A Book Full of Feist's Fortes: Krondor: The Assassins

Krondor: The Assassins is the second book in the Riftwar Legacy saga. It's a story connecting the two video game stories that Feist novelized after the fact: Krondor: The Betrayal is Feist's take on the story of the game Betrayal at Krondor, and it turns out (I just looked this up the other day) that Tear of the Gods is Feist's novelization of the story in Return to Krondor, which got a lot less hype than the first game back in the day.

Missed Opportunity: "Penelope" by Vincent Starrett

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Right after "The Floor Above," which I did a reading of last week, appears a short story by Vincent Starrett called "Penelope." It has tons of great elements of a good weird tale:

• A talkative, eccentric, intelligent main character: Raymond is unorthodox but imaginative and expansive in his descriptions of the world around him
• A strange astrological prophecy: Raymond is told by his mad father to "Beware of Penelope when in perihelion"
• A furtively-told story: Raymond invites Haswell into his home to tell him the story that has convinced others Raymond himself is mad
• A bizarre physical phenomenon: Raymond awakes at midnight one night to discover the force of gravity has inverted for him and only him!
• A tense twenty minutes: Raymond walking around on the ceiling draws out his landlord with a revolver
• An acrobatic exit: Raymond climbs "up" the fire escape to the street and goes around outside for a bit

Almost-Lost Wolfe Media: 1959 TV Pilot with SHATNER as Archie?!

Stumbled onto this while I was poking around on the Internet Archive. Apparently CBS produced a few episodes of a Nero Wolfe TV series back in 1959, with Kurt Kasznar as Wolfe and William Shatner as Archie. The pilot survives in a remastered and colorized version here.

Returning to a Sci-Fi Satire Classic: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

I loved this book back in the 1990s when I first read it. I even went so far as to buy a big collection of the whole series, and enjoyed the hell out of it. But I gave it to a friend, so it had been over twenty years since I had read this book, when I picked it up recently for a review!

A Reading: The Floor Above, by M. Humphreys

I read the second issue of Weird Tales without anything jumping out at me as worth talking about, and had gotten through a good chunk of issue three... was I in the wrong state of mind? Or was I being too stringent?

Then, this story jumped out at me and I decided to do a reading. Only later, when I started looking into this story, did I learn two things:

1) Lovecraft liked this story enough to mention it in a letter,

and 2) It seems as though nobody knows who M. Humphreys was.

A Short Reading: FEAR, by David R. Solomon

This is a strange story. I wouldn't call it amazingly good, but it does manage some excellent gory descriptive language and has an easy-to-miss message about priorities, and how much those different priorities are worth. It's a sympathetic while somewhat anti-climactic ending.

First Impressions: Don Quixote!

This is a whale of a book. I think that I spent a few hours combing through various versions until I found this one, which was the first one that didn't seem to be significantly abridged.

The whole thing is over twelve hundred pages.

The translation I'm looking at is by John Ormsby, from 1885, and others have said this version is both "thorough and accurate."

Thoughtful, Creeping, Slow-Burn Dread: Review of "A Revenant," by Walter de la Mare!

I wanted to do a reading of this one, but I think it's still under copyright! So, a review instead.

I was looking through Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" looking for authors or stories to read and talk about, and one of those authors is better known as a poet and a writer of children's stories. Still, Walter de la Mare did jot down the occasional creepy story, often with a strong focus on characters.

Larger-than-Life Sci-Fi Adventure Continues: Skylark of Valeron!

I felt like it was time for a return to the good old pulp adventures of E.E. "Doc" Smith, so I gave Skylark of Valeron a read!

This book starts with a somewhat hasty rewrite of a scene from the last book: Remember when DuQuesne appeared to... die? Well, as you may have expected (and as you definitely expected if you've read enough Smith), it was a ruse! DuQuesne is alive and well and is hatching a dastardly plot, as is his wont.

Review: Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom"

First published in Weird Tales all the way back in August 1929 (Volume 14, No. 2), this story is the first appearance of Kull of Atlantis, a character Robert E. Howard would write several short stories about and who would be part of the inspiration of his later character, Conan.

It's a major milestone in the sword and sorcery genre, and you can read it free:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_14/Issue_2/The_Shadow_Kingdom

This story is short but it does a lot. It establishes the character and background of Kull, some of his major allies, and one of his major motivations: to fight the serpent-men!

The First Feist Book I Ever Read: Krondor: The Betrayal

The first dose of Raymond Feist's world of Midkemia I ever got was not from a book. It was from an old computer game called Betrayal at Krondor. Back in the mid-1990s, we had a copy of the CD version of the game and I found it really interesting, especially the writing. The intro to the game mentions Feist, but I was too young to make the connection.

Then, one day, as I was wandering around in probably a Borders bookstore, I saw a book: Krondor: The Betrayal. I was taken aback. Was the game based on a book? Later on I would discover, no, it was the other way around, but I picked up that book and it made me into a Feist fan.