The Mysterious Adam Corby -- Revealed
Here’s the age-old question: when is internet stalking not actually internet stalking? Why, when you’re a literary historian doing journalism, of course. Many weeks ago, I composed a long entry called “ The Mysterious Case of Adam Corby .” My real interest lay in how two major fantasy editors from the 1980s, David Hartwell and Lester del Rey, treated one particular fantasy manuscript by a little-known fantasist, Adam Corby. At the time, I had only read the two Corby novels Hartwell officially published, The Former King (1981) and The Divine Queen (1982), and in my post I publicly gushed about the latter. Since then, however, I waded into Corby’s remaining Doom-quest of Ara-karn novels, specifically the ones he self-published almost thirty years later. Now my gushing has transformed into awe. These books are genuinely amazing. They’re powerful; dark; grim. They’re maybe the single most “literary” fantasy of the entire decade, and I’m fully prepared to defend Corby as among the half-doze...