© Swords and Sorcery Magazine
Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new short story published in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. It’s entitled The Library of Vadargarn and is about a tough, unscrupulous swordsman – is there any other type in sword-and-sorcery stories? – who agrees to transport a strange book in a city where books, reading and libraries are banned.
I should say I’ve always been fascinated by stories involving imaginary, fantastical and / or sinister books, such as The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962); The Book of Sand in Jorge Luis Borges’ 1975 short story of the same name; The King in Yellow in Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 short-story collection of the same name (okay, actually an imaginary play rather than an imaginary book); and the granddaddy of spooky made-up books, The Necronomicon in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, which was supposedly written by ‘the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred’ in the 8th century and translated into English in Elizabethan times by Dr John Dee, no less.
I’m also a sucker for fantastical or sinister libraries, like the one featured in the short story The Library of Babel (1962) by Jorge Luis Borges again; or the one that appears near the end of Umberto Eco’s medieval detective novel The Name of the Rose (1980) – Eco gently takes the piss out of Borges by having it run by a blind, malevolent librarian called Jorge of Burgos.
Not that any of the above works had any influence on The Library of Vadargarn. Weirdly enough, the only thing that might have influenced it was the novel I was reading at the time I wrote it, Still Midnight (2009) by the Scottish writer Denise Mina. This ‘tartan noir’ crime thriller is about a businessman getting kidnapped and, while his family try to put together the ransom money, being held prisoner in a disused furnace in an old Glaswegian factory… Which may have had some bearing on where the climax of my story takes place.
For the next few weeks, The Library of Vadargarn can be accessed here.