A Postcard From Crom's Mountain

[cromagnonman]

Greetings fellow ghouls.

As someone who has lurked around these boards - appropriately enough - for untold yonks I thought it was about time that I stuck my oar in and helped paddle this kayak of kitsch against the currents of good taste.

My credentials for being here are founded on a forty year habit of fantasy reading which probably began with the discovery of Roger Lancelyn Green's mesmeric retellings of the Norse myths in the local library and - less cerebraly but no less enjoyably - with the avid weekly consumption of the "March of the Mighty Ones" comic strip in Monster Fun (of lamented memory).

From there I quickly gravitated to Marvel and DC comics and thence to the road to Damascus moment that was the discovery of Robert E Howard. When my nine year old self found the Sphere Conans in W H Smiths it was as if Crom's compass had skewered me through and my life has pretty much orbited around that interest ever since. Over the years that has evolved to take in many of Howard's contemporaries such as Clark Ashton Smith, Ed Hamilton, Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Henry S Whitehead and Joseph Payne Brennan. It wont have escaped anyone's notice that one name noticeably absent from that list is H P Lovecraft. With all due respect to his devotees here I'm afraid I've always had a blind spot when it comes to his appeal. To my mind his continued publication constitutes the only successful horror he ever achieved.

The other notable aspect of the above list is that all the names cited are safely dead and have been for at least a couple of decades. In fact 95% of my reading is taken up with the work of dead authors. I don't have much interest in contemporary fiction. Dead authors tend not to disappoint by going off in progressive new tangents unlike those selfish and smug enough to still be breathing.

Fantasy fiction continues to be my reading of choice; now including the more recently deceased such as David Gemmell and Angus Wells. But I also have a long standing interest in quality historical fiction. Here again we are talking pre millenium classics by the likes of George Shipway, R F Tapsell, Rosemary Sutcliff, Alfred Duggan and Edward Frankland. None of this facile tripe churned out by the bucketload these days with their signed and lined and numbered first editions.

In case anyone should be wondering my reading interests do extend to horror. A lot of teenage hours were taken up with paperbacks plucked from the carousels of the local newsagents: Richard Lewis, Mark Ronson, Guy N Smith, dear old Jimmy Herbert and others doubtless best left unremembered. Nowadays my interest inclines more towards E F Benson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, John Blackburn and - egad - Graham Masterton.
For what its worth a book collecting triumph I'm particularly proud of was recently achieved in the horror field when I found the one volume missing from my set of Dennis Wheatley's Library of the Occult. I found the first back in the Cretaceous period (or so it has often seemed) in Greenwich market. Stupidly expressing the opinion that this looked like a good series to collect I was informed - in no uncertain terms - by the know-it-all behind the stall that I shouldn't bother as it was all but impossible. Talk about a red rag to a bull. Well it only took me twenty five years but I finally proved the idiot wrong when Cheiro's YOU AND YOUR HAND finally surfaced in Charing Cross Road. And for anyone with a late-night-on-Channel-5 mode of thinking, no, its not about that.

So anyway that's me in a nutshell. Which is exactly where you'd expect a nut to be.
I've had a lot of fun and garnered much enlightenment out of this site over the years. And now - as they say in the supplements - its time for me to put something back.    

[dem bones]

Sept 29, 2015 20:46:04 GMT cromagnonman said:

The other notable aspect of the above list is that all the names cited are safely dead and have been for at least a couple of decades. In fact 95% of my reading is taken up with the work of dead authors. I don't have much interest in contemporary fiction. Dead authors tend not to disappoint by going off in progressive new tangents unlike those selfish and smug enough to still be breathing.

Have to say that, when we started Vault, I felt exactly the same way. Then the The Black Book Of Horror hit the fan, sent me scurrying off in search of more work by certain contributors, and now authors old and new, dead and getting there, sit side by side on the shelves of shame, and they don't argue too much. There's diseased life in this ropey old genre yet!

Thanks for the lovely postcard, Mr. Cromagnomman. I hope you enjoy your time here. Have fun.