Saturday, June 13, 2020

Itch Scratched...

I was wracking my brain trying to tell Bobbi the name of the story that had H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as traveling companions across the prairies of Hell in the afterlife.

It was "Gilgamesh in the Outback", by Robert Silverberg, in the shared-universe anthology book, Rebels in Hell.

That's the book in the series that also has Martin Caidin's "There Are No Fighter Pilots Down In Hell", which is a must-read for aviation geeks, being a tale of a "Devil Went Down to Georgia"-style duel between said Devil and the (fictional) greatest 'Murrican fighter pilot ever, with the stakes being the souls of all the fighter pilots, which are held in Limbo by the power of the titular song.

Anyway, back to "Gilgamesh in the Outback"... Apparently Silverberg had so much fun writing it, that he wrote two succeeding novellas in the setting, and the three are available combined into standalone novel form as To the Land of the Living.
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