Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 142 Pages There are a few things that will guarantee that I pick up a book, for a further inspection, and… A number of those things are on the cover of this book :o) I literally had no choice in the matter, I had to pick the book and take a look. The blurb pretty much sold it to me… A home to reavers and rakes, sorcerers and slayers, undead kings and undying things – expanding a page at a time in the stories added by its authors. In the once lands, a lineage of sorcerous wayfinders work to keep godlike monstrosities locked behind the crumbling walls of cursed cities, by allowing the vengeful ghosts of forest gods to inhabit their living flesh. In the wild wastes, tribes of cannibal huntresses fight to balance the old ways and new in a struggle to keep their culture alive by trading in death. In the sprawling city of Khyber, ambitions dance on sword edges while clans of thieves and reavers clutch at power. Welcome to… Shared World. Yep, I was sold. ‘Shared World’ came ...

I’ve been going a little ‘stir crazy’, these last few days, so yesterday afternoon, I took myself into town for a slice of pizza (spicy chicken, in case you were wondering) and a visit to Forbidden Planet to pick up a couple of comics. I say ‘a couple’ but I came out with three comics, I think that was remarkably restrained of me. One series ends, another begins and, ‘Conan the Barbarian’ just keeps rolling along… Just the way I like it :o) ‘Event Horizon: Inferno’ #5 – Ward, Carey, Honchar (ID Dark) There weren’t many surprises here, ok any surprises, but #5 rounds ‘Event Horizon: Inferno’ off in decent style with a strong vein of ‘be careful what you wish for’ vs ‘man really is unaware of his true standing in the universe’. Yep, I’m looking at you Durante… You were a little too villainish but at the same time, it somehow made the final outcome a little more sweet ;o) I’m half and half over where Starck’s arc (see what I did there?) ends up, as I think she deserved a little more, but...

  This will be a much shorter post than normal… While you’re reading this, I’ll be doing ‘fun stuff’ like clearing my work locker out, shredding notes and making sure that I hand my work laptop in before I leave work for the final time. On the other hand, I will be making time for a bacon roll from my favourite cafe so, it’s not all bad ;o) Anyway… It has been a difficult couple of days for reading (there are currently two books, on the comfy chair, that are exactly my kind of thing, I just can’t get into them) but I knew this was likely to happen so I already had a little ‘Conan’ set to one side, just in case… Thirty three issues in and I’ve stopped looking for continuity between the stories; to be honest, I shouldn’t have started looking in the first place. I mean, there is an overall timeline for Conan (it’s his life…) but the comic seems to hop around that timeline and for me, that is the best way to experience Conan’s adventures, just jump in and see what he’s up right now. #3...

The end of my job is only two and a bit weeks away but somehow seems to be dragging out at the same time… I’ve handed all of my projects over, to the new folk, now and I’m left with all the ‘leavers admin’ stuff and all the fiddly little bits that it wouldn’t be fair to leave to someone else. If only I could remember where I left my motivation in the meantime… ;o) Add a couple of pissed off cats into the mix (it’s far too hot at the moment…) and yesterday was pretty miserable to be honest. As luck would have it though, ‘past me’ saw a situation like this occurring and very thoughtfully ordered some comic books that turned up yesterday morning. So, once all the ‘work stuff’ was done for the day, I settled down for some reading… ‘Event Horizon: Inferno’ #4 – Ward, Carey, Honchar (ID Dark) After all the excitement, and a little heartbreak, of #3, this fourth instalment slows things right down again; some of the players didn’t get their ‘time in the sun’ and presumably need to get caught ...

Doesn’t that title look like the kind of football scoreline where the losing side ends up promising to refund their supporters for the cost of tickets and travel…? ;o) Sorry, yesterday was a busy one as well as being far too hot to be so busy. The kind of day where you go for a hospital appointment and the nurse taking your blood pressure asks if it’s normally that low. For the record, the nurse tried taking it again but the second one was worse and she decided to just stick with the first reading… Anyway :o) By the time I made it home last night, I wasn’t much use for anything but these two comics were waiting for me so I was able to end the day on a fairly decent note; one comfy chair and a couple of comics that I’d been looking forward to finally reading. Let me tell you a bit about them… ‘Conan the Barbarian’ #31 – Zub, Braithwaite, Rodriguez (Titan Comics, Heroic Signatures) Remember when I said that I really needed to go back and find a copy of #29 , just to find out exactly why ...

  Page Count: 250 Pages After finishing ‘Conan And The Emerald Lotus’ a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t in a mad rush to jump straight into ‘Conan And The Living Plague’. Nothing against ‘The Emerald Lotus’ but… Oh, just click Here and read my post if you haven’t already ;o) At the same time though, I can’t seem to leave a book unfinished at the moment and both of these books happen to be in the ‘City Of The Dead’ omnibus so… Here we are. Yesterday was a long one, what with one thing and another (and then another…) so after I’d turned my laptop off, I sat down and started reading. And… A Shemite wizard seeks to create a potion to use as a lethal weapon. Instead, he unwittingly unleashes a hideous monster on the city of Dulcine. Hired to loot the city of its treasures, Conan and his mercenary companions find themselves trapped in the depths of the city’s keep. To escape, they must defeat the creature and its plague wracked undead followers, then face otherworldly horrors beyond morta...

This weekend didn’t involve much reading at all… It did involve a picnic, flying a kite, watching ‘Superstore’ (again), getting beaten at Uno (again, again and again...) and falling asleep when I really should have stayed awake. Reading though, not so much. That’s just the way it goes sometimes, I’ll just have to try harder this week ;o) It’s me doing the talking though so there was a little reading that happened around the edges of all the other stuff. And it absolutely won’t surprise you, in the least, to hear that is was all about ‘Conan’, ‘Event Horizon’ and a little Warhammer 40K to round things off. They were all quick reads so it’s very much a ‘quick thoughts’ kind of post today, hope you don’t mind… ‘Event Horizon: Inferno’ #2 – Ward, Carey, Honchar (ID Dark) It feels like an absolute age since I picked up #1 (it has only been a few weeks but damn, the time hasn’t exactly flown…) so I tried #2, promptly went back for a re-read of #1 and then tackled #2 again. It all made a li...

  Page Count: 243 Pages I was pretty excited to see Titan & Heroic Signatures go all in with their ‘Conan’ line so I’ve been making sure to pick up the new ‘Conan’ novels as they’ve been published. Because it’s me though… It’s now a couple of years (ish) in and I’ve got a lovely stack of fresh ‘Conan’ reading that I haven’t even touched. What? I’m very much the ‘mood reader’ these days and the stars never quite aligned… Until now. I’m having a lot of fun, at the moment, with my new mission to read the actual books on my actual shelves (turns out that bookshops aren’t the only places with loads of unread books, who’d have thought it…?) and the other day, I found myself in the mood for a little Sword & Sorcery. I’d heard a lot of good things about John C. Hocking’s ‘Conan And The Emerald Lotus’ so off I went to Titan’s ‘City of the Dead’ omnibus and got reading. A few days later, here I am. One wizard is bad. Two are a disaster...And a deadly disaster, too. For Conan, after r...

Nope, it’s a not a ‘Conan’ book that no-one has ever heard of… I had a hospital appointment, yesterday afternoon, and followed it up with a trip to Forbidden Planet on the way home. It made sense ;o) They didn’t have exactly what I was looking for but that’s OK, I can always go back. In the meantime then, here’s a what I came home with; a small lesson in remembering to stay up to date with single issues… ‘Conan the Barbarian #30’ – Zub, Braithwaite, Rodriguez (Titan Comics/Heroic Signature) This one would have made a lot more sense if I had picked up #29 but, here I am; that’s on me, not the comic. What we have here then is Conan as seen through the eyes of an assassin on a mission to kill him; there’s just no context as to why etc. And that’s not the showstopper you’d think. It was very interesting to see Conan’s character (and the lands of Shem) unfold under the gaze of the Son of the Tooth and I could see this issue working very well as a starting point for new readers. It looks lik...

No blogging for me today... Yesterday was unexpectedly busy (very cool but... unexpectedly busy) and my youngest daughter is coming over later today. Again, very cool but I also want to take some time for myself, before I go back to work tomorrow and things kick off again. What's that? If I'm not blogging... Then what's all this? Fair question :o) Well, the short answer is that is that I'm pinching an old post, from an older blog, to sit here and look busy while I do other things (one of which may actually be reading some of the books that I posted about the other day...) A little 'Conan' for you this time, and a little reminder that there is a very clear line separating the 'Conan' works of REH from, well, everyone else. At least there is for me... You can find the original review over Here but I've changed very little, just tidied things up a bit. There has always been something about my commute that makes me want to escape into a genre novel, mo...

As a rule, I normally stay out of the centre of London when it’s Marathon Day; nothing against the Marathon, I’m just not keen on fighting my way through the crowds, that’s why I do all my Christmas shopping online these days. With that in mind then, why did yesterday see me in town, fighting my way through ‘Post-Marathon’ crowds? Because apparently, I’m the kind of person who won’t even listen to my own advice… Yep, it went about as well as ‘more sensible me’ thought it would. If I start talking about Christmas Shopping on Oxford Street, take me to one side and have a word? Anyway… Birthday shopping, for my eldest, took me into Forbidden Planet; once I’d fought my way past the Manga shelves, the comic book shelves persuaded me to stick around for a while. Not that I needed much persuading… So, here’s what I bought and here’s what I thought of it. ‘Alien: King Killer #1’ – Ahmed, Nieto, Atiyeh, Cowles (Marvel) Whenever I’m in Forbidden Planet, I like to take a chance on a comic book th...

  Page Count: 208 Pages My ongoing journey to read more of the books that I buy is going… Well… You all saw yesterday’s post :o) It’s not going brilliantly but not only do I really enjoy reading fantasy and horror, I’m also dogged and relentless with my TBR pile. Erm… Well, more the former than the latter ;o) I’ll get there, eventually… Anyway. The other day, said journey saw me take a little trek through the Hyborian Age with some quick detours along the way to take in 16th Century France and Hungary, as well as 1930s Egypt. Yep, I finally read that copy of ‘Savage Sword of Conan’, that has been been giving me reproachful looks for far too long. Lets talk a little about it :o) The second volume of ‘The Savage Sword of Conan’ collects issues #4-6 of the ongoing series and kicks things off with one of my pet hates about comic books… The humble ‘crossover’ event. That’s not the book’s fault, lets be clear, but here we are. I’m the kind of guy who settles on a title and sticks with it...

Yesterday ended up being a little bit of a bonus for this Graeme… :o) My daughters wanted to spend some time with their Mum and I had nothing urgent to take care of (or if I did, I’d totally forgotten what it was, that happens more often than it should) so… I slept in for as long as I could (I didn’t beat any records but it was a good attempt) and spent the rest of the day either reading, watching TV or prowling my flat, trying to satisfy a craving for a particular food that I still can’t quite identify. Tell me I’m not the only person who does that? Anyway… I settled for a couple of Bao Buns in the end (I had to eat something…) but that doesn’t really make for much of a blog post here so, let me tell you a little bit about some movies that I watched... ‘Thrash’ (2026) I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for ‘Shark’ and ‘Croc’ movies, at the moment, so when ‘Thrash’ popped up on Netflix, it was an easy decision to make for a little Saturday afternoon viewing. But… Is it just me or do most Ne...

  Page Count: 42 Pages I’ve had a good run, finishing full length novels, but I think it’s time to take a little breather and make this week all about short stories instead. I’m pushed for time at the moment, and I have plenty of anthologies to choose from. Lets see where the journey takes me. Well, the first stop is pretty obvious, not only because you’ve already read the title but also because ‘Warhammer’ has become a real ‘go to’ for me these days, the Old World most of all. I’ve travelled a fair way through the Old World but I’ve never made it to the outskirts of Mordheim, let alone behind its walls. That changed last night though with a tale of friendships lost and found, a horde of rat-men and possibly the best dog ever… Captain Heinrich Gogol is a man on a mission, a mission that will take him into the cursed heart of Mordheim to locate the Heart of Sigmar. The only problem is that the Skaven already have the Heart and they’re not interested in giving it up. And who is the m...

  Page Count: 10 Pages I had a great weekend, thanks, but I somehow didn’t get any time to make headway into what I’m reading right now. It happens :o) So, after my ‘Kull’ post from the other day, I thought I’d dig out my ‘Kull’ collection and read a little more about the man himself. Turns out that I actually have two ‘Kull’ anthologies, it’s an occupational hazard in my flat… Anyway, the best place to start is always at the beginning so last night, I ended up going back to the first recorded sighting of Kull, having a meal by a camp fire... If you’re reading the ‘King Kull’ collection, from Lancer Books (1967), you’ll know this story as ‘Exile of Atlantis’. If you’re reading it in the more recent Del Rey collection (funnily enough, titled ‘Exile of Atlantis’…) you’ll know it as ‘Untitled Story’. For the sake of this post, I’ll be referring to this tale as ‘Exile of Atlantis’; it feels a bit weird to refer to it as ‘Untitled Story’ but maybe that’s just me… ;o) Everyone’s story ha...

I'm not a hundred percent sure but it's a fairly good bet that I got home last night and fell asleep in my chair; not the ideal way to get ready for a busy day in the office today (although I guess it can't hurt...) but here we are :o) It wasn't the ideal way to have a blog post sorted for today either so... 'Past Me' came to the rescue and, here we are :o) So while I'm trying to bend 'office stuff' to my will (and probably get a lot of reading done on the bus), you lucky folk get a little 'Kull action', courtesy of those nice folk at Dark Horse. The original post can be found over Here and looking at the date on it makes me feel pretty old... ;o) My ‘Kull’ reading, so far, is limited to two short stories and a poem (from the ‘Conan’s Brethren’ collection) along with the comic book adaptation of one of these tales. Not really a lot to be going on with then and it’s not a title that seems to be on the bookshelves either… I’m pretty sure there...

I was in the office today and we all know what that means… Well, apart from the inevitable ‘lunchtime bagel’ from Bagel Factory, that’s probably a subject for a different blog entirely ;o) Nope, what I’m talking about is that point, on the bus ride home, where I realise that I’ve finished my book so I end up seeing what’s what on my Kindle App. Luckily, I always seem to have a couple of quick reads, waiting to be read ;o) Today, I visited another nightmarish, grimdark world of the 40th Millennium and then… I’m not sure where I visited, but I’d love to go back one day… ‘The Dark Hollows Of Memory’ – David Annandale (Black Library) The sinister limbo of winter is falling on the Imperial archive world of Mnemosyne. A great fog rolls in, one that will not dissipate for months. With it comes unimaginable hell for the planet’s citizens as the Chaos Space Marines of the Company of Misery stage a brutal invasion. But as the defenders of Mnemosyne fall before the Traitors, something moves in th...

  Page Count: 134 Pages I can feel my reading starting to head in a ‘fantasy direction’, more specifically a ‘Sword & Sorcery’ direction. That’s never a bad direction to head in and we’ll see where the road takes us but for now, I thought I’d start off with some short stories from ‘Old Moon Quarterly: Volume V’. Well, all the short stories from ‘Old Moon Quarterly: Volume V’, actually. You know what I mean ;o) One of the reasons I follow Jim’s blog (and you should too) is that he really knows his ‘Sword & Sorcery’ and has a happy knack for broadening my knowledge of the genre with what he writes about. So when I saw Jim had posted about ‘Old Moon Quarterly: Volume V’ , I thought to myself, ‘I’ll have some of that...’ And after I turned off my work laptop last night, that’s exactly what I did :o) I’ll be honest, I read through the whole volume, in one sitting, but came unstuck with the two poems; ‘The Kings Two Bodies’ (Joe Koch) and ‘A Warning Agaynste Woldes’ (Zachary Bo...