About My Fiction

Shall I admit it? While most of my reading is nonfiction, mainly religious studies, when I do read fiction, it is virtually all Horror, Sword-& Sorcery, hero pulps, Tolkien, and old time Science Fiction. I do not even venture close enough to the mainstream to have read Sherlock Holmes, though I did get through a couple of titles by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet. (I was trying to acquire a taste for detective fiction, but it didn’t work.) And my fiction writing partakes of the same limited interests. I write in the same sub-genres I read. No surprise there! What does surprise me is the sheer number of stories I have written. Even more surprising than that is the fact that so many of them have achieved publication, albeit in small venues.

Lovecraft was a scholarly soul, and part of the effect of his stories, with their gradual build-up from the mundane to the spectacular, is their scholarly, treatise-like tone. The reader gets the feeling he is reading a deposition, a reluctant account, the report of a case. Such narration comes naturally to me, too, because of my prior experience in scholarly writing. It is perhaps something of a limitation, but then if one’s goal is to imitate a limited writer, maybe it is an asset, too!

            But I am also a devout fan of Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lin Carter, Richard L. Tierney, and others. Their fiction hurtles along and is filled with imaginative color. I try to write in this vein, too, and so some of my stories are more action-oriented and stronger on plot. In the last few years, I have taken up the fallen banner of Lin Carter’s Thongor of Lemuria saga. Lin appointed me his literary executor, and so I feel that carrying on Thongor’s adventures is within my prerogative. I have a Conan novel in me, too, but I’m not writing it till I can get official permission.

            My wife Carol and I have a perpetual disagreement over the proper role of literature. She is a natural born educator and activist, and she has little patience with fiction or films that do not convey an ennobling message. But for me, if there is a message, it is icing on the cake, a nice added dimension, but not at all necessary. I agree with Camus as to the utter gratuity of art, art simply for art’s sake. I doubt that even at my most sophistical I could wring a message out of John Jakes’s Brak the Barbarian or Frank Belknap Long’s “In the Lair of the Space Monsters,” but neither do I feel compelled to try! If they stimulate my imagination, stories have done more than their job toward edifying and instructing me. I hope you may derive some minutes of such fun as you read some of my fiction. And let me assure you: none of it is veiled autobiography!