Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Books


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The Hunt for the Vampire Queen

682fd2dfd3cb369b78bcc4298d75925c--robert-e-howard-robert-richardA GREAT BLACK SHADOW lay across the land, cleaving the red flame of the red sunset. To the man who toiled up the jungle trail it loomed like a symbol of death and horror, a menace brooding and terrible, like the shadow of a stealthy assassin flung upon some candle-lit wall.

This is the opening of Robert E. Howard’s The Moon of Skulls, a Solomon Kane story published in the June-July 1930 issue of Weird Tales.
You can find an e-text of the story here thanks to the good people of the Project Gutenberg of Australia. Like most Solomon Kane stories, it’s a nice piece of storytelling, and a testament to Howard’s prowess with a words. Continue reading →


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A Wisp of Smoke, online

wisp cover smallThe KDP morlocks did their job, and right now A Wisp of Smoke, Rising is live on Amazon.

A Wisp of Smoke, Rising is a horror story set in Japan in 1960.
It is also a spy story, a mystery of sorts.
It is also a homage to the media through which my generation discovered Japan.
And it has a historical twist, in more senses than one. Continue reading →


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On the tracks of the vampire queen

As you may remember – or maybe not – I manage a small service, together with my brother, called RE:CON. We do bibliographical and documentary research for writers, game designers and, basically, anyone who’s willing to pay our very cheap fees.

RE:CON LOGO 2

It’s a fun job, one that gives us a little extra to pay the bills, or to have a pizza once a month, and it can be lots of fun.
Because we so far have worked chiefly with game designers and comics writers,and their requests can be really weird.
Like today, that we were hit by a request for a short report on N’Gobi and its vampire queen.
Wow. Continue reading →


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AMARNA

brush_PNG7389I have just contacted and contracted an excellent artist for the cover of my new project.
I have already mentioned I am going to do a serial, a number of self-contained episodes pushing forward an overarching plot, so that readers will be able to enjoy each episode but in the end will also have a full novel in their hands.
It’s the first time I try something like this seriously.
Writing a proper serial, I mean.
I did something that might have looked like a serial when I was in high school, to entertain my classmates and try to win the affection of a certain blonde. It was fun, and it did fit my extremely underdeveloped ability to carry a story for more than thirty pages. And in the end I won the affection of a brunette.
But in retrospect, it was not a very good story. Continue reading →


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Kiss of the Cobra

7102346I’m having a lot of fun reading Kiss of the Cobra, a horror story by Peter Tremayne originally published in 1984, and recently reprinted by Venture Press.
Tremayne – the alias of Cornish writer Peter Berresford Ellis, famous for his historical mysteries featuring Sister Fidelma, also has a solid track record as an author of horror thrillers.

Kiss of the Cobra is a very straightforward horror, classic in the way the old Hammer and Amicus movies were classics, or old Cannon Films summer features tried to be. And it has an Indian setting, which is a bonus – I can’t remember many Indian horrors apart from Dan Simmons’ masterful Song of Kali. Continue reading →


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Henry Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra

and_image_1366916320And talking about historical novels, Egypt and all this sort of stuff…
Henry Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines and She, two books that are highly regarded here on Karavansara, also wrote a book called Cleopatra, published in 1889.

Now, it is sometimes an overlooked fact that Rider Haggard wrote a huge number of books (56 novels, 3 collections of stories and 10 non-fiction books), and while he is still best remembered for his Quatermain-Ayesha novels, but his catalog includes al sort of historical and exotic adventure.
And most if not all of it is available for free online.

But about Cleopatra, now… Continue reading →