If it’s going to succeed in the 21st century sword-and-sorcery needs writers that know and respect its forms, classic authors, and traditions, but are unafraid to take these elements and create something new. In short, it needs writers that deliver what we know and love about sword-and-sorcery while breaking a few rules along the way in the service of their art.

Enter The Eye of Sounnu. This entertaining collection by DMR Books (2020) should herald a coming out party for author Schuyler Hernstrom, who has established himself as someone to watch in our small corner of the fantasy universe. It is unmistakably heroic fantasy/sword-and-sorcery/sword-and-planet, with all the hallmarks and signposts of these closely aligned subgenres, but also the work of a unique and original artist.

There has been other modern S&S I’ve enjoyed, including but not limited to the likes of Swords and Sorceries and the excellent The Desert of Souls. But none have so squarely hit the sweet spot of my own personal tastes as has this recent collection.

The Eye of Sounnu succeeds on many levels. First, the stories are well-paced and rarely drag. They’re fun to read, richly imaginative, and seasoned with humor. Second, they contain some deeper philosophic ruminations amidst the atmosphere and action. But mostly it succeeds because it’s well-written.

Hernstrom is not an entirely unknown quantity. The Eye of Sounnu collects five stories from three years of Cirsova magazine, of which he has been a steady contributor, supplemented with three original stories. A total of eight tales in a tidy 240 pages. Hernstrom is also the author of the out of print Thune’s Vision and a handful of other stories.

The stories of The Eye of Sounnu are eclectic and strange, a mix of classic sword-and-sorcery, pulpy SF, post-apocalypse, and dark ages/medieval. “The Gift of the Ob-Men” is a (slightly) more heroic and weird homage to “The Doom that Came to Sarnath,” with an exiled barbaric hero pressed into service by the strange mushroom-like Ob-men. “Images of the Goddess” is something of a pulpy, tongue-in-cheek echo of A Canticle for Leibowitz, with cloistered monks sending out one of their own to retrieve the image of a goddess from the wastelands. “The First American” starts like something out of Manly Wade Wellman’s Hok stories but quickly shifts direction into weird sci-fi when a young hunter seeks out a “sorcerer” (stranded space pilot Captain Alan Washensky) to help him recover his stolen love from the clutches of the reptilian Dryth. Perhaps the most memorable entry is “Mortu and Kyrus in the White City,” which introduces us to a bit of an homage to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser with its hulking Northern barbarian Mortu and impish companion Kyrus. Save that instead of a thief Kyrus is a philosopher trapped in a monkey’s body and Mortu a motorcycle riding warrior of the wastelands.

If there ever were someone fated to write in the subgenre it seems to be Hernstrom, whose father named him after his friend and colleague P. Schuyler Miller (1912-1974), famous in REH circles as co-author with John D. Clark of “A Probable Outline of Conan’s Career.” According to this interview Hernstrom was raised on his father’s library of sword-and-sorcery, science fiction, and pulp fantasy, growing up in a house groaning under stacks of paperbacks and disintegrating issues of Weird Tales. Later in life he went on to several diverse stops as “a paratrooper, sailor, janitor, bouncer in Roppongi, librarian, and a dozen other things,” accumulating a series of real-world adventures before taking up a pen in 2014 and settling into a writing career.

Even were this portentous heritage not known Hernstrom’s literary inspirations are evident in the stories themselves. Jack Vance bleeds through the pages of “The Star-God’s Grave,” “The Tragedy of Thurn” and other stories. Howard’s influence is plain, as are overtones of Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and perhaps Poul Anderson with the spirit of the old Norse Sagas and inexorable, tragic fate.

Brace yourself as you read, you’ll find a jarring martial hardness in some tales, others with a moral center at odds with (post)modern values. Hernstrom explores the tension between Christian and pagan beliefs. There are warnings about the equivocal nature of progress, and the tradeoffs that come with technological progress and modernity, some quite prescient (“Mortu and Kyrus in the White City” is particularly chilling in the context of current news about the consumptive nature of Instagram and its ill-effects on children). Observations about the hardness of life, and futility of cyclical existence. But none of it is done with heavy-handed didacticism or unskillfully rendered. These elements are subtle, told through the dialogue of memorable characters, lying beneath fun, well-told stories of adventure.

In short, we need to support new sword-and-sorcery and The Eye of Sounnu is a fine place to start. I look forward to seeing what the future holds for Hernstrom—he has been speaking of a Kickstarter to support a forthcoming collection—and exploring his back catalogue as well.

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.