Name Forthcoming: June Book Haul

Normally I do this on the 20th but I happened to run into some delays this month. Serious delays, I'll have you know.

It's not as if I took the pictures and then promptly forgot, no, no. There was some serious stuff going on, man.

Anyway, as you can see, this month it's a very varied batch, running the gamut from sci-fi, horror, classical history and even an extended opinion piece on the epic Fantasy genre as it was in 1987.

First up the latest Hack/Slash omnibus comic, even though the fifth was supposed to be the last one.

I'm not complaining though, as I really enjoyed this one.

It was a lot of fun to catch up with Cassie, especially as, since this one came out of the blue, given the rather definitive ending of the last omnibus, I just let any and all reservations go and just ended up really enjoying myself.

Expect an actual continuation of the overall storyline, and as long as you weren't married to the status quo at the end of omnibus 5, you're probably going to like it. This one practically does not give a shit and does what it wants, and I actually enjoyed that. Which is very unlike my usual self.

Judge Dredd is up next, with the Complete Case Files nrs 28 and 32, which I'm still a ways off of in my read but these were off by more than 35 percent, which together with a 10 percent discount almost halved the original price. Yay! Go me!

Also, I love the cover for Case File 32. A one-panel joke typical of Judge Dredd.

As always, click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Here, from the dread halls of the Black Library comes the reprint of the entire 5 books of the Liber Chaotica. You can easily find these online in a PDF format, of course, but I had been wanting to have the original editions on my shelf for a while, and so in lieu of that I picked up this one instead. It was only 55 euros, after all.

I'll be honest, I don't really understand the low price. Because this thing is magnificent in its presentation alone. Full-colour throughout, countless pieces of artwork, short stories everywhere, and, as they deal chiefly with the Chaos Gods, some of these are gratifyingly nasty and horrifying.

I've already read a bit, and honestly, if you're into the Chaos forces of the Old World (may it not rest in peace, and instead return to us, praise Sigmar), this thing ends up reading like a dark and twisted Bible.

The short historical Epic The Sea, The Sea.

Collected in this slim volume (84 pages) are actually only 2 books of a much larger narrative (7 books); the Greek expedition by Xenophon also know as the Anabasis.

I picked this one because, as I'm going to slowly work my way through the Penguin Epics collection (5 done, 15 more to go), I'm on the look-out for connections to current reads, and though this one doesn't actually connect to anything right now, this one's title nonetheless caught my fancy do I just went and bought it regardless. When it finally arrived I realized that I had already read 2 works inspired by it: Paul Kearney's The Macht trilogy and Valerio Massimo Manfredi's The Lost Army, and I immediately got stuck in.

Like most of these older works, it gets bogged down in names and speeches sometimes, but the scene from which the volume gets its title was pretty powerful.

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Hobbits, wizards, Tolkien-lovers, assorted Orcs and Uruk-Hai, hang on to your butts, because the king of the opinionated writers is here, and he's out to tear you a new one. Yes indeed. It's Michael Moorcock 's Wizardry and Wild Romance novel, the book of his gathered essays wherein he just lets go and laughs at and criticizes every work of Epic Fantasy of his day.

I bought this one both as it's been on my list forever, and because I was hoping to also run into Moorcock's opinion on Gardner's Grendel, foolishly forgetting that this book is solely about Epic Fantasy and that Grendel absolutely does not qualify for that.

Ah well. I've got it now, at least.

Also, look at this. Sad and poignant.

But anyway, it's been 30 years, so you can't really tell what happened with these two.

Up next, Vastarien 1.2 and 1.3.

Vastarien is an award-winning magazine in its second year of publication under the Grimscribe Press publisher, founded by Jon Padgett. As the name alludes, Grimscribe Press is a publisher dedicated to and inspired by the work of Thomas Ligotti. The magazine itself takes its name from the short story of the same name, which just happened to be the first work of Ligotti's that I had read, collected as it was in American Supernatural Tales, one of the 6-volume glossy Penguin Horror Hardback series.

I had already read the first issue somewhere last month, and I was impressed enough that I bought 2 and then, when that one arrived and had been read, 3 and am now halfway through it. There's no way that I'm not going to read 2.1 now. The Magazine has besides a bunch of short stories in the vein of Ligotti's work, also poems and non-fiction essays. The essays have so far all been hugely interesting and informative reads, bar 1, and I won't say which one. And the Eraserhead as Anti-natalist Allegory in particular, from volume 1, which, besides being insightful and informative, was also straight-up horrifying.

There's currently 4 issues out now, with issue 5 (2.2), the Summer 2019 issue, announced just today. I'll be getting that when it comes out in the coming months.

You can see I've been on a Horror and Weird binge lately.

Michael Cisco's the San Veneficio Canon is a book collecting his The Divinity Student and its sequel The Golem. I bought this because after reading the Traitor I found it... special and enduring. See here my review of The Traitor. It remember it being a strange read, and I was hoping for something more of the same, but maybe less impenetrable and this one's blurb stood out to me.

Struck by lightening, resurrected, cut open, and stuffed full of arcane documents, the Divinity Student is sent to the desert city of San Veneficio to reconstruct the Lost Catalog of Unknown Words. He learns to pick the brains of corpses and gradually sacrifices his sanity on the altar of a dubious mission of espionage. Without ever understanding his own reasons, he moves toward destruction with steely determination. Eventually he find himself reduced to a walker between worlds - a creature neither of flesh nor spirit, stuffed with paper and preserved with formaldehyde - a zombie of his own devising. The line twixt clairvoyance and madness is thinner than a razor blade. In 1999, The Divinity Student captured the attention of fans of dark fantasy everywhere, eventually winning the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel. Now, The Divinity Student has been paired with its sequel, The Golem, for a must-have book - The San Veneficio Canon. Michael Cisco has created a city and a character that will live in the reader's imagination long after this book has been read...

You have to admit, it sounds pretty cool.

And lastly, the 20th anniversary edition of William King's Space Wolf, the first ever Warhammer novel that I read.

I couldn't not buy it, but now that I have it I kind of question the worth of this edition.

Sure, it looks all manner of impressive, but there's not much in here.There's a number of colour artworks included that have graced the Ragnar Blackmane novels in the past, but besides the slight introduction by King himself there's nothing really new in here.