Age of Slasher

The Warhammer Horror line continues its second wave with Castle of Blood by C.L. Werner, the first full-length novel in the line to be based in the Age of Sigmar setting. The premise is pretty simple: the ancient Count Wulfsige von Koeterberg has lived for years in isolation in his castle of Mhurghast, overlooking the town of Ravensbach. Decades ago, Count Wulfsige’s errant son died, and since then the Count has been stewing in his own resentment of those he deems responsible, and has been making his plans for revenge.

That revenge is announced at a dinner party he calls at Mhurghast, to which he summons his intended victims – and their children, all of whom are adults of about the age that young von Koeterberg was when he died, give or take. That’s important for the Count’s plan – for, by arranging the dinner in a ritual fashion, he ensures that the children become acceptable vessals for a dire demon of Khorne – a spirit of mass murder and destruction, forcing the parents into a terrible situation where once the demon is unleashed they’ll be forced to kill their own children in self-defence or face destruction at the hands of their offspring.

Slouching Towards Liverpool To Be Born

Ramsey Campbell may well be the greatest living author of Cthulhu Mythos stories these days, despite – or, quite possibly, because – a great chunk of his career has nothing to do with it. Having cut his teeth on Lovecraftian pastiches – the cream of which were collected in The Inhabitant of the Lake – he then developed his own unique voice, with his second collection (Demons By Daylight) applying that voice to a mixture of Mythos and non-Mythos material – breaking new ground with the latter, and revolutionising the former by attacking Lovecraftian themes with a distinctly different worldview, sensibility, and set of writing techniques.

Since then, Campbell has mostly returned to the Mythos for occasional visits rather than extended stays, with 2002’s The Darkest Part of the Woods being a notable exception in that respect, and 2013’s The Last Revelation of Gla’aki being a sort of anniversary tip of the hat to the the eponymous Inhabitant of the Lake, Campbell offering a bit of authorial gratitude for all the good things Gla’aki has brought him over the years.

Now, still showing no signs of slowing down as an author, Campbell has offered us by far his most substantial Cthulhu Mythos work yet: a trilogy of books telling a saga spanning decades. It’s been referred to lazily in some quarters as the “Brichester Trilogy”, but this is an error – Campbell’s imaginary Northern England territory surrounding Brichester which was the backdrop to many of his early stories doesn’t feature here, with all three novels unfolding primarily in Liverpool. Its true title, once again, pays tribute to one of the entities which first put Campbell on the map: specifically, it’s called The Three Births of Daoloth.

The Fall of the House of Strock

Back in April I covered the initial (original) books to come out from the Warhammer Horror line from the Black Library – a new imprint dedicated to the spoopier side of the various Warhammer settings – in the form of a short story collection and a triptych of novellas. (The early line was also filled out by a welcome reprint of Kim Newman/Jack Yeovil’s stories of the vampire Genevieve.)

Evidently, this initial experiment has had positive results. Not only have Black Library embarked on a somewhat more ambitious second wave of Warhammer Horror releases, but they’ve also announced Warhammer Crime – an imprint dedicated to stories set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, which I guess would make a sensible home both for material inspired by the more sleuthing-based entries in the Eisenhorn or Ravenor series, or more police procedural-oriented material like the Enforcer trilogy. (Incidentally, if Warhammer Crime wanted to start with a bang, I’d say that a fourth Shira Calpurnia novel would be very welcome.)

The fact that they’re doing this suggests that not only do Black Library realise that there’s a substantial audience for Warhammer-related stories which do not focus on the full-blown warfare, combat action, and adventure fiction which makes up the backbone of the Black Library line, but they also realise that their range has now become sufficiently expansive that it’s become increasingly difficult for that audience to find what scratches their itch. If the proliferation of these imprints leads to an overall increase in the range of different types of stories offered by Black Library, that’s all to the good.

However, before Warhammer Crime debuts I’ve got some fresh new Warhammer Horror to enjoy, and in particular the first all-new full-length novel to be released in the line. This is The House of Night and Chain by David Annandale, who’s become something of a stalwart of the line, having contributed both to the Maledictions short story anthology and to the novella collection The Wicked and the Damned.

Fresh Folk Horror For the Darkening Seasons

Autumn, especially that part where it begins turning into winter and the hours of darkness seriously start closing in, feels to me like the natural season for horror, especially folk horror and its neighbours. Even after the festivities of Halloween itself, it feels like the dark powers of the universe haven’t so much been banished as appeased, and that cold night is still on the upswing.

It’s good timing, then, that some interesting new offerings have come out at just the right time to be savoured – whether that’s the full-throated folk horror of Hellebore, or the more retro-suburban twist offered by Scarfolk, as explored on the blog of the same name and the previously-released novelisation.

GOGathon: The Dawn of Sierra’s SCI Era

The story so far: after pioneering the graphic adventure game genre with the first three King’s Quest games (with the third one also being the first good graphic adventure game), Sierra decided it was time to branch out a little – releasing adventure games in a range of different genres, including both obvious videogame fare like science fiction to less well-trod territory like police procedural dramas and bawdy sex comedies.

All this was accomplished using the AGI system, which – as I explained at the end of the last article – was developed for the original King’s Quest I and, whilst technically advanced for 1984, clearly wasn’t passing muster by the late 1980s; 1988 would see the debut of a triptych of new games produced using their exciting new SCI engine, and for much of the next decade – until they switched to 3D engines, effectively – Sierra’s adventures would be produced using various updates of SCI, which both allowed for superior graphics and sound card support and included scripting tools useful for adventure game design processes.

But did a superior toolkit yield superior games? Let’s see…

Pickin’ Up Truth Vibrations, Part 4: The People’s Voice Howls At the Moon

In my previous looks at the work of David Icke, modern-day Gnostic heresiarch, I’ve covered his alarming transformation from a basically ordinary media figure into a New Age true believer in a melange of Theosophy and Gnosticism, his gear shift into conspiratorial thinking and flirtation with antisemitism, and his promulgation of his theory of Reptoid aliens secretly controlling the Earth, along with a deeper and more troubling embrace of antisemitism. (As well as promulgating conspiracy theories tending towards antisemitism, Icke also has total contempt for all sorts of traditional religious and cultural practices, and if you only tolerate Jewish people so long as they don’t actually practice any form of Judaism or Judaism-related cultural practices then that’s basically antisemitism.)

By 2005, Icke had come back to the mysticism he’d been espousing in 1990, with a more comprehensively Gnostic worldview. (I will refer to this as Ickean Gnosticism, to distinguish it from historical forms of Gnosticism.) He’d also had a nasty accident in the wallet region; Royal Adams, his agent in the USA, had scammed him out of a fat stack of royalties, and on top of that his marriage to his second wife, Pamela, was disintegrating on bad terms and a messy divorce battle was in the offing.

In February 2007, Icke set up the “Freedom Foundation” as a means for American supporters to channel money to him by making tax-deductible donations via the International Humanities Center. This raised eyebrows in some quarters, since such tax-deductible foundations had been fingered as being part of the New World Order conspiracy since the 1950s. Still, donations can only go so far: ultimately, Icke’s income comes from touring and books, and so new product was wanted. So began a new phase of Icke’s writing…

The Hotel Hoax and the Wholly Fooled

Infamously ripped off wholesale by Dan Brown for The Da Vinci Code, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is a comfortingly silly work of conspiracy theory. The book has its roots in the work of actor and Doctor Who screenwriter Henry Lincoln, who on holiday in France in 1969 came across Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château, a book by Gérard de Sède discussing an enigma surrounding a small town in the Languedoc region of southern France.

Fascinated, Lincoln would go on to produce three documentary films for the BBC’s Chronicle strand discussing the mystery – The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem? in 1972, The Painter, the Priest and the Devil in 1974, and The Shadow of the Templars in 1979 – with these films being the first time the English-speaking world was exposed to the mystery. Each time, Lincoln would revise and deepen his proposed answer to the enigma, as he perceived yet further hidden depths to the story. Joined by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, his investigations would eventually see the release of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982.