The Mines of Behemoth
Sword and (yawn) Sorcery? Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole S&S package: Elves, Unicorns, Dragons, Warlocks and steel-shod young swordswomen of the Celtic Twilight or Nordic Dammerung–I love the whole package as much as anyone. I devour that mainstream Warrior-and-Wizard stuff like jellybeans.
At five hundred, six hundred pages a volume, I gobble them up by the tril- and tetra-logy!
But there’s so much of this front-shelf, mainstream kind of S & S!
The sheer abundance of it is sometimes wearying to contemplate. At these times a mere glimpse of cover art with a gnome or intrepid swordsperson in it is enough set my eyelids a-sagging.
It’s in this mood I remember that there exists a different kind of Sword and Sorcery. This rarer species summons not sleep, but sleep’s opposite; it makes even the reader’s skin restless with tingles and pricklings and delicate shivers. It seems few people write this species of S&S any more.
Or perhaps more precisely, there are never more than a few people writing it at any time. I refer to that kind of Sword and Sorcery which is itself actual sorcery. It can really fly, because its words are wings; its language sings like the crossbow’s quarrel, delivering visions that pierce to the brainstem, and graft new vistas on our imaginations.
It can be midnight black as Macbeth, or moonlit and madcap as a Midsummer Night. It can be a metrical maze of allegorical monsters with a Faery Queen at its center, or a harsh-rhythmed tale of a knight’s winter journey to offer his neck to the axe of a green-bearded demon. Clark Ashton Smith wrote it. Burroughs and Howard proved more than once that they knew what it was. Vance has proved likewise again and again, and Lieber more whimsically. Borges wrote it without the swords, and Stevenson without the sorcerers.
Michael Shea can write it too when he buckles down to it. He did it to the hilt in Nifft the Lean, which garnered one of the best-deserved Howies yet given.
Nifft the Lean
Now comes a second Nift novel–The Mines of Behemoth. The first time I picked it up I marvelled that Shea could write a second anything. His stories and novellas can’t even stay in the same genre for two tales running, and each of his three previous S&S novels was written on a clean slate–new characters, new cosmos, new concept. Not the trilogy type, this Shea–I was sure of it.
And after reading The Mines of Behemoth, I’m still sure. Granted, Nifft and his friend Barnar Hammerhand revisit the Primary subworld, where they went in the Demonsea segment of Nifft the Lean. This is a different part of that subworld, though, and now they’re its plunderers, not its prisoners. In all other aspects, their adventures have nothing to do with the first book. The key point is what is blessedly absent from this second Nifft novel: that comfy tone–faintly flat, faintly droning–that you start to detect in the author’s voice halfway into book two (or early on in book three) of the Dark Elf Trilogy.
All I will say of the plot is that it features our heroes riding into the subworld on the back of a demon-eating giant. Shea’s outrageous inventiveness flows onward from there. For sheer, brute strength of imagination, no one matches him. No one lavishes more invention, more eerie, odd beauties on a tale. Most writers of mainstream S&S would eke a tetralogy out of the visions, the verse (like cut gems!), the terrors and tingles, the ardor and awe he haspacked in the three hundred pages of The Mines of Behemoth.
So What’s this Behemoth?
The Mines of Behemoth
Let the author describe the beast he has created for the new Nifft the Lean adventure… Down in the subworlds the demon hosts seethe, waging cannibal war without end, all against all, each on each.
Humankind in their sunlit lands owe grateful thanks to those wizards–long dead now–who dungeoned the demon multitudes so deep in earth’s bowels, and imprisoned in stone their sleepless malice, their greed for our pain.
Their mightiest tools of tempered steel are powerless to chip one sandgrain from the ensorcelled stone of their subworlds’sky.
Let the guard-spells fail, however, or falter even one and apocalypse follows! Then would a fiend-swarm burst blizzard-like out of the soil. From plowed fields and prairies, from hilltops and valley floors, tumulting gargoyles like sandstorms, like locustclouds would mantle our cities as thickly as corpseflies cover the sunripened slain that pave battlefields.
Such are the demon hosts. And yet, all their wrath and their strength notwithstanding, there lives nearly neighboring them a race of Beings whose sole and daily food is demon flesh! Beings to whom the subworlds are pastureland, and the demons themselves blades of grass.
This is the race of Behemoths, who nest in the bones of the mountains. Theirs is a nation of giants. Their nests are past numbering, and past numbering too is each nestful of giants, and each countless nestful comes rivering out of one womb, the womb of the Nest’s royal mother, its Queen.
Life, the least life, is purest miracle! How far beyond utterance are the wonders unwombed by our all-mother Earth in her eons of labor!
But greatest among these is surely Behemoth, whose jaws scythe the hell-flor, and harvest its horrors!
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Free Stuff from Author Michael Shea
In Memory Drive Slow
“In Memory Drive Slow” is a weird tale inspired by a handwritten sign the author once saw on a Sonoma Country back road.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
Year: 2017
Publisher: Hippocampus PressMichael Shea (1946–2014) was one of the most distinguished, respected, and beloved figures in the fields of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He won two World Fantasy Awards, and his <i>Nifft the Lean</i> series of fantasy adventure novels attracted a wide audience. He also wrote powerful tales of supernatural horror, including several tales elaborating upon H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
This first major volume of writings and tributes to appear after his untimely death contains an array of fiction, poetry, and other writings that demonstrate Shea’s effortless skill in different genres and styles. Four substantial tales–including the unpublished novella “Credit Card” and the award-winning “The Growlimb”–are included, together with an intriguing assortment of weird and fantastic poetry, published and unpublished, including verses that appeared at key moments in his novels and stories.
The volume features tributes to Shea’s unique personal and literary gifts by such figures as Laird Barron, Cody Goodfellow, Marc Laidlaw, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and Jason V Brock, as well as a portfolio of artwork illustrating Shea’s writings by such artists as Michael Whelan, Alan Clark, John Stewart, Allen Koszowski, and Steve Gilbert. The book concludes with a comprehensive bibliography of Shea’s writings.
This book is a poignant testimonial to the imperishable imprint that Michael Shea left upon the domain of imaginative fiction, and upon the individuals whose lives he touched.
Linda Shea, writer and artist, was married to Michael Shea for more than thirty years. S. T. Joshi is a leading author, critic, and editor in the realm of weird fiction and included Shea’s writings in several of
his anthologies, including the acclaimed <i>Black Wings</i> series.Price: $20.00
Purchase NowDemiurge – The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea
Year: 2018
Publisher: Dark RenaissanceFor more than thirty years, Michael Shea has been making his own distinctive contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos devised by H. P. Lovecraft—an entire universe of gods and monsters that hundreds of writers have imitated. But Shea has done a lot more than merely mimic Lovecraft’s prose or add a new god or “forbidden book” to the Mythos. In his Mythos tales, Shea has infused his own unique vision and perspective.The much-reprinted “Fat Face” takes us into the seedy underworld of prostitutes and drug dealers in San Francisco, while other tales such as “Dagoniad,” “Copping Squid,” and “Tsathoggua” vividly meld Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the contemporary world of California, with its swimming pools and beachcombers. Shea was also fascinated with Lovecraft’s novel of Antarctic horror, At the Mountains of Madness, and his stories “Under the Shelf” and “Beneath the Beardmore” take us to that frozen land of death and terror.
The title story, “Demiurge,” is a previously unpublished novella that draws upon Lovecraft’s tales of psychic possession in its chilling portrayal of a nameless monster who may be the harbinger of the overthrow of the entire human race. Michael Shea (1946–2014) was the award-winning author of The Color out of Time, the Nifft the Lean series of fantasy novels, and the classic tales “Polyphemus” and “The Autopsy.” This volume of his complete Cthulhu Mythos tales has been assembled by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft and the Mythos.This volume features wraparound cover artwork and five interior illustrations by renowned artist Aeron Alfrey (MADHOUSE)
Price: $23.94
A Quest For Simbilis
Year: 2020
Publisher: SpatterlightBy dint of a mispronounced spell, Cugel the Clever finds himself once again unceremoniously dumped by a winged demon onto the bleak far northern shores of the Sea of Cutz — the location of a fierce battle aeons past between the archmagician Simbilis and the hordes of the subworlds league. Vowing to exact comprehensive revenge from Iucounu, the Laughing Magician, Cugel sets forth on the long journey back to Almery.
Expecting potent magical gifts in recompense, Cugel swears fealty to Mumber Sull, the exiled Thane of Icthyll. Under the guttering blood-red sun, the two set off across the lands of the Dying Earth to obtain the aid of the legendary Simbilis. They must face cannibals, sorcery, demons, and all the other deadly and sinister creatures that populate the Earth in its final days…
In this — his first published novel — World Fantasy Award winner Michael Shea recounts the further adventures of Cugel the Clever with the permission of Jack Vance, author of The Eyes of the Overworld. Shea subsequently wrote his seminal Nifft the Lean stories, which are foreshadowed, in many ways, in the present work. Dan Temianka, author of The Jack Vance Lexicon, provides an introduction for this new edition, which sheds light upon Shea, Vance, and Temianka’s lifelong friendship with Michael Shea.
On the Paladins of Vance label, Spatterlight publishes original works by authors who have given their own imagination free rein in the many wonderful worlds of the Grandmaster of fantasy & sci-fi.
Price: $13.95
Mr Cannyharme, A Novel of Lovecraftian Terror
Year: 2021
Publisher: Hippocampus PressMichael Shea wrote the previously unpublished novel Mr. Cannyharme in 1981, and it constitutes a remarkable adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s early story “The Hound” (1922), about the depredations of an ancient Dutch vampire. In Shea’s novel, Mr. Cannyharme stalks the seedy Mission District of San Francisco in the aftermath of the hippie movement of the 1960s. Holed up in a rundown hotel, the seemingly harmless Cannyharme—aged, feeble, bent almost double with a crippling disease—is the focus of the supernatural terror in the novel.
Mr. Cannyharme, written in a vibrant prose that brings to life the multitude of characters that populate the book, is a triumph of Lovecraftian terror, but also speaks of the way in which those who are regarded as the refuse of society can assert their dignity and self-worth in a grim environment. In this sense, it proves to be a novel affirming the triumph of the human spirit over the horrors facing it.
Price: $20.00
Purchase now
Note: PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED
The Autopsy / Best Weird Stories of Michael Shea
Year: 2022
Publisher: Hippocampus PressA new 2022 Collection of Michael Shea Stories by Hippocampus Press and a great way to read his classic story “The Autopsy” which has been adapted for TV for Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. “The Autopsy” is one of several tales that mingles gruesomeness and science fiction. Others include “Polyphemus,” where the members of a spaceship encounter the titanic eye of some unthinkably vast and hostile entity. “The Angel of Death” exhibits the battle of two alien entities as they successively inhabit hapless human beings in their quest for supremacy.
Shea’s sensitivity to the downtrodden is exhibited in such tales as “The Horror on the #33,” “Water of Life,” and “Tollbooth,” populated by homeless people, prostitutes, drug dealers, and other disdained members of society. Shea’s affinity for California is shown in “Fill it with Regular,” “Upscale,” and other tales that bring his native state to life. As a bonus, two unpublished stories are included: “Feeding Spiders,” evoking the work of a writer who adopted California as his home-Ray Bradbury; and “Ghost,” where a vengeful ghost stalks the tough streets of South Boston.
Price: $20.00
Purchase nowThe Mines of Behemoth
The second installment of the award winning cult classic "Nifft the Lean" by Michael Shea is entitled "The Mines of Behemoth". In no way does the cover art do that monster any justice, whatsoever. Ever.
Join Nifft and his companion Barnar on an adventure into the subworld.