These days, I get to play the “age card” for all manner of brain farts and such. It comes in pretty handy when I walk into my office and totally forget why I did, or worse, when I leave my car keys in the refrigerator. But since what I’m about to tell you has a shelf life of over three decades, I’m afraid the age card won’t work. What I’ll claim then is that my place of birth—where I was beamed down from a long, long time ago—is the planet Oblivious, a place where I often still reside.

Here’s the deal: in 1978 I published a sword & sorcery novel titled Berbora with a crummy publisher called Manor Books, long since—and thankfully—defunct. As badly as they mangled the editing—and as crappy as my writing was—I always thought that the book had a pretty cool cover, as you can see here. It’s hard to read the artist’s signature, but it looks something like “Hinck.”

Okay, hold that thought for a moment, and let’s talk about Frank Frazetta. The late, great artist (he died in 2010) was renowned for his numerous science fiction and fantasy book covers, including the works of my two favorites, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, as well as for lesser-known writers. Having a Frazetta cover was a badge of honor for any writer in those genres. Despite publishing sixteen novels in fantasy and SF through the early 1990s, I never had the good fortune of a Frazetta cover.

Or so I thought.

Recently, while mucking about on the Internet, I came across a blog post that someone had written about three years ago. The blogger had found a piece of Frazetta artwork, called “Kubla Khan,” dated 1975, and published by Frazetta in 1977. He put it next to the Berbora cover, and guess what?

Holy crap!

The blogger referred to it as a “blatant rip-off.” I can’t argue that. Knowing my publisher at the time, this kind of thing didn’t surprise me. I’m planning on rewriting and reissuing Berbora later this year. Be assured it will have brand-new cover art.

Still, it’s kind of cool having a pseudo-Frazetta cover on one of my old titles, don’t ya know…

SWORDS & SPECTERS: Roland Summers sails again! Within the next 24-48 hours I’ll be releasing The Shrouded Walls of Kharith on Amazon Kindle. This second book in the Ro-lan adventure fantasy series (after The Master of Boranga) finds the young American returning to the bizarre, other-dimensional world from which he had been cast out by Ras-ek Varano, the evil, all-powerful Master of Boranga. Upon this deadly island, Ro-lan sets out on a dangerous quest to find his beloved Larra, and his best friend, Denny McVey.

Here is an excerpt. To set the scene, Ro-lan first journeys to Mogara, where months earlier Denny had fallen under the spell of two nasty women: Ophira, the queen, and Oleesha, her equally vile daughter.

Mogara was dead; the once verdant ground upon which it stood had been blackened by fire, and a long time would pass before anything grew there again. The bamboo huts had been razed in a similar manner, most incinerated completely—though remnants of a few remained. Charred skeletons dotted the landscape, one stack of five or six clogging the narrow stream that paralleled the city—the tributary that Ter-ek and I had followed many months past. Only the crimson obelisk, the stone erected decades past in “honor” of the devil whom those of Boranga worshiped as their Master, remained standing, doubtless as a perverse monument to what I could only assume was his inconceivable handiwork.

 I’m currently revising Book Three, tentatively titled, The Sorcerer of Mesharra. That one will be out later this summer. I wrote about having a second chance at doing all of this, and let me tell you, I’m having a ball. Enjoy!