Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Sandy Ferber


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Film review: The Giant Behemoth

The Giant Behemoth: Beast vs. behemoth

It had been many decades since I last saw The Giant Behemoth. When I was a kid, I had always grown restless with the film, largely because director/co-screenwriter Eugene Lourie withholds a good, establishing glimpse of the titular creature until the picture is almost 2/3 over; an interminable amount of time for an impatient youth who just wants to see a freakin’ monster. As I plopped the DVD in recently, my one thought was, would I be as restless as an adult? Behemoth,


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Jess: An all-but-forgotten winner from H. Rider Haggard

Jess by H. Rider Haggard

Editor’s note: Because it’s in the public domain, Jess is available free on Kindle.

Jess was first published in the U.K. in March 1887, and was H. Rider Haggard‘s fifth novel out of 58. Haggard wrote this book toward the end of 1885… and, remarkably, in just nine weeks! But then again, this is the same man who, earlier in 1885, was able to write the astounding sequel to King Solomon’s Mines,


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Film Review: The Neanderthal Man

The Neanderthal Man: Inspector Henderson goes ape

For those viewers who are wondering if actor Robert Shayne ever incarnated another role besides that of Inspector Henderson on TV’s Adventures of Superman, a quick skim of his IMDb credits will reveal the answer to be a most definitive “yes.” Besides playing the part of the tough-talking best friend of Clark Kent with ever-increasing frequency on that show, which ran from 1952 – ’58, Shayne, it seems, has dozens upon dozens of film and TV appearances to his credit. But those fans who would like to see Shayne as the top-billed,


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Queen Sheba’s Ring: Middling Haggard but still hugely entertaining

Queen Sheba’s Ring by H. Rider Haggard

Editor’s note: The Kindle version of Queen Sheba’s Ring is free!

I am not an author myself, and probably never will be (big sigh), so I can only imagine what a thrill it must be for a writer to see his or her hard work finally appear in print before the public. But can anyone imagine what it must feel like to have three novels released simultaneously?!?! Well, such was the lot for the great H.


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Film Reviews: Village of the Damned (1960) & Children of the Damned (1964)

I’m reviewing these films together because they’re available in this handy double feature DVD. Village of the Damned is also available on Amazon Instant Video.

Village of the Damned
:
These eyes…

A fairly faithful adaptation of John Wyndham‘s 1957 sci-fi thriller The Midwich Cuckoos (reviewed by Ryan), Village of the Damned was released in June 1960. Sporting the admonitory warning “Beware the Stare That Will Paralyze the Will of the World”


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Secret of the Earth Star: A wonderful package from Starmont House

Secret of the Earth Star by Henry Kuttner

Starmont House had a wonderful thing going for itself in the early 1990s. The Seattle-based publisher, with its line of Facsimile Fiction, was taking the old pulp magazines of the ’30s and ’40s, making photocopies of selected stories, and packaging them in a line of reasonably priced paperback and hardcover editions; a genuine blessing for all fans of these old, rapidly moldering monthlies. Secret of the Earth Star, number 6 in the Facsimile Fiction line, in a series that stretched to at least 14,


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Film Review: Monster on the Campus

Monster on the Campus: Another winner from Jack Arnold

In the five-year period 1953 – ’57, director Jack Arnold brought forth five sci-fi/horror classics that are still beloved by psychotronic-film fans today: It Came From Outer Space (’53), Creature From the Black Lagoon (’54), Revenge of the Creature (’55), Tarantula (also ’55) and one of the all-time champs, The Incredible Shrinking Man (’57). Following up Arnold’s string of crowd-pleasing entertainments came the lesser-known Monster on the Campus in 1958,


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Attack of the 50 Foot Woman

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman

“I need a woman ‘bout twice my height, statuesque, raven-tressed, a goddess of the night.”

By the time future baby-boomer classic Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (the lack of a hyphen in the title is annoying) was released in May 1958, moviegoers in theatres and drive-ins across the U.S. had already been exposed to all sorts of radiation-induced terrors. Jump-started by the prehistoric rhedosaurus unleashed by atomic testing in 1952’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the trend was soon followed by another prehistoric radioactive nightmare,


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Downward To The Earth: Coexisting beauty and horror

Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg

Up until recently, I hadn’t read Robert Silverberg‘s brilliant sci-fi novel Downward to the Earth in almost 27 years, but one scene remained as fresh in my memory as on my initial perusal: the one in which the book’s protagonist, Edmund Gundersen, comes across a man and a woman lying on the floor of a deserted Company station on a distant world, their still-living bodies covered in alien fluid that is being dripped upon them by a basket-shaped organism,


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The Wrath of Fu Manchu: Final and fun footnotes of Fu

The Wrath of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer

Previously here on FanLit, I placed an article that discussed every one of the 13 Fu Manchu novels that British author Sax Rohmer produced over a period of decades. But there was one Fu book that I did not discuss therein, for the simple reason that it is not a full-length novel, but rather a collection of miscellaneous items. The Wrath of Fu Manchu is the 14th and final book in Rohmer’s FU MANCHU series.


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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