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Is there anything more dispiriting than the ceaseless quest for novelty, especially when it seems bound to end in disappointment? It’s something I feel just about every time I turn on the TV. We’ve never had so many viewing choices, but so often everything feels reheated, recycled; we’ve seen it all before. The genuinely different is so rare that when you do see it, you know it — and you never forget it.

Sometime in the 70’s I saw an old black-and-white movie on television; it was called The Fabulous World of Jules Verne and it was the most extraordinary-looking thing I had ever seen. Guess what? I never forgot it.

A few years later I saw a movie on the late-night tube about the world’s greatest liar, Baron Munchausen. This time I couldn’t say that I had never seen anything like it because there was one thing that it reminded me of — The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. It was only years later that I learned that both films were the work of the Czechoslovakian director, Karel Zeman.

Zeman was born in 1910 in Austria-Hungary, and after spending most of his twenties working in advertising in France, in 1936 he returned to his home in what had become Czechoslovakia and began to work his way into the film business. He managed to survive both the Nazi occupation of his country during World War Two and the following grey decades of Czech subserviency to the Soviet Union, making films, both shorts and full-length features, that existed in — that created — a stubbornly non-political realm of beauty and humor and eccentric individuality. He died in 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Eastern European satellite regimes.

A few years ago, Criterion released Jules Verne under its original 1958 title, Invention for Destruction, along with 1962’s The Fabulous Baron Munchausen and another Zeman film, 1955’s Journey to the Beginning of Time, in a beautiful Blu-ray set titled Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman. It has a place of honor on my shelf, and it deserves one on your shelf, too, for Invention for Destruction alone; I guarantee it really is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Exactly what was it that I found so striking, so indelibly memorable about Invention for Destruction? What still makes it a jaw-droppingly unique movie, even after all the cinematic and technological innovations of the past seven decades? What made it the most internationally successful Czech film ever (a propaganda success that blessedly kept the cultural commissars off his back)?

Well, imagine that you’re looking at an old book, let’s say a volume of Jules Verne, lavishly illustrated with quaint nineteenth-century steel engravings. Now imagine that those obsessively, almost insanely detailed black-and-white images of Verne’s incredible creations begin to move, begin to assume a reality that overflows the pages of the book to finally become the entire visible world. That’s Invention for Destruction.

Zeman lays his cards on the table in the first scene of the movie, which begins with a narrator browsing through a volume of Verne, looking at page after page of illustrations, until the last one, an engraving of a steamship at sea, begins to move; while still retaining all of the sharp-edged, fine-lined qualities of the original picture, the waves roll, the sidewheel turns, smoke billows from the smokestack, and the camera cuts to the deck of the ship, where we meet our main character, an assistant to a renowned inventor, and the story is off and running. We have literally fallen into a book.

The achievement is all the more amazing because it was done, not with CGI, but with good, old-fashioned legerdemain, with practical effects and camera tricks that go back to the dawn of cinema.

In speaking of Zeman’s methods, Phil Tippett, who supervised the dinosaur animation for Jurassic Park, said,

He employed a technique where he would set up his shots in multiple planes — say you would have a stop-motion character or a live actor shot against… a flat that had painted on it this architecture, and maybe in front of that there would be cut-outs, kind of like a matte painting.

It sounds simple, but when you consider that the entire world of the film was created this way, that virtually every single shot consisted of these multi-layered set-ups, often combined with forced perspective and in-camera split screens, you begin to realize that such a film must have been fiendishly difficult to plan and shoot.

The ultimate effect is not realistic, but hyperreal (at times even hallucinatory), and the movie is filled with something that even the best CGI is unable to convey — the human wit and charm that only comes from something that visibly maintains its connection with the hands of the craftsman who shaped it.

Director and animator John Stevenson (Kung Fu Panda) summed up the Zeman difference perfectly:

Karel Zeman is one of the great magicians in cinema, right up there with Georges Méliès, with Willis O’Brien, George Pal, Ray Harryhausen, and he really should be considered part of that pantheon of people who put extraordinary images into the public consciousness. But what other people like George Pal, Ray Harryhausen, Willis O’Brien were trying to do — their illusions were designed to be as, if not “realistic”, as believable as possible; they wanted you to believe that somebody was fighting a dinosaur or being carried around by a twenty-five-foot gorilla. Karel Zeman invites and audience to come into a completely hand-made, hand-crafted world, and to accept that nothing they’re going to see looks believable or realistic… he was activating that part of the brain that allows you to make a fort out of the cushions of the settee and believe it’s a fort or get in a cardboard box and believe it’s a spaceship or a pirate ship.

Zeman’s highly stylized mixed-media method, his artful and humorous juggling of live-action, stop-motion, puppets, paper cut-outs and anything else he could think up, worked perfectly for Jules Verne (an author he loved as a child), allowing him to act as a master showman, giving us a buoyant nineteenth-century dream of mechanical progress… but a dream that may easily shade into nightmare if the anticipated progress does not take the course we want it to. (Hence the threat implicit in the double-edged title: an Invention, yes…  but for Destruction.)

The movie’s plot is largely taken from Verne’s 1896 novel, Facing the Flag, a book that is often seen as a quasi-prediction of the atomic bomb. The novel blends science and geopolitics in a story in which an inventor creates an explosive that is far more powerful than any ever seen before. (Many of the film’s images are taken directly from the engravings that Léon Benett did for the first edition of the novel.)

Zeman (who co-wrote the script as well as directed) uses Verne’s tale as a Christmas tree on which to hang his delightful and amazing ornaments, and Invention for Destruction is a movie replete with wonders enough to satisfy the appetite of every boy — or girl — who ever loved a ripping yarn. (Zeman once said, “I have only one wish: to delight the eyes and heart of every child.”)

In the world as envisioned by Verne through Zeman, all of earth’s realms have been subdued and transformed by the hand of scientific man: the land is continually crisscrossed by steam locomotives, steam-powered automobiles, and in one indescribably odd scene, by camels on roller skates; the air is crowded with balloons, balloon-cycles, pedal-powered one-man airplanes, and enormous, dreadnought-like airships upheld by dozens of propellers; the sea is swarming with commercial steamships, warships, and submarines large and small – to say nothing of an enormous octopus or two, which, as every lover of Jules Verne movies knows, always spells trouble.

It’s a world with castles perched on rocky promontories from which innocent inventors are kidnaped at midnight at the behest of a monomaniac millionaire and spirited away to an isolated island, where they are forced to work on an enormous cannon which will enable the madman to blackmail the world with explosive shells which could obliterate entire cities.

Image after image is quirkily spectacular or spectacularly quirky. The most amazing sequence is probably the one in which a submarine rams a ship, sending it to the bottom, after which the sunken vessel is looted by divers riding pedal-powered underwater aquabikes… which are equipped with bells, just like any paperboy’s bicycle. The scene ends with an undersea swordfight and though it only lasts six minutes, it’ll take you three times that long to watch it because you’ll be backing it up every thirty seconds, which is true of the film as a whole, at least the first time you watch it.

Paradoxically, for me the movie’s most memorable and resonant image is one of its simplest. As our hero (the inventor’s assistant) and heroine (a young woman from a looted ship who is a prisoner on the island) escape in a balloon, the inventor thwarts his captor’s evil scheme by detonating one of the explosive shells and vaporizing the great gun, the evil millionaire, and the island itself. Zeman sums up the results of the inventor’s brave action in a beautifully eloquent shot: we see a gentleman’s silk top hat, the emblem of bourgeois nineteenth-century elegance, respectability, security, sail silently into the immense sky, becoming smaller and smaller… pause in its ascent… and then fall into the empty sea below.

As much as I trust my ability with words, in this instance I don’t think you should rely on my descriptions of Karel Zeman’s astonishing achievement, because I’m afraid my words aren’t up to the task — I think you should see for yourself:

Well, was I lying?

In this era when CGI has become so sophisticated, so pervasive, and so pro forma that it is increasingly incapable of genuinely surprising or delighting us, where filmmakers can show us literally anything and therefore there is often nothing that they can show us that really excites us, the work of Karel Zeman is a revelation and a tonic. It can awaken that much-maligned but very real thing, a sense of wonder, and it can truly make you feel like a kid again, looking with unclouded eyes at a world in which new marvels are waiting around every corner.

If you watch Invention for Destruction and his other fabulous films, I think you’ll agree that Karel Zeman achieved his ambition and more; his passion was so deep and his vision so inspired and his craft so meticulous that it’s not only the eyes and hearts of children that he succeeded in delighting.

Thomas Parker is a native Southern Californian and a lifelong science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fan. When not corrupting the next generation as a fourth grade teacher, he collects Roger Corman movies, Silver Age comic books, Ace doubles, and despairing looks from his wife. His last article for us was The Old-Fashioned Way: Tove Jansson’s Hobbit Illustrations

Support Independent Bookstores.You can find Author Shoutouts on bookshop.org at LitStack Author Shoutouts. Here are…

The post 7 Author Shoutouts | Authors We Love To Recommend appeared first on LitStack.

I’m having a blast working on book trailers when WMG does Kickstarters. I just completed this book trailer for Dean’s Kickstarter, which launched today. I hope you enjoy the video and I hope it inspires you to look at the Kickstarter! Lots of cool stuff there. (Click here for the Kickstarter)

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Mary-Jo-Assassin-Book-Trailer-Low-Res.mp4

We are delighted to officially announce that THIS KINGDOM WILL NOT KILL ME – Maggie the Undying volume 1 has found a home with Tor UK.

Tor UK, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, is delighted to announce the acquisition of This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, an extraordinary epic fantasy by bestselling author duo Ilona Andrews. Publisher Bella Pagan acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Chris Scheina at Tor US for this and two further novels in this trilogy.

The official press release is here.

We are super excited to work with Tor UK. This means more buying options for the UK Horde, like Waterstones, a wider distribution, and a greater availability of the book in ebook and in print. No more waiting for weeks for the books to arrive from the US. No more cancelled orders due to “lack of availability.” Massive win there.

Furthermore, this edition will be specifically geared toward UK readers, and Tor UK is known for releasing beautiful books. They are also known for publishing unusual, out-of-the-box fiction, which means This Kingdom will be in excellent hands. While portal fantasy/isekai trope dominates in anime and comic format, there haven’t been that many attempts to bring it into the literally world, so we are very grateful Tor UK took a chance on it.

Also, we’ve interacted by email, and they are so nice to work with.

On a personal note, neither Gordon nor I believe ourselves to be legendary. We are just very happy that we finally have a UK publisher committed to supporting our books in such a big way.

This brings me to the slightly more bothersome news.

This Kingdom Begs Forgiveness From the UK Horde

This part of the post is for READERS WHO ORDER FROM AMAZON UK.

If you reside in US and/or order from Amazon.com, none of the stuff below applies to you. Your preorders are NOT affected.

If you have preordered This Kingdom on Amazon UK, you probably noticed that your preorder has been cancelled and funds have been refunded. This means that any Amazon UK customers who preordered This Kingdom will need to re-preorder the book.

Before any further explanations, here is the correct Amazon UK link and well as the Waterstones one:

Amazon UK Waterstones

The price is exactly the same. Tor UK was most gracious about making sure that everything matched and the Horde would not lose out.

Why did this happen?

This is one of those cases where the problem is unavoidable, and it’s nobody’s fault. The foreign rights sale process for US titles usually goes like so:

• US publisher acquires the book
• The book is edited
• US publisher formally accepts the manuscript after edits
• The book is presented to foreign (from US point of view) publishers
• Foreign publishers read the book and, hopefully, make an offer to purchase it for their territory

Sometimes a book is really hot, and everybody bids on it sight unseen, but most of the time this is how the foreign sales happen. On the US side, there is a delay between initial signing of the contract and the actual acceptance of the book, which can be months or sometimes years.

Tor US bought This Kingdom 1 year and 4 months ago, in February 2024. Tor UK didn’t have a chance to read the manuscript until this year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s US listing went on sale and naturally flowed to Amazon UK. This is standard procedure, because if the foreign rights are not sold in the UK, at least the readers who order from Amazon UK would have a chance to purchase the book from the US.

We are so sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. There was no way to prevent it, but we deeply apologize all the same.

On a personal note, we are so excited for this partnership. If the book does well, maybe we will finally make it over to the UK to meet all of you. Fingers crossed.

The post This Kingdom Finds Home in the UK first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

If video games aren’t your thing, you’re not going to like my post today. With the release of Doom: The Dark Ages and let’s plays popping up all over my YouTube feed, I’m going to nerd out today about Doom for a moment. Actually, I’m going to nerd out about one specific cutscene in Doom: The Dark Ages because it flips a common horror trope to highlight the mythology of the main character so perfectly, I’ve been nerding out since I saw the clip during an episode of Jacksepticeye’s let’s play just a little over a week ago. Welcome to my new hyper-fixation.

Before I get into the scene exactly, we’re going to have to dive into the history and lore of Doom.

Doom, Released 1993

The first Doom game released in 1993. To be perfectly honest, I had little to no interest in the game in 1993. I was not yet aware of what an incredible medium for story-telling video games can be. Besides, video games were for boys, and weren’t art anyway, so I wasn’t going to engage. Look, 1993 me was a bit of a snob… and very, very wrong. Mostly. Doom was (and remains) a hyper-violent game, which can be a bit much. But there is a story in there, and as the games progressed, the story has become increasingly well-written and executed. What is that story?

Well, an unnamed marine is sent to Mars as punishment for striking his commanding officer when his commanding officer ordered him to fire upon unarmed civilians. I immediately like the guy. On Mars and its moons Deimos and Phobos, the UAC (United Aerospace Corporation) is conducting teleportation experiments and they accidentally open a portal to Hell. Actual Hell. The hot place with all the demons and things.

Well, all those demons and things pour through, and it’s up to this punished marine to obliterate the Hellish host. Which he does, cutting through the demons like a man possessed. That was terrible. I will be here all week.

At the end of the the game, we discover the head of a white bunny on a pike — the unnamed marine’s (whom we’re now calling Doom guy) pet bunny Daisy, setting up an entirely fresh hatred for the armies of Hell (incidentally, I don’t think it’s an accident that John Wick’s puppy is called Daisy. Space Marine John Doe did not go John Wick on the minions of Hell, John Wick went all Doom Guy on the criminal underworld).

Doom 2, Released 1994

In Doom 2, our hero Doom Guy is called into action again. Earth has been overrun, and he is once again called to take on the armies of Hell in an effort to save humanity. I believe that the two games are set very close together in the timeline. Fueled now by the rage engendered by the loss of his pet bunny (so goofy, and I love it. Also, he supposedly also lost his wife and child, but the big fuss is about the bunny. I’m still figuring that one out) as well as his own innate goodness, Doom Guy once again goes on a rampage. All the same frenetic gameplay and gore.

1996 gave us The Final Doom (it was not, in fact the final one). In this one the UAC, having learnt nothing, I guess, establishes a base on Jupiter’s moon Io. Once again, the UAC manages to open a portal to Hell, and Doom Guy is once again the one who comes to the rescue, tearing through Hell’s minions to save humanity. Poor guy. Bet he has some pretty hefty trauma from it all.

Doom 64, Released 1997

A year later, and Doom 64 is released on the Nintendo 64. Doom Guy is pulled out of retirement to once again battle Hell. This time, he means for it to be for good (it was not for good). At the end of the game, after defeating the Demon Mother, Doom Guy realizes that the only way he can keep Hell’s forces away is to draw them away. In what can only be described as an incredible act of insanity (you thought I was going to say courage, right? Sometimes the two are indistinguishable), he elects to remain in Hell, fighting demons until he dies (he does not die).

And that’s where he remains. We learn in later games that he is such a savage in Hell, he has become their bogey man. He is their monster under the bed. Say his name in a magma pool three times and he appears behind you and takes your head off.

All is quiet on the Doom front until 2004, in which Doom 3 was released. No one can quite figure out how it fits into the timeline, and while the studio assures us that it is canon, our Doom Guy can’t be the protagonist. He is in Hell for this events of this game. The best fans have come up with is that it’s a different unnamed space marine. The world will never know his name. We salute you, brave sir.

Doom 2016 – The soft reboot of the original

It’s another eight years before Doom returns to the gaming world. And this is where we start jumping around in the timeline.

In 2016 we get Doom (2016), and a return to the original Doom Guy. In this game, the UAC —Again! Someone take away their funding!— unleashes Hell again when a certain Dr. Pierce attempts to use Hell’s energy in order to solve an energy crisis on Earth. The obvious result is, of course, that Hell once again invades. In this game, Doom Guy has been sealed away in a sarcophagus for centuries, and has acquired a new moniker. Ladles and jelly spoons, introducing the Doom Slayer. He awakens in an overrun facility on Mars, and immediately begins to rip and tear (quite literally) through the demonic ranks.

This is the game where we start to get story cutscenes, and you’re expected to piece together the story from both these scenes and the gameplay. From this game, you get that the Doom Slayer is the avatar of rage. However, he saves that rage for the demons only. Humanity is safe from him.

With the help of the AI Vega, and UAC Scientist Dr. Hayden, who has managed to transfer his consciousness into an android, the Doom Slayer travels between realms, finds the Crucible (the weapon capable of closing the Well facilitating the invasion) and seal the Well. But Dr. Hayden turns on the slayer. After assuring him that the Well has been sealed, Hayden takes the crucible and teleports the Doom Slayer back to Mars in a betrayal that would surprise no one who paid attention during the game.

Doom Eternal, released 2020

Four years later, the next instalment in the Doom series is released. Doom: Eternal. Taking place after the events of Doom (2016), Doom: Eternal is where we start to get some depth to our protagonist. We discover that he survived his stay in Hell. Found by humans from the realm of Argent D’nur, he is a traumatized mess of a man. But the Sentinels (the knight-warriors) of Argent D’nur see in him a great deal of potential. He enters their ranks.

The gods of Argent D’nur are the Elemental Wraiths, but there are those who have begun to worship the Maykrs; basically techno-angels. They were allies at one time. We learn in one of the flashbacks that a rogue Maykr known as the Seraphim imbues the Doom Guy with near God-like power. This is how he became the Doom Slayer, instead of just Doom Guy.

In this game, the UAC has been thoroughly corrupted, becoming basically a Hell-worshiping cult. It is also revealed that the leader of the Maykrs has made a pact with Hell. In order to maintain the prosperity of the Maykrs, she has agreed to provide Hell with worlds to invade, in exchange for Argent power, created from the suffering of Human souls. And, well, she’s invaded Earth. Well, the Doom Slayer is having none of that. Time to rip and tear again.

And he does.

This is the important thing. Doom Guy, AKA the Doom Slayer, had thwarted Hell’s invasions thrice before going to live full time in Hell. He survived Hell, he made it out (was a complete wreck, but he made it out), he joined the ranks of warriors who battled Hell (before the Maykr’s betrayal), and then thwarted Hell again centuries later (in Doom (2o16)), and then AGAIN in Doom: Eternal, where he also obliterated the leader of the Maykrs. The man is too angry to die. No Hellion has managed to kill him. All who have faced him have perished.

Hell is terrified of him (and not just Hell).

And boy did the director make that plain in the cutscene of Doom: The Dark Ages that caught my attention and made me nerd out enough that I’m writing about it here… because I had to gush to someone, and you’re that person. Sorry and or you’re welcome.

(Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel, taking place before the events of Doom (2016). The let’s play I’m following hasn’t concluded yet, so I’m not sure about the story exactly, so I can’t summarize it for you yet.)

The manner in which the cutscene plays makes it abundantly clear that the Doom Slayer is a monster to monsters. His entrance is reminiscent of countless horror movies. He cuts through a heavy locked door. The drop of his weapon, a flail, reminds me of the Witch King of Angmar as he faces Eowyn on the battlefield in Return of the King. The way he drags it on the ground, sparks flying, as he walks slowly towards his target (the demon Prince Ahzrak), is straight out of Silent Hill (Pyramid Head, anyone?). The way he keeps coming — an unstoppable force of nature— is reminiscent of Halloween.

Here, see for yourself:

The dude is a horror villain. Except he’s on our side. It flips the horror trope so beautifully that I was rooted to the spot while watching, and then immediately geeked out. And have been geeking out for about a week.

I cannot express how much I love this inversion. It’s excellent visual storytelling. Beyond everything you learn throughout the games, this one scene shows the player exactly who the Doom Slayer is, and what he is to the demons. He is not trapped in a facility on Mars with the armies of Hell. The armies of Hell are trapped in a facility on Mars with him. And it’s great.

Anyway, thanks for letting me nerd out for a moment. I’ve really made this a long one. You’re a champion if you made it all the way to the end. I don’t really have a question for you this time around. I’m still marveling over that cutscene. So instead, I’ll wish you all a wonderful day and an even better week.

When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and cuddling her cat. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and a cuddling furry murderer. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. Her serial The New Haven Incident is free and goes up every Friday on her blog.

Portia Meadows runs one of the few pet stores that sells familiars to the magical. Familiars—delicate, moody creatures—keep magic clean and pure. To lose a familiar means losing magic. And on a bright afternoon, Portia’s assistant discovers that something essential has disappeared, threatening not just the magical within the store, but throughout the world.

“The Poop Thief” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Poop Thief By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“Okay, this is just weird.”

The voice came from the back of the store. It belonged to my Tuesday/Thursday assistant, Carmen. High school student, daughter of two mages, Carmen had no real talent herself, but she was earnest, and she loved creatures, and I loved her enthusiasm.

“I mean it, Miss Meadows, this is weird.”

Oddly enough, weird is not a word people often use in Enchantment Place. Employees expect weird. Customers demand it. What’s weird here is normal everywhere else—or so I thought until that Tuesday in late May.

“Miss Meadows….”

“Hold on, Carmen,” I said. “I’m with a client.”

The client was a repeat whom I did not like. I’m duty bound at Familiar Faces to provide mages with the proper familiars—the ones that will help them augment their talents and help them remain on the right path (doing no harm, avoiding evil, remaining true to the cause, all that crap). I do my best, but some people try my patience.

People like Zhakeline Jones. She was a zaftig woman who wore flowing green scarves, carried a cigarette in a cigarette holder, and called everyone “darling.” Even me.

I called her Jackie, and ignored the “It’s Zhakeline, dahling.” Actually, it was Jacqueline back when we were in high school and then only from the teachers. The rest of us called her Jackie, and her friends—what few she had—called her Jack.

Whenever she came in, I cringed. I knew the store would smell like cigarettes and Emerude perfume for days afterwards. I didn’t let her smoke in here—Enchantment Place, for all its oddities, was regulated by the City of Chicago and the City of Chicago had banned smoking in all public places—but that didn’t stop the smell from radiating off her.

Most of my creatures vacated the front of the store when she arrived. Only the lioness remained at my feet, curled around my ankles as if I were a tree and Zhakeline was her prey. A few of the mice looked down on Zhakeline from a shelf (sitting next to the books on specialty cheeses that I’d ordered just for them), and a couple of the birds sat like fat and sassy gargoyles in the room’s corners.

Nothing wanted to go home with Zhakeline, and I didn’t blame them. She’d brought back the last three familiars because the creatures had the audacity to sneeze when they entered her house (and silly me, I had thought that cobras couldn’t sneeze, but apparently they do—especially when they don’t want to stay in a place where the air is purple). We were going to have to find her something appropriate and tolerant, something I was beginning to believe impossible to do.

On the wall beside me, lights shimmered from all over the spectrum, then Carmen appeared. Actually, she’d stepped through the portal from the back room to the shop’s front, but I’d specifically designed the magical effect to impress the civilians.

Sometimes it impressed me.

Carmen was a slender girl who hadn’t yet grown into her looks. One day, her dramatic bone structure would accent her African heritage. But right now, it made her look like someone had glued an adult’s cheekbones onto a child’s face.

“Miss Meadows, really, my parents say you shouldn’t ignore a magical problem and I think this is a magical problem, even though I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty certain, and I’m sorry to bother you, but jeez, I think you have to look at this.”

All spoken in a breathless rush, with her gaze on Zhakeline instead of on me.

Zhakeline smiled sympathetically and waved a hand in dismissal. Bangles that had been stuck to her skin loosened and clanked discordantly.

“This hasn’t really been working, Portia.” Zhakeline said with a tilt of the head. She probably meant that as sympathy too. “I’ve been thinking of going to that London store—what do they call it?”

“The Olde Familiar.” I spoke with enough sarcasm to sound disapproving. Actually, my heart was pounding. I would love it if Zhakeline went elsewhere. Then the unhappy familiar—whoever the poor creature might be—wouldn’t be my responsibility.

“Yes, the Olde Familiar.” She smiled and put that cigarette holder between her teeth. She bit the damn thing like a feral F.D.R. “I think that would be best, don’t you?”

I couldn’t say yes, because I wasn’t supposed to turn down mage business and I could get reported. But I didn’t want to say no because I would love to lose Zhakeline’s business.

So I said, “You might try that store in Johannesburg too, Unfamiliar Familiars. You can see all kinds of exotics. But remember, importing can be a problem.”

“I’m sure you’ll help with that,” she said.

“Legally I can’t. But you’re always welcome here if their wares don’t work out.”

The mice chittered above me, probably at the word “wares.” They weren’t wares and they weren’t animals. They were sentient beings with magic of their own, subject only to the whims of the magical gods when it came to pairings.

The whims of the magical gods and Zhakeline’s eccentricities.

“I’ll do that,” she said. Then she turned to Carmen. “I hope you settle your weirdness, darling. And for the record, your parents are right. The sooner you focus on a magical problem, the less trouble it can be.”

With that, she swept out of the store. Two chimpanzees crawled through the cat doors on either side of the portal holding identical cans of Febreze.

“No,” I said. “The last time you did that we had to vacate the premises. Or don’t you remember?”

They sighed in unison and vanished into the back. I didn’t blame them. The smell was awful. But Febreze interacted with the Emerude, leading me to believe that what Zhakeline wore wasn’t the stuff sold over the counter, but something she mixed on her own.

Without a familiar, which was probably why the stupid stuff lingered for days.

“Miss Meadows.” Carmen tugged on my sleeve. “Please?”

I waved an arm so that the store fans turned on high. I also uttered an incantation for fresh ocean breezes. (I’d learned not to ask for wind off Lake Michigan; that nearly chilled us out of the store one afternoon). Then I followed Carmen into the back.

Walking through the portal is a bit disconcerting, especially the first time you do it. You are walking into another dimension. I explain to civilian friends that the back room is my Tardis. Those friends who don’t watch Doctor Who look at me like I’m crazy; the rest laugh and nod.

My back room should be a windowless 10×20 storage area. Instead, it’s the size of Madison Square Garden. Or two Madison Square Gardens. Or three, depending on what I need.

Most of my wannabe familiars live here, most of them in their own personal habitats. The habitats have a maximum requirement, all mandated by the mage gods and tailored to a particular species. Each bee has a football-sized habitat; each tiger has about a half an acre. Most creatures may not be housed with others of their kind, unless they’re a socially needy type like herding dogs or alpha male cats. The creatures have to learn how to live with their mage counterparts—not always an easy thing to do—and its best not to let them interact too much with other members of their species.

Theoretically, I get the creatures after they complete five years of familiar training (and yes, you’re right; very few familiars live their normal lifespan. Insects get what to them seems like millions of years and dogs get an extra two decades; only elephants, parrots, and a few other exceptionally long-lived species live a normal span).

That day, I had too many monkeys of various varieties, one parrot return who’d managed to learn every foul word in every language known to man (and I mean that) during his aborted tenure with his new owner, several large predatory cats, twenty-seven butterflies, five gazelle, sixteen North American deer, eight white wolves, one black bear, one grizzly return, one-hundred domestic cats, five-hundred-sixty-five dogs, and dozens of other creatures I generally forgot when I made a mental list.

Not every animal was for sale. Some were flawed returns—meaning they couldn’t remember spells or they misquoted incantations or they weren’t temperamentally suited to such a high-stress job. Some were whim returns, brought back by the mage who either bought on a whim or returned on a whim. And the rest were protest returns. These creatures left their mage in protest, either of their treatment or their living conditions.

All three of Zhakeline’s returns had been protest returns although she tried to pass the first off as a flaw return and the other two as whim returns. It gets hard for a mage after a few rejections. Eventually she gets a reputation as a familiarly challenged individual, and might never get a magical companion.

And if she goes without for too long, she’ll have her powers suspended until she goes through some kind of rehab.

Fortunately, that’s never my decision. I’d seen too many mages fight to save their powers just before a suspension: I never want all that angry magic directed at me.

Carmen was standing on the edge of the habitats. They extended as far as the eye could see. My high school assistants didn’t tend the habitats the way that civilian high school assistants would tend cages at, say, a vet’s office. Instead, they made sure that the attendants that I hired from various parts of the globe (at great expense) actually did their jobs.

Each attendant had to log in stats: food consumed, creature health readings, and how often each habitat was entered, inspected, and cleaned. Then they’d log in the video footage for the past day—after inspecting it, of course, for magical incursions, failed spells, or escape attempts.

Carmen had called up our stats on the clear computer screen I’d overlaid over the habitat viewing area. She zoomed in on one stat—product for resale.

I frowned at the numbers. They were broken down by category. The whim returns and most of the protest returns were listed, of course, along with byproduct—methane from the cows (to be used in various potions); shed peacock feathers (for quills); and honey from the bees that had convinced the mage gods to make them hive familiars, not individual familiars.

Those bees only went to special clients—those who could prove they weren’t allergic and who could handle several personality types all speaking through their fearless leader, the sluggish queen.

“See?” Carmen asked, waving a hand at the numbers. “This week’s just weird.”

I didn’t see. But I didn’t have as much experience with the numbers as she did. And, truth be told, I didn’t think her powers were in spell-casting. I believed they were in numerology—not as powerful a magic, but a useful one.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling dense, like I often did when staring at rows of facts and figures. “What am I supposed to see?”

She poked her finger at one of the columns. The lighted numbers vanished, then reappeared in red.

“Available fertilizer,” she said. “See?”

I stared at the category. Available Fertilizer. Our biggest seller because we undercut the competition, mostly so we could get rid of the crap quickly and easily.

“There’s no number there,” I said.

“Zero is a number,” Carmen said with dripping disdain that only a teenager could muster.

“E…yeah…okay.” I knew I was stammering, but the big honking nothingness made no sense. “The assistants haven’t been cleaning the habitats?”

She pressed the screen, drawing down the earlier statistics. Cleanings had gone on as usual.

“So what happened to the fertilizer?”

“I have no idea where the fertilizer went,” she said. “I’m not even sure it came out of the cages. I mean, habitats.”

I had planned to give her a tour of the back, but I hadn’t yet. So she always made the “cages/habitat” mistake, something she’d never say if she actually saw the piece of the Serengeti plain that Fiona, the lioness who liked to sleep under my cash register and Roy, the lion who supposedly headed her pride, had conjured up to remind themselves of home.

Cleaning the habitats was a major job, especially for the larger animals, and usually required extra labor. Entire families came in for an hour or two a night to clean grizzly’s mountainside, especially during blackberry season.

I moved Carmen aside, pressed some keys only visible to me, and looked at several of the previous day’s vids in fast motion. Habitat cleaning happened in all of them.

Habitat cleaners weren’t required to log in what they cleaned unless the item was marketable which poop generally was. Animal poop that is. There’s never a big market for insect poop.

Animal poop (ground up into a product called Familiar Fertilizer) had a wide variety of uses. Mages bought it for their herb gardens. In addition to being the Miracle Grow of the magical world, it also made sure that wolf’s bane and all the other herbal ingredients of a really good potion, magical spell, or “natural” remedy was extra-powerful. Some mages vowed that anything fertilized with familiar poop could be safely sold with a money-back guarantee—especially (oddly enough) love spells.

“Must be a computer glitch,” I said and stabbed a few more buttons.

“Let me.” Carmen got to the correct screens quicker, without me even asking. She knew I wanted to check all that basic stuff—how many pounds of poop got ground into fertilizer at the nearby processing plant, how many pounds of fertilizer got shipped, and how many of our magical feed-and-seed brethren paid for shipments that arrived this week.

Each category had a big fat zero in the poundage column.

“I don’t like this,” I said. “You just noticed this?”

I tried to keep the accusation out of my voice. It wasn’t her job to keep track of my shipments and my various product lines. She was a high school student working two days a week part-time after school.

I was the person in charge.

“I was going over the manifests like you taught,” she said. “I let you know the minute I saw it.”

Which was—I checked the digital readout on the see-through computer screen—half an hour ago, one hour after Carmen arrived.

Pretty dang fast, considering.

“I mean, everything was fine on Thursday.”

Thursday. The last day she worked.

My lunch—an indulgent slice of Chicago pan-style pizza—turned into a gelatinous ball in my stomach. “Can you quickly check the previous four days?”

“Already on it.” She pressed a few keys.

I watched numbers flash in front of my eyes—too quickly for my number-challenged brain to follow. I could have spelled the whole thing, looked for patterns, but I had Carmen. She was better than any magical incantation.

“Wow,” she said after a few minutes. “Those animals haven’t pooped since Friday.”

The gelatinous ball became concrete. I reached for the screen to look at health history, then stopped. A few of those creatures would have died if they hadn’t pooped in three days. Some internal systems were less efficiently designed than others.

Still, I had her double-check the health records just to make sure.

“Okay,” she said after looking at health records from Thursday to Tuesday. “So they all have normal bowel readings. What does this mean?”

“It means that your parents are right,” I said.

“Huh?” She looked at me sideways, all teenager again. She hated hearing that Mom and Dad were right.

“Magical problems become bigger when they are allowed to fester.”

“This is a magical problem?” she asked.

“The worst,” I said.

She continued to stare at me in confusion, so I clarified.

“We have a poop thief.”

***

You find poop thieves throughout magical literature. Heck, you even find them in fairy tales.

Of course, they’re never called poop thieves. They’re “tricksters” who steal their victims’ “essence.” They’re evil wizards who rob their enemies of their “life force.”

Most scholars believe that these references are to sperm, which simply tells me that magical scholarship has been dominated too long by males. (Those inept male scholars don’t seem to be able to read either; a lot of the victims are women who are, of course, spermless creatures one and all.)

The scholars are right in that “life force” and “essence” are often composed of bodily fluids. Some (female) scholars have assumed that this essence is blood, but blood is a lot harder to obtain than the simplest of bodily fluids—pee.

Pee, though, is like all other water. It seeps into the ground. It’s difficult to get unless someone pees into a cup or a bottle or a box. (Or unless you’ve magicked the chamber pot—and there are a few of those stories as well [Those Brothers Grimm didn’t like the chamber pot stories, and so kept them out of the official compilation.])

Poop, on the other hand…

Poop, actually, on either hand is a lot easier to obtain.

Poop, like pee, blood, and yes, sperm, is a life essence. Even in its nonmagical form it has magical powers. It gets discarded only to be spread on a fallow field. The nutrients in the waste material break down, enriching the soil which is often used to grow plants—plants which later become food. The food nourishes the person who eats it. The person’s body processes the food into energy and vitamins and all sorts of other good stuff, and the leftovers become waste yet again.

Most of the non-magical have no idea the power held in a single turd.

Hell, most of the magical didn’t either.

But the ones who did, well, they were all damn dangerous.

And I’d already lost too much time.

***

It seemed odd to call Mall Security at a time like this, but that was the first thing I did. Mine wasn’t the only store with magical creatures.

If someone was stealing from me, then maybe he was stealing from the pet store down the way, the organ grinder monkey show just outside the food court, and the various holiday setups with their real Easter bunnies and Christmas reindeer and Halloween bats. Not to mention all the working familiars accompanying every single mage who walked into the place.

I let Carmen talk to Security. She was young enough and naïve enough to think they were sexy. She had no idea that most of them were failed magical enforcers or inept warlocks who’d been demoted from city-wide security patrol to Enchantment Place.

I stayed in the back room, bending a few rules because this was an emergency. Anyone who took that much poop had a plan. A big plan—or a need for a lot of power.

At first, I figured this thief simply wanted the magical support of a familiar without actually getting a familiar. Magical crime blotters were full of minor poop thieves who stole rather than get a new familiar of their own. They’d mine someone else’s familiar, using the poop as a tool with which to obtain the magic, and no one would notice until that familiar got sick from putting out too much magical energy.

Maybe what we had here was a more sophisticated version of the neighborhood poop snatcher.

Which made Zhakeline a prime suspect.

But Zhakeline’s magic had always been shaky at best, even when she had a familiar. That was why she looked so exotic and had so many affectations.

She had to appeal to the civilians who think we’re all weird. She mostly sold her small magic services to them. If she predicted the future and was wrong or if she made a love potion that didn’t work, the civilian would simply shrug and think to himself Ah, well, magic doesn’t really work after all.

But the magical, we know when someone can’t perform all of the spells in the year-one playbook. Zhakeline barely passed year one (charity on the part of the instructor) and shouldn’t have passed from that point on. But that happened during the years when telling a kid that she had failed was tantamount to murdering her (or so the parents thought) and Zhakeline got pushed from instructor to instructor without learning anything.

Which was one of the many reasons I didn’t want to give her another familiar.

And that was beside the point.

The point was that Zhakeline, and mages like her—the ones who needed the magical power of familiar poop—didn’t have the ability to conduct a theft on this massive scale, at least not alone.

And even if they tried, they’d be better off going to the back yard of a mage with a canine familiar. There was always a constant poop supply, and it provided enough power—consistent power (from the same source)—so that the thief might become a slightly less inept mage, for a while, anyway.

Next I investigated my assistants. Most had no magical powers of their own, but had come from magical families. They knew that magic existed—and not in that hopeful I wish it were so way that a civilian had, but in a this is a business way that led them to peripheral jobs in the magical field.

They worked hard, most had a love of animals, insects or reptiles, and they often had a specialty—whether it was cooking the right kind of pet food or calming a petulant hyena.

I couldn’t believe any of the assistants would be doing something like this because they would have to be working for someone else.

The nonmagical don’t gain magic just by wishing on a powerful piece of poop.

I scanned records and employment histories. I scanned bank accounts (yes, that’s illegal, but remember—emergency. A few rules needed to be bent), cash stashes and (embarrassingly) the last 48 hours of their lives. (Which, viewed at the speed of an hour per every ten seconds, looked like silent movies watched at double fast-forward.)

I saw nothing suspicious. And believe me, I knew what to look for.

Although I wished I didn’t.

***

You see, I got this job, not because I have a particular affinity with animals or I’m altruistic and love pairing the right mage with the right familiar.

I got it because I have experience.

I know how to look for mages heading dark or mages who should retire or mages who mistreat their magic (and hence their familiars). I know how to take care of these mages quietly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss.

It didn’t used to be this way. In the past, places like Familiar Faces existed on side streets and had just a handful of creatures, few of them exotic. Only in the last few years have the mega stores come into existence at high-end malls like Enchantment Place.

And even though we’re supervised by the rules of the mage gods like all other familiar stores, we’re run and subsidized by Homeland Security—Magical Branch.

(Not everyone knows there’s a Homeland Security—Magical Branch, including the so-called “head” of Homeland Security. Hell, I even doubt the president knows. Why tell the person who’s going to be out in four or eight years one of the world’s most important secrets. Knowing this crew, they’d probably try to co-opt the Magical Branch into something dark. Better to keep quiet and protect us all.

(Which I do. Most of the time.)

My job here is to watch for exactly this kind of incursion. Technically, I’m supposed to report it, and then wait for the guys with badges to show up.

But I didn’t wait for the guys with badges. I doubted we would have time.

(And, truth be told, I did want the glory. I was demoted to this position [you guessed that already, right?] for asking too many questions and for the classic corporate mistake, proving that the boss was an idiot in front of his employees. I’m a government employee and as such can’t be fired without lots and lots of red tape [even in the magical world], so I was sent here, to Chicago where I grew up, to Enchantment Place where I have to put up with the likes of Zhakeline with a smile and a shrug and a rather pointed [and sometimes magically directed] suggestion.)

I toyed with rewinding time in all of the habitats—another no-no, but it would have been protected under the Patriot Act, like most no-nos these days. But rewinding time takes time, time I didn’t really want to waste looking at creatures moping in their personal space.

Instead, I did some old-fashioned police work.

I went back out front where Carmen was still flirting with some generic security guard (and the mice were leaning over so far to watch that I was afraid one of them would fall down the poor man’s ill-fitting shirt) and beckoned the lioness, Fiona.

She frowned at me, then rose slowly, stretched in that boneless way common to all cats, and padded through the portal ahead of me.

When I got back to the back, she was sitting on her haunches and cleaning her ears, as if she had meant to join me all along.

“We have a poop thief,” I said, “and I think you know who it is.”

She methodically washed her left ear, then she started to lick her left paw in preparation for cleaning her right ear.

“Fiona,” I said, “if I don’t solve this, something bad will happen. You might not get a home of any kind and none of the other familiars will be of use to anyone. You might all have to be put down.”

I usually don’t use euphemisms, and Fiona knew it. But she didn’t know the reason that I used it this time.

I couldn’t face killing all these wannabe familiars. And it would be my job to do so. I’d get blamed for the theft(s), and I’d have to put down the creatures affected. It was the only way to negate the power of their poop.

She put her newly cleaned paw down on the concrete floor. “You couldn’t ‘put us down.’” She used great sarcasm on the phrase. “It would set the magical world back more than a hundred years. There wouldn’t be enough of us to help your precious mages perform their silly little spells.”

“Which might be the point of this attack,” I said. “So tell me what you saw the last few days.”

And why you never said a word, I almost added, but didn’t.

“I’m not supposed to tell you anything. I’m not even supposed to talk with you.”

Technically true. Familiars are only supposed to talk to their personal mages. But I get to hear and every one of them speak when they come into the store to make sure they really are familiars and not just plain old unmagical creatures looking for a free hand-out.

But Fiona had spoken to me before, mostly sarcastic comments about the store patrons. I’d tried pairing her up with a few, but she always had an under-the-breath comment that convinced me she and that mage wouldn’t be a good match.

“I haven’t seen anything,” she said.

“What have you heard, then?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “The system is working just fine.”

That sarcasm again, which lead me to believe she was leaving out a detail or two deliberately, hoping I would catch it.

Damn lions. They’re just giant cats. They toy with everything.

And at that moment, Fiona was toying with me.

“But something’s bothering you,” I said.

“Not me so much.” She picked up that clean right paw, turned it over, and examined the claws. “Roy.”

Roy was the lion to her lioness. He wasn’t head of the pride because there was no pride. We knew better than to get an entire pride of lions into that small habitat. No one would ever be able to see their individual natures—and no mage was tough enough to get that many catly familiars.

“What’s bothering Roy?” I asked.

“Ask him.”

“Fiona…”

She nibbled on one of the claws, then set her paw down again. “There was—oh, let me see if I can find the phrase in your language—an overpowering scent of ammonia.”

“Ammonia?”

“And a very bright light.”

“An explosion?” I asked. Fertilizer mixed with the right chemicals, including ammonia, created the same thing in both the magical and the non-magical world.

A bomb.

Only the magical bomb made of this kind of fertilizer didn’t just destroy lives and property, it also cut through dimensions.

“It’s not an explosion yet,” she said. “He claims he has a sixth sense about things. Or did he say he can see the future? I forget exactly. But it was something like that.”

“Or maybe he just knows something,” I snapped.

“Or maybe he just knows something.” She sounded bored. “He does say that because he’s king of the jungle, the wannabes tell him things.”

Which was the most annoying thing about Roy. He really believed that king of the jungle crap. Too much Kipling as a cub—or maybe too many viewings of the Lion King.

“I should really send you back to the habitat until this is resolved,” I said to Fiona.

She hacked like she had a hairball, a sound she (sort of) learned from me. She thought it was the equivalent of my very Chicago, very dismissive “ach.”

“I’d rather be out front, watching the floor show,” she said.

And I sent her back out there because I had a soft spot for Fiona. Technically, I don’t need a familiar. I have more than a thousand of them.

But if I did need one, I’d pick Fiona.

She knew it and she played on it all the damn time.

I waited until she was through that little curtain of light before I stepped through the hidden door into the habitat area.

It was always surprisingly quiet inside the habitat area. The first time I went in, I expected chirping birds and chittering monkeys and barking dogs—a cacophony of creature voices expressing displeasure or loneliness or sheer cussedness.

Instead, the area was so quiet that I could hear myself breathe.

It also had no smell—unless you counted that dry scent of air conditioning. The animal smells—from the pungent odor of penguins to the rancid scent of coyote—existed only in the individual habitat.

Just like the noises did.

If I went through the membrane on my left (and only I could go through those membranes—or someone I had approved, like the assistants), I would find myself in a cold dark cave that smelled of rodent and musty water. If I looked up, I’d see the twenty-seven bats currently in inventory.

We were always understocked on bats. Mages, particularly young ones raised in Goth culture, wanted bats first, wolves second, and cats a distant third. I’d given up trying to tell those kids to get some imagination.

I’d given up trying to tell the kids anything.

If I went through the membrane on my right, I’d slide on polar ice. Here the ice caps weren’t melting. Here, my six polar bears happily fished and scampered and did all those things polar bears do—except that they didn’t attack me. They didn’t even bare their fangs at me.

I stopped between the two membranes and frowned. Whoever took the poop hadn’t taken it from inside the habitats. It was simply too dangerous for the unapproved guest.

Hell, it was often dangerous for the assistants. I’d had more than one assistant mauled by a creature that didn’t like the way he was looking at it.

And the poop was not registered as collected either. So whoever had taken it had spelled it out between gathering and delivery into the outside system.

I walked between dozens of habitats, trying to ignore the curious faces watching me.

I did feel for the wannabes. They were like children in an old-fashioned orphans’ home. They hoped that someone would come to adopt them. They prayed that someone would come to adopt them. They were afraid that someone had come to adopt them.

And the only way they would know was if I brought them out of the habitat to the front of the store. (Except in the case of the dangerous exotics or the biting/stinging insects. In those cases, the mage had to enter the habitat without fear. That rarely happened either.)

Finally I got to the Serengeti Plain.

Or what passed for it in Roy and Fiona’s habitat. It was kind of an amalgam of the best parts of a lion’s world minus the worst part. Lots of water, lots of space to run, lots of space to hide. A great deal of sunshine and never, ever any rain.

I slipped through the membrane and, because of my past experience, paused.

The first step into Roy’s world was overwhelming. The heat (about twenty degrees higher than I ever liked, even in the summer), the smell (giant cat mixed with dry grass and rotting meat from the latest kill), and the sunlight (so bright that my best sunglasses were no match for it—and as usual, I had forgotten any sunglasses) all made for a heady first step into this habitat.

More than one assistant had been so disoriented by the first step that Roy was able to tackle, stand on, and threaten the assistant in the first few seconds. After you’ve had several hundred pounds of lion standing on your chest, with his face inches from yours—so close you could see the pieces of raw meat still hanging from his fangs—you’d never want to go back into that habitat either.

Unless you’re me, of course. I expected Roy to scare me that first time.

I didn’t expect him to catch me off guard.

So when he did, I congratulated him, told him he was quite impressive, and warned him that if he hurt a human he’d never graduate from wannabe to familiar.

And from that point on, he never jumped on me again.

But he always snuck up on me.

On this day, he wrapped his giant mouth around my calf. His teeth scraped against my skin, his hot breath moist and redolent of cat vomit. He’d been eating grass again. We were going to have change his diet.

“Hey, Roy,” I said. “I hear you have a sixth sense.”

He tightened his jaw just enough that the edges of those sharp teeth would leave dents in my flesh—not quite bites, not quite bruises—for days. Then he licked the injured area—probably an apology, or maybe just a taste for salt (I was instant sweat any time I came into this place).

Finally, he circled around me and climbed a nearby rock so that he would tower over me. If I weren’t so used to his power games, he’d make me nervous.

“It’s not a sixth sense,” he said in an upper-class British accent. That accent had startled me when we were introduced. “So much as a finely honed sense of the possible.”

“I see,” I said, because I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t even been certain he would talk to me, and he’d done so almost immediately.

Which led me to believe the king of the jungle was more terrified than he wanted to admit.

“You realize I am only speaking to you,” he said with an uncanny ability to read my mind (or maybe it was just that finely honed sense of what I might possibly be thinking), “because great evil is afoot, and I have no magical counterpart with which to fight it.”

I almost said, It’s not your job to fight it, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to insult the poor beast. Instead, I said, “That’s precisely why I’m here. I figured you know what was going on.”

“Bosh,” he said. “Fiona told you. She has a thing for you, you know.”

“A thing?” I asked.

“She wants to be your familiar.” He opened his mouth in a cat-grin. “She doesn’t understand—or perhaps she doesn’t believe—that you have hundreds of us and as such do not need her.”

I nodded because I wasn’t sure what else to do. And because I was already thirsty. I’d forgotten not just my sunglasses but my bottle of water as well.

“Well,” I said, “you do know what’s happening, right?”

“Oh, bomb-making, dimension hopping, familiar murder—all the various possibilities.” He laid down and crossed his front paws as if none of that bothered him. “And just you here because you seem to believe that you can save the world all by your own small self.”

“With the help of your finely honed sense of the possible.”

“That too.” He tilted his massive head and looked at me through those slanted brown eyes.

My heart rate increased. Occasionally I still did feel like prey around him.

“Well?” I asked.

“Have you ever thought that your culprit isn’t human?”

“No,” I said. “Demons don’t care about familiars. Only mages do.”

“Really.” He extended the word as if it were four. “Humans generally ignore scat, don’t they?”

“Generally,” I said. “We try not to think about it.”

“And yet those of us in the animal kingdom find within it a wealth of information.”

“Yes,” I said. “But the amount of power it would take to complete this spell tends to rule out anything that isn’t human.”

He made the same hairball sound that Fiona did. They were closer than they liked to admit.

“You humans are such speciest creatures. It doesn’t help that the mage gods allow you the choices and we have to wait until you make them. It leads me to believe that the mage gods are human—or were, at one point.”

I wasn’t there to discuss religion. “You’re telling me, then, that your finely honed sense of the possible leads you to the conclusion that a familiar has done this.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“A creature then. A magical creature of some kind.”

He slitted his eyes, the feline equivalent of yes.

“But you have no evidence,” I said.

“I have plenty of evidence. Consider the timeline. It took you forever to discover this theft, and yet no bomb has exploded. No one has made threats, and no mage has suddenly gained unwarranted power.”

“That’s not evidence. That’s supposition.”

He lifted his majestic head. “Is it?”

“So who do you suppose has stolen the poop—and why?”

He rested his head on his paws and continued to stare at me. “That’s for you to work out.”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“That’s correct. I don’t really know.”

“But you’re not worried.”

“Why should I worry? From my perspective, removing the scat is a prudent thing to do.”

I hadn’t expected him to say that. “What do you mean?”

He heaved a heavy, smelly sigh. “I’m a cat who lives in the wild. Think it through.”

Then he jumped and I cringed as he headed right toward me. He landed beside me, chuckled and vanished through the tall grass.

He’d gotten me again. He loved that. He’d probably been planning to jump near me through the entire conversation, his back feet tucked beneath him and poised, even though his front half looked relaxed.

He wasn’t going to give me any more. He felt he didn’t need to.

Cats in the wild.

Cat poop in the wild.

Hell, cat poop in the house. Cats were all the same.

They buried their poop so no one could track them.

The problem wasn’t the poop thief.

The poop thief was protecting the wannabes from something else. Something that tracked through scat.

Something that wasn’t human.

I swore and bolted out of the habitat.

I needed my research computer, and I needed it now.

***

Very few things targeted familiars—or perhaps I should say very few non-human things. And I’d never heard of anything that targeted wannabes, because a wannabe’s power, while considerable, wasn’t really honed.

Wannabes were, for lack of a better term, the virgins of the familiar world.

And nothing targeted virgins (not even those stupid civilian terrorists. They got virgins as a reward).

So when I got out of the habitat, I had the computer search for strange creatures or things that targeted virgins. I got nothing.

Except the search engine, asking me a pointed electronic question:

Do you mean things that prefer virgins?

And I, on a frustrated whim, typed yes.

What I got was unicorns. Unicorns preferred virgins. In fact, unicorns would only appear to virgins. In fact, unicorns drew their magic from virgins.

But the magic was pure and sweet and hearts and flowers and Hello Kitty and anything else treacly that you could think of.

Except if the unicorn had become rabid.

I clicked on the link, found several scholarly articles on rabies in unicorns. Rabid unicorns were slightly crazed. But more than that, they had no powers because no virgin (no matter how stupid) was going to go near a horse-sized creature that shouted obscenities and foamed at the mouth.

That was stage one of the rabies. Unlike rabies in non-magical creatures, rabies in unicorns (and centaurs and minotaurs and any other magical animal) manifested in temporary insanity, followed by darkness and pure evil.

The craziness, in other words, went away, leaving nastiness in its wake.

Minotaurs, centaurs, and other such creatures attacked each other. They stole from the nearest mage—or enthralled him, stealing his magic before they killed him.

But unicorns…

Unicorns still needed virgins.

And the only solution was to steal the powers of wannabe familiars.

Provided, of course, that the unicorn could find them.

And unicorns, like most other animals, hunted by scat.

***

I wish I could say I got my giant unicorn-killing musket out of mothballs and carried it through an enchanted forest, hunting a brilliant yet evil unicorn that wanted to devour the untamed magic of wannabe familiars.

I wish I could say I was the one who shot that unicorn with a bullet of pure silver and then got photographed with one foot on its side and the other on the ground, leaning on my musket like hunters of old.

I wish I could say I was the one who cut off its horn, then snapped the thing in half, watching the dark magic dissipate as if it never was.

But I can’t.

Technically, I’m not allowed to leave the store.

So I had to call in the Homeland Security—Magical Branch anyway. I could have called the local mage police, but I wasn’t sure where this unicorn was operating, and HS-MB had contacts worldwide.

They found four rabid unicorns all in the same forest, somewhere in Russia, along with a few rabid squirrels (probably the source of the infection) and a rabid magical faun that was going around murdering all the bears for sport.

The unicorns died along with the squirrels and that faun. The poop reappeared in my computer system, and went back through the normal channels. That week, we made double our money on magical fertilizer, which was good since we’d made none the week before.

All seemed right with the magical world.

Except one thing.

I dragged Fiona to her habitat so I could confront both her and Roy.

They usually didn’t spend much time together. They blamed it on not really having a pride, but I knew the problem was Fiona. She hated having to hunt for him, then watch him eat the best parts.

She hated most things about feline life and once muttered, as yet another well adjusted young mage took a domestic cat as her familiar, that she wished she were small and cute and cuddly.

She had to fetch Roy. He wasn’t going to come. He hadn’t even attacked me as I entered the habitat—probably because Fiona was with me.

I waited as he climbed to the top of his rock, then assumed the same position he’d been in before he jumped at me. Only this time I was prepared. I had my sunglasses and my water bottle.

I also stood a few feet to the right of my previous position, a place he couldn’t get to from the top of that rock.

Fiona sat at the base of the rock, beneath the outcropping, in the only stretch of shade in this part of the plain.

“You want to tell me how you did it?” I asked when Roy finally got comfortable. He sent me an annoyed look when he realized that I had stationed myself outside of his range. “You knew that there was a rabid unicorn after wannabes, and you somehow got the entire group at Familiar Faces to cooperate with you, all without leaving your habitat.”

Then I looked at Fiona. She had left the habitat. She left it every single day.

The tip of her tail twitched, and she tilted her head ever so slightly, her eyes twinkling. But she said nothing.

Roy preened. He licked a paw, then wiped his face. Finally he looked at me, the hairs of his mane in place, looking as majestic as a lion should.

“I am king of the jungle,” he said.

This is a plain, I wanted to point out, but I didn’t for fear of silencing him. Instead I said, “Yet some of the other familiars don’t live in habitats like yours. The snakes, for example.”

He yawned. “The unicorn wasn’t after them.”

“But the animals?” I asked.

He closed his great mouth, then leaned his head downward, so that his gaze met mine. “The Russian Blues are refugees. You didn’t know that, did you?”

I got two domestic cats—purebred Russian Blues. Most purebred cats aren’t familiars—they have the magic bred out of them with all the other mixed genes—but these Blues were amazing. And pretty. And not that willing to talk, even when they knew it was the price of gaining a mage.

“Refugees?” I said. “They were adopted before?”

“Their mages murdered by the new secret police for being terrorists. I thought you checked all of this out.”

I tried to, but I never could. Animal histories weren’t always that easy to find.

“They’d heard rumors about something rabid getting into an enchanted forest somewhere in deepest darkest Russia. Then some young familiars—what you call wannabes—withered and died as their powers were sucked from them over a period of months.”

He tilted his head, as if I could finish his thought.

And I could.

“So the Blues suspected unicorns,” I said.

“There were always rumors of unicorns in that forest,” he said, “but of course, none of us had ever seen them. For normal unicorns, you need virginal humans. None of us had encountered abnormal unicorns before.”

I did the math. The Blues had arrived last Thursday, which was the last day Carmen had worked before Tuesday, when she discovered the problem.

“You went into protect mode immediately,” I said.

“It is my pride, whether you admit it or not.”

I didn’t admit it, but I understood how he thought so. He needed a tribe to rule, so he invented one.

“I still don’t understand what happened. You don’t have the magic to make other animals’ poop disappear.”

“But they do,” he said.

“I know that.” I tried not to sound annoyed. He was toying with me again. I hated being a victim of cat playfulness.

“So how did you tell them what to do?”

He opened his mouth slightly, in that cat-grin of his. Then he got up, shook his mane, and walked back down the rock. He vanished in the tall grass, disappearing against its brownness as if he had never been.

“He could tell me,” I said.

“No, he can’t.” Fiona hadn’t moved.

I let out a small sigh. He hadn’t been toying with me. She had.

“You did it,” I said.

“Me and the bees,” she said. “They’re creating quite a little communications network with those hive minds of theirs. They send little scouts into the other habitats every single time you go from one to the other. The ants too. You really should be more careful.”

I felt a little frisson of worry. I had had no idea. I didn’t want the bees to get delusions of grandeur. I already had to deal with Roy.

“You told them to spread the word.”

She nodded.

“And you told them how the animals could hide their poop.”

She inclined her head as regally—more regally—than Roy ever could.

“Why?” I asked. “You had no guarantee of a threat.”

“This is the biggest gathering of the Hopeful on the globe,” she said. “Of course we are a target.”

She was right. I sighed, took a sip from my water bottle, and frowned. This entire event had opened my eyes to a lot of scary possibilities, things I had never considered.

We were going to have to rethink the way we handled waste. We were going to have to protect the poop somehow, and I didn’t want to consult HS-MB about that. They’d have to hold hearings, and the wrong someone could be sitting in.

I didn’t want us to become a magical terrorism target, nor did I want us to be a target for every rabid unicorn in the world.

I would have to set up the systems myself.

“You need me,” Fiona said, “whether you like it or not. You can’t have pretend familiars. You need a real one.”

She was making a pitch. Cats never did that. Or they only did so if they believed something was important.

“Why here?” I asked. “I’ve found you some pretty spectacular possible mage partners, and you’ve turned them down.”

She wrapped her tail around her paws and stared at me. For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer.

Then she said, “This is my pride. Roy might think it his, but he’s a typical lion. He thinks he’s in charge, when I do all the work.”

She raised her chin. That tuft of hair that all lionesses had beneath looked more like a mane in the shade than it ever had. It made her look regal.

“Well,” she added, “I’m not a typical lioness, content to hunt for her man and to feel happy when he fathers a litter of kittens on her only to run them out when they threaten his little kingdom. I don’t want children. And I want to eat first.”

“You can do that with other mages,” I said.

“But I won’t have a pride. Don’t you see? I’m the one who spoke to the Blues. I’m the one who keeps track of those silly mice—even though I want to eat them—and I’m the one who calms the elephant whenever she has the vapors. No one credits me for it, of course, but it’s time they should.”

No one, meaning me. I hadn’t noticed, and Fiona was bitter. Or maybe she just felt that I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain.

“Besides,” she said, “it’s hot in here. Can we go back to the air conditioning?”

I laughed and stepped out of the habitat. She followed.

“I’ll petition the mage gods,” I said.

“I already did.” She was walking beside me as we headed toward the front room. “They said yes. I put their response under the cash register.”

We went through the portal. The mice were having a party on top of the cheese books. One of the snakes was dancing too, trying to come out of its basket like a charmed snake from the movies. The dance was a bit pathetic, since the snake was the wrong kind. It was the tiniest of my garden snakes.

They all stopped when they saw me. I looked toward the mall’s interior. The customer door was closed and locked and the main lights were off. The closed sign sat in the window.

Carmen had gone home long ago.

I went to the cash register and felt underneath it. Some dust, some old gum—and yes, a response from the mage gods, dated months ago.

“You took a long time to tell me this,” I said to Fiona.

She wrapped herself around the counter. “You should clean more.”

Come to think of it, a few months before was when she really started muttering her protests out loud. In English. She was doing everything felinely possible except blurting it out that she was now my familiar.

I had never heard of a familiar picking a mage.

Although that wasn’t really true. The familiars always made their preferences known. I knew how to read the signs. For everyone, it seemed, but me.

“Do you regret this?” Fiona asked quietly.

“Hell, no,” I said. “Your brilliance averted a major international incident and saved the lives of hundreds of familiars.”

“Don’t you think that makes me deserving of some salmon?”

I almost said I think that makes you deserving of anything you damn well please, and then I remembered that I was talking to a cat. A large, independent-minded, magical cat, but a cat all the same.

“Salmon it is,” I said and snapped a finger. A plate appeared with the thickest, juiciest salmon steak I could conjure.

I set it down next to her.

“Next time,” she said, “you’re taking me out.”

“Restaurants don’t allow animals,” I said. “At least, not in Chicago.”

“I wasn’t talking about a restaurant,” she said. “I meant a salmon fishery or perhaps one of those spawning grounds in the wild. I heard there’s a species of lion who hunts those grounds.”

“Sea lions,” I said. “You’re not related.”

She chuckled, then wrapped her tail around my legs, nearly knocking me over. Affection from my lioness.

From my familiar.

However I had expected my day to end, it hadn’t been like this.

Carmen was right. This day had been weird.

But good.

“So are you going to promise to take me to a fishery after the next time I save lives?” Fiona asked.

“I suppose,” I said, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

Fiona licked her lips and closed her eyes. The mice started dancing all over again, and chimpanzees came out of the back to see what the commotion was.

After a weird day, a normal night.

And I found, to my surprise, that I preferred normal to weird.

Maybe I was getting soft.

Maybe I was getting older.

Or maybe I had just realized that I was a mage with a familiar, a powerful smart familiar, one I could appreciate.

One who would keep me and my animals safe.

One who would rule her pride with efficiency and not a little playfulness.

I could live with that.

I had a hunch she could too.

 

___________________________________________

“The Poop Thief” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Poop Thief

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Enchantment Place, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, 2008
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Kodo34/Dreamstime

 

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Flex.

The stream didn’t glow. I stared at it some more, but I was getting only clear water. It flowed from a gap in the rock, forming a narrow but deep current that ran across a massive cavern.

Chomp, chomp…

“Will you please quit doing that?”

Bear raised her bloody muzzle from the stalker’s body and gave me a puzzled look.

“I mean it.”

She licked her lips.

We’d been moving through the tunnels for hours. I lost count of how many stalkers we’d killed. We ran across two silverfish bug things and killed them too. This latest trio of two females and a male died a couple hundred feet into the passageway and I carried the largest body to the stream.

Bear had developed a disturbing liking for stalker meat. Every time we had a fight, and I got distracted, she chomped on bodies like they were premium dog food. She tried to eat the bugs too, but they must’ve tasted foul because she took a bite and never went back for seconds. I had stuck to candy so far, but the Kit-Kat bar was a distant memory. We had run out of water hours ago.

I looked at the stream again. Bear padded next to me, looked at the water, and whined. She’d tried to drink already but I stopped her.

In a perfect world, I would have boiled the water, but I didn’t have any way to make a fire. And even if I could, my plastic hard hat was the only vessel we had. It would melt. Well, I could probably boil water in a canteen… It was moot anyway. I didn’t have a lighter or any fuel. What I had was two empty canteens and a very thirsty dog, who was currently dancing on the bank in anticipation.

 Fuck it.

I nodded at the stream. “Go get it.”

The shepherd bounded to the bank and began lapping up the water, splashing it all over the place.

“Is any of that actually getting into your mouth?”

Bear paused to give me a look and went back to drinking.

I scooted upstream and dipped my hands into the breach water. The stalker blood faded a little. I scrubbed my fingers. There was dark grime under my fingernails, and I shuddered to think what kind of bacteria was breeding there.

I cleaned my hands as best I could, cupped them, and brought some water to my mouth. It tasted clean and cold. Thank god for small favors.

I filled both canteens, filled my hat, and poured it over my coveralls, trying to wash the dried blood from the neoprene. It took forever.  Finally, I straightened. Bear lay next to the water, twitching her left ear.

“We drank, we showered, it’s time for a feast.”

I walked over to the stalker’s corpse, crouched, shifted my sword into a knife, and paused. Bear had been eating them along the way every chance she got, and so far she didn’t have any shivers.

Mmm, raw alien meat.

I didn’t have any choice. If we had found some plants or fruits that were safe, I would have eaten that, but the caves offered mostly fungi. They were conveniently glowing and hellishly poisonous.

“Stalker. It’s what’s for dinner.”

Bear panted.

I stabbed the stalker and gutted it. I was never a hunter. The only skinning I had ever done was limited to removing the skin from chicken thighs from the grocery store. Getting the pelt off took a while. Finally, I cut a ham free and tossed it to Bear.  The shepherd chomped on it.

I carved a paper-thin slice from the other leg and sniffed it. It smelled kind of gamey. Disgusting. It smelled disgusting. Back home, I bought a special composite cutting board just for raw chicken, because I could put it through the dishwasher. All of my wooden cutting boards were scrubbed after each use, and all of my meat was cooked to the correct temperature. I owned three cooking thermometers.

This meat was raw. Not rare. Just raw.

“Tacos would be so nice right now. Or shepherd’s pie. I make really good shepherd’s pie, with creamy mashed potatoes and a crust of melted cheese on top.”

Bear chewed on the stalker ham.

“You know what my favorite dessert is? Sometimes, when life’s too hard, I go to Dairy Queen and get a Turtle Pecan Cluster Blizzard. It has pecans and little bits of chocolate. I don’t really like pecans, and I’m not much of a chocoholic, but there is something about that Blizzard. I could so use one right now.”

My stomach was begging for calories. I’d been hiking for days by now and between the hikes I’d been fighting for my life. My body kept healing my wounds, and all that regeneration had to have a caloric cost.

I was starving. Everything ached. If I flexed right now, the meat would be bright red. I had to eat, or I would become someone else’s dinner. I couldn’t afford weakness.

I surrendered to my fate and bit into the thin slice.

No flash of pain. No broken glass. It tasted vile and it stank, but it was meat. I was squatting by the river in a breach and eating raw meat. I’d gone completely feral.

I would make it out of this cave, and then I would never think of this again.

I chewed the meat and tried to think of something else. Luckily for me, I had plenty to ponder.

When we crossed the stone bridge out of that small cave, I sensed something. It was far in the distance, hidden behind countless cave walls and solid stone, a cluster of… something. I couldn’t quite describe it. It felt almost like a hot magnet. It pulled on me, but not in a pleasant way. It was more like a psychic ache, like a splinter that got stuck in my awareness and now throbbed.

The stalkers and other creatures had kept me busy, so I mostly noted it and kept moving. But right now, with no distractions, it nagged on me. It could’ve been anything, but the most plausible explanation was usually the right one.

I’d become aware of the anchor.

Most of the gate divers never felt the anchor. That awareness usually came with extraordinary power particular to top tier Talents. Not all the top tier guildmembers could feel the anchor, but everyone who felt it was in the upper slice of the talent pool.

I leaned over the stream and tried to look at my reflection. I couldn’t really see myself.  The light was too diffused. My arms and legs didn’t look that different, but then I was wearing coveralls.

I would have to find a reflective surface somewhere. I didn’t want to dwell on it. As long as I still looked enough like myself to be recognized, I would be fine.

The bigger problem was the anchor. It was closer now than when we started. We were walking toward it. I didn’t want to go toward the anchor. I wanted to go toward the gate and the exit. But right now, I didn’t have much choice. Even if I wanted to backtrack, I couldn’t. We had threaded the labyrinth of the tunnels like a needle, and I didn’t remember the way back.

The assault team had taken a route to the anchor that led away from the mining site. In theory, if I found the anchor chamber, I could try to find that route and use it to reach the gate. However, the closer you go to the anchor, the more difficult the fights became.

I had two choices: to wander aimlessly in these caves or to head for the anchor. Even if I failed to find the route the first assault team had taken, eventually Cold Chaos would send in the second-strike team. Joining up with them would be too dangerous. Cold Chaos wanted me dead. But I could either retrace their steps or follow them to the gate, staying out of sight. I’d gotten very good at moving quietly.

The anchor was the only logical choice. I would have to chance it. At least I had a direction now.

Fifteen minutes later, Bear departed to poop in the corner by some rocks and came back.

“Good to go?”

The dog waved her tail.

Maybe we could take a breather…

The cave wall by Bear’s poop moved.

“Come!” I barked.

Bear ran over to me.

The wall trembled and broke apart, cascading to the floor.

I jumped over the stream. Bear leaped with me. We cleared fifteen feet and landed on the other bank.

Chunks of the wall streamed to the stalker carcass. I flexed. Bugs, about a foot across, with a chitin carapace that perfectly mimicked the stone.

I backed away.

The bug whirlpool broke open, revealing a bare skeleton. Not a shred of flesh remained. If we had fallen asleep here…

“I fucking hate this place. Come on Bear. Before the cave piranha bugs eat us too.”

I headed into the gloom, my loyal dog trotting at my side.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 7 Part 2 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

From the award-winning author of Birth, comes Access by Rebecca Grant, a journey into the…

The post Spotlight on “Access” by Rebecca Grant appeared first on LitStack.

If you stop skritching, I will kill you. Also, if you don’t.

Oooh, catch 22 FTW!

I like skritches and wouldn’t kill anyone.

Samesies. Not, that anyone ever skritches me.

Dramatic Purple Performance Piece! What? Did I miss something?

So, back in January of 2022, I did a post on Roy Thomas and the Marvel Conan comic he created in the seventies. I never read that comic. But for some reason in 2019, I decided to buy the first of what turned out to be his three memoirs about the series (mostly about the first 115 issues, which constituted his first run with Conan), and also one of the Marvel Omnibuses that had been put out recently. I ended up getting four of the high-quality Omnibuses, which are those 115 issues he covered in his books.

And I just finished, a couple years later, the first 100, which culminated with the death of Belit, from “Queen of the Black Coast.”

I also recently started the Savage Sword of  Conan Omnibus, which ran around the same time, and was black and white. It’s a more ‘literary Howard’ comic, and definitely different than the color Conan one (also less popular). 

Below is the original post I did. Then, an additional section, having read through the first hundred. I think this comic is definitely a must for Conan fans.  I prefer some of these stories to the Tor pastiches. They’re not all good, of course, but I have enjoyed my read through. And I cannot recommend enough, getting Thomas’ three books. Read one comic issue, then the accompanying short chapter from his book. It’s a terrific experience. Read on, MacDuff (a little literary malapropism for you).

One Black Gate series which I have started, but is still for somewhere down the line, is a look at the first dozen-or-so issues of Roy Thomas’ Conan the Barbarian comic. And even before running that series, I intend to write one for the second dozen-ish, so I can tie together the various overlaps. This was prompted by a combination of the over-sized Marvel hardback Omnibuses, and Roy Thomas’ TERRIFIC (now) three-volume memoir about the series, from Pulp Hero Press.

I never read the series, growing up. I bought some of the Dark Horse collections, which I liked. And when Marvel reacquired the rights and put out that first door-stopper compendium, I bought it. And I liked it enough to get the next three. I was buying them in conjunction with Roy Thomas’ Barbarian Life. The first Thomas volume covered the genesis of the comic, and the first fifty-one issues – which happened to be the same ones included in the first Omnibus.

Thomas helmed the series for 115 issues – which is how many are covered by the first four Omnibuses (both series’ talk about other issues as well). So, Thomas’ three books complement the Omnibuses perfectly. I read a story, and then I read Thomas’ insights. Along with the relevant commentary in the Omnibus itself. It’s a real Conan treat!

Thomas would write other color Conans for Marvel, and return to it over the years. And he would also contribute to Dark Horse while they had the rights. But it’s that first run, when he was Stan Lee’s right hand, and he made Conan a best-selling property for Marvel, which fans revere.

At the same time, Thomas was running the black-and-white The Savage Sword of Conan, (originally Savage Tales. That’s another post some day)which was more risque, and told a more in-depth story (LOTS of words). It’s a very different experience than Conan the Barbarian, and Marvel has collected those in Omnibuses as well.

Conan the Barbarian ran for 275 issues, from 1970 to 1993. That’s pretty amazing, as when it debuted, Conan was not the well-known figure he is today.

Here’s an excerpt from the first part of the planned Black Gate series:

An awful lot of people were introduced to Robert E. Howard’s Conan (best known as ‘The Barbarian’) through L. Sprague de Camp’s paperback series first from Lancer, and then, Ace. They featured those fantastic Frank Frazetta covers that are still popular today.

And in the early eighties, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in two popular Conan movies that set the standard for fantasy movies until Peter Jackson’s amazing Lord of the Rings trilogy. The sword-swinging former governor of California is the image of Conan many people still have today.

In between those two ‘sources,’ came Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian, with Roy Thomas in charge for the first 115 issues of a much longer run.

De Camp is justly criticized for rewriting Howard’s prose: Robert E. Howard did not need to be ‘edited.’

He has taken somewhat less-justified abuse for the Conan pastiches he wrote – by himself, and with Lin Carter, and Byron Nyborg. While they certainly can be criticized, in general; they deserve to be more fairly assessed than they are, I feel. I like most of them.

While Director John Milius did incorporate some elements from Howard’s original stories, Schwarzenegger’s Conan is a far cry from the original creation. Thomas co-wrote a screenplay for the second Conan movie, but Milius didn’t use it. It forms the basis of The Horn of Azoth comic book, from Marvel.

And Roy Thomas and Barry Smith certainly created their own version in the comics. But Thomas liked Howard’s writing and included much of it. Even though it didn’t feature a superhero, Marvel’s comic was one of the most popular of the seventies and eighties, unlikely as that seems. As is the case with de Camp’s paperbacks and Schwarzenegger’s movies, the Conan comic book was how many people discovered the sword-swinging barbarian. And its importance in the history of Conan cannot be minimized.

I’ve always got a couple of things in the works for here at Black Gate, but I’d really like to get to this Marvel Conan the Barbarian (CtB) series. Is the comic canonical? – no. But Thomas really draws on the source material. And not just the original Conan stories. I’ve already written a 1,500-word essay on The Grim Grey God, which is one of my favorite REH historicals. And it was adapted for Marvel issue number three. It’s terrific! Thomas (with some effort and wrangling) also got to use some of de Camp’s stories as well.

I’ve read a LOT of Sherlock Holmes stories which have NOTHING to do with the original character. They’re complete bastardizations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creations. I’ve had several Holmes stories published, and I try very hard to write the character Doyle created.

Thomas’ Conan is recognizable as Howard’s Conan. No, not exactly the same. But he didn’t just slap the Conan name on a barbarian and draw whatever the heck he wanted to.

BTW – the series will talk about how it was almost Lin Carter’s Throngor, not Conan, that was going to be the hero of the strip. Circumstances barely conspired to result in it being Conan!

Each Omnibus has an introduction from Thomas, talking about the various issues. The comics themselves are in glorious color. I’ve seen some criticism of the quality of the reproduction. I think it’s fine. Easy to read with good lighting (my eyes are getting old – like me). The text is clear. Colors are distinctive. Seeing that splash page, and the color, full-size, is terrific!

There are a bunch of extras at the end of each book, including some artwork, essays by Thomas, and other miscellany. I believe that each volume has been about 800 pages of Conan goodness.

Thomas had written an extensive history of his Conan Marvel experiences for Spanish publication. That work was translated into English, revised, and expanded: and that makes up the three volumes of Barbarian Life. He shares his memories in each volume. Comments on the story, inker, problems, things he liked about them – just great stuff for a fan of the series. A ton of info.

So, the first four, with Thomas’ three-book series, gives you a detailed look at the first 115 issues; with additional topics covered. It’s no surprise Thomas talks a fair amount about his other Conan series, the black-and-white Savage Sword of Conan. And the Omnibuses even include an issue or two.

The Omnibuses are $125 when they come out, but they drop below $100 relatively quickly. They have sold out, though Titan seems to be republishing theri version. I haven’t gotten Volume 5, as it marks the beginning of the post-Thomas Era. Marvel’s King Conan, based on de Camp’s later pastiches, start coming out this summer in Omnibus form.

I really enjoy Thomas’ three books. They are a treat to read. And obviously, being able to read the issue he’s talking about makes it a better experience. I recommend his books, and the accompanying Omnibuses. I have paperbacks of Thomas’ books, for research purposes. But I also have the first two as e-books, and I love the color covers in them. They look great on my Kindle Fire.

Now, if I could get around to writing that series for Black Gate…

UPDATE – MAY 2025

I really enjoyed quite a few of the early issues. #3 was one of my favorite REH historicals, based on “The Grim Grey God. That was immediately followed by the classic “Tower of the Elephant.” #7 was “The God in the Bowl.”

Thomas continued to mix in non-Conan stories, and fragments, by Howard. “Queen of the Black Coast is one of the most popular Conan tales. Thomas built his tenure around this story. Issue #57 was devoted to what resulted in the opening of “Queen,” ending with Conan galloping towards the docks. #48 recounts the first part of Howard’s story, with Conan joining Belit’s crew on the Tigress, and becoming Amra (The lion).

Thomas would get to the second and concluding part, 43 issues later in #100 (in a double-length issue). There were flashbacks, and a few solo adventures, but he had Conan and Belit adventure for about three and-a-half years. Thomas comments that the Miller and Clark timeline (tacitly endorsed by Howard himself) had them roaming for three years.

But there’s plenty of Conan and Belit in this first hundred issues. Belit and Red Sonja (who in Howard’s original stories is nothing like the chainmail bikini clad warrior here) appear in a few issues together. They do not become bffs.

Elric of Melnibone comes by (twice, I think). A John Jakes plot is used, but it’s not one of Brak the Barbarian’s. Thoth Amon emerges as a foe of Conan.

El Borak, Steve Clarney, and Kull, are among those REH characters whose stories are converted to Conan. And many one-off REH stories. Literary estate executor Glenn Lord worked well with Thomas, allowing Marvel to buy the rights to use many REH works (originally Marvel had the character, but not the Conan stories, though that changed).

There’s plenty of original Conan, but it’s cool to see so much Howard – and other writers’, including Norvell Page (separate post coming on that one). I enjoy reading non-Conan stories, such as “Out of the Deep,” rewritten for Conan (that’s a cool Weird Menace story).

I am going to switch over and read some Savage Sword of Conan, having bought the first two Omnibuses. I also skipped over most of the included Annuals, added to the end of each Omnibus. Volume Three had and Annual with the first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” which has always been a favorite of mine.

I’ll get back to the final fifteen Thomas stories, which are post-Belit.

But I think that the Conan comic was quite good. If you’re going to check it out, I HIGHLY recommend getting at least Thomas’ first memoir. The books absolutely enhance the experience, issue by issue.

Jeffrey Talanian wrote an essay on Thomas and Conan, which you can read here.

And, this page has ALL of my Robert E. Howard essays here at Black Gate. I’ve written quite a bit.

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXVII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

The Forever War (Ballantine Books, 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman

Rich Horton continues to review classic science fiction novels at his blog, Strange at Ecbatan. Last month he turned his attention to Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, on the 50th anniversary of its release.

It’s definitely worth reading — a bitter and cynical look at war, some cool ideas including the effect of time dilation and lots of physics, a somewhat transcendent but pretty creepy conclusion. And, also, some very ’70s things, including pretty questionable — at times downright offensive — “sexual revolution” era sexual politics, and oddly 70s-ish notions of dystopia. My impression… I liked it then and I endorsed its Hugo and Nebula wins.

The Forever War is one of the most honored science fiction novels of all time. First published by St. Martin’s Press in 1975, it swept every major SF Award, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. In 1987 it placed 18th on Locus’ list of All-Time Best SF Novels, beating out The Martian Chronicles, Starship Troopers, and Rendezvous with Rama. It’s been in print nearly continuously for the last four and a half decades. Here’s some of the most noteworthy editions.

[Click the images for bigger versions.]

Three decades of The Forever War. First row: Orbit (1976), the first unexpurgated edition (Avon, 1991),
and the Gollancz SF Masterworks edition, with Author Notes (1999). Covers by Patrick Woodroffe,
Dorian Vallejo, and Chris Moore. Second row: Eos (2003), St. Martin’s Griffin (2009), and
Open Road (2014). Covers by Jim Burns, Tomislav Tikulin, and Michel Vrana.

So what’s the book about? Here’s Rich again.

William Mandella is drafted into a war against the aliens, there are several very impressive battle scenes, he falls in love with fellow soldier Marygay Potter, they are separated by time dilation, the war ends when it is realized the whole thing was a mistake due to poor communication, Marygay waits for William by flying back and forth in a spaceship until time dilation means their timelines are synchronized again…

What did I think on a reread? It’s still a pretty effective book. The telling is cynical in a totally believable way. The Army scenes ring very true — and Haldeman would certainly be a better authority than me anyway. The soldiers are foulmouthed, dislike their commanding officers, but fairly disciplined if only because the alternative is dying…

It’s very exciting, and well-written. The battle setups are interesting, and seem like a plausible use of the technology Haldeman invents. Some of this tech is pretty implausible, but in an almost believable fashion. The new section, originally called “You Can Never Go Back”, concerns William and Marygay’s return to Earth after their battles, at which time they are eligible to muster out. They describe at thoroughly decayed Earth society, in a very ’70s fashion. Homosexuality is [encouraged] as a population control measure (though — as Mandella even points out — birth control is pretty easy to enforce anyway.) Haldeman’s depiction of homosexuality is mostly positive, I suppose, but there are some cliches, which I understand he regretted in later years. The rest of the depiction of Earth at that time seems a bit over the top — but partly it’s a device to make it plausible that the two of them reup.

As Rich notes in his review, the early (pre-1991) editions of The Forever War were significantly abridged, omitting the entire middle section. The 1991 edition restored most of the expurgated sections, but left some some clumsy changes from the early edits intact. It wasn’t until 1997 that Avon published a version that Haldeman considered definitive.

See the complete details on the publishing history of The Forever War here at Black Gate, and read Rich’s complete review at his blog here.

I’ve become quite bad at updating, and I’ve added a prompt in my diary to write something at the end of every month.

This is a catchup, so what has happened this year?

The Long Way Home

The fourth book of the series, Don’t Stop Now, has been finished and edited and is sitting on the Amazon servers collecting pre-orders.

https://mybook.to/TLWH4-DSN

This takes the intrepid crew of the Dark Phoenix (formerly the Acid Penguin) into the heart of the Inner Worlds. Those star systems aren’t as rich and stable as Jan and Bjorn expected, and the best flow of commerce is all against their direction of travel.

But they find one good turn deserves…

Ah. Not quite. Well, it would be difficult to say they get an easy good turn back, but life does become very shady and interesting for a while.

And then they’re in the depths of the Inner Worlds, where evil and corruption sink into the very fabric of star systems.

Warning, this book ends on a cliffhanger. Mwah ha ha ha!

I did write half of this on the newsletter, so followers there will recognize the early episodes. I’m not using the newsletter for TLWH any more. It made great sense at the time, but I can’t juggle so much these days.

There are a couple more books in this series to complete the arc of returning to Calloway and saving their colony (and rescuing that lost colony too).

I’ve also bundled the first 3 books together into a boxset. Link below.

https://mybook.to/TLWH-Boxset1

Amber Farrell – Paranormal PI – Bite Back

Well, I’m making progress with #9, but summer is here, and the delay in completing TLWH4 means that BB9 is slipping from Q3 to Q4 this year. As ever, there are a tangle of threads to weave into order and the pace has to be kept up.

Amber and Bian have the initial meeting of the new Assembly to host in Denver, which itself is full of problems for both of them, but Amber also has to persuade the Were Confederation to attend, and she can’t simply ignore the war with Basilikos while the Assembly sits. Nor can she refuse to assist as Emergence seeps into the highest levels of government, not forgetting there’s the investigation of who exactly was behind the whole of Matlal’s undercover operation in the States … who gave the orders for her to be treated like a lab rat by the late Colonel Peterson? Who could be so high in the administration of the Department of Defence that they could authorize that?

And all the while, her friends are increasingly worried about her: her state of mind, and her soul itself.

Bite Back 9 is my highest writing priority this year. Big and twisty, folks.

In the background, I’ve also bundled all 8 books together in a boxset. There are readers out there who don’t want individual books, even long ones, they want LOTS and LOTS of words. It just so happens that the 8 major novels amount to over a million words, so that should keep them happy. If you know of any ‘whale readers’, here’s the link

https://mybook.to/BB-Boxset1-8

There are at least 2 more books in the Bite Back series.

And now to my poor orphans. Firstly, the other two series which I have promised I will get to…

Bian’s Tale

I loved writing the first book. (A good thing because my editor made me rewrite it about 3 times).

I loved the research, and it was necessary because 1890s Saigon isn’t the most accessible of eras & places. I have a huge box of books (some of them in French), videos in DVD and VHS(!) format, TV recordings, entire battered notebooks, travel guides, etc. etc.

I found the box stuffed away in the back of the attic a couple of weeks ago.

Why?

Because when I released Bian’s Tale 1, The Harvest of Lies… it disappeared with barely a ripple. I don’t think the writing is bad, or the setting is too unusual. (Although someone complained of the evidence of too much research, lol). But I think I got the marketing wrong (cover, advertising etc.).

While I was still finding that out, for a few weeks, I was running on the enthusiasm of the first book, and outlined five others, and I wrote some of book 2, The Words of the Dead. Then I put it aside because the response to book 1 was so bad, and eventually I tidied the research away into the attic.

All that said, with the resurgence of Bite Back, now people are discovering The Harvest of Lies and complaining about the non-appearance of book 2.

I will return to The Words of the Dead. I hope next year. There are 5-6 books in the series which will take Bian through to the point where she is appointed Diakon of House Altau, with maybe an epilogue that shows Bian’s point of view at that first meeting with Amber described in Sleight of Hand.

The Harvest of Lies is at:

https://mybook.to/THoL

Among the Stars

Another orphan series. The first two books were written as episodes which I posted on WordPress and made available in newsletters.

Book 1, A Name Among the Stars, was a definite success. I wrote it as a bit of an experiment, which freed me from the concept of narrow genres and writing styles. Book 1 was a deliberate attempt to write a mash-up of a Regency romance and Science Fiction adventure, in the first person, in the present tense. It was great fun to write. I thought it was going to be a stand-alone, but enough people asked for more, and so I wrote A Theat Among the Stars. The complexity of the story required the addition of multiple PoV characters, with Zara remaining in the first person and other PoV characters speaking in the third person. All fun to write as well.

Readers liked A Threat Among the Stars, but not in the numbers to make book 3, A Ship Among the Stars, a high enough priority.

I have written some short stories which form part of book 3, and I do want to finish this series, but it’s definitely a ‘next year’ thing.

There are a couple more books in this series.

The first two are at:

https://mybook.to/Among_the_Stars

Other Orphans

Stand Up

An unnamed sequel to Change of Regime

Newsletter stories (monthly)

A host of others.

Yes. I know. I hate not finishing things. I will get through everything, but I started a slow writer and I haven’t got any faster!

I mentioned in January’s list that I had fewer books to recommend in February and March. I read a lot but didn’t finish some of the books, and the ones I did finish, I didn’t really like well enough to recommend. As I tell my writing students, you have to stick the landing. And some of those landings really missed. A few of the others just bored me. I faded out as I went along and realized I didn’t want to read the book anymore. (I do that by grabbing other books, starting those, and realizing that I’d rather be reading them.)

I have stories here from 2 different Best American Mystery & Suspense, but I’m not recommending either volume, since I didn’t read a lot of them. The stories seemed child-cruelty heavy or animal abuse heavy, and I’m not really into either of those things. And there’s some I’m not fond of the kind of noir in either of them. So it’s up to you if you get these two volumes. 

So here’s what I liked back in February…

 

February 2025

Bernier, Ashley-Ruth M., “Ripen,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023,  edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. When editors are lazy with the Best Americans and do not put the stories in any kind of reading order, the opening story is a real crapshoot. I’m always braced for something that does not give me any ideas as to the way the volume will go. As a result, I approach the first story with trepidation, and usually that trepidation is justified.

In this volume, though, the first story, “Ripen,” is well written, powerful, and memorable. I was happily surprised by the entire thing. The setting is rich, the characters vivid, and the story itself strong. Read this one.

Cho, Winston, “AI: The Ghost in Hollywood’s Machine,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 13, 2024. (This story online has a different title.) Fascinating piece that could have been written about any emerging technology, really. AI will change how business gets done all over the planet (is changing?), and Hollywood is no different. It will make some things easier to “film” such as massive crowd scenes (already is, in fact) but it might cost a lot of jobs. As in a lot of jobs. And the kind that normally don’t get taken by technological change…as in the jobs of creatives. I think we’ll see a lot of these articles in the future as we try to figure out how to live with this newest thing in our lives.

Cobo, Leila, “Guarding Celia Cruz’s Legacy,” Billboard January 11, 2025. Fascinating interview with Omer Pardillo, who manages the Celia Cruz estate. It’s about how he got the job, how he goes about maintaining the estate, and the heart of the estate. He lists where the revenue comes from. He says it’s mostly from recording royalties and brand partnerships. It’s really fun to see his joy at all of the success the estate’s been having. At one point, he states that it’s not bad for an artist who’s been dead for 21 years.

Cole, Alyssa, “Just a Girl,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby, Mariner Books, 2024. This story, written as a series of online TikTok posts, DMs, texts, emails, and online articles, is devastating and heartbreaking and extremely powerful. Tiana, her first year in college during Covid, starts posting updates on TikTok, and gaining a following. She tries a dating app, encounters a gross guy, and calls his yuckiness out on her TikTok…and then he and his friends start going after her. Everything spirals after that. What’s amazing about this story is that you can see the joy leaching from this young woman as she realizes how terrible the world can be—and how dangerous it is for young beautiful women. Highly recommended.

Freimor, Jacqueline, “Forward,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023,  edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. Normally, I wouldn’t read a story that looked dense and difficult, but the format (and the footnotes) are the point of the story. It’s an amazing work of fiction, with a great reveal. Yes, it takes concentration to read it, but it’s really worthwhile.

McClintock, Pamela, “Ryan Reynolds Multitasks Like a Mofo,” The Hollywood Reporter,  December 13, 2024. There’s a lot of fascinating quotes in this interview with Ryan Reynolds, whom The Hollywood Reporter dubbed their Producer of the Year. He does a variety of things besides act, and seems to enjoy all of them. The quote I like the most is at the end:

…it’s all an emotional investment. If you can create emotional investment in anything, any brand, it creates a moat around that brand that really, I think, facilitates the resilience and allows it to weather the storms in the bad times. And yes, that’s the part I love.

I think I love it too, although not as much as actual writing and making things up. Still, lots of good stuff to think about in this interview.

Zeitchik, Steven,“The Other Rebuild,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 17, 2025. 2025 has been such a shitshow already it’s hard to remember that the LA Fires happened only a few months ago. We seem to be moving from tragedy to tragedy, heartbreak to heartbreak, every single day, and we lose track of what others have gone through. A number of my friends went through the fires and fortunately, in this round of the climate change blues, very few of them lost their homes. (I can’t say that about previous California fires.) But everyone’s mental health took a nosedive. Many moved to different digs in the same town while others are leaving their LA h

Scream, Blacula, Scream (American International Pictures, June 27, 1973)

20 vampire films, all first time watches for me.

Come on — sink ’em in.

Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973) – Tubi

I’ve seen Blacula (1970) plenty of times, but somehow never got around to watching the sequel, and thank the stars I did, because it’s excellent. I think I like it even more than the original.

If you are new to this nonsense, the original film told the tale of an African prince who is bitten by Dracula and becomes a bloodsucking fiend on the streets of L.A., tapping all jive turkeys he comes across. It’s obviously a product of the Blaxploitation era, but its dodgy premise is saved by the presence of William Marshall. For my money, Marshall can stand toe-to-toe with Christopher Lee as one of my favorite depictions of the count (so to speak). Like Lee, he brings much gravitas, animalistic savagery, and raw sex appeal to the role, along with one of the best voices in the business.

This sequel though has the added bonus of Pam Grier at her height of acting skill and gorgeousness, and a voodoo sub-plot that adds an extra layer to what is ultimately a tragedy. Marshall brilliantly walks the line between monster and victim, and it doesn’t matter how many other players are in the scene, he and Grier keep you mesmerized.

A wonderful start to a new project — onwards and upwards!

8/10

Blood Shot (Infinite Justice Productions, 2013) and Night Teeth (Netflix, October 20, 2021)

Blood Shot (2013) – Prime

Nope, not the quickly forgotten Vin Diesel actioner from four years ago, nor the other Blood Shot from 2013 starring Danny Dyer, this one is a straight to video chunk of sparkly tomfoolery featuring brief cameos from a lot of actors who need new patios.

In a nutshell, the CIA has a special division that employs the services of the last living vampire to take out terrorist threats to the US of A. This vampire (Michael Bailey Smith — wonderful) is a wise-cracking brute of a Nosferatu, and an effective hitman (bitman?). However, his missions are often hampered by a dogged detective, played with maximum grizzledness by Brennan Elliott, who is determined to kill the vamp. His attempts to kill the bloodsucker grow successively funnier as he exhausts his collection of tricks (garlic-filled shotgun shells etc.), all the while getting the snot kicked out of him. Things come to a head when a nefarious gang on a manic jihad arrive in the city, ready to unleash a nuclear bomb, and the vampire and detective must reluctantly team up to take them down.

First of all, I wasn’t expecting anything from this, but I had a splendid time. The snippy buddy-cop routine between the two leads was excellent and there were some genuinely funny moments.

It’s not all YIKES-free though.

A close squint at the poster will reveal Brad Dourif in brown-face and hook-nose prosthetic as ‘Bob’, the jihad organizer whose real name is too long so everyone shortens it. He’s not the only white actor playing a character of Middle-Eastern descent, so be forewarned. It’s a bizarre decision, but perhaps in keeping with the irreverent nature of the story. Also, if you do decide to take a look, don’t be put off by the seizure-inducing first 10 mins. It settles down quickly, possibly because the editor got tired or had to go to hospital.

A cautious recommendation.

7/10

Night Teeth (2021) – Netflix

First up, I don’t like this title. It’s awkward to say and isn’t very interesting. Secondly, this is a Netflix film, and I like that they are producing so many films and giving newish directors a crack, but I’ve reached the point where they all look the same to me. Same lighting, same editing, same polished ‘product.’

That’s what they’re knocking out. Not films. Content.

Anyhoo, on a more positive note, I liked the idea of L.A. being split into five, vampire-run, districts, and one uppity bloodsucker attempting a coup during the course of one night. The monster on the power trip is Victor (of course), played by Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy of GoT), and he has sent his faithful hitwomen out to do the dirty deeds. The bitey ladies, Zoe (Lucy Fry) and Blaire (Debbie Ryan) need a driver for the night, and the hapless Benny (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) ends up filling in for his brother, who is up to shenanigans. As Benny drives the women from slaying to slaying, he slowly figures out what is going on, and then has to fight for survival.

It’s a potpourri of borrowed ideas from the likes of the Underworld and John Wick films (especially the secret society with rules), and could have been spectacular, but leaden writing and wooden delivery (particularly from Sidney Sweeney and Megan Fox in a 5-minute cameo) let it down. I was really impressed with Ryan and Lendeborg Jr. though, and could stand to see them in more projects.

Recommended if you like glitz and exposition.

6/10

Vampires on Bikini Beach (Beacon Films, 1988) and Dracula:
The Original Living Vampire (The Asylum, January 28, 2022)

Vampires on Bikini Beach (1988) – Tubi

Remember the 80s? That glorious time when the best vampire films came out? Fright Night, Near Dark, Lost Boys, Innocent Blood, Vamp, et al. What a time. Anyhoo, writer/producer/director Mark Headley thought “Hey, folks love vampire flicks, and they like bikinis, and my pal needs an 80-minute promo video for his dull band, I got it!” and so this film came to be, and it was bad.

Here’s the skinny: some boring teens find a boring book that has something to do with some boring vampires in the most boring parts of Venice Beach. Boredom ensues.

It’s so shoddily written, acted and filmed, that it can’t even be considered as a ‘so bad it’s good’ flick; it’s just aggressively rubbish. It’s the first hate-watch I’ve done in a while, which is amazing considering all the crap I watch.

Recommended.

1/10

Dracula: The Original Living Vampire (2022) – Prime

Cue arguments about whether vampires are technically ‘living.’

Anyhoo, when the words ‘The Asylum presents’ flash up on screen, they tend to trigger a Pavlovian response in that my expectations are immediately quashed. This is a very healthy attitude, and can sometimes lead to a pleasant surprise. Not this time, however.

D:tOLV is a weird film. It really doesn’t know what it wants to be — a horror film, police procedural, or a comedy. I don’t suspect the latter was intentional. It allegedly takes place in the UK, which for some reason is depicted as a turn of the (previous) century Austrian town transplanted to the Carpathians, complete with mountain-top castle. The clothing is early 20th C, houses are lit by candle light and some bulbs, Van Helsing carries a luger, and characters say stuff like ‘it’s above my paygrade.’

Anachronisms aside, it’s an interesting twist on the tale. Amelia Van Helsing is a police detective working with Captain Renfield. Amelia works closely with mortician Dr Seward (Michael Ironside, briefly phoning it in), and chemist Jonathan Harker, as the group tries to solve the murders of a bevy of red-haired women, all drained of blood. When Van Helsing’s girlfriend, Mina, gets targeted by Drac, they must rally forth and get on with some slaying.

This premise is let down by some pretty bland acting (Amelia and Dracula in particular were wrongly cast) and a great deal of dull conversation. I mean, a LOT of conversation. 50% of the film is Harker and Van Helsing pulling a Mulder and Sculley – the twist being that Van Helsing doesn’t believe any of it. The other 50% is filled with Seward talking to himself, some lacklustre action, and a couple of sex scenes to ensure there are some knockers for the foreign markets. Wasted potential.

Minus another point for the bad grammar on the poster.

4/10

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (Universal Pictures, August 11, 2023)
and The Velvet Vampire (New World Pictures, June 1971)

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) – Prime

The untold story of the doomed Demeter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula has long been a gothic tease for horror fans. It has been touched upon in other films (and was my favorite part of the recent Dracula adaptation by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat), but my anticipation was riding high when I heard André Øvredal was directing a version of the story. Øvredal is responsible for Troll Hunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe, two of my favorite films, and with a cast fleshed out by the likes of Liam Cunningham and Corey Hawkins, how could it go wrong? Well, it didn’t, but it also didn’t go spectacularly either.

It looks good, and the performances are great, but there was something about it that didn’t quite work for me. Perhaps it was the repetitive, episodic feel of crewmembers being bumped off one by one while exposed on the deck during the night watch, maybe it was Dracula himself. I loved the design of the vampire, but his face didn’t do it for me. His savagery was undeniable though, and the effects, a seamless blend of practical and CG, were top notch. Hawkins’ character, Clemens, offered up an interesting angle being not only a man of science, but also black, in a time when Eastern Europeans would have been remarkably intolerant. He does touch upon this, but I feel it could have been explored further.

Cunningham is the captain of the ship in every sense of the word, elevating every scene he is in, and the skeleton crew do their jobs well, even if they are largely forgettable aside from the reliable David Dastmalchian. I went into this assuming it would be a ten-out-of-ten movie, but it gets eight from me, partly because I hyped it up too much for myself, and partly because an awesome sequel is hinted at but the box-office was so dire that, like Dracula, it will never see the light of day.

8/10

The Velvet Vampire (1971) – Prime

It would be remiss of me not to include a title from the Roger Corman stable, so here we are, with a notable title for several reasons. Firstly, it was directed by Stephanie Rothman, a trailblazer in the film industry and responsible for a clutch of genre-bending flicks. Rothman leaned into the fluid sexuality of vampires, no doubt prompted by the recent success of Hammer’s lesbian vampire films (Vampire Lovers, Twins of Evil, Lust for a Vampire), and adapted a story, Carmilla, written in 1872 by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmilla is considered to be the first lesbian vampire story ever published, and the lead antagonist, Diana Le Fanu, is named after him as a direct homage.

The tale concerns Sarah and Lee, a swinging married couple who encounter Le Fanu at an art gallery (where the actual Johnny Shines is playing a fantastic tune), and the enigmatic Le Fanu invites them to stay at her remote home in the middle of the Mojave desert. By this point, Le Fanu has already killed a would-be rapist in the opening scene, so we are well aware of her strength.

Car trouble forces the couple to start walking, but then Le Fanu turns up in a dune buggy (!), and takes them back to her place. After that, not much happens. There’s some walking around, a bit of jealous chat, and some semi-erotic dream sequences, but you will have to wait about 40 mins for someone to actually get bitten.

Naturally, shenanigans ensue.

Is it a great film? Not particularly, but you can see why it’s a cult classic. Lee’s casual promiscuity, Sarah’s blank-faced screaming, Diane’s bisexual seductions, some early electronic scoring, and some lovely color design (look for all the red bits) are certainly worth a look if you don’t have anything more pressing to attend to.

5/10

Previous Murky Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:

You Can’t Handle the Tooth, Part II
Tubi Dive
What Possessed You?
Fan of the Cave Bear
There, Wolves
What a Croc
Prehistrionics
Jumping the Shark
Alien Overlords
Biggus Footus
I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie
The Weird, Weird West
Warrior Women Watch-a-thon

Neil Baker’s last article for us was Part VII of Tubi Dive. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, teacher, and sculptor of turtle exhibits. (AprilMoonBooks.com).

I know we don’t normally do posts on the weekend, but Mod R is off anyway, and if I do it on Monday, our newsletter will eat the post. We can only do one post a day or it loses it.

Hidden Legacy in Dutch.

Love Books has collaborated with So Many Pages to release this beautiful special edition of Hidden Legacy in Dutch.

Verschijningsdatum: 17-07-2025

Pre-order actie: bestel dit boek bij So Many Pages en je ontvangt automatisch de artprint ‘Baylor Sisters Portrait’ van Luisa Preissler bij je pre-order! Zo lang de voorraad strekt, exclusief bij So Many Pages en exclusief bij de pre-order.

Romantasy must-read! Een verslavende slow burn van internationale bestsellerauteur Ilona Andrews.

Click to Preorder

The Inheritance Release Date

As of now, we are aiming for July. We are desperately trying to finish, but last week was just difficult for many reasons. We will have ebook and print. The audio will come out later. We are in talks for the split narration audiobook, that will feature a woman reading Ada’s parts and a man reading Elias’ parts. We can’t announce anything more concrete until all details are finalized and the contracts are signed.

The length will be around 50K, which is shorter than Magic Claims but longer than Magic Tides.

As always, while most of the story will be released on the blog, a chunk of the finale will be held back for the official publisher version.

I need to reach out to my CEs to see if anyone has an opening.

This Kingdom Needs an Astronomer

We have three moons. They are at different orbits and positions so they are not always in the same phase. Does anyone know of a calculator that would let us ballpark the moon phases and calendar? There has got to be some sort of tool where you can plug in your month length and calculate things for a hypothetical planet, right?

The post Housekeeping Saturday first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

This month has been way better than last month. Though it would be hard to get much worse than last month.

But now, it's almost Omega's turn to fly the ship! He's so excited that he promises not to appear over you as you sleep​, whispering into your ears with six mouths. As long as you preorder. If you don't buy the book, he promises nothing.

Writing The Pilot was an interesting challenge, mainly because of all the interruptions over the last half a year. I did enjoy writing Omega, though. Especially his backstory. Probably my favorite scene to write was a flashback to before Omega had powers, because you get to see him act like a lunatic but in a more human way.

While enjoyable, he's still hard to write as the central character of a book, because Omega doesn't care about anything. Or does he? Yes he does, because otherwise there would be no story, but bringing that out was Interesting Challenge #2.

Interesting Challenge #3 will be writing the next book, because we'll get to explore some COOL NEW THINGS that I won't SPOIL because they're SPOILERS for the ending of this one.

Besides putting a book up for preorder, the coolest thing I did this month was go to Epic Universe, the new theme park in Orlando.

I know they already had Super Nintendo World in Japan and California, but I hadn't spoiled myself, and my first time walking into the Mushroom Kingdom was literally breathtaking. It took my breath. I shed a single nostalgic tear.

The entire park seems like it's tailor-made to appeal to me specifically. The worlds are themed after Wizards, Dragons, Monsters, and Nintendo. This is the park that my eight-year-old self sketched in a notebook.

For real, the entire park is incredible. And we got in when it was raining and therefore not hot or crowded, which is a Florida life hack for theme parks.

-Will

P.S. The Chocolate-Covered Pretzel Oreos sound like they wouldn't work, but they are delicious.

Hello! I’m frantically packing for my upcoming tour but wanted to give you a final reminder about the WE COULD BE MAGIC preorder campaign. If you’re in the US or Canada, preorder your copy and upload your receipt to receive these special items :

• An adorable scrunchie set inspired by the book

• An exclusive digital sneak peek of THE HOUSE SAPHIR (my next fairy tale retelling, coming out this fall!)

BUT HURRY! This campaign closes June 2 at 11:59pm ET.

A swoon-worthy young adult graphic novel about a girl’s summer job at a theme park from #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer.

When Tabitha Laurie was growing up, a visit to Sommerland saved her belief in true love, even as her parents’ marriage was falling apart. Now she’s landed her dream job at the theme park’s prestigious summer program, where she can make magical memories for other kids, guests, and superfans just like her. All she has to do is audition for one of the coveted princess roles, and soon her dreams will come true.

There’s just one problem. The heroes and heroines at Sommerland are all, well… thin. And no matter how much Tabi lives for the magic, she simply doesn’t fit the park’s idea of a princess.

Given a not-so-regal position at a nacho food stand instead, Tabi is going to need the support of new friends, a new crush, and a whole lot of magic if she’s going to devise her own happily ever after. . . without getting herself fired in the process.

With art by Joelle Murray, the wonder of Sommerland comes to life with charming characters and whimsical backdrops. We Could Be Magic is a perfect read for anyone looking to get swept away by a sparkly summer romance.

How to get your swag:

1. Preorder your copy via my Bookshop.org store (or wherever you normally purchase your books).
2. Submit your receipt here. US/Canada only. See link for full details.

See you on tour! Make sure you check out the special tour linktree for individual event details and ticketing.

Do you follow me on Instagram? If you don’t yet, you’re going to want to as there will be a rom-com giveaway featuring WITH A LITTLE MAGIC, INSTANT KARMA, and WITH A LITTLE LUCK. Coming soon for my Instagram followers.

Until next time, happy reading and I can’t wait to see many of you on the WE COULD BE MAGIC tour!

With love,

Marissa

The post Will I See You On Tour? first appeared on Marissa Meyer.

Are you ready to read a collection of short stories that reads like a novel?…

The post Immerse Yourself in 12 Influential Short Story Novels That Epitomize the Form appeared first on LitStack.

Well, this one goes to show that (again) I shouldn’t let my preconceptions determining my reading. From that title, I was expecting some sort of time-travelling Medieval/Tolkienesque fantasy, something akin to say, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, but perhaps a bit more light-hearted. It isn’t. (Well – except perhaps the light-hearted bit.) The author himself says…