"The Screaming Skull" (1908) by Francis Marion Crawford, the second story in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, takes us into the mind of disturbed retired sailor as the skull of a possibly murdered friend haunts his guilty conscience. Told in the first person in what the editors …
Continue reading Weird #2 The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford (1908)
In the spreading of the weird fiction virus, "which book was first sick?" (Miéville, "Afterweird," 1116). Alfred Kubin's novel Die andere Seite (The Other Side) can be thought of as 'Patient Zero,' or at least the one Ann and Jeff VanderMeer thought acceptable to identify for the purposes of their anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange …
Continue reading Weird #1 The Other Side (excerpt) by Alfred Kubin (1908)
I've never read alchemy treated in this way before. The Alchemists' Council was so engaging, I wrote a review for The Bull Calf.
Here the tradition of heroic fantasy is pure. There's no steampunk, cyberpunk, slipstream, or New Weird; historical fantasy, urban fantasy, and magic realism are likewise nowhere to be seen. This is the fantasy of the hippies and the anti-Vietnam protesters.
Picture a cold, damp hut, surrounded by mischievous crows, on the banks of a swollen river, against the backdrop of a smoky, nineteenth-century city awash in crime lifted straight out of a penny dreadful. Add this to the miserable squalor: that the resident of said hut, one Robin Sparrows, serves as office clerk to a predatory law firm whose motto, Lupi pastores erunt, …
Continue reading The Miseries of Mister Sparrows by Matthew A.J. Timmins
At the beginning of another MythCon, this one in Colorado Springs--where I am now, giving a presentation--it is fitting to review the book of the first MythConer with whom I ever struck up a conversation. This is one of the only cases where I knew the author before I knew he was an author. I found him waiting …
Does magic exist in the contemporary world? Charles de Lint's mythic fiction brings supernatural beings into the context of the everyday and Forests of the Heart explores the contact between ordinary people and what he calls Mystery. Bettina and Adelita are sisters, both partly Mexican, partly Indios, and raised by their grandmother to see la époco del …
John Crowley's Aegypt Quartet asks the question, "What if there was more than one history of the world?"; David Walton's Quintessence, on the other hand, actually explores one of these alternate histories. It is set in a world that follows the rules of known science in the sixteenth century--which means the world is flat and …
If you arrived at a crossroads, would you take the right or the left fork? We are faced every day of our lives with choosing a path. Once our decision takes us onward, we cannot return. The past that once was--and the path we might have chosen instead--grows more and more distant with each 'Y' …
Milan during the time of Bishop Ambrose and Emperor Theodosius in 394 AD was the new centre of the Roman Empire, a cosmopolitan city home to Christian and pagan alike--the perfect setting for demon hunt. A young girl and an elderly priest are found dead in their beds under similar circumstances, after a night of …
Continue reading Demon Hunter Severian: Lady of the Night Gates by Giovanni Anastasi
Matthew Rettino 