Nonfiction Update: I’ve Got a New Home

On October 23, 2020 By Ryan HarveyIn Announcements, my nonfiction

In September I announced that the Perilous Worlds project was done, and all my posts for them had vanished (temporarily) into the ether. I also hinted that our blogging crew might emerge at another website, and now it’s happened: I’m blogging as part of the web-presence for the magazine Tales From the Magician’s Skull at the Goodman Games website. I already had a relationship with Magician’s Skull because my friend Howard Andrew Jones edits it and my story “Dead Queen’s Triumph” appeared in the April issue.

My first article at Goodman Games is already live, a Halloween-themed look at the “weird menace” pulps and Robert E. Howard’s brief foray into this gory and bizarre corner of pulp history. This was one of the articles I had written for Perilous Worlds that dropped into limbo before it could be published, so I’m happy to see it crawl up from the lower depths to plague the world this October with grotesque mad science and deformity.

I believe some of my articles previously published at Perilous Worlds will resurface at Goodman Games, so I’m going to hold off on my earlier plans to post them on this blog. The future for this project is still coming into focus, but I’m glad to have a new home for my nonfiction.

Check Out My New Edgar Rice Burroughs Article

On January 9, 2019September 17, 2020 By Ryan HarveyIn my nonfiction

Hello there, 2019! I had hoped to get something posted a bit earlier, possibly filled with definitive statements about the year to come (i.e. making stuff up), but it’s already been an extraordinarily busy year for me so far. Perilous Worlds is starting to ramp up, and soon you can expect around an article a week from me on the site.

My newest article for Perilous Worlds is up now, the first one they’ve posted since the site opened in October: it’s a short examination of the history of the pulps using Edgar Rice Burroughs as a focus. (Update: the original Perilous Worlds site has sunken into the Styx, along with my articles. I’ll repost them here and update the link.)

ERB was one of the reasons the pulp medium grew the way it did. I’m pleased with how the article came out, since it is no simple task to compress the history of the pulps into under a thousand words. Perilous Worlds is teaching me important lessons on concision! Two more articles are finished and waiting in the wings, and I’m finishing up a new one this weekend, a little visit to The Worm Ouroboros. I also recently delivered an article on The Hour of the Dragon to Black Gate as part of a round-robin project on all of the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. That won’t end up posted for a few months, however.

Forgotten Fantasy: The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt

On November 8, 2018November 1, 2020 By Ryan HarveyIn books

Face-in-the-Abyss-Avon-Cover — Face in the Abyss wrap-around cover by Rodney Matthews

Edgar Rice Burroughs opened up the world of the pulps in the ‘teens, and the field of fantasy and science fiction (the latter of which didn’t even have that name yet) attracted new voices. One of the most successful to follow Burroughs was A. (Abraham) Merritt, a magazine editor and part-time speculative fiction author. Merritt specialized in the Lost Civilization tale. He lavished an imaginative perspective onto this sub-genre unlike anything seen previously. In novels like The Moon Pool (1919), The Metal Monster (1920), and Dwellers in the Mirage (1932) he created science-fantasy vistas as astonishing as they were verbose. And “coruscating” and “scintillating,” two words Merritt passionately loved.

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