Review: Tales From the Magician’s Skull Issue 5

Got this a couple of months ago, finally getting around to reading the stories. As usual, I’ll try to avoid major spoilers; when I mention something that may be spoilerific, I’ll put it in parentheses so you can breeze by it if you want.

There is a nice cover by Sanjulian, and it actually matches one of the stories in the issue. A small thing, but I like when that happens! Then a page of editorializing by Howard Andrew Jones, touching on Covid’s impact and how it changed plans for conventions in 2020, and a quick rundown of this issue’s authors and stories.

A brief – and, for me, obligatory – note on typos. I found six or seven this issue. I think that this is taken seriously, and after looking a story over for the third or fifth time the eyes of an editor can glaze over, but I am looking forward to the issue when no typos wave at me from the page. I have asked this question before (to much silence), but maybe in this age of barely-literate social media posts, nobody except me cares about getting things right? Have standards been so reduced?

So first up is Pool of Memory by James Enge, another Morlock story. He’s one of the characters with a regular home here in TFTMS, which I am of course a fan of – both generally, and in this specific case. I have come to appreciate Enge’s creative situations and locales. I am still a bit left out from the emotional heft of the stories because I have not read the book(s?) featuring Morlock. There are references and characters that do not impact me as they are intended to. I guess at this point, that’s my fault; but then again, the stories appearing in this mag could maybe be given some more internally relevant continuity? That was certainly the case when he lost his hands…Anyway, this story is a bit of a commonplace set-up – “I don’t know who or where I am” – that has the potential to go south pretty fast, but instead I was drawn into it as Morlock tries to remember who he is and figure things out. It was cool seeing his innate curiosity manifest through the fog and how his investigative methods took over. Great visuals, and a well-described bizarre climax raise this story high. There is a bit of help with an object that makes things clear, but it was Morlock’s unorthodox investigation that discovered it and his reasoning ability that allowed him to apply it, so it’s cool. The sad note that the story ends on somewhat paralleled my own as I don’t know who Goldie is exactly to Morlock or what the Wardlands are, but things are explained adequately enough to understand the impact upon Morlock.

This is followed by The Guardian of Nalsir-Fel by Adrain Simmons. It is an Arabic/Mediterranean flavored fantasy. The two primary characters are street-performers of a slightly roguish bent who are involuntarily caught up in a plot they do not quite understand. I really like that the impulsiveness of one of the characters causes things to go awry from the start (as someone who could have been the major villain in the tale is killed pretty early) and they must launch a rescue without a clue where to start. The distract-them-with-an-uproar-while-I-enter-the-building-unseen scheme is a pretty standard trope at this point, and the solution to the facing the monster at the end literally fell into the character’s hand, but neither were particularly jarring. Not sure if these characters have shown up anywhere previously, as one of them remarks he had never killed anyone before (in Sword&Sorcery, that usually indicates the first story in a sequence, as there are a lot of killings), but I’d definitely like to read more set in this world. A solid story.

Next we have another recurring character, John C. Hocking’s Benhus the King’s Blade in The Corridors of the Crow. I have enjoyed all of the Benhus stories, there has been one in each issue so far (and one in Skelos with him as a much older character, which may or may not be canon), and the only reservations I have expressed are about his gadgets getting him out of jams too often. That’s not the case here (though his super-knife does end one violent encounter). The mood is very strong in this story. The enforced mystery of the party’s destination is laid on a bit thick (because Benhus doesn’t know where they are going), but it doesn’t really detract and just underlines how Benhus is still not sure of himself. We again get some compelling supporting characters; I would like to see a few of those we have encountered before make a return appearance or two. That being said, we do see the impressively powerful King Numar Flavius again, and Hocking manages to inject menace into almost everything he says or does. Again we are shown a glimpse that Benhus is not particularly a decent person, as was the case in the first story, and those particular events come back to not just haunt him, but threaten him. A pretty strong ending, and Benhus uses his head to end a situation that probably would have killed him, which is nice to see.

Road of Bones by Violette Malan is next up, featuring her returning characters of Dhulyn and Parno. I really wanted to like this tale, given how disappointed I was in the other two that have shown up in the magazine. And I did, initially, with a pretty solid set-up. But things got convoluted as the story developed, in both action and plot. I admit up front time travel makes my eyes roll, and accomplishing it through a vision with poor rationalization (Parno appears in Dhulyn’s vision while simultaneously being awake on watch; so therefore, surely, the younger version of the secondary character can come out her vision of the past to co-exist in the real present with his older self, right) does nothing to change that. There is a reliance on the reader being familiar with time paradoxes from Star Trek and/or Harry Potter (in fact one scene echoes HP strongly as they wait outside a door, hearing their voices in the room beyond, not wanting to walk in on themselves). The only action scene is practically lifted from Leiber’s Lords of Quarmall, and the villain has no menace and is dealt with rather easily and unconvincingly. On the plus side, Malan’s quality of writing is pretty good, and the Pathos of Sundowner’s is handled well and sympathetically. I have to wonder if this ability to bring people out of the past by having a card-induced vision about them will be any kind of major turning point in the series, as it logically should, or if it is just a throw-away plot device for this single story.

Then we have another Elak of Atlantis story by Adrian Cole, Dreams of a Sunken Realm. I’ve read three stories of this revitalized series before, to mixed feelings. This story continues that opinion. Cole has been around a long time and is a solid writer, but this is not his strongest work. There are clearly efforts to make it read/sound like a pulp tale from the past, which I do like. There are some cool visuals of Elak and crew being under the sea, and a past cataclysm. But the dialogue gets weak in a lot of areas (for example, Elak’s command to “Use all the oars!” when the ship has been getting pulled away from its course; they probably would have been already, and the statement lacks the heft of Conan’s “Row, you dogs!”) and the author’s voice is very thin at points (for example, in describing a being met under the sea, the webbed fingers are “Possibly used for swimming.” Ya think? The next sentence describes them as gleaming as if from water, “probably being amphibious.” Ya think? Given the circumstances, these hedging words are unnecessary). So Elak’s crew gets pulled under the waves by an ally for an info-dump, then they go back to their city to prevent a similar cataclysm to what they were warned about. The climax is interesting, but I have to wonder why the MacGuffin that allowed them to win here did not work for the guys who had it in Lemuria? Maybe because there are a few less evil gods now than then – but it is stated that this is a cataclysm to destroy Atlantis. In the motion-picture tapestry that they watched depicting the destruction of Lemuria, the red MacGuffin never even showed up. It shows that the author has some passion for the characters and series, and there was plenty of action, and the pacing was outstanding, but I didn’t care much for this story.

Digression coming up – skip the next two paragraphs if you want to avoid a critic navel-gazing.

So that brings up a point in my mind regarding this story and the previous. If you expect to see problems, you often will whether they exist or not. Given my feelings toward the previous Dhulyn/Parno and Elak stories, am I reading things into them, magnifying problems? Or, are they really average or worse? I am pretty sure it is the latter, given the problems I have stated, but I do question myself a bit here. I have seen some criticism of some my stories/rpg adventures where a commenter latched onto a certain factor, and then blew it up so that it infected the whole (not saying I didn’t deserve criticism, just that it is easy to see one problem and then perceive everything as being flawed). We only have to look outside the window to see that lots of people believe a few documented instances of election fraud invalidates an entire election, or that if you believe racism is hiding behind every bush, you will inevitably find it.

I don’t like being critical; I was a B- college student in my English major, so I was not a strong student in the curriculum. So I do question my unfavorable opinions, and try to hold myself to standards when reviewing, particularly stories that don’t do it for me. But I have read (and written) fantasy and sf since the 70’s. I do have a good feel for these stories, and I can articulate what works and what doesn’t. This is inherently subjective, but I do think there are some objective mileposts in stories. But seeing as how the editor of the magazine included these last two stories, maybe I’m wrong about something somewhere. Not that inclusion in this magazine means I am wrong about their quality; only that the editorial vision here is different from mine, at a minimum.

OK, enough of that crap. If I had any sense, I’d delete it. But it does tie into what is being done here…so I’ll leave it out there so people can pick me apart as I do the authors here. It should be clear to those who’ve followed along for a while how seriously I take myself (cf. The Greywater Chronicles).

The last story in the issue, Demons of the Depths by C. L. Werner, is a Japanese fantasy tale about the demon-hunting Samurai Shintaro Oba. This is a very strong tale. The mix between action, plot, and dialogue is pretty much perfect. There are other stories in this series, I take it, though I have not read them, but you don’t need to have. Everything you need to know is revealed without an infodump. The author’s voice is really good; most Western authors tend to write simply when writing Asian fiction, but Werner doesn’t. Not that the prose is florid or anything, it just feels natural, and I like it. The enemies are diabolical and tough, and there is a hard realization for Oba at the end. Duty and Honor are articulated – a must when writing about Samurai – but done subtly without drawing overt attention to the topics. I want to read more about the ronin Oba.

The last significant piece is a profile on Howard Lamb by the editor Jones. This is a great article, and made me wonder why I never picked anything by Lamb up, despite being aware of him for most of my life. I seem to remember a profile in an early issue of the Savage Sword of Conan. Before the year is out, I will get some of his stories.

And there we have it. Overall, this is another strong issue of the Skull, even with the stories I didn’t like – as usual, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I have one more issue on the subscription that I went in for; pretty sure at this point I’m going to extend the sub.

You’ll certainly enjoy this issue! Use all the oars!