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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: February 2019

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Sheepshead Bay, NYC

15 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Picture postals

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The dyke and spillway at Sheepshead Bay, New York City. Presumably the open sea is on one side, hence the spray of the waves hitting the breakwater, and a low semi-tidal salt-marsh bay is on the other side.

This appears to be the southernmost extremity of a watery landscape that H. P. Lovecraft discovered rather early in his encounter with New York City, because Dench had his home there…

Dench’s [home on Emmons Ave. was a regular amateur press meeting-place, and was located] by the old, curious wharves of Sheepshead Bay [near the old Dutch marsh country, that being] “the vast, low-lying flat lands and salt marshes of Southern Brooklyn; where old Dutch cottages reared their curved gables, and old Dutch winds stirred the sedges along sluggish inlets brooding gray and shadowy and out of reach of the long red rays of hazy setting suns.

Emmons Ave., Sheepshead Bay, in 1931, showing how it fronted the wharves and jetties. John Milton Heins’s “Face to Face with Amateur Journalists” (1920 reprinted in The Fossil #333 from The American Amateur) reveals a few more details of the Dench house, confirming that it was directly on the shoreline… “Sheepshead Bay in a bungalow, on the water front”. In Lovecraft’s time this waterfront was a busy working place, and in the season boats were eagerly hired by sports fishermen and hunters. The following two maps show the Sheepshead Bay shoreline frontage in broad relation to Fulton St. and Prospect Park, and the flatlands to the north. The detailed topographical maps shows the exact location of the Sheepshead Bay shoreline frontage on which Dench’s house was located, and the proxity to the named “Flatlands” settlement and its wide marshland surroundings. One can see why the area provided New York City with such excellent fishing and duck-hunting.

Almost the entire Long Island shoreline was once salt-marsh flatland and swamps. By Lovecraft’s time most of this was long gone, but the New York City Guide of 1939 reported a settlement called the ‘Flatlands’ remained and that… “Much of the southern section [of this] is unreclaimed marshland” with a population of rough squatters and fishermen. Lovecraft’s “vast, low-lying flat lands and salt marshes” of the 1920s thus appear to have run south of the settlement of Flatlands toward Sheepshead Bay, with “Bergen Beach” being mentioned by the Guide as an especially bleak place: “At Bergen Beach, the brooding silence of the dour marshland hangs over old houses and shanties”.

This watery landscape had originally drawn Dutch settlers because it reminded them of the very similar fenland country in Holland, and they knew how to work it and what could be got from it. By Lovecraft’s time it seems that the Dutch had mostly moved on and up in New York society, but their relics remained and continued to fascinate him. For instance Lovecraft’s self-parodying story “The Hound” arose in September 1922 after… “I had been exploring an old Dutch cemetery in Flatbush, where the ancient gravestones are in the Dutch language”. He had chipped a small piece off a Dutch gravestone…

I must place it beneath my pillow as I sleep… who can say what thing might not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb? And should it come, who can say what it might not resemble?

It is likely that Lovecraft first knew the marshland area through walks there in the company of his fellow writer Everett McNeil. Seemingly in Autumn 1922, when they likely used Dench’s nearby house in Sheepshead Bay as a base. Possibly this large marshland area was not fully explored by Lovecraft in 1922. Nor during his later New York residency, unless perhaps you count as evidence the briefest vision of a pre-New York landscape in the story “He”… “in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh constellated with nervous fireflies.”

But the area and its Dutch heritage certainly fascinated Lovecraft. He continued to visits Flatbush for walks (for instance in August 1925), and drew heavily on his historical knowledge of the New York Dutch in “The Horror at Red Hook”. In 1928, when he briefly returned to New York, he spent much time intensively researching the Flatbush area, to seek out the most ‘antient’ buildings in the flatlands and other rare survivals from colonial times that might still lurk there. This project included venturing out (seemingly for the first time?) to the old tidal-mill called Gerritsen Mill…

Being oblig’d by circumstances to spend above a month and a half, last spring [Spring 1928], in the town of Flatbush, near New-York, in the province of that name, I resolv’d to make my sojourn pleasant by means of such observations of good scenery and historick monuments as the nature of the region permitted. […] My stay in Flatbush was chiefly notable for my discovery, thro’ diligent searching of many books, of several objects of much antiquity which I had never discover’d before. The western end of Long-Island, in which the village [of Flatbush] is situate, was settled by Hollanders at a very early date; and so widely scatter’d were their architectural constructions, that a surprising number have surviv’d to the present time amidst surroundings more and more incongruous. […]

But most of my late explorations dealt with those parts of the country south of the village; once very open and sparsely settled, but now fast spoilt by cheap streets and the cottages of an hybrid foreign rabble. On the 19th of May I made a trip to that part of Jamaica Bay call’d the Mill Basin, there seeing for the first time the Jan Schenck house, built in 1656 from the timbers of a privateer [ship], and reputed to be the oldest house in the entire province of New-York. This house, an old Dutch cottage with steep peaked roof, is situate on a flat tidal marsh near the shoar […]

On still another occasion I visited the old Gerritsen Tide Mill on a creek south of Flatbush. This was built in 1688, and a dam made at the same time still confines the rising waters of the sea. The wheel is in a good state, though the building itself hath suffer’d considerably since its abandonment near forty years ago. […]

Further explorations in Flatbush, Flatlands, New Utrecht, and related regions yielded many highly picturesque glimpses of old farmhouses, churches, churchyards, and other reliques of better days.

The Mill in 1922, as Lovecraft would have known it.

The newspaper cutting above is from 1934, after Lovecraft’s time as a resident in New York. A grand 1930s mega-scheme was afoot and intended to drain the marshes for a vast new leisure-park. The Gerritsen Mill might have been part of that, but it was conveniently burned down shortly after its restoration was announced. The scheme never happened, and New York got a wildlife preserve instead. But the burning was a small incident in a vast web of local corruption which grew around the draining and reclaiming of the swamps and marshes of the eastern USA in the 1890s-1930s period.

Lovecraft does not mention a boat, which at that point he presumably could not afford to hire, and which one would assume (from looking at the maps) would have been necessary to fully explore the area and reach the remotest homesteads. He was likely restricted to roads, tracks and trolley-buses.


Did the area have an influence on Lovecraft’s fiction? It seems doubtful, and even if it did then the influence is certainly not now provable.

i) One might wonder if perhaps the marshes vaguely contributed something to the general atmosphere of “Innsmouth” (written some three years later). But Lovecraft had known marshland (Cat Swamp) and wild creeks (the York Pond ravine) intimately in middle-childhood, and a number of swamps and marshes had been investigated during his adult travels and visits. Marshes at places such as Ipswich, Mass. may have more of a claim to have inspired those of “Innsmouth” — there is for instance an early 1917 Lovecraft poem “On Receiving a Picture of the Marshes at Ipswich” and Ipswich is very frequently mentioned in “Innsmouth”, albeit never in direct connection with marshes. Lovecraft instead re-positions his marshes to surround Innsmouth itself, and his… “wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.” Although the narrator’s later wide views of the Innsmouth terrain do seem to hint that this marshland stretches away very extensively, perhaps even reaching nearly to the nearby Ipswich. That said, there are many salt-marshes on that 20-mile stretch of coast and they appear to occur all the way from Newburyport down to Gloucester. While these might have been picturesque in their own way, especially when surveyed from a hill or train, they appear to have been purely rural and thus lacked the enticingly ‘antient’ architectural elements that Lovecraft sought in Flatbush and the Brooklyn flatlands…

ii) There is a familial name-link with the Gerritsen Mill in the Brooklyn flatlands, as readers will remember that in Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” the hero-villain Suydam marries a Cornelia Gerritsen. But the Gerritsen name had by then spread far and wide in New York.

iii) Some might even wonder about the impact of Lovecraft very probably getting inside a number of ancient primitively-built Dutch barns, in his intensive 1928 exploration of rural Flatbush — and how that might have influenced his central use of the barn in “The Dunwich Horror” (written some months later in August 1928)…

One also recalls that it is from the Wilbraham “marshland” that the memorable whippoorwills of that story came…

there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.

iv) Interestingly, there was also local Sheepshead lore of a sea-monster. This was deemed to lurk a little way off the shoreline, but was surprisingly little-seen. This may, for some, recall the general idea of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach”. In the postcard seen below their local monster appears in a humourous photomontage of the time…


For those wondering about the Sheepshead placename, apparently it has nothing to do tasty mutton dinners — “Sheepshead” is simply the name of an abundant type of local edible fish, which gave its name to an early hotel, and thus the area was named.

A memoir of child-life out on the salt-flats, Thomas J. Campanella’s “The Lost Creek”, evocatively recalled this landscape as…

An incursion of nature into the cast grid of the city, Gerritsen is a relic landscape, a counterpoint to the artificiality of its surroundings. The rolling hummocks wear a soft, wind-tossed mane of reeds, and here and there thickets of aspen, sumac and bayberry punctuate the scene. Ring-necked pheasants, descendants from flocks released for a hunting estate in the nineteenth century, dart between clumps of phragmites [very tall densely-packed water-reeds]. Far off to the northwest the peaks of Manhattan are surreal, the tilted bedrock of an alien world. The steady hum of motors on the Belt Parkway recedes. The deep tide of time casts its spell.

As for Lovecraft, a 1931 letter to Morton (Selected Letters III) sees Lovecraft riffing through several pages of Kerouac-like ‘stream-of-consciousness’ word-associations, due to having eaten a tasty dish of roast lamb. His intent here is to convey to Morton the richness than can be obtained by simply musing on what one already knows, rather than using a mealtime to peruse a mundane newspaper in search of new ‘facts’. Lovecraft’s plate of roast lamb yields, among other fleeting cerebral associations…

Sheepshead Bay …… Emmons Ave. [Dench lived at 3052 Emmons Ave., Sheepshead Bay] …… stink of fish ….. Gerritsen Tide-mill 1688 … Avenue V . …… Neck Road .. ….. Stillwell House . . … Milestone. .. 8 miles to Brockland Ferry … flat marshlands, creeks, waving sedge, flutter of marsh birds .. .. .. curved cottage roofs … . east winds sighing of Old Holland .. … mutton-chop whiskers …. Victorian aera

“8 miles to Brockland Ferry” indicates the lore-haunted inscription on the old milestone in front of the Voorhees homestead in Sheepshead Bay, on the corner of Neck Road and Ryder’s Lane. Thus we can be fairly sure the Voorhees house was encountered on Lovecraft’s Flatbush itinerary, along with many others. Many of these old houses were photographed in ways that do not suggest their landscape/shoreline context, but the Schenck House is an evocative exception…

Lovecraft’s recall of “mutton-chop whiskers …. Victorian aera” also suggests he may have met old Dutch men on his walks, men who still held to their homesteads and to the old Dutch manner of appearance and dress — albeit probably having abandoned their clog-wearing by that time…

Elsewhere the letters to Morton also give a strong indication that it was Everett McNeil who made Lovecraft aware of this unusual local waterscape, mostly likely in the early 1920s when Lovecraft was visiting rather than living in New York. He writes of McNeil in 1929, on learning of the old man’s death, and strongly links McNeil with the landscape by recalling the early 1920s and…

the vast, level reaches of the old Dutch marsh country around Sheepshead Bay, brooding with elder mystery in the autumn gloaming, and with the winds of old Holland’s canals blowing the sedges that waved and beckoned along strange, salty inlets. […] Through those fantastic streets, along those fantastic terraces [of New York City], and over those fantastic salt marshes with the waving sedges and sparse Dutch gables, the quaint, likeable little figure may continue to plod… phantom among phantoms…

The mention of “autumn” here might place the first walks into the marshlands, with McNeil, quite near in time to Lovecraft’s September 1922 exploration of the Flatbush churchyard that led to “The Hound”.

Lovecraft and McNeil would surely be pleased to know that the U.S. Army is currently putting the finishing touches to a decades-long restoration of 180+ acres of the old salt-marshes, meaning that a substantial part of the once “vast” flatlands have survived in a form that the two men would recognise.

On where to archive zines

14 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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The latest issue of The Fossil is available, #378, January 2019. This long-running publication covers the history of amateur journalism. No Lovecraft or related content this issue, but Dale Speirs of Calgary in Canada usefully writes in with some suggestions. He has been the editor of his monthly zine Opuntia since 1991, and with no-one in his family interested in zines, he was wondering where he might reliably archive his scanned zine collection. After some research he chose two and his zine’s run is now…

available free from either www.fanac.com […] so now a complete run of Opuntia is preserved in two places

It seems to me that these two sites could usefully be considered by those wishing to archive fannish material, alongside the obvious choice of archive.org.

Doom… doom… doom…

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

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maybe 80-90% of humans will die. There are real problems ahead in figuring out how we limp with some success from the current civilization to a probably much more limited one 100 years from now.

People seriously believe this utter total crap. It’s so sad. Even hyper-intelligent guys like Graham Harman, who does the Lovecraft object-oriented philosophy texts.

Lee Brown Coye’s Lovecraft

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

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A posthumous portrait of Lovecraft from the mid 1960s. Lee Brown Coye’s illustration for an Arkham House 1967 limited edition book, Three Tales of Horror by H.P. Lovecraft. The tales were “Space”, “Dunwich” and and “Thing”, and the book had about 16 full-page b&w plate illustrations by Coye.

In a similar vein… the current exhibition “HP and Me: Illustrations for the early stories of HP Lovecraft” by Jason Filler. Until 28th February 2019 at Art@Archer, Oakland, California.

CarcosaCon 2019

12 Tuesday Feb 2019

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As Mickey Rooney might once have said… “Look kids… there’s an old abandoned castle up there on the hill! We don’t need those blockheads in town. Let’s use that castle to put on our show!”

CarcosaCon ships 350 of “the most devoted fans of [the RPG] Call of Cthulhu” to a remote castle in Poland…

a one-of-a-kind opportunity to meet legendary RPG creators, talk and play with them in a low-key environment. What else is there, waiting for the players? The halls and chambers of the Czocha castle are full of nooks and crannies, perfect for RPG sessions, a games room full of Cthulhu-related games, a tavern hall, original lectures, an exciting LARP, a gripping escape room and dungeons filled with never-before uncovered, terrifying secrets. All this within a scenic castle overlooking a tranquil, yet mysterious lake. CarcosaCon is an international convention, where the primary language used is English. The aim of the convention is to combine game-playing as a hobby with a weekend getaway with friends.

I don’t normally cover the RPG side of Lovecraft, or fan conventions, here at Tentaclii. But this looks like an event that’s too fab to overlook.

Presumably, having been ‘play-tested’ so-to-speak, the venue could also become a suitable future home for a wider pan-national Lovecraft convention for Eastern Europe? I’d imagine that most of the younger fans there all speak reasonably good English these days, so the language barriers (that held such things back in the past) might now be able to be overcome?

Added to Open Lovecraft

12 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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Added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog…

* J.M. Jimenez, “The Impact of the Eldritch City: Classical and Alien Urbanism in H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos”, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction #131, Vol. 47, No. 3, 2018. (The impact of knowledge about classical cities, both as built and as cultural environments, on Lovecraft’s imagination).

* M. Wilczynski, “The eye looks back: Seeing and being seen from William Bartram to H.P. Lovecraft”, Beyond Philology, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2018.

* I. Schmitt-Pitiot, book review of Lovecraft au prisme de l’image, Miranda, 17, published online February 2019. (In French. A straightforward review of a 2017 book in French which surveyed: “Lovecraft and image; Lovecraft and cinema; Lovecraft and comics; and finally Lovecraft the transmedia figure”).

Fern-punk tentacles

11 Monday Feb 2019

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A rather pleasing new sculpture in Rhode Island, by Sean Harrington, a sort of ‘steampunk tentacular’ upward-spiralling cluster of ferns which definitely evokes the Lovecraftian. Though it’s not sited in Providence. It’s about 15 miles south of Providence, and adorns the main bicycle path which runs from the University of Rhode Island campus down to the shoreline at Narragansett.

If there were to be a trail made to Lovecraft’s Dark Swamp, this might be the artist to adorn it?

Added to Open Lovecraft

11 Monday Feb 2019

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Added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog…

* C. Olsson, “Atephobia: On Lovecraft, Deleuze and the limits of affectual geography”. (Masters dissertation for Lunds University, Sweden. “The path that Lovecraft opens towards the inhuman” does not offer an easy way for academics to convey “the inherent horror of the inhuman” in the field of affectual geography).

* L. Matek, “The Architecture of Evil: H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, CounterText, Volume 4, Number 3, 2018.

Some first editions

11 Monday Feb 2019

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Heritage Auctions currently has a nice consignment of first editions on the auction block, mostly detective. But some Lovecraft and science fiction. It was interesting to see, in hi-res form, the Spring 1931 Creeps anthology which included a Lovecraft story. Is it just me, or does the cover face also somewhat resemble Lovecraft on the jaw?

Lovecraft remarked in a letter…

Did I tell you that Little Belknap and his Grandpa [Lovecraft] are both to be represented in the coming weird anthology Creeps by Night edited by Dashiell Hammett and published by the John Day Co.? Sonney’s story will be “A Visitor from Egypt”, and mine will be “The Music of Eric Zann” — a favourite of my own, by the way. We got only twenty-five bucks apiece, but the prestige may be helpful in dealings with editors…

It’s also interesting to get a good look in crisp hi-res at some famous book editions… Animal Farm dressed up like a children’s story rather than a political neutron-bomb, and Asimov’s Foundation trilogy looking like just another standard 1950s space adventure for boys…

Time in the Arts – call for papers

11 Monday Feb 2019

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“Time in the Arts”, a call for papers for KronoScope: Journal for the Study of Time. Deadline: 1st March 2019. The journal is not Open Access or public, unfortunately, and sits behind a paywall at Brill. But some may still be interested.

A pictorial RPG scenario: The Assemblage of Dr. Arnold Astrall

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Unnamable

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The Assemblage of Dr. Arnold Astrall

Following my reading of the 2018 Cthulhu/Lovecraft RPGs survey I thought I would have ‘a first-time try’ at making an outline RPG scenario, or something that I imagine is like one, through picture-researching and making a new creative assemblage of vintage pictures.

The result takes the form of a ‘curated scrapbook’. This can be filled with your own words, to accompany your own detailed RPG game scenario story. This scrapbook is imagined as having been made by a U.S. museum curator. It contains all that is known about a strange and evidently dangerous upland area in the Near East, and this book serves as his briefing document for your own intended expedition to the location.

The 130Mb printable bundle for this is available for all my $5+ Patreon patrons in a .ZIP download, with 24 book pages at full size. They should print adequately at 10″ x 8″, if you require print, and then trimmed and hole-punched. Pages are laid out with photos but not with explanatory caption-cards, for which blanks are provided and you add them to match your developed game scenario. Matching paste-in cards, the telegrams, and paper scraps are thus provided for you in the bundle, together with additional blank book pages and a suitable typewriter font in .TTF format. There is also a PDF with the following suggested story/scenario details…


THE BOOK:

To assist you before you leave on your expedition the museum curator has assembled this 24-page book, drawing on the museum archives and correspondence folders. It tells of three previous expeditions to the region. The curator stresses that the book must be kept secret, since he does not wish to entice other western expeditions into the dangerous area.

The curator (pictured) first provides you with a paste-in of the telegram. This recently alerted him to the need to send you and your team to the area. (What it says is up to you to add. The same is true of explanatory typed cards for each page, for which space has been left in the layout).

First expedition: The book tells briefly of the first expedition. A Victorian explorer — the museum curator’s father — was visiting the antiquities as an antiquarian tourist when he had cause to venture out to a remote Trading Post. Possibly he went there in search of curious carved items. At the Post he heard tell of a mysteriously shunned fertile belt in the desert uplands. In search of adventure he hired three guides, at some cost, and penetrated toward it for some days. He found an extended oasis of jungle-like ravines that ‘should not have been there’, according to any Army map that he had seen of the area.

Beyond these fertile ravines, the uplands returned to rocky dry land where he encountered a high ruined cliff city. An ancient and eerie track led him up behind this city, to what from the manner of their stone-work seemed impossibly ancient ruins sited on the clifftop above. Both the city and its fore-runner were unknown to the guides, who had known only of the fringes of the fertile area. The explorer never returned from this trip into the interior, but one haggard guide later traded the explorer’s saddle bag — with its notebook fragments and camera plates — at the trading post. These were thus recovered by the authorities and sent back to the museum. His notebook has a scribbled note about what can be glimpsed in the uplands beyond the clifftop.

Some years later there was some missionary exploration which penetrated as far as the fringes of the fertile ravines, seeking hypothetical converts. But at its edge it was found to have been recently subject to immense earthquakes and earth-rifts, causing the sparse local population to fear it intensely and making further exploration as far as the supposed city impossible.

Second expedition: This was formed of two botanists from the curator’s own Museum. Having become interested in the area due to his father’s disappearance there, Dr. Astall had discovered that bizarre fossil plants could be had from the region. He set this father and son team to work on these at the Museum, and quite a collection was formed. The two men later went to the district itself in search of more such fossils. They were also tasked with finding any further details of Dr. Astrall’s lost father.

In the lobby of their port hotel there suddenly appeared a recently harvested living specimen of the supposedly ‘fossil’ plants. The two botanists met with an eccentric snake-charming plant collector, their local correspondent, who suggested it may have come from the mysterious and shunned fertile belt.

The pair travel out and get just past the first really deep rift of the mysteriously fertile belt. There they discover the flies that feed on the living plants to be deadly (and in a rather curious and alarming manner). Of the pair, only the father returned to America. The father continues at the Museum, and he studies the dead flies intensely, as well as the fossil plant collection. He is curiously reticent about what he has discovered, if anything.

Third expedition: A rich young man had come, only a few years ago, to Dr. Arnold Astrall at the Museum. He enquired of the fragmentary notebook made by the Victorian explorer, Astral’s father. These pages were shown to the young man. Dr. Astral noticed the young man became somewhat agitated when he saw the faded map in the notebook. He then abruptly left the Museum.

A short while after this visit Dr. Astrall received an excited telegram from the young man — he had a route to the lost city, firepower on his hip, fly-repellent grenades at the ready, and a fully mechanised base-camp at his disposal! No damn death-bugs would get him! There was surely gold in that city, and he meant to get it! The Museum would generously get 10% of the treasure found, as thanks for its help.

Yet… that was the last the world heard of the young man. Three photographs were to be the only relics of his lost expedition, the film reel being recovered from a drunken guide known to have visited the Trading Post. These pictures are presumed to be of the uplands somewhat beyond the mysterious cliff-city.

By pasting in picture-corners, the curator has indicated to you a mysterious missing photo from the third expedition. It is said to have been seen at the Trading Post by a missionary…

Possibly it was a closer picture of the Mysterious Winged Thing seen swooping toward the camera in the last photo.

The curator has added some final pages of notes and advice…

You are to form the fourth expedition. Good luck and bon voyage!


Settings, in order:

1. THE MUSEUM and its archives. What can be learned here about the fossil plants and their two researchers? About Dr. Arnold Astrall’s father? About Dr. Arnold Astrall himself?

2. THE PORT HOTEL. What can be learned about the district from afar? Can the eccentric local-plant collector be recruited to the expedition?

3. THE TRADING POST. Rumour and local lore. Obtaining the missing photo(s). Persuading local guides to go.

4. THE FERTILE BELT. Its dangerous plant-flies and earth-rifts. Other dangerous plants may lurk. Or walk…

5. THE ANCIENT CITY. Are there relics to be found here of the rich young man’s mechanised expedition? Of Dr. Arnold Astrall’s father? What was the lure of the uplands, that apparently drew the young man away from the city?

6. THE WEIRD UPLANDS BEYOND THE CITY.


Suggested H.P. Lovecraft works for use as inspirational touchstones:

* The opening part of “Under the Pyramids”.

* “The Outpost” (poem).

* “Winged Death”.

* “The Evil Clergyman” (fragment).

* “The Nameless City” and “The Transition of Juan Romero”.

* Lovecraft’s plot details for “The House of the Worm”, re : flies.

* Lovecraft’s letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928…

“absolutely marvellous firefly display […] All agree that it was unprecedented, even for Wilbraham. Level fields & woodland aisles were alive with dancing lights, till all the night seemed one restless constellation of nervous witch-fire. They leaped in the meadows, & under the spectral old oaks at the bend of the road. They danced tumultuously in the swampy hollow, & held witches’ sabbaths beneath the gnarled, ancient trees of the orchard”. [Lovecraft went to bed afterwards, intending to dream the fireflies into…] “spectral torches, & about the lean brown marsh-things (invisible to mortal eyes) who wave & brandish them in the gloaming when the unseen nether world awakes”.

Lovecraft had already prefigured these “lean brown marsh-things” as “fauns” in a summer 1915 poem…

So wink the fireflies in the humid brake;
While Fancy traces in the fitful light
The torches of the fauns that dance by night.


That’s it. My $5+ Patreon patrons get the 130Mb printable bundle for this! .ZIP file links have been sent via the Patreon message service to all my $5 or more Patrons. Links will also be sent to anyone signing up at or above that level, and making their first monthly payment.

Caza and Lovecraft

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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A fine new cover by Phillipe Caza, for a new French RPG apparently to be played with the Cthulhu Hack system. He only did the cover, according to the book’s interior credits.

I see that Caza is interviewed in a chunky 460-page book recently published in French, Lovecraft : Au coeur du cauchemar (Lovecraft: Heart of the Nightmare, 2017)…

“Lovecraft en image…” (“Lovecraft and image …”) Interview with Philippe Caza.


Complete table-of-contents for Lovecraft : Au coeur du cauchemar, in English translation. Items of possible special interest to scholars are noted in bold.

Introduction.

THE MAN

“H.P. Lovecraft, between myth and facts”, by Bertrand Bonnet.
“Lovecraft and his prejudices…”, Christophe Thill interview.

Interview with S.T. Joshi.

“Places and Lovecraft”, by Mathilde Manchon.
“In the footsteps of Lovecraft in Providence”, interview with François Bon.
“H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard: Friendship, Controversies and Influences”, by Bertrand Bonnet.
“Robert E. Howard and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Selected Correspondence”, by Patrice Louinet.
“Lovecraft and revisions: the doctor of weird fiction”, by Todd Spaulding.

WORK

“H.P. Lovecraft in press: brief history (and prehistory) editorial of the writings of Lovecraft”, by Christophe Thill.
“Cthulhu, the myth”, by Emmanuel Mamosa.
“The myth of Cthulhu”, interview with Raphael Granier de Cassagnac.
“Lovecraft in twenty-five essential works”, by Bertrand Bonnet.
“The work of Lovecraft”, interview by Christophe Thill.
“Lovecraft and the Lost Generation”, by Florent Montaclair.
“Lovecraft and science”, by Elisa Gorusuk.
“The anti-heroic fantasy of H.P. Lovecraft”, by Christophe Thill.
“The invitation to travel”, by David Camus. [On the travel writing?]
“French translations of Lovecraft: from introduction to tradition”, by Marie Perrier.
“Lovecraft Translator”, by David Camus.
“The poetry of Lovecraft”, interview with Michel Chevalier.

THE EXTENDED UNIVERSE

“Lovecraft Heroes of Fiction”, interview of Patrick Marcel.
“Cthulhu from 7 to 77 eons, or Lovecraft in comics”, by Alex Nikolavitch.
“Adapting Lovecraft to a video game …” interview with Jean-Marc Gueney.
“For a handful of tentacles … HP Lovecraft at the movies”, by Sam Azulys.
“Lovecraft in images…”, interview of Francois Baranger.
“Lovecraft in images…”, interview of Nicolas Fructus.
“Lovecraft in images…”, interview of Philippe Caza.

“Role play: Lovecraft and the world of gaming”, interview of Editions Sans-Detour.
“Role play: Lovecraft and the world of the game”, interview with Cédric Ferrand.
“Lovecraft and them”.

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