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Beating Heart & Battle Axes – New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Forges a Book

Beating Heart & Battle Axes – New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Forges a Book

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Beating Hearts & Battle Axes – A Romantic Sword & Sorcery Anthology seeking funding, championed by New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine. Cover Art is by M.E. Morgan

New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine, championed by Oliver Brackenbury, has emerged over the last few years to provide a market with “love for the classics, and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling.”  Black Gate has featured the crowdfunding for and reviews of the initial volumes (link).  Today we highlight a crowdfunding endeavor that is in progress now, set to end on July 20th: a collection of six stories called Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes. Starting with this new anthology, Oliver Brackenbury (Publisher) & Jay Wolf (Editor) will carry that same approach into the Brackenbury Books lineup. It’s a bold meeting of Sword & Sorcery and the current zeitgeist in fantasy publishing: Romantasy. Some of the stories get quite spicy, too!

Check out the Beating Heats & Battle Axes campaign now!

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Triangulating Moving Targets: Equimedian

Triangulating Moving Targets: Equimedian

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Equimedian (Hex Publishers, February 6, 2024). Cover artist unknown

When we first meet Jason Velez, the protagonist of my alternative-1970s novel about science fiction, fandom, and the unskeining of reality itself, he’s in a bad way. By the end of Equimedian’s first chapter, he enumerates seven things he wants to change in his life. The list kicks off with a call to action to sell off the bulk of his SF paperbacks. The reasons Jason offers seem straightforward enough: he needs cash, and he’s tired of hauling around thousands of books.

But is there more to it than that?

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A Lovely Work of Magic & Mystery: Vinyl Wonderland by Mark Rigney

A Lovely Work of Magic & Mystery: Vinyl Wonderland by Mark Rigney

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Vinyl Wonderland (Castle Bridge Media, June 25, 2024). Cover artist unknown

Vinyl Wonderland is Mark Rigney’s new novel. It’s told by an older Brendan Purcell, about some strange happenings back when he was 17, having just dropped out of high school for… reasons. Which will become clear. His life is a mess — his mother died suddenly, his father is drinking terribly, and has lost his job. And Brendan too is drinking constantly, and has also lost his job. But he has a new one — helping out at Vinyl Wonderland, a used record store. This is 1984, when records were still the primary means of buying music. (It’s also a time I was haunting used record stores!)

Shortly before Christmas, Vinyl Wonderland owner Karl asks Brendan to take over for a few days while he tends to his hospitalized mother. And he warns him — have nothing to do with the “Elvis door” — a locked door behind an Elvis cardboard standup in the rear. And for a while, Brendan complies, even though some people, including the town’s mayor, importune him to let them through the door. Meanwhile both Brendan and his dad are drinking even more, and we learn a bit about Brendan’s life — he’s a good soccer player, but other than that not much of a student, and apparently a terrible person. How much of this — the drinking, the bad attitude, the downright mean stuff he admits to — is in reaction to the loss of his mother, and how much was already part of him, isn’t clear.

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Conan: City of the Dead, John C. Hocking’s Living Plague is Alive Inside

Conan: City of the Dead, John C. Hocking’s Living Plague is Alive Inside

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Conan: City of the Dead, by John C. Hocking (2024, Titan Books. 507p)

It’s June of 2024, and Titan Books has just delivered John C. Hocking’s City of the Dead which contains both Conan and the Emerald Lotus (1995, TOR) and its follow-up Conan and the Living Plague — a book lost in the limbo of publishing craziness for ~two decades! Hocking also wrote a bridging novella set in between these two novels called “Black Starlight” (serialized across Conan comics in 2019, and provided assembled as an eBook in 2023 as Conan: Black Starlight: The Heroic Legends Series).

Since Titan Books & Heroic Signatures had the rights to publish and print “Black Starlight” separately, it seems like a lost opportunity to have it absent from  City of the Dead, but fans are just glad to finally see the Living Plague in print, it is tough to whine about that.

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Lord of a Shattered Land and The Doom of Odin: Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden Deliver High-octane, Euro-Mediterranean Adventure

Lord of a Shattered Land and The Doom of Odin: Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden Deliver High-octane, Euro-Mediterranean Adventure

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I just finished two Euro-Mediterranean-inspired fantasy novels, and, by chance, both feature dragons on their beautiful covers. This post showcases both. Scott Oden’s The Doom of Oden wraps up a trilogy (Grimnir Series) and Howard Andrew Jones’ Lord of a Shattered Land begins a five-book series (Hanuvar Chronicles). Each offers anti-Roman myths/legends, Oden’s Grimnir overtly calls out Rome (and then introduces loads of Nordic fantasy) and HAJ’s Hanuvar’s primary antagonist is the Dervan Empire (obviously inspired by the Roman Empire). In the spirit of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, who roamed the Euro-Mediterranean continue of Hyboria, these both continue a tradition with a unique flair. These series are not to be missed!

Both are veteran authors with respect for history and historical fiction (HAJ is known for his Harold Lamb series editing and Oden for his bibliography that includes The White Lion, The Lion of Cairo, Men of Bronze, and Memnon). Here they write sagas about veteran protagonists. Don’t expect coming-of-age stories or epic fantasy, five-character parties either. These provide the classic Sword & Sorcery approach: the protagonists may have sidekicks, but they operate primarily on their own, and they are already equipped with experience/skills/power from page one. So the pace is fast and focused.

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Future Treasures: Vinyl Wonderland by Mark Rigney

Future Treasures: Vinyl Wonderland by Mark Rigney

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Vinyl Wonderland (Castle Bridge Media, June 25, 2024). Cover artist unknown

Mark Rigney will be familiar to most long-time readers at Black Gate. He wrote his first blog post for us (Portals: A Writer Blogs About Process) more than a dozen years ago, and never really stopped, with more than a hundred articles here over the last decade. We published several of his excellent short stories as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction library, starting with “The Trade,” and serialized his complete novel In the Wake of Sister Blue back in 2015.

Mark is perhaps best known to Black Gate readers as the author of the Renner & Quist novels — The Skates, Sleeping Bear, Check-Out Time, and Bonesy — featuring unlikely occult investigators Reverend Renner and retired investigator Dale Quist. Fellow BG blogger William Patrick Maynard called them “Funny, moving, enlightening, entertaining – Mark Rigney’s Renner & Quist series is in a class of its own. The recommendations come no stronger.”

His latest novel Vinyl Wonderland, on sale in three weeks from Castle Bridge Media, has all the markings of a breakout book. It’s a terrifically twisty mystery with a fantastical bent, and easily the best novel I’ve read so far this year.

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A Paean to the Outsider: A Review of Neither Beg Nor Yield, edited by Jason M. Waltz

A Paean to the Outsider: A Review of Neither Beg Nor Yield, edited by Jason M. Waltz

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Neither Beg Nor Yield (Rogue Blades Entertainment, April 2024)

I can’t say if Jason M. Waltz and his Rogue Blades Entertainment’s swansong is the largest collection of Sword & Sorcery ever published, but it’s damn close.

It’s also the most metal. From this over-the-top, blood-splash cover featuring an axe headed toward the reader’s face to the powerful black & white line art that runs throughout. there’s a Savage Sword of Conan-meets-Heavy Metal vibe to the layout that tells you exactly the feel of the prose within.

With all respect to my friend Dave Ritzlin at DMR Books (and the most metal *publisher* of S&S), who literally launched his press by bringing S&S-loving metalhead musicians together to create anthologies of tales, I don’t mean erudite, I can tell you the difference between symphonic metal, thrash metal, Viking metal, dark metal, and the White Christ help us, Troll Metal (which I just learned a few months ago is actually a thing): I mean working out with your buddies in your dad’s garage gym with the Judas Priest-cranked between rewatches on VHS of Conan (the Barbarian, we don’t talk about the sequel), and Beastmaster, or cackling to yourself while working on your killer dungeon to spring on your friends at Friday night’s game with Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden wailing metal.

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What Makes a Project a “Passion Project”?

What Makes a Project a “Passion Project”?

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For me, a passion project is something that could not be sold in a traditional sense to the mainstream market, but you want — need — to create it anyway. Dear Penpal, Belgium 1980 is the kind of project that I could not sell to a traditional publication house despite it being a middle grade-appropriate cozy ghost story. Partly because it is told in 24 physical letters. Partly because while it is middle grade-appropriate, its ephemeral nature and subject matter will appeal to a broad range of ages — which makes it hard for any marketing department to categorize.

It’s not just a ghost story. Nor is it just a story of a Gen-X, latchkey kid trying to survive in a foreign country. Nor is it just a story about the importance of family (especially a military family) and the power of friendship. It is a project that defies conventional age, topic, and multimedia barriers.

For this passion project, the questions I get most often are: “Why physical letters?” and “Why Belgium in 1980?”

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Immaculate Scoundrels: That Tarantino-style Wuxia-80’s Heist-Fantasy Film… with Lizard People… you never knew you needed

Immaculate Scoundrels: That Tarantino-style Wuxia-80’s Heist-Fantasy Film… with Lizard People… you never knew you needed

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Immaculate Scoundrels (Flying Wizard Press, March 5, 2024). Cover by Brian Leblanc

There are lots of jokes associated with being GenX; so many, in fact, that arguably, the best joke is being GenX, period. I mean, multiple discussions of various generations literally provided lists and manage to forget that there actually is a group of people born between 1965 and 1980 at all!

But thanks to the odd 80s nostalgia of Stranger Things, Maverick, and the never-ending exploitat… er… expansion of the Star Wars franchise… the rather odd era of Big Hair, Nuclear Escalation, the birth of the Summer Blockbuster and a lot of pretty bitchin’ music is in vogue. It was an interesting, weird and contradictory time to grow up, with a lot of contradictory media and mixed messages (I’ll never forget seeing a literal “Say No to Drugs” commercial attached to the trailer for Porkys).

The end result was a generation marked for having a certain feral cynicism born of constant reminder from about age 13 that we were the “baby bust” and had zero political or economic influence and likely never would so just “go do you.” And any inclination otherwise probably ended with the dot.com crash, 9/11 etc. all hitting as most of us were 25 – 33, with 1/2 the generation still on a Clintonian hangover and the other half still believing Reaganomics had been a thing.

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Immaculate Scoundrels by John R. Fultz

Immaculate Scoundrels by John R. Fultz

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Every job needed a crew.

from Immaculate Scoundrels

I keep revisiting the earliest days of writing about contemporary swords & sorcery lately. Last month I read and reviewed Rogue Blade’s fantastic new anthology, Neither Beg Nor Yield. Now, I’ve just finished John R. Fultz’s return to bash and thrash of the genre with Immaculate Scoundrels (2024).

Fultz was one of the first authors I encountered back in 2011/2012 when I started blogging about S&S. He was one of the writers I discovered through the electronic pages of Black Gate, along with James Enge, Howard Andrew Jones, and Ted Rypel in particular.

Between his collection The Revelations of Zang (2013 – I read it after winning a free copy in a giveaway here at Blackgate!) and The Books of the Shaper series, Fultz staked out a claim to being one of the best new voices in S&S.  These works were heavily inspired by Clark Ashton Smith’ and Lord Dunsany’s strange and often psychedelic fiction ladled over with more blood and thunder. If you think I’m maligning him, rest assured I am not. Anybody daring enough to take Smith as an inspiration and make it more violent, well, that’s not a bad thing.

Instead of more S&S, Fultz followed up with a Native American-themed sword & planet duology. I reviewed both The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015) and Son of Tall Eagle (2017) here. I might have been a little disappointed he hadn’t written more stories like his previous ones, but these are good books and Fultz isn’t one to sit around spinning the same tales again and again.

In the intervening years, he’s written enough short fiction to fill two collections. The first, World Beyond Worlds (2021) brings together his fantasy stories from the period. The second, Darker Than Weird (2023) contains fourteen straight-up horror stories. Now, with Immaculate Scoundrels, it’s back to swords & sorcery, but not like in any of his previous books.

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