With due deference to Scott Smith, David C. Smith is far and away the best Smith to happen to genre fiction since Clark Ashton. His heroic fantasy of the late Seventies and early Eighties was distinguished by a bleak clarity of vision about human beings and the openings our nature creates for pre-human or trans-human Evil. The resulting stories, novellas, and novels were operatic without Bayreuthian kitsch, informed by the Athenian tragedians, the Jacobean revengers, and Smith’s passion for the eternal severities of the most case-hardened pulp fiction.

With his friend sometime sword-and-sorcery writer Joe Bonadonna and Jake Jaquet, the former editor of Dragon magazine, David has symposed up a storm about the state of the subgenre we all spend so much time worrying about, and the resulting conversation, with the trio seated at a table stacked with pulps and paperbacks, is available in six parts at YouTube:

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Roderick T. Long, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University and a self-described Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian, left-libertarian market anarchist, has penned a thoughtful essay on Howard’s Pictish tales. Long sees Howard’s racism and racialism as part of a complex cultural, historical, and artistic dynamic, one potent enough to transcend garden variety prejudice and attain a genuine artistry reminiscent of Kipling. A follow-up post, meanwhile, meditated on Howard and feminism.

There is much within these two posts for Howardists to debate, but agree or disagree they are fine examples of the sort of serious critical writing Howard deserves, writing originating from well outside the incestuous Howardian tribe. Professor Long does Howard’s shade the favor of taking him seriously, judging and criticizing his stories as literature and not mere pulp hackwork, and that is very nice to see.

Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odour of coming winter.

Algernon Blackwood, “The Wendigo”

The small screen can deliver big scares; Eric Kripke has been proving that more often than not for two full seasons and a strike-shortened third with Supernatural. That show, in which two brothers drive the unluckiest backroads of the American night while being driven by a family mission that asks too much of them, crashes through The CW’s sugar-and-spice-and-spite like a classic rock power chord. And at least half the episodes of Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror were good unclean fun; sixty minutes without commercials can amount to the functional equivalent of a novelette, if not a novella. When Showtime wasn’t interested in a third season, the MOH auteurist anthology approach lived to affright another day as Fear Itself, eight episodes of which aired this summer before NBC switched to scaring us with flexi-dwarf gymnasts instead. As soon as the opening credits of “Skin and Bones,” the episode shown on the night of Thursday, July 31, revealed that the director du semaine was Larry Fessenden, I began hoping for a particular monster with which Fessenden has worked almost as often as did Scorsese with De Niro. . .the rottenest tooth in a knowing primordial grin, the blackness at the core of the rampaging blizzard.

At the start of “Skin and Bones” (written by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan. who also scripted one of my favorite Masters of Horror episodes, the John Carpenter-directed “Cigarette Burns”), the ranch-owning but city-dwelling Grady Edlund has been missing for 10 wintry days. He returns as the only surviving member of a party that unwisely elected to ride the high country in the teeth of a storm, and even while indoors, bed-ridden and being cared for by his wife, sons, and brother, reeks of . . .externality, of having come back wrong. If Famine rather redundantly put itself on a starvation diet, the result might look like Grady, who is played by Doug Jones, an actor-turned-human-canvas worthy of the best efforts of a Bernie Wrightson or Gahan Wilson, perhaps even a Goya or Bosch; as Larry Fessenden proudly notes of his “Skin and Bones” work “He is the special effect.”

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Came across a couple of wickedly funny satires on YouTube, which both use The Lord of the Rings to skewer their targets, filmmakers Michael Moore and George Lucas respectively (and oh so effectively). I give you:

Fellowship 9/11: The beloved, saintly, indefatigable, scrupulously honest redresser of America’s wrongs visits Middle-earth and quickly discovers a sinister plot by corrupt elven, dwarven, and human bureaucrats, zealots, and pampered elites to demonize the poor, peaceful, third-world peoples of Mordor and steal their oil. This film not only inoculates the viewer from ever taking the Man from Flint seriously again, it also (perhaps unintentionally) tars and feathers the many film and book critics who used the appearance of Jackson’s (awful) trilogy to portray Tolkien as a closet cultural supremacist hiding behind a thinly veiled allegory of metrosexual good guys and dreadlocked, Ebonics-braying monsters.

Lord of the Rings by George Lucas: What if the sage of Skywalker Ranch had been the one who tackled the Rings trilogy on the big screen? Using hilariously on-point parodies of actual Star Wars prequel DVD supplement footage, along with animation that eerily captures the real life quirks and ticks of the people involved, the makers of this little gem demonstrate how vacuous and absurd Lucas’ insufferably pompous latter-day pronouncements have been in the face of his abysmal products.

Many such attempts at satire quickly lose steam and degenerate into bad Saturday Night Live sketches, but these two manage to maintain their momentum and become classics.

In the article I recently posted surveying Sword-and-Sorcery since the Eighties, it was a particular pleasure to push the ornery-in-the-best-sense, refusing-to-consent-to-consensual-reality work of Matthew Stover as hard as I could. Stover’s latest novel will be throwing elbows on bookstore shelves this fall, and over at his blog he’s been musing about how, while the women who enjoy the adventures of Hari Kaine (an assassin as lethally talented at kingdom-decapitating as Gemmell’s Waylander) really, really enjoy them, a certain post-graduate studies quality makes demands that will at least partially exclude some readers:

The real problem with gathering feminine readership for the Acts of Caine, it seems to me, is that [Heroes Die, Stover’s first Caine novel] depends on an SFF-savvy reader — for it to have full effect, the reader should already be well-versed to the point of exhaustion with the various tropes that the story is twisting into less-familiar shapes. Which seems to be more of a guy thing, overall.

Make sure the woman you lend the book to has already read Conan and Bran Mak Morn, Elric and Hawkmoon and Fafhrd & Gray Mouser and the like, and I’m pretty sure she’ll like Caine.

This is a problem with male readership as well. As one editor at Del Rey told me:

“What stops Caine from being more successful is that he’s only accessible to people who are already hardcore fans. Write something ‘entry-level’ — not necessarily Harry Potter, but even more grown-up entry-level like most of Jonathan Carroll or Neil Gaiman, something where someone who knows nothing about SF and fantasy can enjoy it — and you’re golden.”

Unfortunately for me and my career, I’ve never been able to pull something like that together, outside of Star Wars.

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Speaking of Ernest Hemingway, whom Steve mentions in his last post, friend of The Cimmerian John J. Miller has a brand new piece on the Master and his fishing habits in The Wall-Street Journal. Miller’s interest is more than professional — he grew up in Michigan and recently vacationed “Up North” in Seney, where the Hemingway stories discussed take place.

Mark is tied up with ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas at the moment, and so won’t be able to answer Gary until early next week. Until then, Arnie Fenner, the man whose introduction started this latest flurry of posts, writes in to clairfy a few things. Here’s Arnie:

Yee-haw, boys! Get a rope! We’ll teach that Fenner fella a…Godfrey Daniels! You guys are talking about me! 🙂

Just to be clear, I don’t think I did a hatchet job on REH, definitely didn’t deify Frazetta, and certainly didn’t give de Camp a pass, either, (shoot, Mark’s posting is longer than the intro) so I’m guessing that questioning some of the suppositions about Howard that have appeared in the last decade or so is what has raised everyone’s Irish. We all read the same stuff and can come to different conclusions, particularly when evidence is anecdotal or offered 70 years after the fact. In other words, its a big world and the last time I looked there was room in it for more than one opinion.

No, I don’t think Howard was a “great” writer, but (as I stated) certainly believe he was an exceptional storyteller. That’s not a dismissal or criticism or damning with faint praise at all — at least, it wasn’t intended as such. That he was able to overcome his circumstances and limitations and create work that people are still passionate about decades after his death…says loads. The difficulties a writer — or artist — surmount in order to create a lasting work makes their accomplishment all the more remarkable. But I also pointed out that Howard benefited from — became better at his craft with the guidance of — Farnsworth Wright’s editing. A matter of opinion, I’m sure.

Steve asked: who do I think are great writers? Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, to name a few. Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, George MacDonald Fraser, and Robert E. Howard (among others) are great storytellers. There’s more than enough room on my bookshelf for both.

I do agree that Rusty Burke would have written a better intro.

If Mark wants to talk about our differences of opinion sometime over beers, I’d be glad to. He’ll have to buy, of course: after all, I know Frazetta. 🙂

As I said awhile back, Leo, I greatly enjoy The Cimmerian. If you’d like a copy of the Conan book, I’ll ask Tim Underwood to send you one. Despite the introduction, it’s actually pretty nice.

Yesterday I was so Pearl Harbored by Mark’s disclosure of the contents of Fenner’s foreword to the new Underwood volume that the blackly comic aspects of the situation were lost on me. For example, the blurbage for the book at the Bud Plant site straight-facedly informs us that Fenner “always has a new take on whatever iconic subject he approaches.” Sure he does, if by “new take” one means wheezy, so-retro-as-to-be-paleo underestimating and overlooking.

Even funnier is the fact that this foreword, so determinedly, effortfully ill-informed, is one bookend to the selected Conan stories, the other being H. P. Lovecraft’s “In Memoriam: Robert E. Howard,” only one of the very best (and least aged) appreciations of Howard’s legacy ever written. As Felix Leiter observes in Diamonds Are Forever, “nothing propinks like propinquity,” and the propinquity in this case does Fenner no favors. Perhaps someone will be moved to argue that it speaks well of the Underwood team that they were open-minded enough to house two such contrasting assessments of REH under the same roof; me, I see editorial incoherence bordering on cognitive dissonance. Are Howard’s Conan stories mere glorified captions for the Frazetta paintings, or are they what Lovecraft suggests they are? Let’s listen: “No author — even in the humblest fields — can truly excel unless he takes his work very seriously; and Mr. Howard did just that, even in cases where he consciously thought he did not.” Yep, to borrow another phrase from “In Memoriam,” it really is a “sorry piece of cosmic irony” that Lovecraft’s X-ray vision should now have to cohabit with Fenner’s myopia.

In the come-on that Underwood Books apparently supplied to Amazon and other vendors, both the Hyborian Age and Middle-earth are mangled, as “the Hyborean Age” and “Middle Earth” respectively. Furthermore, the Hyborian Age is wrongly labeled “an alternate Earth that preceded Tolkien’s Middle Earth.” Big deal, some might mutter; an “e” instead of an “i,” a missing hyphen — so what? Well, I long ago concluded, whether within REHupa or online, that references to writers named “Tolkein” or “Hemmingway” were guarantees that whatever opinions followed could safely be ignored, and my suspicion is that with Underwood Books or anyone else, those who don’t sweat the small stuff don’t get the large stuff.

I see from the Underwood website that they publish the Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1980-82 (Volume 6), edited and introduced by none other than Don Herron. Don is rumored to know a little about Robert E. Howard; would it have been so very difficult to solicit his opinion on the Fenner foreword before going to print with it? The website also offers something that I can barely imagine a Herronian reaction to, or that of anyone who cherishes genre classics: War of the Worlds: A Modern Version of the Classic Novel by H. G. Wells. Apparently one Robert Reginald has pried Wells’ classic loose from its 1898 context, vandalism the website justifies as follows: “Yet, despite the book’s stature and the power of its story, its antiquated language and outmoded science have limited its interest for modern readers. This new adaptation remedies that, preserving the authority of Wells’ narrative while modernizing the language.”

Where to begin? “Outmoded science” — has scientific accuracy been what lures readers to the novel since the Twenties at the latest? “Antiquated language” — Dracula came out in 1897; should we modernize Stoker’s language too? Or what about Heart of Darkness from 1899? Conrad was not only an old-timer but a Pole writing in English; we’d better render him accessible to 21st century subliterates right away. No time like the present, or should that be no time but the present? I don’t idly mention Heart of Darkness here, the Conrad and Wells texts are not-so-secret sharers, very much of their turn-of-the-century moment in the way they shift uneasily beneath the White Man’s Burden. But what does that matter when we can have Robert Reginald pre-chewing the vocabulary and retrofitting the references for us? All the while “preserving the authority of Wells’ narrative,” of course, in much the same way as “The Treasure of Tranicos” preserves the authority of Howard’s “The Black Stranger.”

“No one” will watch a black-and-white film these days; better colorize ’em all. “No one” will read “antiquated” prose either; maybe Underwood Books or some other cultural benefactor can step in to modernize the creaky language of “The Shadow Kingdom” round about 2035 or so, or the very stories strung up from — er, collected in — Bitter Tree in the mid-2040s. Can’t wait.

Guest blogger Gary Romeo writes in to respond to some of the criticisms TC blogger [redacted] leveled at both Gary and L. Sprague de Camp in Mark’s previous post. Here’s Gary:

“By the 1920s, Leon Trotsky had been labeled by Stalin as an enemy of the Soviet State. He had all memory of Leon eliminated after Trotsky’s exile, turning Leon into what has subsequently been called ‘the annihilated shadow’.”

The Secret Life of Leon Trotsky — Robert Elias

“Trotsky ended up being almost like Stalin’s imaginary friend. You know, that imaginary friend some of us had as kids, the one you could blame stuff on.”

The Sheila Variations — Sheila O’Malley

The editors at Wandering Star had sought to eliminate de Camp. In their various book introductions the editors would refer to “several critics,” “schools of thought,” and “some observers.” De Camp’s name was being systemically eliminated from any Robert E. Howard discussion. Even when appropriating de Camp’s idea that Howard’s youthful stay in that Texas area known as Dark Valley became the source for Cimmeria, they refused to mention his name. Patrice Louinet later confessed: “there is absolutely no denying de Camp made the Cimmeria/Dark Valley connection before me. Not acknowledging this fact — the anteriority of the link, not the so-called borrowing — was an editorial decision on my part. De Camp […] was not gonna be in this book, period.”

But de Camp did not disappear so easily. [redacted] has resurrected him to be the person of blame for every criticism of Robert E. Howard.

The latest critic to have been tainted by the Sprague Virus, according to Mark, is Arnold Fenner. I feel compelled to do another “Nuh Uh!” to Mark’s “Waaah. Waaah.”

First off, Mark tells us the book is a mere eight stories for $100. The cost for the two Wandering Star Conan volumes was over $400, and they don’t comprise a complete set either. Mark was apparently unaware that there is a mass market hardcover available from Amazon for a mere $16.50.

Like Mark, I am bewildered by the tack that Fenner chose to take. It is obvious that Howard fans today want all praise and glory, and have no stomach for insights that are not wholly complimentary. Why Fenner wrote what he did will have to explained by Fenner, but they are not the same observations made by de Camp. Mark implies that Fenner got his information from reading The Miscast Barbarian. Lets look at it.

One issue Fenner seems to have a beef with is Howard fans, like Sprague de Camp, who try to emphasize Howard’s toughness. De Camp says in The Miscast Barbarian that “by the time Robert entered the Cross Plains High School, Howard was a large, powerful youth. When fully grown, he was 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighed around 200 pounds, most of it muscle.” Fenner writes “photographs of Robert show him as an unscarred, well-fed, and not terribly muscular young man.” If Fenner read The Miscast Barbarian he certainly disagrees with de Camp.

Fenner brings up Howard’s mention of enemies. This most likely comes from Fenner remembering the scene where Novalyne Price spots Robert’s gun while they are driving in his car as much as anything de Camp wrote.

Mark is on firmer ground when quoting Fenner about the suicide and Howard’s attachment to his mother. But there are other sources than de Camp for all this. There is Novalyne’s book and movie, as mentioned before. And de Camp was not the only one writing of Howard’s attachment to his mother and focusing on the suicide in the early 60s and 70s. Glenn Lord wrote in an introduction to the Bear Creek stories that “An excessive devotion to his mother proved to be his Achilles’ heel.” And every issue of The Howard Collector ended with the Howard death verse, “All fled, all done…”

By the end of Mark’s critique even he realizes Fenner is disagreeing with de Camp on major issues. “Howard’s use of poetical style is well documented by nearly everyone who’s written critically of the man in the past two decades (even de Camp noted it…),” says Mark in response to another Fenner criticism.

The same is true for most critics of Robert Howard. They disagree with de Camp. Let’s look at three commonly quoted critics. Sam Lundwall, Franz Rottensteiner, and Stephen King.

Lundwall’s book Science Fiction: What it’s All About quotes de Camp’s defense of Sword-and-Sorcery and his stress on the genre’s entertainment value. Lundwall states:

After having delivered this unabashed praise to escapism, de Camp goes on to note the renewed interest in Heroic Fantasy and in this respect he is undoubtedly right. Old classics are reissued by the score together with new stories of blood, thunder and well-sharpened swords. The spectrum goes from the gentle novels of James Branch Cabell to the sadistic tales of Robert E. Howard… however, looking at the state of the world — the real world — today. I can well believe there are some deeper reasons too. There was a similar interest in heroes and mighty deeds in Hitler’s Germany.

Lundwall is clearly stating that his opinion is different, by a large degree, than de Camp’s. De Camp’s view is that it is all good escapism. Lundwall is making an argument that the violent nature is not just escapism. Lundwall is saying REH is dangerous fascist-inducing stuff. So saying that this critic is influenced by de Camp is clearly wrong.

Later, Lundwall again quotes de Camp to disagree. Lundwall quotes de Camp, “[S&S provides] the reader with a heroic model with whom he for a moment can identify himself…” Lundwall’s rebuttal, “As far as entertainment goes, I can’t see anything wrong with this. Though I still dislike the over-emphasis on violence.”

So even though Lundwall later mentions the suicide, he is not doing it as a mindless drone hypnotized by de Campian propaganda. He is disagreeing with de Camp on fundamental points.

Franz Rottensteiner is another case. His The Fantasy Book quotes another de Camp defense of Sword-and-Sorcery. Rottensteiner follows the de Camp quote with a dismissive, “Apologists of this kind of entertainment trace its development back through Eric Rucker Eddison and Lord Dunsany to William Morris…. But in fact it is not even the debilitated offspring of these sagas, but rather a misbegotten child of our own technological civilization, offering a quick escape from an oppressive world.” Rottensteiner, like Lundwall, is disagreeing with de Camp to a large degree. De Camp never talked about fascist underpinnings or escaping from an “oppressive world,” just a mundane one. These guys have their own axes to grind, that are clearly different from de Camp’s views.

Stephen King is no de Campian-influenced fan of the genre either. King in Danse Macabre says “This kind of fiction, commonly called ‘sword & sorcery’ by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a tacky feel….” He then goes on, “The only writer who really got away with this sort of stuff was Robert E. Howard….” Then, “Howard overcame the limitations of his puerile material by the force and fury of his writing…” Then comes the truncated Del Rey quote: “Stories such as “The People of the Black Circle” glow with the fierce and eldritch light of his frenzied intensity. At his best, Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy, and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out.” But King follows that with, “Yet his other work was either unremarkable or just abysmal….”

By pointing out that de Camp is not always to blame for a critic’s negative appraisal of Howard (among other things) I have been labeled by the de Camp bashers as a decampista. It is as fine a label as any, but please don’t forget that I (and Steve Allsup) are REH fans first and foremost. I am not a fanatical de Camp fan. I like him well enough and enjoy his work but, hell, remember I forgot his birthday!

Mark makes a final plea that publishers should only hire admiring critics like Rusty Burke, himself, or others cut from the same cloth to write introductions to Robert E. Howard material. In other words, a stifling of thought, sameness, is preferred over anything that might veer from the current orthodoxy. Mark ends by basically issuing a boycott of the product. Paradox holds the Conan/Robert E. Howard franchise these days and would most likely agree on a boycott of these public-domain publications. But they should be wary of a fandom that calls for sameness and rigidity in all things related to Robert E. Howard.

Mark’s post about the new Batman film from a Howardist’s perspective was one of the better contributions to the long Dark Knight of the soul that’s fallen on the blogosphere, arguably a wee bit more plausible than the following Andrew Klavan assertion in The Wall Street Journal: “There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand.” Artist Drew Friedman begs to differ. And Cheney, the No. 2 who tries harder? Is he maybe Harvey Dent? Or remember the online debates when 300 was released? Was Bush Leonidas, or was he Xerxes? And who was Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith? Back when Viggo Mortensen was capturing so many imaginations in 2002 and 2003, a REHupan proudly reprinted a letter he’d sent to his local newspaper that anointed Bush the American Aragorn, the hero-king who was defending the West against the Evil gathering in the East.

Was there ever a time when popular culture did not lend itself to this sort of game, one that the left-handed and the right-handed both line up to play? The concept of a Manchurian candidate long ago escaped the control of Richard Condon or John Frankenheimer. High Noon, Rio Bravo, and High Plains Drifter have been arguing among themselves for decades (in his Playboy interview John Wayne labeled High Noon “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my life”. Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America is a book I dote on (and may well have quoted from more than from Howard’s own works during my REHupa years), and yet once in a great while a mulish part of me wonders, can every single Western between 1962 and 1976 really have been about Vietnam?

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