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The King Beyond the Gate, by David Gemmell. I like Gemmell's stuff because he was the rare modern fantasy writer who didn't do bloated multi-book sagas. His style was more to establish a setting and do self-contained plots that built on the history established in the previous entries in the...

Say It With Bullets, by Richard Powell. Another one of the Hard Case imprint, this one concerns a guy out for revenge on some old buddies who apparently shot him in the back and left him for dead as the communists were taking over China. He's back in the U.S. and using a bus tour of the western...

I haven't had much time for reading lately but I did get through the fourth Tarzan book, Son of Tarzan. Unfortunately, this one was kind of a slog. Say what you will about Burroughs's writing, his stuff usually has intensity and sense of great forward momentum, but until the last quarter this...

Swords Against Death, by Fritz Leiber, the second collection of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Beautiful heroic fantasy, alternately haunting and funny, and Leiber is stylistically way beyond most fantasy/sci-fi authors. He's like the Raymond Chandler to Robert E. Howard's Dashiell Hammett...

Dr. No, by Ian Fleming. James Bond was killed at the end of his previous adventure, From Russia With Love, but the beginning of this one reveals that he got better. Phew! This is Fleming's homage to Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels, probably the wildest Bond novel written at the time, even moreso...

Lately I've read: The Wolf's Hour, by Robert McCammon. This is basically a James Bond story, except it's set during WWII and James Bond happens to be a werewolf. The sex scenes are kind of funny and the gore is way over the top but this is a lot of fun and McCammon has a very readable style...

Haven't had as much time for reading lately but I did finish: Grave Descend, by John Lange. "John Lange" being an early pseudonym for Michael Crichton. This was pretty entertaining, about a diver hired to salvage a sunken yacht only for not all to be as it seems. The hero's sidekick, a...

Just passing along that Donald Hamilton, creator of Matt Helm and author of The Big Country, among numerous others, has died. Here's hoping he's honored with some long overdue reprintings of his work.

Finshed The Black Castle, a very good vampire novel by Les Daniels set during the Spanish Inquisition. Sometimes Daniels gets a little carried away showing off the research he did but I appreciated that it's a vampire story that doesn't try to muck with the standard legend too much (I'm so bored...

On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers. Entertaining read, although mildly disappointing considering how some reviews built it up. I found Powers's writing style somewhat cold and mechanical, which caused the magic of the story to feel less, well, magical :) Surprising that Hollywood isn't trying to...

Last things I've read were: The Big Blow, by Joe Lansdale. A ficticious story about a real guy during a real situation, it's about a young Jack Johnson coming up in the boxing world while at the same time the 1900 hurricane that erased Galveston is encroaching. The ending is somewhat...

I read: The Gods of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs was like the Joel Silver of the 1910's - his books are literally non-stop action and carnage. Great fun but also exhausting to read :) The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. I figured I ought to get around to this since...

That's good stuff. I'm still very much in a pulp mood: just finished Doc Savage: The Devil Genghis and The Shadow: Malmordo. I'm thinking about re-reading the John Carter of Mars books.

I finished Into the Volcano, which was a pretty good homage to the classic superspy genre of the 60s. I very much appreciated how the story was written straight - it's not at all a jokey Austin Powers send-up. It's written in such a way that if you had a time machine, you could go back to that...

The Bloody Red Baron, by Kim Newman. Solid but nonetheless inferior sequel to Newman's excellent Anno Dracula. I think Newman had trouble coming up with interesting ways that mass vampirism would affect WWI, so the alternate world angle kind of fell flat. Lots of the usual entertaining...

That's one I'd very much like to read at some point. Love the movie. I'm working on a few books right now, so it's been slow going lately, but I have finished a couple. Judgment Night, by CL Moore (1943). One of the great space operas. It's largely distinguished by taking what up til then...