In Memoriam: Steve Tompkins

I just came across a great tribute to the late Robert E. Howard scholar Steve Tompkins over at the REH: Two-Gun Raconteur website and thought I'd post a link. Why? Simply put, it's because I believe that Tompkins was a great writer and amazing critical thinker whose work deserves to be more widely read than it is, which, outside of the Howard fandom community, it largely is not. Tompkins was an intellectual whirlwind whose essays slalomed breathlessly from topic to topic - he could veer from Quentin Tarantino to Stephen King to Herodotus and then back to his original subject (usually Howard, less often (but just as ably) J. R. R. Tolkien or Charles R. Saunders or Ian Fleming), leaving the reading's head spinning trying to keep up with him. If you care about great writing (and particularly if you are as dismayed about the ghettoization of genre fiction as I often am), you should check him out. Click on the link above, or, better yet, take a look at his archived posts at The Cimmerian, which remains some of the finest work of his I've seen on the net.