Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

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).

Lovecraft at SDCC 2024

17 Wednesday Jul 2024

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At the San Diego Comic-Con 2024…

Friday 27th July, 4pm—5 pm, Room 4: “Discussing Lovecraft with Gou Tanabe”.

Gou Tanabe (H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth) and his editor, Hayato Shimizu, join Michael Gombos (senior director international licensing, Dark Horse) and Zack Davisson (translator, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth) to discuss the process of adapting H.P Lovecraft’s stories to manga format.

The ‘Hyperborea’ tales by Clark Ashton Smith

15 Monday Jul 2024

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New on Archive.org, a collection of the strongly Lovecraft-influenced ‘Hyperborea’ tales by Clark Ashton Smith. This has the same cover as the early 1970s 95-cent U.S. Ballantine paperback, but this new upload is probably to be avoided. Because I immediately randomly spotted a typo at the start of a story: the German “die” for “the”.

Better, then, to look for these Lovecraft-influenced cycle of tales among the free texts kindly placed online by Will Murray and made from good corrected texts. These are freely available as HTML pages. Although one has to already know the list of Hyperborean titles and then hunt for them among what is an A-Z list.

So, to save people some time, here is my quick linked contents-list. The links lead to the HTML-format stories which make up the Murray-edited The Book of Hyperborea (Necronomicon Press, 1996). The listing below is in the same order as the book’s contents…

Introduction to ‘The Book of Hyperborea’, by Will Murray *

The Tale of Satampra Zeiros

The Muse of Hyperborea [Fragment, not linked in the A-Z, but it is online] *

The Door to Saturn

The Testament of Athammaus

The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan

Ubbo-Sathla

The Ice-Demon

The White Sybil

The House of Haon-Dor (Fragment) *

The Coming of the White Worm

The Seven Geases

Lament for Vixeela [Poem, not linked in the A-Z, but it is online] *

The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles

[The Coming of the White Worm (Abridged)] *

Postscript by Will Murray *

Altogether, a relatively short collection by modern triple-decker doorstop standards, at around 70,000 words in total including introduction and postscript.

Audiobook? Yes. The tales above can now be found as a free HorrorBabble audiobook playlist The Hyperborean Cycle on YouTube. Around seven hours. This playlist lacks only the above-starred (*) fragments, poem, and introduction / postscript.

Note that the early 1970s Ballantine book (mentioned at the start of this post) also had…

* Hyperborea (simple map).

* About Hyperborea and Clark Ashton Smith: Behind the North Wind (essay by Lin Carter).

[the core stories, then to finish]

* The Abominations of Yondo (story)
* The Desolation of Soom (fragment)
* The Passing of Aphrodite (fragment)
* The Memnons of the Night (fragment)

Of these additional four however, Carter was unsure if they belonged… “I have the feeling that the short tales which follow are the surviving fragments of yet another such cycle: one which was abandoned, or left undeveloped, for some reason we can only conjecture. I may be wrong in this assumption.”

* Notes on the Commoriom Myth-Cycle (essay by Lin Carter) — I. The Genesis of the Cycle, II. The Sequence of the Hyperborean Stories, III. The Geography of the Cycle.

For further tales by others see A Hyperborean Glossary by Laurence J. Cornford, which is an A-Z and its front page lists the additional sources — tales ‘finished’ later by Lin Carter but apparently based on work or notes by CAS (?), plus various Hyperborea related/set tales by others. Many of these appear to be collected in Robert M. Price’s Book of Eibon along with what looks like an expanded map.

More recently there was also a substantial 2013 anthology, containing the work of some notable modern writers, titled Deepest, Darkest Eden, The New Tales of Hyperborea. I see this now has an affordable Kindle ebook on Amazon.

“Even the smallest of them held a hint of the ghastly…”

14 Sunday Jul 2024

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The annual Lovecraftian MicroFiction Contest is open for 2024 entries. Part of the Lovecraft Film Festivals. “Microfiction” here means “500 words or less”, and they want a “complete story, [meaning a tale with] a character, situation, beginning, middle, and end”. “All entries must be written by you”, which must imply no AI assistants. Deadline: 9th August 2024.

The Haverhill incident

13 Saturday Jul 2024

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WHAV local radio, Haverhill, reports last month’s filming of…

“a new documentary, Strange Magick, filmed partly in Haverhill and with a significant focus on the city in the 1920s […] Haverhill native and WHAV writer Dave Goudsward helps investigate the connection between Howard Philips Lovecraft and infamous occultist Aleister Crowley”

Goudsward is also an executive producer of this…

documentary [that] explores a possible conspiracy between them [Lovecraft and Crowley] produced by their mutual acquaintance with fellow amateur author Myrta Alice Little.

It seems to be taken for granted that the occult loon Crowley was there as a spy or somesuch, and that they knew each other, since there are… “re-enactments of pivotal moments in Lovecraft, Crowley’s and Little’s acquaintanceship” and apparently the makers even rope old ‘Tryout’ Smith(!) into the conspiracy, all in an effort to highlight… “Crowley’s actions in the United States” for British intelligence. Alleged actions, I should add.

But I guess it might actually be a ‘what if’ pseudo-documentary, which an unwary WHAV reporter has wrongly assumed to be a plausible and factual documentary?

On the map

04 Thursday Jul 2024

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The Lands of Dream wall-map of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, by Jason Bradley Thompson, makes it into the University of Wisconsin Collection. Via their acquisition of the American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection. At their page, ‘open image in new tab’ + zoom, for a larger, readable version of the map.

Useful to have as a wallpaper on your tablet while listening to an audiobook of Dream Quest, and with its muted colours it’s not as a super-gloss as other versions. You can also have this in your own collection in super-gloss though, as I see it’s still available as a 24″ x 36″ wall poster.

In the same American Geo. Soc. collection, I see another imaginary world wall-map, The Land of Make Believe (1930).

Also, on looking at Jason’s website I see he has an update on his RPG, with a post on Dreamland 2024 Plans and an accompanying Dreamland PDFs Update to “version 2.0 of the public PDFs” (Quickstart, Character Sheet, and ‘The Paradise of the Unchanging’). Travel rules for the game “have been significantly revised” after playtesting, and he shows a map of the regions around Ulthar together with travel routes…

Tanabe’s Cthulhu – re-dated, in English

04 Thursday Jul 2024

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After countless aeons of waiting, Gou Tanabe’s mountainous 288-page graphic-novel adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu finally surfaces as an English translation. Due from Dark Horse, 15th October 2024. Re-dated, as it was originally July 2024. Why the heck are translations of graphic novels so slow to appear? It’s 2024 and the AI revolution is full flow. The publishers should have AI and virtual assistants all over this sort of thing, and it should be done in a week.