Andre Norton’s 1978 QUAG KEEP (cover by Jack Gaughan) fascinated me as a kid — the idea of tie-in Dungeons and Dragons novels was several years in the future so a story where a group of D&D players are mysteriously transported into Greyhawk (the original setting) and turned into their characters was something different. Rereading now, I find myself wondering how this came to pass — was Norton a fan? Did Gary Gygax or someone at DAW Books pitch her on the idea?
As far as the execution goes, it’s a mixed bag; overall, I enjoyed it but the worldbuilding is very fuzzy. We don’t learn the evil DM’s agenda in trying to fuse Earth and Greyhawk, don’t learn how the magic dice on the PC’s wrists work to alter their luck, and the characters are largely written as stock figures (cleric, ranger, bard, etc.) — I might have liked it better if the players’ personalities had carried over. There’s also stuff that feels odd because I started playing with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and there’s stuff here that doesn’t make sense by those rules. That said, Norton’s a good writer and she wrote the book so it plays to her strengths. Like her Witch World books we have characters under strange compulsions, shadowy forces of evil, standing stones as places of power — it works well enough.
OVER HER DEAD BODY: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic by Elisabeth Bronfen ponders the appeal of dead women as ta subject for art (Poe wrote that the death of a beautiful woman was a natural subject for poetry). That seemed like it would fit with my interests but Bronfen’s writing style is heavy academese and the first chapter reveals she’s approaching the topic from a Freudian perspective; as so much of Freud has been discredited, I gave up after a couple of chapters.
SHADOW OF THE LION by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and David Freer has potential too: Venice in the days when it was a major European power is a fascinating city so a historical fantasy of magic and skullduggery in 16th century Venice sounded promising. However the doorstop book lost me after 60 of its 700 pages. Like a lot of historical novels the story is buried under the period details to the point I have no idea what the story is, who the protagonists are or what the threat they have to fight is. Another DNF.
I did finish ILL WIND: Weather Warden Book One by Rachel Caine but it never particularly engaged me. This urban fantasy series is set in a world where nature wants us all dead and only the Wardens can shield humanity from the impact of hostile weather, earthquakes, floods, etc. Weather Warden Joanna is now on the run for being a)demon-possessed and b)having killed her mentor for causing the possession; now she’s heading across the country to ask a former lover for an exorcism. I found the backstory of Joanna and her lover confusing and inconsistent and the story’s villain is a disability stereotype (she turned to evil because evil could cure her horribly scarred face!).
The problem with BULLIES, BASTARDS AND BITCHES: How to Write the Bad Guys of Fiction by Jessica Page Morrell, is primarily a reader/book mismatch: the advice (even villains should have humanity!) might have been useful back when I started writing but that was a long time ago. There’s nothing terribly novel in her approach (e.g., give each character six defining traits) but most writing books I’ve read over the years aren’t offering anything radically new.
That said, Morrell’s analysis of specific fictional characters often falls flat. Conan, for example, is hardly an alpha male who can’t take orders (and of course, “alpha male” isn’t the biological reality Morrell assumes) — several stories show he’s willing to work as a soldier in the ranks. Nor does an argument that Lolita is morally complex fly (Lolita’s not a nice thirteen year old, therefore an adult having sex with her isn’t black-and-white wrong. Uh, yes it is).
Batman art by Jerry Robinson. All rights to images remain with current holders.
I picked up E.L. Doctorow’s RAGTIME because I love 
Andre Norton’s MERLIN’S MIRROR is a lot less rewarding. The book feels like Norton read 
then leaps forward to 1970 when a Spider-Man crossover served to introduce readers into her new series —
—which as you can see debuted the leather jumpsuit that’s defined her look ever since. Credit goes to Spidey artist John Romita, who modeled the new look not on Emma Peel (a popular assumption) but the 
The book wraps up with Natasha guest-starring in Daredevil after her series went belly-up. This proved more successful as they became lovers and crimefighting partners for the next four years, with Black Widow getting cover credit alongside DD for some of that time.
As a mythology loving kid, I was thrilled to encounter DC’s Captain Action as a kid — what could be cooler than a superhero who got powers from magic coins left behind by the gods of myth? Solar powers from Shamash, lightning from Thor, speed from Mercury, fighting skills from Ares, wind control by Aeolus, all pitted against his archfoe Krellik, who gained evil magic from the Slavic dark god Chernobog. I’d had the collected CAPTAIN ACTION CLASSIC on my Amazon wishlist but while 
The Lone Pine Club were the cast of a long-running British children’s series by Malcolm Saville; so long-running, in fact, that I have Mum’s copy of the first book, MYSTERY AT WITCHEND, but I was buying new books in the series as a tween. This has the Morton family (Mom, older kid David, identical twins Dicky and Mary) relocating to Shropshire during the war where the three siblings and a couple of locals — most notably the tomboyish Petronella — form the club to have fun in the outdoors. But wouldn’t you know it, there are German sleeper agents in the neighborhood plotting to sabotage the local reservoir, though in contrast to so many Boys And Girls Own adventures the kids don’t stop the Germans, they just get caught up in the adult investigation.
Museums turned to adding theater because they could swap a new play in much faster than replacing a midget or a dog-faced boy; over time, they also added waxworks, novelty acts and even short film, making them the launching pad for vaudeville, cinemas and carnival sideshows. While the offspring outlasted the parent, Dennett points out that Ripley’s Believe It Or Not appealed to the same sense of wonder that had audiences flocking to Barnum and others, and ran well into the late 20th century.
Cage was not Power Man when he started out (see the Billy Graham cover here) and the Barbara Gordon Batgirl was a separate character from the one who appeared a few years earlier (if that’s not what Dauber meant, he wrote it poorly). So I’m even happier that I didn’t bother to go through it all.
BELLA AT THE BAR by Jenny McDade and John Armstrong is one of a number of British sports comic strips for girls (I know of several ice-skating ones for instance). Bella Barlow is that classic figure of children’s adventures, an orphan with cruel caregivers (Uncle Jed and Aunt Gertrude) who use her as unpaid slave labor. Bella, however, is a naturally gifted gymnast who has a shot at become a serious competitive athlete — as long as Uncle Jed doesn’t find out. While this doesn’t appeal to me as much as 
Cully Hammer launched the Jaime Reyes incarnation of the character (the names been in use since the 1940s). El Paso teenager Jaime discovers a strange scarab which then bonds to him, turning him into a powerful armored superhero. This upends his life and puts him into conflict with the metahuman street gang the Posse, local crimelord La Dama and a lot of superheroes who aren’t sure he’s trustworthy.
LORE OF THE WITCH WORLD is a collection of short stories from various anthologies so they’re almost all stand-alones; “Sword of Unbelief”brings back Elys and Jervon from 
SCOOBY-DOO TEAM-UP: Doomed by the usual team of Sholly Fisch and Dario Brizuela has Scooby and friends help Supergirl when she’s haunted by the ghosts of Argo City, assist Dyno-Mutt when Blue Falcon goes off his rocker and in my favorite story, assist a small town threatened by DC’s gorilla villains, from Monsieur Mallah to Pryemaul the Nazi vampire gorilla (that’s him on the Brizuela cover). The line “It’s the Gorilla Boss of Gotham City and the Mod Gorilla Boss, together!” for some reason had me convulsed with laughter. A shame there’s only one TPB of this series left.
HEROIC FANTASY, edited by Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt, was a sword-and-sorcery collection from the late 1970s, selecting from what I think of as a talented B-list rather than the big names such as Fritz Leiber or Michael Moorcock. That’s not meant as an insult because the results are very good, including an Andre Norton Witch World fantasy, a Cyrion story by Tanith Lee, one of Charles Saunders’ Imaro tales and a story of the Voidal by Adrian Cole. The last was particularly fun to reread because at the time I had no way to find the small-press volumes in the series but now, in the Internet age, it’ll be easy. This collection does tend toward the grim, and the heroes are overwhelmingly white (except for Imaro) and male (except for Norton’s), but I like it nonetheless. There are also good, informative essays on swords, armor and heroism that I enjoyed rereading.
In her Witch World books Norton has always been keen on female characters charting their own paths, which makes the sexism of HORN CROWN an unpleasant surprise. The book opens with humans arriving in the empty land (the Dales, the setting of her past few books) after fleeing their own world for unknown reasons (there’s been some mindwiping). Despite being The Early Years it’s really just like the 
closing, then taking other jobs for a couple of decades. The three graphic novels he eventually wrote to follow up are collected in BEANWORLD OMNIBUS Vol. 2. The baby beans introduced in the first volume are growing up and figuring out their destiny; Beamish continues his pursuit of Dreamish; and the other denizens of Beanworld engage in their own adventures. As quirky and unique as the first collection (and just as hard to synopsize), which makes me regret we haven’t seen anything from Marder since 2017. I hope there’s more soon.
