Tag: books

“So Staggeringly Bad”

Don’t hate-watch the Amazon abomination. Don’t indulge whatever curiosity you might have about precisely how bad it happens to be. Don’t think that you’ll score points with anyone by cleverly pointing out its copious problems that even a half-wit could have anticipated. Just stand back, ignore it, and leave it to burn.

Turkey is not the word. No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerising awfulness of Amazon’s billion dollar Tolkien epic.

This is a disaster dragon – plucked, spatchcocked, with a tankerload of Paxo stuffed up its fundament, roasted and served with soggy sprouts.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power (Amazon Prime) is so staggeringly bad, it’s hilarious. Everything about it is ill-judged to a spectacular extreme.

The cliche-laden script, the dire acting, the leaden pace, the sheer inconsistency and confusion as it lurches between styles – where do we start?

One disconnected style follows wildly after another. A static scene in which elves journey by ship is conceived as a PreRaphaelite painting – each actor stock still in silver armour, swords clasped to their chests, long hair rippling, eyes fixed on the horizon in pious awe. Inspired by a flock of birds, they lift their voices in a heavenly choir.

There’s a lot of this quasi-religious imagery. The first episode begins with a cod Bible reading: ‘There was a time when the world was so young, there had not been a sunrise, but even then there was light.’

Popular culture invents blether like this to replace real religion. It’s scientology for the superhero movie era.

‘Year gave way to year, century gave way to century,’ the narrator continues, and already this reviewer was giving way to laughter. Soon, every fresh clunker provoked such hoots that I had to keep pausing to gather my composure.

It will be beneficial for the world to observe, yet again, what inevitably happens when SJWs are permitted to acquire the rights to well-loved intellectual property.

“If this show fails, say insiders, executives could be forced to shut down Amazon Studios.“

Let it fail. Let it fail in such a proverbial manner that it will replace Heaven’s Gate as an industry byword for complete and utter catastrophe.

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The Siege of the Black Citadel

THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL

The first in a series of Conan novels by The Legend Chuck Dixon is also appearing in the new Illustrated Text format on Arktoons. A limited signed edition will be available soon on the Arktoons store.

Slender and lithe, the girl spun in the firelight to the hypnotic beat of the drums. A trilling flute rose and fell with each twirl of her body. A necklace of long white feathers offered tantalizing glimpses of swaying breasts as she danced. Sky blue eyes flashed from beneath a mane of cornsilk hair plastered to her face by a sheen of sweat, her taunting gaze set off by a band of charcoal ash streaked across her face as a mask. Anklets of silver bells made their own music as her feet flew across the sand.

The air was thick with the scent of men and spices under the broad market tent that dominated the settlement of camp followers. Braziers offered meat, most probably horse, served piping hot on rods of oak. Barrels of ale and spirits, certainly watered down, were drained at a dear price that rose each day. There were women as well, and the cost to lie with them remained affordable. there was no scarcity of whores of all kinds in the rebel camp.

The men who crowded the rugs and tables that encircled the center ring of the tent paid the steep prices for food and drink with a grumble, yet they paid. The tedium of garrison life and the increasing cold of the coming winter forced them to find distractions within the souks and bordellos of the nomadic village of merchant tents that had come to rest beyond the log ramparts of the siege fort. The anticipation of battle to come—a battle many of them might not survive—made a man think more of the pleasures of the day than a full purse in a future he might not be alive to see.

“Cimmerian, I would speak to you,” Danix said, touching the broad shoulder of a man seated on the ground at the edge of the open ring.

“Conan cannot hear you, captain,” said M’ollo, a swarthy Turan with a braided topknot that reached the small of his back.

“Your words are drowned out by the tinkle of that harlot’s chimes,” laughed Lugan, a Nemedian with a thick brush of white blond hair and a puckered scar where his right eye had been.

THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL Episode 1: Copper Coins

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Backings Old and New

First, CASTALIA JUNIOR CLASSICS backers will be pleased to know that a) ebook editions 4, 5, and 6 are now available on the Arkhaven store and can be downloaded at no charge with the same coupon that was utilized for books 1, 2, and 3. If you don’t have the code, or misplaced it in the interim, we’ll be sending out an email this weekend.

Second, CASTALIA JUNIOR CLASSICS 1-6 leather editions will be bound in August. They will ship in late August/early September. If we have any extra sets, we will make them available in that time frame. And if you’re one of the five goatskin buyers, we’ll need to get your color selected this weekend, so please send an email to confirm that you still want one.

Third, for Lodi fans, Alex Macris is running a crowdfund for BY THIS AXE: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization. In this tome you will find the secrets of the great and proud race of dwarves, compiled, codified, and curated for use in your favorite old-school fantasy role-playing game.

And fourth, Arkhaven’s Jon Del Arroz is running a crowdfund for OVERMIND, a science fiction graphic novel. Ayla Rin, Agent of Terra Prime has uncovered a plot against the Imperium! On a faraway colony planet, the governor is linking his populace into an ethernet where they are being mind-controlled by a rogue artificial intelligence that seeks galactic domination! Only Alya Rin can stop this nefarious plot and save humanity as we know it.

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Of Books and Things

ITEM: There are 4 signed DEATH MASK editions left in stock.

ITEM: The current Castalia Library book is THE PROMETHEAN by Owen Stanley. It is designed to be a set with THE MISSIONARIES, both 1st and 2nd editions.

ITEM: The previous coupon will work with the JUNIOR CLASSICS 4-6 downloads when they go up on the site tomorrow. We’ll also email a download link to a zip file of all three to backers in order to maximize the hit rate.

ITEM: HYPERGAMOUSE will now run twice a week. We anticipate a hardcover edition next spring.

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It’s Going to be So Bad

How to demonstrate you don’t understand the work of JRR Tolkien in three words or less:

Season 1 has a $465 million budget. Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke stated in May 2021 that she was “pretty confident” that the show will draw the required viewership to make the money worth spent.

Back in 2017, when it was reported that Amazon had bought the rights to “The Lord of the Rings” — winning a bidding war against Netflix — the number reported with that sale was $250 million. That number alone made it the most expensive television series ever, but later, The Hollywood Reporter reported that the whole series would end up costing more than $1 billion, due to production expenses (casting, producers, visual effects, etc.). “The Lord of the Rings” film trilogy’s own Elijah Wood reacted to that particular figure during an interview, saying, “That’s crazy to me.” For context, the Peter Jackson trilogy grossed $2.92 billion worldwide. The combined budget for all three films was $281 million.

That $250 million rights deal for “The Lord of the Rings” also came with a five-season commitment for the series. A guaranteed five seasons should also guarantee at least one full story told from beginning to end, even though there’s always the possibility of more, depending on the series’ success. The deal also allowed for the potential of spin-off series, which could mean the potential for even more of Middle-earth outside just this adaptation. In November 2019, Deadline confirmed that Amazon had officially ordered a second season of the series and that it was already in the works. According to the report, the official early renewal means that there will be a shorter wait time between the first two seasons come release.

However, the series may not ever get out of the Second Age — which is, again, 3,441 years long, so it’s got a lot to work with — as, according to Tolkien scholar and “The Lord of the Rings” consultant Tom Shippey, the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has refused to grant Amazon permission to film anything other than the Second Age, as to not alter the history of the more fleshed out Third Age. “But you can add new characters and ask a lot of questions…”

The tagline of the newly-released trailer? “Nothing is evil…in the beginning.”

When you already suspect – no, when you already KNOW – that the series is going to be a converged abomination wearing the title of the books as a skinsuit, you shouldn’t be surprised by anything the Hellmouth producers come up with.

And yet, to begin with a marketing tagline of “Nothing is evil…” is really going a bit far even for a collection of inverted anticreatives. No matter how it is subsequently modified after the ellipsis.

It’s going to be bad. It’s going to be so bad, it’s going to make THE WHEEL OF TIME and the last season of A GAME OF THRONES look good by comparision.

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Interview with Razorfist

Dark Herald interviews Razorfist for Bounding Into Comics about his new Dark Legion book, DEATH MASK as well as the decline and inevitable rise of pulp fiction:

DARK HERALD: Your Nightvale series appears to be strongly inspired by pulp era adventure stories. Pulp fiction was fairly common through the 1980s, but then interest started to taper off over the next twenty years. Why do you think that happened?

RAZÖRFIST: “Logistically speaking, what killed the pulps were the wood rationing and shortages of the mid-’40s.”

“The Shadow, the most popular of the ‘hero’ pulps for a long while, dropped to a shorter digest format and even cut Walter Gibson’s pay to keep the lights on. He would ultimately quit Street & Smith over it. Most pulp publishers were already dead after World War 2 and just didn’t realize it until the bills came due all at once over the next decade.

In the ’50s, those old yellow paperbacks (for a time, distributed via vending machine) seemed to replace Pulp as Television and Comics came to the fore. Ultimately, those got thicker and more pretentious until they became the ‘elevated’ gas station literature you see today”

“With thirty different titles ‘written’ by James Patterson, none of which he was ever even dimly aware of. They did sort of morph into the ‘genre fiction’ you’re alluding to throughout the ’80s. And in a weird way, they live on through Star Trek and Star Wars books, Battletech and so on.

These publishing houses are essentially printing pulp. It’s just a bit more bloated and seems to have aspirations to be more than it is. Sorry to say, it isn’t and never will be. Which is exactly the way I like it.”

DARK HERALD: I’ve recently run into a few other authors like you and Sky Hernstrom that have written new Robert Howard style high adventures. Do you think there is pulp revival underway? Also, who else do you know of who is working in contemporary Pulp?

RAZÖRFIST: “Yeah, I’ve read some of Sky’s stuff in Cirsova and enjoyed it. The first ‘New Pulp’ writer I was aware of was Barry Reese, who does a Shadow-esque vigilante series featuring characters like ‘The Peregrine’ and ‘Lazarus Grey’.”

“I think a Pulp Revival is inevitable. Whether it happens now or decades hence. Attention spans have fallen. Smart devices are tucked away in every pocket. Short fiction and bite-sized stories seem the way to go.

Yet, the ‘Phonebook Fantasy’ writers seem to have a minimum page count of 500 and fill the majority of it with worldbuilding bloat. And despite the name, it isn’t all that novel, either. None of them are doing anything terribly interesting to justify it.

Writing straightforward Fantasy is fine – I love it to death – It’s the pretense that it’s anything more that I can’t abide. And the smug superiority as they look down their nose at shorter, more plot-driven fiction.”

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DEATH MASK, Nightvale Book 2

I believed I promised you that we would have a book announcement of our own this weekend, and here it is.

KARA’ZIN

Empire of perfidy.

With Menuvia little more than a funeral pyre, Xerdes flees to the Traitor’s Kingdom of Nazgan. Where larceny is legal, honor is fatal, and it pays to keep a low profile.

For the deserts of Nazgan are not empty. A lethal legend now haunts the badlands, thirsty for sinful blood. A hooded horror none dare name.

Even as the masked wraith carves its way through the underworld of two separate countries, it has only ever uttered a single world.

“…Xerdes.”

Razorfist has written the second book in his Nightvale pulp fantasy series, which is being published by Dark Legion Books. He’s releasing a limited edition of 750 signed copies, of which only 340 are left after he announced DEATH MASK on his stream about eight hours ago, so don’t wait if you’re interested in a signed copy. Seriously, don’t wait. They will probably be gone before the Darkstream tonight.

Fortunately, you can also preorder both the regular hardcover and paperback editions until June 30.

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THE MISSIONARIES: A Review

If you’re not a Castalia Library subscriber and you’re contemplating the possibility of dipping your toe into deluxe book collecting, THE MISSIONARIES is an excellent place to start. There is a reason we chose it as the first book in the Castalia Library.

The Dark Herald discusses the Owen Stanley book on the Arkhaven blog:

The Missionaries takes place on Elephant Island. An Australian protectorate that Australia wants off the books. The Island is going to be Independent whether they like it or not. The Moroks who inhabit Elephant Island would have been surprised to hear that anyone besides them owned it in the first place.

“Roaring” Roger Fletcher is the Australian Royal Magistrate in name. And the local king in function. The native Morok peoples are convinced that he is the incarnation of their chief god Takime. He lives rough as he wishes and enjoys the Morok’s love and respect, as well as their roast pork and their svelte women. He carefully manages local disputes using trial by combat as a way to keep murder, rape, and cannibalism within acceptable limits.

The Moroks have their own culture and are rather fond of it.

Laripa was distinguished among the settlements of the Moroks by the presence the greatest orator Malek; the greatest sorcerer Macardit; and the greatest philosopher, Garang, a twisted, hairless little man with a squint. It was thus a kind of Florence or Paris, a cultural center where the aspiring young intellectual of the Moroks came to learn the secrets of their fathers, and, more hidden still, the dark revelations of the Before-Men who, led by Tikame himself, had roamed the mountains when Time itself was not.

The problem is that the UN has decided that they won’t be allowed to keep it. Fletcher’s opponent Doctor Prout, is a sociologist who has been given an ounce of power by a UN Special Commission. I can’t think of a more terrifying combination.

This story is skillfully constructed. The tone is consistent and builds steadily to a climax that I didn’t quite predict. That’s good because there’s nothing worse than an ending you saw coming all along.

There is an organic mixture of poetic description that paints a vivid and flourishing portrait of life on Elephant Island, that is ably counterbalanced by its larger-than-life characters. As well some lower-than-life characters. In my time I’ve known people like all of them. If you’ve lived a quiet life, allow me to assure you, these are all real people.

The work is consistently toned and beautifully written with prose that made me remember what a sweltering island jungle smelled like after an afternoon storm.

Years ago, the reporter Amanda Robb asked, prior to her interview of me, which Castalia House book she should read to best understand what made us different than all the other publishing houses. I told her to read THE MISSIONARIES. When we subsequently talked, I asked her what she thought of it. She said it was the most disturbing and most racist book she had ever read. She also said that she couldn’t put it down, that it kept making her laugh out loud, and now she hated herself for it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a sign of a novel that is not merely good, but great, with substantive commentary on the human condition.

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THE MISSIONARIES 2nd Edition

Castalia House is pleased to announce that the 2nd edition of THE MISSIONARIES is now available to order. A 400-unit print run of the Library 2nd edition and a 50-unit print run of the Libraria 2nd edition are now being produced; we will decide upon the cowhide and goatskin colors in the near future. So, if you did not manage to acquire a copy before the 1st editions were sold out, or if you are a completionist, this is an opportunity to add the 2nd edition of the first Library book to your collection.

Subscribers can utilize their discount codes as usual. If you are a subscriber and you do not have a code, please contact library-at-castaliahouse-dot-com.

Castalia Library 2nd Edition

Libraria Castalia 2nd Edition

We will be producing 2nd editions of other sold-out Library books, including MEDITATIONS and AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND later this year. The precise size of the print runs is yet to be determined.

UPDATE: If you’re the one who mentioned typos in the 1st edition in last night’s Darkstream, please email me the list of typos to which you were referring so we can fix them.

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Three Steps Forward

Some days, it feels like one step forward, two steps back. But today is a Three Steps Forward day, as all of the machines less the final two are arriving at the Bindery. We’ll put up some pictures on SG tomorrow, and I’ll try to show some on the Darkstream too.

Loading the truck in England.

It’s going to take a month or three before the Bindery is fully operational, as we need to make some modifications to the location in order to ensure everything is in line with the local codes, train everybody in, then assemble practice books until we meet our quality standards, but today marks the most significant step in the process since the subscribers made the whole thing possible by purchasing Bindery Editions of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY.

As an added bonus, here are the designs for POLITICS and ETHICS covers. As you can see, they will make handsome companions for the recently sold-out RHETORIC, although I’m not entirely certain about the central figure for ETHICS, so it’s possible that cover may change somewhat. But the spines are settled and they are going to look spectacular on the shelves as a three-volume set.

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