Darrell Schweitzer (b. 1952) is a prolific editor, poet, novelist, essayist, and critic of sf and fantasy literature (his ISFDB entry is several pages long).
During the 1970s and early 1980s Schweitzer wrote a number of fantasy short stories featuring 'Julian the Apostate'. Set in the Middle Ages, in a world that contains both real-life and legendary locales, the stories pit Julian - a disgraced knight - against all manner of supernatural phenomena, including demons, vampires, wizards, and even minor deities of one sort or another.
The Julian stories mingled the action-driven narratives of sword-and-sorcery fiction with the more contemplative, poetic approaches taken by H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany in their fantasy pieces. As well, others of the Julian stories, such as 'Divers Hands', could be categorized as horror stories rather than fantasy tales.
For reasons that are unclear, Schweitzer's stories never got the attention they deserved from the editors of fantasy anthologies - particularly the DAW anthologies - that were published throughout the 1970s.
While 'Divers Hands' made it into 1979's The Years Best Horror Stories: Series VII, only one of the 14 volumes of DAW's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories ever featured an entry from Schweitzer ('Transients', in The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 14, 1988).
Given the presence of quite a few duds in every volume of The Year's Best Fantasy anthologies - many of these duds originating from editor Lin Carter, in particular - one would think that more of Schweitzer's stories would have been anthologized by Carter (and later, editor Arthur Saha), but this did not prove to be the case.
Getting hold of Schweitzer's material can be problematic. Unlike other fantasy authors of the 70s, such as Carter, Tanith Lee, Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Brian Lumley, etc., etc., Schweitzer's fiction was published in the small press, rather than mass market paperbacks. This is true even today, where an examination of Schweitzer's amazon pages shows his works being issued from myriad small press and ebook outlets.
Which brings us to 'We Are All Legends' (193 pp), printed in 1981 by the small press company Starblaze. The book is illustrated by Stephen E. Fabian. A bit larger than a mass-market paperback, 'We Are All Legends' doesn't have the print quality of modern-day Print on Demand / KDP Print books, so readers will need to consider this if they are interested in acquiring it.
L. Sprague de Camp provides an Introduction, followed by 13 'Julian' stories that saw print between 1978 and 1981, most of these in zines such as Void (Australia), as well as anthologies like Andrew Offutt's Swords Against Darkness.
Summing up, if you are a fan of fantasy fiction of the 70s and 80s and you see a copy of 'We Are All Legends' on shelf, it's worth picking up: Schweitzer's stories are as well done, and sometimes superior, to those of the above-mentioned authors.
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