Anthony Pryor's Home Page

John Holbrook "Jack" Vance was one of those Renaissance men of whom I'm enormously envious. Skilled in many areas, from sailing to cooking to music, he's best known as one of the greatest American literary fantasists, and his work continues to inspire today. Currently, I'm busy rereading Vance's masterful Lyonesse trilogy, which I feel in some ways rivals Tolkien and Martin for its depth and scope.  The novels of the  Lyonesse saga -- Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc, chronicle in leisurely and picaresque fashion the struggle for the control of the Elder Isles, a vanished continent which lay south of Cornwall, north of Iberia, and across the Cantabrian Gulf from Aquitaine, in an uncertain time during Europe's dark ages. With such a pseudo-historical framework to hang his story upon, Vance incorporates both historical and fantastical events -- Christian missionaries seek to convert the pagans of the isles with limited success, the warlike S...

  This month, I found myself rereading the works of one of my favorite supernatural authors, the talented TED (Theodore “Eibon” Donald) Klein,. Born in 1943, Klein served as editor of Twilight Zone Magazine, and wrote Dario Argento’s film Trauma (1991). He’s best known for his horror fiction however, and though his output is small (two novels and a dozen short stories), TED Klein delivers more bang for your buck than almost any other horror writer. I’m focusing on his four best-known novellas, which appeared in his 1985 collection Dark Gods . This anthology is out of print, as are some of the other anthologies in which they appear, but most can be located on Amazon and at used-book sites,  for prices ranging from cheap to utterly absurd.   My readings were drawn from four different collections — Gallery of Horror (Petey), Dark Forces (Children of the Kingdom), The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels (Nadelman’s God), and A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Myt...

Time to finally pay attention to this blog, I think. I haven't done a blog in quite a while, so I'm a bit rusty; bear with me. I just uploaded the files for my second novel, Wings of the Fallen, on Amazon. This was a pre-order deal so I needed to have it online by midnight, and I just got in under the wire. It seems there was one major plot issue I had forgotten to resolve and so was working on this until the very last moment. More information on the book and the Amazon page is forthcoming, but it's 11:30 and I'm bushed. 

 So I guess I've got a blog again. Here it is. More to come.