A look at the cover that Greenwood gave The H.P. Lovecraft Companion in 1977, a first ‘high pass’ over Lovecraft’s work, written by a Sherlock Holmes fan and newspaper book-critic. The book is usually presented for sale without the dust-jacket, and when it is a nice copy it’s usually for sale at silly prices.

The first section surveys Lovecraft’s style and opinions of other authors. Then follows a section with brief summaries of nearly 60 stories. There’s an A-Z of key places, characters and monsters found in the fiction. Then a survey of the pantheonic monsters. The final part briefly outlines Lovecraft’s pantheon and surveys what he was known to have read re: the occult and witchcraft.

It’s long since been superseded and the book is probably most interesting today for the choice of the cover picture which taps into “Witch House”, rather than into “Cthulhu” and tentacles as would be the case today. Thus the subject matter and 17th century woodcut style would have framed Lovecraft’s ‘first glance’ academic library reception within the mid-70s interest in the New England witch trials. The smiling wizard and the frowning witch also implicitly make an appeal to the then-emerging gender studies crowd in academia, which again links to “Witch House”.

If… Derleth had sold out in the late 50s and licensed Lovecraft for a comics line…

Kid Kthulu.

New on Archive.org, Writing For The Quality Market (1935) is a short but detailed book that lays out what the ‘quality’ or ‘slick’ magazine market was like in Lovecraft’s last years, complete with a great many tables that ‘scientifically’ assess the types of purchased stories and their characteristics. Obviously, short of making a return to his “Sweet Ermengarde” days, he wasn’t going to fit in.

How to make a cute 3D-rigged Elder Thing, in the Spore Creature Creator module.

With a bit of wrangling it’s possible to get these to Collada .DAE format, and then into Maya or 3DS Max and from there to other software. Blender perhaps, if you want free software, although their 2010 Open Collada support is apparently basic and has been abandoned since circa 2012.

Board Games UK has an in-depth and very informed review of the new board-game Cthulhu: Death May Die. Even if you don’t care to play such Derlethian things, it appears to be quite a minor work of art in itself, with fine card-art and hand-painted miniature pieces.

From the music press, news that…

Dark ambient label Cryo Chamber are releasing a two-hour dark soundscape album recorded by over 20 ambient artists to pay tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. […] The label is keen to stress [the album] is not a compilation, rather a collaboration — and a huge undertaking.

Casey Douglass has a review.

I’m late in getting to the very trippy hippy-tastic poster for the release of the movie of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. The poster slipped out and got lost in the razzle-dazzle of the run-up to Christmas. The movie’s cinema release is on 24th January in the USA, so you should have about a month or so to catch it. Then the 4k Blu-ray and DVD is due a month later on 24th February 2020.

“Wrightson Collector: A collection of ALL things Bernie Wrightson”. A dedicated website with a large gallery, including fanzines and small magazines with photos of interior pages with art.

Hollywood-watchers report that work is underway on adapting the Hans Rodionoff / Giffen / Breccia graphic novel Lovecraft (2003). The adaptation is mooted as a possible costume horror-drama which “will take place in the 1920s”. Sounds good, though the first sixth of the 130-page book is actually set in the 1890s with Lovecraft as a boy, which would entail two sets of period costumes. But I guess the zillion TV-series now being made have produced a thriving behind-the-scenes trade in costumes-and-props, and that a Lovecraft adaptation could be cost-effectively costumed with cast-offs from the likes of Babylon Berlin and Penny Dreadful.

The Lovecraft graphic novel then goes on to feature the adult Lovecraft as the central character. It’s very much a “his monsters and cultists are real” gory fantasy-horror rather any kind of straight bio-book. “Real” in the sense that, for example, in one scene Lovecraft brains a hostile cultist to death with his typewriter. It’s a book that has many good moments in the first half, but in the end the art outshines the baggy story — and it doesn’t help that the dialogue often seems stilted or clunkily expository.

However, the TV writers have previously worked on something called Game of Thrones and thus have landed a “multi-year deal with Netflix”. So they obviously have the talent to hammer out the flaws in the book. My guess would be that, if not a movie, Lovecraft could become a five-part mini-series destined for late-night screening in the run-up to Halloween 2021? There’s no politics in the book, though doubtless there will have to be all sorts of politically-correct changes and slantings made before it can be allowed to reach the screen. Still, if the project can negotiate the inevitable leftist whining without being ruined, then I have a hunch it might even be the first substantial big-budget TV depiction of Lovecraft-as-character?