Protected: “If you go down to Innsmouth today…”
21 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts
The Xothic Cycle in ebook
21 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Amazon lists a new £3.99 ebook edition of The Xothic Cycle by Lin Carter, for publication 26th March 2020. It’s from Gateway, ebook re-publishers of the Gollancz yellow-covers of yesteryear. It’s possibly not completist, though, as the blurb calls it the first such book…
This is the first collection of Lin Carter’s Mythos tales; it includes his intended novel, The Terror Out of Time.
“First” of two or three? As such I suspect this is not to be confused with the Chaosium title The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter, edited by Robert M. Price. If you can’t wait for the 2020 ebook, then the Price collection can currently be picked up in paperback for £10 inc. shipping, and has an introduction by Price to each story. According to a Table of Contents kindly posted by the late W.H. Pugmire it doesn’t, however, include the “intended novel, The Terror Out of Time” — which the ebook apparently does.
Was Carter any good as a Mythos writer? It’s not all that easy to quickly find out. He was a pro, and yet S.T. Joshi has little to say about Lin Carter as a fiction writer (rather than a scholar and critic) in the book The Rise and Fall. One has to snuffle around in the sparse online comments to get a sense that Carter was post-Derlethian in his free-wheeling and name-spawning approach to the Mythos. I don’t get the sense he was going reverently back to the master and trying to fill in the gaps, in manner that was both relatively seamless and stylistically congruent.
W.H. Pugmire was rather more helpful in giving an opinion, remarking in an Amazon review of the Price book that…
The writing in this book may not be first class, but dang if this isn’t an amazingly FUN book to read.”
He also implied there was no attempt to mimic Lovecraft, with Carter’s…
style being that of a story-teller, plain and simple. I find the writing style in this book extremely pleasant, and the narratives flow easily.
Thus it sounds like a fun book for completists. But don’t expect to encounter Lovecraft’s style, or a Mythos with the Derlethian accretions chiselled off.
Also from Carter, A Look Behind the Lovecraft Mythos seen here in the Panther paperback edition…
Lovecraft’s devices
20 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Propnomicon creates the Tillinghast Device from Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”.
Lovecraft’s devices are perhaps an under-considered part of his work. Off the top of my head I can think of…
* The time travel device and camera-like ray weapons in “Shadow out of Time”.
* The devices of Curwen (“Never before or since had he seen such instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust and cobwebs of a century and a half”).
* The ‘mechanical’ and ‘canister’ aspects of the ending of “The Whisperer in Darkness”.
* The machines in “Cool Air”.
* The ray-projector in “The Evil Clergyman”.
* The cosmic telepathy device in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”.
And probably there are others I forget now, and still more that are less central to the plots or to be inferred from the Commonplace Book or even the letters. I don’t recall ever seeing a pure Lovecraft RPG book (as opposed to a ‘Derlethian/wider-Mythos Lovecraft’ RPG book) collecting such things in one volume and giving them gamer stats etc.
Illustrated Call of Cthulhu
20 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New on The HPLHS Store, and thus able to combine nicely with other orders, the English version of The Illustrated Call of Cthulhu…
Every now and then we find a product that’s so fantastically great we must have it for our store. For some time we’ve been following online the progress of this illustrated version of The Call of Cthulhu by the French illustrator Francois Baranger. His illustrated book is finally done and is, quite simply, spectacular. We are delighted to share with you this new English edition by Fria Ligan and Design Studio Press.
It’s an oversized illustrated version with painted illustrations.
The same artist also has an “At the Mountains of Madness” book, done in the same format… but when last noticed here it was in French only. There’s also an interview with him in the recent book, Lovecraft: Au coeur du cauchemar, which could possibly be translated into English by someone at some point.
Octo-puss
20 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
“Are Cats Part-Octopus?” Now, there’s an idea for story. While the notion has had slight and rather cursory attention in toon graphics and seen the occasional hand-crafted plushie bunged on Etsy, there seems plenty of potential for a more explanatory Lovecraftian fiction on connections between the two creatures.
Alton H. Blackington
19 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Bret Kramer of Sentinel Hill Press has noticed that a few of a series of “Yankee Yarns” New England folklore radio-broadcasts are now on Archive.org. They’re from Boston’s Alton H. Blackington, who broadcast 1933-53 and who would drive thousands of miles and interview many people to get his tales and get them straight. He also made such trips pay by being a newspaper photographer and running a New England stock-photo company. After finishing with radio he continued as a popular stage lecturer and published the best of the Tales in print as several volumes under the titles Yankee Yarns and More Yankee Yarns…
A mine of ideas for the region’s fiction writers, as well as a repository of folk-life, I’d suggest. Perhaps even more importantly, a large chunk of his photography collection survived…
“[the core of] the collection is the dozens of images of typically eccentric New England characters and human interest stories. Most of the images were taken by Blackington on 4×5″ dry plate negatives, however many of the later images are made on flexible acetate stock and the collection includes several images by other (unidentified) photographers distributed by the Blackington News Service. … His photographic vision extended to include hermits and eccentrics, skilled craftspeople, and the living relics of old traditions, including lighthouse keepers, whalers, and the last living town crier. … Blackington [had a] narrative eye and appreciation for the eccentricities of New Englanders and the vestiges of its long past”
… which raises the possibility of using some of it to help produce a new “Lovecraft’s places and faces” book, by pairing images related to or evoking Lovecraft’s travels with his letters and public-domain maps. Or perhaps a Ken Burns-style documentary made along the same lines, “panning and scanning” across such pictures.
“The Horror Of The Heights”
18 Saturday Jan 2020
Posted in Doyle, Lovecraftian arts
A new 39 minute reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Horror Of The Heights” (1913). The blurb is via Wikipedia and has plot spoilers, the opening being… “The story is told through a blood-stained notebook, dubbed the ‘Joyce-Armstrong Fragment’.” Other aspects are quite Lovecraftian, although the writing isn’t.
If the reader is not to your taste, HorrorBabble has it on YouTube in a good steady British English reading, and there are other readings on Librivox here (40 mins), here (42 mins) and here (36 mins).
Archive.org has the original appearance in The Strand magazine 1913, complete with superb colour plates. I won’t show these here as they’re visual spoilers.
H.P. Lovecraft read a good deal of Conan Doyle, as a lad in his ‘detective phase’. Joshi states that… “he read every Holmes story published up to that time (circa 1903)” and that these formed a key template for his early boyish fiction writing. Lovecraft wrote that… “I used to write detective stories very often, the works of A. Conan Doyle being my model so far as plot was concerned.”
He later recalled he had dipped a toe back into new Holmes stories in 1908, but found these… “an odd (& rather mediocre) pair or series of tales” and thereafter gave up on Holmes. If he also sampled the best of the non-Holmes horror, ghost and weird stories of Conan Doyle appears to be uncertain.
A story by Doyle titled “The Horror Of The Heights” would certainly have attracted Lovecraft’s attention. Yet he would probably have not seen it in The Strand, but rather in Doyle’s non-Holmes 1918 book collection Danger! and other stories. This would surely have arrived in the Providence Public Library in multiple copies and then been noticed by Lovecraft once the initial rush of borrowing of it had subsided — perhaps circa 1919. But more likely the nature of this particular story might have been called to his attention by someone in his circle, at some point in the mid 1920s, before he fully formulated shoggoths. While it appears we have no evidence of such a reading that I know of, we do know that in 1924 Lovecraft was discovering overlooked items such as Wells’s collection Thirty Strange Stories (1897, read January 1924), and Wells’s classic The Time Machine (1895, read November 1924). He was also doing much ‘catch up’ reading for his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, with the aid of the New York libraries, the many used bookstores, and the private libraries of friends. Could he also have been sampling the best “strange stories” of Doyle, Kipling and others at this time?
Witch-craft
16 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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 50s
15 Wednesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
In the slicks
14 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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.
Make an Elder Thing in Spore
14 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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.
Cthulhu: Death May Die
11 Saturday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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.
