Dispatches from the silver key

Arcane Arts

Metal is vast. Metal is diverse. Metal is sprawling. The number of subgenres is staggering … more than 70, are you kidding? And to be honest, a little stupid. Drone metal. Funeral doom. Djent metal. The finer points of classification make sword-and-sorcery vs. heroic fantasy look like high school debate club.

And so I don’t think it’s possible to write an absolutely definitive history of heavy metal. And even if you could, who would be interested in such a thing? If you like doom are you likely also a fan of funk metal or Christian metal?

This past weekend I finished reading an attempt at a comprehensive history, Andrew O’Neill’s A History of Heavy Metal. I’d describe it as breezy, entertaining, fairly well written. But also, quite biased and therefore incomplete. An ostensible history shouldn’t ignore bands that the author does not like. O’Neill hates glam metal, so we get 10 pages of why it sucks … except for maybe Appetite For Destruction. He also has little use for Anthrax and Megadeth (Dave Mustaine’s nasally voice grates on him) so they’re largely ignored too, despite their considerable footprint.

For what it’s worth I recommend A History of Heavy Metal as a breezy, sometimes entertaining read that filled in a few corners for me. Black and death metal, mainly, and a lot of bands I’ve never heard of.

What he wrote was fine… but it’s not what I want to read. Or write. I’d rather go deep than broad. Curated instead of encyclopedic.

This is a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up writing a heavy metal memoir. We have histories. We’ve got Sound of the Beast and Louder than Hell and O’Neill’s book. We have information: Videos, podcasts, even, a map. We’ve got a million stories of the bands and performers themselves. The territory is well staked-out.

We don’t need another Flame and Crimson for heavy metal.

So, I wrote something quite different. A story from one fan’s perspective—my own. My life, with heavy metal as the backdrop.

My memoir will only focus on the handful of metal genres I like. But I’m not writing a history. So if you’re looking for a treatise on Unblack Metal (a real subgenre, by the way) you’ll need to look elsewhere.

But if you’re looking for one fan’s utterly unique story maybe you’ll like this. August is getting closer.

Two Robert E. Howard updates

1. Last week was the 90^th anniversary of Robert E. Howard’s death and this my belated acknowledgement. I enjoyed seeing all the coverage of Howard Days on Facebook and YouTube. One day I will get back to Cross Plains. Congratulations to all the Robert E. Howard Foundation Award winners, in particular Will Oliver and Scott Oden. Oliver wrote a fantastic biography of REH that I’ve reviewed previously on the blog. Oden has been a S&S stalwart and also wrote a couple Conan pastiches that channel Howard’s prose in a way very few can.
2. This will be the last Arcane Arts before the June 20 Robert E. Howard virtual conference hosted by the new inheritors of The Dark Man, so here’s your final plug. Legendary H.P. Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi has been added as a speaker on my panel, which is intimidating to say the least. I’ve also received a list of questions that we might cover. I think it will be a good session. Please sign up; it’s free. I understand registration has been a little light.

RIP Jane Yolen

I was saddened to hear of the passing of the prolific and talented Jane Yolen, age 87. I have fond memories of reading Owl Moon to my kids long ago, a story about a girl and her father I found quite touching.

Yolen also had a story that appeared in Heroic Visions. In a review from 2011 I thought it was the best story in the anthology.​

Cool 1970s horror mag

I’ve said on a few occasions there was something weird, and great, about the 1970s. Something in the air that decade, and not just my infant squalling (I was born in 1973)

Here’s more proof: A video about the short-lived 70s horror mag Fantasy Classics which reprinted old-school, Weird Tales era stories of horror and the occult.

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I love the aesthetic, the art, craft, the detail of this magazine. The cover of the first issue reminds me of Black Sabbath’s debut album—also a product of the 70s. I was particularly interested to see an issue dedicated to Clemence Housman’s The Werewolf, which I haven’t read but need to. If you are a fan of Arthurian literature and its many adaptions and retellings, I cannot recommend her The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis enough. It is not a bombastic, Hollywood-style retelling of King Arthur. Think The Green Knight, psychological and introspective and atmospheric.

Yeah, I might need this Warlord Omnibus

As a kid growing up one of the comics I picked up from time-to-time was Mike Grell’s Warlord. It had a sword-and-sorcery vibe that drew me in long before I’d heard of the term, possibly before I’d even heard of Robert E. Howard or Conan. That winged helmet was badass.

Grell was a fan of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs Pellucidar series and the influences are plain. Here’s his concept pitch to D.C. Comics: "The story of an archeologist who stumbles through a time portal and winds up in Atlantis became the story of US spy pilot whose SR-71 is damaged while on a mission over Russia and plunges through an opening at the North pole into the world at the center on the earth, where creatures of from mythology and Earth's ancient past co-exist amid fantastic cities and leftovers of the civilization of Atlantis … drawing on many sources, including my own US Air Force experiences to lend a note of authenticity to the characters background.”

I’m thinking about pulling the trigger on this omnibus, but hesitating just a bit from the anxiety I feel revisiting old properties. I have an incredible fondness for Thundarr the Barbarian and Transformers and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, not all of which have held up. Will Warlord retain its magic? I am leaning toward, f-it,let’s find out.

Should Brian pick up Warlord? Send him your yea or nay.