Summary: A better than usual issue of Fantastic. This one leads off with Bloody Man, a very good fantasy novella by Avram Davidson set in a picturesque British Hidalgo and featuring series character Jack Limekiller.
Good stories are provided by Keith Taylor (another installment in his ‘Felmid the Bard’ sword and sorcery series) and Lin Carter (who completes a entertaining if perhaps over-the-top horror piece from Clark Ashton Smith).
There is also a short horror piece by Grania Davis. L. Sprague de Camp, Richard Lupoff and (a very early) Steven Utley bring up the rear (the de Camp story is one of his ’Willy Newbury‘ stories, and Lupoff’s is part of his ’Ova Hamlet‘ pastiche series).
[ISFDB] [Archive.org]

Other reviews:
Todd Mason, Socialistjazz. blogspot.com
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Ted White; Assistant Editors, Lou Stathis, Terry Hughes

Fiction:
Bloody Man • novella by Avram Davidson ∗∗∗∗
God of the Naked Unicorn • novelette by Richard A. Lupoff [as by Ova Hamlet] ∗
New-Way-Groovers Stew • short story by Grania Davis ∗∗
Algy • short story by L. Sprague de Camp ∗
The Stairs in the Crypt • short story by Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith ∗∗∗
The Atheling’s Wife • novelette by Keith Taylor [as by Dennis More] ∗∗∗
Ocean • short story by Steven Utley –

Non-fiction:
Editorial • by Ted White
Fantasy Books • book reviews by Fritz Leiber
According to You • letters

_____________________

Some time ago I mentioned, at the start of a review of the February 1976 issue of Fantastic, that I planned to read through all four issues for that year. Given that was written in 2016, I think I had better speed up . . . .

This issue contains one of the highlights of 1976, Bloody Man by Avram Davidson, one of his ‘Jack Limekiller’ series, which features Jack, a Canadian ex-pat who lives in British Hidalgo (previously the British Honduras). This one opens with him asking Archbishop Le Beau, who is the middle of scaling fish, for work:

“They tell me . . . ” Limekiller hesitated, briefly. Was it My Lord? Your Lordship? Or was it . . . it was, wasn’t it . . . Your Grace?
Some saints levitate. Some are telepathic. It was widely said and widely believed that William Constance Christian Le Beau was a saint.
“Just ‘Archbishop’ will do, Mr. Limekiller,” the old man said, without looking up. Scrip . . . scrop . . . scrip. . . Jack found himself looking covertly around. Perhaps for loaves.
“Ah . . . thank you, sir . . . Archbishop. . . . they tell me that I might be able to pick up a charter for my boat. Moving building supplies, I understand. Down to Curasow Cove? For a bungalow you want built?”
Flop went the fish into the basket.  p. 6

After receiving the Archbishop’s agreement and a letter of introduction, Limekiller sets about obtaining the materials he requires. He soon finds out, however, that there aren’t any supplies in sleepy Point Pleasaunce, so his travels take around the town and beyond, which provides the reader with a number of delightful picture-postcard descriptions of the places he visits and the people he meets:

Well, there was the Royal Telegraphy. Her Majesty’s Government did not exactly go to much effort to advertise the fact that there was, but Limekiller had somehow found the fact out. The service was located in two bare rooms upstairs off an alley near the old Rice Mill Wharf, where an elderly gentleman wrote down incoming messages in a truly beautiful Spencerian hand. . . . or maybe it was Copperplate. . . . or Chancery. . . . or Volapiik. What the Hell. It was beautiful. It was, in fact, so beautiful that it seemed cavalier to complain that the elderly gentleman was exceedingly deaf, and that, perhaps in consequence, his messages did not always make the most perfect sense.
Gambling that the same conditions did not obtain at the Royal Telegraphy Office in Port Caroline, Limekiller sent off several wires, advising the Carolinian entrepreneurs what he wanted to buy, and that he was coming in person to buy it.
“How soon will these go off?” he asked the aged telegrapher.
“Yes, that is what I heard myself, sir. They say the estate is settle, sir. After ahl these years.” And he shook his head and he smiled a gentle smile of wonder.  p. 11

Stepping out into the pre-dawn was like stepping into a clean, cool pool. Already, at that hour, people were about . . . grave, silent, polite. . . . the baker setting the fires, the fisherman already returning with their small catch. The sun climbed, very tentatively, to the edge of the horizon. For a moment, it hesitated. Then, all at once, two things happened. The national radio system, which had gone off the air at ten the night before, suddenly awoke into Sound. Radios were either dead silent or at full-shout. In one instant, every radio in Port Caroline, and in the greater Port Caroline Area, roared into life. And at the same moment, the sun, suddenly aware that there was nothing to oppose it, shot up from the sea and smote the land with a blast of heat.  p. 17

Most of the first part of the story is travelogue like the above, but Limekiller eventually starts hearing mentions and rumours of a ghostly mystery, the “Bloody Man” of the tale:

“An’ one day, me see some-teeng, mon, me see some-teeng hawreed. Me di see eet, mon. Me di see di bloody mon—”
“Hush up you mout’,” said Piggott. But the other, a much older fellow, did not hear, perhaps, or did not care, perhaps. “Me di see di blooddee mon. Me di see he, ah White-MON, ahl cot een pieces ahn ahl blood-dee. Wahn, two, t’ree, de pieces ahv heem dey ahl come togeddah. De mon stahn op befah me, mon. He stahn ahp befah me. Ahl bot wahn piece, mon. He no hahv wahn piece een he side, mon. He side gape, mon, gape open. Eet bleed, mon. Eet BLEED!”
And now other faces than the proprietor’s were turned to the narrator.
“Hush up you mout’, mon!” other voices said, gruff.
Brown man, glass of brown rum in his brown hand. Sweat on his face. Voice rising. “Ahn so me di know, mon. Me di know who eet ees, mon. Eet ees de blood-dee Cop-tain. Eet ees Cop-tain Blood!”  p. 15

This supernatural thread slowly develops through Limekiller’s subsequent trip down to Curasow Cove with his shipment—he witnesses a fishing grounds dispute between the locals and Arawak tribesmen from the south, displaced because of sightings of the apparition—and then Limekiller himself sees the Bloody Man when his boat enters a supernatural mist. Then (spoiler) after talking to Harlow, one of the locals who provides information about who the apparition might be (there is talk of Blackbeard and the Flying Dutchman, etc.), Limekiller asks the Archbishop for help in laying the ghost to rest.
In the climactic scene, and after fighting off the Fallen (who summon waterspouts and sharks), the Archbishop administers the sacrament to the Bloody Man and he disappears.
There is an interesting historical postscript where the ghost is revealed as Captain Cook (who met his death in Hawaii, thousand of miles away), and whose ghost has supposedly returned to the area because of a light-hearted oath made by Cook before his death.
I really enjoyed the wonderful description and colourful detail of this story (it is probably my favourite of the ‘Limekiller’ series¹) but I suspect the average genre reader’s enjoyment will depend on whether they take to the sprawling travelogue that occurs before the fantasy elements come to the fore.
**** (Very Good). 19,250 words. Story link. 

•

God of the Naked Unicorn by Richard Lupoff [as by Ova Hamlet²] (Fantastic, August 1976) is one of a series of author parodies—although this one doesn’t concentrate one writer but mashes up Dr Watson and various pulp action heroes.
The story begins with Watson, after another failed marriage, returning to Baker Street in search of accommodation only to find that Sherlock Holmes no longer lives there (he has apparently retired to keep bees). Watson rents a flat in a down-and-out area and is almost immediately visited by ‘The Woman.’ After learning of Holmes’ retirement she reveals the purpose of her visit:

“The God of the Naked Unicorn has been stolen.”
“The God of the Naked Unicorn!” I exclaimed.
“The God of the Naked Unicom!”
“No!” I blurted incredulously.
“Yes!” she replied coolly. “The God of the Naked Unicorn!”
“But—but how can that be? The greatest national art treasure of the nation of—”
“Shh!” She silenced me with a sound and a look and a renewed pressure of fingertips to wrist. “Please!
Even in more familiar and secure quarters than these it would be unwise to mention the name of my adoptive motherland.” p. 44

Watson and The Woman then take a train and an autogyro flight to a building in the Arctic called The Fortress. Here, The Woman introduces him to Doc Savage, and leaves after saying the theft is part of a greater plot. Savage takes Watson to meet a number of other men:

“Richard Benson—the Avenger,” said the man in gray.
“Kent Allard—the Shadow,” the hawk-nosed man chuckled grimly.
“Gordon, Yale ’34—my friends call me Flash.”
“Curtis Newton, sir, sometimes known as Captain Future.”
“John Carter, former captain, confederate cavalry.”
“David Innes of Connecticut and the Empire of Pellucidar.”
“Richard Wentworth,” said the second of the black-clad men, “known to some as the Spider.” Even as he shook my hand I detected a look of suspicion and jealousy pass between himself and the man who had identified himself as the Shadow.
And finally, the man in the green clergy suit. “Om,” he intoned making an Oriental sign with his hands before extending one to me in western fashion. “Jethro Dumont of Park Avenue, New York. Also known as Dr. Charles Pali and—the Green Lama. p. 53

We later learn that Holmes and Tarzan were kidnapped at the same time as the theft of the God of the Naked Unicorn. Savage explains:

“The fiend had apparently developed a superscientific device of some sort which reduced the stature of his victims to that of pygmies, and he strode away with poor Holmes under one arm and Greystoke under the other.”
“Yes,” I said encouragingly, “pray continue.”
“Well, Dr. Watson,” Savage resumed, “as the fiend left the Exposition of European Progress he seemed to be mumbling something to himself. I could barely make out what it was he was saying. But it seemed to be something like Angkor Wat, Angkor Wat. But what could that possibly mean, Watson?” p. 58

Savage and Watson then take another autogyro flight to search for the evil genius, first to Angor Wat then to a number of other locations before ending up back at Baker Street. There (spoiler), they find the man they seek—a writer sat in front of a typewriter apparently writing the tale of which they are part. Watson shoots the man: pulp flakes come out of the bullet wound.
If you like the pulp pastiche and superhero references then you’ll probably appreciate this more than I did, but it’s an overlong piece that is mostly description and motion. And the ending is on the same level as “and then I woke up and found it was all a dream.”
(Mediocre). 12,000 words. Story Link.

•

New-Way-Groovers Stew by Grania Davis opens with the lesbian narrator’s description of the 1960’s Haight-Ashbury scene—which includes, atypically for the time of publication, a frank description of her elderly gay friend:

He’s always so funny, and admittedly, more swishy when he has a new lover. Not that any of them appreciate his wit, his charm, his intelligence. The old fairy usually manages to dig up some tight-assed sailor from the Tenderloin, or a motorcycle freak from one of the leather bars. He buys them new clothes, prepares lavish and tender gourmet meals, and gazes at them with sad, baggy basset-hound eyes, waiting for some small sign that some of the feeling has been appreciated, perhaps even returned. That maybe (but this is really too much to hope for) something might develop. Something permanent, a real relationship with warmth, love. But it never does.
When Jule excused himself for a brief visit to the john, his latest Chuck (or Stud) started eyeballing the prettiest girl in the room, boasting loudly, “I hate faggots, and I hate this nancy food, and the only reason I’m hanging around with that old auntie, Jule, is cause I’m temporarily short of bread. Soon as I get me a bankroll, I’m getting a big red steak, and some pretty blonde pussy. And all you queers can shove it up your ass!”  p. 62

There is some more about the narrator’s and Jule’s friendship before the story turns to the Flower Children who are beginning to converge on Haight Ashbury. We learn about the latter’s communitarian lifestyle, and how they initially coalesce around the New-Way-Groovers Free Store, an establishment which freecycles goods and also provides a daily stew, made from various scavenged foodstuffs, to all-comers.
The narrator and Jules occasionally visit with the people at the store, and Jules later gets involved in a long argument with a man called Tony, during which, among other things, they discuss morality (Tony states at one point, “The highest morality is to take care of yourself”). This idea later manifests (spoiler) when the narrator gets a note from Jules saying he has gone away, and to send all his money to his sister in Detroit. When the narrator asks Tony where Jules has gone, she is given a bowl of stew that is much richer than normal and which has chunks of meat in it. Tony tells her that they stole some meat, got themselves a “fat old pig”.
This piece contains quite a good portrait of alternative life in 1960’s Haight-Ashbury but, even after the morality argument, the cannibalism ending is silly and a bit over the top. So this is a game of two halves as a horror story—but perhaps notable as an early example of one with lesbian/gay characters.
** (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

•

Algy by L. Sprague de Camp is a ‘Willy Newbury’ story,³ and one which sees Willy and his new wife Denise arriving at his aunt’s vacation camp at Lake Algonquin to rumours of a sea monster. An old friend who works there fills them in:

Mike scratched his crisp gray curls. “They do be saying that, on dark nights, something comes up in the lake and shticks its head out to look around. But nobody’s after getting a good look at it. There’s newspaper fellies, and a whole gang of Scotchmen are watching for it, out on Indian Point.”
“You mean we have a home-grown version of the Loch Ness monster?”
“I do that.”
“How come the Scots came over here? I thought they had their own lake monster. Casing the competition, maybe?”
“It could be that, Mr, Newbury. They’re members of some society that tracks down the shtories of sea serpents and all them things.”  p. 72

The rest of the story revolves around the aunt’s daughter Linda and two men who are keen on her: one is George Vreeland, an unreliable local character, and the other is Ian Selkirk, one of the Scots who is there to investigate the sightings. Matters develop at a ball where Selkirk cuts in on Vreeland and Linda—to the displeasure of the former—and then, when Selkirk and Linda are later canoodling in a canoe, matters come to a climax when the monster surfaces besides them. Selkirk jumps out of the canoe and swims to shore, not because he is fleeing the monster but because he has spotted that it is a fake and that Vreeland has been operating it from the pump house on the edge of the lake. It later materialises that Vreeland’s boss (another camp site owner) hired him to set up the hoax to attract tourists to the area. Vreeland was only supposed to surface the fake monster at night but, jealous of Selkirk, he used it to try and scare him away.
Finally (spoiler), when Willy and Lord Kintyre (Selkirk’s boss) go out on the lake to examine the fake, something drags it under the water and rips it to shreds.
I suppose this is well enough executed, but the story mostly involves cardboard characters going through the motions of a mainstream plot—with a brief supernatural twist tacked on the end.
* (Mediocre). 4,750 words. Story link.

•

The Stairs in the Crypt by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter opens with the death (“the inexorable termination of his earthly existence”) of the necromancer Avalzaunt, and his subsequent entombment:

If the pupils of Avalzaunt assumed that they had taken their last farewells of their master, however, it eventuated that in this assumption they were seriously mistaken. For, after some years of repose within the sepulchre, vigor seeped back again into the brittle limbs of the mummified enchanter and sentience gleamed anew in his jellied and sunken eyes. At first the partially-revived lich lay somnolent and unmoving in a numb and mindless stupor, with no conception of its present charnel abode. It knew, in fine, neither what nor where it was, nor aught of the peculiar circumstances of its untimely and unprecedented resurrection. On this question the philosophers remain divided. One school holds to the theorem that it was the unseemly brevity of the burial rites which prevented the release of the spirit of Avalzaunt from its clay, thus initiating the unnatural revitalization of the cadaver. Others postulate that it was the necromantic powers inherent in Avalzaunt himself which were the sole causative agent in his return to life.
After all, they argue, and with some cogence, one who is steeped in the power to effect the resurrection of another should certainly retain, even in death, a residue of that power sufficient to perform a comparable revivification upon oneself. These, however, are queries for a philosophical debate for which the present chronicler lacks both the leisure and the learning to pursue to an unequivocal conclusion.  p. 83

I guess you’ll either like this mannered, discursive, and droll stuff (as I did) or you won’t. If you are in the former group then the rest of the story will treat you of an account of how Avalzaunt waits for a ghoul pack to break into his tomb to release him, swears them into thraldom, and then seeks out the sustenance his post-life body now requires—human blood and gore. During these depredations Avalzaunt becomes more and more swollen as, apparently, the undead can neither digest nor excrete “the foul and loathly sustenance whereon they feed”.
Eventually, after working his way through several of his former apprentices, and preying on the fat monks of Cambora, he is (spoiler) finally stopped by the silver knife-wielding abbot in an Grand Guignol ending that sees everything Avalzaunt has consumed spew out of his body (think of a bloodier and messier version of Monty Python’s Mr Cresote sketch).
I suspect many will find this an overwritten and ridiculous story, but I thought it was an entertaining pastiche of Smith’s work.⁴
*** Good. 3,600 words. Story link.

•

The Atheling’s Wife by Keith Taylor⁵ [as by Dennis More] is the second story in the writer’s ‘Bard’ series, which is set in sixth century Celtic Britain, and begins with Felimid mac Fal arriving at the hall of King Cedric, looking for passage across the sea and away from the island:

The walls were gigantic timbers adzed and fitted together like the ribs of a ship. The corner-posts were carved like frowning gods, and it would have taken three men to stretch their arms around one. The roof was tiled with scales a foot across, from a sea-dragon the king had hunted down. They glittered like beaten metal, green shading into grey at the edges. Felimid could have ridden through the doors without ducking the lintel, and a comrade could have gone either side of him without scraping the posts. The doors themselves were sheathed in bronze, with silvered iron hinges marvellously wrought. Hinges long as he was tall, nearly.
The double portal, huge as it was, was framed in the naked white skull and jaws of the sea-dragon whose scales covered the roof. Teeth half as long as a man’s arm shone like white salt. Bereft sockets under blunt bone ridges were caves of deep shadow. They seemed to glare with menace yet. The notion of riding under them did not enchant Felimid even as an image.  p. 92

After the guard tells Felimid that the jaws will snap shut if he intends any misdeeds, Felimid passes through into the interior, and later finds himself sitting at a lowly place at the king’s table. At the top are King Cedric, his wife Vivayn, and the king’s brother Cynric.
Felimid realises that he will have to be careful as he is fleeing from Cedric’s father, King Oisc of Kent,⁶ but it does not stop him intervening when a number of the men start tormenting a dwarf called Glinthi, who they then try to throw into the hearth. Felimid intervenes, efficiently seeing off the other men and rescuing Glinthi, and bringing himself to the notice of King Cedric. Felimid briefly speaks to the king and then performs for him, flattering him shamelessly with the songs he sings. Then, after his performance is over, Felimid sleeps with Eldrid, one of Vivayn’s ladies in waiting.
Felimid’s smooth progress is subsequently interrupted when one of the reasons he wants to leave the island—Tosti, a shapeshifter/werewolf from King Oisc’s court—turns up at the camp. After a confrontation between the two they appear before the king, but Tosti unexpectedly refuses to fight Felimid (Felimid has a silver inlaid sword, and Tosti is more likely to lose any duel in his human form). Then, later that evening, Vivayn, wearing a glamour to make her look like Eldrid, comes to his bed. Felimid sees through the disguise but sleeps with her anyway.
The story comes to a climax (spoiler) when Tosti ambushes Vivayn/Eldrid when she leaves Felimid’s bed the next morning. He tells Felimid to lay down his silver sword, and the bard complies as he doesn’t want Vivayn killed, her glamour to disappear, and everyone to see that he has slept with the king’s wife. Fortunately, the bard is saved when Glinthi intervenes. Tosti initially fights but then flees, and we see one of his henchmen killed by the dragon’s jaws when he rushes to the hall to summon help, lying about what has actually happened.
Felimid subsequently tells Cedric that Tosti is a shapeshifter and, realising the complex situation he is in (the two women who share their lovers, Glinthi’s earlier treasonous comments), departs the camp to pursue Tosti.
This is a well enough plotted piece of Sword & Sorcery but it could have done with another draft as it is a little rough in places. Also, some of the point of view changes are also a little odd—the first story was told in the first-person and you can see the author is still getting to grips with the third-person transistion⁷. That said, the protagonist’s occupation and the story’s convincing setting are strengths.
*** (Good). 9,200 words. Story link.

•

Ocean by Steven Utley opens with the female narrator, who has “flippers and gills now”, poisoned by the spines of a sea urchin—but she escapes its effects by surfacing and becoming a flying creature.
The next section describes an ongoing struggle she is having with a man who is either (a) interfering with her (possibly prosthetic) body, or (b) operating her controls (she may be a spaceship), or (c) she is a personality living in a ship’s computer. Later we learn (spoiler) that it is the latter, and that she is on a generation ship where everyone died apart from her. When she got old she uploaded into the ship’s memory, and at that point sensed a malevolent entity. The story ends with some sort of reckoning.
Trying to work out what was going on while reading this story was like wading through mud.
– (Awful). 2,700 words. Story link.

•••

The atmospheric Cover for this issue is by Stephen Fabian for Bloody Man. He also contributes good black and white work for that story, and for Keith Taylor‘s The Atheling‘s Wife. The other Interior Art consists of good pieces by Richard Olsen and Joe Staton, and two by Dan Steffan and Tony Gleason. These latter two are, whatever one thinks of their technical qualities, dull images (the Steffan piece looks like a random pane from a comic book). The non-fiction in the issue leads off with a long Editorial by Ted White. This starts with the editor quoting two long letters about the John Norman Gor fantasy/S&M novels (which were the subject of a negative editorial a couple of issues ago) before he veers off into a long discussion  about what he actually said in his editorial, free speech, and the evolution of modern pornography to date (this was around the time of a so-called ’snuff‘ movie). The final result resembles one of those long internet threads where, by the time you get to the end of it, you can barely remember what was first said.
After this there is mention of the recent change of schedule to quarterly:⁸

You’ve probably noticed, if you’re a regular reader of this magazine, that we’ve been skipping issues recently. That is, the February issue was followed not by an April issue but rather by the May issue. And there was no July issue; this issue is dated August.
The sad fact is that sales fell dramatically with the introduction of our $1.00 cover price, and although it’s too soon to know whether that was just a one-time situation or not, we were forced to change from a bimonthly publication schedule to a quarterly schedule. For that reason the next issue will be dated November.
Frankly, I’m very unhappy about this turn of events, as is the Publisher. I feel that in the last year we’ve published an unusually wide variety of fantasy and that the actual quality of our fiction has been steadily improving. I feel that the issues of the last year have been issues any editor might justifiably take pride in. And I’m saddened that this has not been reflected by sales. p. 130

White concludes with the wish that the magazine soon returns to bimonthly, a hope that was not to be realised.

•

Fantasy Books by Fritz Leiber leads off with some of his personal history with Harlan Ellison before he tackles that writer‘s collection Deathbird Stories:

But he worked ten years on the cycle of stories in this book. They show it, being heavily ornamented, almost chryselephantine, gold and ivory now joined to the silver and marble—in twenty years he’s learned a lot about words and here he scatters them lavishly yet precisely, almost as if they were brilliantly plumed darts he were ceaselessly throwing at his story a-building, bright-ribboned banderillas for the plunging toro of his tale—each landscape vast but with a single focal point from which the lines of perspective radiate to infinity.
[. . .]
[But] basically the stories are fantasies, often of the wild Weird Tales variety (cf. Bloch’s science and the way Spinrad mixes cryogenics and blood-of-a-virgin witchcraft in Bug Jack Barron)—”Adrift” mixes werewolfry with the search for the locus of the soul with sub-particle physics in a reprise of Fantastic Voyage in which the pancreas becomes a vast, man-killing desert with skulls scattered about.
In short, each story is a whopping big picture, or rather three-dimensional (or maybe four or five) sculptured form. Now there are two consequences of this to be noted. One: Each story is surely “a construct built in a void, with every joint and seam and nail exposed” (one of Ursula Le Guin’s characterizations of fantasy in From Elfland to Poughkeepsie) and this construct may be, but is not always, a monstrous, maze-like, plastic futurian city or wasteland, like one of Silverberg’s, with one man wandering in it (Ellison’s man raves, suffers, and rages; Silverberg’s retrospects). One can get the impression from this that the author is egotistical to the point of solipsism and wish he would or could get interested in getting more quietly inside the skin and mind of one or preferably several other characters— none of whom are completely stripped of mystery—write that sort of novel. p. 112-113

There are further interesting comments about Ellison’s work before Leiber moves on to cover a handful of other books. There’s a Lord Dunsany collection (“perhaps the finest fantasy book bargain of all time”); an August Derleth SF collection (“clearly a product of Derleth’s afternoon mind”); a Carl Jacobi collection; and, finally, a booklet/essay by L. Sprague de Camp about Robert E. Howard, The Miscast Barbarian (first in his ‘Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerors’ series, several of which appeared in Fantastic).
Interesting column.

•

The long (and, like the editorial, sometimes rambling) letters column, . . . According to You, cover several subjects: the stories in the February issue, the role of women in S&S; fringe beliefs; and yet more on the Gor novels. One of the latter letters from E. K. Hardt (from Dallas) gives a description that, if I recall correctly, nods towards (my perhaps less enthusiastic) thoughts about the first few novels when I read them in the mid-seventies (I gave up after the fifth one):

Let’s get off Norman’s sex fantasy for the moment and onto the quality of his fiction, which on the whole is very good. The two best of the ten novels have been Nomads and the latest one, Maruders, with the Tarn-race sequence in Assassin probably the best cohesive passage in the series. In each case the sexual element, while present, has been softpedaled to tell a good rousing story and it has been done very well. p. 126

I wonder what I would think of them now.

Overall, a pretty good issue, and one worth getting for the Avram Davidson novella. ●

_____________________

Footnotes:

1. The ‘Jack Limekiller’ series of stories (which were later collected into a book) at ISFDB. Book purchase link UK/USA.

2. The Ova Hamlet stories were collected, first in The Ova Hamlet Papers (1979) and then in the expanded The Compleat Ova Hamlet (2009).

3. The ‘Willy Newbury’ series at ISFDB. The stories were collected in The Purple Pterodactyls (1980).

4. I suspect the whole (or most of the) Smith /Carter collaboration is probably Carter’s apart from the plot idea. Ted White’s introduction states:

Lin Carter, working from Clark Ashton Smith’s extensive legacy of notes, outlines, lists of titles and story-fragments, has collaborated posthumously with Smith (who died in 1961), creating new stories—two of which appeared in the briefly-revived Weird Tales, and the third, “The Scroll of Morloc”, here (October, 1975). Here is the fourth.

5. Keith Taylor first published these stories under the pseudonym Dennis More. ISFDB lists this series as two separate ones, Bard and Felimid, but they are the same sequence.

6. The events that cause Felimid’s problems with King Oisc are detailed in the first story of the series.

7. Ted White’s introduction to Taylor’s piece says this:

This story is a direct sequel to the author’s Fugitives in Winter (October, 1975), but unlike that story this one is told third-person. As More explains it, “To write in the first-person about a sixth-century Celtic bard, even a fantasized one, is something I just couldn’t keep up. And it’s easier to juggle a number of characters this way.”

8. One of the casualties of the frequency change was the serialisation of a Thomas Burnett novel (most likely Cry Silver Bells. I think). More on this in the review of the November 1976 issue (which will be appearing in 2036 at this rate). ●