The Shadowed Circle Compendium - Steve Donoso, ed.

I’ve been a big fan of THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, a beautifully produced journal devoted to The Shadow, ever since it began publishing a few years ago. Now we have THE SHADOWED CIRCLE COMPENDIUM, an even prettier volume reprinting some of the best articles from the first seven issues of the regular journal, plus half a dozen new articles that make this book well worthwhile even if you’ve read the others in their original appearances.

The highlight of the new articles, for me, is “The Shadowed Seven”, in which editor/publisher Steve Donoso asked more than twenty fans and/or scholars of The Shadow to select their seven favorite Shadow stories, the ones they would take with them to the proverbial desert island. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I contributed to this article myself.) All the different incarnations of the character were fair game for this exercise: pulps, comics, movies, and the radio show. There’s a good representation of all of those, although the pulp novels dominate the lists. I didn’t make a count or anything like that, but it seemed to me that the very first novel, “The Living Shadow”, was mentioned more than any of the others, which makes sense. After all, it established the character and set the tone for everything that was to come after. Several of the other early pulp novels were very popular, too. Even now, more than 50 years after I read them the first time, I vividly recall the great action scenes, the incredible shoot-outs between The Shadow and the hordes of gangdom, and how enthralled I was by them.

Other new articles include a look at The Shadow’s appearances in various fanzines over the past 40-some-odd years, checklists of the novels and reprints, and “The Essential Shadow Reference Collection”, devoted to the various books that have been written about the character.

If you haven’t been reading THE SHADOWED CIRCLE, the compendium is definitely a best-of-the-best volume and is likely to send you scurrying to pick up back issues of the regular journal. If you’ve been reading it from the start like me, you’ll have a great time revisiting old favorites and taking in the new material. THE SHADOWED CIRCLE COMPENDIUM is available in hardback and paperback editions, and if you’re a Shadow fan, or a fan of the pulps in general, it gets my highest recommendation.