03 Wednesday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
For its 10th Lovecraft Festival…
“RadioTheatre has adapted ten of H.P. Lovecraft’s greatest terror tales… live on stage in repertory theatre.”
17th-28th October 2018, Christopher St., New York City.
So far as I can tell, they’re not the same as the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre who produce the excellent dramatised Lovecraft audiobooks.
03 Wednesday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH
The fondly-remembered 1970s Conan comics of Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith / Gil Kane / John Buscema comics are to get a “full remaster” from Marvel, presumably working from the Marvel archives.
CONAN THE BARBARIAN #1-26 from 1970-1973 – as well as material from 1971’s SAVAGE TALES #1 and #4, CHAMBER OF DARKNESS #4, and CONAN CLASSIC #1-11 … all painstakingly restored to match the beauty of the original editions.
Presumably that means a remaster that has them looking like you just bought them off the news-stand in the 1970s? Once fixed, they’re to be then manfully strapped into a $125 / £85 hardback. Oversize and at 784 pages, you’ll probably need some Conan-style iron wristbands and rippling arms to even lift it!
Pre-ordering now, to ship at the end of January 2019 as Conan the Barbarian: the Original Marvel Years.
01 Monday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
This blog is not going to become a clearing-hub for fiction anthology calls, but — being a Brit interested in local folk-lore — I’ll make an exception for the current call for stories for “The Realm of British Folklore” from Spectre Press in the UK. The submitted stories don’t have to be macabre, it seems, but can’t be twee (think: garden gnomes, twinkly Tinkerbell fairies, merry ponies etc). The deadline is 31st October 2018.
The same publisher also has a call for an anthology to be titled “The Children of Clark Ashton Smith”, seeking stories in the mould of Smith.
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham, for an edition of Milton’s Shropshire masque Comus (1634).
01 Monday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I find that “anthology” + “cats in libraries” or “library cats” gets no results in search. That seems like a large gap in the weird/fantasy story-anthology theme-o-scene. Think of the creative possibilities… weird, intellectual, macabre, historical, comedic.
The closest I can find is the title “Cats, Librarians, and Libraries: Essays for and About the Library Cat Society”, from the librarians. That was from way back in 1992, and appears to be unobtainable now. Further investigation finds it was 42 pages, and more of a convention booklet. Though it was obviously nicely presented…
30 Sunday Sep 2018
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, REH, Scholarly works
A new clean scan of Lovecraft’s “Homes and Shrines of Poe” article. Originally in The Californian for Winter 1934, but here scanned from the early Lovecraft fanzine The Acolyte for Fall 1943. So far as I’m aware, despite its public domain status, the essay is only otherwise available in Collected Essays, Volume 4: Travel and via a rather clunky tiling image-viewer format at the Iowa Digital Library.
The issue is not on Archive.org, as yet, but they have The Acolyte for Summer 1945 with “Interlude with Lovecraft” by Stuart M. Boland, outlining his now-lost correspondence with R.E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft in the mid 1930s. I see that Bobby Derie expertly scrutinised both of Boland’s 1945 claims in 2017, in an excellent long blog post “A Lost Correspondence: Robert E. Howard and Stuart M. Boland”. I’ve now added his essay to my Open Lovecraft listing, since the latter part concerns Lovecraft.
The Acolyte for 1944 Summer has a reprint of Lovecraft’s “8th century” warrior poem, done as a translation into a slightly stiff (perhaps deliberately so?) Victorian-era English. Possibly that poem is only otherwise available in The Ancient Track?
Other issues of The Acolyte are online in viewer form at the Iowa Digital Library. These have: Lovecraft’s “Poetry and the Artistic Ideal”; his “Notes on Interplanetary Fiction”; “a “discarded draft” of “Innsmouth” (readable format) in an issue with a very fine cover (see below); and Hoffman Price’s memories of Lovecraft (appears to be the same as the text reprinted under a different title in the now rather expensive Lovecraft Remembered).
Cover of the Spring 1944 issue of The Acolyte. The picture is signed “Ava Lee”, but inside the issue’s art is credited to “R. A. Hoffman and Alva Rogers”. Other covers by Alva are clearly signed “Alva Rogers” and are done in a much less refined style. R. A. Hoffman was the fanzine’s art director. I can find no details online of an “Ava Lee”. He/she apparently also produced a cover for the first issue, but the only scanned copy of No. 1 is missing the cover illustration. The artist was possibly trained/worked as a stage designer for the theatre, judging by the picture? It also appears to have been cropped from a wider landscape format picture, to make it fit a front-cover. Which again suggests it was originally a theatre-design concept illustration.
28 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
John Coulthart today posted a bunch of his Lovecraft story illustrations as a blog post.
One of the illustrations for “The Colour Out of Space”.
28 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A new comics anthology of Lovecraft adaptations, Lovecraft: The Myth of Cthulhu, and it’s wholly new in English.
“Illustrated in haunting black and white by Esteban Maroto over 30 years ago, these comics are re-presented in a new edition, adapting three of H.P. Lovecraft’s most famous stories involving the Cthulhu Mythos: “The Nameless City”, “The Festival”, and “The Call of Cthulhu”.”
Very pleasing artwork and lettering…
It if reminds you a bit of the best 1970s Eerie or the oversize b&w Marvel Comics, that may be because the same artist did Red Sonja with Roy Thomas and appeared as an artist in Eerie. Thought it seems that these strips didn’t appear there, and are new translations from the Spanish. They are said to have appeared in the back of the Spanish children’s comic Capitan Trueno, of all places, and then vanished. The artist never had his art back from the publisher, but he recently found good photostats and has now republished the strips in English.
I’m not keen on the cover, but I guess ‘Show The Monster On The Cover’ is what gets a few extra sales in today’s crowded comic-store marketplace. Currently the book is only available in paper, and runs to 80 pages. If this gets onto Kindle at £3.99, once the print-run sells out, it should sell very well there.
27 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
French publisher Ki-oon is set to launch a new series of Lovecraft graphic novel adaptations, done in the Japanese b&w manga style by the best Japanese horror-manga artists. At The Mountains of Madness is released in French on 4th October 2018. Here’s a sample of a spread…
It’s being picked up by Dark Horse, for English publication.
25 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
“Douglas Adams’s” Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as a Representative of Cosmic Horror”, a new B.A. undergraduate dissertation, in English from Hungary. Online and public. At first glance it looks short for a final dissertation, but that’s a trick of the formatting — since it does run to 6,000 words. It puts forward an interesting claim that some of this blog’s readers might want to note…
Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker series is usually labelled as science fiction. [But] Adams abandons the traditional devices of science fiction and because he borrows from cosmic horror, it could be argued that the Hitchhiker series could be considered a representative of cosmic horror.
Listed as relevant factors are:
* “Cosmos as a threatening entity”.
* “Merciful ignorance”.
* “Merciful lack of self-knowledge”.
* “Irony – the effect and technique”.
24 Monday Sep 2018
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Harold S. Farnese didn’t write any stories, poems, or articles for Weird Tales, nor was he a cover artist or illustrator. His eight letters published in “The Eyrie,” the letters column of Weird Tales, failed to land him in the top twenty contributors in that category. [Yet he] may have been the first person to adapt a work by H.P. Lovecraft to a form other than verse or prose.
Harold S. Farnese, Part Three.
Harold S. Farnese, Part Six (final part).
From Tellers of Weird Tales. See also his post on “The Lovecraft-Farnese Correspondence” with a new timeline.
23 Sunday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The Lovecraft Travel Agency has just now opened its doors, with 18 vintage travel and tourism posters.
23 Sunday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Which stories might I want to read in Shadows Over Baker Street, the well-known Sherlock Holmes-Lovecraft mash-up anthology? I rarely glance at such anthologies and, even when I do, I’m not someone who slogs through all stories. Roll on the day we get ‘the Spotify for stories’ and can do our own remix anthologies. In the meantime I just want the best in any given anthology or collection, and am prepared to do 30 minutes of research to find out which stories are deemed the best.
Nor do I care for ‘sidelong stories’, of the sort that often pad anthologies by strapping a minor character into some tangentially connected setting. For instance, Shadows Over Baker Street has a reportedly good story featuring Sebastian Moran on a tiger-hunt in India. But neither the setting or the minor character appeals to me. I don’t read Sherlock Holmes stories for their jungle settings.
Let’s see what the reviews say about the book:—
Baker St. Dozen has a biting review from a sceptical Sherlockian perspective. They only strongly commend the following stories, which use the expected setting and approach:
* Steven Elliott-Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.
Kirkus has its usual snippy review, though this one is less cutting than usual. They note:
* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.
The latter is singled out by Kirkus as a “stunning” and “ingenious reworking of the familiar incident of Holmes’s misadventure at the Reichenbach Falls”. An Amazon review also claims it to be darkly comic, if one reads it in the right way.
The Harrow Review has:
* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Steven-Elliot Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* James Lowder, “The Weeping Masks”.
Innsmouth Free Press singled out:
* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.
Note that several of the more fannish reviewers, who I also consulted, also disliked Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”. Apparently for its too-whimsical approach. You either love it or hate it, it seems. My own reaction to it takes the form of a short Holmes pastiche story “The Case of the Purloined Prose”.
I then skittered over the Amazon reviews, but failed to spot claims for as-yet un-noticed gems in the collection. F. Gwynplaine Macintyre’s “The Adventure of Exham Priory” did have another bit of acclaim in one such review.
Thus, for those who don’t want to slog through all 480 pages of what is widely regarded as a very patchy collection, Shadows Over Baker Street appears to boil down to…
* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Steven-Elliot Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.
* James Lowder, “The Weeping Masks”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.
* Simon Clarke’s “Nightmare in Wax” – this ends the volume, and does get occasional tepid mentions in the reviews.
Only half a dozen. Still, the book is now on Kindle for just 99 pence (about $1.30). Even just for a handful of such crossover stories, that’s not a bad price.
Finally, talking of Cthulhu and Sherlock, avoid this new book series like the plague. Great covers, but bloody awful books from both a Lovecraftian and Sherlockian perspective. And just plain bad writing too.
