The Vinciolo Journal

Fantasy and History Alchemized

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A Kiss with Teeth by Max Gladstone

A Halloween story that is also for Father's Day! I review @maxgladstone's "A Kiss with Teeth" #Halloween2017 Vlad's the World's Best Dad!

I have never read a more Halloween Father’s Day story than “A Kiss with Teeth” by Max Gladstone.

In this dark but ultimately heartwarming tale, Dracula has moved to suburbia to raise a family, but begins to grow apart from his wife Sarah and his son Paul as he suffers from the seven-year itch. It is one of the stories collected in the anthology The New Voices of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle…

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Weird #5 Casting the Runes by M.R James (1911)

Which is scarier? Evil rune casting sorcerers or "split infinitives, and every sort of thing that makes an Oxford gorge rise"? @OxfordWords

Book reviewing can be a perilous profession, especially when the author of the book in question knows a thing or two about alchemy and Runic magic. In such cases, it is not advised to write an overly negative review, for fear of reprisals on the part of the sorcerer in question. Unfortunately, in M. R. James’s 1911 weird tale “Casting the Runes,” the reviewer, Mr. Harrington, learns this lesson…

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Weird #4 Srendi Vashtar by Saki (1910)

Weird #4 Srendi Vashtar by Saki (1910)

In “Srendi Vashtar” (1908) by Saki, a sickly boy named Conradin has a lively imagination exasperated by the dreariness of his Edwardian childhood. Having been given five years to live by a doctor whose “opinion counted for very little” (53), he declares, in the midst of his loneliness and boredom, that his polecat-ferret is a god. Founding his own personal religion, he names the “great ferret”…

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Weird #3 The Willows by Algernon Blackwood (1907)

In Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," even a river otter can be a portent of terror. @Weirdfictionrev

No weird tale that I have read captures a sense of dread and impending doom so subtly and beautifully in its descriptions of the natural world as “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood (1907), the third story included in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Tales.

In this story, two canoeists journey down the Danube and wind up stranded on a sandy island in the middle of a swampy part of the…

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Weird #2 The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford (1908)

#awfp "I have never believed in ghosts, unless that thing is one." I review The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford.

“The Screaming Skull” (1908) by Francis Marion Crawford, the second story in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, takes us into the mind of disturbed retired sailor as the skull of a possibly murdered friend haunts his guilty conscience. Told in the first person in what the editors call “an outstanding early example of modern monologue, verging…

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Weird #1 The Other Side (excerpt) by Alfred Kubin (1908)

#awfp Patient Zero for the Virus: my review of The Other Side by Alfred Kubin (excerpt) in @AnnVanderMeer and @jeffvandermeer 's The Weird.

In the spreading of the weird fiction virus, “which book was first sick?” (Miéville, “Afterweird,” 1116). Alfred Kubin’s novel Die andere Seite (The Other Side) can be thought of as ‘Patient Zero,’ or at least the one Ann and Jeff VanderMeer thought acceptable to identify for the purposes of their anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. It is doubtful that the true Patient…

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The Alchemists' Council by Cynthea Masson

Alchemy is treated as a metaphor for ecological sustainability in The Alchemists' Council by @cyntheamasson. @ecwpress

At the World Fantasy Convention in 2015, I happened to receive a free copy of Cynthea Masson‘s The Alchemists’ Council(ECW Press, 2016). It introduced me to a transdimensional universe in which alchemy is treated as a metaphor for ecological sustainability. I’ve never read alchemy treated in this way before and the subject matter was treated in a complex, dialectical fashion that I found really…

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Announcing the Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project

I will review all 110 stories in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's anthology The Weird.

At the World Fantasy Convention in 2015, I was introduced to the world of weird fiction.

My roommate for the weekend, Usman T. Malik, introduced me to the  Year’s Best Weird Fiction anthology series (Undertow Publications), where a short story of his, “Resurrection Points,” had been published recently. His enthusiasm for his genre of choice, the weird tale, was contagious.

Soon I had discovered…

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"In the Ruins of Shambhala"

My new flash fiction story, "In the Ruins of Shambhala," appears on 600 Second Saga! A divine power, fallen to earth...

My short story “In the Ruins of Shambhala” has appeared on 600 Second Saga, a flash fiction audiobook podcast. It’s my first publication outside of a student literary magazine and you can listen to it here! It is narrated by Mariah Avix.

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The Other in Epic Fantasy and Seven Pillars of Wisdom

The Other in Epic Fantasy and Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  “At the Ford of Danamol a spur of the mountains runs right down to the river, making a low rampart of hills screening it from the north. The Khentor host was pausing to eat about two miles away from the Ford; Li’vanh and Mnorh had gone away from the rest about a mile, to the top of a low rise, to keep a watch. They were lying very flat in the short grass taking it in turns to keep an eye on the…

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9 Ways Guy Gavriel Kay Stole Productively from Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain

9 Ways @guygavrielkay Stole Productively from Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain @BrentonDana #ballantine

At a wine and cheese social last November, my professor, Dorothy Bray, who taught a class on the fantastic in medieval literature over the Fall, began to talk to me about how Guy Gavriel Kay had ‘stolen’ material from The Fionavar Tapestry from an earlier author.

I was mildly scandalized that Kay, who has achieved the Order of Canada, should have stolen details from an earlier author of epic…

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Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant

Something deeper than your typical classic fantasy: Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant. @BrentonDana #epicfantasy

Last January, Dorothy Bray, a professor at McGill University where I study, handed me an old Ballantine Adult Fantasy classic: Red Moon and Black Mountain (1970) by the well-named Joy Chant. Rediscovering the Ballantine fantasy books proved to be a nostalgic romp through territory supposedly familiar to all of us who read and love fantasy novels. The Ballantine series was where the motifs and…

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Underworld as Otherworld: Combined and Uneven Development in Charles de Lint's Urban Fantasy Fiction

@egsamcgill #Urbanfantasy represents an idea of modernity as both combined and uneven. My analysis of Charles de Lint.

Today I will be presenting on urban fantasy and how it relates to the conditions of combined and uneven development.

Modern fantasy as a literary form has diversified since The Lord of the Rings (1954) and its subsequent paperback imitators. Stereotypically set in medieval or pseudomedieval kingdoms with dragons, elves, and faeries, these paperbacks were rarely set in cities, but usually in the…

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One Thousand and One Hockey Nights in Canada

#Canadientalism --that's Orientalism but Canadian. Today I pastiche Arabian Nights illustrator H.J. Ford.

Canadientalism–that’s Orientalism, but Canadian. Instead of a discourse of largely European imperialist knowledge production aimed at defining the “exotic East,” Canadientalism is a discourse of American imperialist stereotypes aimed at defining the essential nature of the “exotic North.”

In the visual arts, we see Orientalism perpetrating stereotypes of the Arab, everything from turbaned thieves…

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What are the Seven Pillars of Wisdom?

What are the Seven Pillars of Wisdom? Great cities of the Middle East or sacred Irish trees? @BrentonDana

T.E. Lawrence

Steadily, I am reading through T.E. Lawrence’s military memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and I had to ask myself, “What are these seven pillars of wisdom anyway?” Nowhere in the text does he ever mention these seven pillars. What were they and what could they possibly mean?

My quest lead me down an interesting path of discovery, into the Bible and the works of Robert Graves, whose…

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The Miseries of Mister Sparrows by Matthew A.J. Timmins

The Miseries of Mister Sparrows by Matthew Timmins: A Wodehousian #PennyDreadful with slapstick humour.

Picture a cold, damp hut, surrounded by mischievous crows, on the banks of a swollen river, against the backdrop of a smoky, nineteenth-century city awash in crime lifted straight out of a penny dreadful. Add this to the miserable squalor: that the resident of said hut, one Robin Sparrows, serves as office clerk to a predatory law firm whose motto, Lupi pastores erunt, means ‘the wolves shall…

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Could the Artificial Paradise of the Assassins be a Fairy Otherworld?

Could the Artificial Paradise of the Assassins be a Fairy Otherworld? @LeVostreGC @assassinscreed @BrentonDana

After a hiatus, weekly posts have returned on Saturdays. Today, I propose a modest theory about the Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan ibn Sabbah, the leader of the Nizari Ismai’lis, which are more infamously known (however unfairly) as the Assassins. I have discussed the Old Man of the Mountain in the past in the context of the famous Assassin’s Creed franchise. In this post, I try to understand…

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