• About
  • Directory
  • Free stuff
  • Lovecraft for beginners
  • My Books
  • Open Lovecraft
  • Reviews
  • HPL Travel Posters

Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Lovecraft as character

Bradbury’s “The Exiles” (1950) – the Lovecraft version

06 Wednesday Jul 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraft as character

≈ Leave a comment

My thanks to ‘Susmuffin’ for locating Ray Bradbury’s Martian story “The Exiles” (1950 version), featuring Lovecraft as a character. It appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Winter/Spring 1950. Though a Mars story it is not formally part of The Martian Chronicles, being set long after the end of that cycle. By that time Mars has been abandoned by humans, but the first new colonists are now arriving and they encounter what might be Martian ‘ghosts’ in human form. Ironically, given the censorship theme of the story, the Lovecraft section was excised for later printings of the story.

I’ve extracted it in a printable plain-text form as a PDF, in the hope that a reader with a talent for voices might make it an audio recording for YouTube: Bradbury_The_Exiles_1950.pdf

The Dark Brotherhood (1966) and “The Lamp of Alhazred” (1954)

06 Wednesday Jul 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character

≈ 2 Comments

Don Herron usefully notes an occurrence of Lovecraft-as-character in his new blog post “Two-Gun Bob: In Memoriam?”…

Derleth himself also engaged in the fun, as in “The Dark Brotherhood” from 1966, a masterful parody in which he dropped ‘Arthur Phillips’ for Howard Phillips [Lovecraft] … A tale not openly about Lovecraft.

From the story’s opening…

The police have been beset by the usual number of cranks, purporting to offer information about the matter, none more insistent than Arthur Phillips, the descendant of an old East Side family, long resident on Angell Street

A quick glance at the Archive.org copy shows that much is made by Derleth of Providence at night, and Lovecraft’s night-walking. Not knowing Derleth, except from having read a few in the 1970s Panther paperbacks at around age 14, I hadn’t realised this was a Providence-set Lovecraft-as-character tale. It’s to be found on YouTube in a good 80-minute audio reading from Aaron Strouse.

Robert M. Price in an old copy of Crypt of Cthulhu touches briefly on Lovecraft in Derleth, usefully noting that in Derleth…

‘Ward Phillips’ in “The Lamp of Alhazred” is obviously and transparently Lovecraft.

Sadly “The Lamp of Alhazred” is not on YouTube except in Spanish. The text is however available and The Weird Tales Podcast reading from 2019 has it as an .MP3 download. Downloads are best because the pitch and speed can be shifted in the AIMP player, as well as having the graphic equaliser on the ‘Headphones’ preset. In this case it’s too fast and a little high and thus the speed needs to be slowed and the pitch shifted accordingly.

So there you go, an audio double-bill of ‘HPL as written by Derleth’. Though I have to say that I gave up on the slow and ponderous “The Dark Brotherhood” after three and a half chapters. The character is obviously Lovecraft, in all but name and a Sonia-a-like also appears. But I doubted there would be much more biographical ‘reveals’ as the story progressed moved on into Derleth-land. The much shorter and earlier “The Lamp of Alhazred” is more engaging, and not without some charm at the end.

Incidentally a local search for “The Lamp of Alhazred” (1954) also led me to Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos (1973), which briefly noted Bloch and Derleth’s uses and also added that…

HPL appeared in one of Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, indulging in one of his (Lovecraft’s) favourite pastimes, eating ice cream.

I don’t recall that at all, from my fairly complete re-listen to the Martian Chronicles some five or six years ago now. Anyone know which story?

Notes on Selected Letters II – part two

09 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraft as character, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Over the summer I’m reading through Lovecraft’s Selected Letters. Here are my notes for Selected Letters II. With just one more post on Vol. II tomorrow, re: new discoveries about Lovecraft’s room at 169 Clinton Street on the edge of Red Hook.


* Page 221. Lovecraft’s family Bible, purchased 1889 by his parents, had in it a clumsy… “imitative engraving of Belshazzar’s Feast” by the Northumberland-born visionary artist John Martin (1789-1854). Lovecraft later recognized the picture “upon seeing a proper plate of the subject for the first time.”

* Page 222. 10th January 1928. Beirce’s translation of The Monk & the Hangman’s Daughter as a possible precursor to, or primer for, some of the feel of “The Dunwich Horror” (written August 1928)…

it is scarce two weeks since I read, for the first time … I shall not soon forget the general picture afforded of the wild Bavarian mountains, the sombre, ancient life of the salt mines, & the whispered, fearsome lore of the crag-fringed tarns & black hanging woods….

Around the spring of 1928 (page 331) Lovecraft also heard a public lecture — presumably at Brown — on modern Greek folklore… “I heard a highly illuminating lecture on the subject a year ago by Sir Rennell Rodd, a lifelong student of neo-Hellenic folklore.” This may also have fed into his fateful trip to Wilbraham and the birth of “The Dunwich Horror”. Rodd’s 1890s book on the topic is online, and he had presumably added to his knowledge since then.

* Page 296. By early 1929 he was weekly taking “the N.Y. Sunday Times and the sanely balanced and disillusioned news-weekly Time.” But a few years later he intimates to Long that he has limited his intake of national and international current affairs.

* Page 298. “I’d say that good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature, that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretive reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself. … The picture can, if it be good art, give you something in the real scene which you couldn’t have gathered for yourself — which only the particular artist who painted the picture could ever have gathered preserved for other people to see. … We derive from this process a feeling of magnification in the cosmos — of having approached the universal a trifle more closely, and banished a little of our inevitable insignificance. Instead of being merely one person, we have become two persons — and as we assimilate more and more of art we become, in effect, more and more people all in one; till at length we have the sensation of a sort of identification with our whole civilisation.”

* Page 323. He reads The Silversmiths of Little Rest, by William Davis Miller. Because it related to his family-tree and “the Casey side av me” believed by his family research to be originally “the English Caseys of Gloucester”, England. The 50-page 18-plate book was produced in a limited edition of 150, seemingly for antiquarians in New England. Little Rest was a place, rather than a description of the work-habits of the smiths. “Full biographical and occupational information (markings, inscriptions) on the following key Little Rest (i.e., Kingston, RI) silversmiths: Samuel Casey, John Waite, Joseph Perkins, Nathaniel Helme, Gideon Casey and William Waite.”

* Page 324. March 1929. He alludes to something Talman is writing or has recently written. “By the way — it’s a good idea of yours to square us criminal Caseys with society by making an Howard Phillips a reg’lar deteckatiff” [regular detective]. Which hints that Talman had recently penned or planned to pen a crime-detective story featuring a “Howard Phillips”. I don’t yet have the volume of Talman letters, and I imagine I may find there some detail about this apparent ‘Lovecraft as character’ story. By January 1929 Talman had moved to Red Hook, and I would guess he was enamoured of “The Horror at Red Hook” with Detective Malone, and thus probably wanted to write something similar himself — perhaps a clever sequel featuring Lovecraft himself. But I shall have to wait for the book of Talman letters to find out if there are more details on this.

* Page 329-30. April 1929. He observes that the… “Famous ‘London Terrace’ in West 23d St. [New York City] — where a friend of mine has lived all his life — is to come down shortly to make room for a wretched apartment skyscraper.” Who was this friend? He may be footnoted in the Toldridge letters, but I don’t yet have that volume. But something can be gleaned from the building data. Historians now refer to the row as a… “development from the 1840s known as London Terrace, built to look like typical London [British] apartments at that time”. A local report of 1929 gives an alternative name, mourning the loss of… “a row of private dwellings of considerable age and great local interest, identified as London Row or London Terrace”. The book The City in Slang (1995) gives a folk-name and the location… “One of the earliest so-named Millionaires’ Rows in New York was a block on West 23rd Street, a development formally called London Terrace, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.” So these data may help someone to pinpoint Lovecraft’s mysterious friend, who still lived there in 1929 and was likely either i) affluent and elderly or ii) a young lad of an affluent family.

* Page 353. Lovecraft tells Mrs Toldridge… “I pass in sight of the ancient Carter house every time I walk down town — & the neighbourhood is still much as he knew it in 1770 & thereabouts. Across the street an old brick schoolhouse built in 1769 is still serving its original purpose, whilst at the foot of the hill the old Quaker Meeting House ( 1745) still broods beside its deserted wagon­sheds. … John Carter, Providence’s colonial printer, & publisher of the Providence Gazette & Country-Journal before, during, & after the revolution. His old shop & office, the Sign of Shakespeare’s Head, in Gaol-Lane, is still standing in good condition notwithstanding the sinking of the neighbourhood to slumdom. It is a large square house on a steep hill, with fanlighted doorway & the double flight of railed steps so typical of colonial Providence.”

The John Carter house is at “21 Meeting Street”, an address which unlocks the Library of Congress. Here is the house as Lovecraft would have known it circa 1933-35. The Industrial Trust building can be seen behind on the left. Modern photos show a currently ‘restored’ colour that can range from neon-red to coconut-shell brown, so I’m not sure how to colour it. Here it’s sort of ‘faded creosote’, in keeping with its decrepit slum state.

Notes on Selected Letters II – part one

23 Monday May 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Astronomy, Historical context, Lovecraft as character, New discoveries

≈ 4 Comments

Over the summer I’m re-reading H.P. Lovecraft’s five volumes of Selected Letters and this time I’m making notes. Here is part one of my notes on Selected Letters Vol. II.


* Lovecraft mentions Chase’s Drug Store located at the central “bridge” area of Pawtuxet, stating that this store offered all the best available postcards of local scenes (page 58). The Providence Public Library has a picture of Chase’s frontage, with a chap appearing to carry away a packet of drugs that could equally be a set of postcards. I’ve here rectified and faintly colourised it (this kind of picture doesn’t take colour very well). The picture was made by Mr. Chase, so it is his store.

* Lovecraft states that he had his cuttings on Rhode Island and antiquarian matters well-sorted and assembled into scrapbooks by October 1926. These having been in mounded up in piles on his desk, when living in one room at Red Hook (page 77). His scrapbooks, antiquarian or otherwise, do not appear to have survived.

* In April 1926 he was back in Providence and exploring his own city. Though obviously inspired by Eddy’s recent introduction to the reality of an ‘unexplored Providence’, he appears to be alone in the following exploration. He was also presumably using the secrets he had learned about the layout of colonial Providence during the fateful visit to the Shepley Library. He thus begins to visit on foot parts of Providence he had not previously visited…

I discovered one of the most hellish slums ever imagined by mankind. it was a place whose existence I had not before realised — the end of Chalkstone Ave. near Randall Sq. and the railway — and its dark hilly courts approach the very ultimates of blasphemous horror.” (page 43)

It appears to be a dangerous area even today, just to warn any local Lovecraftians who might be thinking of photographing there. The 2022 news reports two shootings in Chalkstone Ave.

* In May 1926, Lovecraft was still exploring previously unexplored “seedy” by-ways, but this time perhaps less squalid ones. As he was in the company of his aunt…

Mrs. Gamwell and I took a walk thro’ a section of the town in which I had never set foot before — an antient and now seedy district east of the river and just south of the good residential area. Colonial houses abounded, and I was astonisht at some of the gorgeously antique effects obtainable here and there. […] It is call’d Dove Street, and has neither pavement nor sidewalk, but consists of irregular rows of simple Colonial cottages with rough stone doorsteps, and here and there a flagstone or two.” (page 54)

Dove Street is one of the parallel side streets that run alongside the main Hope Street at Fox Point, and head down toward the waterfront rail-yards at India Point. Dove Street still exists, though the map hints it may have been truncated in modern times. Today the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Mary Elizabeth Robinson Research Center is located about 160 yards to the north, which means that researchers might also fit a visit to nearby Dove Street in when visiting. The top part of Dove Street appears, from Street View, to be on its way to being gentrified.

* In February 1927 he writes of the Providence waterfront and names four “dark alleys” there…

the vivid, glamorous waterfront with its rotting wharves & colonial warehouses & archaic lines of gambrel roofs & dark alleys with romantic names (Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Bullion, etc) & wondrous ship-chandleries & mysterious marine boarding houses in ancient, lamplit, cobblestoned courts”.

Today “Doubloon Street” etc. One of which might have partly inspired “The Call of Cthulhu” setting…

one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside [of Providence] which formed a short cut from the [dock used by the Newport boat on the] waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street.

* In October 1926 he travelled, seemingly by motor-coach, from Providence and…

the Eddy Street coach terminal over the antient Plainfield Pike […] and later on the region devastated to create the new Scituate reservoir” (page 81)

In March 1927, five months later, he wrote “The Colour Out of Space” with its soon-to-be reservoir setting.

* He cleaned his old telescope in October 1926…

I cleaned the brass of my telescope yesterday for the first time in twenty years. Gehenna, what a green mess! And I couldn’t get it very brilliant even in the end. That’s what neglect does!

So this tells us two things. That he still had his old telescope, but that he had not used it for a long time.

“Gehenna” is a word used in the King James Bible in the final parts of Isiah, and refers to a beautiful garden place, a garden-grove for refined dancing and singing that was near to Jerusalem. An insidious and intractable Moloch worship [i.e. ritual sacrifice of young children by burning alive] came to replace the dancing and song. Lovecraft thus alludes to the later form of the valley when, after being utterly despoiled by the Moloch worship and sacrifice, the later and more respectable kings of the city sought to blot out the memory of the despoliation with further despoliation of their own — they buried Gehenna under a giant tip used for the fire-ashes and waste and unwanted dead bodies of Jerusalem. Thus “Gehenna” became a byword for ashes and filth.

In April 1927 (page 126) Lovecraft gives the vaguest hint that he may have made some winter or early spring 1927 observations through the newly-cleaned telescope…

As in your case, the skies exert the utmost fascination upon me; nor is the weaving of wild dreams about their unplumbed deeps & suns & worlds in the least hampered by the precise astronomical data which my scientific side demands.

* By June 1927 (page 140) Lovecraft had noticed how at least one critic had made the connection of the more fanatical aspects of the Puritan era with “the horror-element in American literature”…

It is easy to see how the critic Paul Elmer More traces the horror-element in American literature to the remote New England countryside with its solitude-warped religious fanaticism.

* Eddy Jr. pops up again in July 1927 (page 156) when he is “hunted up” to join a gathering of visitors at Barnes Street of Morton, the Longs and others. The implication of the wording is that Lovecraft has not seen Eddy Jr. for a while, had not invited him to the gathering, and was not quite sure how to get in touch with him when someone (likely Morton) suggested Eddy Jr. should join them at Barnes Street.

* His birthplace and childhood home at 454 had an “ebony and gold” decorative scheme for the “front hall”, and then a rich “old gold and rose” for the “front parlour”, in which he used to read The Arabian Nights.

* A letter offers us some implied details of Long’s proposed “novelette”, which would have made characters out of Lovecraft and others in the New York City ‘gang’. He chides Long (page 172)…

As for your new novelette — look here, young man, you’d better be mighty careful how you treat your aged and dignified Grandpa as here! You mustn’t make me do anything cheerful or wholesome, and remember that only the direst of damnations can befit so inveterate a daemon of the cosmick abysses. And, young man, don’t forget that I am prodigiously lean. I am lean — LEAN, I tell you! Lean! And if you’re afraid that my leanness will make the horror get you instead, why just reduce [diet] like your Grandpa and escape as well! And be sure to depict me in my new Puritan frock coat. I think I shall adopt an umbrella also.

Evidently the proposed novel had by September 1927 become a “novelette” and was in the planning stage. Lovecraft by then expected it to be in the weird monster-horror vein and likely to feature mysterious demise or else “damnation” for the gang. Presumably it was to be set in the mid 1920s in New York City. That’s about all that can be gleaned here. His use of “LEAN” refers to Long’s humorously ribbing of Lovecraft about the early part of his New York sojourn, during which the master had grown distinctly plump under the influence of Sonia’s cooking and also her largesse in paying cake-shop and restaurant-bills.

* In late September 1927 Lovecraft lists his recent notable reading likely to be of interest to Ashton Smith (page 174)…

– Goat Song by Werfel. (a printed play)

– Atlantideer by Beniot.

– New Lands by Charles Fort (only “skimmed”)

– The World’s Desire by Rider Haggard and Long (a mis-transcription for Lang) (planning to read)

The latter was not a new book, and had first appeared in 1889. Lang was the famous late Victorian scholar and folklorist, compiler of numerous useful popular anthologies of fairy and Northern epic stories, and translator of ancient classical texts. Haggard was the florid and fantastical adventure writer, famous for She. Their novel apparently… “continues the story of Odysseus, who returns to Ithaca to find his home destroyed”. He then leaves for a new quest, seeking his former love Helen of Troy. Lovecraft likely did read the still-rather-readable novel, since it spurred entry #141 in his Commonplace Book. Incidentally, the novel’s Wikipedia page has obviously had a severe and politically rebarbative mauling by leftists.

New Lands was a 1923 book by the modern confabulator Charles Fort, in which he focused on apparent “astronomical anomalies” that fall or float down from the sky. Fort used the book to loosely… “pull together examples of falls of stones, gelatinous substances, anomalous earthquakes, fireballs … bright stars, luminescent gas, mirages, ball lightning”, in pursuit of his barmy notion of ‘sky islands’ — actual land floating all unseen in our upper atmosphere. This theme of sky-falls has obvious relevance to Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”, written March 1927. Since I assume that Fort’s book was “skimmed” before and not after the writing of the famous story. I’ve not seen any other suggestions that New Lands inspired “Colour”, or rebuttals of the notion. Thus this may be my new discovery — if the dates align.

“Atlantideer” is a mis-transcription for Atlantida. This 1919 novel appeared in English in 1920 and was serialised in Adventure. It appears to be a romantic Sahara desert ‘lost race’ adventure with strong similarity to Haggard’s famous She. Indeed so strong that there was a legal case over it.

Goat Song appears to be a romantic coming-of-age tragedy-adventure involving a Spartan boy-warrior and his beloved.

It’s interesting that The World’s Desire, Atlantida and Goat Song could all be construed as having strong female themes which would have allowed Lovecraft to ‘think through’ his relations with the departed Sonia.

* With the visiting Talman’s help he discovered apparent Welsh elements in his family ancestry. Although striking an amused pose, he appears rather peeved and not a little un-nerved by this (page 180). Several slightly later letters see him diving headlong into Ancient Roman history and imagining (and indeed dreaming) himself as a Roman. I intuited that this may have been in reaction to the Celtic discoveries, or as he phrased it “this shocking revelation of hybridism”. This discovery has obvious implications for the development of the later “Innsmouth” and its idea of tainted heredity. The Welsh discovery was not the only shock from his family tree. Later, as Ken Faig Jr. has recently discovered, Lovecraft found an American side of the family line who had been rather lowly fish dealers. Thus offering us another possible inspiration for “Innsmouth”.

Actually the Welsh link in his core line of descent, as I’ve pointed out, may not have been really Welsh by lineage and blood. It may have simply been by residence. Although admittedly his letters do report him discovering one seemingly true-blooded Welsh lady had married into the family. Sadly his Northumbrian / Welsh(?) family line never seem to have been followed by a modern genealogist, and indeed I’m not sure if the relevant data now exists.

* He notes with some pleasure the first appearance of his fiction in hardback, when “The Horror at Red Hook” was re-printed as the concluding story in “Not at Night”. This was actually titled You’ll Need a Night Light, the third of what had only just become the ‘Not at Night’ series. These books contained Weird Tales reprints, selected for the British market by the magazine’s London agent Charles Lovell and then passed to Selwyn & Blount’s anthologist Christine Campbell Thomson for final choice and arrangement.

Despite this being a “third edition” cover the publisher apparently went bust shortly after publication, and the book’s UK rights were promptly purchased by Hutchinson. Which led to a legal tangle with Weird Tales, as a later Lovecraft letter recounts.

* And finally, a line written while joshing with Long (page 202) sounds like an entry in the Commonplace Book, but wasn’t…

… certain queerly-dimensioned cities of windowless onxy towers on a planet circling around Antares

Martian Falcon (2015)

04 Wednesday May 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, New books

≈ Leave a comment

New to me, a novel with Lovecraft as an extended character. It’s Martian Falcon (2015) by Alan K. Baker, who I find is a fellow Brummie from Birmingham, England.

The title is a play on the famous noir The Maltese Falcon. Lovecraft becomes a private investigator along with Charles Fort, in the New York City of 1925. A 1925 in which “the supernatural is real”. The Kindle edition is £2 in the UK. In paper it runs to 292 pages.

Skimming the reviews quickly builds a picture of a fun steampunk / mythos / pulp-noir / Martian mash-up adventure in an alternative New York. Sounds great.

Sadly, despite the cover’s ‘Lovecraft and Fort’ strapline seeming to suggest a series, there don’t appear to have been any more such novels.

Honeymoon in Jail

02 Monday May 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ 1 Comment

S.T. Joshi’s blog announces that his new Lovecraft-as-character novel has been published. This is…

my detective novel Honeymoon in Jail, with Lovecraft and Sonia as the detectives … set in the spring of 1928, when HPL came to Brooklyn (unwillingly) to help Sonia set up a new hat shop.

Sounds fun. Available now in ebook and paper at 196 pages. The ebook is £3 in the UK. Possibly just the thing for a wet May ‘Bank Holiday’ Monday, as we often have here in the UK.

Also noted by Joshi is an amusing 1951 Jean Cocteau drawing of one of Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, currently for sale…

Some notes on the Cole letters

19 Saturday Mar 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraft as character

≈ Leave a comment

I’ve finished reading the Cole letters, which front the new expanded volume of Lovecraft-Galpin letters. Here are some notes.

Galpin wrote a detective novel, now presumably lost (p. 19).

By the mid 1930s Lovecraft had access to the latest Encyclopedia Britannica at the Public Library (p. 34) and slightly later purchased a Modern Encyclopedia (p. 110) that brought him right up-to-date with entries that had… “all the dope on neutrons, Nazis and the N.R.A.”.

The cut-price Newport passenger / cattle-boat boat was the Sycamore (p. 62). No postcards are to be immediately found.

He describes the layout of No. 66 (p. 65).

The origin of his “andwhere” phrase is given (p. 67).

He bemoans the “new synthetick highway” from Providence-Boston, this presumably being some sort of early motorway inter-state road which the express passenger coaches soon used. (pp. 82, 132). This was fast, but very dull in terms of scenery and architecture. Lovecraft then discovered an old-school bus-line that was still taking the ‘through the towns’ route, and booked a ticket for Boston. Later he had Loveman bring him back from Boston by the old route.

Various friends and acquaintances were being injured or killed by the new fast cars. Munn’s father was killed, for instance (p. 87).

Cook was writing a werewolf novel, presumably either left unfinished or lost (p. 105).

Lovecraft reveals his talent for purring like a cat, loudly and well. He teaches several kittens to purr in this way (p. 122 and elsewhere).

The Red Rooster and New Times (Babcock) for May 1935 had two 1920s photos of Lovecraft and “numerous photos of other amateurs” (p. 127 and footnote). This doesn’t appear to be online.

Mrs Miniter very early depicted ‘Lovecraft as character’. Of her “novelette of 1923” titled The Village Green, Lovecraft stated “I am recognisably depicted!” (p. 143). So she beat Belknap Long to it by nearly a decade. Lovecraft noted Long was writing a novel of the Kalems in 1931 (Letters to Wandrei, page 265) but it never appeared.

Lovecraft and Disney

16 Wednesday Feb 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

The leading Spanish newspaper El Pais this week featured a nicely stylised Lovecraft in a recent cartoon strip by their Max cartoonist, imagining a conversation between Disney and Lovecraft.

The punchline doesn’t translate at all well, but this is the best I can do with it…

COLOSSUS OF THE ARTS: Lovecraft and Disney.

HPL: Come on, Walt, admit it. You feel, as I do, a morbid fascination with evil things. What’s more, you far surpass me when it comes to expressing horror and the abominable. Your best creations have always been the evil characters, admit it.

Disney: That’s not true, Howard. What about Donald Duck?

HPL: Bah, who cares about that colourless wimp? Whereas your Scrooge McDuck, he would laugh at my Cthulhu and his cultists!

New on Archive.org

24 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

New on Archive.org, the 1943 “Fungi From Yuggoth” stencil duplicated edition. Mmmm… smell that hand-cranked duplicator fluid and fan-sweat…

Also newly arrived on Archive.org from microfilm, the Monthly Weather Review 1872-2012. Useful for U.S. researchers seeking a quick answer to “and what was the weather like when event X was happening?”. The new run of Notes and Queries 1849-2014 also looks handy.

I also spotted Jacqueline Baker’s novel The Broken Hours (2015), seemingly a creepy atmospheric haunting story set in Lovecraft’s house and late Depression-era Providence. Another one that escaped me during the blog hiatus. I guess this counts as another ‘Lovecraft as character’ work, though I’m not yet sure if he actually makes an appearance.

Great Books podcast: “The Call of Cthulhu”

13 Wednesday Oct 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, New books

≈ Leave a comment

The National Review magazine’s Great Books podcast is this week Episode 199: ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ by H.P. Lovecraft…

John J. Miller is joined by Paul LaFarge of Bennington College to discuss H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”.

Who is LaFarge? He turns out to be the author of a complex ‘what if?’ Barlow-as-character novel The Night Ocean (2017). Another one I missed in the Tentaclii hiatus, then. The only non-Amazon / non-paywall full review I can immediately find by search is by The Hysterical Hamster. Warning, the review has lots of plot spoilers.

New book: Providence Blue

03 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Providence Blue is a new ‘Lovecraft as character’ fantasy novel. Warning: general ‘structure-of-the-novel’ spoilers below.

In Rhode Island mysterious creatures were…

encountered by renegade preacher Roger Williams on his historical journey that ended with the founding of Providence, Rhode Island. [Later in Providence] Lovecraft is an accomplished and impish ‘Magus’”.

He investigates these historical encounters, as these seem to have foreshadowed his own monsters and to have links with a real Cthulhu cult. Even later in Providence…

An anxiety-filled former punk-rocker [Wilum Pugmire?], a drifting Athenaeum employee, and an entire cast of unique and well-developed characters find themselves thrown into a puzzling and some harrowing ride around Providence [and beyond]

Catholic World Report newspaper has an interview with the author (with some detailed spoilers, and also a horrid pop-up page-blocking overlay and nags)…

Pinault is a Professor of Religous Studies at Santa Clara University, and a native of Providence. … The author’s Catholic faith is evident throughout the story, as each character seeks redemption and an ultimate answer to the myriad sufferings of mankind.

Sounds fun but there’s no ebook or audiobook version, sadly, just a paperback. Might make for a good chunky graphic novel, by the sound of it, it you were looking for such a book to adapt.

New book: Providence Blue

28 Tuesday Sep 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

Providence Blue is a new ‘Lovecraft as character’ fantasy novel. Warning: general ‘structure-of-the-novel’ spoilers below.

In Rhode Island mysterious creatures were…

encountered by renegade preacher Roger Williams on his historical journey that ended with the founding of Providence, Rhode Island. [Later in Providence] Lovecraft is an accomplished and impish ‘Magus'”.

He investigates these historical encounters, as these seem to have foreshadowed his own monsters and to have links with a real Cthulhu cult. Even later in Providence…

An anxiety-filled former punk-rocker [Wilum Pugmire?], a drifting Athenaeum employee, and an entire cast of unique and well-developed characters find themselves thrown into a puzzling and some harrowing ride around Providence [and beyond]

Catholic World Report newspaper has an interview with the author (with some detailed spoilers, and also a horrid pop-up page-blocking overlay and nags)…

Pinault is a Professor of Religous Studies at Santa Clara University, and a native of Providence. … The author’s Catholic faith is evident throughout the story, as each character seeks redemption and an ultimate answer to the myriad sufferings of mankind.

Sounds fun but there’s no ebook or audiobook version, sadly, just a paperback. Might make for a good chunky graphic novel, by the sound of it, it you were looking for such a book to adapt.

← Older posts

 

Please become my patron at www.patreon.com/davehaden to help this blog survive and thrive.

Or donate via PayPal — any amount is welcome! Donations total at Summer 2022, since 2015: $200.

Archives

  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010

Categories

  • 3D (12)
  • Astronomy (51)
  • Censorship (13)
  • Films & trailers (87)
  • Fonts (8)
  • Guest posts (2)
  • Historical context (1,032)
  • Housekeeping (77)
  • Kittee Tuesday (66)
  • Lovecraft as character (32)
  • Lovecraftian arts (1,320)
  • Lovecraftian places (19)
  • Maps (55)
  • NecronomiCon 2013 (40)
  • NecronomiCon 2015 (22)
  • New books (816)
  • New discoveries (149)
  • Night in Providence (17)
  • Odd scratchings (786)
  • Picture postals (178)
  • Podcasts etc. (346)
  • REH (145)
  • Scholarly works (1,126)
  • Summer School (31)
  • Uncategorized (1)
  • Unnamable (85)

Get this blog in your newsreader:
 
RSS Feed — Posts
RSS Feed — Comments

H.P. Lovecraft's Poster Collection - 17 retro travel posters for $18. Print ready, and available to buy — the proceeds help to support the work of Tentaclii.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.