A new point-and-click “hidden object” PC game, Mystery Stories: Mountains of Madness…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HUAfICN9lg&w=420&h=315]
Mystery Stories: Mountains of Madness
21 Monday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Haunter of the Dark wins 2011 Machinima Expo
20 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
A Lovecraft machinima movie has won the Grand Prize in the 2011 Machinima Expo (machinima is amateur 3D animation storytelling, rendered in real-time with a videogame engine). Phil Browne’s adaptation of The Haunter of the Dark was made with the real-time animation software iClone. Here’s the film with the director’s commentary…
[vimeo 32303090]
And here’s the original…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyqoNvcmEcM&w=640&h=360]
BBC’s Shadow over Innsmouth – director’s cut adds 30 mins
20 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
The director’s cut of the recent BBC adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is out now, with an extra 30 minutes which were cut for the broadcast…
“This 2011 adaptation comprises 5 episodes, originally aired on BBC Radio 4 Extra […] an additional 30 mins of mystery-filled audio within these five episodes”
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
19 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted in New books
Today in the UK both The Financial Times and Guardian Books notice the new wrist-breaker anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Amazon UK currently has the book used for as low as £10.
It weighs in at 4lbs, and 750,000 words. So… can I get a Kindle version? No, of course not. What a waste of great publicity. All those potential sales from newspaper reviews just flushed down the drain or diverted to Pirate Bay, because there’s no Kindle version. Seriously, do we need a mass “one-star review” campaign on Amazon, to force publishers to give readers Kindle versions of new books?
Anyway, the chronological anthology looks interesting (even if the only Lovecraft in it is “The Dunwich Horror”, often regarded as a failure), and Weird Fiction Review has a handy table of contents.
House of Black Wings on DVD
18 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Lovecraft Library Volume 1 – shipping early Dec 2011
18 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A weighty new 232-page collection of comic book adaptations of Lovecraft, The Lovecraft Library Volume 1: Horror Out of Arkham, due 6th Dec 2011 from IDW. Introduction written by Robert Weinberg.
Volume 2 is currently out as a series of traditional comic-book part-work pamphlets, as “H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror” (includes a 100-page adaptation “The Dunwich Horror”, plus other stories), and these will then presumably also be collected into a single volume at some point in 2012. When put together the two volumes should bring us over 400 pages of new comic book adaptations of Lovecraft tales.
The Making of the American Science Fiction Magazine, 1923-1973 – free academic paper
17 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Scholarly works
An interesting new empirical / industry-structure analysis of the rise of SF in America: David Reinecke, “From the Pulps to the Stars: The Making of the American Science Fiction Magazine, 1923-1973”. Princeton University CACPS Working Paper #44, Fall 2011.
Stranger Magic reviewed
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Marina Warner’s new book on magic and the reception of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, reviewed…
“The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. These dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy became inseparable from “nigromancy”.
Of obvious relevance to much weird fiction from the 1920s and 30s, and Lovecraft’s use of mad Arab wizards, etc. Warner is not your usual theory-clotted lit crit academic, she’s a proper historian and independent scholar.
Howard’s “The Black Stone” – free podcast
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH
A free unabridged audio reading of perhaps the most Lovecraftian of Robert E. Howard’s stories, “The Black Stone” (1931). The new recording was kindly made by Cthulhupodcast, over the summer in July 2011…
Above: Illustration for the story, by British artist Greg Staples
A ten-page comic book adaptation appeared in Marvel’s Savage Sword Of Conan (March 1982 issue).
New York Times obit. for Les Daniels
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Scholarly works
The New York Times obituary for Les Daniels — horror author of Providence, and “one of the earliest historians of comic books” with books such as Comix: A History of Comic Books In America (1971).
Also… “The subject of his master’s thesis was the horror author H.P. Lovecraft” and he wrote on Lovecraft for the local Providence press. It seems S.T. Joshi has a section on the Daniels vampire novels, in the book The Evolution of the Weird Tale. Joshi also suggests, in one interview, that Daniels’s Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (1975)… “is probably the best we have, but of course it is very much out of date”.
The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction in the Media
15 Tuesday Nov 2011
The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction in the Media is shipping now. The table-of-contents makes it look a lot more interesting than the publisher’s blurb does (which foregrounds the William Shatner involvement, presumably in the vain hope that Trekkies will buy it)…
Preface by Richard Holmes / Prefatory Note by James Gunn
INTRODUCTION: VOICES HEARD ‘ROUND THE COSMIC CAMPFIRE by John C. Tibbetts
THE LOVECRAFT CIRCLE
* “The Provocative Abysses of Unplumbed Space”: S.T. Joshi Explores the Universe of H.P. Lovecraft
* “I Am Providence”: Henry Beckwith on H.P. Lovecraft
* “Psycho Is Not About a Shower Scene!”: Robert Bloch
* “From Providence to Liverpool”: Ramsey Campbell
* “Certain Things Associated with the Night”: T.E.D. Klein
THE HEROIC AGE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
* “Robert E. Howard and The Whole Wide World”: Dan Ireland
* “Batman and Me”: Bob Kane
* “The Man Who Explained Miracles”: John Dickson Carr
* “Superman is a Friend”: Christopher Reeve
* “Wonder’s Child”: Jack Williamson
* “Ragnarok and Relativity”: Poul Anderson
* “The Way the Future Was”: Frederik Pohl
* “I Tell People Stories”: Wilson Tucker
* “The Complete Enchanter”: L. Sprague De Camp
THE BRADBURY COLLABORATIONS
* “Stan and Ollie”: Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen
* “Joe and Me”: Bradbury and Joseph Mugnaini
THE BRADBURY CIRCLE (Friends and Associates)
* “Let’s Put on a Show!”: Julius Schwarz
* “Mister Monster”: Forrest J Ackerman
* “Dandelion Chronicles”: William F. Nolan
* “The Repairman Cometh”: F. Paul Wilson
* “A Bradbury Companion”: Donn Albright
DESTINATION: MARS!
* “Back to Barsoom”: Bob Zeuschner Talks about the Mars Books of Edgar Rice Burroughs
* “This Is Where We Start Again”: Kim Stanley Robinson
THE EXTRAVAGANT GAZE
* “A Sublime Madness”: Professors Albert Boime and Tim Mitchell Talk about Goya, Gericault, and Caspar David Friedrich
* “Scenes from Childhood”
* “Album for the Young”: Maurice Sendak
* “There’s a Lot of Reality to These Fantasies”: Charles Sturridge and Fairy Tale
* “The Mysteries of Chris Van Allsburg”
* “Gahan Wilson’s Diner”
“WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE…”: TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET AND STAR TREK
* Frankie Thomas on “Tom Corbett” and the Early Days of “Live” Television
* Four members of the Enterprise crew speak out about Star Trek: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, De Forest Kelly, and George Takei
THE MUSIC OF TERROR
* “Symphonie fantastique”: Jack Sullivan
POSTMODERN GOTHIC
* “The Night Ride of Charles Beaumont”: Jason V Brock
* “The Kiss That Bites”: Susie McKee Charnas
* “A Magellan of the Interior”: Peter Straub
* “The Billion Year Spree”: Brian Aldiss
* “Savage Pastimes”: Gothic Schlock and True-Crime Horrors: Harold Schechter and Rick Geary
* “Different Engines”: Alternate Worlds and Anachronistic Technologies: Cynthia Miller and T. L. Reid
“THE HERESY OF HUMANISM”: GREG BEAR AND GREGORY BENFORD
EPILOGUE
Celebrity culture as gothic culture
15 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in Unnamable
The New York Times magazine on celebrity culture as a re-invention of gothic spectacle…
“When people talk about a contemporary gothic revival, they’re usually talking about Romantic fictions like Twilight and True Blood. But it’s in the so-called real world of the tabloids, Internet gossip sites and reality TV that the genre is truly thriving. With their troubled heroines, haunted castles (or bad-vibe hotels), fakes and counterfeits, long-buried secrets, madwomen, controlling patriarchs, damsels in distress, reckless cads, depravity and the looming threat of financial ruin, these stories are striking for their endlessly recurring themes of excess, addiction, decadence and madness. And like the pursued heroines of 18th-century novels, the waifs of the tabloid stories seem at once abject — doomed to wander the wilderness while being poked at by the villagers wielding sticks and telephoto lenses — and trapped: sealed off in the glass dungeons of their fame.”