Dark Muse News: Heart of Vengeance & Other Tales of Azatlán by Gregory Mele

Dark Muse News: Heart of Vengeance & Other Tales of Azatlán by Gregory Mele

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Heart of Vengeance & Other Tales of Azatlán by Gregory Mele
(Obsidian & Bronze Ltd, August 2026, 280 pages). Cover Art by Mark Smylie.

Mele’s Meso-American Mysteries, Melee & Mayhem Awaits

Gregory Mele brings swordplay, sorcery, and the dark gods of a lost Meso-American world vividly to life in his Heart of Vengeance & Other Tales of Azatlán (Obsidian & Bronze Ltd.); it is a thrilling collection of occult mysteries, brutal battles, and weird adventures where the dead rarely stay dead. Dark Muse News jumped on it when it became public in August 2026 (available in several places; check out the author’s website).

It has 14 stories, 4 original and 10 published previously in various magazines.  Their connection? All share characters, deities, and the land of Tehanuwak (map below).

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From Robert E. Howard to Ray Bradbury: The Literary Influence of The Bible and The Odyssey

From Robert E. Howard to Ray Bradbury: The Literary Influence of The Bible and The Odyssey

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The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage Classics, 1990)

College lit classes introduced me to two works that had a profound influence on my own development as a writer.

The first was the King James version of The Bible. My family was Catholic and I’d read the Catholic Bible in my teen years. We didn’t read the whole Bible for my college class but read samples from King James, which is considered — by Catholics — to be a Protestant Bible. (It doesn’t include books that are part of the Catholic Bible, such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 & 2 Maccabees, and portions of Esther and Daniel.)

My college class did not read The Bible for religious reasons. We read it as literature, and the King James version is magnificent literature. I wasn’t even religious anymore myself but I loved the language.

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 9: The Score

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 9: The Score

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The Score by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1964), reprinted as Killtown by Berkley Books in 1973

What is it?

Volume 5 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels. This volume arguably features the greatest single heist Parker ever gets involved with. He and an unusually large team of accomplices robs an entire town, all in one night.

It’s also the first time in the series s a heist is not just a side story but the main point of the entire book, from the planning and the execution to the complication and the aftermath. We see a bit of that with the armored car robbery in The Man with the Getaway Face, but that’s the plot of only the first half of that book, and it’s nothing quite like the scale on display here.

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What I’ve Been Reading: October, 2026

What I’ve Been Reading: October, 2026

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I listen to a dozen audiobooks a month, easy. Often, a re-listen. I fall asleep with an audiobook timer set, every night. Having bought my bungalow in June, I try to spend a little time reading on the front porch, most days. Now that Fall weather has (FINALLY) settled in here in Columbus, I’m trying to be more intentional about it. Plus, the spare bedroom is actually the reading room.

So, I’ve gotten in some reading the past month.

SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN – CHUCK DIXON

I’ve blogged about Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian a couple times. I only began reading that one during COVID, and I now have five of the Marvel Omnibuses, as well as Roy Thomas’ terrific three-volume memoirs about the first 100 issues.

And just a year or two ago, I expanded my reading to include the black-and-white Savage Sword of Conan, also helmed by Thomas. Originally I preferred CtB. But the art style, and the depth of the stories, have really made me a SSoC fan. I read the first several Marvel volumes, which were by Thomas. But I’m currently reading Volume X, with Chuck Dixon doing the writing. Gary Kwapisz seems to have done most of the artwork (inked by Ernie Chan) and I’ve adapted to his style pretty quickly.

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Neverwhens: S.E. Lindberg’s Grave’s Daughters — an Imbalance of Familial Humors may Destroy a World

Neverwhens: S.E. Lindberg’s Grave’s Daughters — an Imbalance of Familial Humors may Destroy a World

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Grave’s Daughters by S.E. Lindberg (Ignis Publishing, June 24, 2026). Cover by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme

There is many kinds of world-building. Some create worlds so adjacent to our own, they simply are shadows — a slight change of name, a slight change of history. Others use an Earthly template — Bronze Age, Classical, Medieval, Early Modern, Victorian — and then layer their own elements of magic and science atop; while others yet create wholly distinct, carefully articulated “other worlds” that are the characters of the story themselves.

This is not what S.E. Lindberg writes about.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, June 1923 (Volume 1, Number 4), Part 1

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, June 1923 (Volume 1, Number 4), Part 1

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Weird Tales, June 1923, front and back covers
The fourth issue of Weird Tales, dated June 1923, keeps the same format as the issue previous — starting with the large bedsheet size, about 9 inches by 12. The trade dress of the cover is the same, with the same logo. The design of the cover, with a splash of red in which one story is advertised in black writing, is the same. Unfortunately, the actual cover art, by regular Weird Tales artist William Heitman, isn’t very good.

There’s a lady, there’s an ape, and the latter seems to have surprised the former in her room. The majority of Weird Tales readers were likely able to place the image at once as a scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders In the Rue Morgue,” which is reprinted this issue. The problem is that it’s not a particularly evocative image, and the poses of the characters seem odd at first glance and make less sense the more you look at them.

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #69 Now Available

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #69 Now Available

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Miguel Santos’ Banner Art for #69. A tip of the hat to a classic!

Happy news, S&S fans! Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #69 is out and it is one of our most ambitious issues yet.

We’ve got four stories and three poems, three audio works, the next two pages of Miguel Santos’ comic Ancestors and more art than you can shake a broadsword at!

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Forgotten Authors: Richard Tooker

Forgotten Authors: Richard Tooker

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Richard Tooker

Richard Tooker was born in Farina, Illinois on July 3, 1902 to George Lattimer Tooker and Laura J. (nee Switzer) Tooker. His family eventually left the small town of 600 people to move to North Dakota and also lived in Minneapolis.

After graduating from prep school, he took a job as an editor of Westerns before serving for two years as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps during the 1920s. As with many authors he worked a variety of jobs, including as a musician, journalist, cowboy, railroad clerk, bank clerk, and a farmer. By the 1930s, he had settled in Phoenix, which would be his permanent home.

His first short story was “Planet Paradise,” published as by Dick Presley Tooker was written when he was only fifteen, but did not appear until the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. His only other publication in the 1920s was the novel The Day of the Brown Horde, published by Payson & Clarke in 1929. It would be reviewed in both Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories and later an excerpt would be reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

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Who Watches the Watchmen? Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein

Who Watches the Watchmen? Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein

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Space Cadet (Ace Books, May 1971). Cover by Davis Meltzer

A book with the title Space Cadet is a little hard to take seriously; not many people can help thinking of the slang meaning. But it wasn’t used that way when Heinlein wrote it in 1948. If some people didn’t take it seriously, it was because science fiction as such wasn’t taken seriously — but Heinlein himself was quite serious about it.

In fact his novel was the first public use of the phrase, though it became better known after the television show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet bought the right to use it from him in 1950 — enough so that in 1953, Porky Pig appeared in Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century as an “eager young space cadet.” The expression might have suggested youth and naiveté, but not being out of touch with reality.

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The Weird Must Flow: The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Michael Kelly

The Weird Must Flow: The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Michael Kelly

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The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2 (Undertow Publications, August 18, 2026). Cover by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis

Weirdness is often part of horror, so we might call it a sub-genre that editor Michael Kelly has decided to further explore (after an excellent previous anthology) by collecting a number of dark short stories penned by a group of distinguished authors.

As a reviewer I enjoy the privilege of focusing on the stories that I’ve especially enjoyed, especially on the basis of their “weird” character.

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