The Beast from the Sea of Blood E-Book

Richard Blakemore

• Herausgeber: Cora Buhlert
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

They seek a treasure and find a monster…

Thurvok, the sellsword, and his friends Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, the sorceress Sharenna and Meldom’s sweetheart Lysha are on the hunt for a legendary pirate treasure, when they find themselves marooned on a desolate isle. To add insult to injury, there is no treasure on the island. There are, however, monsters…

This is a short story of 5400 words or 20 print pages in the Thurvok sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

Leseprobe

The Beast from the Sea of Blood

by Richard Blakemore

Bremen, Germany

Copyright © 2020 by Cora Buhlert

All rights reserved.

Cover image by © Daniel Eskridge via Dreamstime

Cover design by Cora Buhlert

Pegasus Pulp Publications

Mittelstraße 12

28816 Stuhr

Germany

www.pegasus-pulp.com

Introduction

by Cora Buhlert

Nowadays, pulp fiction writer Richard Blakemore (1900 — 1994) is best remembered for creating the Silencer, a masked vigilante in the style of the Shadow or the Spider, during the hero pulp boom of the 1930s.

Furthermore, Richard Blakemore is also remembered, because he may or may not have been the real life Silencer, who stalked the streets of Depression era New York City, fighting crime, protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty just like his pulp counterpart.

The mystery surrounding the Silencer has long overshadowed Richard Blakemore’s other works. For like most pulp writers, Blakemore was extremely prolific and wrote dozens of stories in a variety of genres for Jakob Levonsky’s pulp publishing empire. Blakemore’s work spans the full range of the pulps, from crime stories via westerns, war and adventure stories via romance to science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, the sheer amount of stories Richard Blakemore wrote during the 1930s refutes the theory that he was the Silencer, for when would he have found the time?

Of the many non-Silencer stories Richard Blakemore wrote, one of the most interesting is a series of heroic fantasy adventures that Blakemore penned between 1936 and 1939, making him one of the pioneers of the genre now known as sword and sorcery.

Richard Blakemore was an acknowledged fan of Weird Tales and particularly admired the works of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and C.L. Moore. And so, when Jakob Levonsky started up his own Weird Tales competitor called Tales of the Bizarre, Blakemore immediately jumped at the chance to write for the magazine and created Thurvok, a warrior hero in the mould of Conan, Kull and Bran Mak Morn.

Thurvok debuted in the story “The Valley of the Man Vultures” in the first issue of Tales of the Bizarre in 1936. He started out as a lone adventurer, but quickly gained a companion in Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, whom he encountered towards the end of “The Valley of the Man Vultures”. Not long thereafter, the duo of adventurers became a quartet with the addition of Sharenna, a formidable sorceress, and Lysha, Meldom’s childhood sweetheart.

“The Beast from the Sea of Blood” follows on directly from the previous story “The Tentacled Terror” and once again takes Thurvok and his friends out to sea aboard the sloop Mermaid’s Scorn, which they acquired in the previous story.

Like its immediate predecessor, “The Beast from the Sea of Blood” is a straight adventure story, in which our heroes set sail in search of a pirate treasure and find a monster instead. But whereas the monstrous guardian from “The Tentacled Terror” is a Lovecraftian creature, the titular beast is an oversized version of an real world creature, a trope which would become very popular in the post WWII era, inspired by fears of nuclear war. But unlike the giant atomic mutant insects that were so popular in B-movies of the 1950s, there is no pseudoscientific explanation for the existence of the beast. Instead, it just is.

Pegasus Pulp Publishing is proud to present to you the adventures of Thurvok and his companions, in print for the first time since 1930s. So buckle up and prepare to accompany Thurvok, Meldom, Sharenna and Lysha as they face…

…the Beast from the Sea of Blood.

The Beast from the Sea of Blood

by Richard Blakemore

From the ocean called the Sea of Blood for its red waters the colour of freshly shed blood rose a small rocky island. Nothing and no one lived here except for a colony of noisy seagulls and some crabs, which scuttled across a narrow strip of sandy beach. This was the Desolate Isle, a place avoided by sailors far and wide, because it was believed to be cursed. At least, that’s what old Danvalk said. But then Danvalk would believe his own bed was cursed, should he happen to fall out of it in a drunken stupor.

Thurvok the sellsword, on the other hand, did not believe in curses. But nonetheless, the red waves, so very much like the fresh blood sprouting from an enemy’s cut throat, unnerved him. As a son of the Eastern steppes, he did not much care for the sea in general. Any body of water larger than a well, a puddle or bathing pond tended to make him nervous. But the Sea of Blood with its eerie gory colouring made him even more nervous. Water should simply not be that colour and only the cannibals of Grokh bathed in fresh blood.

Nonetheless, he was stuck here for the time being. For the Mermaid’s Scorn, a small fishing sloop that Thurvok and his friends had purchased from the one-legged sailor Danvalk, sole survivor of an ill-fated expedition to the lost city of Nhom’zonac, had run aground on the sands just off the Desolate Isle. Until the tide rolled in, she would not sail again. At least, that’s what Sharenna had said and she prided herself in her knowledge of the sea. Even though she had run the Mermaid’s Scorn aground, come to think of it.

Worse, the quest that had brought them here, a great pirate treasure supposedly hidden among the seagull nests, had proven to be a bust. Thurvok’s friend and companion Meldom — thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin — had gotten the story of the treasure from an old acquaintance, who’d claimed that he’d been right there, when it was hidden.

“Well, if the treasure really is so great, why doesn’t he get it himself then?” Thurvok had asked.

Meldom had no answer to that, probably because there was none.