This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on February 17, 2023.

Conan – Blood of the Serpent

By S. M. Stirling – Titan Books – December 13, 2022

Review by Robin Marx

Conan – Blood of the Serpent marks the long-awaited return of the fantasy genre’s most famous barbarian hero to long-form prose. First introduced to the world by Robert E. Howard in a 1932 issue of Weird Tales magazine, the Conan stories have had a tumultuous publication history. After Howard’s 1936 suicide, hardback releases by Gnome Press in the 1950s and enduring support in the pages of fanzines like Amra kept the barbarian from disappearing into obscurity. Editors L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter further popularized Conan in the 1960s with a series of paperback novels that blended Howard’s original material, “posthumous collaborations” based in part on unpublished fragments and outlines, and stories created whole cloth by de Camp and Carter. While the publishers and contributors involved shifted multiple times in the decades to follow, paperbacks featuring Conan the Cimmerian were a ubiquitous presence on bookstore shelves until the late 90s, when releases slowed to a trickle. Harry Turtledove’s Conan of Venarium was released as late as 2003, but the recent trend has been to reject pastiche and return to Howard’s original texts, excised of the occasionally controversial embellishments and expansions of later authors. Some fans argue that the original Howard work is all we need, but others still yearn to see Conan set out on new adventures. The past few years have shown a tentative few steps back in that direction with the 2019 publication of two novellas—one by John C. Hocking and one by Scott Oden—serialized as part of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan comic book series. Oden was also commissioned to write a short story for inclusion with the Conan Unconquered (2019) video game. Perhaps signaling the start of a greater revival, Conan – Blood of the Serpent is the first original full-length novel to feature Conan in nearly twenty years.

Positioned as a prequel to the 1936 Howard novella Red Nails, Conan – Blood of the Serpent opens with the titular barbarian languishing in Sukhmet, a backwater village in Stygia, the Hyborian Age’s antediluvian precursor to ancient Egypt. Employed as a scout in Zarallo’s Free Companions, a multi-ethnic mercenary band hired by the Stygians to guard against Darfari raiders, Conan seems to spend as much time riding herd on drunk and idle sell-swords as dealing with foreign threats. The monotony of garrison life is shaken up, however, when he encounters a new addition to the band: Valeria. Formerly of the Red Brotherhood, the blonde and blue-eyed pirate’s beauty is matched only by her lethality. Conan is instantly smitten. Fiercely independent and all too accustomed to advances from her compatriots, Valeria is unimpressed. Conan isn’t the only one pursuing Valeria; while Conan is content to bide his time and prove his merits, an arrogant Stygian commander named Khafset proves himself less willing to take no for an answer. His fixation turns to murderous hatred, forcing Valeria and Conan to embark on a desperate journey across untamed lands, contending with threats both terrestrial and supernatural. Together and apart, Conan and Valeria carve a bloody swath across deserts and jungles, their footsteps dogged by the evil magic of the serpent-worshiping Stygian priesthood.

As a new Conan adventure, Conan – Blood of the Serpent is largely successful. Numerous authors have shown that Conan can be a deceptively tricky character to portray with any accuracy. Decades of inconsistency and, for lack of a better term, “flanderization” across various forms of media have led to a multitude of Conans that sometimes wildly diverge from his depiction in the original tales. Too often the result is a brutish, monosyllabic, meat-headed jock rather than the cunning, pantherish figure created by Howard. In Conan – Blood of the Serpent S. M. Stirling demonstrates a nuanced grasp of the character. His Conan is appropriately deadly in combat and takes the direct approach when need be, but he’s also just as likely to use clever strategy or stealth to deal with obstacles. In The Phoenix on the Sword, the very first Conan short story, Howard described the character as possessing “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth.” While so many depictions of Conan give us the former, grim-faced and dour, Stirling goes out on a limb a little and shows us some of that mirth, in a way we don’t often get to see. His Conan is downright jovial at times. Throughout the novel, Stirling displays a reassuring understanding of Conan’s character.

While Stirling delivers an entertaining Conan story, what he does NOT do is emulate Robert E. Howard’s style. I suspect this will be the most controversial aspect of the book for longtime Conan fans, as the most celebrated pastiche novels (i.e., the ones still talked about today, as opposed to lesser efforts) sought to pair an authentic-feeling Conan with prose that feels like something Howard would have written. And Stirling doesn’t do that, he simply declines. The book is written in a thoroughly modern style, and Stirling doesn’t go out of his way to pepper the text with Howard’s favorite expressions. Where Howard’s Conan tends to express his reflections and feelings through his actions and remarks, Stirling gives him the degree of interiority that contemporary readers are accustomed to, complete with italicized thoughts.

Not only is Conan – Blood of the Serpent a prequel to Howard’s Red Nails as advertised, I was surprised to discover that the final pages of the novel lead directly into the novella in question, with zero gap in the narrative. Titan Books wisely included Red Nails in this volume, and frankly the book would have felt incomplete otherwise. It’s a laudable move, as it allows newcomers to read a modern fantasy novel paired with one of the very best of the original Conan stories, but it also makes the contrasts between each writer’s style particularly stark. Both authors give the reader numerous scenes of intense combat against both man and beast (Stirling’s Conan slaughters a veritable zoo’s worth of African wildlife), but I was surprised to find it was Howard that went further in graphic detail when describing bloody swordplay. Also, perhaps inevitably due to the long-form novel format, Stirling struggles to maintain the propulsive, breakneck pacing seen in Howard’s short stories and novellas. Parts of Conan – Blood of the Serpent feel padded by comparison. The novel begins with not one but TWO tavern brawl scenes, whereas Howard would have cut to the literal chase and started his tale at the point in the narrative Stirling only reaches after a hundred pages. On the other hand, the extra space gives Stirling more breathing room for characterization. He has the space to directly show us aspects of Conan’s character (his mastery of wilderness survival, for example) that are generally mentioned in passing in Howard’s own work. Non-white characters are also given more dimension, while Howard tended to rely on the stock archetypes his pulp audience would have been familiar with.

Conan – Blood of the Serpent is blatantly a Conan novel written by S. M. Stirling, and not something that could be mistaken as a lost Howard tale. This is all die-hard Conan fans need to know. If Howard’s distinctive blood and thunder authorial style is a requirement for a prospective reader to enjoy a Conan story, this book may be skipped. But newcomers to Conan and existing fans who love the character and are open to other voices are encouraged to take a look. This volume delivers an engaging and approachable new adventure along with one of the very best of the classic stories. Regardless of whether or not future novel plots are directly connected to the events of the original stories, I would love to see Titan Books continue to package new stories with the classics.

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This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on February 1, 2023.

Gothic

By Philip Fracassi – Cemetery Dance Publications – February 3, 2023

Review by Robin Marx

Philip Fracassi’s new horror novel Gothic opens with its protagonist Tyson Parks trapped in an untenable situation. Twenty years ago he was a New York Times bestselling horror author, hailed as Stephen King’s heir apparent. But times have changed and his more recent books have been commercial and critical failures. His smug Manhattan agent—lounging in the posh corner office Tyson’s labor and talent financed—berates him like a child for falling out of step with the fickle tastes of the fiction market. Tyson’s latest manuscript is both late and diverges significantly from the book he pitched to his anxious publisher. The creative well is running dry and his business partners are growing impatient while his debts mercilessly compound.

Tyson’s fortunes change, however, when his supportive partner Sarah buys him an ornate Victorian Gothic writing desk as a present for his 59th birthday. A smoothly polished stone slab supported by decadently engraved rosewood, the monumental antique is intended to reignite Tyson’s creative spark. And it works, beyond Sarah’s wildest hopes. From the moment Tyson sets fingertips to keyboard, he is drawn into a fugue state in which the words flow easily and the hours slip by, leaving him pages of disturbingly compelling tales of witchcraft and human sacrifice. Publishable pages. But while his writing career makes a dramatic recovery, his personal life takes a drastic turn for the worse. After receiving the desk, loyal family man Tyson finds himself growing distant and dismissive towards his friends and loved ones, even gradually becoming paranoid and outright violent. A new, malignant Muse is his constant companion. If that wasn’t enough, in addition to the desk’s dark influence, Tyson finds himself targeted by Diana, the mysterious and ruthless last scion of the aristocrat who originally owned the artifact. For the desk is, in reality, a repurposed altar dedicated to blasphemous occult rituals.

The clever conceit at the heart of Gothic is that it is an unabashedly old school horror novel about an old school horror novelist. It’s a book that the reader can easily envision Tyson Parks writing himself at the height of his popularity. Tyson may be struggling because he’s behind the times, but Gothic celebrates the era when writers like him were most successful, when names like Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, and Peter Straub adorned every drugstore paperback spinner rack. Fracassi wisely avoids directly aping King’s voice and tics, but King in particular is referenced multiple times in the book. The writer’s descent into madness immediately brings to mind The Shining, and the seductive, haunted artifact that gives with one hand while exacting a terrible price with the other reminds the reader of a certain cursed possessed car. In fact, this parallel is amusingly lampshaded by Tyson’s best friend, Billy: “Can you believe it Tyson? It’s like Christine…but wood!”

While Gothic is clever and occasionally referential, it doesn’t go overboard on postmodernism or irony. It takes a somewhat silly premise—haunted furniture—and combines it with familiar (some might even say played-out) gothic horror elements like warlocks, moonlit ritual sacrifice, and devil worship, and then proceeds to deliver a serious, straight-faced horror story. Fracassi uses these well worn tropes not to mock them from the smirking perspective of an “evolved” 21st century horror writer, but because they are still COOL.

Gothic, as they say, goes hard. The book limits itself to an intimate cast of characters and imbues them with a great degree of interiority, making their insecurities, fears, and struggles relatable to the reader. Fracassi then tightens the screws, subjecting each of them to an inexorably escalating sequence of horrors. Moments of outright violence are infrequent, but are graphically and squirm- inducingly described. While it is handled with what I felt to be appropriate gravity, there is one scene of sexual assault that may be too intense for some readers. Gothic is a novel that draws the reader in and makes them care about the characters before absolutely devastating them. As demonstrated in the shocking climax, no one who comes into contact with the demonic desk survives completely unscathed. Gothic concludes with an extended denouement that hints at even grimmer implications for the world at large.

While plot and characterization are generally quite strong, the character of Diana was the weakest aspect of the book. Her ancestry and its entanglement with the desk’s origins are important to the narrative, but despite the cold-hearted tenacity she displays throughout most of the book, she appears uncharacteristically careless at a crucial moment. Gothic has an uncommonly strong cast of characters, however, and this one false note does little to tarnish the book as a whole.

The horror genre is currently blessed with an abundance of talented authors all pushing in different directions, innovating and deconstructing and elevating, but it’s gratifying to see one newer writer recognize that the classic tropes became classic for a reason. Sometimes an old-fashioned spooky story about possession and devil worship just hits the spot. Gothic is an immensely satisfying love- letter to the golden age of paperback horror.

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This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on January 27, 2023.

Frolic on the Amaranthyn

By Chase A. Folmar – Sable Star Press – April 6, 2022

Review by Robin Marx

After an act of brigandry goes awry, the seductive thief Emrasarie and the hulking swordsman Uralant the Untamable find themselves at the mercy of the masked sorcerer Zelaeus. Their lives at his disposal, he compels the pair to board Numynaris’s Ark in search of forbidden arcane secrets. An enigmatic relic left by an ancient and cruel race, the colossal vessel drifts along the mist-shrouded Amaranthyn river, playing host to a hallucinatory bacchanal: the titular Frolic on the Amaranthyn. Emrasarie and Uralant soon learn that the ethereal beauty of the Ark and its Frolic conceals a deeper rot.

A briskly-paced 101-page novella, Frolic on the Amaranthyn blends swashbuckling action with nightmarish horror elements in the tradition of Weird Tales magazine. While the ornate diction and cynical approach to sorcery and its practitioners immediately bring to mind Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance, the diametrically opposed protagonists and their heist mission recall Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The lush, phantasmagorical prose reminds the reader of Tanith Lee, late queen of dark fantasy.

Chase A. Folmar takes a broad strokes approach to both characterization and world building. The reader is not told much about the heroes or the world in which they live, just enough to serve the requirements of the story. We learn that Emrasarie is an orphan with a history of exploitation at the hands of men. She has light fingers and has learned to use her striking beauty to her advantage. Her partner Uralant, on the other hand, has a hot temper and the brawn to back it up. The setting of Frolic on the Amaranthyn has a vaguely ancient Greek feel, reinforced by Folmar’s choice in diction: this is a world in which autochthons are beholden to eupatrids, rather than one where commoners are ruled by nobles.

While character backgrounds and setting details are kept brief, Folmar revels in describing the present scene. Like Smith and Vance, he spices the text with obscure and evocative terminology. Colubrine, autolatry, myriapod, incarnadine, erubescent, inuculent, rufescent, amaurotic, etc. Nearly every page of Frolic on the Amaranthyn includes a term that would be at home in a Word-a-Day calendar. This style of prose unashamedly places flavor above accessibility, but during my first read-through of the book I resisted the temptation to reach for the dictionary. As with Smith and Vance, I elected instead to just relax and let the rhythm and musicality of the unfamiliar words wash over me. Later reviewing the book with dictionary at hand provided some additional nuance and specificity, but this extra research was not in any way required to comprehend or enjoy the book.

A world of dark beauty is presented through the poetic prose and exposition. We are reminded repeatedly that, though surface elements may be beautiful—such as the architecture and luxurious finery on display—like Zelaeus’ exquisite mask it often serves to hide a deeper corruption. For all the superficial aesthetic beauty, brutality is never far away. The upper classes subsist heavily on their inferiors, and are willing to use violence to maintain this status quo. Over the course of Frolic on the Amaranthyn, Emrasarie and Uralant learn that humanity is threatened by an even more malicious and insidious parasite.

Numerous dark fantasy and classic Sword & Sorcery elements are present in Frolic on the Amaranthyn, but the choice to have the protagonists be a romantic couple is an uncommon choice for the genre. They don’t fall in love over the course of the adventure, they’re not friends (with or without benefits), they are already dedicated to each other. This intense commitment comes into play during the course of the story, with both of them drawing strength from their bond and using it to overcome both physical trauma and mind-affecting enchantments. This aspect of the characters felt fresh and ripe for further exploration.

Frolic on the Amaranthyn delivers an exciting and fast-paced dark fantasy adventure with appealing protagonists in a distinctive setting. This reader was left hoping that Folmar will return to the duo and their intriguing world in the future.

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