We’re into September and ten days from the autumn equinox, so technically it’s still summer. You wouldn’t believe it from the thermometer though. It’s a balmy eight degrees C this morning in the hills of Bradford. Brrrrrr.

So we need activity to keep us warm and as you may have seen, we fired out a quick follow-up to our Conan episode with a chat with Clarky about some Conan knock-offs from the 1960s.

Our choices were largely driven by what we had kicking about. In fact, I’ve had some of these kicking around for decades, too many Howard and ERB patches to count. I did struggle with Thongor though and I’ve got loads of them and other Lin Carters too like the whole Jandar of Callisto line (but they do have amazing Pennington covers so there is that).

We will get to Sword and Planet again at some point. We’ve done Gor and Dannus, so it’s high time we actually looked at some GOOD planetary romance fiction. We came close to covering the first of Moorcock’s Kane of Old Mars books probably three years ago, but I had two separate copies of the first one fall to bits on me, so it went on the back burner. I also had a show scheduled with Anthony Perconti and Matthew X Gomez, a couple of the authors/editors of anthology mag Broadswords and Blasters, but scheduling issues (all mine) got in the way. Hopefully we’ll get that back in diaries soon.

Now that Brak and Thongor are struck off the list, I have a couple of spares that will be winging their way to Patron Demons too. HUZZAH!

Coming up next, Graham will be back as we head into the spooky season with some sort of tonally all over the place eco-horror thriller fantasy mash-up that may have sent us down a new author rabbit-hole too. That will be coming up around the end of the month.

And then, speaking of scary-time, the Halloween Poll indicated a clear winner (58% of the vote) for our traditional Halloween Special. And it’s Guy N Smith again, but no crabs on this occasion… oh no… this time it’s the first of his ex-SAS killer turned priest quadrilogy. We’ll be covering SABAT: The Graveyard Vultures.

We’ll get back to some Moorcock soon too, with plans for Corum, Hawkmoon and Elric catch-ups in prep… and Saga Press release the all-new Von Bek volume in a month or three so watch that space…

In other news, Jim Jupp’s Ghostbox Records is about to release the new cut from ethereal dark-folk electronica geniuses Beautify Junkyards – NOVA. Jim sent me a copy of the CD for an advanced listen and I’ve already pre-ordered the vinyl. As we would have said back in the day, it’s mint.

That’s about it for today’s update. Phil and I are headed on our jollies in the next few days where we will combine a trip to the coast with a sojourn across the North Sea to attend the 80th Commemoration of the Battle of Arnhem with my old fella. Dad isn’t an Arnhem vet of course, but he has been a member of the Parachute Regimental Association for over 50 years and this will be the first time he’s attended without my dear old mam, so it will be a beer-soaked and emotional occasion, but also pretty fucking cool. Expect holiday snaps in the next report.

Take care folks and see you out there… on the moonbeam roads.

Dad (middle) and chums Pete (left) and Brian (right – RIP) somewhere in West Germany in the late 60s.

From the North he came, to seek knowledge and fortune. Cast out by his tribe for offending Ulfr, God of the Wastes, he is driven by mirth, restrained by melancholy.  One day he will return to make offerings to the Bear Druids, particularly Mewler the Claw. She thinks he’s an idiot but owes him a debt.
        Memories of Krangg, The Iron Bear

Clarky is back in Derry and Toms to talk Conan knock-offs, and pool our thoughts on an all-Barbarian game and how to resolve the inevitable “Pah! My hand-tailored sandals are more northern than you, you weakling southlander habadasher!” type conflicts.

We get into Thongor and Brak mainly, but also a touch of Kothar and a mild dusting of some other characters whose names I’ve forgotten.

One of them had a halberd though.

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“Dishonesty hollows a man, like the bog bug hollows out a tree. Don’t be that tree. It’s dry, useless and dusty, although it does burn ok.”
         Krangg, 134th of Ogbok’s Moon, 13423

Over on the patreon page, the Halloween poll is live and the patrons are already making their opinions known on what we will cover for the October Halloween Special.

First up (and currently in the lead) we have the first installment of Guy N Smith’s Sabat series. OK, technically it’s called Sabat: The Graveyard Vultures and it’s about SABAT…

Mark Sabat, ex-priest, SAS-trained killer, and exorcist, is a man with a harrowing mission. Haunted by his past and driven by an unrelenting need for vengeance, he must seek out and destroy his mortal enemy—a brother who has chosen the Left Hand Path and embodies the eternal principle of Evil.

And he has a ‘tache too! INSTAWIN.

Your next option is SLIMER! Another returning author for this year’s poll in the form of Harry Adam Knight (AKA John Brosnan flying solo this time). We had such a good time with The Fungus, Slimer was an obvious choice for this year.

I mean it’s a The Thing knock-off set on a North Sea oil rig in the 70s. With a horrific thingified dong scene. It’s crackers, out of order and therefore eminently suitable.

Recently, I’ve also been shitting my pants playing a PC game called Still Wakes the Deep that is also a The Thing knock-off set on a North Sea oil rig so this feels sort of topical.

Third on the list for this year is an all new author, but the cover is ace and it sounds lurid and violent so we have SLITHER by John Halkin, first book in the ‘Slither-Slime-Squelch’ trilogy.

It’s about worms eating people. Bring it on!

And finally, for perhaps the third year running, 2024 is the last chance for… SLUGS by Shaun Hutson. I haven’t read it since I was at school, the film is hilarious and amazing and Hutson himself reckons he’s the Pope of Horror Town.

We’ll be the judges of that damn it.

As per last year, we’ll probably do more than one horror themed show in October and, as it hasn’t ever been voted top, I’ve already arranged with Allister T to look at William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. Allister is a massive Hope Hodgson lover, as am I, so I’m looking forward to that one but where would we be here at Derry & Toms without some low, violent and dirty killer critter/moist triangle/SAS trained vicar action?

Somewhere. Probably. But nowhere I’d want to be. And certainly not in October.

We’re two-thirds of the way through summer already and here in Blighty the weather is only now reflecting the time of year with any real level of commitment. It is a nice afternoon though so I’m sitting in the yard with a cold one musing on the contents of the third and long overdue volume of The Journal of Gerard Arthur Connelly. The Journal is one of the things (alongside the second and third planned sessions of the Black Sword Hack Ultimate Chaos Edition game I began a year ago – watch or listen at your leisure if you’re of the gaming persuasion) that got waylaid by the events of 2023 and again in the first part of 2024. Creativity is a fleeting thing, for me at least, and I need a specific set of circumstances to get in the zone. Unfortunately, the precise composition of those circumstances remains a mystery, but I had a little surge of activity on it over the last couple of days and vol 3 has crept closer to completion.

So that’s good.

On the flipside, however, having such a long time between sections and spurts of writing leads primarily to me looking askance at what came before and wanting to revise and alter. But I don’t have time, so this coming volume will remain, to some degree, a stream of consciousness (mine or Connelly’s is hard to tell). I also came across a piece I wrote over ten years ago when looking through old folders so that’s getting woven in too. By woven, I mean dropped in almost wholesale as an interlude. But I like it so I’m going to subject you to it too. Should you read it of course. No pressure. There may come a time when the originally planned four volumes get broken down, revised and re-assembled as the very first Breakfast in the Ruins Publications one-shit book.

The dream…

Then an all-star supergroup concept album featuring friends of the show like Wayne, Graham, Derek, Dave and Allister T. I reckon between us we can beat the Edgar Winter/L Ron Hubbard collaboration into the dirt.

THE DIRT I TELLS YER!

(You have no idea how many times I’ve almost bought this – and given that Allister T and I have talked about doing an episode about ostentatious SF/Fantasy driven prog concept albums I probably will).

The third thing that got waylaid was the re-recording of chapters 8-10 of the audio version of the Journal. They’re the only bits remaining from the scored audio version of volumes one and two that are holding up Wayne in completing his work and I need to get that done for no other reason than his work on the music needs to be heard. It’s progressed a long way since we first put the sections together that appeared at the end of podcasts in 2021 and 2022 and we have a sort of plan to put it all on Bandcamp as a companion to his two complete and frankly fucking awesome albums inspired by the Journal.

I shall endeavour to complete those last re-recordings soon and then, maybe, even start recording volume three…

On the podcasting front, the next episode on the RPG experience (Reflections on The Void) will be along this week, featuring Steve and his excellent gaming gang. Following that we have a nice little slate prepped and we’ll be looking at a bit of Conan, a Moorcock-edited anthology called Before Armageddon, a selection of alt-barbarian novels from the 60s of varied levels of quality that we’re calling Barbarian Bingo, and a vintage piece of eco-horror that dates back to the days of scanning Pops’s coffee table for booty and finding an alarming reference to my home town within. It’s August in a couple of days too so I’ll be putting out this year’s Halloween poll, watch out for that.

And finally, for now, you’ll see that the header photo for this update is a very tidy Dancers at the End of Time trio that I picked up recently in a very tidy slipcase. I think it’s high time we kicked that series off with An Alien Heat, particularly since we’ve been covering The Coming of the Terraphiles and there are some thematic connections there without a doubt.

That reminds me that we still haven’t done any Bastable, either. So much to cover. So little time.

So, in the interests of time I’ll leave things there for this report.

Stay safe folks and I’ll see you out there… on the Moonbeam Roads.