The Black Wheel by Abraham Merritt & Hannes Bok

When Abraham Merritt died of a heart attack on August 21, 1943, at the age of 59, the world lost one of the greatest writers of adventure fantasy of all time. He left behind a number of novels in various stages of completion, including the first quarter of The Black Wheel. Hannes Bok, an artist and illustrator who did almost 150 covers for assorted pulp magazines, starting with the December 1939 issue of Weird Tales, took on the formidable task of completing Merritt's story. Bok was the first artist, by the way, to win a Hugo award, and went on to pen several other novels of his own. I must say that he does a rather good job at pastiching Merritt's style;... Read More

Beyond the Golden Stair by Hannes Bok

Hannes Bokwas the pseudonym of Wayne Francis Woodward, a science fiction and fantasy illustrator and artist who also wrote. In 1948, Bok published a 35,000-word novella called “The Blue Flamingo” in Startling Stories. For decades, rumors circled the science fiction community that “The Blue Flamingo” was an excerpt from a larger novel. In 1970, after Bok’s death, Lin Carter found the manuscript and published it as Beyond the Golden Stair.

In his foreword, Carter talks about Bok’s adulation of Abraham Merritt, who, with books like The Moon Pool and Dwellers in the Mirage, had extended the subgenre of “the lost world.” Bok’s fantasy stories and ... Read More