Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, written

21 Thursday Oct 2010

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Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of unwritten story ideas, written up as about 25 new stories…

“I put together a pool of writers from across the country, ranging from playwrights to improv actors to magazine editors to internet comedy writers, and I gave them all the same simple proposal: I would use a random number generator to assign them one of the Lovecraft ideas. They would then write, with the only limitation being that they fulfil all aspects of the idea they were given.”

Lovecraft’s full original list is available here or as a PDF here. Just one example…

“Adventures of a disembodied spirit — thro’ dim, half-familiar cities and over strange moors — thro’ space and time — other planets and universes in the end.”

Fish-frogs

20 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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Frog-people of Innsmouth? An old illustration of degenerative inbreeding…

“There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today – I don’t know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst – fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em – they used to have lots of horse trouble before the autos came in.” — Shadow over Innsmouth.

Lovecraft in comic books – convention report

06 Wednesday Oct 2010

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Josie Campbell’s useful blow-by-blow report on a recent discussion of Lovecraft in comic books…

“A dedicated crowd braved the heat at the West Hollywood Book Fair to hear Steve Niles, Mike Mignola and Hans Rodionoff talk about the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on horror comic books. Packed elbow to elbow, the audience was made up of Lovecraft fans, comic fans…and a fish-man from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” ”

Cover from Jason Thompson‘s 5-issue graphic novel of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Salon Futura #2 published

05 Tuesday Oct 2010

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Issue 2 of Salon Futura fiction magazine is out, and available for download as an .epub file.

If you need it for the Kindle (which doesn’t support .epub) convert it. Just download the excellent freeware Calibre. Then it’s a simple four-step conversion process…

1. Locate and load your .epub file.

2. Select Convert | Convert Individually.

3. Select Convert to .mobi format. No need to configure this, a straight conversion should be fine.

4. Now connect your Kindle’s USB lead to the desktop, then send your converted file as a .mobi file to the Kindle.

It’s done!

Lovecraft on the Kindle

04 Monday Oct 2010

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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So, now that the Amazon Kindle ebook reader seems to a mature platform with the Kindle 3, what ebooks are available from the Kindle store in the run-up to Christmas 2010? Not a bad basic selection…

An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics)

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics)

The Dreams in the Witch House and other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics)

Those who can’t afford the definitive Penguin editions can still get the $2.29 bundle of 67 of the stories, presumably taken from public-domain sources online, and presumably (I would hope) specially formatted for the Kindle. If you look around online you may also find a .mobi formatted ebook (which Kindles can read) of all the stories, for free.

Keep in mind that the Penguin Classics editions are the ‘final cut’ versions, carefully edited and corrected from original sources by the leading Lovecraft scholar. The free versions are taken from sources that are littered with errors and omissions that crept in over the decades.

Tales of Lovecraftian Cats, now on the Kindle

30 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts

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I’m pleased to say that my book Tales of Lovecraftian Cats is now available on the Kindle [ Amazon U.S. Kindle store | Amazon U.K. store ].

Four Horror Stories Of Cats, radically reworked and rewritten in the style and mythos of H.P. Lovecraft.

Contents:

* “Beware the Cat”. Being the first ever English novel (1584). A gothic horror story of talking cats, freely adapted and modernised in a new Lovecraftian translation.

* “How the Grimmalkin Came”. A new sequel to both “Beware the Cat” and Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”.

* “The Sending”. A new prequel to Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”.

* “The Case of the Savage Cat”. A new prequel to Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”.