"In the 1970s, the heyday of swords and sorcery, a deluge of bad heroic fantasy flooded the market; as a result, since the early '80s, hardly
any swords-and-sorcery books have been published outside the Conan the Barbarian series, the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, Michael
Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, and Marion Zimmer Bradley's
feminist Sword and Sorceress anthology series. The derivative '70s
swords and sorcery deserved to be washed away, but some worthwhile
works disappeared as well. Two lost series that deserved far better
are Karl Edward Wagner's Kane books and Darrell Schweitzer's Sir Julian stories. Both series are well written and intelligent, and they share
an even rarer trait: the dark, brooding sensibility that helped make
Robert E. Howard's sometimes purple (and always scarlet) Conan stories so popular and memorable.
Now the Wildside Press has reprinted We Are All Legends, the long-unavailable collection of 13 linked
stories about Sir Julian, the Crusader damned by God after a night
spent with a Satanic witch. Julian roams Europe and the East, and
strange lands not found on any map, seeking to escape his fate. In
"The Lady of the Fountain," Julian's encounter with a lamia may destroy
both the knight and his closest companion. In "The Veiled Pool of
Mistorak," Faerie lords send Julian on a grim quest to find a city
that exists no more and a man doomed ever to live. In "The One Who
Spoke with the Owls," the penniless knight accepts a job before
learning its terms and wakes to discover he has been hired to slay a
pagan witch. "The Castle of Kites and Crows" presents a vision of cosmic reality that will chill the soul of anyone raised in a Christian
faith. While the first-person narration occasionally makes Julian
sound more self-absorbed than accursed, We Are All Legends is a fine entertainment that merits the attention of fantasy and horror
fans."
– Cynthia Ward
Contents:
- Introduction by
L. Sprague de Camp
- The Hag
- The Lady of
the Fountain
- Island of
Faces
- The Veiled
Pool of Mistorak
- The One Who
Spoke with the Owls
- The Castle
of Kites and Crows
- The Riddle
of the Horn
- Divers Hands
- The Unknown God Cried Out
- Into the
Dark Land
- A Fabulous, Formless Darkness
- Midnight,
Moonlight, and the Secret of the Sea
- L'envoi
