Just in time for Christmas (and the Solstice), Tales from the Magician’s Skull No. 9 arrived. It contains a Morlock story I’m especially proud of–“Three Festivals”. Among other things, it’s an homage to the great Rahsaan Roland Kirk, whose “Three for the Festival” was reworked as “Freaks for the Festival” for The Case of the Three-Sided Dream in Audio Color, one of my all-time favorite albums.
The story is accompanied by a wonderfully pulpy 2-page illustration by Chris Arneson, and the issue has a lot of great stuff in it–Howard and Joe’s reports of Gen Con, a new Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story by the redoubtable Nathan Long, new fiction by New Edge stalwarts like S.E. Lindberg and Tais Teng.
My conscience smote me when I looked at the “About the Author” section, though. In it, I promised that the Morlock collection Evil Honey and Other Stories would be available by the time this issue came to light. Well–it’s not. I was teaching a new course in Fall 2022 and it ate up any free time I might have had.
To try and make up for this misdeed (or lack of deed, which often adds up to the same thing), I posted something I’ve been promising for a while: A Probable Outline of the Career of Morlock Ambrosius, something that was written up for me by my cousin, colleague, and frenemy, Gabriel McNally (narrator of “A Stranger Comes to Town”).
