Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

New on DeviantArt

11 Tuesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

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My pick of the new Lovecraftian art on DeviantArt, with a few that are also new-to-me.

H. P. Lovecraft Sticker by Kayemby. “I take commissions & sell funky vinyl stickers on eBay.”

Octocat by MorpheusLunae.

From “Under the Pyramids” by Gomro.

H.P.Lovecraft bust by tot-art.

Brain Case by d1sarmon1a.

Night ride by Nashotobi. Successfully evoking the nightscapes of Lovecraft’s New York years. From a forthcoming “occult noir graphic novel called Colton Crux, inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft, the movie Inception, and old Noir films”. This has been successfully crowdfunded, is on pre-order and is set to ship in spring 2021.

“The Whisperer in Darkness” by TotemOfHorror (“possible Nyarlathotep form”).

Holmes Lowell Longfellow page by SamInabinet. From his forthcoming Pickman Perspectives which appears to be a book.

Cast a Deadly Spell fan-art. (mis-scanned proportions on DA, corrected here).

“Dreams in the Witch House” by Ronanmc. Borrowing somewhat, but effectively, from Donald Sutherland.

E is for Elder Thing by Armorwing.

“The Haunter of the Dark” by Nele-Diel for the Cthulhuscape game.

“The Haunter of the Dark” by vsqs.

Not new, but new to me, Bast, Goddess of all Cats by Astanael. Part of his extensive Lovecraftian tarot deck in draft sketch from 2017.

Nyarlathotep by Fausto-XIII.

Fishman of Innsmouth by Indecline69.

Captain Marsh! by Wiggers123, who has others from Innsmouth.

“The Music of Erich Zann” by Urikedi.

Lost in the Void by TakeOFFFLy.

The Temptation of St. Lovecraft by John Sumrow, with a nod to Dali’s “The Temptation of St Anthony”.

Howard Collector #5-8, inc. “Who is Grandpa Theobold?”

09 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, REH

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New on Archive.org…

Howard Collector #5, Summer 1964.

Howard Collector #6, Spring 1965. With the poem “Who is Grandpa Theobold?”, from a letter. This would count as another early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, albeit not in fiction. I wonder what the likely year on this poem is?

Howard Collector #7, Winter 1965.

Howard Collector #8, Summer 1966.

Also new and of interest is a new Dark Worlds Quarterly survey of Robert E. Howard’s Bran Mak Morn in the Comics.

Experimental Musical Instruments

05 Wednesday Aug 2020

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Makers of strange Lovecraftian sonic devices may be interested to learn that a complete run of the journal Experimental Musical Instruments (1985-99) is now newly at Archive.org, with unified TOCs and article synopses. It appears to have been a practical journal by and for makers of working devices and instruments. Lots of practical articles on obscure and self-made instruments. For instance below we see the start of what appears, after much searching, to be the world’s only practical article on “clay bells” (April 1989).

Revue de la BnF and others

04 Tuesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Cthulhu on the cover of the Revue de la BnF, the substantial journal of the French National Library. Sadly it’s not open access. The issue, #59 (October 2019), was a world-building special issue and led into a 2020 ‘year of comics’ for the Library.

What is open access and public is the Library’s shorter quarterly ‘lobby magazine’ Chroniques. Issue #87 (January-March 2020) of Chroniques was their special BD (comics) / fantasy / Tolkien issue (they had the big Oxford Tolkien show visiting, and made it even bigger).

The #87 issueof Chroniques well worth a look, even though it’s all in French. I’d recommend a translator software but, amazingly, in 2020 it’s still impossible to translate the text of a PDF in place, without uploading it to some Cloud service or doing a half-baked conversion to MS Word first. Sure, the PDF format is hard to parse. But how difficult can it be to take a 3000px snapshot of a page, OCR and translate the text on it, erase the original text, then return the translated text into the erased area? Project Naptha can do that, though only for English… so why can’t at least one desktop PDF reader software do it? On a page such as this…

Anyway, it may also interest some readers to know that the Library’s CNLJ (children’s literature dept.) produces a very long-running journal in French La Revue des livres pour enfants (Review of Books for Children). This has a two year rolling paywall, during which only free samples are available online. After that it’s open access all the way back to 1965. This back-list reveals choice items such as Nº 242: a Nicole Claveloux special-issue.

New book: H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Family and Family Friends

03 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Family and Family Friends is now listed on the Hippocampus Press website. Nice and chunky at 1,110 pages, mostly because of the immense amount of letters to his aunts Lillian Clark and Annie Gamwell. These letters are here given “complete and unabridged” and also in a meticulously annotated and indexed form. There are also “previously unpublished letters written by Lovecraft’s grandfather, Whipple V. Phillips, to his grandson in the 1890s”.

Quite reasonably priced, at $60 for both in paperback. There’s an “Add to cart” button on the page, so I assume they’re shipping now. No sign of them yet on either Amazon USA or UK or eBay, but no doubt they’ll appear there in due course.

The books have a pleasing cover design by Daniel V. Sauer, around evocative art by David C. Verba.

At the Sign of the Cat

28 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

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The Lovecraftians of Hungary are seeking sponsors for their planned Spring 2021 national/regional meet-up event, and hope to launch a crowdfunding appeal in October 2020. As such they…

are open to ideas and suggestions, we welcome anyone who can share with us their experience of organizing and running such a campaign.

This also all for 2021, but they also note that…

However, all of the above [re: delay of the national event to 2021] does not apply to the graphics exhibition titled Supernatural Horror in Literature, organised jointly with the Memento Morri Association. Due to the nature of the exhibition and the venue, the opening of this exhibition will continue as planned on 8th September 2020.

The show will, appropriately enough, be at “the Cat (1084 Budapest, Berkocsis utca 23.)” and run for a month.

Entry deadline: 11th August 2020, and physical framed works need to be shipped to Hungary in good time.

The Cat, Budapest.

New book: Miskatonic Country

27 Monday Jul 2020

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Coming soon, a new Call of Cthulhu RPG Keeper’s Guide book…

This book is a guide to every Miskatonic Country scenario for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game published in a book by Chaosium or one of its licensees, and set in the 1920s.

Perhaps also useful for Lovecraft Mythos writers, if only to know what’s already been done in the region in terms of RPG storytelling in the classic Lovecraft period.

Call: Shadows Over Avalon

17 Friday Jul 2020

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I don’t normally feature calls from anthology editors, but I’ll make an exception for one that’s both historical and British-flavoured. Shadows Over Avalon seeks stories arising from a short passage in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward…

They were the pointed Saxon minuscules [scribal handwriting] of the eighth or ninth century A.D., and brought with them memories of an uncouth time when under a fresh Christian veneer ancient faiths and ancient rites stirred stealthily, and the pale moon of Britain looked sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins of Caerleon and Hexham, and by the towers along Hadrian’s crumbling wall.

One of Lovecraft’s ancestral roots went back to Hexham and its district, and he had made an intensive study of the area via maps and books.

The remains of the Ancient Roman frontier wall at Hexham.

What’s wanted for the new book? The editors seek… “Cthulhu Mythos stories set in the Arthurian world”. Deadline: 1st October 2020.

Here’s Bartholemew’s 1910 map of the Arthurian Regions, to help you along, though doubtless the Arthurians now have better. Chester as Caerleon is very dodgy, and presumably the likes of Wolverhampton are only there for orientation.

And two evocative pictures from Hexham…

In the Saxon crypt at Hexham Abbey.

Ancient Roman memorial stone to a soldier, later found and set up in Hexham Abbey.

H. P. Lovecraft’s Odd Couples

16 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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The Gay & Lesbian Review surveys “H. P. Lovecraft’s Odd Couples”, as part of the July-August 2020 issue. This issue is on the ‘Fantastics’ and appears to be a special on fantasy writers and artists. Available now at a modest $3.99 for a digital copy. Surprisingly it’s not also sold via Amazon, or else I’d have had a one-click copy downloading to my Kindle.