03 Monday Jun 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, part of their large ingest of OApen’s open-access ebooks, the book Ghosts — or the (Nearly) Invisible: Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media. Chapters on “Ghostly Science or Scientific Ghosts: The Fourth Spatial Dimension in Children’s Literature”, and “Haunting the Wide, White Page: Ghosts in Antarctica”, among others.
02 Sunday Jun 2024
Posted in Podcasts etc.
The Moon Terror by Albert G. Birch, new on Librivox as a three-hour audiobook.
It was issued as an offshoot of Weird Tales, drawing on their first four years of stories. As S.T. Joshi has it…
The Popular Fiction Publishing Company did publish one book in 1927 — The Moon Terror, with stories by A. G. Birch, Anthony M. Rud, Vincent Starrett, and [editor] Wright himself, all from early issues of Weird Tales — but it was such a commercial disaster that no more books of the sort were issued.
The new recording is just the Birch story, which was the lead item in the ill-fated volume.
01 Saturday Jun 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A table-top RPG that ‘Lovecraft the Roman’ might have enjoyed, Cohors Cthulhu: Tabletop Roleplaying Game. “A 2d20 RPG adventure of mighty Roman warriors and their barbarian rivals fighting the forces of the Mythos”. Funded with a cool £221,000 and shipped in late 2023, and now with a new follow-on expansion-set Kickstarter.
Although be warned that it seems to be as much about pagan forests as Roman army life…
Far from the Eternal City, deep in the forests of a hostile frontier, unravel the mystery of a village overcome by nightmares its people are forced to re-enact on the waking world. Without the support of a Roman column, cast into a strange land, will you survive with your sanity intact?
Far from nicely tiled Roman hot-baths and libraries, I’d suspect. Though that is also what Lovecraft himself hazily envisaged, and I’m fairly sure he would have tried his hand — had he lived — at an ‘Ancient Romans on the African frontier’ tale. Though in this game it appears that the pagan northern forests are the setting.
01 Saturday Jun 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
Now open in New York City, the exhibition “The Art and Story of Edgar Rice Burroughs: Selections from the Vinson Family Collection”. Until 27th July 2024 at the Society of Illustrators.
31 Friday May 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A graphic novel of “Entombed with the Pharaohs”, the story Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Houdini, now newly funded on Kickstarter.
31 Friday May 2024
Posted in Maps, Picture postals
College Hill, Providence, as it might have looked had the 1960s planners had their way…
The same City planning document also has a useful early map showing and pinpointing many names that readers of Lovecraft’s letters will be familiar with…
30 Thursday May 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
In France, Campus Miskatonic 2024…
This year again, we organise our HPL convention dedicated to HP Lovecraft in Verdun, France. We’ll deal with Lovecraft and the Great War.
Happening in Verdun, France, 8th-9th November 2024. ‘The Great War’ being the original way of referring to the First World War, prior to the Second World War.
They’ll be aided in this by new French editions of the letters, and new French translations of war tales such as “The Temple”.
Also in France, coming in August 2024, a chunky new Lovecraft special for the famous Métal Hurlant (‘Heavy Metal’) comics-magazine…
Echoing the 1978 Lovecraft Special, which remains one of the best-selling issues ever of Métal Hurlant, we invited a new wave of authors to delve into the complex and fascinating universe of the Master of Providence. The results go far beyond our expectations, demonstrating once again the deep resonance and timeless relevance of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s imagination. Every page of this issue will be proof of the continuing influence that Lovecraft has on new generations of authors.
272 pages, so it’s not just a news-stand floppy. Let’s hope for an English translation. Although Euro-comics are notoriously slow to produce translations (if at all), despite the fairly low-cost of translation and fix-up of the pages, easy digital distribution (Amazon Kindle ebook etc), and an obvious market. It’s curious that, as an industry, they don’t seem to want to sell their wares abroad.
29 Wednesday May 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
Another retrospective set of thoughts on Lovecraft’s illnesses and genetic inheritance. New on The Polyphony, a ‘medical humanities’ magazine from Durham University in the UK. “Narrating Anxiety through Lovecraftian Horror”, in which… “Buke Saglam takes us through the weird and wonderful world of Lovecraft’s writings, exploring the link between his work, his anxieties, and posthumanist thinking”.
28 Tuesday May 2024
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, New books
Spanish readers have a new 256-page volume of translated letters, Diario de suenos: cartas de H.P. Lovecraft, Vol. II., with this “Vol II” focussing on Lovecraft’s dreams and cat letters…
all the dreams in the author’s surviving correspondence are collected [and these have] until now been unpublished in Spanish”. And as a bonus, “the final section ‘The Fabulous Adventures of the Kappa Alpha Tau Fraternity’, dedicated to Lovecraft’s letters about his feline friends.
27 Monday May 2024
Posted in New books
Now available from The HPLHS Store, The Spirit of Revision – Deluxe Hardback Edition with the Zealia Bishop letters. The edition is illustrated and… “is extensively annotated by Sean Branney and Andrew Leman”. Which presumably means it may be worth getting this alongside the same(?) Lovecraft letters as found in the recent Woodburn Harris volume of letters from Hippocampus. Since I assume that the letters are there differently annotated by Joshi and Schultz.
Also, from the Dept. of Sumptious Dust-Accumulators, The Shunned House: Whipple Edition. Yours for just £350.
26 Sunday May 2024
Posted in Housekeeping
How to indent a quote, without the ‘blockquote’ CSS styling taking over, in a WordPress.com free blog and also in a self-hosted WordPress blog…
Add it to a right-click snippet pasting add-on in your browser. Write your post in the HTML editor, not that other thing.
Of course, with a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can also add quote-styling plugins.
26 Sunday May 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New on YouTube, The Shadow Over Innsmouth as a 20-minute iClone movie. Very early iClone, by the look of it. So possibly made a while back, and only just released? My guess. I can’t find any trace of it elsewhere.
iClone being the first dedicated mass-market animation maker, based on a game engine and thus requiring low-poly figures and faces. It’s been greatly improved since the early days.