21 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
H.P. Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep”, newly read and animated by Norwegian motion-graphics designer Kim Holm and Romanian illustrator and metal musician Costin Chioreanu.
“Nyarlathotep” on YouTube.
20 Wednesday Jan 2021
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
During the Second World War H.P. Lovecraft’s friend and fellow writer Frank Belknap Long penned a series of pulp entertainment science-fiction tales of one John Carstairs. Carstairs was the Curator of the Interplanetary Botanical Gardens… and occasional Botanical Detective. Young, but dapper and eminent. As you might expect, weird and wonderful mobile plants feature heavily. As such, I guess the hero’s spectacle-wearing probably serves both for the close-inspection of leaves and flowers, and as useful eye-protection against venom, deadly pollens and trailing stingers. Long was likely drawing on his own real-life fascination with the rearing and keeping of fancy fish (see the Lovecraft letters), and possibly an affection for the many hothouses of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Perhaps, after Lovecraft’s death, he later also raised a collection of carnivorous plants?
The series ended along with the war in summer 1945.
A few years after the end of the war, as paper rationing eased, it was partly collected in a nice 1949 hardback. I’ve colour-shifted the hardback jacket toward red, as I can’t believe a publisher of the late 1940s would issue a boys’ book in pink. It must have faded.
In 1959 it was issued as a cheap British paperback, to launch a branded series of fantasy reprints, and with a cover keyed to both the ‘six-gun cowboy’ and Superman crazes of the time. So I find that my statement a few posts ago, that Long only ever had the two Panther paperback collections here in the UK, was wrong. He also had this.
A L.W. Currey page for the book describes the contents as “a fix-up novel”, so I’m guessing new linking passages might have been added?
The tales obviously don’t satisfy hardcore detective-story buffs, if one review is anything to judge by. But a decade ago pulp fan Jerry House reviewed the one-volume reprint of this series…
For me, the great thing about these stories is the sheer inventiveness of the many vegetative creatures that Long has created. Their diversity is stunning. As a writer, Long could blow both hot and cold, and there’s far more heat here than cold. This may not be everyone’s cup-of-tea, but if you like pulp — and say ‘to heck with a lot of logic’ — give this one a try.
Sounds fun. The series is partly free at Archive.org, if you want to sample some. In order:
“Plants Must Slay”. (also found in the anthology Saint’s Choice of Impossible Crimes)
“Satellite of Peril”.
“The Ether Robots”. *
“The Heavy Man”. *
“The Hollow World” (long novella)
* = not in the 1959 reprint book, according to the TOCs. None of the missing are in The Early Long, and only “Wobblies in the Moon” is in one of the ebook ‘megapacks’ on Amazon.
Ramble House currently has the full set in ebook for $6, though regrettably not on Amazon. The page blurb for this states that “The Heavy Man” and “Wobblies in the Moon” had been left out of the 1949 book. But the table-of-contents for both print editions has “The Heavy Man” and “The Ether Robots” as being left out. Can the TOCs for both have been astray? The ebook’s new introduction also states that “the second and third stories were reversed in sequence”. Who knows? Anyway, the ebook has the order correct, and I’ve followed its TOC order in the above links.
The ebook introduction by Richard A. Lupoff is also interesting for a brief insight into Lovecraft. Lupoff recalls one long rooftop conversation with Long…
Our conversation drifted to other topics. These included his friendship with Lovecraft, and the relationship between Lovecraft and his arch-nemesis, the German-American agent George Sylvester Viereck. “It took only the mention of Viereck’s name and Howard’s face would turn beet red, his neck would swell until you thought he was going to burst, and he would practically foam at the mouth!”
One wonders what might have caused such resentment? Viereck was a Massachusetts writer who became a notorious ‘agent’ of the German state. Most likely it was his First World War pro-German publishing activities that would have set the Anglophile Lovecraft against him…
During the First World War he edited a German-sponsored weekly magazine, The Fatherland with a claimed circulation of 80,000. In August 1918, a lynch mob stormed Viereck’s house in Mount Vernon [a suburb of New York City], forcing him to seek refuge in a New York City hotel. In 1919, shortly after the Great War, he was expelled from the Poetry Society of America.
18 Monday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New to me, a peep at the cover of a 1980 German edition of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
The over-sized Teutonic battle-horns and black-letter typography would no doubt have prompted a wry chuckle from Lovecraft, had he seen it.
17 Sunday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
On 1st January 2021 the copyright time-pinger ‘dinged’ and thus enabled hplovecraft.com to restore the text of “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind” by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft. The short tale is now presumably also available for YouTube audio recordings and adaptation into comics, animation etc.
Originally published in Weird Tales for April 1925, and there credited to Eddy.
Joshi’s considered option in I Am Providence was that Eddy likely wrote the first draft of the tale, and Lovecraft then revised this “around February 1924, just prior to his move to New York”. Then advised further on finessing the ending, in what Eddy later referred to as “several conferences” — an ambiguous phrase which I would suggest might even encompass telephone calls from New York.
14 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Having finally got around to hearing Harlan Ellison’s fine reading of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame”, I was impressed and left wondering what the other “Philip Hastane stories” are. “Singing Flame” is the first of these, but regrettably the others are said to be far more plainly written and darker in tone. It turns out all are free on the Eldritch Dark website and can be found in audio…
* “The City of the Singing Flame” (as original + sequel) (& audio);
* “The Devotee of Evil” (& audio);
* “Hunters from Beyond” (& audio);
* “The Music of Death” (posthumous, long fragment and ideas);
* “The Rebirth of the Flame” (posthumous, unwritten, brief outline and ideas).
These are more ‘Lovecraftian + sex’, on hearing.
What is actually similar to the more lyrical and mystical “Singing Flame”? It’s said that the “Captain Volmar tales” are actually the closest shelf-companions to “Singing Flame”. These being collected recently in the print book Red World of Polaris, and also mostly available free online in text form. In order…
* “Marooned in Andromeda”;
* “The Amazing Planet” (originally “Captivity in Serpens”);
* The Red World of Polaris (newly re-discovered);
* The Ocean-World of Alioth (unwritten, synopsis and fragment only).
Some other of Smith’s similar-sounding pulp science-fiction tales from around this time appear to be…
* “The Eternal World”;
* “The Dimension of Chance”;
* “The Immeasurable Horror”.
Of the above and the “Captain Volmar” tales, only “The Immeasurable Horror” is in audio, being free on YouTube here and here.
There are Audible listings for some paid Smith audiobooks, but these are all listed as “unavailable” even when using a USA VPN. Were they ever released? Theoretically an audiobook for the multi volume Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith should have:
Vol. 1: inc. “Marooned in Andromeda”.
Vol. 2. inc. “The Amazing Planet”.
14 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“The Other Lovecraft” by science-fiction author James Blish, written 1964 and seemingly still unpublished.
It appears to be mis-described in the sale listing. The later note appended by the editor says “would have appeared”, not “was” published, in “Epilogue magazine”, and the bundle appears to include an earlier announcement page for the article.
But Epilogue was actually George Zebrowski’s fanzine rather than a regular magazine and it appears to have lasted only three issues… and ended with #3 in summer 1964. I can find no trace of this Blish article on Lovecraft, which had been set to appear in the Halloween issue, and thus have to assume this item has never been published. There’s nothing of it in the Bibliography and no other trace of it.
Judging by what can be glimpsed of the first page, it appears not to be a personal memoir, but who know what lurks on the reverse of the sheet?
13 Wednesday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
More production press-stills on eBay, from The Cry of Cthulhu movie. I had a previous post here on this $7m stop-motion Lovecraft movie from 1977 (set for a 1981 release that never happened). The Cthulhu picture adds a new name to the model makers on the failed project, Robert Skotack, who later worked with James Cameron.
12 Tuesday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Back in 2012 Tentaclii noted that Horacio Lalia was seeking English licensees and translators for his H.P. Lovecraft comics adaptations. At the time I could only find one book collection of his work, and that not in English.
New to me in 2021, I see that there are now four volumes of Lovecraft comics adaptations from this veteran b&w Argentine comics artist. Three were made for publisher Albin Michel and are now collectable at around £60-80 used, plus a later one for Glenat which is still available at a reasonable price. All were published in French in the French ‘BD’ format.
Lovecraft – La Couleur Tombee Du Ciel (1998)
Lovecraft – Le Grimoire Maudit (2000)
Lovecraft – Le Manuscrit Oublie (2003)
Lovecraft – Les Cauchemars de Lovecraft (2014)
Sadly it appears he never found a way to get an English edition, circa 2012. Possibly the b&w was a hard-sell, at a time when publishers assumed that young audiences needed garish re-colouring if they were to buy comics reprints. But British readers may fondly recall his name from 2000AD and StarLord in the late 1970s and early/mid 1980s. Here is an example from what appears to be his 1970s work, with superb layout and fine penmanship, and another showing the woodcut-like style later used in his Lovecraft adaptations.
09 Saturday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A stylish bit of b&w showing Lovecraft, for what appears to be a new Spanish illustrated book by Ziperart, of Cuentos de H.P. Lovecraft. I guess he did sometimes type with his hat on, when the weather was especially cold.
Also of note, though not Lovecraftian, over in Canada the new indie publisher Eye of Newt is growing a small range of quality fantastical art-led books.
The new Froud-alike fairies book launches next summer.
07 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Nice to see a new Lovecraftian videogame that’s a rare thing… a roaring success when first released. At least, a success judging by the spoiler-packed reviews.
Trailed a few months back in Digital Art Live, the first reviews for the new Call of the Sea game are now in…
Call of the Sea is an amazing, albeit short, adventure puzzle game. It’s a fully engrossing experience that’s tense, but not scary, and is the perfect game to show to people if they’re interested in the Lovecraftian genre but aren’t fans of [post-1960s] horror. … the thing I love most about Call of the Sea is that it’s not a horror game, yet it’s fully inspired by the Lovecraftian horror genre. A fully optimized and glitchless package. Out of the Blue Games couldn’t have designed a better game for their debut.” (Gaming Trend review).
Call of the Sea is solid adventure with tons of atmosphere [and] shrouded in mystery and easy to dive into. […] it’s hard to ignore just how challenging and charming the title is. (The Escapist)
Call of the Sea is a gorgeous game. It has more of a cartoony style to it, but the levels are highly atmospheric and feature lovely vistas and beautiful use of vibrant color. The areas also feel lived-in and believable. This is certainly the kind of game where you’ll stop and gawk at the scenery every now and again.” (PC Invasion)
There are puzzles, but apparently seamlessly integrated into the story and not fiendish or illogical (as one knocking ‘review’, seemingly from a leftist anti-fan, would have it). The Games Radar review seems to have it about right, on the puzzles…
The puzzles are beautifully balanced too, not so complex you immediately head to YouTube for a solution feeling like your math teacher was totally right about your failures, but not so easy they feel like last-minute set dressing. … It’s a great story, told with heart, and the perfect narration.
It appears to riff on Lovecraft’s idea at the end of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, the one encapsulated in the ideas and plans the “Innsmouth” protagonist has for his cousin in the Canton madhouse, as he spirals up to a new sort of ‘sanity’.
Also ‘fresh from the sea’, New Horror Express interviews film-maker Chad Ferrin on The Deep Ones…
A Lovecraftian horror picture done very much in the 80s mould [… the movie] will be released in the U.S. on 1st May 2021.
04 Monday Jan 2021
Posted in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts
Tentaclii returns… a week earlier than planned.
03 Sunday Jan 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The competition is organised by The Book Collector, a London based literary journal. You are asked to describe, in 1,000 words, an imaginary banquet for book-lovers.
Deadline: 22nd January 2021. £500 prize.
