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Post by deuce on Feb 6, 2017 19:21:32 GMT -5
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Post by thedarkman on Feb 14, 2017 22:49:42 GMT -5
Found this quite by accident recently, turns out to be a damn good read. The Beowulf legend as told by a dwarf in his twilight years, and he claims to be a part of the legend and friend to the Geatish warrior who will come to be known as Beowulf. .  |
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Post by deuce on Feb 20, 2017 17:06:22 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Feb 22, 2017 21:38:40 GMT -5
A good blog post on British thriller author, PM Hubbard. His brand of Gothic Horror has been compared to that of MR James and Arthur Machen. mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=30963 |
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Post by emerald on Feb 23, 2017 12:23:25 GMT -5
A good blog post on British thriller author, PM Hubbard. His brand of Gothic Horror has been compared to that of MR James and Arthur Machen. mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=30963Hey Deuce, nice catch there. I read the review with interest, as I love the eerie, macabre fiction Hubbard's work was being compared to, but the comments really drove home how badly I need to read this guy. In the comments a request is made for recommendations for other authors who have achieved the same creepy, otherworldly effects, and many are offered. I was familiar with every one of them, yet I had never even heard of PM Hubbard, much less read his work. So I ordered some books. Thanks. |
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Post by almuric on Feb 23, 2017 12:32:17 GMT -5
Never heard of this Hubbard. I suppose I'll add him to the pile.
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Post by andys on Mar 2, 2017 13:26:29 GMT -5
I've been slowly grinding away at Dean Koontz's Watchers. It's the only book by Koontz that I've tried and I think it will likely be the only one when I finish it because I'm not seeing what's so special about it. It has a cool concept - two creatures escape from a lab, one good and one evil, both psychically linked - but the plotting is indifferent and the characters just don't grab me very much. At one point in the book, Koontz finally does the big background dump in which one character explains to another what's really going on, and then around 100 pages later he basically repeats the same scene with the other set of characters. Funnily enough, the most intriguing character in the book is the one that's deliberately kept off-stage the most: The Outsider. One thing that Koontz really, really gets is how to create a monster that you can pity without ever diminishing its threat potential. This thing is a complete bastard, it hates and feels compelled to kill literally everything, yet it hates itself most of all because it's aware of its uniqueness and ugliness and that it will never have a place in the world. There are a couple of sections involving the Outsider that almost got me tearing up, but never in a way that I forgot how dangerous it is. This is striking to me because modern artists so frequently fail at this, creating "monsters" that are really just misunderstood and would be perfectly friendly if it wasn't for all the mean ol' good-looking normal people misjudging it. It's probably how we arrived at vampires being sparkly. And I'll just go ahead and say it: Golden retrievers are the most boring dog breed out there. Yeah, a lot of them are perfectly nice dogs (we used to have one in the 80s, although it was actually the crankiest dog we've ever had), but they're just bland and people who are into them tend to be bland in my experience  |
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Post by almuric on Mar 8, 2017 22:41:17 GMT -5
Stealer of Flesh, by William King. This is the first (free) volume in King's Kormak Saga. Kormak might best be described as Conan the Crusader. He's a Guardian, a knight who roams the Kingdoms of the Sun, battling the forces of the Shadow. Which makes it sound High Fantasy, but it's definitely S&S, despite the presence of orcs and dwarves. Kormak is a highlander from Aquilea, the son of a blacksmith who "learned to climb before he could walk". His name is a variant of one of REH's favorite character names there's an echo of Solomon Kane as well. And it's nice and short, too. The story consists of four linked novellas, which is pleasingly old school for those of us who remember those old S&S novels of the '60s and '70s.
My only real criticism is that there's a few places where the prose could have been cleaned up a bit. That's a common problem with self-published works, I've found.
I will certainly be checking out the next one in this series.
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Post by thedarkman on Mar 9, 2017 7:05:35 GMT -5
I have been reading some of the Fargo western/historical series lately. I feel they lean more towards historical adventure due to the fact they occur in the 1914-1918 timeframe and are often set outside the traditional western setting; Alaska, Pacific Northwest, Central America, Argentina, ect. Great historical details mix with bone-crunching and bloody action. The books are generally under 200 pages and move like a .38 hollow point. Fargo is like a turn of the century Conan: a professional fighting man who kills for money, and travels far and wide in search of adventure. Highly recommended!
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Post by emerald on Mar 9, 2017 12:36:19 GMT -5
I have been reading some of the Fargo western/historical series lately. I feel they lean more towards historical adventure due to the fact they occur in the 1914-1918 timeframe and are often set outside the traditional western setting; Alaska, Pacific Northwest, Central America, Argentina, ect. Great historical details mix with bone-crunching and bloody action. The books are generally under 200 pages and move like a .38 hollow point. Fargo is like a turn of the century Conan: a professional fighting man who kills for money, and travels far and wide in search of adventure. Highly recommended! The Fargo series is great stuff, and it's finally available as e-books, which makes it one helluva lot easier to read than it was a year or so ago. None of the old paperbacks were common, and the last four or five books had only a single printing back in the 1970's and were pretty tough to find. The Fargo books written by Fargo's creator, Ben Haas, are some of the best 'men's action-adventure fiction' ever. But they're so smoothly written and direct that you can breeze through them fast enough to miss out on the well set-up conflicts, cool atmosphere, and solid, yet never overbearing, historical detail. Here's the full list in order of their original publication... Fargo Panama Gold Alaska Steel Massacre River The Wildcatters Apache Raiders Wolf’s Head Valley of Skulls The Black Bulls The Sharpshooters Phantom Gunman Killing Spree Shotgun Man Bandolero Sierra Silver (by an unknown author) Dynamite Fever (by an unknown author) Gringo Guns (by an unknown author) Hell On Wheels The Border Jumpers Death Valley Gold Killer’s Moon Fargo & the Texas Rangers Dakota Badlands Haas wrote all but those three in the middle, and it seems his son had had hand in some of the last ones, but those read enough like Haas that I'm banking Dad gave them an editorial once-over. Nobody, not even James Reasoner, knows who wrote Sierra Silver, Dynamite Fever and Gringo Guns. These three Fargos are simply not in the same league as those by Haas and should only be read by those who know what they're getting into. (In short: middling adventure pulp that gets the Fargo character so wrong it's kind of stunning.) The Fargo series once shared shelf space with the rest of the 1970's era men's action adventure heroes-- the Executioner, the Destroyer, the Death Merchant, the Butcher, the Specialist, etc. But for my money none of them, except maybe Haas own Sundance, can hold a candle to Fargo. |
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Post by johnnypt on Mar 9, 2017 14:03:56 GMT -5
Currently reading The Book of Lost Tales 1. It's interesting to see Tolkien's early ideas for Middle-Earth. Also, my Middle-Earth collection is more or less complete, minus a couple of things I'm not hugely interested in and whatever Christopher Tolkien pulls out of his ass in the future:  It is interesting to think that is the only place (in Book 2) he ever wrote a full version of the Fall of Gondolin, which was the first "Lost Tale" he wrote back during the war and read it in public in 1920...then figured he'd get around to going back to it at some point. As I mentioned in the Tolkien thread, I don't know if Christopher could even do a fix-up book like Children of Hurin or Beren & Luthien because his dad just didn't do all that much with the story apart fleshing out the part when Tuor gets to the city.
I also finished reading History of the Hobbit (thank you Kindle for saving me about $100!), and it was just another separate story when he started out, then bit by bit he added in a few things from his "mythology" and by the time we get to the sequel...well, we get something that needed 12 books to go back and talk about.
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Post by Von K on Mar 9, 2017 15:07:14 GMT -5
I have been reading some of the Fargo western/historical series lately. I feel they lean more towards historical adventure due to the fact they occur in the 1914-1918 timeframe and are often set outside the traditional western setting; Alaska, Pacific Northwest, Central America, Argentina, ect. Great historical details mix with bone-crunching and bloody action. The books are generally under 200 pages and move like a .38 hollow point. Fargo is like a turn of the century Conan: a professional fighting man who kills for money, and travels far and wide in search of adventure. Highly recommended! The Fargo series is great stuff, and it's finally available as e-books, which makes it one helluva lot easier to read than it was a year or so ago. None of the old paperbacks were common, and the last four or five books had only a single printing back in the 1970's and were pretty tough to find. The Fargo books written by Fargo's creator, Ben Haas, are some of the best 'men's action-adventure fiction' ever. But they're so smoothly written and direct that you can breeze through them fast enough to miss out on the well set-up conflicts, cool atmosphere, and solid, yet never overbearing, historical detail. A while back I read a great article by Howard Andrew Jones about Ben Haas here: www.howardandrewjones.com/uncategorized/celebrating-the-work-of-ben-haasAt the end of his article Howard posted a link to James Reasoner's blog where James has posted a letter Ben Haas wrote to his son Joel explaining 'How to Write a Pulp Western.' jamesreasoner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-to-write-pulp-western-ben-haas.htmlCool advice for those interested to learn directly from Ben Haas himself. Joel has also posted some additional observations on James' blog. My thanks to John H, Howard, James and Joel! |
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Post by almuric on Mar 9, 2017 17:48:07 GMT -5
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Post by thedarkman on Mar 9, 2017 20:42:12 GMT -5
The Fargo series is great stuff,
I have downloaded a bunch, that's why I'm on a bit of a spree! I also own 7-8 paperback copies as well. I have yet to read Sierra Silver because it's attributed to the house name John Hardin; not sure if it would be good! If you collect the paperback versions, I have a spare copy of Valley of the Skulls...
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Post by deuce on Mar 11, 2017 17:44:15 GMT -5
A good blog post on British thriller author, PM Hubbard. His brand of Gothic Horror has been compared to that of MR James and Arthur Machen. mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=30963Hey Deuce, nice catch there. I read the review with interest, as I love the eerie, macabre fiction Hubbard's work was being compared to, but the comments really drove home how badly I need to read this guy. In the comments a request is made for recommendations for other authors who have achieved the same creepy, otherworldly effects, and many are offered. I was familiar with every one of them, yet I had never even heard of PM Hubbard, much less read his work. So I ordered some books. Thanks. I'm glad I could point y'all to something worthwhile. BTW, this is what happens when a person types "[author name]" and "a. merritt" into Google and heads down the rabbit hole. You often discover interesting things.  |
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