Hocking Understand this S&S kind of Stuff - City of the Dead released

 Most of this content was simulcast on Black Gate June 25, 2024: 

CONAN: CITY OF THE DEAD, JOHN C. HOCKING’S LIVING PLAGUE IS ALIVE INSIDE

 

CONAN City of the Dead, by John C. Hocking (2024, Titan Books. 507p)[/caption]

It’s June of 2024, and Titan Books has just delivered John C. Hocking’s City of the Dead which contains both Conan and the Emerald Lotus (1995, TOR) and its follow-up Conan and the Living Plague—a book lost in the limbo of publishing craziness for ~two decades! Hocking also wrote a bridging novella set in between these two novels called “Black Starlight” (serialized across Conan comics in 2019, and provided assembled as an eBook in 2023 as Conan: Black Starlight: The Heroic Legends Series). Since Titan Books & Heroic Signatures had the rights to publish and print “Black Starlight” separately, it seems like a lost opportunity to have it absent from  City of the Dead, but fans are just glad to finally see the Living Plague in print, it is tough to whine about that.

Conan fans will be purchasing City of the Dead in a frenzy since they are familiar with Hocking’s style and its heroic journey

Want to know what the fuss is all about? This post is all about John C. Hocking’s Conan pastiche. It consolidates my reviews from Emerald Lotus and Black Starlight and highlights from my interview-with-Hocking and pre-review of Living Plague (that post contained informational, but distanced comments, about the book since the manuscript was still not available to all… at the time, I was blessed with one of the sacred Perilous World copies by Hocking to read). Read this and you'll have all the excerpts and context needed to lure you into the City of the Dead.

John C. Hocking Interview

 BEAUTIFUL PLAGUES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN C. HOCKING - originally posted on Black Gate Feb 4, 2022

To help reveal the muses that inspire weird fiction and horror writers, this interview series engages contemporary authors on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Recent guests on Black Gate broaching this topic have included Darrell Schweitzer, Sebastian Jones, Charles Gramlich, Anna Smith Spark, & Carol Berg, Stephen Leigh, Jason Ray Carney. See the full list of interviews at the end of this post.

Today we corner John C. Hocking whose Conan pastiche we reviewed a few months ago.

John C. Hocking is an American fantasy writer who is the author of two well-acclaimed Conan novels and has also won the 2009 Harper’s Pen Award for Sword and Sorcery fiction for his story, “The Face In The Sea”. He lives in Michigan with his wife, son, and an alarming quantity of books. He is a nigh-obsessed reader and writer of lurid pulp fiction, the author of Conan and the Emerald Lotus, the "Black Starlight" Conan serial, and their time-lost companion, Conan and the Living Plague, and an obedient thrall of Tales From the Magician’s Skull.

For clarity, we'll actually corner him twice. Firstly, here on Black Gate, we'll cover his weird, pulpy muses & Conan pastiche; secondly, in a companion interview, we'll cover his King's Blade and Archivist series on the Tale from the Magician's Skull Blog.