Ursula of Ulm

More strange things afoot in Fort Worth, 1977

Before we get started

Ursula of Ulm is the continuation of the De ReDordica series by Pilum Press which began with Shagduk. You can read my review here, or take a listen to the review at the Tooky’s Mag YouTube channel.

Also, the author and editor are friends.

The Background

Like Shagduk, Ursula is largely an epistolary novel in the form of a diary, and after a digression into the medieval past, it quite literally picks up where Shagduk leaves off on the very next morning. Stephen is something of an ass - a brilliant linguist and a decent musician who works at a library to make ends meet, but clueless about women and often uncaring or oblivious about others instead of his own preoccupations - who has stumbled onto the realization that a lost world, language, and magic exist. He discovers this looking into the disappearance of professor Sherwood and discovery of his papers and some odd effects. He doesn’t spend as much time reflecting on the magical aspects slowly creeping into his life as he does his music, the drama with his bandmates, learning magic, and his own perceived cleverness. The latter is somewhat deserved, but has enough blind spots to blot out a map.

If there’s a critical dramatic turning point that marks the end of Shagduk, it’s Stephen’s acceptance that magic, summoned creatures like the one he and Randy bested, and the demonic imp that had been plaguing him, are real, that the circle of those “in the know” is wider than just himself, Randy, and Sherwood, and that he was going to stop merely dipping his toes in.

Unfortunately, Stephen has a habit of turning unerringly into error.

The Book

Ursula starts with a short story. Those who have read Pilum’s Death Flex will recognize the story of Der Schliem. It is worth rereading in its own right, but also to refresh one’s memory of Ursula, because it helps set the canvas against which Stephen’s further misadventures can be painted. Set in medieval Germany, I believe Nuremberg, it is a transcribed interview with a physically and mentally deformed man guilty of horrific crimes and passions, who worked as a kind of Igor to a wizard, and was supplanted in his position of perceived importance by a beautiful witch. How old Ursula was even then is unclear, but she is very much still around in the present.

And then we return to the library and Stephen’s less and less everyday world of 1977. Still a time capsule of 70’s vibes, horror starts to creep in, bit by bit. Before things go wildly askew, even as he questions the blowback of using magic, he proceeds to study it more and use it more and more habitually. It soon becomes apparent that there are even more people “in the know” than Stephen was remotely aware of, and that Stephen’s continued survival owes less to his increasing competence than to the fact that most of the players other than Diane are utterly unaware that he’s aware - until they aren’t. For those who were waiting for the plot to pick up in Shagduk - things proceed to go completely off the rails by the end of Ursula, with dire and sometimes deadly consequences for those around Stephen.

Stylistically, other than the Schleim bit which is a journal entry in its own way, it follows the journal format of Shagduk from Stephen’s point of view, and continues to walk the line well of verisimilitude well between the needs of a novel and a real journal. If you sat down and thought about it, a real journal would not go into many of the details and dialog that a novel must, but Ursula still stays on this side of the line of believability by strongly maintaining Stephen’s voice, and the kind of details that would either be assumed or noticed in their presence or omission. The ongoing everyday details, as well as the grounding provided earlier, keep the weird goings-on rooted, and make the sudden appearance of murder and mayhem all the more startling.

You can order your own copy at Pilum Press.

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Please also join the Pilum Press Discord and/or the Autarch Discord. Pilum is the publisher of several books and short story collections including Shagduk, Ursula of Ulm, and Thune’s Vision. Autarch is the home of the Adventurer Conquerer King RPG.