Bitter Steel Published

Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Achilles, Beowulf! Kull, Conan, Kane!

Heroes are born, but they never die. They become legends; they become myths. Bitter Steel is a collection of new myths, new heroic adventures told in the ancient tradition.

So come! Gather with me around the fire where the smoke stings our eyes. We’ll listen to the drums beat in time with our hearts. We’ll drink from the common bowl as it passes among us. The darkness whispers outside our camp, but we have no fear. There are heroes among us. Let us hear their tales.

--- --- --- --- --- ---

I’m very happy to say that Bitter Steel has now been published. This is a collection of my heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery stories, along with some fantasy poems on the same themes. Most of these have been previously published in small magazines in and out of the States, but many of those have also been revised for this book, and there are new pieces that have never before seen print.

The top of this post is the back cover blurb for the book, and for those who aren’t familiar with the genre, “Conan,” “Kull,” and “Solomon Kane” are sword and sorcery heroes created by the writer Robert E. Howard. The stories in this book are in that same Howard tradition, and Howard himself wrote in the tradition of The Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Norse Sagas.

These are the kinds of stories that Frank Frazetta, the very fine artist who just recently died, did his most famous cover paintings for. If you’d like to see more Frazetta art, check out the Unofficial Frank Frazetta Fantasy Art Gallery. The ones below I borrowed from there.





At the moment, Bitter Steel is only available on Amazon, but it should be available at Borders and Barnes & Noble soon, as well as at Wildside Press. I’ll be posting more about the book over the next few days.

Thanks for listening.
-----
-----

The Hero Problem

I recently read Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, the first in the Doc Savage series. I thought it was pretty bad. In fact, I’ve never been a fan of the Doc Savage books. I’ve read maybe a dozen or so and while they often have interesting beginnings, and some rather cool concepts, I’m usually pretty bored before the end. So I started to wonder why, and I believe I’ve figured out a major reason.

I just don’t like the character of Doc Savage, mainly because he’s just too damn perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I like for my heroes to be heroic. I like to root for the main character in a story, and I don’t root for true anti-heroes, such as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. But I like my characters to have complexity and at least some areas of gray.


Conan the Cimmerian, created by Robert E. Howard, is a good example of the kind of hero I like. Some call him anti-hero but I disagree. He certainly doesn’t always follow the rules of societies he finds himself in, but he clearly has an internal moral compass. He doesn’t betray a friend. And when he becomes king he indeed rules for the betterment of his people. He’s far from perfect, though. He was a thief when young. He’s ambitious, not above drunkenness, and has a weakness for women. These things make him far more human than Doc Savage and far more real. They also mean that he isn’t 100 percent predictable, as Doc Savage is.

There is one character who is pretty close to a true anti-hero that I do like, and that is Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane. But even Kane isn’t “quite” out for just himself. He has respect and liking for some people. He’s not just a vicious psychopath, which is how Hannibal Lecter was drawn in Red Dragon and through Silence of the Lambs.

I’d like Doc Savage a lot more if he ever had a lazy moment, or drank too much once in a while. Or, for goodness sake, what’s up with this “no women” thing? As I was reading this last volume there were several places where it talked about how Doc couldn’t allow himself to be weak toward women because he had such lofty goals. Reading it with today’s eye, I immediately thought, is he gay? Of course, many of these books were written in the 1930s and 1940s so they are dated in this way. But Howard wrote about Conan in the 1930s too and the character doesn’t seem nearly as dated.

A too perfect hero just doesn’t work for me. Give me a Conan type every time.

-----
-----

Comic Books

I was in the comic book store the other day, my first time in probably twelve years, to order Femme Noir by Christopher Mills. While there I checked out some of the other offerings and bought a few. I was never a big comic book fan. As a teenager I read some, but probably never had more than 100 or so, and these were mostly Fantastic Four, Spiderman, and one or two war comics like Sgt. Rock and Ghost Tank. I also had a horror western one called Jonah Hex.

Later, when I first joined the Robert E. Howard group, REHupa, I bought a number of the Howard related comics like Conan and Kull. That was in the early 90s but that phase didn’t last long. Having been weaned on books, I always found reading comics rather irritating, frankly. You’d settle down for a read, and be done almost instantly. Five minutes tops for most comics. I quickly found the only way to enjoy them was to collect 5 to 10 issues and then read them all at one sitting.

This time I bought a few of the new Dark Horse Conan comics, and read them back to back, and a couple of “graphic novels,” which are essentially longer comics that give you a bit more of a satisfying read. For one of the very few times in my life I bought something primarily for its cover. It seems that there are a variety of Frank Frazetta comics coming out and I’ve always enjoyed Frazetta’s art work, particularly the stuff he did for the Karl Edward Wagner Kane paperbacks and the Death Dealer paperbacks. I picked up a comic with one of his “Kane” covers called Dark Kingdom, part 1. The story did not involve Kane, however, but a character named Red Morden. The tale itself was very typical but the art was nice.

I did, however, find a nice surprise in the store, a Jonah Hex: Origins graphic novel. This really took me back and I enjoyed it quite a bit since there was a meaty story to the work. How about you? Any comic book dinks out there? Have comics been at all an influence on your writing? I would generally say that they haven’t influenced my own work at all, most likely because of my limited exposure to them during my formative years.