As I’ve noted previously, Karl Edward Wagner remains a woefully unappreciated and unrecognised writer of weird fiction; whilst most of his horror fiction was composed in the short form, his novels tended toward horror-inflected savage sword and sorcery (Wagner’s series concerning ‘Kane, the mystic swordsman’ being a case in point). Another such offering was Legion From The Shadows: a tribute to Robert E. Howard, and a sequel to Howard’s Bran Mak Morn tale, The Worms of the Earth. Set in Roman-occupied Britain, The Legion From The Shadows is not only a rousingly pulpy ‘historical’ sword and sorcery read, but it references classic weird fiction authors such as Machen, Lovecraft and, of course, Howard. Whilst it has been a few years since I last read The Legion From The Shadows, my recollection is that there is enough connective tissue to Lovecraft’s fictive cosmology to also consider it, nominally, a novel of the Cthulhu mythos. Cracking stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment