The long-running Perfect Bound podcast has a special new episode on a “very specific horror sub-genre” in comics… Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
Podcast: cosmic horror in comics
02 Thursday Apr 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts
Fungi From Yuggoth
30 Monday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
A clear look at the cover for Fungi From Yuggoth: An Annotated Edition (2017), via the scan for a copy currently for sale on AbeBooks.
The tight crop on the seller’s scan makes it look vaguely like it might be a booklet. But it was in fact a limited edition 288-page hardcover, copiously annotated. With fine illustrations by Jason C. Eckhardt. 300 copies were issued at $45 each, and a paperback or ebook edition has yet to appear.
David E. Schultz, one of the leading authorities on Lovecraft, has spent decades preparing this annotated edition of the Fungi. He meticulously discusses the origin of the poem (including the influence of Donald Wandrei’s similar cycle, Sonnets of the Midnight Hours), its connections with Lovecraft’s fiction, Lovecraft’s changing thoughts on natural expression in poetry, and the complex history of the poem’s publication — both as individual sonnets and as a unity. Schultz also provides penetrating annotations on every poem.
Whispers from the Ghooric Zone bagged a copy in 2018, and kindly offered potential readers a peep inside.
The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao
30 Monday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Just over a year ago the news was filtering out of the passing of Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire. To mark the occasion, I’m sure he’d have appreciated seeing this slightly cleaned still of Tony Randall, in George Pal’s The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), especially as the star somewhat resembles Wilum in his finest get-up.
Guns, Love, and Tentacles
28 Saturday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The real-time-comic styled sci-fi AAA vidogame Borderlands 3 has a new strongly Lovecraftian makeover, in the form of its major “Guns, Love, and Tentacles” premium DLC. On release now, it’s apparently it’s a great success and even strongly improves a vital aspect of the game.
Kotaku’s review sums it up (partial spoilers)…
The scenery on Xylourgos is […] a massive (and dead) monstrosity known as Gythian serves as the centerpiece, and inhabitants have built a town directly under its corpse. Gythian is an ever-present aspect of the environment and storyline, with tentacles stretching both literally and metaphorically across the planet’s vast wastelands. [The alien planet] Xylourgos is also cloaked in darkness thanks to a perpetual solar eclipse, the thin glimpses of light that manage to escape casting an eerie blue-green hue over the icy landscape.
Gythian is an obvious homage to Lovecraftian deities like Cthulhu [with] a cult that worships Gythian’s heart as part of some bizarre love ritual. There’s also an NPC [non-player character] who believes himself to be a fishman a la “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and asks the player to lower him into a frozen lake to commune with his fish queen.
Borderlands 3 isn’t a game known for its incredible boss fights. They usually go a little something like this: a giant bad guy appears [at the end of the game’s level] and you shoot them until they die. [Yet here the player at last gets] a boss fight that actually feels difficult, compelling, and rewarding […] it makes a nice change from defeating Borderlands bosses through brute force.
[…] one of the most enjoyable romps I’ve had with the Borderlands series since it debuted in 2009.”
Sounds great. Doubtless there will be a gazillion play-throughs on YouTube before the weekend is out, so go there if you want to see more of what the game looks and plays like.
“English dreams and memories”
27 Friday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Seen below are some good photo-reference pictures for an 18th century suit, and these may be useful for artists seeking to depict H.P. Lovecraft as an 18th century Englishman of letters. Interestingly, if Lovecraft had ever acquired the financial means to purchase a steam-heated English mansion in Devonshire, complete with semi-tropical glass-houses, then he could have settled in England. Since he knew of…
… the legal provision which makes me still able, as the grandson in direct male line of a true-born Englishman, to call myself a rightful British subject.
… but otherwise one imagines that our climate would have dampened his ardour for England, even on a summer visit of a few months.
Lovecraftian Anime
24 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast veers off the ancient track and dives into a survey of Japanese animation, in the new “Lovecraftian Anime” episode.
Along similar lines is the new “Reading the Bible with Horror” podcast, interviewing the author of a book-length survey of all the ‘monster horror’ bits of the Bible. The blurb for this also reveals a new project, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters.
Plot Points on Lovecraft and gaming
19 Thursday Mar 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
A new one-hour Plot Points podcast asks…
How did H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’ influence gaming? Academic Scott Bruner, Chaosium stalwart Jim Lowder, and host Ben Riggs (Encounter Theory) gather to discuss!
It’s a wrap
17 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
John Coulthart has posted a full scan of his cover-art for His Own Most Fantastic Creation, in the post “Double weird”.
“I’ll feel amply empowered to shoot you a free copy.”
15 Sunday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
That strange scurrying noise? It’s a horde of Lovecraftians burrowing into a HPLHS dropdown-menu, to get at the free .MP3 of the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre: The Rats in the Walls radio drama…
On moving into 66 College St. Lovecraft had discovered a… “narrow and hideously nighted space in the attic under the eaves — reached from the attic proper by low doors, and having no windows whatever. … I am wholly alone in the house now, with my aunt at the hospital and the downstairs neighbour on the high seas bound for Germany — but what was that creaking above me last night? Part of that black space [in the attic] is directly over my desk. Perhaps it was only the rats…” — H.P. Lovecraft, to CAS, June 1933.
Two Gentlemen Meet at Midnight
10 Tuesday Mar 2020
New on Archive.org, August Derleth’s Arkham Sampler #4 (Autumn 1948). The journal ran for eight issues. This issue’s highlight, today, is a ‘poem for voices’ by Derleth. Inspired by reading Lovecraft’s letters he imagines the shades of Lovecraft and Poe meeting at last, one night in Providence.
And here’s a picture to set the mood for a reading. It’s not been seen here before at Tentaclii, and is from my late summer 2019 haul of such pictures showing Lovecraft’s 66 College St and its surroundings. The two men are at the Van Wickle Gates at the top of College Street, only a moment’s walk from 66 College Street. In fact, given the timing in the 1940s, one wonders if the picture wasn’t inspired by Derleth’s 1948 poem.
I don’t know who holds Derleth’s copyrights these days, but if they’re sensible descendents then there may be potential here for a musical album. Of soundscape / found-sounds / low-key ‘night music’, combined into tracks evoking Providence at night in the 1930s/40s leading into a dramatised vocal performance of this poem with FX. Perhaps earlier in the album one might also have some of Poe’s more ‘cosmic’ lyrics and then Lovecraft’s churchyard letters/poem, both mentioned in the above poem, done in the same way.
New book: His Own Most Fantastic Creation
10 Tuesday Mar 2020
I don’t usually cover anthology slabs here at Tentaclii, but I’ll make an exception for a fun one that features Lovecraft as a character, edited by the venerable S.T. Joshi. His Own Most Fantastic Creation is a £25 (about $40) hardcover from PS Publishing, and is pre-ordering now for shipping in April 2020.
The blurb is usefully descriptive…
Darrell Schweitzer focuses on Lovecraft’s childhood, when he was plagued with dreams of “night-gaunts” and was left bereft by the early death of his father. John Shirley depicts Lovecraft as a gawky teenager evolving his notions of “cosmicism”, while Scott Wiley emphasises Lovecraft’s devotion to cats. Stephen Woodworth and Donald R. Burleson ring changes on the Lovecraftian theme of personality exchange. Lovecraft famously collaborated with Harry Houdini on a story. Donald Tyson and Jonathan Thomas write very different stories on the association of these two figures. Mark Samuels focuses on Lovecraft’s creation of imaginary tomes of forbidden lore, while the stories by Richard Gavin, David Hambling, Jason V. Brock, and S. T. Joshi supply broader ruminations on the origins of Lovecraft’s revolutionary motifs. While eschewing Lovecraft himself as a character, the tales by W. H. Pugmire and Simon Strantzas exhibit figures who reveal strikingly Lovecraftian elements while probing the psyche of the man from Providence.
Super. It’s perhaps a pity that there’s not also an essay comprehensively surveying the uses of Lovecraft-as-character and Lovecraft-alikes in fiction, comics and poetry up to about 1969. Perhaps also appending the 1970-2020 titles in a simple checklist form. But I guess that might belong in a companion volume collecting such early stories and poems. However, Joshi does mention just a few of them in his short introduction…
Lovecraft the man has served as an inspiration for fiction writers as early as Edith Miniter (“Falco Ossifracus’ 1921), Frank Belknap Long (“The Space-Eaters’ 1928), and Robert Bloch (“The Shambler from the Stars:’ 1935) in his own day”.
What’s new on DeviantArt
09 Monday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Another survey of what’s new on DeviantArt…
Azathoth, the demon sultan by Taisteng.
Lovecraft and Barlow by Loneanimator.
Iranon by FluoriteAmphibian.
Necronomicon 5 by Libriproibiti.
“Ketched in the rain, be ye?” by SamInabinet.
The Gilman House by MaestroMorte.
The Cats From Ulthar a mini-sculpture by DeterFArt. More.
Cthulhu in digital oil by Stayinwonderland. “This is the first in a series of paintings … I’m imagining a coastal town in England where a Cthulhu cult emerged. Either prior to, or in parallel with, the Innsmouth story and set close to 1900.”
H.P. Lovecraft by AnnaHSzymborska.
