I’m pleased to discover, via an ancient aside on an Archive.org fanzine, a Lovecraftian author of quality who was completely unknown to me.

Jeffrey E. Barlough produced a well-regarded trilogy in the 1990s and early 2020s, and has followed it up with a regular series of books. Anchorwick is a kind of prequel and said to be the best to start with, though The House in the High Wood has an affordable ebook.

The setting is an alternate history in which the last Ice Age never ended and our current interglacial warm period never arrived. A sliver of the olde British civilisation that managed to emerge now clings on down the coastline of North America. Surrounded by Ice Age megafauna, no less. A gaslamp/steampunk blend of Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft, but with an appealing-sounding dash of eccentric and imaginative whimsy added to the mix.

Sadly no audiobook version, despite the avid fan-base, or even other ebook editions. His website has the full list for the Western Lights series…

Dark Sleeper (2000)

The House in the High Wood (2001)

Strange Cargo (2004)

Bertram of Butter Cross (2007)

Anchorwick (2008)

A Tangle in Slops (2011)

What I Found at Hoole (2012)

The Cobbler of Ridingham (2014)

Where The Time Goes (2016)

The Thing in the Close (2018)

Hooting Grange (2021)

Rose of Picardy (in preparation)

DMR brings news of a new book of sword & sorcery by Lovecraftian Ramsay Campbell, Far Away & Never. Not quite new, though shiny. It’s a reprint of an apparently quite enjoyable and rollicking set of fantasy-horror stories, from many decades ago.

At last, Claveloux and Zha’s classic Dead Season (aka “Off Season”) in a good English edition. March 2022, apparently.

Possibly inspired by a dream Lovecraft had. In the Selected Letters he notes a somewhat similar dream of Providence…

the street car that went by night over a route that had been dismantled for six years, & that lost five hours in climbing College Hill. Finally plunging off the earth into a star-strewn abyss & ending up in the sand-heaped streets of a ruined city which had been under the sea.

The cover forebodes a new digital colouring, complete with yellow faces, but hopefully the interior will be in black and white. It’s also to be found in late 1970s issues of Heavy Metal magazine.

Tucked away in the back of Fantasy Classics #15 (2008), newly arrived on Archive.org, another adaptation of Kadath that’s new to me. Rather nicely done and 48 pages.

Inktober 2021 is here. I’d completely forgotten about it, what with the global Internet melting into a puddle from 1st October onward (better now, including a vital local SSL root certificate Windows/Opera fix, here at Tentaclii).

Obviously potential for Lovecraftian doodling and dwiddling. It’s often assumed that some hand-ground oak-gall inks and hand-plucked swan-quills are required for Inktober, but there’s no reason you can’t join in with more affordable digital tools.

Arkham Reporter decides that the new VR story-game DAGON: By H.P. Lovecraft 2021…

is absolutely brilliant.

I’m not sure how easy to parse “brilliant” is, for those outside the UK. It’s a common British word approximating to ‘superb, scintillating, inspired, very pleasing’.

For those without the VR kit / powerful PC to run VR, Arkham Reporter also offers a YouTube run-through. Dagon 2021 is available on Steam.

A superb emulation of Moebius by Kaja Saudek for the cover of the Czechoslovakian pocket edition of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, Stin nad Innsmouthem (1990).

According to a local site this was the nation’s first non-samizdat taste of Lovecraft after the collapse of communism…

Writings by H. P. Lovecraft appeared on the common Czechoslovak book market as early as 1990 [as a] series of several parts containing the short stories was published by Zlaty kun (the cover and title pages were illustrated by Kaja Saudek).

This comment suggested to me that there were more covers like this, yet to be found. A little digging finds that there are, and you can actually still some of buy them. Although not the Innsmouth one, for some reason. The cover of the 1991 Randolph Carter translation is also ‘very Moebius’. and there are even a couple of R.E. Howard items.

Daildeli Databaze has what appears to be the full set of covers and interior illustrations…

So far as I can tell, though he made many comics during his career, he never did a Lovecraft adaptation. He appears to have developed his own series, such as Arnal, with a faster and more Crumb-like style that could veer toward pop-art.