Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

New books from Modiphius

31 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH, Scholarly works

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A new 120-page book claims to catalogue all the monsters of Robert E. Howard. Conan: Horrors of the Hyborean Age appears to be one of those PDF books for gamers that that give them the monster ‘stats’, but which are also rather useful for the reference shelves of writers.

Not sure about the cover, though. I recently re-read the Howard Conan stories in audiobook and I don’t quite remember Wonder Woman fighting a T. Rex, as per this book’s cover. Nor the distinctly LOTR orc who flanks Conan.

As a gamebook it needs to be interflipped with the Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed core rule-book. There appear to be other catalogue-like guide books to Conan’s world in the same series, one on Ancient Ruins & Cursed Cities and a guide to Nameless Cults, Cosmology and Gods. Apparently they all have inspiring art inside, and I’d guess also some maps.

Gloom Number

30 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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As we say goodbye to an irrationally gloom-shrouded year, it seems surprisingly fitting that I stumble on the newly-posted cover of Life magazine’s “Gloom Number” from July 1914. One imagines Lovecraft must have noticed this in the Reading Room of the Public Library, and on the magazine racks, at the start of July 1914.

Presumably the death of John Barleycorn, dated to 1st July 1919 on the central tombstone, had some relevance to the anticipated legal and political moves toward prohibition of alcohol? The cartoonist would thus be implying that the planned prohibition of alcohol would not work. If that’s the case then he also implied that those who promoted prohibition were gloomy killjoys, long past the age at which fun might be had.

London Lovecraft Festival returns in 2019

29 Saturday Dec 2018

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The London Lovecraft Festival Returns…

“This year [2019] the festival is one day longer and many productions will be larger, with several one-off performances especially created for the festival. These include: a staged reading of “Cool Air” originally done at the 2005 Seattle Lovecraft Festival; a production of “Shivers”, the cult favourite spooky tales and music event; and a first-ever “Night of a Thousand Tentacles: Lovecraft” burlesque evening on opening night, co-produced with the Clocktopus Cabaret. There is also an interactive production “Patient 4620” which will place over all seven days of the festival, off-site at the Royal Museum of Contemporary Art. […] Two brand new, fully-realized productions will make their world premiere at the festival: “Late Night with Cthulhu”, a look at life after the Old Ones take over; and “Lovecraft After Dark”, an expansion of story-teller Jonathan Goodwin’s excursion into weird fiction. […] two nights of the show “Providence”, a blending of Lovecraft’s life and stories; a reading of “Pickman’s Model” by master storyteller Robert Lloyd Parry; two nights of a puppet-enhanced version of “The Lurking Fear”; and a sound-effects/radio play presentation of “The Colour out of Space. The festival also has a new writing strand…”.

Essential Salt

29 Saturday Dec 2018

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“Revealing Illustrations” by Jared A. Nielsen.

“We are celebrating the completion of Jared A. Nielsen’s 13 copper etchings for the book “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” for an edition by Uncanny Valley Press. Original etchings and posters for sale. Free letterpress printed poster set by Paul Alessini for those who attend the event!”

Date: Friday the 18th of January 2019, 6pm to 9pm.

Venue: Saltgrass Printmakers, at 412 South 700 West, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Vanquish Fantasy

29 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Fonts, Lovecraftian arts

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Propnomicon has discovered J.S. Sullivan’s Vanquish Fantasy Font, a pseudo-exotic calligraphic font that has a usefully indefinable air of ‘east of Alhazred’ about it. It’s only for “non-commercial use” though, so can’t be used for a comic, game or card-set — unless you first come to an arrangement with the font’s maker.

Looking through Sullivan’s DeviantArt gallery I see he has a similar script font, Banish, under the same license.

If you need free + commercial use then Font Squirrel is your main clearing-house and catalogue.

Review: H.P. Lovecraft: He Who Wrote in the Darkness

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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H.P. Lovecraft: He Who Wrote in the Darkness is a substantial new graphic novel by writer Alex Nikolavitch and the Argentinian artist Gervasio.

A highly compressed low-res PDF preview edition was kindly provided for review by the publisher, Pegasus Books of New York. The body of the book runs to 98 pages of art, rising to 112 pages when counting the introduction by screenwriter David Camus, chapter dividers, a page of biographical endnotes on Lovecraft’s circle, and some cross-promotional padding. The book is available in print and as an ebook download via Amazon. While the book is currently rather expensive in the UK at £19 in print and £18 in ebook, I see that used print copies are starting to become available here at lower prices. I also see that the price of the print edition has dropped by $10 in the USA, since its Halloween 2018 publication.

The two-page introduction is by screenwriter David Camus and appears to have been translated from his native French. This is informed and perceptive, with Camus making interesting and very relevant points about Lovecraft’s delight in playing roles (the Old Gent, the Dandy, the Hermit, the Prankster, the Mentor, the Cynic and so on) and about the often-overlooked humour and subtle self-parody that can bubble up in Lovecraft’s work.

Gervasio’s art is not the slickest ever seen, but is a delight throughout. He frames his panels expertly, the panels flow a complex story over the page with ease, and within these panels his precise facial expressions speak volumes. For instance an especially memorable expression from Samuel Loveman. He has just passed Sonia on the stairs as she leaves Lovecraft for good, and Loveman is ascending toward Lovecraft.

This one panel shows how much there is for an informed reader to bring to this graphic novel, if one knows Lovecraft’s life and friends well. Yet it also shows the depths of meaning that the casual uninformed reader will totally miss. It’s a credit to the two creatives at work here that the book usually manages to walk the tightrope between the two types of reader.

Gervasio’s attention to period detail and clothing is excellent, and he doesn’t stint on this. His panels are filled with all sorts of charmingly authentic items, and yet they hardly ever feel cramped. One even wonders if he might be putting his own knowledge of Lovecraft’s life into the panels. For instance, in the first panel we see Lovecraft walking into the seedy Red Hook in search of cheap solo lodgings. Behind him a plump older man is about to be run down by a truck. Possibly Gervasio has no idea that Lovecraft’s good anarchist friend Morton was killed by a collision with a vehicle in 1941, but it’s a poignant little detail to open with. Having a cat watch Lovecraft is also a nice touch, but again it’s only something that will have meaning for those who know Lovecraft’s life.

There are many such details to be found as one reads on. I should also note that Gervasio’s art has also been expertly coloured in a ‘very slightly faded’ way and with obvious reference to typical “1930s urban America” colour palettes. Unfortunately we don’t get a Marvel-style credits box which breaks down exactly who-did-what, so I’m uncertain exactly who the colour flatting was done by. But it doesn’t seem to have been Gervasio himself. In terms of the details of the visual characterisations, Gervasio accurately portrays the various members of the Lovecraft circle. Yet he obviously had no access to the good photograph I found of Henry Everett McNeil (see my recent book on McNeil, Good Old Mac) which revealed McNeil to the world for the first time since the 1920s. Thus, while McNeil is accurately portrayed here as an ‘oldster’, he is far too angular and crew-cut in appearance. Also, Sonia is perhaps not as voluptuous and well-fed as she really was, as here she is more angular in appearance.

The script by Alex Nikolavitch is neatly structured, covering Lovecraft’s life from 1925 to 1937 in chronological order while dipping occasionally into flashback memories and short evocations of the stories. This wide variety of settings retains interest, but often shuttles the reader about at a hectic pace. Nikolavitch necessarily condenses, highlights and omits, for dramatic purposes. For instance, we see only Mrs Miniter and no Mrs Beebe on the fateful visit to rural Wilbraham that birthed “The Dunwich Horror”. Nor do we see the many cats and curious ‘cat-ladders’ of the property. But this won’t be noticed by non-Lovecraftians. Sometimes emotional overtones are added, such as Lovecraft being rather ‘off-ish’ with a pushy Hoffman Price when they first meet in New Orleans in 1932. Overall, I’d say that Lovecraft is perhaps depicted by Nikolavitch as rather more openly grouchy and grumpy than he really was…

These are not really criticisms, just observations on the quite understandable changes that are inevitably needed when shaping and heightening a serious dramatic work.

But there are some minor criticisms to be made. The most significant point open to negative criticism is the dialogue. Often this is heavily encumbered by the need to explain an Important Biographical Fact to the uninformed reader. This leads to characters “speaking out of character”, often jarringly so. This ‘NPC’ problem is amply demonstrated by the first major splash page, which conveys a plain fact about the 1925 solar eclipse but which falls flat both emotionally and as spectacle.

There also are perhaps a few rather large historical liberties taken, though in some cases I can’t be sure. For instance Houdini is shown as being assassinated by a religious fanatic for his atheism, rather than killed by a jock-ish student who threw an idiotic and probably inebriated punch. Perhaps this actually reflects some new Houdini scholarship but, from my reading on Houdini and Lovecraft, I wasn’t aware of this religious aspect of his death. One recent trustworthy scholar shows it was actually all a mis-direction by Houdini’s conniving widow, who claimed the punch killed him in the hope of cashing in on a ‘double indemnity’ in his insurance policy. But I’m not a Houdini-ist and am not qualified to judge.

There are also a few basic errors that the publishers of an expensive £19 / $26 book should have caught but didn’t, such as Sonia’s line “Does the neighbour inspire you” (page 23) which should have read “neighbourhood”, and a jarring continuity error on the opening panel. In the very first text we read in the book we are told the date is “1st January 1925”, yet we see Brooklyn in high summer with the trees in full leaf… rather than darkly descending into the worst New York winter snowstorm in living memory (1st-3rd January 1925).

Despite my probably overly-picky criticisms, for the general reader this graphic novel will be a fine and informative read. It will introduce many to a basic outline of Lovecraft’s life and friendships, including those who would not venture to read a weightier life of Lovecraft. Such readers will miss a great deal but they will be pleased by the real richness of the art, entertained by the varied settings and the occasional dips into the famous stories, and they will simply not notice the historical omissions and changes.

H.P. Lovecraft: He Who Wrote in the Darkness is thus a welcome addition to a small but growing number of such graphic novels which depict aspects of Lovecraft’s biography, and it will sit companionably on the shelf alongside Une nuit avec Lovecraft (2018) and Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft (2017). Let us hope that these three are just the opening books in what will become a small library of graphic novels that depict the wealth of material to be found in Lovecraft’s endlessly fascinating life and strange interior dimensions.

New album: The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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A very positive review for the heavy Lovecraft tribute album The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos (Dec 2018) by German band Sulphur Aeon. The ‘death metal’ form of heavy metal isn’t my thing, but I’ll take the word of the reviewer that this new release is something very special within the sub-genre. The album is also of interest here because it’s from one of the few bands who only focus on Lovecraft…

[The band] Sulphur Aeon stand as debatably the single best musical entity drawing inspiration from the Cthulhu Mythos. […] The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos, continues their conceptual obsession […] This is premium, nearly flawless death metal, building on every positive attribute of their previous work to create something titanic and utterly sinister. It’s one of the best metal adaptations of its source material, and also happens to be one of the single best death metal releases of 2018.

Other reviews are equally as positive and the sample track, at the foot of the review, is certain an impressive listen. Even a bit of a melodic toe-tapper, rather than the expected wall-of-noise-and-screaming. If this is death metal, at its best, then I may have misjudged it somewhat.

Apparently the focus of the album is a sonic evocation of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”, and the lyrics are in English. It appears to be available in full(?) and free to stream on BandCamp…

The album’s cover artist signs himself “Ozarsson”, which makes him un-findable in Google, but he’s online as Ola Larsson of Sweden.

Vastarien

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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S. T. Joshi has a new blog post. He notes a new and apparently high-quality literary journal on the macabre, which includes essays…

Vastarien, containing my essay “Richard Gavin: The Nature of Horror” (a chapter of 21st-Century Horror). This superbly produced journal, edited by Jon Padgett and published by Grimscribe Press, is a wonder to behold.

The content-lists make it rather difficult to tell what’s an essay and what’s not. For instance, is Christopher Mountenay’s “Bequeathing the World to Insects” an essay on this post-human notion in imaginative literature (the far-future ‘mighty beetle civilisation’ of Lovecraft, etc), or a story?

The Kindle ebook issues can also be had on Amazon at £3.50 (about $5) each, and there are 10% free samples.

Review: Aquaman (2018)

26 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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WARNING: SPOILERS!

Aquaman (2018).

So… there’s this story that starts at an old lighthouse. One stormy night the lighthouse keeper gets to mate with a sea-visitor. They produce a hybrid child, then there’s a submarine attack on a sunken alien city… and there’s a devolved race of monstrously fishy trench-dwellers, a giant trapped sea-monster under the ocean that’s a octopus-dragon-squid hybrid… then a mysterious stone codex with ancient lettering on it, and to decode this our heroes need to discover a hidden ancient city under the Sahara. It’s Lovecraft, right?

Nope. It’s the big-budget Aquaman. Having been told the new Aquaman movie is “surprisingly Lovecraftian”, I’ve now seen it. While it certainly has broadly Lovecraftian moments and elements, at its core it’s the stock-formula pulp that Lovecraft was writing against: those 1920s pulp tales which tiresomely re-worked well-worn themes of politicking medieval kingdoms, over-proud war-hungry princes, treacherous councillors, beautiful princesses who fall for the flawed and banished hero-prince, and a hidden ancient Sword That Will Unite the Kingdom. The pulp authors merely placing these stock elements in some hidden underground realm, on Venus, at the poles, or in this case underwater. Read a half-dozen good ones, and you’ve basically read them all.

That said, Aquaman is generally very enjoyable for what it is, and is full of very well-made visual spectacle. The amount and duration of high-end CG is amazing, and there is a ton of money on the screen. After recent disasters DC must have ‘bet the farm’ on this one, and it’s paid off. Despite the CG it’s all very believable and coherent, and in terms of the physical acting involved in doing ‘underwater’ I saw no flaws. The design values are very high in terms of how things look, and the costumes, vehicles and creatures are all well integrated into a tight example of movie world-building.

Is it Lovecraftian? Not really, certainly not as much as some have claimed. Though it has its moments:

* the opening of the movie echoes the opening of “Innsmouth”, in terms of the submarine attack on the underwater reef. This attack is, of course, a ‘false flag’ attack in a hijacked submarine. Aimed at helping the wicked power-hungry prince to stir up a war against the hated surface-dwellers.

* almost nobody will notice, but we see that Aquaman’s dad has been reading “The Dunwich Horror” before he mated with the Fishy One From The Sea (who after some initial puking very quickly turns from bedraggled mermaid to primped Glamour Queen). The book is under the snow-globe that emotionally grounds the movie’s opening scenes. The book should probably have been “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for thematic congruence, but I guess Hollywood felt that might be a little too politically incorrect.

* then there’s an undecipherable carved stone with a hidden message in it, and it needs to be taken to an ancient ruined city of the forgotten ones under the Saharan desert. But Aquaman and his companion princess have an Atlantean GPS to reach its hidden entrance, which is kind of lame. They could at least have used some kind of mystic ‘water-sense’ to follow the vast amount of water that’s said to be sunk beneath the desert.

* the secondary baddie starts quoting Lovecraft directly (“Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men”), when he surfaces for his big second-act battle with Aquaman. However, his costume looks so utterly ridiculous and camp that you just can’t take him seriously. He’s obviously disposable and just there for Aquaman to beat up, half way through the movie. The need to fit with the DC universe meant that the movie’s makers lost a huge opportunity to make him a deluded Cthulhu-worshipping cultist, whose secret double-crossing aim is to release the…

* giant Cthulhu-like mountain-sized Kraken-y sea monster that has been trapped below the sea for aeons. This monster is, of course, released… though no cultists are involved in making this happen.

* we get the briefest mention of a crucial bit of back-story involving Atlanteans who survived the famous deluge of Atlantis and remained pure-bloods and the Trench dwellers who did not remain pure and fell into a “savage regression” biologically. While the visual look of this devolved race is Lovecraftian, when it’s eventually revealed, the cultural nod is actually more to H.G. Wells and his famous devolved Morlocks. This is confirmed when we learn that the Trench dwellers hate light, and can be driven back merely with lighted distress flares.

* there’s ten minutes of a nightmare encounter at sea with this devolved deep ocean race. These are definitely Derleth-Lovecraftian in appearance, and we’re told they were once Atlanteans but that they devolved in a “savage regression” to fishy bestiality over the millennia. This scene has its moments, but the monsters are again only really there for Aquaman to battle past… so that he can reach a tropical Thunderball-like Paradise Island… where the Magic Trident of All Power power-up thing is resting.

* the Magic Trident of All Power power-up thing is in a cave behind the Glowing Waterfall, where it’s guarded by a giant tentacular being. But Mrs Squiddy talks, in a manner more akin to Tolkien’s Smaug the dragon than to anything in Lovecraft. Anyway… there’s little time for a chat, as War Is Brewing.

Except for about 30 seconds in the dark Trench, the ocean conveys no sense of a vast and eerie darkness, and there’s no unfathomable ‘cosmic awe’ akin to outer space. So, it’s not Lovecraftian in that sense.

Is it DC, then? I have no clue at all about that, not being a DC fan. I know absolutely nothing about the DC comics version of Aquaman, other than that he’s DC’s equivalent of Marvel’s Sub-Mariner character. I thus probably missed many DC-tastic Easter Eggs, but I guess they’re in there. I only noticed how Aquaman positioned itself to dovetail with other blockbuster properties. Disney’s Tron: Legacy is probably the biggest debt it owes, and that debt is massive. But this viewer didn’t mind in the slightest, since the movie re-works the best bits of the Tron sequel so beautifully, at such duration and on such a vast scale. In terms of the hero’s own personality and style it’s very obviously pitched as a rival to Marvel’s Thor. As ‘screen fun with a coherent story’, Aquaman even manages to hold its own against the excellence of the latest Thor: Ragnarok movie. Those who know the Lord of the Rings movies will also spot visual nods in Aquaman, such as the distant shot where a tiny Gandalf falls silently into the inky depths of Moria.

Overall Aquaman is entertaining fun, and if you have a strong bladder it’s worth seeing at the cinema purely for the visuals. It deserves its “top movie of Christmas 2018” box-office cash take. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an Oscar in the offing for the costume designers and/or the action scene story-boarders. Although in terms of ‘action Oscars’ they’ll have tough competition from the latest Mission Impossible.

The story and dialogue is… still messy, but it’s an enjoyable mess. It veers wildly between jaw-dropping fanboy ridiculousness, over-the-top camp homage, and a surprisingly sugary moms-iness. But this isn’t meant to be a movie that one thinks about deeply. It’s just a good adventure romp and zips through at a fast pace. The Thor-like hero is engaging and of the ‘clever guy who hides it under goofy-and-dumb’ type, and his Atlantean princess is winsome-but-tough. Their dialogue might have popped and surprised just a little more. But on the other hand the script editors have kept the talkiness and jokes under control. There are some three-minute “let’s talk about our feelings” family reunions, but there’s no turgid lecture-mode that slows things down every ten minutes (as in the interminable second movie of The Guardians of the Galaxy series). The usual worthy ‘messages’ from the Hollywood elite are in there, but only briefly and at a very basic level:

* don’t put plastic and effluent in the sea;
* ‘place all humanity above the needs of one nation’;
* modern pirates are bad people;
* human/Atlantean half-breeds can become King, if they prove themselves worthy by their actions.

The latter point raising the question of what, exactly, some of the surviving Atlanteans were mating with in order to devolve into Trench dwellers — thus raising in the remaining pure Atlanteans such an abject horror of hybridity that they never once pause to make the obvious distinction between humans and lobsters. By the look of it, the rogue Atlanteans were sneaking off to snuggle up to the primitive Giant Crab People on dark nights. Which, in a way, is very Lovecraftian.