As I was saying not long ago, I keep my hand in on things Robert E. Howard. A couple of items have been announced already, and I believe at least one more I contributed a tidbit to will be popped out as a surprise during Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains, Texas, next month.
The anthology Dreams in the Fire is available for pre-order, if interested — definitely the kind of book where if you like this kind of book you may like this book, but if you don’t like this kind of book, well, my bet is you really won’t like this book. If you know what I mean. Stories and poems by fans of REH, many of them with pro credits, all proceeds to benefit the Howard House and Museum.
A great cause. I contributed my 1980’s poem “The Blades of Hell,” originally placed with editor Steve Jones for Fantasy Tales in England, then tuned up a bit for a 2005 reprint in The Cimmerian, and now back again. That’s the cool thing about being a legendary battle-scarred gray wolf of Howard Studies, you can get by with a reprint of a poem, no less. Plus editor Mark Finn didn’t seem interested in a much more fascinating item I thought I mentioned as a possible contribution — maybe next time.
You can read an interview with Finn about this project on the Two-Gun Raconteur website — and for the next issue of Two-Gun Raconteur the print journal I knocked out a near-7000 word review concerning the three anthologies of Howardian litcrit promised for Howard’s centennial in 2006. Promised, but not delivered, or badly delivered, and that’s where the fun comes in. Yeah, it was time to pull out the broadsword and strew some viscera about, so Howard Fandom won’t forget I’m still guarding its borders.
