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Mythic fiction

Dreadgod Book Review

What happens when the universe’s greatest executioner gets sick of his job? Everything you see here. And what do you see here? One of the best adventures written in the early twenty-first century. I admit that is a pretty low bar, but I gladly stock Wight on my shelf

Nightland Racer

Nightland Racer is Fenton Wood’s completely gonzo fable about a down on his luck former bootlegger who drives a nuclear-powered truck into the future to battle a malevolent black hole. The past, the present, and the future meet in a world where myths are truer than truth, and the

The Black Company by Glen Cook

Glen Cook’s The Black Company is about the stubborn endurance of heroism in the midst of unbelievable wickedness and depravity. The story is incredibly dark, but there is a core of hope that shines through. This is the book that everyone who claims they like grimdark fantasy should read

The Last Fanatics: How the Genre Wars Killed Wonder

The Last Fanatics by JD Cowan is an important piece of unaffiliated but not wholly unrespectable scholarship about the history of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in the twentieth century. No one else is asking, let alone answering the question of how we got here with the amount of detail

The Well at World's End by William Morris

Sometimes, I read books so you don’t have to. The Well at World’s End really is a seminal work, but it is also a slog of a book that I wouldn’t recommend to someone reading for fun. But it is a fascinating story, and the prototype of

Darkness and Stone: The Lost Book 3

Darkness and Stone wraps up Peter Nealen’s WarGate series The Lost nicely. You get a cataclysmic final confrontation, endless chthonic horrors, and the phrase, “you mean you just guilt-tripped him to death?” One of my favorite things about this series is that Nealen manages to give the impression that

Uncle Obi Wan

George Lucas tried to write the Star Wars prequel movies as a tragedy; it is possible his difficulties here were because tragedy is relatively less common in the pulp tradition he was using for inspiration. For the most part, the pulps were romances, a series of marvelous adventures. In a