What do you think?
Rate this book
Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery
In the spirit of Robert E. Howard, Tanith Lee, Karl Edward Wagner, and films like Conquest and Fire & Ice comes Profane Altars: Weird Sword and Sorcery. Underground horror authors Emma Alice Johnson, Matthew Mitchell, Adam Smith, Sara Century, Charles Austin Muir, Edwin Callihan, and editor Sam Richard conjure forth visions of the unknowable and ancient past. One of spider gods, aging warriors, crystal antlers, cultist soldiers, and whispered legends of strange creatures and woeful knights. A bridge between weird horror and Sword & Sorcery, Profane Altars presents new realms fantasy within cloistered worlds of doom and wonder.
Featuring cover art by the legendary Jeffrey Catherine Jones.
Featuring cover art by the legendary Jeffrey Catherine Jones.
140 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2024
9 people are currently reading
90 people want to read
About the author
Sam Richard
45 books108 followersSam Richard is the author of several books including The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God and the award-winning To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows. He has edited ten anthologies, including the cult hits Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery and The New Flesh, and his short fiction has appeared in over forty publications. Widowed in 2017, he slowly rots in Minneapolis where he runs Weirdpunk Books. You can stalk him @SammyTotep across most socials or at weirdpunkbooks.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 5, 2025
Everything about this book, from the cover art (by the legendary Jeffrey Catherine Jones) to Sam's introduction writing about how this project came together to the stories and the several new to me authors absolutely kick ass. These stories are insanely dark and treacherous and absolutely pulsing with weird, macabre vibes.
The stories by Emma Alice Johnson, Adam Smith, Sara Century, Edwin Callahan were phenomenally dark and extremely well written. Queen Of The Fire Arch by Charles Austin Muir absolutely floored me. It's by far the longest story and I wish there were another 300 pages in that dark, chaotic world. Phenomenal work....
From the back cover: "...Spider gods, aging warriors, crystal antlers, cultist soldiers, and whispered legends of Strange creatures and woeful knights."
Another fantastic anthology from Sam Richard and Weirdpunk books.
The stories by Emma Alice Johnson, Adam Smith, Sara Century, Edwin Callahan were phenomenally dark and extremely well written. Queen Of The Fire Arch by Charles Austin Muir absolutely floored me. It's by far the longest story and I wish there were another 300 pages in that dark, chaotic world. Phenomenal work....
From the back cover: "...Spider gods, aging warriors, crystal antlers, cultist soldiers, and whispered legends of Strange creatures and woeful knights."
Another fantastic anthology from Sam Richard and Weirdpunk books.
July 11, 2024
Not really what I was expecting. It said in the spirit of Robert E Howard, Karl Edward Wagner, and Tannith Lee. Not from my standpoint. This doesn’t mean the anthology was poorly written. It just wasn’t Sword and Sorcery. It was definitely weird, dark fantasy with a heavy dose of the macabre.
July 16, 2024
Notes from a Decaying Millennial:
I received this book as a paid subscriber to the Weird Punk 2024 Sub-club.
I was not paid to write this review, all views and opinions are my own.
-
Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery is the latest offering from Weird Punk Books. This book scratched an itch that very rarely gets attention these days. Part of the creative soup that makes up the shambling behemoth I am was made from absorbing Tales from my Dad's copies of Heavy Metal Magazine, reading the works of Michael Moorecock, Tolkien, Howard and Lovecraft. to name a few. To put it simply, I've been primed for a book like this for awhile. Like a members gathered together for a quest to forbidden vistas, Editor Sam Richard brings to the volume: Emma Alice Johnson, Adam Smith, Matthew Mitchell, Sara Century, Charles Austin Muir and Edwin Callahan.
Like members of the questing band with their own weapons and skills, Each author puts forth a tale that dares the reader to re-think the limits of S&S prose, but in a manner showing a deep love for the genre. Profane Altars will rekindle the dying embers of your love for S&S fiction.
-
Alas like some disintegrating parchment scroll, on which is writ the deeds of figures long lost to time. This volume eventually ends....Though perhaps, if the fires of joy and wonder with the tales are alight in enough readers...there could be a second volume..only time and the mind of Sam Richard will tell.
I received this book as a paid subscriber to the Weird Punk 2024 Sub-club.
I was not paid to write this review, all views and opinions are my own.
-
Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery is the latest offering from Weird Punk Books. This book scratched an itch that very rarely gets attention these days. Part of the creative soup that makes up the shambling behemoth I am was made from absorbing Tales from my Dad's copies of Heavy Metal Magazine, reading the works of Michael Moorecock, Tolkien, Howard and Lovecraft. to name a few. To put it simply, I've been primed for a book like this for awhile. Like a members gathered together for a quest to forbidden vistas, Editor Sam Richard brings to the volume: Emma Alice Johnson, Adam Smith, Matthew Mitchell, Sara Century, Charles Austin Muir and Edwin Callahan.
Like members of the questing band with their own weapons and skills, Each author puts forth a tale that dares the reader to re-think the limits of S&S prose, but in a manner showing a deep love for the genre. Profane Altars will rekindle the dying embers of your love for S&S fiction.
-
Alas like some disintegrating parchment scroll, on which is writ the deeds of figures long lost to time. This volume eventually ends....Though perhaps, if the fires of joy and wonder with the tales are alight in enough readers...there could be a second volume..only time and the mind of Sam Richard will tell.
August 25, 2024
“Profane Alters Weird Sword & Sorcery” is a sword & sorcery anthology with a twist - it seems like it is mostly populated by stories written by horror authors, which entails a subtle but interesting shift in tone and voice for the stories in the collection.
The introduction states as much and was nice to read.
“Two Mothers” starts the collection strong, introducing a story that reflects on age, legacy, mother hood, and heroism vs. monstroisim. It was a nice to see an older protagonist, as that is an under represented demographic in the annuals of heroic prots. The story had tones of Beowulf for me, in its theme of age and the heroes journey as well as both the prot and the antagonist. Overall, it was a good story, albeit there were a few typos here and there, I think, and I think it didn’t follow some established patterns of the S & S genre, but it still fit well.
“Maybe Just Us” was the next story. I’ll concede that this one left me a bit confused-was Ella a woman or an axe? Why was the author writing about teenagers skinny dipping (a contemporary simile that pulls the reader out of the time and place of the narrative)? Would the writing and story improve? Yes and no. Mind you these are just my opinion. The battle scenes had something - a certain violence that was delightfully shocking…but the narrative and the world and people within continued to confuse. So, not wanting to give up on it, I went back to the beginning and reread it from the start, and liked it a lot better the second time. I think the problem was a lot of atypical sentence structures were the author was trying to be clever but was losing me. Idk. Anyway, was lots more enjoyable on a second reading….but it gets so very weird and strange…idk…is this even sword & sorcery? It kind of felt like a poor caricature. There are a few lines that were well written and the characters and story were interesting, but it was so very disjointed.
“Knight Rumors” found me when I had really had enough from the prior tale; I was really hoping for something a little more solid, but, to me this was even worse, which is really saying something. Maybe it was meant to be artistic, poetic? I will never know…half way through I had to give up on this gibberish.
At this point I’d placed the marker pretty far down, so I was absolutely delighted when “Never Threaten a Spider” not only had coherent sentences, but seemed to be an actual sword & sorcery story rather than some sort of anti-story like the prior piece…what more it actually seemed kind of good. The protagonist was interesting, the descriptions drew me in, granted perhaps a bit to much time was spent on eyes and eyebrows, but hey, that is sword & sorcery too. And you know the further in you got the more you had to root for the protagonist. The rabbit bit was fun. Anyway, add one to the good story stack.
“Queen of the Fire Arch” thankfully continued this trend epically, being well written with just enough mystery to keep me reading. Probably the longest piece in the collection, it reads fast as it’s good. Clearly sword & sorcery with a strong touch of eldritch horror, the story worked well, and could nearly serve as prologue for what was likely to come next.
“The Song of the Nameless Phalus” was, perhaps surprisingly, interesting and fitting well with the eldritch influence the best S&S stories had in this volume. There was a problem with tense as sometimes the past tense would randomly convert to present tense, but that’s more an editing matter I think. Overall the story was horrific but interesting and enjoyable, though soundly, delightfully strange.
“Light from a Dead Star” was poetically well written and doubled down on the eldritch aspects of S&S as well as the warrior looking back trope. While overall I liked this one and thought the writing was great, the story could have benefited from more characters and dialogue and other aspects to make it feel more concrete than purely symbolic..not that the symbolic bits were bad, but it kind of dragged a bit in the middle.
Overall, as with most anthologies, some stories were subjectively much better than others. While I strongly think one man’s trash tale is another man’s treasure tale, a couple of these I really, really couldn’t get into to the point where I started wondering if some deranged AI wrote the story…though there were a few that I think were okay to very good. And the concept, the premise, of writing S&S through a different lens, is wonderful. So that stated, I hope this small press gives it another go - there’s a lot of potential here.
In any event, in the end here, I’ll rate this collection as 3 out of 5 strange stars from beyond our universe.
The introduction states as much and was nice to read.
“Two Mothers” starts the collection strong, introducing a story that reflects on age, legacy, mother hood, and heroism vs. monstroisim. It was a nice to see an older protagonist, as that is an under represented demographic in the annuals of heroic prots. The story had tones of Beowulf for me, in its theme of age and the heroes journey as well as both the prot and the antagonist. Overall, it was a good story, albeit there were a few typos here and there, I think, and I think it didn’t follow some established patterns of the S & S genre, but it still fit well.
“Maybe Just Us” was the next story. I’ll concede that this one left me a bit confused-was Ella a woman or an axe? Why was the author writing about teenagers skinny dipping (a contemporary simile that pulls the reader out of the time and place of the narrative)? Would the writing and story improve? Yes and no. Mind you these are just my opinion. The battle scenes had something - a certain violence that was delightfully shocking…but the narrative and the world and people within continued to confuse. So, not wanting to give up on it, I went back to the beginning and reread it from the start, and liked it a lot better the second time. I think the problem was a lot of atypical sentence structures were the author was trying to be clever but was losing me. Idk. Anyway, was lots more enjoyable on a second reading….but it gets so very weird and strange…idk…is this even sword & sorcery? It kind of felt like a poor caricature. There are a few lines that were well written and the characters and story were interesting, but it was so very disjointed.
“Knight Rumors” found me when I had really had enough from the prior tale; I was really hoping for something a little more solid, but, to me this was even worse, which is really saying something. Maybe it was meant to be artistic, poetic? I will never know…half way through I had to give up on this gibberish.
At this point I’d placed the marker pretty far down, so I was absolutely delighted when “Never Threaten a Spider” not only had coherent sentences, but seemed to be an actual sword & sorcery story rather than some sort of anti-story like the prior piece…what more it actually seemed kind of good. The protagonist was interesting, the descriptions drew me in, granted perhaps a bit to much time was spent on eyes and eyebrows, but hey, that is sword & sorcery too. And you know the further in you got the more you had to root for the protagonist. The rabbit bit was fun. Anyway, add one to the good story stack.
“Queen of the Fire Arch” thankfully continued this trend epically, being well written with just enough mystery to keep me reading. Probably the longest piece in the collection, it reads fast as it’s good. Clearly sword & sorcery with a strong touch of eldritch horror, the story worked well, and could nearly serve as prologue for what was likely to come next.
“The Song of the Nameless Phalus” was, perhaps surprisingly, interesting and fitting well with the eldritch influence the best S&S stories had in this volume. There was a problem with tense as sometimes the past tense would randomly convert to present tense, but that’s more an editing matter I think. Overall the story was horrific but interesting and enjoyable, though soundly, delightfully strange.
“Light from a Dead Star” was poetically well written and doubled down on the eldritch aspects of S&S as well as the warrior looking back trope. While overall I liked this one and thought the writing was great, the story could have benefited from more characters and dialogue and other aspects to make it feel more concrete than purely symbolic..not that the symbolic bits were bad, but it kind of dragged a bit in the middle.
Overall, as with most anthologies, some stories were subjectively much better than others. While I strongly think one man’s trash tale is another man’s treasure tale, a couple of these I really, really couldn’t get into to the point where I started wondering if some deranged AI wrote the story…though there were a few that I think were okay to very good. And the concept, the premise, of writing S&S through a different lens, is wonderful. So that stated, I hope this small press gives it another go - there’s a lot of potential here.
In any event, in the end here, I’ll rate this collection as 3 out of 5 strange stars from beyond our universe.
August 8, 2024
A good collection of Weird Sword & Sorcery. The stories herein lean much more toward the weird than the classic idea of S&S. Vibes are more Clark Ashton Smith, Tanith Lee and Vancian than they are Howard or Lieber. Would make a good addition to any “Appendix N” type list.
3.5
3.5
August 30, 2024
"Two Mothers" and "Knight Rumors" were my absolute faves in this anthology. Love the weirdness of these sword and sorcery stories!
September 5, 2024
Every story is a delight
These aren’t your typical fantasy stories. They all have more than a touch of macabre in them and don’t follow the same tropes as most fantasy stories. There are no knights in shining armor saving the day. Sometimes the monsters are the heroes. Sometimes there is no hero. Fantastic storytelling in every one and definitely some delightful, unexpected twists.
These aren’t your typical fantasy stories. They all have more than a touch of macabre in them and don’t follow the same tropes as most fantasy stories. There are no knights in shining armor saving the day. Sometimes the monsters are the heroes. Sometimes there is no hero. Fantastic storytelling in every one and definitely some delightful, unexpected twists.
June 25, 2024
Looks like I get to debut the review!
It's a lovely anthology.
My top three of the collected stories are:
Knight rumors
Song of the nameless phallus
Light from a dead star.
It's a lovely anthology.
My top three of the collected stories are:
Knight rumors
Song of the nameless phallus
Light from a dead star.
December 10, 2024
A nifty idea in a tidy little package. If you dig ye olde venerable sword and sorcery genre but would like to read same with a modern and, yes, weird twist, procure this slender volume post haste. Weirdpunk is a cool little press and always worth supporting.
Like any anthology, some pieces are better than others, but all here rate at least above average. No clunkers. However, Charles Austin Muir's "Queen if the Fire Arch" steals the show. This story alone is worth the price of admission. And I haven't even mentioned the killer cover art. Good stuff, by Crom!
Like any anthology, some pieces are better than others, but all here rate at least above average. No clunkers. However, Charles Austin Muir's "Queen if the Fire Arch" steals the show. This story alone is worth the price of admission. And I haven't even mentioned the killer cover art. Good stuff, by Crom!
November 27, 2025
I picked up this book of weird sword and sorcery short stories because the amazing cover called to me... promising nostalgia and magical adventure. It wasn't even a conscious choice, I just had to have it.
After reading it, I'm happy to say that the authors don't disappoint. The tales are even better than I hoped. They deliver the best of warrior mythos mixed with deliciously dark sorcery.
One story, Queen of the Fire Arch by Charles Austin Muir, particularly called to me. It paired beautifully descriptive prose with such a captivating plot.
I absolutely recommend picking this up!
After reading it, I'm happy to say that the authors don't disappoint. The tales are even better than I hoped. They deliver the best of warrior mythos mixed with deliciously dark sorcery.
One story, Queen of the Fire Arch by Charles Austin Muir, particularly called to me. It paired beautifully descriptive prose with such a captivating plot.
I absolutely recommend picking this up!
October 29, 2025
You'll at least like some of these. The authors all have distinct styles.
December 30, 2024
Amazing from start to finish. Everything you'd want if you're a fan of Conan or other Grim fantasy tales.
December 20, 2024
Hard-edged tales of sword and sorcery that bridge the gap between ancient epics, Weird pulp, and transgressive modern experiments.
August 30, 2024
Profane Altars succeeds beautifully in injecting the Weird into Swords & Sorcery. It also goes a far way towards justifying my conviction that fantasy and horror make for an ideal pairing. I enjoyed all the stories in the anthology, but I'll highlight two.
- "Knight Rumors" by Matthew Mitchell is a brutal, fractured tale told in slivered vignettes. Or perhaps it's not a tale, but a kaleidoscopic myth, a glimpse of a dark entity who slaughters innocents across the ages. The prose is visceral, the imagery electrifying.
- "Queen of the Fire Arch" by Charles Austin Muir takes the form of a diatribe. An obscure courtier tells an astounding (unbelievable?) tale of how the queen has died and why the nation must now mobilize for war under his command. Full of wonderful bombast and demoniacal action.
- "Knight Rumors" by Matthew Mitchell is a brutal, fractured tale told in slivered vignettes. Or perhaps it's not a tale, but a kaleidoscopic myth, a glimpse of a dark entity who slaughters innocents across the ages. The prose is visceral, the imagery electrifying.
- "Queen of the Fire Arch" by Charles Austin Muir takes the form of a diatribe. An obscure courtier tells an astounding (unbelievable?) tale of how the queen has died and why the nation must now mobilize for war under his command. Full of wonderful bombast and demoniacal action.
February 26, 2025
2.5 stars rounded down.
An uneven but interesting little anthology of sword/sorcery adjacent shorties. If it weren’t for the overt use and misuse of the SnS tropes, I would say these stories fall more into a weird fiction bucket. That’s not a bad or misleading thing. In fact, most of my favorite SnS has a few nice heavy dashes of the weird or horrific. My problem mainly is in the quality of prose. Many of the stories were wearing sword and sorcery costumes rather than approaching the genre through original voice. This resulted in some overly garbled or confusing passages and a couple duds. What I liked, I really liked, the rest…meh.
Though, I like what Steve and weirdpunk is doing and will continue to check out and support their stuff, this collection missed the mark for me.
Stories ranked:
Nameless Phallus—best balance of weird/SnS
Two Mothers
Maybe Just Us—weird prose, liked the story
Never Threaten—strange prose style
Dead Star—gets a little lost in its own writing
Knight Rumors
Fire Arch—somehow both too much and not enough
Read on paperback from weirdpunk books.
An uneven but interesting little anthology of sword/sorcery adjacent shorties. If it weren’t for the overt use and misuse of the SnS tropes, I would say these stories fall more into a weird fiction bucket. That’s not a bad or misleading thing. In fact, most of my favorite SnS has a few nice heavy dashes of the weird or horrific. My problem mainly is in the quality of prose. Many of the stories were wearing sword and sorcery costumes rather than approaching the genre through original voice. This resulted in some overly garbled or confusing passages and a couple duds. What I liked, I really liked, the rest…meh.
Though, I like what Steve and weirdpunk is doing and will continue to check out and support their stuff, this collection missed the mark for me.
Stories ranked:
Nameless Phallus—best balance of weird/SnS
Two Mothers
Maybe Just Us—weird prose, liked the story
Never Threaten—strange prose style
Dead Star—gets a little lost in its own writing
Knight Rumors
Fire Arch—somehow both too much and not enough
Read on paperback from weirdpunk books.
December 24, 2025
Like any anthology, some stories resonated more with me than others, but if nothing else, Richard's sense as an editor and being able to have these authors match one another's voices to the arcane material - was something special. I will say I wanted maybe a little more "weird" at play, but there's always the next one!
December 30, 2025
"What is best in life?"
Compilations of Weird Fantasy stories written by talented Horror authors that's what. Oh, also to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Compilations of Weird Fantasy stories written by talented Horror authors that's what. Oh, also to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews