The twenty-eight issue of Savage Realms Monthly bears a cover date of May 2024, a first edition notice of April 2024, and was released on Amazon on 3rd June, 2024. It contains the usual three stories offered by SRM, along with a brief uncredited editor’s introduction and interviews with the authors of each piece.
First up is “Red Trail of Vengeance,” by the experienced sword & sorcery author Steve Dilks. Dilks is no stranger to the pages of SRM, having appeared in the magazine’s very first issue, which bore the cover date of January 2021. “Red Trail of Vengeance” is the latest entry in the author’s series of stories features a colossal Black man named Bohun, “once a champion warrior of Damzullah.” One of the previous stories appeared in the inaugural issue of SRM, though that tale, “Festival of the Bull,” was a reprint from the sole issue of Swords of Adventure, which appeared in November 2018.
piece—the set piece battles are particularly fine, as is an excellent scene of an escape from a well—the author does not escape or subvert readerly expectations. Still, it is probably the rare reader of Savage Realms Monthly who comes to the magazine looking for wild innovation, and Dillks’ latest story of Bohun (the individual pieces will be collected next month in Bohun: The Complete Savage Adventures), while it doesn’t offer such—neither is there any whiff of the “sorcery” half of the equation—does put the writer’s considerable talents for action, pace, and characterization on display.
In contrast to Dilks, Matthew McConkey is a newcomer to Savage Realms Monthly, and according to his author interview, this is just his third published story. That surprised me, because this is a very accomplished piece. Written in the first person, “Last Sigh of the Sea,” tells the story of a patricide outcast from a high mountain region fallen far into the service of a lowland king, and of the various forms of sacrifices he has made and makes. The story has a classic fairy tale structure—there’s an old witch woman who is in fact not really that old, but more to the point the entire piece is built around thematic and even literal plot repetitions in sequences of threes—but with a definite sword & sorcery sensibility. I was genuinely impressed by the author’s narrative voice and prose style, both of which struck me as very well-developed and mature, whether for a new writer or no. The “Old Powers” invoked by an outland king are straight out of, by turn, the Gospel of Matthew, Macbeth, and any number of classic weird sea tales, but the particularities are striking, the differences imaginatively rendered. This is one of the best stories I’ve read in any issue of Savage Realms Monthly.
Alas, “Last of the Star-Crossed Wizards,” by the delightfully named Jonathan A. DeLaughter, falls very far short of the marks set by McConkey and Dilks. If I was feeling particularly ungenerous, I would simply summarize the story as follows and be done with it: a Dungeons & Dragons party—complete with a barbarian, a fighter, and a spell caster—uses a deus ex Cthulhu to overcome a cliched threat. There’s a bit more here than that, thankfully, but nothing to particularly recommend the piece. With its sea of familiar proper nouns (familiar in their mood if not in their particulars), descriptions of magical effects easily recognizable from table top and video role-playing games (in some cases, the names have not even been changed to protect the innocent!), and the appearance of a sort of mini-Cthulhu which has any potential cosmic horror rendered inert by its spouting of painfully portentous dialogue, this story simply isn’t up to the standards established by the other two in this issue.
Still, the magazine is worth the price ($9.99 for print, $2.99 for Kindle, “free” for Kindle Unlimited subscribers, all exclusive to Amazon) for the McConkey alone.
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