A year or so back I encountered Renegade Swords when I was browsing around for Sword & Sorcery stuff, and at first I thought it was some old books due to their very vintage looking covers and layouts. Turned out that these were new Sword & Sorcery anthologies put together by DMR Books, whom I were a bit familiar with, focusing on what they describe as obscure and overlooked short stories within the particular genre.
When I grew up I wasn’t into this kind of Fantasy so I’m not sure what was available, but as an adult I’ve seen that there were a running series of anthologies called Flashing Swords which was edited under author Lin Carter. Allthough I’ve never gotten my hands on any of the Flashing Swords books they did look awesome and featured well known authors of the genre, some of which we can find in Renegade Swords.
And what I like about what DMR Books did here is that they clearly show their love for Sword & Sorcery, wants to pay their respect to its legacy but also bring forth lesser known or rare stories. For example you have stories by Robert E Howard, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner and Lin Carter but it’s not the kind of story you’d expect.
How rare or lesser known these stories actually are is hard to say, and the quality of the material put together varies of course. But the very concept is both cool and fun, plus each of the stories features a small introduction with background information and which version of the story you’re about to read.
As of now there are only 3 volumes out but I really hope there will be more, and I hope that DMR Books can expand to not only focusing on obscure or forgotten stories and reprint classic ones as well. If you want to read Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane series you will have to either own an old and moldy copy, or pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for the same crappy copies out there.
How about Lin Carters Thongor? Or John Jake’s Brak the Barbarian? There are A LOT of stuff out there that could be great for a series like Renegade Swords, or why not a new series of classic tales?
DMR Books has done a great job putting together these 3 volumes and are putting out a lot of new Sword & Sorcery stuff, which is awesome! But we really need some of the good ol’ stuff that’s hard to come by these days.
Hyborian Book Reviews 