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Post by ramseycampbell on Feb 18, 2010 10:42:24 GMT
^are the shorts you completed still easily available anywhere? after reading 'the hand of doom' from wordsworth i really fancy some more! I think they're out of print, but abebooks may well help...
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Post by andydecker on Feb 18, 2010 11:21:58 GMT
I know KEW was overseeing a series of restored REH Conans Those were and are still wonderful editions for a massmarket paperback. Berkley Books put them out in 1977. You get the Weird Tales text, not the edited text, some original weird tales illustrations, a fact-filled foreword and afterword and - as a gimmick - the cover as a little poster. And all for 1,95 back then. Today, were you literally drown in Howard books - the joke about Stephen King and his published groceries-list is old and tired, but the same is true for Howard today; how many different editions of Almuric do you need? - they still held up or are better. Berkley Medaillon, 1977 As much as I love Howard´s work, a part of me is convinced that all of his characters are not well suited to longer texts. I know, blasphemy, but they work because of the short format. Which I think is the reason why there is so much good material in the comics and so many boring novels. Some of the writers of Savage Sword of Conan wrote short stories which are much superior than half of Tor Books output. The same goes ironically for KEW´s Kane. The big novels drag in places, while the short stories are often quite wonderful because they nail the atmosphere, which Howard, Lovecraft and Smith are famous for, so perectly. It is a shame that most (all?) of KEWs novels are out of print. I am also convinced that Soloman Kane is the most problematic of Howard´s characters for an update. In our times you have to put the character into a historical context, if you write a novel about him, and it would be really difficult to not portray him as a religious nutcase who would burn any nice lass who misses church on sunday as a witch at the stake. Basically he would be Peter Cushing´s character in Hammer´s Twins of Evil or a version of Matthew Hopkins.
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Post by andydecker on Feb 18, 2010 12:09:27 GMT
^are the shorts you completed still easily available anywhere? after reading 'the hand of doom' from wordsworth i really fancy some more! Another strange publishing history. First the completed stories were published in 1979 by Bantam in a two book edition of Solomon Kane, Skulls in the Stars and Hill of the Dead. Then they were reprinted in 1995 in the paperback Bean edition Solomon Kane, which was Volume III of their Robert E. Howard edition. This one has an interesting foreword by Mr. Campbell and contains all of the Kane stories. Here in Germany the completed kane stories were published as a book in the Terra Fantasy edition in 1982, which seems to be an an original edition done by the editor of the line. It contains the three completed Kane stories of Mr. Campbell, the Howard story The Road of Azrael and a Kane poem by Howard.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Feb 18, 2010 12:14:27 GMT
I make it a general rule that a pastiche is not likely to be as good as an original. I'm not saying it would be impossible. However, part of the beauty of a thing lies not only in its execution but in its conception. Howard conceived Conan and was responsible for adventures spanning his lifetime. Any other authors are filling in a jigsaw and of course they may do that accurately or not but they didn't invent the puzzle.
Howard talked of the writing of Conan as though it were simply jotting down random memories of actual events. This, I believe is one of the reasons behind his character being so convincing. i haven't read all the pastiches - as I tend to avoid them but I did read some of the ones with De Camp at the time of their release. I had a feeling that i was reading good stories by good writers. Not so with Howard, who was a master of the moment and was not merely good but brilliant.
The worst pastiche I ever read was the completion of Tarzan: the Lost Adventure by Joe R. Lansdale. Perhaps the writing was okay but Lansdale tried to impose a completely erroneous moral framework around the novel. It's my principal criticism of this kind of activity. part of the enjoyment of an author is his moral and historic framework - these mores are specific to a time and place and obviously spill out into the story - writers attempting a pastiche still carry their own baggage and usually it clutters up the hallway. This kind of crime is paralleled by those who edit Enid Blyton books because there are offensive passages in them
I'm not saying its not possible to circumvent this.
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Post by Jaqhama on Feb 18, 2010 12:53:51 GMT
Jaq, re your comment on REH and his imitators. (Now you respond by saying you've read all of the Kane books and have mint editions wrapped in mylar bags in a vault and were KEW's illegitimate son and I should stop being so patronising!?!) Well in truth the dreadful Thunderbird movie only cost me a dollar for a weekly rental. I've read most of the Kane novels and still have my copies of Darkness Weaves and Bloodstone. And speaking of the Conan comics...I much preferred some of the Marvel Conan comic storylines to the majority of non REH Conan novels. And hello Ramsey and welcome to this little vault of horrors. Whilst I will probably not read your Soloman Kane novel I have read a couple of your horror books and throughly enjoyed them. As an aside a chap suggested on a SF forum a month ago that no one today writes like Leigh Brackett...and yet again I was struck by that observation. Leigh wrote her stories in a particular style and structure. Not terribly hard to mimic; if one was writing an Eric John Stark story (for example) and one had a couple of Leigh's books on the table to refer to. I've always wondered why the many Conan authors who've tried their hand at REH's character(s) haven't managed to get (in the majority of cases) even an inkling of REH's writing style. I would agree that writing an entire novel in a style and structure not the writer's own could be a hard task. But if one sets out to continue tales and characters begun by other authors, should one not attempt to mimic their writing in the first place? Rather than just use the names of the original author's characters?
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Post by andydecker on Feb 18, 2010 19:07:24 GMT
Perhaps the writing was okay but Lansdale tried to impose a completely erroneous moral framework around the novel. It's my principal criticism of this kind of activity. part of the enjoyment of an author is his moral and historic framework - these mores are specific to a time and place and obviously spill out into the story - writers attempting a pastiche still carry their own baggage and usually it clutters up the hallway. This is of course a problem with pastiches. It is very hard to ignore historical mores and moral which often cannot be divorced from characters. If you write the characters from todays view they are not the characters any longer.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Feb 18, 2010 19:39:11 GMT
Here's an example of Lansdale's Tarzan dialogue which I quote from a scathing and rather good review on amazon:
"Keep your mind off the loincloth, dear?"
This tiny example summarizes the utter failure of this attempt. Tarzan simply doesn't say things like this.
That dreadful temptation to do something new, to explore an aspect of the character, to develop the story in a contemporary direction - which in the end is all bollocks because what you want is more of the same.
I confess that regardless of literary minds it would take a genius to recreate the feel you get from Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E Howard. These men felt inadequate before the literati but could they tell a story.
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Post by Dr Terror on Feb 18, 2010 20:21:55 GMT
"Keep your mind off the loincloth, dear?" I've probably bored you with my anecdote about the Conan playstation game, but in typical bore fashion... Conan is wandering around a city, a thief attempts to pick his pocket. Conan is wearing a loincloth.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Feb 18, 2010 20:48:15 GMT
You are never boring Dr Terror - although that might be because my memory would frighten a goldfish - and you made me laugh again
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Post by ramseycampbell on Feb 19, 2010 10:52:02 GMT
I would agree that writing an entire novel in a style and structure not the writer's own could be a hard task. Not so much hard as, I'd suggest, unnecessary. For instance, I think the best modern Lovecraftian tales are written by writers who don't attempt to pastiche Lovecraft's style (as I did, very badly, many years ago). Equally, I didn't feel that Karl was trying in The Road of Kings to imitate Howard's.
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Post by ramseycampbell on Feb 19, 2010 11:01:06 GMT
I am also convinced that Soloman Kane is the most problematic of Howard´s characters for an update. In our times you have to put the character into a historical context, if you write a novel about him, and it would be really difficult to not portray him as a religious nutcase who would burn any nice lass who misses church on sunday as a witch at the stake. Basically he would be Peter Cushing´s character in Hammer´s Twins of Evil or a version of Matthew Hopkins. Well, he isn't quite that in my novel or Michael Bassett's film! By the way, I especially like it that Purefoy (who is excellent) plays him with a West Country accent.
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Post by Jaqhama on Feb 20, 2010 14:59:36 GMT
"Keep your mind off the loincloth, dear?" I've probably bored you with my anecdote about the Conan playstation game, but in typical bore fashion... Conan is wandering around a city, a thief attempts to pick his pocket. Conan is wearing a loincloth. Ah, maybe you only assumed he was picking Con's pocket...maybe he just wanted to test the Cimmerian's (cough) mettle.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 25, 2010 13:18:07 GMT
Well I went to watch the movie last night and I thought it was a very very good attempt at getting heroic fantasy onscreen in a way that remains as faithful as possible to the source material while appealing to a mainstream audience.
I've read the Solomon Kane stories in Wordsworth's Right Hand of Doom, plus whatever else made it into the Panther Skullface omnibus from 1976 and I think this movie does as good a job as any could have of adapting Kane to the big screen.
James Purefoy is excellent, downplaying the heroics but never descending into annoying emo-type self pity, and Jason Flemyng is a very Howardesque evil magician villain, but the real star is director Michael Bassett who manages some terrific breathtaking visual compositions (bleak landscapes, a graveyard that looks like an updating of the b&w Universal horrors at their best) and never ever descends to the Stephen Sommers poke your eye out with special effects every two minutes approach. I'd heartily recommend it - it's certainly the best attempt at putting Howard on screen so far and it deserves to be successful so they can do another one
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Post by David A. Riley on Feb 25, 2010 14:12:49 GMT
Great review, John. I'm looking forward to going to see it, hopefully next week. This week I went to see the new Wolfman and was a bit disappointed. Too long, poor acting, too much over the top violence that just didn't seem credible and a total lack of any sympathetic characters. Larry Talbot was morose from the beginning so there was little change in him after he was cursed with lycanthropy, while the main female lead was insipid. As for Anthony Hopkins - the less said the better. And what really put the lid on it, in my view, was that none of the other characters were likeable, so that when they were killed off by the wolfman, who cared? I had to go and watch the original again last night just to set things right - plus its sequel, Frankenstein meets the Wolfman (which was also a lot better than the new Wolfman movie!)
David
PS Sorry for taking this off topic, but I just had to get this off my chest.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 25, 2010 14:31:23 GMT
I felt exactly the same about The Wolfman, David! Lon Chaney wasn't the greatest actor in the world but Benicio del Toro made me realise just how good Lon was at evoking sympathy with that character. Emily Blunt was awful but her performance was eclipsed by Anthony Hopkins who either delivered his lines as if he didn't care or in a variety of regional accents. The gypsies all being played by English character actors also raised a smile. But the whole father-son thing that Hollywood seems obsessed by (everything from Finding Nemo to Boiler Room to this) was something this film really didn't need.
On the plus side I liked the village location, and Hugo Weaving could be a great 'classic' horror star if he gets the right roles. And the transformation sequence in the asylum and subsequent rooftop chase was great. Unfortunately it showed up the rest of the film.
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