25 Sunday Jul 2010
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I’ve made a new photomontage to celebrate the start of this blog, and called it “The Thing found in Shroveport Quarry”…
It’s a combination of five different public-domain old photographs.
Also a not-quite so successful “ship attack” picture, which ended up looking more like a still frame from a 1920s film…
24 Saturday Jul 2010
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
This was the book that started it for me, at age 11. A 1971 ‘schools’ paperback called The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror, published by Scholastic Book Services of New York in December 1971. Somehow it had made its way to England many years later, and the editor Margaret Ronan had presumably selected the stories for suitability for children (the introduction was apparently by Margaret Sylvester, who as a 15-year old girl had corresponded with Lovecraft in the mid 1930s). It was the first horror book I had read, and — despite its dreadful cheapness in both its production and the price pencilled inside it — I took a whole hour deciding to buy it or not…
A dreadful cover suggesting vampires, though I guess publishers had to ‘start where people are’, back in 1971. And vampires were the hot ticket, back then. But after that taste of Lovecraft (“Colour out of Space”; “The Outsider”; “Shadow over Innsmouth” and others) I hunted down the UK Panther paperback collections — with their superb covers — on the second-hand bookstalls of the local markets.
Panther paperbacks cover gallery after the jump… Continue reading
24 Saturday Jul 2010
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I’ve found another Lovecraft “mash up”. Murray Ewing gives a long and useful account of self-publishing his Alice at R’lyeh, This is a new Carrollian nonsense poem, with illustrations, which imagines a combination of Alice and Lovecraft. Predictably, and as I know myself, embedding the required fonts in a PDF and getting it to print to the required page size was a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions. But in the end, he writes…
“I could get 100 16-page booklets for a little over £100 […] I went with www.thedigitalprinters.com […] I got the quote, uploaded my PDF, got an email back suggesting a lamination for the covers, okayed that, and then, a week later, I had my box of Alice at R’lyeh booklets. That moment — receiving your actual finished, physical copies, tangy with the scent of fresh ink and peppered with paper-dust — is the first heaven of self-publishing.”
The story of promoting it comes in Part two.
23 Friday Jul 2010
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Photos from inside the “A Love Craft” art exhibition, which has just closed in New York.
There’s also a less stand-offish set of visitor photos from Zazoo & Satori (a prolific tag-team for photographing all the fab NY shows, it seems) on Flickr.
Allison Sommers has her exhibition work online here and The Observatory Room has the full list of artists and a couple of other pictures online.
22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The great bard of Northampton, England has the first part of a new Lovecraftian graphic novel out now, as a $1.99 preview sampler titled Neonomicon: The Hornbook
The horror in Neonomicon is unfortunately said to be of the “gore” variety, thus breaking with Lovecraft’s hints and elisions to graphically show intricate nastiness — perhaps Moore is aiming at something in Continue reading
22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Durn it… it seems I wasn’t the first to have the idea of using re-combined old public domain stories as scaffolding for creating brand-new Lovecraftian stories. I’ve just read of the new Classics Mutilated series: “an all-new prose collection of genre mash-up stories […] allowing a variety of writers to mix fantasy and horror elements with classic tales and icons.” The cover illustrates a Lansdale story that’s Mark Twain meets the Uncle Remus stories, channelled via Lovecraft.
22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts
Just published: my book Tales of Lovecraftian Cats (2010). I experimentally used old and obscure public domain horror / fantasy stories as scaffolding to write new Lovecraftian stories. All the stories feature Lovecraft’s favorite animal — the cat.
In this experiment I take my cue from Lovecraft — who was 50 years ahead of the curve on transformative fan works and collaborative mythos-building — since he once wrote in a letter of 1933…
“Someone ought to go over the cheap magazines and pick out story-germs which have been ruined by popular treatment; then getting the authors’ permission and actually writing the stories.”
My book includes two new prequels to “The Horror at Red Hook”, and a new Randolph Carter story, as well as my translation and modern adaptation of the first English novel, Beware the Cat (1584). There’s a limited edition hardback (please contact me), and an affordable paperback edition available from the link above.
A free sample is here (PDF link). I’ve made sure to embed the fonts used, but you never can tell with Adobe — please comment if you don’t see an elegant layout. It probably means that the fonts didn’t embed properly.