H.P. Lovecraft, suddenly popular in Hungary with a string of new pocket-book editions with fine translations.

Here’s a loose summary-translation of the review-article, trying to get some sense out of Google’s goulash of a translation…

… rumour has it that these two H.P. Lovecraft collections are among the most successful in Helikon’s impressively designed pocketbook series. Their success perhaps offers an insight into the current nervous state of the Hungarian people … [One little-remarked] characteristic is that Lovecraft’s work is that it is hardly inseparable from the works of those he felt to be his fellow warriors. One could muse at length on the intricate spread of effects and repercussions among his circle, and at times I feel that this literary program was emphatically, though never declared as such, movement-like. [When one considers his stances and his almost gnostic understanding of the world/cosmos] the tricky question is whether Lovecraft should be considered “reactionary” or just “progressive” from the point of view of the history-of-ideas. [Of course, many mis-read him, but his cult is guarded by] aesthetic priests who are the Jesuits of pop culture: their reputation may be fearsome, but whoever gets to know their views more thoroughly inevitably comes to understand them. For instance the Hungarian Lovecraft Society [is doing fine work nationally … but even they may not fully penetrate the] remarkable “local history” aspect to his reflexively “cosmic” works — perhaps then it is permissible for this zealous but distant deacon, interested in deliberate misreadings, to commit a dark hermeneutics. On Lovecraft’s gravestone not “I Am Providence”, but “I am the Providence.

Now there’s an idea…

Men try to build model railways that are exact miniatures… ‘Crewe 1959’ and so on. [But] there’s definitely more room for fantasy model railways. I would maybe build The H.P. Lovecraft Line.

I was never a practitioner in any serious way as a boy, but it’s still regrettable to hear that the tabletop craft is not being passed down from father to son in the way it once was. It seems destined to join the ‘Endangered Traditional Crafts’ red-list. I imagine that one thing that might pep up the appeal for pre-teens would be to cross-breed it with tabletop fantasy-horror RPGs and card-games. Many might also enjoy a few hours with a ‘Providence 1890-1937’ model railway builder-sim PC game, if it’s chock full of enjoyable Lovecraftian horror elements. Kind of like Sid Meier’s Railroads, but with night-gaunts and tentacles and tunnels under College Hill.

If the meantime the kids have yet another story/colouring-book heading their way this summer.

Slightly heavier in tone, there is also a major new tabletop game from the Achtung! Cthulhu guys. Against The Gods Themselves will be an easy-play story-driven game of time-travelling Nazis, it seems.

I see that Chaosium’s 2006 one-volume Malleus Monstrorum was republished in two handsome volumes at the end of 2020. Originally a 300-page oversize compendium of the Call of Cthulhu RPG mythos monsters and gods, illustrated… “entirely with classic works of art and vintage photos, some real, many cleverly forged” as one reviewer put it. Of course it slithered into Derleth territory and even stretched to Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Colin Wilson — but failed to embrace the Dreamlands since that was done in another Chaosium book. “Lovecraft fans interested in the book for non-gaming purposes will probably be disappointed” the reviewer of the 2006 edition usefully concludes, thus saving writers cash and disappointment.

Still, it’s worth a quick flick-through in PDF just for the clever art. Also to know what to avoid. I mean that it may be ‘negatively’ useful for writers who need to be sure that their ‘new’ monster is not actually similar to what has already been done in the extended Mythos. In that sense this could be a useful second-opinion after the un-illustrated Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia and other sources such as the Dreamlands book.

However, the budget PDF version of the 2006 original has been removed from sale, and the paper is now at ‘collectable’ prices. Previews of the new 2020 two-volume set suggest why — the old 2006 layout is gone… its eccentric home-brew mix of “classic works of art and vintage photos” has been removed and replaced by more generic ‘fantasy card-art’ style illustrations. These are presumably unlikely to puzzle today’s card-collecting kiddies, or to offend the Holy Inquisition of the Perpetual Outrage.

New edition.

Old edition