I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (JANUARY 2026 EDITION)

And we’re off! To a very slow start. Because I was traveling and busy and enduring general madness and whatnot.

Anyway, it’s a start.

Lorelei of the Red Mist by Leigh Brackett

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this 1946 novella is an interesting curiosity in that (1) it’s co-written with Ray Bradbury and (2) it wasn’t a collaboration so much as a case where Brackett wasn’t able to finish the story after she got an offer from Howard Hawks to co-write the screenplay for The Big Sleep with William Faulkner, so she asked Bradbury (whom she was mentoring at the time) to think up an ending and finish it for her.

The story is a planetary romance set on Venus, in which professional thief Hugh Starke is on the run after stealing a million credits. His ship crashes and he’s left for dead, but he wakes up in a new body – specifically, a warrior named Conan – thanks to a mysterious sorceress named Rann who is also Conan’s former lover. There is a war going on between the humanoid fish sea-people who live in the Red Sea, Rann’s people (descendants of the sea people) and the humans of Crom Dhu, which is under siege. Rann wants Starke-as-Conan to kill the leader of Crom Dhu and end the siege. Starke has other ideas. There's also a zombie army at some point.

The story itself is pure planetary-romance pulp, and it’s okay if you like Conan stories (and this was apparently intended as an homage to Robert E. Howard) – which, I confess, I’m indifferent to. It’s perhaps more interesting to see how the story obviously switches writers in midstream, and also how at least some of the details here would find their way into Brackett’s Eric John Stark tales, which she started writing a few years later, particularly her descriptions of Venus as a liveable planet – she would reuse the Red Sea concept in Enchantress Of Venus. Anyway, it's not terrible, but it's probably more worthwhile if you want to see what Bradbury was doing before he became famous.

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Play Red Misty for me,

This is dF