Charles R. Saunders’ Nyumbani Talesby Bill WardIn Nyumbani Tales (MV Media 2017), sword-and-sorcery great Charles Saunders collects 13 short stories spanning his early career, work that had previously appeared in a variety of publications, from small press ‘zines like Weirdbook and Black Lite, to mass market anthologies such as Beyond the Fields We Know and Hecate’s Cauldron. Fans of Saunders’ Imaro series will already be somewhat familiar with his short fiction, since the earliest parts of that epic were built upon the classic early Imaro shorts that first won the character his reputation. And, while many of the stories within Nyumbani Tales aren’t strictly speaking sword-and-sorcery, there are not only familiar faces here for Imaro fans, but a great deal of familiar ground as well.That familiar ground, of course, is Nyumbani itself, Saunders’ fantastic African setting. An amalgam of different times and cultures, mythic and legendary elements as well as pure Weird Tales style invention, Nyumbani has been the unfolding backdrop for most of Saunders’ fiction. In his introduction to Nyumbani Tales and, perhaps even more importantly, in the biographical asides that preface each story in the collection, we get a glimpse at not only how Saunders’ writing evolved, but how his literary journey affected his secondary world of Nyumbani itself. These tales aren’t just re-collected here, but they have been polished and updated to further integrate them into the mythos of Nyumbani as it appears in the Imaro saga, for example by adding terminology like mchawi or Mashatan. If any good can be said to have come out of Saunders’ fraught publication history, it was in allowing him the opportunity to cohere and develop his grand setting over decades of reflection and refinement.The stories themselves in Nyumbani Tales present a strong folkloric element, several being adaptations of traditional tales, others being fresh coinages operating within those same parameters of mythic storytelling. Some of the most memorable tales in the collection hit with the real power of legend, such as the dark tale of famine and deception “The Death Cattle of Djenne,” or the creepy and unsettling shape changer story “Amma.” One of my favorites was “Khodumodumo,” the story of a heroic sacrifice to defeat a ravenous monster that read like a perfect mix of pulp adventure and campfire tale, but with a pathos that would be impossible to...