Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

HPLinks #9 – swamps, theory, a century of Rats, a new bio graphic-novel, and more

14 Monday Oct 2024

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HPLinks #9.

“[in the] foreign colonies one sees a gradual Americanisation” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, February 1932.

* Sky News Italy reports on a new graphic novel about the master H.P. Lovecraft…

Recounting the life of the famous writer in a dreamlike and imaginary way, a soon-to-be-published graphic novel combines biographical and fantastic features to explore the genesis of H.P.’s literary works.

The chunky new graphic novel is HPL – Una vita di Lovecraft. By writer and cartoonist Marco Taddei, illustrated by Maurizio Lacavalla. Lacavalla has a rough and inky style that reminds me a little of Nicole Claveloux…

To be published in Italian by Edizioni BD. The 234-page table-trembler was launched in September at the Treviso Comic Book Festival, Italy, and is set for general release on 15th October 2024. Amazon UK shows an affordable £9 Kindle version (presumably with a free-sample on release), while Amazon Italy has both the digital and dead-tree versions.

* L’Antique Sentier has a well-illustrated new blog post on “La decadence de Red Hook”, in French, with extended translation of Lovecraft’s letters. Worth seeing for the pictures alone, though of course you can auto-translate.

* Swamp Atlas has a new and long survey of marshes, bogs and swamps in H.P. Lovecraft’s works, including those found in the poetry. In Italian.

* From 2012 but new to me, “H.P. Lovecraft: creencia estetica y asentimiento intelectual”. Freely available as part of the Catalonian open-access journal Taula. Examines the formation of…

Lovecraft’s theory of cosmic horror” arising from “the deep connection between his narratives and scientific images of the world, his distinctions between intellectual assent and aesthetic belief and between the mundanely gruesome and true cosmic fear.” Also notes how this feeds into… “the metaphysical assumptions that underpin his late literature.

* Free in open-access from Brazil, the 294-page ebook As Nuances Do Gotico: do setecentos a atualidade (‘The Nuances of Gothic: from the 17th century to the present’) (2023). The lead essay is on the modern nature of the monstrosity revealed in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

* The German Lovecraftians reported in September that the latest annual… “double-issue of our magazine Lovecrafter is nearing completion”. This year the magazine takes the topics of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ / ‘Lovecraft and the cinema’.

* In France, the article “The Rats in the Walls: un centenaire, mon chat, et la restauration monumentale” celebrates the centenary of “The Rats in the Walls”. Freely available online, in French.

* A review of the new Dagon videogame adaptation, as played on the PlayStation console, from PlayStation Universe…

Dagon Complete Edition is a captivating, engaging, and informative piece of content that truly loves and respects H.P. Lovecraft. […] the visual quality is so enjoyable and vivid that the [one hour of] bare-bones gameplay never wears out its welcome.

The reviewer usefully notes that one of the DLC easter-eggs is a cel-shaded toon adaptation of Lovecraft’s very juvenile tale “The Little Glass Bottle”, written when the budding master was about seven years old.

* Horacio Lalia: Una Vida Dibujada, a 2023 book on the life and work of an acclaimed comics artist. He has produced several books of Lovecraft adaptations, among his other horror comics.

* New to me, a collection of comic-book adaptations HPL Vol. 1: Comic Adaptations of the Works of H.P. Lovecraft, all by Canadian Nick O’Gorman. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, “The Music of Erich Zann”, “The Doom that Came for Sarnath”, and “The Cats of Ulthar”. Apparently the Herbert West: Reanimator serial is also made to fit into the book’s 156 pages, and thus I guess we should expect a little truncation. Published by Target Destroyed in summer 2023, and available as a budget Kindle ebook as well as in paper. The maker (I think I had previously noted his recent Imprisoned with the Pharaohs comic-book adaptation) expects to eventually illustrate all Lovecraft’s works in this way, culminating with “At The Mountains of Madness”. The Vol. 1 book is “quite violent and gory” says one reviewer, so it’s not a kiddie-comics edition of Lovecraft.

* In Spain, the citizens of the city of Pamplona celebrates their link with Lovecraft, in the form of a new book…

In 1927, the American writer H.P. Lovecraft had a strange dream that took him to ancient Pompaelo [Pamplona]. An illustrated book will recreate the story that was left unfinished. Lovecraft dreamed that he was an Ancient Roman and was undergoing the ancestral rites of the so-called ‘mountain people’. Almost a hundred years later, author and editor Oihane Amantegi and illustrator Unai Gonzalez have come together to create the first adaptation of Lovecraft’s dream-story. In order to carry it out, they have launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Verkami platform. […] the story shows the extensive knowledge that Lovecraft had of ancient history, of Hispania [Spain] and of the Basques in particular.

It’s already been handsomely crowd-funded, with 23 days still to go.

* In table-top games, a big crowdfunder for Trail of Cthulhu 2E (2nd edition) is being launched about now. Trail is a core Lovecraftian investigation RPG that uses the Gumshoe play system.

* A new links page for Bob Byrne’s collected Robert E. Howard essays posted at Black Gate.

* Archive.org is still offline, after a serious hack. The Wayback Machine is back online today, though in read-only mode. The Archive is reportedly due back in “days, not weeks”, apparently. When it’s back, you may want to save out your own torrent magnets and host them on a blog post etc as a backup. So long as you’re still seeding what you posted, your files should (theoretically) then still be available to the public even if the Archive goes down again.

* And finally, the largest exploration spacecraft ever built has today successfully launched on a SpaceX rocket. The craft will search for evidence of alien life in the dark waters below a frozen ocean, on a large and mysterious moon near the edge of the Solar System. Very Lovecraftian!

— End-quote —

“There recently appeared before the public a rather unsophisticated volume entitled Pollyanna, which preached a sweetly artificial doctrine of converting ills into blessings by the contemplation of possible calamities still more direful. [Though the book proved a success with girl readers,] poor Pollyanna became the target of every penny-a-line hack reviewer and little-wit in Grub-Street [i.e. mass-market journalism]. They loftily demonstrated that the easing of melancholy by force of imagination is a vastly unscientific thing. Impossible, they vowed! Or, even if possible, it ought not to be […] The New York Tribune, in fact, deemed the inoffensive Pollyanna sufficiently culpable to merit a sneering editorial. So runs the worldly-wise current of twentieth-century life! Your modern philosopher had rather be mature and miserable, than childlike and contented; and he deems you a monstrous imbecile if you can be happy at a time when he thinks you have not sufficient cause to be happy. Heaviness of spirit, he doth asseverate, is a sacred obligation of every thoughtful and responsible citizen. [… I confess to] no little amusement at the wailing of these worshippers of morbid maturity. […] It is dangerous to dabble in realities, and if more of us were able to retain the happy illusions of our infancy, those illusions would be so much nearer truth [in reality, and yet meanwhile] on the pleasures of the fancy rests all the mighty framework of art, poesy, and song”. — H.P. Lovecraft, “In the Editor’s Study”, October 1916.

More dark and character LORAs

08 Tuesday Oct 2024

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

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A few more Lovecraft-adjacent LORAs, released or spotted recently. These are free ‘style-guidance’ plugins for AI image-generation models based on Stable Diffusion 1.5.

* Nightmares of the Machine Age LORA. Vehicle designs to inspire your Lovecraftmobile.

50s Noir Movie LORA.

* Tabletop RPG / Call of Cthulhu – Old style Photos LORA. Apparently requires trigger-word retro, not specified on the record-page.

The same maker also has Call of Cthulhu RPG document generators, 1, 2 and 3.

The Great Cthulhu – Character LORA. The same maker also has Deep Ones and The King in Yellow LORAs. Note the Clip Skip requirements.

Still waiting for a good ‘Lovecraft as character’ LORA.

HPLinks #8 – Yog-sothothery, Ward Illustrated, movies, weird non-fiction, catlands and more

06 Sunday Oct 2024

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HPLinks #8.

Fully fun-checked.

* A new Italian book of essays was published on 2nd October 2024, Yog-sothothery – Oltre la soglia dell’immaginari (‘Yog-Sothothery – Beyond the threshold of the imagination’), edited by Salvatore Santangelo and published by Castelvecchi Editore. The book…

explores the life and works of H.P. Lovecraft, highlighting his unique cosmogony [and] includes essays by experts on Lovecraft’s work, including: Angelo Clementi, graduate in philosophy, screenwriter and journalist; Virginia Como, graduate in literature, specialized in philology, linguistics and cultural anthropology; Pietro Gurriello, founder of the Dagon Press magazine and editor of the Lovecraftian Studies magazine; Paolo Mariani, writer of short stories in the horror and fantasy genre; Adriano Monti Buzzetti Colella, essayist, journalist and head of the Culture Editorial team of TG2; Miska Ruggeri, journalist with experience in politics, travel and culture; Salvatore Santangelo, journalist and university professor, expert in international politics.

The publisher’s website finds nothing for a search for either ‘Lovecraft’ or ‘Sothothery’. Nothing about the book on the front page, either. But at least Amazon Italy has a page which reveals the book is out, is 160 pages and is in print only. No table-of-contents, that I can find.

* Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, illustrated by Jason Eckhardt (2024). The book is available now from Necronomicon Press. It also has maps, handily placed on the back cover.

* Mark Finn’s biography Blood & Thunder: The Life of Robert E. Howard is now available as a Kindle ebook, and note that…

This is the updated and expanded second edition of the Monkeybrain Books 2006 edition. This is the author’s ‘director’s cut’ of his popular biography […] a total of 35,000 more words

* I fondly if vaguely recall the 1970s British Orbit paperbacks of R.E. Howard tales. I’m fairly sure I had Worms of the Earth and Swords of Shahrazar, if not others, in the 1980s. There’s now a new YouTube video celebrating and showing them, “Robert E. Howard in Orbit | 70s Brit paperbacks”.

* The local Portland Tribune reports “It’s a cornucopia of cosmic horror in the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and gives handy summaries of many films. I’ve linked to an Archive.is copy, since the Tribune region-blocks all visitors from the UK and EU.

* Over in Holland, I also noticed a Zienema: Lovecraftian Halloween Special cinema evening in Groningen. Set for 29th October 2024.

* Now crowdfunding, All Tomorrows by C.M. Kosemen, a solo-artist artbook and apparent timeline of future ‘speculative evolution’…

I knew that the many weird species I created would be impossible to unite with a single coherent story, so I went with historic narration — similar to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Olaf Stapledon’s incredible books, Star Maker and Last and First Men.

* The Silver Key has a new review of the academic book
Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft (2019).

* The scholarly journal The New Ray Bradbury Review now has the latest issue #8 online, which has the theme of Bradbury and the early U.S. space programme. Free and open-access.

* A brave attempt at starting a new paid-for non-fiction web-a-zine with a leftist slant, Speculative Insight: space, magic, footnotes. Partly paywalled, subscription, and no RSS feed.

* The latest SFFaudio Podcast #806 summons Robert Silverberg’s “Demons of Cthulhu” (1959). Freely available online.

* I now have the volume of Lovecraft’s letters to Toldridge in my hands. I see it doesn’t include the letters she sent to him and which have survived. Some of which are at the John Hay repository and can be freely seen online…

   bdr:422815
   bdr:422816
   bdr:422817
   bdr:422818
   bdr:422819

* Spotted on eBay, a ‘perhaps’ business-card for HPL’s optician? We know that the younger HPL wore glasses, loved the upmarket covered Arcade of shops as his natural home for purchases and haircuts, and that when young he felt that money was no object (i.e. he wouldn’t ‘shop around’ to get a cheaper pair).

Slightly weighing against this possibility is the mid 1890s ad in his boyhood astronomy journal, for the Providence optician R.H. Allen. The boy Lovecraft has spotted in the newspaper that Allen was selling a second-hand astronomical instrument of some worth.

* Also found on eBay, another ‘perhaps’ picture. A curious and rather precarious-looking building that may have been a familiar sight to Lovecraft, on the seaward approaches to and from his favourite town of Newport…

* And I also spotted a nice set of pictures from someone selling a set of the Gollancz hardbacks, UK ‘yellow jacket’ editions once easily found in our public libraries.

* And finally, I came across the “weird science-fiction adjacent” ‘zine Perhaps You Might Try The Soup, hailing from the inner-city ‘catlands’ of Dublin, Ireland. I hadn’t before heard the word ‘catlands’, but it’s a fine psychogeographic shorthand. Where people keep cats in inner-city England (and presumably also Dublin), the streets are nearly always more pleasant than streets where mostly dogs are kept or no pets at all. It’s a simple and effective metric, and an apt word. One can even imagine an eccentric map which marks out the ‘catlands’ of a large town or city. I find that the word first occurs in Scribner’s Magazine in 1893, where in W.E. Henley’s long poem “Arabian Nights” (man recalls the tales and magical lands he knew in boyhood) the figure of Puss-in-Boots is described as… “King over all the Catlands, present and past and future”. Thus the word has ‘prior art’, and could presumably be used as the title of a new book or comic — without fear of trademark trolls.

— End-quote —

“One may easily sympathise for a time with the rebellious artists who point out the insignificance of human inhibitions, but they begin to fatigue one when they persist in denying equal insignificance to the freakishly extravagant instincts which they so consistently exalt. Where so little sense of proportion exists, it is impossible to feel any sense of serious power — and as art material, this conventional perversity is becoming woefully hackneyed …” — Lovecraft writing to Belknap Long, the quote being a possible source for the title of the forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

HPLinks #7 – Esquire, Bok, the voice of CAS, dogs and cats, Shadow Out of Time movie, and more

30 Monday Sep 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

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HPLinks #7.

* With thanks to ‘Eastman’, fresh scans of “Lovecraft cultist” by J.C. Henneberger as published in Esquire magazine, March 1946. Also “The Ten-cent Ivory Tower” by John Wilstach in Esquire magazine, in the Christmas issue dated January 1946 (with a continuation on page 160). And an author’s rebuttal in Esquire, June 1946. I commented at length on these back in 2020, though the post’s images were later lost in the site-move.

* New from the HPLHS store, the book Night-Black Deeds, being an “enriched” edition of Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”.

* A new Hannes Bok LORA, being an illustration-style add-on for Flux. Flux is the latest ‘hot thing’ in AI image-generators, and more stable than the wayward Stable Diffusion.

* Deep Cuts takes a lengthy look into Lovecraft collaborator Hazel Heald’s Letters To August Derleth.

* Insolita: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares do Insolito, da Fantasia e do Imaginario (‘Insolita: Brazilian Journal of Studies of the Unusual, Fantastic and Imaginary’). In open-access, with seven issues all in Portuguese. Very much focused on horror and the weird, and with a strong tilt toward screen culture. Articles have included ‘Cyclopean Games: the Lovecraftian heritage in games’, and the latest issue has an article on the film adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space”.

* New on YouTube, Clark Ashton Smith Reads a Letter to H.P. Lovecraft (1930). Genuine letter? Who knows, but the voice is well done. I assume AI-generated + some kind of ‘olde time radio’ audio filters, but perhaps not.

* New from Psilowave Records, a 70-piece, 8-figure, “Colour out of Space” custom 8-inch figure set. Ordering now.

* 2024 illustrations and storyboarding roughs for the Lovecraft story “Cats of Ulthar”. By a student at the Academy of Applied Arts, University of Rijeka, Hungary. Also a short account of his making of an illustrated book. Freely available online, though not free to re-use.

* Another interactive game which adapts Lovecraft’s “Dagon” is due for release on 10th October 2024. Announcement Trailer on YouTube.

* A new free audiobook on LibriVox, an A-Z Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel (1953). The focus of the tome was on American books, and each entry included a plot digest. On pursuing it on Archive.org one finds a whole lot of best-forgotten 1920s and 30s novels of lost races and ‘princesses in need of rescue’, but also some works that may interest. This is the format used for entries…

As you can see… plot spoilers.

* Horror comics have risen from the dead. The latest Comics Experience podcast peers nervously through the cemetery gates.

* Slightly misleading… the official George Kuchar (1942-2011) bibliography lists “Graphic Classics: H.P. Lovecraft, Vol. 4, Eureka Productions, 2002. (2nd edition includes Kuchar’s bio of H.P. Lovecraft, originally published in Arcade in 1975, [and this 2nd edition was dated] 2007)”. But I see that the 2002 edition also had a reprint of the tendentious 1970s ‘underground comix’ bio-strip.

* A U.S. legal case has reportedly led to the… “U.S. Patent and Trademark Office cancelling Marvel and DC Comics’ joint trademark for the word ‘Super Hero'”. Superhero, super-hero, and variants were also covered, until now. Creators and publishers are now free to trade using the word(s) in the U.S. Springing to mind… “HPL: Supine-hero!”.

* The International Documentary Association has a review of the acclaimed art-house ‘Lovecraft meets Pessoa’ movie Telepathic Letters, reviewed by a fellow film-maker… “In the film, Lovecraft says, ‘The universe may be a dream, but it cannot be considered a human dream'”.

* The IMDb is listing The Shadow Out of Time (2025), a $500k low-budget movie from Weird Howard Films. Due for release October 2025.

* At the Philippe Labaune Gallery in New York City, “Hell, Ink & Water: The Art Of Mike Mignola”. From 19th September – 26th October 2024. The gallery has an online one-page version of the ‘for sale’ items in the show, though it takes a while to load.

* At the Heath Robinson Museum on the western outskirts of London (UK), the large exhibition “The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy”. From 28th September – 5th January 2025.

* And finally, I’ve ordered the volume of Lovecraft’s letters to Toldridge, which should arrive before mid October. I’ll hope to post some notes on these letters by late October and then into November. These letters are more cheery, by all accounts, than the Sully letters — and thus not such a show-stopper as those were.

HPLinks #6 – LitFest, Dongbei, MythCon, and a mysteriously foxy map in HPL’s own hand

23 Monday Sep 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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Welcome to HPLinks #6.

* A short Q&A interview with the Innsmouth Literary Festival organisers. The event happens here in the UK on 28th September 2024, and will bring together Mythos writers, publishers, editors and collectors of weird fiction.

* Leftist Spanish newspaper El Pais this week has a new feature article on “Dias felices e impios en el club de lectura Lovecraft” (‘Happy, Ungodly Days at the Lovecraft Book Club’) ($ paywall, in Spanish). The Club being a group of fans who apparently strike the journalist as unusually cheerful for Lovecraftians.

* According to Amazon UK, Francois Baranger’s oversized L’Ombre sur Innsmouth illustre releases in French in mid October 2024, not 2025 as was mooted earlier in the year.

The French Druillet – Lovecraft artbook and the English edition of Tanabe’s Cthulhu manga are expected about the same time.

* A recent long podcast on “Modern Religion and H.P. Lovecraft”, with Christopher Ruocchio and Austin Freeman. Freeman is the editor of the excellent recent book on Lovecraft and aspects of theology and the Bible.

* From Brazil in open-access, the new article “Lovecraft e a logica dos transitos culturais” (‘Lovecraft and the logic of cultural transits’). Examines his transits into and consequent… “massive penetration [into the culture, and how this disturbs] “classic dichotomies and dominant philosophical and aesthetic perspectives”.

* A new bibliography of Lovecraft in Hebrew translation, via S.T. Joshi. Who, in the same post, reveals he has finished his massive survey history of atheism.

* From Indonesia in English, an open-access journal article on Lovecraftian Elements in the Writing of Three Icons of the Dongbei Renaissance…

Literary works based on Dongbei (China’s Northeast) or composed by Dongbei-born writers have been playing a preponderant role in modern Chinese literature” […] “the three leading neo-Dongbei writers portray preternatural creatures, and their narratives convey fear of the unknown and nameless approximations of form” and thus their work “bears resemblance to the Cthulhu Mythos”.

* Partial online proceedings of the recent Mythcon 53 (August 2024), with videos and transcripts, plus some PDF papers. About 75% Tolkien, but with other papers. Such as: “Clifford Simak’s Big Front Yard”; “Fantasist of Middle America: L. Frank Baum and his Works”; “Middle West and the Pastoral Ideal in the American Artistic Landscape”; “The Tragic Life and Misconstrued Work of Jules Verne”; and “Wisdom and Life Lessons in the Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and David R. Slayton”. Freely available online, though they still await some PDFs.

* Talking of Simak, it’s good to learn that the long-awaited final two volumes of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak were released in 2023. Though (of the set) these two still appear to lack Kindle editions on Amazon UK. 14 volumes in total. #13 was Buckets of Diamonds (tales of strange events in otherwise ordinary American towns) and the final #14 was Epilog (Simak’s robot stories).

* A pleasing new quick-sketch of Klarkash Ton by MrZarono, at DeviantArt.

* A John Carter of Mars audio series, now fully funded on Kickstarter. The $84k+ raised will enable… “the first dramatic audio adaptation”, multi-cast and with lush soundscapes. Though note it’s an ‘adaptation’, rather than an ‘unabridged reading’ + cast and FX.

* A slick new directory of 920 illustrators understood by Midjourney, the popular paid-for online AI image-generator. Illustrated, and with a search-box, so you can quickly look for the names of long-ago pulp artists.

* Compare the above with Arcanorium at DeviantArt, a huge and magnificent selection of old-school painted fantasy art. No AI involved.

“Wizard’s Revenge” by Don Maitz.

* And finally, rather less prettily, my cleaning of Lovecraft’s map of “Foxfield”. This being his unused setting for a weird tale. Found on the back of one of the letters whose paper was used to write “The Dreams in the Witch House” in early 1932. The letter he used for this map is dated 25th October 1930, therefore this map must have been drawn between then and early 1932. Here I’ve carefully removed the typed letter in Photoshop, to leave you with only the pencil map…

His “1932 | 1692” note suggests the likely years that could have been involved with a Foxfield tale: an investigation in 1932 of events in that place in 1692 — the year in which the Salem Witch Trials began. Thus one might think of it as a fold-out visual addition to his Commonplace Book of story-ideas. (With thanks to ‘Eastman’ for the Web link to the Brown repository page containing the scan). (Update: Cthulhu & Co. has a transcription online).

HPLinks #5 – Endowed Fellowship, shadow-puppets, strange climates, weird law, and more

17 Tuesday Sep 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #5.

* Applications for The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H.P. Lovecraft, at Brown University in Providence, are due by 17th January 2025.

* I note that Brown University has a list of theses and dissertations that were done at Brown and relate to Brown and the parts of Providence adjacent to the university campus. Of possible interest to Lovecraft researchers are: Fox Point: the disintegration of a neighborhood and the related Community building: The Azorean, Cape Verdean, and Continental Portuguese in Fox Point, 1900-1940; Arsenic contamination in Providence’s East Side (relevant to “Colour”?); The problem of academic reputation at Brown University in the 1930’s which might perhaps marginally illuminate Lovecraft’s presence on the edge of the campus at that time; and Choosing Genes: the eugenics of Herbert Eugene Walter [1867-1945]. The latter was a full Biology professor at Brown from 1923, a leading heredity expert, and he later also taught at the Marine Biological Institute of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. As such he sounds like a rather interesting figure to include as a character, or to at least reference, in a 1930s New England Mythos adventure.

* H.P. Lovecraft Film Fest Kickstarter, live and… already funded in a flash! The event is now set for 3rd-6th October, and note that the online “Streaming Program is 18th-22nd October” 2024.

* Nighttide Mag has a report on Dreams of Light and Shadow: TL Wiswell’s Shadow Puppet performances… “At this year’s NecronomiCon, Tonnvane ‘TL’ Wiswell performed shadow play adaptations of two of H.P. Lovecraft’s weirder short stories.”

* The Rise of Cthulhu blog has the post “NecronomiCon Providence 2024 part 1” which has notes on the panels he attended. Part two remembers the spectacular Lovecraftian WaterFire parade of 2013 in Providence.

* In France, Actualitte takes a closer peep at the handsome new Druillet et Lovecraft artbook.

* An Italian Lovecraftian points out that Lovecraft and Barlow did alarmist ‘global warming’ fiction first, with “Till A’ the Seas” (January 1935, for publication in the Californian for summer 1935).

* A call to contribute to The Pulpster #34, which for 2025 will have the theme of ‘Masters of Blood and Thunder’. The theme centering being the writers Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars, Tarzan etc), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood), and Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River, crime novels, original King Kong movie script). The editors also seek articles on your favourite villain from the pulps.

* The new paper “The Law is Weirder than AI” (2024)… “Primarily through the lens of author H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales, I argue that the law is very weird [and this then leads me] to an assessment of the weird claims surrounding ‘artificial intelligence’.” Freely available online.

* From the Ukraine, a new short discussion paper on “The horrors of Lovecraft: disgust and repulsion”. In English and freely available online.

* Egregoric Times has a blog post that briefly considers “H.P. Lovecraft, Horror Writing and ‘Transliminality’. The author wonders if there may be neurological basis for openness to what appears on the surface to be “paranormal or extrasensory experiences”, especially in certain conducive places and atmospheres. I recall I read a weak one-page guest-article on a very similar topic, in New Scientist magazine, a few weeks ago.

* DMR reviews The Best of Jules De Grandin by Seabury Quinn, one of the most popular Weird Tales writers… “I kept thinking, ‘How on earth was this guy more popular than Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft?'”.

* Coming in October from Hippocampus, the book Where the Silent Ones Watch, a chunky anthology in which… “twenty-seven authors and poets visit William Hope Hodgson’s worlds and concepts, to dig deep into his mythologies and delve into fresh mysteries in unexpected times, locations, and interpretations.”

* The following paperback covers are completely new to me. I had thought (though not as a collector) that I was broadly familiar by now with the 1970s paperbacks of the British publisher Panther. But who knew they put out two volumes of Machen? Not me. Vol. 2 being dated 1975. Neither appeared later in the used bookshops I frequented, in all the time I was assiduously browsing and purchasing. Ah, for the long-lost days of the 50-pence second-hand paperback, or ‘three for £1’…

* Also new to me, I see The Meeplesmith has a nice line in Lovecraftian miniatures for tabletop gaming. Lots of them, relatively affordable and nothing ‘sold out’ as yet. There’s a tiny figure of Lovecraft himself. But there’s no stylised Lovecraft Circle (imagine: a bespectacled young Barlow, the old anarchist Morton, the New York dandy Belknap Long, straight-man Leeds leading his freak-show friends, etc) as yet, and no Erich Zann-like figure that I could see. Which seems a missed opportunity.

* A real-life “Sahara Expedition – In Search of the Unknown 2024”, happening 23rd – 27th Oct 2024 in Tunisia. A 1930s Lovecraftian LARP adventure in a real desert.

* And finally, the sometime-Lovecraftian creative Alan Moore on language…

Q: Could you disclose to our readers some of your favourite and most interesting occult artifacts?

A: My most powerful, without a doubt, is the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged. That is the best book anyone will ever read. To understand language is to understand what is hidden, which is to say, the occult.

Moore also has his own book coming soon, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

HPLinks #4 – table-trembling translations, Polish letters, Martians in 1924, ‘Little Bobby’, Tom Sutton, Lovecraftian tabletop gaming, and more

09 Monday Sep 2024

Posted by in Films & trailers, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #4.

* French publisher Gallimard is to publish a huge table-trembling single-volume slab of Lovecraft’s tales in French. Recits (‘Tales’) is due shortly before Halloween 2024, and has 29 new translations in 1,408-pages. I’m told the La Pleiade imprint being used is highly prestigious in France.

* A new Polish edition of Lovecraft’s selected letters, Lovecraft Listy Wybrane 1906-1927 (‘Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1906-1927’). Due for publication in a 544-page hardback by Vesper, on 13th September 2024. The book’s cover doesn’t inspire, but I dug up the publisher’s page and this reassured me. At the end of the blurb found there, one reads that…

The letters were selected and translated by Mateusz Kopacz. He is a Lovecraft expert and translator of, among others, the major Lovecraft biography by S.T. Joshi.

* Edgar Pera’s new feature-length film Telepathic Letters (2024, 69 mins), now on the film festival circuit. It’s getting a lot of flak from the AI-haters, it seems, as he used Stable Diffusion to make the movie.

   i) The Trailer.

   ii) An ICS review… “avatars of Pessoa and Lovecraft speak to one another … Pera introduces two thematic threads that both Pessoa and Lovecraft believed to be the foundation of humanity – fear and madness – and explores how they both influence artistic expression”.

   iii) A Cineuropa review of Telepathic Letters… “The film seamlessly shifts between documentary and portmanteau horror, and its multifaceted formalism could also be seen as a video-art piece – a collage of bizarre, unsettling and otherworldly imagery”.

   iv) The Hollywood Reporter had an interview with Edgar Pera about the new film, in English. ($ possible paywall, but I had the whole interview).

… while preparing The Nothingness Club, about Pessoa’s heteronyms, I found many more invisible links between them. Now I have tons of their books, [where I have] written in the margins “Link Lovecraft” or “Link Pessoa.” And since we were already preparing then The Spiral of Fear, a Lovecraft feature, I thought that making a film about them might be a good way to make Pessoa and Lovecraft readers meet.” (Pera)

   v) A long interview on Telepathic Letters in the open-access journal Rotura, with choice screenshots. In Portuguese.

   vi) The Portuguese newspaper Espresso has what might be a new profile-interview with Pera, but it’s behind a $ paywall.

* Postscripts to Darkness has a new long article on “”The dread contemplation of infinity”: Some Thoughts on George M. Gould and Cosmic Horror Before Lovecraft”. Continued in the follow-on long post “Lovecraft, Lucretius, and Leonard’s Locomotive-God: Further Thoughts on Cosmic Horror”. The latter essay…

further explores Lovecraft’s developing conception of cosmic horror by focusing on another of Lovecraft’s under-recognized contemporary influences; namely, the American professor, poet, memoirist, and translator, William Ellery Leonard.

* Centauri Dreams tunes in to “The ‘Freakish Radio Writings’ of 1924”. In August 1924 the earth seemed to be receiving radio messages from a fast-approaching Mars, at least according to credulous press reports. It was actually bona-fide research that…

was serious SETI for its day. A dirigible was launched from the U.S. Naval Observatory carrying radio equipment for these observations, with the capability of relaying its signals back to a laboratory on the ground. A military cryptographer was brought in to monitor […] any signals from [the closely approaching] Mars as detected by the airship

Very likely to have been a point of discussion with Lovecraft at the Kalem Club, I would imagine. And even today it may be a real-life hook on which some Mythos writers could hang a 1920s story.

* Congratulations to all involved with The Fossil, journal of the historians of amateur journalism. It has now reached issue 400 (July 2024). The issue is freely available online in PDF, and includes… “Past Editors Ken Faig, Jr. (2024-2012) and Don Peyer (1996-1997) recalling their years editing The Fossil, and Monica Wasserman describing the involvement of Sonia Greene Lovecraft in amateur journalism.” Plus a note about the mysterious listing of a “H.P. Lovecraft in the 1917 Los Angeles City Directory”. Another real-life hook which may interest some Mythos writers, I’d suggest.

* Wormwoodiana reviews the new book L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy…

Anyone interested in how a modern literary estate was usurped can learn from the vitriol and scheming profusely detailed in this book. […] Derleth comes across as scheming, duplicitous, and extremely petty. The evidence is all here.

* Deep Cuts has a new long article on the scholarly Mexican work of Lovecraft’s young friend Barlow, “Deeper Cut: R.H. Barlow & the Codex Huitzilopochtli”.

* An article in the Italian open-access journal Classica Vox, “Exotika e Outer Ones”, sees a connection between a 1927 lecture heard by Lovecraft, given by Sir James Rennell Rodd on classical antiquity, and the story “The Whisperer in Darkeness”. In Italian, with English abstract.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the French journal Revue Roumaine for April 1966. In a review of a volume of the poetry of Emil Botta, one finds…

For in Emil Botta’s poetry there is nothing more striking than this feeling of perpetual flight towards a ‘beyond’ that the poet tries to evoke. Botta’s poetry is an attempt to fly over a territory, completely unknown, in a strange and sad universe above a “no man’s land” located between life and death. Let us note a striking resemblance, although devoid of any material possibility of filiation, between Botta’s lyrical adventures and the dreams of another great dreamer of our time, Lovecraft. There are almost disturbing correspondences here that seem to suggest a coherence of their dream universe. But while Lovecraft is a narrator whose descents into the depths of dreams are pregnant with dark events, Botta’s poetry pilots brief, violent, exhausting plunges into this obscure empire of shadows.

* The Spanish open-access journal Helice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction publishes in Spanish and some English. Of special note is the 2023 English article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe (1838-1938), and Beyond: A Historical Overview”. Freely available online.

* DMR has new review of Tom Sutton’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” Portfolio (1978). An item new to me, and with impressive penmanship judging by the scans shown…

See also the 2023 Dark Worlds Quarterly article “The Lovecraftian Tom Sutton at Charlton Comics”. I think I actually had a couple of his Charlton issues in my collection, back in the day. Long lost, now. But I see that a 148-page collection of the best of Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things (Charlton) was issued in 2015, and still appears to be available in a $90 hardback in the USA.

* Said to be newly available on a streaming movie service in the USA, the HPLHS movie adaptations The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness. Though they seem to be region-locked, and thus are not yet available for me in the UK…

* The religious multi-author online magazine Protestia reports “Oldest Baptist Church in America Hosts Cthulhu For Horror-Themed NecronomiCon”, with some interior pictures of the event. Reports ‘with a frown’ and a wry tone, I note. But that modest reaction in itself shows how far we’ve come, from the foaming-at-the-mouth of the 1980s evangelical ‘satanic panic’.

* Mysteries of Montreal has a short overview of the NecronomiCon 2024 RPG gaming-related panel discussions which he attended, and some criticisms.

* RPG maker Chaosium’s Fall and Winter Releases list for 2024. Includes a new Investigator’s Guide for Cthulhu by Gaslight (the Lovecraftian RPG set in late Victorian / early Edwardian Britain, as I recall). I imagine this may interest both Mythos and Sherlock Holmes writers, as well as the intended audience of RPG players. Also due from Chaosium before Christmas is At The Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, which looks amusing.

* And finally, an online museum dedicated to the various felines Famous On th InterWebz. Lovecraft’s cat not yet among them.

HPLinks #3 – revisions, the Lovecraft Annual, Old Worm, Lovecraftian theatre in Hamburg, telepathic letters and more

02 Monday Sep 2024

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Welcome to HPLinks #3.

* New as a limited-edition hardcover book from Hippocampus, Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction Volume 4 (Revisions and Collaborations): A Variorum Edition…

“this final collection includes all known revisions and collaborations undertaken by Lovecraft on behalf of his friends and clients. As with previous volumes in this series, the texts preserved herein scrupulously follow archival manuscripts, typescripts, or original publications, and constitute the definitive edition of these stories. For the first time, students and scholars of Lovecraft can see at a glance all the textual variants in all relevant appearances of a story—manuscript, first publication in magazines, and first book publications. The result is an illuminating record of the textual history of the tales, in an edition that supersedes all those that preceded it.”

The Eddy collaboration tales, which I seem to recall are now out-of-copyright, are able to be included.

* The latest Lovecraft Annual scholarly journal also appears to be shipping from Hippocampus Press. Or at least, Amazon UK says it can whizz me a next-day copy if needed, and Joshi reports that he has had his editor’s copies in the mail.

I see that the 2024 contents list includes an essay by Joshi on “The Lovecraft Letters Project”, as well as an advance review of the forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

Note: If you can’t get to the Hippocampus Press website, change your DNS provider in your Web browser. Cloudflare in particular doesn’t seem to be able to access the site.

* A new book-chapter by philosopher Graham Harman “The Weird and the Absurd” ($ paywall, but with a free abstract). He contrasts the weird (H.P. Lovecraft) with the absurd (Dali), with a view to characterising the contours of knowledge itself.

* EuroSiberia has a new long essay on “Lovecraft and Multipolarity”.

* From Switzerland, a long article in French on “Le naturaliste danois qui avait ete ressuscite par Lovecraft” (‘The Danish naturalist who was resurrected by Lovecraft’). Which means Olaus Wormius (1588-1654), ‘Old Worm’.

* From the Ukraine’s Forum for Linguistic Studies, a new multi-author paper on “Proper Names as Presupposition Triggers in the Horror Story — Semantic and Functional Aspects”. Being a linguistic study of the names in Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear”. Freely available online, in English.

* The new short book, Ripples from Carcosa: H.P. Lovecraft, Haunted Landscapes, and True Detective (July 2024) is now available as a 142-page paperback. The Amazon blurb is not especially illuminating. However, the back-cover blurb is much clearer and more enticing. This suggests a close and fan-friendly scholarly study of the sources for the first season of the U.S. True Detective TV series (2014, eight episodes). Of which… “first and foremost, there is H.P. Lovecraft…”. No reviews that I can find as yet, though I see that in 2023 S.T. Joshi perused an advance copy. He described it as… “a searching examination of the first season of True Detective and the influence of Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Chambers upon it.” (Note: buyers should not confuse it with the Chaosium RPG book of the same name).

* I don’t normally note the ongoing wealth of Lovecraftian anthologies, but since I enjoy Sherlock Holmes tales I’ll make an exception for the new Sherlock & Friends: Eldritch Investigations (June 2024). The book arises from a successful $3,000 crowd-funder, and offers “nine adventures” across some 80,000 words. Publisher Tule Fog Press has the contents list, and this also notes the protagonist(s) in each story, e.g. “The Adventure of the Cats of Ulthar” is a tale of “Miss Lois Cayley, a spirited young bicycling adventuress”. No reviews as yet, but one of the editors usefully added on his blog that the aim was for a collection of… “tales [which] ‘channel the spirits’ of the Victorian and Edwardian detectives who graced the dime novels and pulp magazines”. Sounds fun. A free-sample and a £5 Kindle ebook makes it less of a gamble, should you be tempted.

* Also of note, but also an unknown quantity, the anthology Bound in Blood: Stories of Cursed Books, Damned Libraries and Unearthly Authors (Sept 2024).

* Also coming in September 2024, a Kindle ebook in Italian, Atlante delle terre del sogno di Lovecraft (‘Atlas of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands’). The blurb has it as… “compiled by Carlo Baja Guarienti, aided by the pencil of Alberto Ponticelli, with an afterword by S.T. Joshi and the map drawn by Francesca Baerald.” It’s to be an ebook equivalent to 155 pages, according to Amazon. Sounds to me like a gazetteer of places, with a single map, rather than an atlas with lots of map-plates.

* Hamburg, Germany, again. The city seems to have a thing for Lovecraft theatre. Indeed, they now actually have a Lovecraft theatre. In Hamburg… “the new Miskatonic Theater opens on September 6th with the play “The Call of Cthulhu” based on the tale by H.P. Lovecraft.”

The new theatre building, the only dedicated horror theatre in the world, here looking very suitable as a home for a ‘Miskatonic Theater’.

Sadly, after a great deal of hard work to open this new venue, the nearly fitted-out theatre was then gutted by burglars. Who appear to have stolen everything not nailed down. Apparently the police had no cameras in the area, since “unknown persons” is the only description of the crime that I can find. Anyway… no-one has recovered the stolen property and thus the Theatre now has a crowd-funder campaign to replace what was stolen. This campaign is currently only half-way to raising 15,000 euros and still needs support.

* A new movie from the acclaimed director Edgar Pera, billed as Telepathic Letters (2024, 69 mins), imagines that letters flowed between the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft. But via the dreamlands, and… “with a dreamer’s logic [in which] Pessoa’s multiple personalities meet the nightmare creations of Lovecraft”. The film is currently appearing on the German film-festival circuit, with a mid September date in Oldenburg. I’ll try to link reviews in next week’s HPLinks #4.

* The Ephemeral New York blog investigates a topographic aspect of Lovecraft in New York City, and finds a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse, in… “the secret Village behind brick walls, embowering trees, iron fences, and horsewalk doorways”. With photographs.

* A new 23-minute making-of video on YouTube, “Making a Lovecraft-inspired light-up water-well diorama”, as in the well and well-sweep from “The Colour Out of Space”.

* New to me, from France, the free open-access academic journal Imaginaires (2019—). Special issues since 2019 have included: ‘Gothic, Teen, and Pop Culture’ and ‘Ireland: Spectres and Chimeras’.

* At VoegelinView, “The Theology of Fantasy”, reviewing the book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (2023).

* And finally, one of the more pleasing bits of Yog-Sothery I cooked up with the AI image-generator Stable Diffusion, and which was then tickled with Photoshop. Feel free to colorise, use as a book cover or album cover, etc. I place this image under Creative Commons Attribution.

HPLinks #2 – Innsmouth Festival – London Festival – Metal Hurlant special – and more

26 Monday Aug 2024

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HPLinks #2.

A new book for August 2024, published a few days ago. H.P. Lovecraft, A Fine Friend — Wilson Shepherd Remembered, 1932–1938, by John Camack Shepherd. Published in hardback and as a $20 paperback, 290 pages…

In a rural Alabama town, during the 1930’s, a teenage boy had dreams of being a science fiction publisher. In a dirt floor cellar, using primitive, second-hand presses, he managed to publish several science fiction/weird fiction magazines. Along the way, he came into contact and developed a correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, who became his ‘fine’ friend. He was nineteen years old when he wrote his first letter to Lovecraft.

The blurb mentions no discovery of new letters, and I assume that new material would have been mentioned. Shepherd was also the publisher of the History of the Necronomicon. I see Collected Essays V also has “Correspondence between R. H. Barlow and Wilson Shepherd of Oakman, Alabama Sept – Nov 1932”, but this was Lovecraft’s attempt “to unsnarl” a misunderstanding that had arisen between Barlow and Wilson. Joshi calls the farrago “unintentionally comical”.

* Tickets are still available for the Innsmouth Literary Festival here in the UK. The event appears to be a large and well-organised reunion convention, post lockdowns, for British mythos writers and their fans and publishers. On Saturday 28th September 2024 in the town of Bedford. On looking up the town on the map, I see it’s conveniently midway between Birmingham and London, and between Oxford and Cambridge. The map shows it has not one but two railway stations.

* Now published, Michael Bukowski’s H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: Weirdly Illustrated (August 2024).

* Goeliminal has a long NecronomiCon 2024 convention report. As yet, I can find no other blogs reporting on NecronomiCon 2024. But, looking for such, I found a gushing new review of the novel I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas (2017)…

“a wonderfully-constructed mystery [which] follows the goings on at the annual Providence-based convention, the Summer Tentacular, where fans gather each year to share their love for all things Lovecraft.”

I see this is now also available as an audiobook.

* There is however one Armitage Symposium 2024 talk on YouTube, “The Shadow Over Lake Erie: Cleveland and H.P. Lovecraft”. Though regrettably, its very poor audio makes it un-listenable. Though I can just about hear something about Lovecraft’s New York friend Kirk hailing originally from Akron, Ohio.

* Dr. Edward Guimont will be giving a talk at the AstroAssembly 2024, “When the Stars are Right, H.P. Lovecraft and Astronomy”. The gathering takes place in early October 2024, at the Seagrave Memorial Observatory in Rhode Island.

* Now available, Metal Hurlant No. 12: H.P. Lovecraft. This is the current incarnation of the famous French comic-strip magazine, here publishing a new 272-page follow-up to the best-selling Lovecraft issue of 1979.

There’s also a Metal Hurlant ‘Special Lovecraft’ YouTube video, in French. No page previews, just interviews about the special.

* XRAY.fm produces a regular music podcast. For Lovecraft’s birthday in 2024, episode 551 was an hour of the best “Mythos In Metal” (August 2024).

* RPG blog Grognardia posts on “The War Against Lovecraft”. Comments arise from the ‘trigger warning’ found in the recent large-format artbook for The Dunwich Horror.

* Deepcuts has a long and detailed overview of what was staged at the 2023 London Lovecraft Festival, a theatre and dramatic-readings festival dedicated to Lovecraft adaptations.

* New on YouTube, a talk on The Metaphysics Of Lovecraft: “Dreams In The Witch House”.

* A new channel on YouTube, a side-project of HorrorBabble called ‘FantasyBabble’. The channel’s first offering is The Complete Hyperborean Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith as a YouTube playlist, six hours of readings in total. Possibly new readings(?), since the old HorrorBabble version of this cycle was 24 minutes longer.

* Reddit reports that film director Richard Stanley (The Color Out of Space) is once again working on The Dunwich Horror as a potential big-screen movie adaptation. Incidentally it appears that he should no longer be deemed ‘cancelled’ (see the bottom post in the Reddit thread). Although I suspect that may not make much difference to the ‘once accused, always guilty’ cancel cultists.

* CounterPunch writes “In Praise of the Weird”, commenting on recent spats occurring as part of the U.S. presidential election campaigning. To repeatedly refer… “to your opposition and their policies as ‘weird’ is to denigrate it as abnormal” [which can seem] a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity & inclusion’.”

* New at the Bowery Boys website, a mega-list of Every Bowery Boys History podcast in chronological order by subject. For free, a great many polished podcasts on the history of New York City. Many of which offer useful background for aspects of Lovecraft’s exploration of the city in the mid 1920s. Including: #274 Ghost Stories of Hell’s Kitchen; #114 Supernatural Stories of New York; and #172 Ghost Stories of Brooklyn.

* I see that the World Fantasy Convention (who knew?) is to be held in here in the UK, from 30th October to 2nd November 2025.

* And finally, 2,000 year old mosaic discovered at Virconium in England. An Ancient Roman site. One creature depicted, if you look at it from a certain angle, almost looks like one of the Old Ones.

The Dreaming Stone (1996)

27 Saturday Jul 2024

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New to me, and now new on Archive.org, another Dreamlands RPG book. This one is Call of Cthulhu Dreamlands – The Dreaming Stone (1997). 66 pages, out-of-print and offered for silly prices on Amazon in paper. It begins…

The Dreaming Stone [RPG] is intended as an introduction to H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, as put forth in Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu supplement, The Complete Dreamlands. Even if the investigators have already experienced the Dreamlands, The Dreaming Stone still offers a considerable challenge. Though ostensibly written for the 1920s, the adventure can be transferred to the Gaslight or Cthulhu Now settings with relative ease. Any Dreamlands. Even if the investigators have already experienced the Dreamlands, The Dreaming Stone still offers a considerable challenge. Though ostensibly written for the 1920s, the adventure can be transferred to the Gaslight or Cthulhu Now settings with relative ease. Any number of investigators can participate, though groups of at least four to six are recommended. If there are fewer, the keeper may wish to tone down the number of encounters or foes, or let the investigators roll additional Dreamlands-residing characters to bolster their ranks. Investigators are assumed to have a few adventures under their belts before playing this scenario, as their reputations and an already-established rivalry draw them into the action. If you are planning to run [as] an investigator [i.e. player] in The Dreaming Stone, read no further. The remainder of this book is intended for the keeper’s [i.e. game master’s] eyes only.

Reviews note that this is… “The only ever adventure book for H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands”, and that it is a “skeleton” on which to build rather than a mighty Table-Trembling Tome of Total Tale-telling.

Call from Washington / The Nameless City

23 Tuesday Jul 2024

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A review of a recent attempt to put a 75-minute “The Call of Cthulhu” on the theatre stage, in Washington DC.

For a more positive vibe see a review of the new “The Nameless City”, a successful low-poly indie videogame…

It marries the oppressive and mystical atmosphere of Lovecraftian fiction with gameplay elements that both add variety and serve a narrative purpose as well, then caps it all off with an ominous ending that felt just right for a game in this particular genre. I personally found its PSX-style graphics charming

Ah, Wilderness! (1935)

21 Sunday Jul 2024

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I’ve at last been able to see the U.S. movie Ah, Wilderness!, 1935’s gentle celebration of the small-town world of America as it was in 1906. Lovecraft saw it late in life (circa Christmas 1935/36) and revelled in its lavish layers of thirty-years-ago nostalgia. Similar to a movie of today being nostalgic for 1994, or one of the 2010s being nostalgic for 1980.

saw “Ah, Wilderness”, which made me home-sick for the vanish’d world of 1906!

“… revelled in it. Yuggoth, but it made me homesick for 1906! [it] gives all sorts of typical 1906 glimpses, including an old street-car, a primitive steam automobile, &c. It was photographed in Grafton, Mass. […] where the passing years have left little visible toll.

“At times I could well believe that the past had come back, & that the last 3 decades were a bad dream. [the world it depicted] having many a value which might well have been preserved had social evolution been less violently accelerated by the war.”

I recall that Lovecraft also remarked that the family sitting room was almost a double for the one he had known as a boy. Also the hallway.

He also seems to imply that the rural newspaper office which published his astronomy articles, was in appearance similar to the office briefly seen in the movie (the young hero’s father owns the town newspaper).

the articles landed, & I also landed others with a rural weekly …. (this was the Ah, Wilderness year of ’06)

Ah, Wilderness! is very well-made and acted, with lavish costumes and scenes. Worth seeing simply for the very satisfying scene of a steam-car ‘scaring the horses’. But (unless I’m missing something, being British) it is perhaps not the all-time classic that some had claimed. Though, as the 1933 play, it does appear to have become a staple of American repertory theatre.

The film usefully gives one a better feel for Lovecraft’s formative environment and sensibilities. Many of us have been subtly trained by agitprop to casually think of the Victorian and Edwardian periods in bleak b&w Dickensian terms, all grimy urchins, grim school-masters, and grinding urban poverty. The movie is a useful corrective. As with the 1930s, the view of which has been similarly be-grimed for political purposes, most people were actually ‘getting on with getting on’, and rather enjoying the novelty of becoming middle-class.

The cynical young hero is somewhat Lovecraft-like, at least in the early scenes. The concerns of creeping socialism and chronic alcoholism, though treated lightly, are the same ones which permeated young Lovecraft’s world. The hero (Eric Linden), at first a ‘going to Yale’ stiff of a teenager, is perhaps the weakest part of the film and perhaps a little too ‘1930s movie star’ in appearance — this makes it harder for the viewer to suspend disbelief. His youngest brother is the firecracker Mickey Rooney. But the young Rooney’s usual gurning and capering is thankfully kept on a very tight leash, in what must be one of his first film appearances.

Even having seen Ah, Wilderness!, I’m still as a loss as to why the strange title was chosen. No-one gets to look at a sweeping vista and proclaim the words, unless I missed something. I would have called it “Bang goes the Fourth!”, since it’s set on the 4th July.

For another Hollywood view of 1906, this time from the post-war 1940s, I’ve found Ah, Wilderness! also inspired the glossy musical adaptation Summer Holiday (1948).