Weird Tales Magazine No. 366: Sword & Sorcery Issue
Weird Tales Magazine
by Various
Why You'll Love This
Old-school sword and sorcery gets a sharp revival here — blood, magic, and moral ambiguity from a lineup that ranges from Neil Gaiman to pulp veterans you haven't discovered yet.
- Great if you want: classic S&S fiction alongside essays and poetry in one volume
- The experience: punchy and varied — stories hit fast, moods shift between entries
- The writing: contributors span registers from pulpy grit to lyrical — never monolithic
- Skip if: uneven anthology quality bothers you — not every story lands equally
About This Book
Swords clash, spells ignite, and ancient evils refuse to stay buried in this dedicated sword and sorcery issue of one of fantasy fiction's longest-running magazines. Gathering original stories, essays, and poetry under a single blazing banner, the issue immerses readers in a world of blood-soaked battlefields, dark enchantments, and morally complicated heroes who win — when they win at all — by tooth and nerve rather than virtue alone. This is fantasy stripped of comfort, where the stakes feel genuinely dangerous and the magic comes at a cost.
What makes this collection worth your time is the range of voices working within a tradition rather than against it. Contributors including Neil Gaiman, Jane Yolen, and Howard Andrew Jones approach the genre from different angles — some reverential, some subversive — and the friction between those approaches keeps the reading experience alive and unpredictable. The mix of prose fiction, criticism, and poetry gives the issue a texture that single-author collections rarely achieve, letting readers absorb the genre from multiple directions at once. It reads less like a sampler and more like a genuine argument for why sword and sorcery still matters.
