Category Archives: Books

Tim Byrd and The Blogs of Doom

Hi.

For those who don’t know me, or have known me but don’t have great memory, or those who know me but are in denial, my name is Tim Byrd, and I’m a writer and a dad.

That is not in order of importance.

Anyway, I’ve blogged a bit in the past [NOTE: on 3/11/09, I imported the earlier blog and those entries are now available as part of this blog], and as part of a personal campaign to re-engage the world, plug my work, and make new friends, I’m blogging again. I’m also on Facebook, MySpace, and maybe shaking a tin cup outside your local Starbucks (I probably need a shave).

Next year, G.P. Putnam’s Sons is going to publish my first novel, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom. The book is the first of a series depicting the adventures of Doctor Spartacus Wilde, super-scientist, gadgeteer, physical exemplar, warrior, and the coolest dad in the world except for me.

Doc has two brilliantly capable kids, Brian and Wren, who join him for his perilous travels, often saving the day (and the planet) themselves.

Anyone who enjoys grand old pulp adventure in the Doc Savage/Indiana Jones/The Shadow style should enjoy Doc Wilde. It’s written for young readers, but full of literary allusion and other stuff for smart folks of all ages.

HELLBOY IS HELLA GOOD

Forgive me for saying “hella.” Sometimes I get meme-flu. I’m better now.

Inspired by the upcoming Hellboy movie, I took steps to fix my lack of knowledge about the title character. I knew he was a creation of comic artist (and writer) Mike Mignola, whose shadowy, Kirby-esque work I’ve really liked over the years. Nobody else draws like Mignola.

I’d never really looked at Hellboy, though, because it looked like it was perhaps some weirdness-for-the-sake-of kind of thing. That and I rarely ever read comics anymore for sheer grumpy financial reasons (as in, a $4 comic that’ll take me 8 minutes to read is less entertainment for the moola than a $7 paperback that’ll take me a few days).

Little did I know that Hellboy wasn’t just a grand adventure strip, it’s pure pulp. And we’ve established I loves me some pulp.

Reading several Hellboy tales over the past week, I found them to be great fun, soaked in Lovecraftian atmosphere, told with great wit. What really surprised me, though, is that reading Hellboy is like reading folk tales or myth, because Mignola starts in those realms and builds his stories the way a good shaman would build a lesson tale.

And Hellboy himself is quite a character. He’s supposed to be a key figure (on the wrong side) in the Apocalypse, but, well, he refuses. So he fights the good fight against creatures much like himself. Oh, and his right hand is this great big slab of red rock, sometimes called “The Right Hand of Doom,” and it holds the power to end the world, and while he’s not inclined to use it that way, others are, and sometimes try to get it off him.

Great stuff.

Can’t wait for the movie.

EDIT: If you’d like to read some of this stuff for free, check out the e-comics at http://www.darkhorse.com/zones/hellboy/downloads.php . Also, the “Animation” bit is very cool.

My Return to Hyboria

The other day, I wrote about Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, who is coming to the movie screen, if indeed the filmmakers manage to bring him there (you never know for sure till it’s done, as I know all too well). This was just the latest bit of data in what has been a return to the realms of pulp for me the past year or so.

I’ve always loved pulp, and never been far from it, and in the recent past I used a short Savage Worlds adventure with 1930’s pulp action to introduce my players to the system, I introduced my son to Doc Savage (in the pages of the original novels and Marvel comics, as well as the George Pal/Ron Ely movie misfire from the seventies, which is actually pretty cool if you’re a 7 year old boy), I reread some H.P. Lovecraft, I started (and have nearly completed) a juvenile adventure novel that is deep tribute to both Doc Savage and Lovecraft, I added more pulp to my DVD collection (The Shadow, The Phantom, The Rocketeer, and of course the Indiana Jones trilogy), and hell, I could go on, but you get the point. The listing may be extraneous, anyway, since when I think about it, I could probably do a similar list from any previous year. As I said, I’m never far from pulp.

The latest is I’m re-reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, in their original form, unexpurgated and un-bastardized by L. Sprague de Camp or anyone else. I always loved this stuff, and haven’t ventured near it in years, so the inherent danger was that it wasn’t actually as good as I remembered (this has happened to me quite a bit, alas, and much golden light from my storied past has paled in the process). I mean, what if Howard wasn’t as good as I remembered? What if the blood and thunder and poetry of his prose was what my teenaged mind brought to his clunky hack material?

Well, no worries. The SOB could write.

I burned out on fantasy years ago, having read so damn much of it, and seeing so much of it become, basically, clumsy Tolkien pastiche brewed in folks’ own Dungeons & Dragons games. George R.R. Martin brought me back for a grand visit with his “Song of Fire and Ice” series, which brings Shakespearian complexity and historical novel heft to muscular, gritty pulp adventure, and is some of the best damn fiction of any sort I’ve ever read. I drop back in on Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser every couple years, and each time I’m surprised that, while I recall Leiber as being a prose god, I’m still giving the man less credit than deserved.

And Tolkien. I love Tolkien, but I think Peter Jackson mostly improved on his work, and you don’t read J.R.R. for his prose anyway, but for his world- and language-building and epic tale-telling. And it’s when Tolkien’s at his pulpiest, with screeching Nazgul and sinister giant spiders and, well, Gollum, that he’s at his best. And Aragorn could build his fire in the wildlands of Weird Tales and be completely at home. Tom Bombadil…well. Um.

I’d read 100 pages of Howard’s Conan any day over 100 pages of Tolkien. Howard’s writing is as muscular and aggressive as his barbaric hero, and as intelligent. Conan is a far cry from the contemporary stereotype of the bulky, none-too-bright savage, and the stories put him in a variety of situations, not just the same one over and over. Magic in these tales is rare and mysterious and almost always corrupt. Monsters are scary, not just another bag of hit points to whack at. There is passion and danger and the feel of real (often swampy) earth underfoot.

So, in short, I’m lovin’ my return to Howard’s Hyboria, and watching Conan in action again is thrilling. If you haven’t read this stuff, you should. Start here.

Raisin’ Kane

Wow.

I used to have a friend, a big red-bearded Carolinian name of Karl Edward Wagner, who was one of the absolute best dark fantasy writers I’ve ever read. He was, in my eyes, one of the three best sword & sorcery writers of the 20th Century, the other two being Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, and his horror fiction blew most of his peers out of the water. In other words, he was a master. His stories won awards, he was a gifted anthologist, and he was a great guy to go on a bender with at a SF convention.

Karl died in 1994. A nice tribute can be found here.

Karl created a dark sword & sorcery hero who should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Conan of Cimmeria, but unfortunately recognition of Karl’s work never filtered far outside the envelope of genre. That hero was Kane, an immortal warrior cursed by “a mad god” to wander the world for some long forgotten sin, perhaps the first murder. Kane was a true anti-hero, just as likely to be up to no good as he was to be helping someone, and was a fascinating character with a lot of depth.

And Karl wrote like John L. Sullivan threw fists.

Well, perhaps the day will come that Kane is better known to the masses. Tonic Films, which is owned by one of the producers of the recent horror flick Cabin Fever (itself contending for an Independent Spirit Award for Outstanding Achievement), has acquired the rights to Karl’s book Death Angel’s Shadow, a book of three Kane tales, and are planning to film the first story, “Reflections for the Winter of My Soul,” with the possibility of filming the other two if that one does well.

Here’s hoping they do Kane even a quarter as well as Karl did…

Julius Schwartz

For those who’ll know who I’m talking about, I’ve just seen notice that Julius Schwartz of DC Comics has died. He was a great, nice, creative man who influenced a lot of folks, and he’ll be missed.