ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR BY WILLARD M. OLIVER

The latest issue of Phantasmagoria magazine #27 includes my review of Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author by Willard M. Oliver. Below is a copy of this review: 

ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS AUTHOR

By Willard M. Oliver

Published by University of North Texas Press, 2025

This is a big book (579 pages), especially for a writer whose life ended after only thirty years. But when you look at the amazing literary legacy left behind by Robert E. Howard this is not too long a book at all. And Willard M. Oliver does full justice to all of Howard’s many stories, heroes, and the different genres in which he wrote, with chapters on Weird Tales, “On Werewolves and Horror Yarns, 1925”, “The Last Celt”, “Solomon Kane and Historical Fantasy, 1928”, “Steve Costigan and the Boxing Yarns, 1929”, “King Kull and the Birth of Swords and Sorcery, 1929”, “‘Lovecraft, One of the Greatest Writers of Our Time’, 1930”, “Bran Mak Morn and the Picts, 1930”, “Oriental Stories, The Magic Carpet, and Historical Fiction, 1931”, “The Cthulhu Mythos, 1931”, “Westerns both Strange and True, 1932”, “‘Hither Came Conan, the Cimmerian’, 1931”, “Steve Harrison and the Detective Yarns, 1933”, “Breckenridge Elkins and the Tall Tale Yarns, 1934”, “El Borak and the Adventure Yarns, 1934”, and so on and so forth.

Not only are we given detailed biographies of Howard’s parents, but also of his close friends and his only girlfriend, Novalyne Price, as well as those writers he became involved with, mainly through frequent correspondence, such as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Willard M. Oliver’s thoroughness is exemplary, and he is never boring, giving the reader a keen understanding of the times in which Howard lived and wrote, his constant problems with editors, the rejections, rewrites and struggles with payments, the latter being especially important to him as Howard was determined from the start to be a full time writer with no other employment to distract him if he could manage it.

I was fascinated with Howard’s continual rejections from many markets, including his main standby, Weird Tales. His determination to make his way as a writer despite numerous setbacks is inspirational, but I sense eventually this all took its toll, especially when he began to rely on the payments he received to help cover medical bills for his mother, which only became greater and more frequent as her terminal illness (tuberculosis) progressed towards its inevitable end.

As I read this book I became increasingly more impressed with what Howard managed to produce over those few active years as a writer and what he had to endure, both mentally and physically. I must admit, though, it’s a book whose final chapters I approached with growing trepidation, knowing how it would end: with him sat alone in his car with a loaded gun. With the failure of his friendship with Novalyne Price, who it is obvious he would have wanted eventually to marry had things gone differently and their relationship hadn’t finally soured, plus the toil of the necessity to look after his mother both physically and financially, all took it out of him, till the end had a dreadful inevitability about it, especially for someone given to periodic bouts of black depression.

Despite the tragic end to Howard’s life, this is an incredible book, utterly readable, insightful and impressively thorough, one of the best biographies of a writer I have ever read, and I recommend it unreservedly for anyone with an interest in the creator of Conan.  

 

Lucilla - a novella reviewed on the Vault of Evil

The first review of my novella Lucilla is available to read online on the website The Vault of Evil. 

"At 90 medium print pages, Lucilla is equivalent to a slimline 'seventies NEL, and moves like one, too."

amazon UK £13.99 in hardcover/£2.99 in kindle

amazon.com $17.85 in hardcover/$3.70 in kindle

 

Book review: Ramsey Campbell, Certainly edited by S. T. Joshi

RAMSEY CAMPBELL, CERTAINLY

ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 2002–2017

Edited by S. T. Joshi

Published by Drugstore Indian Press, an imprint of PS Publishing Ltd 2021

Over the years Ramsey Campbell has written knowledgeably, often humorously, but always with sincerity on a range of subjects from other authors, artists, films, books and, quite honestly, about anything and everything to do with weird literature and beyond.

This book includes those written over a fifteen-year period from 2002 till 2017. I was pleased to see it included the article I commissioned for The Fantastical Art of Jim Pitts which I published in 2017 under my Parallel Universe Publications imprint.

Included in this collection of articles and essays are reminiscences of many important genre people. One is about the American literary agent Kirby McCauley who was partly responsible for creating and organising the first World Fantasy Convention and its awards. Though I never met him, he did provide me with my first American sale (to issue one of Whispers magazine). This had a double benefit for me as, when Whispers won a World Fantasy Award that year my story from issue four was included in the hardcover book produced to commemorate the event, edited by Gahan Wilson, who designed the famous award caricaturing Lovecraft’s head. Other reminiscences include such legendary figures as Fritz Leiber, Nigel Kneale, Manly Wade Wellman and Richard Matheson, as well as contemporary writers too, such as David Case, Gary Fry, Mark Samuels, Thana Niveau, Joe Hill and Joe R. Lansdale amongst quite a few others.

Campbell will always be associated with H. P. Lovecraft and there are five articles about the master himself: ‘Lovecraft Analysed’, ‘Lovecraft in Retrospect, in Retrospect’, ‘Influences’, ‘He Was Providence’, ‘Glimpses in the Dark’, and ‘Lovecraft’s Monster’, all of them brimming with insights. 

As anyone who follows Campbell on Facebook will know, over the years he often catches the attention of any number of cranks, trolls, and other miscreants that prowl the internet, though woe on those who mislead themselves into thinking they can get the better. Nor is he adverse to taking on those he believes have taken a step too far in attacking writers whose work he admires. Here we have two articles, ‘Plagued by Plagiarism parts 1 and 2’, in which he takes to task his old adversary Chris Barker over accusations against M. R. James in a booklet titled ‘Plagiarism and Pederasty: Skeletons in the Jamesian Closet’. Campbell is succinctly impressive in the way in which he playfully yet factually debunks Barker’s ill-informed contentions, which give the impression he fired them off in a scattergun attempt to at least hit the target once. Thanks to Ramsey’s critique he fails completely. Both articles are not only critically observant but a joy to read.

There is, in fact, a great deal to enjoy in this book, which covers an entertainingly wide number of subjects. The good news, of course, is there’s a six year gap since the last article published in this book and now, so there must already be quite a few new ones for another book.

 

 

 

Book Review: The Children of Red Peak by Craig DiLouie

 

THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK

Craig DiLouie

Published by Redhook. 384 pages. 2021

Available in paperback, kindle and audio.

Religious Doomsday cults are always fascinating – though God forbid anyone reading this review should ever be unlucky or foolish enough to join one. Sometimes, however, there isn’t a choice. especially if a child’s parents are drawn into one. That’s sheer bad luck.

As it is with “the children” of Red Peak, whose parents are attracted to what is at first an easy-going, almost paradisical cult intent on returning to a simpler life in a farming community of like-minded individuals, safe from the stresses of modern life.  

They have a hierarchy of elders – Shepherds – under the guidance of a Moses-like figure, the Reverend Peale, whose gentle understanding helps to temper the sometimes more hard-line attitudes of those under him. But it is this same leader who eventually turns the group onto a path that takes them to self-destruction, after he temporarily takes a leave of absence to go on a pilgrimage of personal enlightenment – and sees God.

It is this eye-opening event on the heights of Red Peak, an isolated mountain range some distance from where they live, that changes everything. When their leader returns he informs the group that God has told him the End Times are about to take place and they have been selected to be part of the elite that will ascend to Heaven when this happens. To be saved, though, they must abandon their pastoral paradise and journey with him to Red Peak, where he saw and spoke with God. There they will establish a new community to await their salvation.

All of this is told in retrospect through the four surviving children who decades later meet at the funeral of the only other child to have lived through the terrible final weeks of the cult. Unable to bear her memories of what happened any longer, the suicides, murders and self-mutilations that occurred that day, she has ended her life.  Which brings the suppressed memories of all the traumas the others suffered back to the surface, as well as questions they have struggled to deal with over the years: What really happened that day? Why did the loving, kind-hearted Reverend persuade their parents and everyone else to kill themselves – or to kill those who were unwilling to do it themselves? Was it really God the Reverend saw? If so, what kind of “God” was it?

Worse still, no amount of searching by the authorities had ever been able to find any trace of those who died, as if their bodies really did ascend to heaven, leaving a mystery behind that people still talk about with awe.

Now grown into adults, the survivors have built careers for themselves, though their choices appear in some ways not much more than desperate attempts to block from their minds what they glimpsed, suspected, or worried happened, unable to move from beneath the shadow of that awful event during which they not only lost their parents but most of their friends too. It is the violence of what took place that haunts them, as some of the parents murdered their own children to “save” them, and, during the days before the apocalypse, cult members tried to exculpate whatever sins they thought they had committed through acts of self-mutilation. One mother, who had become convinced she was too fond of talking, cut out her tongue, while another, because she was vain about her looks, savaged her own face. The compulsion to carry out bloody acts against themselves, is yet another trauma with which the survivors have had to deal.    

Their reunion at the funeral acts as a catalyst towards what happens next – because they know that whatever drew their parents to Red Peak is still there, if not in reality at least in their minds. Is it God? Does the mountain really hold a path towards heaven? Is there still time in which to seek their own redemption for everything that happened? Or to find out what really took place there – and why?

This is a fascinating tale, told from the viewpoints of the four survivors who decide their only hope to move on with their lives is to return to Red Peak to try and find answers to their questions. It is a decision that will awaken more than just memories, though, and their determination to clear up the horrors of the past, when their childhoods came to a hideous end, builds towards a chilling climax of what is a brilliantly visualised and illuminating tale.