Jonathan Thomas’s Tempting Providence and Other Stories is a 2010 story collection which I don’t think I was aware until now. But on reading the blurbs, the title story certainly appeals.

Apparently the story “Tempting Providence” is the best of what the Publishers Weekly called an “uneven” bunch. Amazon reviewers appear to concur about the unevenness. Although I see many glowing nuggets of praise plucked from magazine reviews, and that Thomas is in the “Elite” of recent writers according to Joshi’s new book 21st-Century Horror: Weird Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. So he seems worth a look.

In the well-regarded title story, it is said, the wistful ghost of H. P. Lovecraft returns to modern Providence. He finds that a herd of real-life horrors have been allowed to run rampant across his beloved city. He lyrically compares the dehumanised modern city to the old Providence he knew so well. What a fine idea for a story. Thomas is a native of Providence, and thus the topographic and architectural details must be presumed to be accurate to a level that only a local could attain.

I’d definitely like to read this story at some point, and there’s a £5 ebook. Though no audiobook, or a 99 cent audio reading of just that story. I see that it’s the third story in the book, so I can’t get it free just by weaselling the free 10% ebook sample from Amazon.

But my finances dictate that the book is one for my WishList at present, since I recently had to spend £130 to replace an old computer monitor than died. Nice to see a big version of the book’s cover, though, simply in terms of a tasty bit of Providencial Lovecraftian art presented within an adequate design framework (though I would have improved the use of type, such as by reducing the huge gap between the words ‘Tempting’ and ‘Providence’). Self-publishing is drifting into a dangerous disregard for the needs of book cover design and typography, in my view, though this fine cover from Hippocampus shows how appealing a cover can be to potential readers. I doubt I’d have stumbled on the book, in image search, if it hadn’t been for seeing a thumbnail image of the cover. The cover is your primary initial marketing hook, and it should not be neglected just because Amazon often chooses to annoyingly whisk the reader to the start of the body text when they first open a purchased ebook.

The cover art is by Thomas S. Brown, who I’m pleased to discover is both British and on DeviantArt with a fine big Gallery that I had never seen before (despite much regular burrowing into DA for Digital Art Live magazine). Brown’s Gallery has a delightfully Lovecrafty version of the famous ‘death of Chatterton’ paintings…

There’s also a darker ‘age stained’ version of the picture, something that perhaps reflects the fact the the original also exists in several versions. I saw the original of the Birmingham version of the ‘death of Chatterton’ many years ago, up close and at leisure. I hazily recall that it was unexpectedly small, but also magnificently detailed.

I’d never seen this cover before, for Joshi’s Decline of the West…

del Toro has this week revealed a list of possible or shelved projects for which he has finished screenplays, in addition to the Mountains of Madness project that everyone already knows about…

SECRET PROJECT (UNTITLED)

SUPERSTITIOUS [at a guess – old school superstitions, such as ‘throw salt over your shoulder for luck’, become ‘real’ in some way?]

NIGHTMARE ALLEY [perhaps his Water-like take on the 1947 film noir set in a seedy carnival?]

HAUNTED MANSION [apparently a movie to be built around the Disney theme park attraction?]

THE HULK pilot [TV reboot]

THE BURIED GIANT [live-action sequel to The Iron Giant? or perhaps a movie of the great children’s book The Giant Under the Snow?]

THE COFFIN [? my complete guess would be a traditional Poe-style horror, with many del Toro twists?]

DROOD [presumably his take on Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood?]

LIST OF 7 (Mark Frost) [apparently it’s a 1993 occult murder mystery novel in the Sherlock vein, but one that spirals up and out into a sort of wild theosophical da Vinci Code. Sounds fun, though it seems there’s no graphic novel which is a pity. Not even an audiobook, other than a 1993 cassette-tape edition.]

A Lovecraft rough sketch that seems perfect for a bit of inking and colouring practice, with the likes of Krita. Brown has it at an even larger size in .JP2 format, but to make it manageable here and in Photoshop I’ve reduced it to 4k and 3Mb in .JPG format.

A detail at 100%…

From the Brown University Library H.P. Lovecraft Collection, with 131 items now online.

I’m hearing a wizzle of buyer remorse, albeit only from one buyer, about getting the Props of Nyarlathotep box-set. Thus I’ve added a cautionary rider to my recent post on the set…

It’s very expensive, though, so before a purchase you may want to find someone who has it and ask them if it was worth it.

Yes, posts can change, be corrected and updated. The Web is inherently unfixed. I’m not someone who sees a blog post as set in stone once I press “Post”.

New in 2018, and shipping from the H.P.L. Historical Society, the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set. I don’t normally note gaming stuff here, but this luscious collection of 109 props, handouts, vintage maps and a CNN-worthy deluge of sniffable fake news clippings may also appeal to readers simply as an aesthetic item. These are all… “called for by the Chaosium game supplement Masks of Nyarlathotep“.

It’s very expensive, though, so before a purchase you may want to find someone who has it and ask them if it was worth it.

An in-depth review on RPG.net is glowing in its appreciation of the collection…

   “This is gaming history in the making. This product is so pioneering, so over-the-top in what it tries to achieve and how triumphantly it succeeds, that it deserves the creation of a whole new grading system. […] Excellence is not an adequate word for me to describe the quality of the components. I wouldn’t know where to start from. The multi-page Nansen passports, of whose real-world existence I learned because of this product, and the perfect (printed) copy of the duty stamp on them? The actual cut-out duty stamps of Australian, British and American provenance? The latter even have different identification numbers for crying out loud! The authentic yellowed facsimiles of maps of the era? The transparent stickers that will be used to emulate passport control stamps, and which include as detailed and different stickers as ‘cancelled’, ‘expelled’ or even ‘persona non grata‘? The gorgeous Chinese scroll (!), packed around two well-crafted wooden pieces?! I can’t verify whether the Chinese writing is legit, yet judging from everything else I have no reason to suspect that it isn’t. The attention to detail is astounding. The whole box smells of wood, probably because of the matches and the papyrus rolls. Newspapers smell like newspapers.”

I also read elsewhere that a slipcased hardback of Masks of Nyarlathotep shipped in the last few weeks, as a “revised and updated” edition which plays nicely with the latest edition of the core Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG. No sign of this on Amazon UK or USA, but Chaosium has a page. I’m reliably informed it’s one of the two or three best add-ons for the Call of Cthulhu RPG.