays into the Amazon, his family and friends considered him to be near super-human. As before, they expected Fawcett to stumble out of the jungle, bearded and emaciated and announcing some fantastic discovery. It did not happen.

Over the years, the search for Fawcett became more alluring than the search for El Dorado itself. Rescue efforts, from the serious to the farcical, materialized in the years that followed, and hundreds of others lost their lives in the search. Rewards were posted. Psychics were brought in by the family. Articles and books were written. For decades the legend of Percy Fawcett refused to die.

The great mystery of what happened to Fawcett has never been solved, perhaps until now. In 2004, author David Grann discovered the story while researching another one. Soon, like hundreds before him, he became obsessed with the legend of the colorful adventurer and his baffling disappearance. Grann, a lifelong New Yorker with an admitted aversion to camping and mountain climbing, a lousy sense of direction, and an affinity for take-out food and air conditioning, soon found himself in the jungles of the Amazon. What he found there, some 80 years after Fawcett’s disappearance, is a startling conclusion to this absorbing narrative.

It is a fascinating story to say the least – I’ve ordered the book and am looking forward to reading it. Also, a movie is in the works starring Brad Pitt as the doomed explorer.

In my previous post, I chronicled my history of reading Charles Saunders’ Imaro stories. In addition to the D.A.W. paperbacks, I tracked down various stories in anthologies such as the excellent Heroic Fantasy edited by Gerald Page and Hank Reinhardt, old issues of Dark Fantasy, and Weirdbook. Whenever I saw a copy of an Imaro book at a used bookstore, I would buy it and give it to friends. In the early 1990s, David C. Smith got me into contact with Charles Saunders. He told me about how D.A.W. Books abruptly killed the series after he had already written a fourth novel and part of a fifth. At this time, Imaro was a stranger to Saunders. Robert E. Howard mentioned how he would lose touch with a character. He would drop him and move on. The same appeared to happen with Saunders.  Over time, things changed as fans clamored for more. Steve Tompkins began writing a long critical analysis of the Imaro stories. Steve actually had a finished version on a floppy disk that he lost at a Sex Pistols concert in 1996.

In the interim, Saunders wrote a two novel cycle set in a new world he devised. Then he came back to Imaro in the new century. He rewrote the first two books for Nightshade. Nightshade published the books but did not appear from my vantage to do any sort of promotion and dropped the series after two books. Saunders picked himself up and has gone to lulu.com with the “Sword and Soul” imprint. The end result is The Naama War.

I should have read this book in 1986 but I will settle for having read it last week. First- this book is an instant classic. It is an epic that brings together some threads since the earliest story. The Naama are a Khoi/Hottentot type people at the tip of the continent of Nyumbani channeling very bad Lovecraftian Mythos sorcery. The stars are right for the return of the Mashataan, Saunders’ version of the Great Old Ones. They have plans for conquering the whole continent of Nyumbani. There are big sprawling battles, some great villains, hair-breadth rescues, and lots of sorcery. The novel comes in at 118,000 words. The story is dense but it is lean. Saunders works his words hard and the dialogue is never superfluous. The novel also has levels to it. A fantasy fan can enjoy the big epic sweep. There is also quite a bit of examination within the novel of family relationships or lack thereof, friendship, sacrifice, and alienation (and I am probably missing some things). So there are some literary aspects to it if you are willing to look.  Imaro has been groomed as the champion for good and he doesn’t necessarily like it. Being the Terminator has made him resentful, distrustful, and afraid of human relationship. He almost loses his humanity in the process of becoming what others intended him to be. Had this novel been published in the 80s, D.A.W. Books would have had one of the three greatest fantasy novels of the decade.

The four Imaro books so far can be subdivided into two duologies. The first two are the more traditional Howardian sword and sorcery. The third and fourth novels comprise a continuing story that is Tolkienesque in certain ways. There are other stories about Imaro after the events in The Naama War that are back to the more traditional sword and sorcery. So, Imaro regains his sense of human emotion as time goes on.

If you haven’t read Charles Saunders, you can remedy that. Go to Amazon or to Nightshade Books’ website and order the first two Imaro books. Then go to lulu.com and get the 3rd and 4th. I haven’t read a fantasy this good in a long time and a novel this intense since reading Wallace Breem’s Eagle in the Snow over a year ago. Sometimes good things do come to those who wait and I have been waiting since the mullet was the haircut du jour (never had one).  And, there is more Imaro on the way. Stay tuned.

Back in late 1983, I had read most of Howard, all of Leiber, Moore, Moorcock, Wagner, and some Jakes. I was reading any and all sword and sorcery fiction I could get my hands on. I was in college at the time and looking back had the time for the reading. The big sword and sorcery boom was already a few years gone. I had started out with Tolkien in high school, moved on to Howard, and returned to Burroughs who I had read when I was twelve and thirteen.

Anyway, I was as at the Phantom of the Attic, a comic book and bookstore on South Craig Street in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh.  The store had Howard’s Tigers of the Sea and King Kull which I had searched in vain for two years. I also picked up the first Swords Against Darkness anthology at the same time.  Bill Trimmer, my sword and sorcery guru, who worked there (hey Bill, if you read this, send me an e-mail), mentioned “The new Imaro book is coming out.” I asked “What is an Imaro?” Bill then proceeded to tell me about a black Conan type character in a fantasy Africa. Sounded intriguing. A month later I picked up Sword Against Darkness IV & V at Eides on Pittsburgh’s north side. SAD IV opened with “Mai-Kulala” by Charles R. Saunders. The opening got me.

“He was an outlander; that was obvious enough, with his horned, spired helmet of Zanjian vintage and mesh-mail cuirass that could only have been made in Azania…Yet the string of lion teeth about his thick neck and the marozi-skin girding his loins signalled the untamed, the barbaric. Predatory flame burned within his jet-black eyes, reinforcing an impression of latent menace…”

The story was good, real good. Imaro was a barbarian who acted like a barbarian. A couple of months after that, I picked up Imaro (D.A.W. Books #459, Nov. 1981) at one of the local Atlantic Bookstores. There was an excerpt from a review by Tom Easton from Analog giving a thumb’s up to the novel.  I instantly recognized this book was a fix up of stories from small press magazines I was just finding out about. Each story got better and better– “Turkhana Knives,” “The Place of Stones,” “Slaves of the Giant-Kings,” “Horror in the Black Hills,” and “The City of Madness.” I couldn’t believe it, this was modern day and was like reading Conan in the 1930s. Saunders had a background not beaten to death, the action was good to excellent, the writing was virile. The sorcery in sword and sorcery was not forgotten. The Lovecraft Mythos was brought in but subtly instead of your usual tentacular fiction. The book was different in having episodes in young Imaro’s life which shaped the character which is crucial long term.

In short order I bought The Quest for Cush, which had just come out. I immediately noticed the nice cover by James Gurney. At that time Gurney was doing some eye catching covers for D.A.W. Books before he created Dinotopia. If it were ever produced, I would buy a book of Gurney’s early paperback cover art. There was another excerpt from a review, this time by Jim Neal of Daily News Tribune: “Saunders is a powerful descriptive writer, at times rivaling the master of the sword-and-sorcery genre, Robert E. Howard himself. His alternate Africa is believable and comes alive to the reader.”

This book had less of the episodic feel to it and more of a novel though portions had appeared as stories in Fantasy Crossroads. Imaro’s character had been established in the first book, now the plot began to thicken as he journeyed north to Cush. Swords cut and ichor flew as supernatural menaces were dealt with.  Charles Sanders read his horror or watched a fair number of Hammer and A.I.P. films at the same time he was reading Robert E. Howard and Basil Davidson’s Lost Cities of Africa.

In Autumn of 1985, I had heard that the third Imaro book was out. I was living in Cleveland and I could not find it. I can remember taking a bus to downtown Cleveland one late October or early November Saturday morning and searching all the bookstores. At the same time, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Warrior Woman, also a D.A.W. book with a nice James Gurney cover was everywhere. Finally I found a copy of The Trail of Bohu at Eides in Pittsburgh months later. This was a full fledged novel with no small press antecedents. The tone was also different. The Howardian vibe that characterized the first two books had changed. This was obviously part of a multi-novel epic. In retrospect, a reader could see that Saunders was evolving his own voice. At the time, I figured, O.K. the next novel will be out in Fall 1986 or early 1987. I was reading Peter Tremayne’s Raven of Destiny, Manly Wade Wellman’s Cahena but there was no Imaro on the horizon. Things had changed. There was still sword and sorcery fiction coming out in paperback up until about Spring 1985. Then the genre went into exile. Steve Tompkins used to refer to the K-T event of 1985 (referring to the term used for the dinosaur extinction). To this day, I still don’t know if gaming killed it, Tolkien imitative fantasy ala Terry Brooks and Dennis McKiernan, editorial bias, bad sales or what. I never thought a good rip-roaring story with swords and ichor went out of fashion but some decision makers must have. This story picks up in the future…

Yesterday, I put forth some of my opinions on the big fantasy novel. I have been reading David Drake for about twenty seven years. I picked up his early collection From the Heart of Darkness in the Fall of 1983 mainly due to the Karl Edward Wagner introduction. In that introduction, Wagner stated “His style is straightforward and economical, somewhat unusual in a genre overladen with purple prose, and Drake professes a debt to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.” Drake was a stalwart of sword and sorcery fiction with his Vettius and Dama stories set in the later Roman Empire and his novel The Dragon Lord, which started as a Cormac MacArt pastiche.

Lord of the Isles goes back to 1997 and is very much a product of its time. Drake talks about the book at his website, “It occurred to me that I could write a heroic fantasy, this time slanting it toward the Tolkien end of the spectrum instead of the Howard end as I had with The Dragon Lord. That portion of the market seemed to be holding up well (unlike Adventure SF), and my editor at Tor was Robert Jordan’s editor (and wife).”

Drake is a fan of both Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien–

“Robert E Howard’s heroic fantasy stories were a lot of the reason I started writing myself, and when I was seventeen I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. (I’ve reread the work frequently).  It’s my belief that heroic fantasy forms a broad arc, with Howard being one pole and Tolkien the other. The works of the two men differ in emphasis but are extremely similar at the core level. Both writers affected me and my writing a great deal.”

I view David Drake writing a big, fat fantasy novel series as a case of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole or at least a writer adapting to the market dictates. Drake’s background does stand in contrast when comparing this book to other fat fantasy novels. This book comes in at 625 pages, short compared to Terry Goodkind. The novel itself contains some of the big, fat fantasy plot standards such as the hidden heir to the throne, young characters, sets of siblings off on the adventure etc. The delivery is something different though. Soon there are four separate story lines going on with four characters. Divide this up and you really have about 158 pages per character. Drake does have some padding via dialogue generally weighed towards the beginning. While the book is the beginning of an epic, there are episodes within that are more Weird Tales than Lord of the Rings. There is a distinct Clark Ashton Smith influence here as Drake mentions at his website. The world of the Isles is not unfamiliar to those who have visited Zothique and Hyperborea. One memorable scene has a nasty character getting his comeuppance when a demon rips his face off. There is also a lot of Lich Fu going on in the book. Had this story been written in the 1930s, this would have been a series of stories. If written around 1977 for Ace Books, this would have been an 80,000 word novel with the characters of Garric and Sharina combined for one adventure. Because this was written in the 1990s, it was a 625 page book. There are now nine novels total set in this world. Drake has made each novel a self-contained story though part of a larger cycle. Will I be returning to the Isles? Not immediately, this sort of thing is not part of my normal reading but I will return eventually. Having some time to kill like being on a plane, cruise, at the beach is the way to read an over-sized novel of this sort. David Drake tells me the Clark Ashton Smith elements get bigger in later novels. Interestingly, I have been told by someone who knew Karl Edward Wagner that Wagner was not much of a Clark Ashton Smith fan. David Drake certainly is.

There is an episode of the T.V. cartoon King of the Hill where Hank Hill’s wife, Peggy, buys a bookstore. Awkward son, Bobbie is looking through the shelves and discovers a whole shelf of at least 20 books. He pulls one off and say “Cleo the Huntress and the Elves of Evermore.” Before you know it, Bobbie is wearing a horned helmet (one horn sticking out of the top) and talking about the justice of the unicorn. I thought it was a hilarious piece of satire on never ending fantasy book series.

Karl Edward Wagner also did it in “Neither Brute Nor Human” when his fictional alter ego, Damon Harrington, writes a high fantasy series for “Columbine Books”–Talyssa’s Quest: Book One of the Fall of the Golden Isles.  All good satire has a basis in reality and sad to say we have books like this.

Lester and Judy-Lynn Del Rey are often blamed for the big fat fantasy novel starting with Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara. That book is actually small in comparison to what would come later. Tor Books is the outfit that really got the door stoppers going with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. I never got suckered into reading that series. I recognized it for what it was early on. Jordan took the soap opera whether it be General Hospital or Dallas and put it into a fantasy setting. I once coined the term Lord of the Rings 90210 to describe this phenomena. Tor struck gold with the idea and went on to publish Terry Goodkind who seemed to put out even bigger novels! This is very 1990s. Books got bigger as the prices went up.  For laughs, I used to go to Amazon and read hostile reviews of Robert Jordan’s last books by former fans. They realized the joke was on them as they went through high school, then college, then to post-graduate  jobs while Jordan just kept the books coming while not appreciably moving the story along. George R. R. Martin followed suit. I did read his series as the first three books came out in somewhat regular intervals. There is now a five year gap since the last book with vague messages that the next one will be out later this year. I am not holding my breath. Odds are Martin dies before he gets around to finishing his series.

I have to say I am hostile to the big, fat fantasy novel and series. I grew up reading pulp era writers and writers influenced by the pulps who knew how to tell a rousing story at 80,000 word max. Is The Broken Sword more for being less? I would say yes. Lord of the Rings looks downright lean in comparison to what has come along the past 20 years. What really irks me is the dialogue driven story. The old fictioneers moved the story along with some description, action interspersed to keep the reader’s attention, and some dialogue to add tension. I recently read three of Charles Willeford’s “Hoke Moseley” detective novels in rapid succession. Willeford would introduce a new character, describe him, make a few comments about their personality, and the move on with the story. Too much modern fantasy fiction has page after page of inane dialogue trying to create the personality of a character. Somewhere on the web I read that women like drama in their lives, men don’t.  Maybe that explains the big, fat fantasy novel, it attempts to get the female gender side of accounts receivable with verbal “drama.” All that dialogue crowds out other things like a well choreographed fight scene. Action appears to suffer interestingly. I was getting increasingly irritated with David Gemmell as his Rigante books especially seemed to have way too much space devoted to domestic scenes and family dialogue. Luckily, old time story telling did not completely die out. Paul Kearney came along with the Monarchies of God series which was in fighting trim and full to the brim with action. This post started out as a review of a big fantasy novel by a sword and sorcery writer who turned to this book form. I had more to say about the form in general and decided to a post on the big, fat fantasy novel in general first.

Spitting Feathers;

or, Chewing Over the Unplucked Turkey that is

SOLOMON KANE

By

Richard Toogood

Any priests in the market for a fresh penance to dispense from their confessionals could, I suggest, do a lot worse than to consider directing the sinful to repeated viewings of SOLOMON KANE. Not because the film affords any sort of cogent insight into the nature of sin and redemption but because watching it amounts to the most painful form of punishment imaginable. For a Howard fan it makes for an atonement almost Torquemadan in its cruelty.

Now, of course, any film has the right to be judged on what it is rather than what it is not, and so one cannot simply dismiss SOLOMON KANE as a moronic travesty of its source material but that is only because there is nothing whatsoever of Robert E Howard in it; unless one elects to count the conscription of Kane’s vague conjecture voiced in “Blades of the Brotherhood”, that he seeks his “soul’s salvation, mayhap”, an idea interpreted by Michael Bassett’s inept and asinine script with quite boneheaded literalism.

There is also one passing mention of Kane having sailed with Admiral Drake, inserted, one suspects, purely for the benefit of the Howard cognoscenti. A touching concession perhaps, but one wholly misjudged because with Bassett having set his film, arbitrarily and to no fathomable purpose, in 1601 and Drake’s voyage of circumnavigation having been undertaken in 1577, then by my reckoning the relevant subtraction of years reduces the film’s Kane to Drake’s cabin boy rather than “Devon’s king of swords”.

The wretchedly confused setting is by far and away the most pressing of the film’s manifold problems. And it isn’t just the obvious crass anachronisms that betray Bassett’s lamentable lack of feel for period: the flying of a Union Jack years before it was designed for instance, the existence of a thriving community of monks more than sixty years after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a witch burning (witches were always hanged in England whatever Hammer films would have you believe) etc etc etc. The film is actually tailored and costumed as if for a remake of WICHFINDER GENERAL. Had the film indeed been set during the Civil War then the general anarchy that the film depicts could be considered plausible, but to suggest that the authoritarian state of Elizabeth 1 would ignore the wholesale ravaging of the entire West Country is patently absurd. Bassett’s historical research appears to have come courtesy of the sort of books that come complete with pop-up illustrations.

If Bassett’s grasp on history is limp then his grip on the socio-religious complexities of the period is positively flaccid.  It is painfully evident from the picture’s depiction that Bassett is utterly clueless as to what puritans actually were; something of a shortfall, if you ask me, when it is the ideology of such that is supposed to provide the moral compass for the film’s protagonist. And so in place of the rigid political conservatism and harsh moral strictures, for which they were synonymous, instead we get Pete Postlethwaite’s cheery band of proto-Quakers; just the kind of cinematic cannon fodder guaranteed to liberate a morbid and self-pitying Solomon Kane from his adopted pacifism.

Without the engine of Howard’s inventions to drive it, and lacking any coherent sense of period to sustain interest, the film is little more than a dull and dreary two hour slog through a tedious succession of blizzards and rain storms, interspersed with a positive wallowing in filth. The repetitive scenes of abused peasants being dragged through the mire cannot fail to evoke memories of a muddy Michael Palin complaining, “help, help, I’m being oppressed”.

Bassett’s plot affords few thrills and springs no surprises (only the lobotomized could ever be caught out by its revelations) and runs out steam approximately halfway through whereupon it simply repeats itself for the remainder of the run time. Unforgivably its wholly unnecessary, and painfully clichéd, attempt to explain Kane’s origins robs the audience of all but the most fleeting glimpses of the real Howard hero through the fog of Bassett’s crass conceits.

Technically the film is adequate; both the cinematography and the score are competent without being by any means memorable, although the effects are decidedly of the bargain basement variety only. Postlethwaite aside, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo by Max Von Sydow too, the support acting is little elevated beyond am-dram standard.

With so little else on offer to catch the eye it is fair to say that the film stands or falls on Purefoy’s central performance. And he is undoubtedly impressive when the dismal script compels him to be, although just why he felt compelled to affect laryngitis for the film’s entire duration escapes me. He is less successful in those sequences when Bassett’s incompetence requires him to affect a misplaced, and distinctly unKaneian, defeatism, self-pity or despair, ludicrously culminating in a meek submission to crucifixion in the film’s single most risible scene; a sequence as spectacularly misplaced as it is, quite literally, incompetently executed.

In general however Purefoy looks the part and even manages to employ the accent without coming across like a country bumpkin. Moreover he is terrific in the fight scenes and carries the exquisitely tailored costume well (a costume which we are expected to believe the film’s drippy heroine managed to run up overnight in the back of a wagon: I’m all for suspending disbelief Mr Bassett but don’t expect it to support elephants ).

In closing, I think few Howard fans would complain at seeing Purefoy in the big black hat again. Just so long as he comes unburdened by another puerile script and witless direction.

As for Mr Bassett: please go and ruin some other author’s characters and never darken Howardian doors again.

ends

Wonder of wonders, I stopped at the local Barnes & Noble store and it actually had a Paizo Planet Stories book. No– not A. Merritt but it did have Piers Anthony. I have bemoaned the lack of visibility of Paizo’s Planet line with the biggest book chain in the U.S.  Piers Anthony was a fixture of Del Rey in the 1980s and the power of his name appears to have overcome B&N’s reticence.

I can remember thumbing through the Tor paperback of Steppe back in the 1980s when it came out. It was in the U.K even earlier. I do have something of a prejudice regarding Piers Anthony because he struck me as everything that was wrong with fantasy in the 80s. I have read one novel by him, Orn due to some paleontology incorporated into the plot. It was alright but nothing to write home about. Steppe is about a Uighur Turk from the Dark Ages who is transported into the future. A sort of Harold Lamb meets Doc Smith. The Paizo edition is intriguing. The presentation is as a pulp with good paper. 7 x 10 inches, double columns, some pulp like illustrations- I love that.  The pulp dimension and layout is very easy for reading by the way. This is a big gamble for Paizo. Bookstores seem conservative if not reactionary in their habits. Some slack jawed shelf-stocker may not know what to do with it, that is if first a manager ordered the book. I would love to see this sort of format take off. If nothing else, it is different and in my view a positive step away from the trade paperback (which I hate). The Planet Stories line has been building a reputation for pulp era reprints. Many of the covers are reminiscent of early Jeff Jones and again a welcome change from the same old, same old. The publication of a more recent Piers Anthony novel is a departure. The title may expand the number of buyers or it may potentially alienate the pulp oriented buyers. Receipts will tell.