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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: September 2010

Tales of Lovecraftian Cats, now on the Kindle

30 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts

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I’m pleased to say that my book Tales of Lovecraftian Cats is now available on the Kindle [ Amazon U.S. Kindle store | Amazon U.K. store ].

Four Horror Stories Of Cats, radically reworked and rewritten in the style and mythos of H.P. Lovecraft.

Contents:

* “Beware the Cat”. Being the first ever English novel (1584). A gothic horror story of talking cats, freely adapted and modernised in a new Lovecraftian translation.

* “How the Grimmalkin Came”. A new sequel to both “Beware the Cat” and Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”.

* “The Sending”. A new prequel to Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”.

* “The Case of the Savage Cat”. A new prequel to Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”.

Kadath art book

30 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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The Kadath Travel Guide. In French only, but profusely illustrated.

Translated blurb:

“With this new book published by Mnemos, you will begin the most fantastic dream quest for the first time since HP Lovecraft, you will survey your own risk the unknown streets of the city of Kadath. Four authors and illustrator have explored Kadath for you. On the trail of Randolph Carter, between beauty and terror, demons and wonders, you explore the famous city of the Lands of Dream, the capital of forgotten gods and cursed ones.”

Antique fonts

27 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Fonts, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

The Fell Types as open-source Truetype fonts by Ignio Marini. So named because they were imported by John Fell of the Oxford University Press, from Holland circa 1670–1672, to bypass government interference in printing. As Propnomicon says, they’re excellent for “faux antique” documents.

After install they turn up not under “F”, but under “I”, as ‘IM Fell Types’.

In the same vein is the display caps font “LP Aspen Cam”, but where you’d obtain it now I’m not sure. It seems to have completely vanished from the web.

[ Hat-tip: Propnomicon ]

Crusoe now available on the Kindle

27 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts

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My recent Lovecraftian ‘re-mix’ novelette Crusoe: the macabre further adventures of Robinson Crusoe is now available as an ebook on Amazon, for the Amazon Kindle ereader. It’s on the U.S. store only at the moment ($4.99), and I hope the UK store will list it soon. The whole book was re-formatted from scratch for the Kindle, and includes optimised illustrations in the text. It’s been a learning exercise in hand-crafting the HTML required for the Kindle, and crunching the illustrations down, which is a bit of a chore but is hopefully worth it. I hope to get my other Lovecraft books into native Kindle form over the next few weeks.

Weird Tales and the Great Depression

26 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, REH

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The Robert E. Howard Reader has been published. The book of scholarly essays contains one of direct interest to Lovecraft fans, “Weird Tales and the Great Depression” by Scott Connors.

MythosCon programme online

24 Friday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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MythosCon (Jan 2011, Arizona) has detailed program/schedule information. I can’t afford to go from the UK. But I’m hoping that the convention will be “podcast-friendly”, and will post the best of the panel discussions and talks online as MP3s.

Culture from Yuggoth

23 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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The Moon Lens blog has a long literary appreciation, today, of Lovecraft’s sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth.

And while looking for illustrative images, I found the covers for Alan Moore’s comic series Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths…

Collected as a hardcover: Alan Moore’s Yuggoth Cultures

Cover Art: Juan Jose Ryp, coloured by Nimbus Studios.

Houellebecq interview

22 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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New at The Paris Review, a long interview with Michel Houellebecq. It hardly touches on Lovecraft (his H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life was published in 2008), but does contain some insights into why he likes/writes science fiction.

Release the Air Octopus!

21 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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Kaare Andrews (noted comics artist on Spider-Man and The X-Men and The Incredible Hulk) has a new Lovecraftian horror film out soon, going straight to DVD.

The premise of Altitude is quite interesting. It’s a green-screened indie film from Canada, set in a light plane — a constrained setting which one can only hope the director’s undoubted visual flair for composition has made the best of. The trailer looks good, in that respect, and the CGI looks competent. So one can only hope the story (by Paul A. Birkett, of Escape Velocity, Mindstorm, and Crash Landing) is strong, the plot has some intelligent twists, and the acting/dialogue isn’t dire. Birkett’s films get between one and two stars on IMDB, though, so I’m not hopeful.

/Spoilers ahead/

The film is set in a small light plane, flown by a rookie teen pilot taking four cute friends for a spin. They go up and of course they hit a storm. They start to run out fuel. Then they panic. Then it gets really bad…

Sounds similar to the Twilight Zone “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Storm, Plane, Madness, Lovecraftian Sky Beast.

Altitude has been shown at the San Diego ComicCon without reviews, and it’s possibly a bad sign that it’s going straight to DVD (26th October 2010) — although maybe that’s just because they don’t want to waste money on the marketing needed to herd the mouth-breathing popcorn-heads into the cinemas. Straight-to-DVD doesn’t necessarily mean it’s dire — remember what Spielberg did with just a big truck and a TV-movie budget in Duel, for instance.

The official trailer (spoilers alert: it seems to lay out most of the film)…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLWbM3r2W2I&fs=1&start=8;&hl=en_US]

Speculative Heresy essay

21 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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Ben Woodard of Speculative Heresy opens a week of essays with a long philosophical article on Lovecraft’s attitude to science, the categorisation of the natural world.

“That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.” — Lovecraft, in “From Beyond” (1920).

I note that the Speculative Heresy team link to the Open Humanities Alliance, who have a template up for a new academic ejournal, titled simply Monster. No issues or even any blurb yet, but I’d welcome an open access journal that sees contemporary philosophers tackling monsters and the monstrous in the human imagination.

The insect philosophers

21 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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I had thought that this story in the December 1930 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions…

…was an indication that Lovecraft’s passing aside about a beetle race in “Shadow out of Time”…

“After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Shadow out of Time” (written Nov 1934 – Feb 1935).

… might have been his picking up on a current of thought popular at the time. But there is a much earlier precedent in Lovecraft’s works…

“You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (published October 1919).

Possibly Lovecraft got the ‘successors to humanity’ idea from H.G. Wells. There is an excised section of The Time Machine which imagines a far future Earth in which the degenerated last men are preyed upon by gigantic insects — although Lovecraft didn’t read that book until his New York soujourn, and since he read the book version he wouldn’t have seen that extracted section with the insects.

Possibly the idea of having the beetle race be “the successors of humanity” was a later addition to the 1919 idea in Lovecraft’s mind. One wonders if seeing people encased in the black carapaces of the early cars didn’t spark his imagination on that point?

Here is Lovecraft on the topic in a letter, in the mid 1920s…

“if the sun gives heat long enough, there will certainly come a time when the mammal will have to go down to subordination as the reptilia went before him. We are not nearly so well equipped for combating a varied environment as are the articulata; and some climatic revulsion will almost certainly wipe us out some day as the dinosaurs were wiped out—leaving the field free for the rise and dominance of some hardy and persistent insect species—which will in time, no doubt, develop a high specialisation of certain functions of instinct and perception, thus creating a kind of civilisation, albeit one of wholly different perceptions, (when other species view a given object, their ocular image of it differs—sometimes widely—from ours) emphases, feelings, and goals.”

Mansions of Madness

20 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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Fantasy Flight adds another Lovecraftian board/table-top game alongside its existing Arkham Horror title. The new game Mansions of Madness is described as…

“Horrific monsters and spectral presences lurk in manors, crypts, schools, monasteries, and derelict buildings near Arkham, Massachusetts. Some spin dark conspiracies while others wait for hapless victims to devour or drive insane. It’s up to a handful of brave investigators to explore these cursed places and uncover the truth about the living nightmares within. Designed by Corey Konieczka, Mansions of Madness is a macabre game of horror, insanity, and mystery for two to five players. Each game takes place within a pre-designed story that provides players with a unique map and several combinations of plot threads.”

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