Winner Of London Lovecraft Festival’s New Writing Contest Announced…

Orange Shade Productions and the London Lovecraft Festival are pleased to announce that the winner of the first “Writing Lovecraft” competition is James Goss, who submitted “The Collectors of Screams,” a Mythos-expanding work set in a very strange office in the twenties. Goss is best known for his work on universe building within Doctor Who, but in addition to his rich body of work in this area he’s also written plays including “The Gentlemen of Horror” (about the friendship between Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) and a much-produced adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The play will be given a staged reading at the Old Red Lion on the closing night of the 2019 London Lovecraft Festival (5pm, Saturday 9th February 2019).

I wonder if he was where the Peter Capaldi -series Doctor Who had so many of its Lovecraftian ideas from? See, for instance, the episode “Heaven Sent” (Series 9, Episode 11) which so obviously used and reworked Lovecraft’s plot details for “The House of the Worm”.

Snagged from an eBay listing. I like this take on the Chtulhu idol. Apparently a prop made for a LARP.

This post is a follow-on from last week’s Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Rhode Island School of Design.

Rhode Island School of Design’s Pendleton Museum was an annexe to its main galleries and a favourite Providence spot for Lovecraft. It was a ‘must-see’ stop on the tour of the town given to his visitors, partly because entrance appears to have been free. The interior appealed greatly to Lovecraft because it was a faithful recreation of a Colonial era house. It was said to have been based on the Edward Dexter house in arrangement.

Pendleton House” [opened 1906] … “sedulously maintained in order to give the visitor a faithful picture of Georgian interiors as they really were.” — Letter from Lovecraft to Kleiner, 1919.

Attached to the [Waterman St.] museum proper is a perfect reproduction of a colonial mansion, containing the finest collection of American colonial furniture in the world.” — Letter from Lovecraft to Galpin, 9th August 1936.

When Lovecraft talks about a perfect Colonial interior, this is the sort of exemplar he has in mind at the level of the upper-classes. Albeit in richly plain colours, creams and warm polished woods, brass and flashes of gold gilding, rather than the dour black and white seen here.

Pendleton Museum or Pendleton House had its public ‘entrance through Waterman St.’, rather than its own frontage. Visitors would have had to walk through the Rhode Island School of Design galleries in order to reach it.

It was set to be matched with a long-anticipated Colonial style courtyard garden, but this was delayed again and again until finally the plans for it were drawn up in 1933, and the Garden was eventually realised until 1934. One assumes that Lovecraft was likely to have attended the opening event for the Garden, but I don’t know of any record of that.

Vintage cassette audiobooks, currently on eBay (not from me) along with “The Lurking Fear” in the same format.