31 Friday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Hippocampus has announced the new S.T. Joshi novel starring H.P. Lovecraft, in an imagined plot set in 1914. The Assaults of Chaos: a novel about H.P. Lovecraft is initially in a limited edition of only 500 in hardcover. Let’s hope there’s a later paperback, and even a affordable Kindle edition, to keep it available.
28 Tuesday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Proposal for a fairly simple non-RPG gamer’s fun Lovecraft board-game…
The board-game to be based on Lovecraft’s many long night-walks in New York, walks made frequently when he lived in the city for several years in the mid 1920s. Devise a simplified Monopoly-like version of New York City circa 1926, based on appropriate places found on maps and guides to the city at that time, and in the Lovecraft letters etc. The board-game would then have Lovecraft and his New York friends (maybe also a few cats from Ulthar, Detective Malone from “Red Hook”, and the old man from “He”) encountering mysterious atmospheres in NYC locations as they circle the squares at the edge of the board. The “hall of mirrors in Coney Island at night” would be an example of the sort of location to use (Lovecraft visited Coney Island several times), as well as the more obvious graveyards and museums etc. By landing on and answering knowledge questions about these places the players collect cards. When they have a certain combination of cards, this lets them into the tunnels or crypts or abandoned subway stations on the board. All tunnels emerge in the raised centre of the board — where players have a dream-encounter / psychic battle with Cthulhu. Perhaps they have to escape from the dream that Cthulhu is ‘sending’ to them. Perhaps Cthulhu is hanging off the Empire State Building, to which he is gripping King Kong-like. Players can only escape him via answering strange riddles, which would fit with Lovecraft’s concern with unspeakability and madness. The goal of the game would be to complete a tour of the Lovecraftian places in New York at night without going insane from too many Cthulhu dream encounters.
Feel free to take this idea and run with on Kickstarter. Just send me 10% of the take 🙂
26 Sunday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
24 Friday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Dead Authors podcast, in which Nietzsche meets Lovecraft as a dramatised over-the-top comedy interview. Starts at 3:06 minutes. Warning: some distasteful bits.
24 Friday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
A board-game/card-game based on Neil Gaiman’s Lovecraft/Holmes crossover story “A Study in Emerald” has been abundantly funded on Kickstarter, and should ship in October 2013…
Perhaps that’s a special case because the stars have aligned: Lovecraft / Gaiman / Holmes / steampunk-era, all wrapped up in an accessible game format. But I’m wondering how Lovecraftian scholars might tap into such generosity for things Lovecraftian? Some off-the-cuff ideas…
* A search-engine for the full collection of the Lovecraft letters would surely get handsome funding. It could be done in the same proven-secure manner that Google Books uses for presentation of its search results, only letting you see small snippets. The source would be the full Schultz/Joshi digital archive of the letters. The engineers at Google might even help out with that, as they helped with deciphering the recent Lovecraft postcard-letter.
* If a long-time Lovecraftian researcher wanted to be compensated for making all their texts “open access” in digital perpetuity on archive.org, as they headed into retirement, I’d imagine a Kickstarter campaign might do it.
* A full searchable online library (built on a combination of Google Custom Search Engine and Omeka) reproducing Lovecraft’s own library in searchable digital form, plus all the books he’s known to have read. It would have to be limited to public domain materials, but if you look at Joshi’s book Lovecraft’s Library you’ll see that a lot of it is now in the public domain.
* Maybe some kind of simple-but-full digital gazetteer of all Lovecraft’s places, built on Omeka and with each record having embedded links to Google Maps and Google Streetview for the location. Could be done as a wiki, but in my experience small open collective wikis fail even faster than a socialist economy. Might be best done by a small team of long-time Lovecraftian geographers.
* A simple introductory “Beginner’s Guide to Research in Lovecraft and his Mythos”, along the lines of the “For Dummies”… books? I suspect there’s a whole lot of intelligent people out there would might like to write and blog about Lovecraft and the later Mythos authors in a more grounded manner, but who lack any real guide to start them off. The other problem of course, is the sheer expense of acquiring the print-only Lovecraft books that are needed if one is to triangulate and fact-check the many discoveries still to be made via the free online resources. Such a “Beginner’s Guide” could also usefully be translated into other key languages.
* There’s my Lovecraft timelines idea, but the software doesn’t yet exist to do that in an elegant or easy manner.
22 Wednesday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
The Guardian newspaper has an obituary on the death of Basil Copper, the British author of the Lovecraftian mythos novel The Great White Space (1974) and much else. This novel seems regarded by some as a favorite of early Derleth-era mythos fiction and which was republished a few weeks ago as an official budget-price Kindle ebook (warning: plot spoilers early in the blurb) from Valencourt Books. If you can find them, key recent books on Basil Copper are: the bio-bibliography Basil Copper: a life in books (2008) published as a 300-copy limited edition; and a fine two-volume collection Darkness, Mist & Shadow: the collected macabre tales of Basil Copper (2010) which is now out-of-print.
21 Tuesday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A delicious painting of “The Silver Key” (with some artistic licence), by Claudio Bergamin of Chile, South America. This is one of two Lovecraft works in his DeviantArt gallery…
No free unabridged audio book of “The Silver Key” online, sadly.
18 Saturday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New stage play, Stephen Near’s Monstrous Invisible, which…
“tells the relatively unknown story of [H.P. Lovecraft’s] brief courtship, marriage and subsequent divorce to a woman named Sonia Greene.”
23rd-25th May 2013 at Theatre Aquarius in Canada.
17 Friday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
16 Thursday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
The Young Man of Providence is a 43-minute BBC Radio dramatised documentary on Lovecraft, dug up from Halloween 1983 and online as an mp3. It’s a mix of narrated documentary and his letters, with occasional fragments from the stories read by old-school actors and mixed with excellent FX. The best Lovecraft documentary, I’d say, although not perfect. I wonder if it might be worked up into an unofficial fan-film documentary? It could be carefully expanded into a feature-length movie by inserting new narration-free sections (contemplative Ken Burns-style pans across archival materials / evocative landscapes / old haunts / Jarman-esque dream-montages) to slacken the galloping pace that the format of a 40-minute radio programme necessarily enforced on the producers.
Above: Lovecraft at 10 Barnes St. (1926-1933) by Cortney Skinner.
15 Wednesday May 2013
Posted in 3D, Lovecraftian arts
Need Cthulhu to do your bidding? No need to mess around with The Neconomicon and star-charts. The excellent Cthulhu Rising 3D model is currently 40% off, at $20.97. It’s a 3D digital model that you can pose and light and render (i.e. make a picture of) using the free DAZ Studio 3D software. Images made with him are royalty-free.
There’s also a range of other Lovecraftian monsters available, and even a 3D Lovecraft himself.
14 Tuesday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Bill Coberly has a long and interesting essay on “The Call of Leviathan: Mass Effect and Lovecraft” at The Ontological Geek. Warning: big plot spoilers for Mass Effect 3, and the Mass Effect 3 DLC “Leviathan”.
I bailed out of the Mass Effect trilogy at the end of the excellent first PC game, put off by press reports that the second game would do that “so 2009, dude…” thing of making the game experience dark and gloomy and depressing. I don’t remember the first game as being Lovecraftian, other than perhaps the cosmic levels of boredom induced by its bad DLC episodes. But with its sumptuous SF settings and excellent reviews, cosmic sweep and official God Mode, and the “Call of Cthulhu”-like DLC episode “Leviathan”, I might give Mass Effect 3 a try at some point this year.
