Just The Axe, Ma'am #5
A monthly curated newsletter of new and notable sword & sorcery
We hope you had a safe and happy holiday!
This month, we look at the closure of Scott Oden’s Grimnir trilogy, remember David Drake's contributions to sword & sorcery, Whetstone magazine's hiatus, and much more.
+ Created on a dare from a friend in regards to whether one could incorporate orcs into real-life history to create a sword and sorcery story evocative of myth & folklore without appearing silly, Scott Oden, a long-time admirer of Robert E. Howard, came up with Grimnir, the last of his kind. A character far more misanthropic and nihilistic than Conan the Barbarian, but with an outsider’s eye, allowing him to be a more honest POV for the reader as they’re exposed to medieval European history.
Grimnir first appeared in A Gathering of Ravens in 2017 to promising reviews. Alas, its follow-up, Twilight of the Gods, came out just weeks before 2020 changed everyone’s lives and was lost in the shuffle regarding promotion.
The third and final book, The Doom of Odin, is coming out. Oden has pushed farther and weirder as Grimnir’s quest for vengeance against the dragon Nidhogg takes him to Rome in 1349. A chance arrow slays him, sending him to his own gloomy Valhalla to be with the rest of his long-dead family and kin, except being killed there brings him back to our world and vice versa, lending the book a surrealistic hallucinatory atmosphere.
Scott Oden’s blog has been upfront and honest with the creative burnout he has felt after this trilogy’s completion, but on the eve of the book’s release, he revealed two new projects he is working on.
One is a series of short stories built around the last skeletal survivor of the soldiers who grew out of dragon’s teeth that the Greek hero Jason fought in his quest for the Golden Fleece, and more recently, he revealed he is preparing his next long-form novel project: Thirteen dealing with Roman legionaries who have returned home but find themselves stalked by something supernatural that has followed them back from elsewhere.
Oden’s love for high concepts and skill at savage, fiery prose should be self-evident, and the release of The Doom of Odin should be celebrated as the closing of one chapter and the start of a bold new one for the author.
In the promo leading up to the book release, Oden sat down with the man he made a bet with about Orcs to discuss the conclusion.
As well he did an extended conversation at Liam’s Lyceum:
Finally, Robin Marx has a review of the book along with Twilight of the Gods at Grimdark Magazine.
David Drake (1945 - 2023)
+ David Drake has sadly passed away. Though best known for his military SF such as Hammer’s Slammers, David Drake first came to prominence writing horror and sword & sorcery as part of a regional scene including both Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman, with stories appearing in Stuart David Schiff’s Whispers magazine. During this time, he wrote several sword & sorcery stories featuring the Roman soldier Vettius and his merchant friend Dama.
He also wrote the self-contained “The Barrow Troll,” which first appeared in the December 1975 issue of Whispers (pictured above) and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, leading to frequent reprints.
He remained strictly on short fiction throughout the 1970s. In 1977, however, fellow sword & sorcery author Andrew J. Offutt approached him about getting a plot outline that Offutt could use for another of Robert E. Howard’s Cormac Mac Art books that he was writing for the publisher Zebra Books, in which the character, a Gaelic pirate in the time of the historical King Arthur, who originally appeared in straight forward historical adventure tales from Robert E. Howard was instead retooled into a sword & sorcery protagonist.
By the time Drake had completed the plot outline, which amounted to 16,000 words, Offutt was experiencing business difficulties with Zebra, which played a part in Offutt's rejection of the outline. Since Drake had already sketched out the story, he transformed the plot into a full novel with the characters reworked away from the Howardian roots.
That novel became The Dragon Lord with a notably cynical take on Arthurian Legend, and from there, Drake went on to a full-time career as an author, leaving the legal profession behind.
He went on to acclaim for his military SF, like the intense, somewhat \personal Redliners, as well as the epic fantasy series Lord of the Isles.
Early on, though, he collaborated with Karl Edward Wagner on the SF/horror meets sword & sandal novel Killer. The rest of his sword & sorcery was collected in 1989’s Vettius and Friends, and his horror work is contained in collections like From The Heart of Darkness and Balefires.
Drake collaborated with Jim Baen on a seven-volume collection from Robert E. Howard and gave a foreword to 2010’s Sword & Sorcery anthology from Tachyon publications.
In 2021, he announced that he was stepping away from writing anymore due to undisclosed health reasons.
Read more about David Drake here:
From Baen Books publisher Toni Weisskopf at File 770
On Brian Murphy’s Silver Key blog.
Here on Substack at the Geekerati Newsletter from
On a personal note, I particularly want to single out his story "Than Curse The Darkness," which is easily one of the best Cthulhu Mythos stories ever post-H. P. Lovecraft, as much as it rips down all the Boy's Own adventure cliches that had grown around it due to the Arkham House continuations from August Derleth, Brian Lumley et al. in favour of juxtaposing the real-life horrors of the Belgian Congo to humanize the insane cultists and portraying the alleged good guys as the imperialist racists that they are who are complicit in what is happening around them.
David Drake said more recently that the shadow of his experiences in Vietnam drives the story, but while undoubtedly true, it was in response to a not terribly perceptive review of the story. In its way of deconstructing much of the tropes of an era in Mythos fiction, it blew the doors off what was possible (and from there to cosmic horror) as much as Ramsey Campbell was doing with his later Mythos work.
"Than Curse The Darkness" should be recognized as a top-tier horror story.
You can read authorized online versions of the stories mentioned here.
The Barrow Troll
Than Curse The Darkness
Whetstone releases issue 8 and announces a hiatus.
+ Whetstone: The Amateur Magazine of Sword & Sorcery was initially begun in 2020 by editor Jason Ray Carney with collaborators Chuck E. Clark and Luke E. Dodd as a means to break down a self-imposed wall between those who review the literature and those who make it, encouraging passive readers to become active contributors.
In Carney's words:
”We often think of writers as working alone, in their belfries, one flickering candle illuminating their typewriters. A deeper appreciation of pulp history reveals writers who are in constant epistolary contact with each other, their editors, and their readers. Literary art, it seems, requires the rich soil of a fecund artistic community. I hope Whetstone can come to serve sword and sorcery amateurs in this way.”
In the following four years and eight issues, which developed and maintained a stylish black & white fanzine aesthetic meant to evoke the small-press fantasy zines of the 80s updated to a more 21st-century dungeon synth and metal music aesthetic, their efforts to stimulate community discussion and bridge-building led to the overall growth of the independent sword & sorcery scene being far beyond what anyone thought.
Indeed, earlier this year, Carney wrote about the “glut” of new sword & sorcery at Spiral Tower Press, which led to some interblog discussions with genre historian Brian Murphy, author Scott Oden and game designer Travis Miller. It is alluded to within Oliver Brackenbury’s editorial for New Edge Sword and Sorcery #2. Carney revisits the topic in his editorial for Whetstone #8, where he notes the term “glut” has negative connotations he did not want to associate with the bloom of new works in the genre, which has continued unabated since that discussion. Due to this bloom, however, he feels that the Whetstone project can be pronounced a success at developing a fecund artistic community. It is time to put it on hiatus.
Carney & co. are not leaving the overall SFF scene but are continuing their efforts on the cosmic horror magazine Witch House. They are launching a new magazine, Way Station, with the same black and white zine aesthetic and free to download for readers. With a similar mandate to give the same encouragement to new and developing writers, this time in the space opera subgenre, Our loss in the sword & sorcery scene is definitely their gain, and we look forward to what gets published by them in 2024.
In the meantime, if you haven’t already, I advise you to check out the eight issues of Whetstone, which are available for free download on their website.
In Other News
+ Christopher Rowe wanted us to know he has a sword and sorcery story, “The Moult,” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies that you can read here.
+ Michael Moorcock appeared on the Goodman Games Channel to discuss the release of The Caribbean Crisis, which he is doing in collaboration with
, and a more general discussion of the field of British pulp fiction he drew from. One of my favourite moments is near the end, when the hosts reveal they will be back in the next episode to discuss Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star, and Moorcock reacts with surprise, delight, and interest in tuning in.Moorcock turned 84 on December 18, and a couple of lovely tributes to him can be read from Goodman Games in their Adventures in Fiction blog and Tachyon Publications.
+ Speaking of authors named Michael, Michael Chabon posted this intriguing Instagram post of himself outside Robert E. Howard’s home in Cross Plains, Texas. Could the Pulitzer award winner be writing a new sword & sorcery project? It’s not like he’s unfamiliar with the greats of S&S, with his 2009 historical novel Gentleman of the Road dedicated to Fritz Leiber and his characters having a noticeable Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser dynamic.
Far more likely, however, it seems Chabon is writing a novel that somehow revolves around the life of the author who created Conan.
Barring any more foreshadowing in social media, we should know what this project is in 2025.
+ The above is sneak preview art by John Molinero for a brand new edition of John R. Fultz’s The Revelations of Zang, a 2013 sword & sorcery collection that is getting reprinted next month from Rogues in the House Presents. Read more about the book's genesis and his thoughts on a new reprinting here from Fultz himself.
Review Roundup
+ The Eternal Crusader YouTube Channel reviews John C. Hocking’s “Conan: Black Starlight,” which we wrote about in October.
Spiral Tower Reviews has recently returned with several new articles:
+ Matt Holder’s review of Howard Andrew Jones’ A City of Marble and Blood: Is Sword and Sorcery Novelistic? Maybe Not, but I'm Still on Board for the Hanuvar Ride
+ Ricky Broome notes that Skelos 2 Strikes a Harmonious Blend of the New and the Old.
+ Liam Hall discusses The Many Merits of Between Princesses and Other Jobs by D. J. Butler.
+ Over on Quill To Live, Lord of a Shattered Land by Howard Andrew Jones gets a rave review from Andrew Mather, and it places on the list of 20 best books of the year at Lucky 13.
Podcasts on Parade
+ The Cromcast looks this month at the only full-length Conan novel by Robert E. Howard, with part 1 of “Hour of the Dragon.”
+ New Edge Sword and Sorcery Story Chat looks at “Dara’s Tale” contained in Tales From the Magician’s Skull. Editor Oliver Brackenbury is joined by Jay Wolf and Matt Holder to discuss it, and you can listen to it here:
+ Rogues in the House looks back at 2023 and forward to what’s in store for 2024:
As well, Rogues co-host Matt John does a blog post expanding more on the past year and upcoming books from Rogues in the House Presents, like the aforementioned Revelations of Zang from John R. Fultz and John’s as-yet-title-unknown collection.
This Month in Sword and Sorcery Magazines
+ Heroic Fantasy Quarterly: As well as having their issue #58 out right now for you to read for free, the magazine has also updated regarding their upcoming Best Of HFQ #4 with a sneak preview of art, one sample for the story “Brotherhood of the Book” by M. R. Timson is printed above.
+ New Edge Sword and Sorcery: NESS has been having a busy month. As well as shipping all the issues to their crowdfunding backers on November 29th, they opened up a new store on their official website for purchasing issues #1 and #2 and merchandise. As well as being spotlighted in Black Gate, they have received a positive review from the Skiffy and Fanty show.
Author June Orchid Parker started a blog to discuss the creative process that went into her story “How Many Deaths Till Vengeance?” in New Edge Sword and Sorcery #2.
+ Old Moon Quarterly: Their submission call begins January 1! Click here to learn more about their submission guidelines.
In the meantime, they have provided an art preview pictured above from Senkai Yami for an upcoming issue.
+ Swords and Sorcery Magazine: Editor Curtis Ellett wishes us a Happy New Year and invites us to read the following new stories that can be read for free.
“The Judgment Tree” by D. K. Latta
“Across Bloody Skies,” by Jay Requard
“Plagues in Arak,” by D. J. Tyrer
+ Tales From The Magician’s Skull: No new news this month, but their parent company, Goodman Games, celebrated the birthdays of three genre giants this month, along with the above-linked look at Michael Moorcock (linked above) also did entries for Leigh Brackett (b. Dec 8), and Fritz Leiber (b. Dec 24).
+ Whetstone: The Amateur Magazine of Pulp Sword & Sorcery: See Above.
Submission Calls
The following markets are dedicated to or specified to accept sword & sorcery.
+ BFS Horizons, put out by The British Fantasy Society, is always open. 500 - 5000 Words. Remuneration £20. Submission Guidelines.
+ Grimdark Magazine is open for submissions on the 1st of March, 2024, at 00:01 AEDT and opening up their submissions email address for two weeks until 23:59 14th of March, looking for short stories of up to 4,000 words for original fiction and up to 12,000 words for reprints.
They expect to purchase between 2 and 4 original pieces of fiction and a similar number of reprints.
See the submission deadlines here.
+ Old Moon Quarterly opens for submissions January 1, 2024. 8 cents per word Story length 1 - 6k words.
“We love stories that combine that sense of action and adventure with well-rounded characters who make us question our own realities and perceptions. We love to see the gothic, the baroque, the eldritch, and we love to see it hit with an axe.”
For more details, pour over their submission storylines here.
+ Swords & Sorcery is always open. Takes up to 10k words. Payment: $25 USD. Submission Guidelines.
Thank you for reading! We wish you a safe and happy New Year, and we will be back next month!—KB
There is a ton of content in this newsletter and I'm clearly going to have to check out the Scott Oden series.
Excellent issue, once again, Kevin!