Witchery Plus: A Weird Tales Trilogy - Keith Chapman

Several years ago my friend Keith Chapman published a pair of stories--a fantasy in the mold of Clark Ashton Smith and a sword and sorcery yarn--in a double volume. He's redone that book, added a third story, this time a modern-day horror yarn set in Australia, and published it as WITCHERY PLUS: A WEIRD TALES TRILOGY, which is available in both e-book and print editions on Amazon.

"Night Howl" is the new story in this volume. Chapman sold a number of comic book scripts to Charlton for their horror titles, and the original version of this story was one of them, but it went unpublished when Charlton switched over to mostly reprints. Converted to prose, it appeared first on the BEAT TO A PULP website and now is in print for the first time. It's about a pair of lovers on the run from a murder charge, and in that respect, it works very well as a noir crime yarn. But there's also a possibly supernatural element involving an old Gothic paperback featuring a heroine with the same name as one of the characters in this story. Are the bizarre events of that old paperback replaying themselves in real life? Chapman uses that question as the springboard for a very well-written tale that generates suspense all the way to the end.

Now here's what I had to say (slightly edited) about the other two stories when I reviewed them back in 2013:

"After an interesting introduction that addresses the genesis of these tales, Chapman produces a fine Clark Ashton Smith pastiche set in Smith's evil-haunted French province Averoigne, "Black Art in Yvones". A young protagonist, a beautiful blonde, and a sinister femme fetale even give this tale a slight noirish feel. In the second novelette in this collection, Chapman ventures into sword-and-sorcery territory with "Wildblood and the Witch Wife", featuring a very likable pair of adventurers reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It's set in historical England rather than a fantasy world, but there's still plenty of sorcery and action."

Although probably best known for his Westerns, Keith Chapman is one of those authors who can write just about anything and do a good job of it. He's a fine storyteller, as these stories amply demonstrate. If you've never sampled his work before, WITCHERY PLUS would be a very good place to start. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Magic Carpet Magazine, July 1933

This pulp also contains a Robert E. Howard story, his historical novelette "The Lion of Tiberias". But also behind that J. Allen St. John cover, you'll find a superb novella by H. Bedford-Jones, "Pearls From Macao" (which Tom Roberts reprinted as an early entry in his Black Dog Books line, many years ago, the edition I read and remember fondly), as well as stories by E. Hoffmann Price, Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, Warren Hastings Miller, and Geoffrey Vace, who was actually Hugh B. Cave's brother Geoffrey. This is just a spectacular issue of THE MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE, a great example of why the pulps were so wonderful, and if you want to read it for yourself, Adventure House has reprinted the whole thing. High recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Fantastic Story Quarterly, Winter 1951

Hey, watch those hands, you guys! I thought at first this cover was by Earle Bergey, but it's not attributed to him anywhere that I can find. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's certainly suggestive and eye-catching no matter who painted it. This issue of FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY is mostly reprint, with only two new stories by Frank Belknap Long and Milton Lesser, best remembered as Stephen Marlowe. The reprints, from various issues of WONDER STORIES and WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY in the Thirties, are by Eric Frank Russell, Clark Ashton Smith, Eando Binder (Earl and Otto Binder), and a couple of authors I'm not familiar with, Alan Connell and Siegfried Wagener (his only credit in the FMI).

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Magic Carpet Magazine, July 1933

THE MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE and its predecessor, ORIENTAL STORIES, didn't last very long--15 issues total--but they sure published some great stuff while they were around. The July 1933 issue of THE MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE features a cover by J. Allen St. John and stories by H. Bedford-Jones, Robert E. Howard, E. Hoffmann Price, Geoffrey Vace (who was actually Hugh Cave's brother Geoffrey . . . or sometimes Hugh Cave . . . or sometimes both of them--I don't know who actually wrote this particular story), Clark Ashton Smith, and Warren Hastings Miller. What a fantastic bunch of authors! I've read the Bedford-Jones story in a Black Dog Books chapbook reprint, as well as the REH story, but none of the others. I'll bet they're all good, though.

The Charnel God - Clark Ashton Smith

A while back John Hocking suggested that I read Clark Ashton Smith's story "The Charnel God", which originally appeared in the March 1934 issue of WEIRD TALES. Now I have, and I'm becoming more of a CAS fan after never reading much of his work until recently.

"The Charnel God" is one of Smith's Zothique stories, set on a far future, decadent Earth where magic has replaced science. The plot concerns a young couple unlucky enough to be stopping in a city where the local god demands that the bodies of anyone who dies there be placed in his temple so he can consume them. It seems that the wife has this unusual disease that causes her to fall into a death-like coma from time to time, and sure enough, a spell of it hits her while she and her husband are there. The doctor who is summoned pronounces her dead, over the husband's objections, and priests show up to cart the "body" over to the temple of Mordriggian to be consumed. The husband, the hero of the tale, is determined to break in and rescue her before she can be gobbled up.

But that's just the very beginning of the story, which gets much more complicated with a plot by a local sorcerer, reanimation spells, running around inside the temple, sinister priests who may or may not be human, and Mordriggian himself, the hungry and vengeful god whose decrees set everything in motion.

Smith spins this yarn in his typical lush prose full of vocabulary you'll have to look up (or go by context, which is what I tend to do). This isn't the sort of writing I normally like, being more a fan of the terse, hardboiled style, but damned if Smith doesn't make it work, and work beautifully. There's even some nice action and plenty of creepily vivid imagery. This one's been reprinted in a number of places and is worth seeking out. As for me, I plan to continue reading more of Smith's stories.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Empire of the Necromancers - Clark Ashton Smith

Of the Big Three authors from WEIRD TALES, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith, Howard is the only one whose work I've read extensively. So the next story in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, Smith's "The Empire of the Necromancers" (from the September 1932 issue of WEIRD TALES), was new to me. It's one of Smith's Zothique tales, set on a decadent, far future Earth where science has disappeared and magic has risen again. Two evil sorcerers are booted out of the city where they've been causing trouble, and while wandering in the desert they come upon the bones of a warrior and the man's horse. So what do they do? Raise both warrior and horse from the dead and press them into service as they travel on to a lost city that's been wiped out by plague, giving them many, many more bodies to reanimate. They set themselves up as emperors of this kingdom of the dead, but you know that sooner or later this is not going to end well.

This story shares several of the things that bother me about much of Lovecraft's work: long-windedness, a slow pace, and very little dialogue, which leads to a lot of telling and not much showing. But man, it's creepy and full of vividly grotesque imagery like one of the sorcerers riding that skeleton horse while the skeleton warrior shuffles along behind. Not to mention lurid plot elements such as necrophilia and murder. I'm a pretty tough sell when it comes to stories like this, but "The Empire of the Necromancers" won me over and I wound up liking it quite a bit, enough so that I'll probably read more of Smith's work one of these days.