18 Monday Mar 2013
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
Rather expensive, but Book Design Templates has a nice MS Word book template, called Flourish. Might be useful for print-on-demand self-publishers who can’t afford, or who can’t use, Adobe InDesign.
17 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Excellent free unabridged podcast reading of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model”.
Above: Alley off Fulton St., the Boston North End before demolition.
17 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Into the Dark, available online via BBC Radio 4’s ‘Listen Again’…
“John Agard, who has recently received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, offers some of his own work in a programme that reflects on the way we interpret lightness and darkness. With reference to literature, mythology and religious thought, as well as music … he considers what it means to embrace the darkness.”
17 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in New books
Out now, a new Alan Moore take on Lovecraft in the form of a one-shot comic Nemo: Heart of Ice…
“Set in 1925, it focuses on Janni Dakkar, daughter of Captain Nemo, and the pirate crew of her submarine Nautilus [in] a fairly standard adventure framework [of 48 pages in which] “Heart of Ice” delves deep into the lore set out in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and Moore pulls out all the stops to capture the cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s work.”
16 Saturday Mar 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Black Bag Pictures has a Kickstarter for the film Miskatonic University. Authentic New England settings, period costumes, and apparently Lovecraftian.
It’s a colour costume drama, but it could be cool to do a faux documentary in noir-ish b&w. Use really old actors, as if interviewing the ancient faculty of the University. Do a sort of straight Ken Burns-style documentary on discovering why the University was disbanded for mysterious reasons in the 1950s, etc…
11 Monday Mar 2013
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH
New on the SFFaudio Podcast, a complete and unabridged reading of The Shadow Kingdom by Robert E. Howard, the first of Howard’s Kull works. Professionally narrated by Todd McLaren. Part of the purchasable audio book Kull: exile of Atlantis (Tantor Media).
04 Monday Mar 2013
Posted in Odd scratchings
Amazing news that a number of previously uncollected Lord Dunsany stories are turning up. They’d apparently been sitting unregarded in the yellowing pages of various old British newspapers.
03 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Historical context
I’ve been having a quick look at which stories might be relevant to Lovecraft’s own mythos (rather than to the later expansions of the Mythos) in the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith. So far as I can tell the most substantially Lovecraft-relevant stories are…
The Return of the Sorcerer
The Nameless Offspring
Ubbo-Sathla
The Holiness of Azederac
The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
I also read that the following are Lovecraftian in tone or approach…
The Hunters from Beyond
The Coming of the White Worm
The Dark Eidolon
The Dweller in the Gulf
The Plutonian Drug
The Treader in the Dust
The Seven Geases
The City of the Singing Flame
The Abominations of Yondo
The Eternal World
Xeethra
The Epiphany of Death
A Star-Change
But then I was confused by finding a list of the contents of Robert Price’s The Klarkashton Cycle (his Chaosium collection of mythos-related stories of Clark Ashton Smith) (Thanks to Matthew T. Carpenter for the listing and notes on the versions and titles)…
The Ghoul
A Rendering from the Arabic (alternate version of The Return of the Sorcerer)
The Hunters from Beyond
The Vaults of Abomi (alternate version of The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis)
The Nameless Offspring
Ubbo-Sathla
The Werewolf of Averoigne (alternate version of The Beast of Averoigne)
The Eidolon of the Blind (alternate version of The Dweller in the Gulf)
Vulthoom
The Treader of the Dust
The Infernal Star (fragment)
For someone not really familiar with Clark Ashton Smith’s work this is confusing, and I wonder if the Chaosium collection was distorted (use of alt. versions, re-titling, etc) because of copyright restrictions? Or did it perhaps venture beyond the original Lovecraft mythos in scope (I’ve never seen mention of Smith’s werewolf stories as mythos)?
Am I right in thinking that there’s really not yet been a definitive book collection of the Smith stories which have more than a brief “mentioned in passing” relation to Lovecraft’s fiction?
03 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
New S.T. Joshi podcast interview at CRealm (mp3 link) with an intermission reading of the start of R.E. Howard’s “Black Canaan”.
03 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
03 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in New books
Just a note that S.T. Joshi’s excellent monumental Lovecraft biography, I Am Providence, is now widely available in paperback. Currently $36 for both volumes with free shipping on Amazon US, or £32 on Amazon UK.
24 Sunday Feb 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
French SF magazine Bifrost is planning a special Lovecraft issue…
“a date has not yet been not yet fixed and the content is not yet fully defined, but the fact is that we are concocting a special Lovecraft issue of Bifrost. […] would like to give a complete explanation of the French HPL and his work, its evolution and everything.”
If you can write in good native French, they might be interested in an article or interview proposal.
