Robert E Howard – Blood and Porridge

November 5, 2024November 5, 2024

Rab Foster gets grim

© Schlock! Webzine

Rab Foster, my penname when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new story published. It’s called The Mechanisms of Raphar and it appears in the November 2024 – Volume 18, Issue 13 – edition of Schlock! Webzine.

Once upon a time, I believed fantasy fiction came in two varieties only. There were 1000-page-long, telephone-directory-sized epics whose narratives involved quests, wizards, kings and queens, elves, hobbits and orcs and the first thing you saw when you opened the books was a lavishly detailed map of the fantasy-land in question. This J.R.R. Tolkien-esque variety was known as ‘high fantasy’. And then there were short stories where Conan the Barbarian, armed with only a broadsword and a leather jockstrap, cut a bloody swathe through enemy warriors, slew the occasional giant snake and earned himself the adoration of the occasional busty maiden. These were examples of the more down-and-dirty ‘sword and sorcery’ variety, of which Robert E. Howard was the leading practitioner.

But not anymore. Nowadays, if I type the question, “What are the different types of fantasy fiction?” into Google, it gives me 24 sub-genres. These include all sorts of nice, cheery-sounding things such as ‘hopepunk’ (“about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges”), ‘romantasy’ (which are “typically set in fantastical worlds, with fairies, dragons, magic, but also feature classic romance plotlines – enemies-to-lovers, soulmates, love triangles”) and ‘cosy fantasy’ (“works that contain or portray a comforting healing ambience to the story… centre on slice of life moments… and are often gentle in their narratives”). A well-known example of that last sub-genre is Travis Baldree’s 2023 novel Legends & Lattes, in which an orc and a succubus join forces to… open a coffee shop. Now I’m not going to slag off Legends & Lattes because it’s wrong to diss a book I haven’t read. Let me merely say it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. Or indeed, cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the niceness spectrum from hopepunk, romantasy and cosy fantasy is… grimdark. This is the nihilistic, blood-soaked, everyone’s-a-bastard variety of fantasy most famously essayed in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1996-2011) and TV series (2011-19). The science-fiction author Adam Roberts has described grimdark as fantasy stories where “nobody is honourable and might is right”, and which “turn their backs on the more uplifting Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealised medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then really was.”

I’m not that big a fan of grimdark. I sometimes find its ‘everything sucks’ attitude rather adolescent. But The Mechanisms of Raphar is pretty grim, and pretty dark, so I guess it qualifies as a story of this type. I’ve experienced a few lows recently, especially in my professional life, and I can hardly say I’m enchanted with the state of the world in 2024, so perhaps the story is a manifestation of my current discontent.

The Mechanisms of Raphar was vaguely inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum. Unlike the famous 1961 movie version directed by Roger Corman, which was about Vincent Price mourning his dead wife in a castle that coincidentally happened to have a few torture instruments stowed in its cellar, Poe’s original tale is about a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who tries to withstand the various devices of torture they use against him. In The Mechanisms of Raphar, the villains are an insane, sado-masochistic religious cult who worship a god of pain, have a giant temple that’s packed full of torture-machines, and make their services available – for a fee – to people who want other people to suffer horribly, such as despots and their prisoners or other religions and their heretics. I’m from Northern Ireland, so I don’t have a high opinion of organised religion. I think this shows in the story.

Incidentally, the name ‘Raphar’ is an anagram of ‘Har Par’, which is my tribute to Har Par Villa, the most extraordinary museum in Singapore. Har Par Villa’s most famous – or notorious – attraction is a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell where you can see the souls of sinners being horrifically tortured and punished for the crimes they committed while they were alive. Indeed, the ‘Tree of Blades’ that features in the story is inspired by the ‘Tree of Knives’, festooned with bloodied bodies, on display in Har Par Villa’s depiction of hell.

Until the end of November, The Mechanisms of Raphar can be read here, while you can access the contents page of Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine here.

And now that I’ve hopefully worked that bloodlust out of my system, maybe I will write a cosy fantasy next… Maybe my next Rab Foster story will be one where a kelpie and a balrog join forces to open a tea-room in Goblin-land.

July 11, 2021

Rab Foster gets theatrical

© Aphelion Webzine

I’m pleased to announce that my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers has been published in the July 2021 edition of the webzine Aphelion. The Theatregoers is a sword-and-sorcery story in, I hope, the tradition of such revered pulp writers as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and C.L. Moore and, as usual with my fantasy fiction, I have published it under the pen-name Rab Foster.

On this blog I’m not normally presumptuous enough to offer other writers, or aspiring writers, advice on how they should go about creating stories. On this occasion, though, I’ll suggest two strategies that helped me to put The Theatregoers together.

Firstly, when you have an idea for a story, get that idea written down as quickly as you can before it flits from your memory again. (At my age, things flit from my memory with terrifying speed.) I have a 17-page-long document on my computer hard drive containing more than 400 ideas I’ve had for stories over the years and I’m constantly adding to it.

Admittedly, many of those ideas will probably never see the light of day as stories and, to be honest, looking at some of the ideas I wrote down long ago thinking they were bolts of divine genius, I don’t think the world will be missing anything if they don’t. I doubt if anyone really wants to read a story about the notoriously bad Dundonian poet William McGonagall building a time machine in order to travel back in time to prevent the Tay Bridge Disaster from happening; or about a Sri Lankan tuk-tuk driver who’s secretly a superhero; or about ‘a fashion show for serial killers’, where the dresses have been fashioned out of… Well, you can probably guess what they’re made of.

The other writing strategy I’d suggest is to keep reviewing your list of ideas and particularly think about how two or more ideas can be incorporated into one story. In other words, don’t see each idea as a single seed from which a single story is grown. Many times, I’ve had an idea that’s looked good on paper but that has resolutely refused to develop into a story – until it’s occurred to me to try splicing it together with another, seemingly totally different idea elsewhere on the list.

In fact, with The Theatregoers, I ended up throwing no fewer than four disparate ideas from my 17-page list into the creative blender. I’d always wanted to write: (1) a story set in an abandoned city out in the middle of some inhospitable desert (similar to the setting of the 1921 H.P. Lovecraft story The Nameless City); (2) a story set in a theatre, where the characters would have adventures falling through trapdoors, scrabbling down stage curtains, flying about on wires above the stage, running through storerooms full of assorted props, and so on; (3) a story about vampire-like creatures that don’t drain their victims of blood but of moisture; and (4) a story about a tattooed person whose tattoos aren’t as inanimate as you’d expect, reminiscent of the title character in the classic Ray Bradbury collection The Illustrated Man (1951). Somehow, I came up with a single, hopefully coherent narrative.

© Panther Books

For the next few weeks, the main page of the July 2021 edition of Aphelion can be accessed here, while The Theatregoers itself can be accessed here.

May 3, 2021May 12, 2021

Rab Foster gets perspective

I still remember the moment when I discovered Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and, by extension, the joys of sword-and-sorcery fiction. I was ten years old and my family had just boarded the ferry at Larne on the east coast of Northern Ireland. We were heading across the Irish Sea to Stranraer in southwest Scotland, where we planned to spend a week’s holiday. (In years to come, we would be on that ferry many more times. However, by then, we’d moved to Scotland permanently and were travelling in the other direction, back to Northern Ireland to visit family and friends.) Anyway, the ferry-trip took about two-and-a-half hours, which seemed like an eternity to a restless ten-year-old like me. To escape the prospect of extreme boredom, I went straight to the ferry’s little onboard shop and bought a slim paperback from a bookrack there.

The book was Conan the Freebooter (1968), which caught my eye because its cover featured the titular barbarian engaged in a bloody fight with a giant ape. It contained five short stories about Conan’s exploits in the Hyborian Age, a mythical era of forgotten civilisations, magic, monsters and romance that’d supposedly existed tens of thousands of years ago between the destruction of Atlantis and the beginning of recorded history. Actually, only three stories of the five were proper Conan ones written by Robert E. Howard – Black Colossus (1933), Shadows in the Moonlight (1934) and A Witch Shall Be Born (1934). The other two, Hawks Over Shem and The Road of the Eagles (both 1955), were actually non-Conan stories by Howard that’d been set in Egypt in 1021 AD and the Ottoman Empire in 1595 respectively. However, another author, L. Sprague de Camp had sneakily rewritten them years after Howard’s death, resetting them in the Hyborian Age and replacing their original heroes with Conan.

Anyway, as I sat on that ferry reading that particular book, my enthusiasm for the sword-and-sorcery wing of fantasy literature was kindled. Warriors, knights, sorcerers, witches, kings and queens, princes and princesses, goblins, trolls, ogres and dragons, populating castles, fortresses, palaces, citadels, gladiatorial arenas, mysterious forests, mist-shrouded lakes, dark caves and foreboding mountain passes, involved in the casting of spells, the summoning of demons, epic quests to locate mystical objects with fantastical powers, Machiavellian court intrigue, battles, sieges, swordplay, derring-do and much, much bloodshed… How could the imagination of a ten-year-old not be fired by all that? Admittedly, I found the busty, lascivious wenches who kept popping up in the Conan stories a bit boring, although needless to say I appreciated their presence more when I was a few years older.

Of course, decades have passed since then and my opinions of Robert E. Howard and his oeuvre have changed somewhat. Yes, I still respect him for knowing how to tell a proper story. But it’s difficult to read the average Conan story now without wincing at least half-a-dozen times at the barbarian’s swaggering sexism – those aforementioned busty, lascivious wenches had little to do apart from throw themselves adoringly at their hero’s feet – and the general undercurrents of racism and ableism.

And there are plenty of other sword-and-sorcery stories by other writers I’ve discovered since then that I prefer. For example, there are the Jirel of Joiry stories, a swashbuckling fantasy series written both about a woman (Jirel) and by a woman (Catherine L. Moore), which appeared in the 1930s at the same time as the Conan ones, their polar opposite in the sex-war stakes. There’s Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1958-1988), which wittily rip the piss out of the genre. And there’s the Kane novels and short stories (1970-1985) written by the underrated Karl Edward Wagner, which feature an immortal swordsman who’s as violent and immoral as Conan but whose adventures are described with considerably more intelligence.

Anyway, this is all a preamble to saying that Rab Foster, the alias under which I write my own fantasy fiction, has a new sword-and-sorcery story called Perspectives of the Scorvyrn published in this month’s edition of Schlock! Webzine. I see it as a back-handed tribute to Robert E. Howard. The two main characters are opportunistic warriors in the mould of Conan and have a similar swing-your-sword-first-and-ask-questions-later attitude to life. Unfortunately, their lack of scruples and imagination leads them into serious trouble. And that’s trouble with a feminist tinge… Moreover, much of the story is written in the present tense and, as its title suggests, it’s told from multiple perspectives. That’s a style and approach that I’m sure a writer as traditional and old-school as Howard would have absolutely bloody hated.

For now, Perspectives of the Scorvyrn is available to read here, while the homepage of the May 2021 edition of Schlock! Webzine can be reached here.