Friday, April 27, 2018

May June Groupreads - Brak the Barbarian and Tales from the Magician's Skull


The Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group welcomes all to join their May June 2018 Groupreads:


Topics:

(1) Tales From the Magician's Skull - Link to Discussion Folder
Recently kickstarted, it is time to delve into this Howard Andrew Jone's led magazine.

(2) Brak the Barbarian - Link to Discussion Folder
Before John Jake's wrote about the civil war, he wrote Clonans! With Frazetta covers no less!

Masthead Banner Art Credits

(a) Tales from the Magician's Skull #1
edited by Howard Andrew Jones / cover art by Jim Pavelec 2018

(b) John Jakes's Brak the Barbarian / cover art 1977 by Charles Moll
Brak the Barbarian (Brak the Barbarian, #1) by John Jakes Tales from the Magician's Skull #1 by Howard Andrew Jones 

Sunday, April 22, 2018

Abbott App - Mad Libs for Warrior Women

I'm proud to know Steven Abbott, a professor & consultant in the coatings & formulation industries. He is also a wizard at making HTML and Javascript Applications. We met as we partnered on a Surfactant Phase Behavior (one section of his Practical Surfactant eBook/App-set)

Well, his creativity has been corrupted by his granddaughters! And now he is writing Apps for fiction, Mad-Lib style creations of stories that are personalized. It's easy and fun. Just enter content into the fields and press download story. Check it out:



Here are his words from his Linkedin post:

Steven Abbott:
"This is nothing to do with work. Girls don't tend to have exciting (geeky) stories written about them. I wrote a large set of helicopter rescue stories for my granddaughter Ella, then another set where she flies an anti-gravity ship (invented by the Professor) to the moon, Mars etc. With her permission, I've now put the text on-line in a way that you can enter the name of your daughter, granddaughter, family friend and immediately get a fully personalised version as a Word document.

You can then have fun adding your own illustrations (a key part of what Ella and I did together). The early stories are very simple because they were made up on the spot. The later ones needed lots of research before telling them. The final helicopter story is a blockbuster expedition on Everest and the anti-grav trip to Mars features all the big sites on that planet. They are currently only in English (Ella is German but bilingual) but in principle could be translated to other languages if anyone wanted to help."


Sunday, April 15, 2018

Necroscope - Review by S.E.

Necroscope by Brian Lumley
SE. rating: 5 of 5 stars

Weird ESPionage from the master of mashing up horror and adventure:

Brian Lumley's Necroscope is not heroic fiction, which I typically focus on. It is very entertaining and has connections to Weird Sword & Sorcery adventure which led me to read it:

1) Heroes of Dreams & Khash series: I discovered Lumley’s writing via his Weird Sword & Sorcery. Vintage dark fantasy spawned in the early 1900’s from the work of pen-pals R.E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft; though it seems rare to find quality Conan-Mythos mash-ups. Lumely has done so a few times. First, his Hero of Dreams series is an overt mashup of Lovecraft’s Dreamcycle and Leiber’s Fafred and Gray Mouser series. Lumley’s Tarra Khash series (a.k.a. Tales of Primal Land) was written in a similar vein (i.e. fun Sword & Sorcery adventure in a Weird-Fiction, Cthulhu-esque world).

2) Blood Omen Legacy of Kain: A huge fan of the Horror S&S Game Series “Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain”, I was delighted to learn that Lumely’s writing influenced Denis Dyack’s vision of Nosgoth. Denis Dyack, creator of Silicon Knights, made the original Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain game (various incarnations from 1996 thru 2009). As a Kain fan I did not know the influence from Lumely until I saw an interview on Youtube (The Quantum Tunnel 2016 called Blood Omen Legacy Of Kain Deep Dive 1) in which Dyack reveals that the classic horror/action-rpg game was influenced by Lumey’s Necroscope series. Given the Visceral, Vampire, Lovecraftian, and Time Travel elements, this makes sense; however, the book has a contemporary setting versus the medieval one in the game.

As a fan of Khash, Heroes of Dreams, and Legacy of Kain… I just had to check out Necroscope. So what is it really?

Necroscope is “ESPionage” fiction (a word coined in this book), blending paranormal horror with spy adventure. It kicks off a series of 18 books (published 1986 to 2013). This first entry is entertaining and sets an expansive foundation for a wild ride. People with supernatural powers (predicting the future, speaking to the dead, etc.) are being enlisted into government agencies.

The book is ostensibly about the battle between the United Kingdom vs. the Russian governments special forces, but the conflict is really about Harry Keogh (speaker to the dead) vs. Boris Dragosani (who approximates a vampire). Each is associated with a government, but each is motivated by personal goals which take center stage. The reader learns about supernatural powers as these two do. After they master their respective powers, they go to battle in a most bizarre way chock-full of undead things and over the top time travel.

Expect lots of changing perspective and lots of story threads that will gel about half way through. Artwork is unexpectedly sprinkled throughout the book (even the Kindle version). The geometry puzzles and Moebius Strips shown relate the story and make for fun, relevant, diversions. This is very digestible horror for non-horror fans. A very fast read, recommended to just about everyone who likes dark adventure.


View all my reviews

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Helen's Daimones is now Audible

Helens Daimones Audible Book cover
The beautiful, haunting narration by Kathy Bell Denton for the Helen's Daimones audible book - LINK is now out. (just released April 2018). Seriously, check out Kathy Bell Denton's awesome voice in the sample (click the play button on audible, OR the Youtube video below).

Private message me, S E Lindberg, for a complimentary review copies of the book (any format: paperback, ebook, or audio).

First come first serve Audible Promotional Codes for the entire book (no membership required),
For US:
H4BPTUC4DRDKH
SXK53NLR3CKS8
HCZRRJ5KZ3823

First come first serve, Audible UK codes:
FLTPM6E8F4QAA
H5T7B6GSNPS9G
EC42R44B8BQRZ




Reviews:
Fletcher Vredenburgh from Black Gate reviews Helen's Daimones (link to 2017 review) .
"Helen is one of the stranger heroes to feature in swords & sorcery. Is she delusional, mad, gifted? I was never quite sure — she is only a little girl — but I was never able to take my eyes off her. With a cast as strange as this novel has, Helen remains the focus throughout. Even when she’s off stage, the question of what she is doing always seems to rise to the fore."

"Too much of what’s called grimdark is little more than sex and gore splashed over a standard epic fantasy story. True horror — and at its heart, Helen’s Daimones is a horror story — unsettles, disorients, and makes you feel like the world will fall out from under your feet at any moment. Lindberg’s novel does all those things."


Beauty in Ruins reviews Helen's Daimones LINK
The Dyscrasia novels by S.E. Lindberg are deep, intricate reads that harken back to the pulp days of Lovecraft, Howard, and others... Helen's Daimones is weird fantasy, weirdly told, for weird readers. As the strongest of the three stories to date, it makes for a great introduction to Lindberg's world, and creates more than enough interest for a fourth entry.

What this chapter did for me was breathe real life (no pun intended) into Lord Lysis. He becomes a sympathetic character here, especially in his encounter with a tragic young woman (buried alive so many years ago), the ghosts of her children (hung for their corruption), and their army of dolls (crazy, dangerous dolls). He's still a monster, a fearfully powerful being, but he's also a personality here. As for Doctor Grave, he was already a full-fledged character, but he becomes a little more chilling here as new layers of mystery leave us to question his deeper motives.--- Bob Milne 2017