Here is the cover of the new fantasy anthology Vlad Tepes by Ailus Editrice, which contains a my story Il Duello (the Duel), and many other stories by fine Italian writers.
The cover is wonderful.
And before you ask, no, there is no English language edition in the works. Sorry.
I tried.
No really, I tried.
I took the afternoon off, a nice bowl of tea, and I attacked Curse of the Pharaohs, the book about Tutankhamen’s curse I had found at a free giveaway a few months back – you’ll remember I posted about it.
Considering I am currently sketching an Egypt-related project – plus of course the Aculeo & Amunet and Contubernium stories, and the idea of re-playing Masks of Nyarlathotep… all this considered, a nice afternoon reading about Egyptian curses looked like a nice way to have fun and do research at the same time.
But what the heck… Continue reading
I mentioned Masks of Nyarlathotep a few days back, talking about the Pulp Cthulhu handbook.
Now, for the uninitiated, Mask of Nyarlathotep is probably the War & Peace of Call of Cthulhu, if not of the whole horror gaming genre.
Granted, Beyond the Mountains of Madness is bigger, and Horror on the Orient Express is probably creepier, but for globe-trotting variety, implied menace, cast of characters and locations, plot intricacies and sheer gaming goodness, Mask of Nyarlathotep remains a classic, sort of the standard against which Call of Cthulhu scenarios are evaluated. Continue reading
The snippet above is the opening of Shanghai Under Fire: July 1937 – March 1938, a 120-pages book published by the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury that provides a day-by-day breakdown of what came to be known as The Battle of Shanghai.
You can find relatively cheap reprints on Amazon, or a digitized copy in the Internet Archive, which is the one I am using right now. Continue reading
Pulp Cthulhu – where has this thing been all my life?
Now, the answer is simple – it was in a folder filled with notes on my gaming table, sitting underneath my copy of Call of Cthulhu, 3th edition.
Meaning, we always played Call of Cthulhu as a pulp game.
I played with other keepers, that were more “lovecraftian”, or maybe just more depressed, or more sadistic – in the end, adventures lost their meaning as character after character died horribly and in the end nothing hung together anymore.
Boring.
Queen of the Dead Lizards, featured in Pro Se’s Explorer Pulp was the first story I ever pitched to a foreign (to me) publisher.
I had a few articles and game scenarios under my belt, and I had a few English-language stories self-published through Amazon, but pitching a story to a proper publisher?
It was the first.
I did not believe they’d like the pitch, but they did – you really never can tell.
So, when I started working on it, I did myself a crash course in adventure pulp – just to be on the safe side.
I re-read Howard’s Fire of Ashurbanipal and a selection of his El Borak stories.
I dug out two issues of the reprints of Oriental Stories.
I tried to get in tune with the language, the rhythm – I don’t know if I managed to acquire anything of that, but it was an important crutch for my morale.
And then I kept Languages of the Silk Road by Lonely Planet, and Odyssey Books The Silk Road by my side for reference.
Yes, I was scared. But then I got to work… Continue reading
I was reflecting today that a lot of non-fantasy fiction authors I love, I met before in articles and essays than in stories.
Case in point: Max Allan Collins.
I first met this extremely prolific writer in a collection of essays called The Fine Art of Murder – which I bought massively discounted in 1994 in a bookstore that no longer exists, in Turin. The only library I was thrown out of – but that’s another story.
The Fine Art of Murder is an excellent book, by the way.
Just as excellent as much of what I read by Collins.
And I am a fan of his Quarry series. Continue reading
Karavansara 