Category Archives: New books

The Spine Chillers

07 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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British comedy writer Ben Clark’s The Spine Chillers is a short graphic novel that treats readers to yet another fictional Lovecraft. Only just released, it’s getting good reviews which say it’s a laugh-out-loud comedy.

The set-up is that H.P. Lovecraft lives in a grotty boarding-house with Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce. Something is hiding in the attic. Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) turns up to investigate. Sadly the art is in child-o-vision. Which won’t entice many to part with a hefty £14 for it in paper, but apparently the writing is brilliant. One suspects that it’s a little bit more of a pitch for a TV series or movie than it is a graphic novel. Still, it’s another in the small crop of recent graphic novels featuring Lovecraft as a character.

Giraffes on Horseback Salad

07 Thursday Mar 2019

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Dali worked with Harpo Marx. That is quite enough to enlarge one’s mind with endless surrealist possibilities. But there’s more. They became friends and devised a screenplay for a movie in which man of mundane reality falls in love with a dream-woman from the realm of comical absurdity. A notebook and treatment was presented to the MGM movie studio, but the studio declined the project. These materials have now been tracked down, and much research undertaken. The resulting ‘graphic novel re-creation’ of the planned movie will be published, sans the Marx Bros. distinctive physical comedy and syncopated wisecrackery, on 19th March 2019 as Giraffes on Horseback Salad.

So far as I know Lovecraft never saw the Marx Bros. movies, though from 1930 to 1935 he could have seen all the classics newly-released at one of the Providence movie-houses: Animal Crackers; Monkey Business; Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races.

What would a Dali / Lovecraft collaboration have sired? We can only dream…

Elder Props freebies

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Fonts, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings

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New on Archive.org… Elder Props (1981), an 84 page compendium of printable pages, presumably for use as photocopies made as RPG game prompts and elements. The artist has a nice clean toony ink style, which I like a lot.

If you wanted these in colour, look at Krita’s 4.0’s new ability to auto-paint line-art.

I see that the same book can also be downloaded from the site of the artist for free, though there’s it’s confusing labelled Evil Dead, which makes one think of tiresome video-nasty zombies movies of the 1980s rather than the Neconomicon.

The artist is still working, and has a similar product for the awesome Gravity Falls series. Also free Fonts…

Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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A major new history book from Erik Davis (author of the superb TechGnosis) is always welcome, especially one edited and designed by MIT Press. His new High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies is pre-ordering now, to ship in July 2019. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a ‘Lovecraft chapter’ or two.

The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth – now in ebook

03 Sunday Mar 2019

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My new short book The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth is now available on Amazon as an ebook. In 22,000 words it carefully identifies 135 points or ‘cracks’ in The Lord of the Rings and related material, ‘cracks’ in which one might write new fan-fiction stories…

The 22,000-word book is a side-project from my forthcoming scholarly book on Tolkien, and as a bonus this new ebook version adds ten more ‘cracks’ not in the print edition.

The Shadow Out of Time

02 Saturday Mar 2019

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Here’s a glimpse of the style of the manga-style comics adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time adaptation, recently completed by Gou Tanabe in Japan. This book is apparently getting manga fans excited, and he’s said to have a cult following. Personally it’s not an art style I greatly appreciate, but it’s good to get a full-length adaptation of this major story.

Going underground…

01 Friday Mar 2019

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Two new books that may be of interest to readers, on the mysteries of the subterranean. Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet has just been published, front-loaded with so much lamestream media acclaim that I’m slightly suspicious. Apparently it uses a reportage style, focusses on human works, and packs it all into 288 pages.

The other book is said to take more of a science-writing approach, and came out this time last year. The Evolution Underground – Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath our Feet weighs in 400 pages. For some reason Amazon UK highlights a pointless one-line 2-star review, and to add insult to injury claims there is only that one review for the book. On scrolling down the page one finds there are actually 12 reviews available, all reasonably positive.

Coming in October 2019, Underground Cities: Mapping the tunnels, transits and networks of our cities.

‘Trends, Observations and Conclusions’ for Lovecraft RPGs in 2018

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

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A while back I noted a 10,000-word survey of Lovecraft RPG publishing in 2018, which at that point was about to move on to a series of articles scrutinising individual titles.

Now there’s a final part, Cthulhu in 2018: A Retrospective, part 5. In the first section this looks at 2018 Kickstarter campaigns that have yet to ship, and then concludes with a general “Trends, Observations and Conclusions” section. The latter is a useful addition to the articles I linked to in my earlier post.

Weird Fiction Review #9

17 Sunday Feb 2019

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S. T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s warmed in, in Seattle. While here in the UK it’s bright sunshine, ten degrees and the very earliest breath of springtime wafts over the moist soil. Joshi’s blog brings news that Weird Fiction Review #9 is out with a Colin Nitta cover re-imagining the famous Fantastic Four debut cover…

Includes “an illustrated history of Gnome Press”, an essays on surrealist horror novels, and another on “H.R. Giger-inspired Alien toys”.

Caza and Lovecraft

10 Sunday Feb 2019

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A fine new cover by Phillipe Caza, for a new French RPG apparently to be played with the Cthulhu Hack system. He only did the cover, according to the book’s interior credits.

I see that Caza is interviewed in a chunky 460-page book recently published in French, Lovecraft : Au coeur du cauchemar (Lovecraft: Heart of the Nightmare, 2017)…

“Lovecraft en image…” (“Lovecraft and image …”) Interview with Philippe Caza.

Complete table-of-contents for Lovecraft : Au coeur du cauchemar, in English translation. Items of possible special interest to scholars are noted in bold.

Introduction.

THE MAN

“H.P. Lovecraft, between myth and facts”, by Bertrand Bonnet.
“Lovecraft and his prejudices…”, Christophe Thill interview.

Interview with S.T. Joshi.

“Places and Lovecraft”, by Mathilde Manchon.
“In the footsteps of Lovecraft in Providence”, interview with François Bon.
“H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard: Friendship, Controversies and Influences”, by Bertrand Bonnet.
“Robert E. Howard and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Selected Correspondence”, by Patrice Louinet.
“Lovecraft and revisions: the doctor of weird fiction”, by Todd Spaulding.

WORK

“H.P. Lovecraft in press: brief history (and prehistory) editorial of the writings of Lovecraft”, by Christophe Thill.
“Cthulhu, the myth”, by Emmanuel Mamosa.
“The myth of Cthulhu”, interview with Raphael Granier de Cassagnac.
“Lovecraft in twenty-five essential works”, by Bertrand Bonnet.
“The work of Lovecraft”, interview by Christophe Thill.
“Lovecraft and the Lost Generation”, by Florent Montaclair.
“Lovecraft and science”, by Elisa Gorusuk.
“The anti-heroic fantasy of H.P. Lovecraft”, by Christophe Thill.
“The invitation to travel”, by David Camus. [On the travel writing?]
“French translations of Lovecraft: from introduction to tradition”, by Marie Perrier.
“Lovecraft Translator”, by David Camus.
“The poetry of Lovecraft”, interview with Michel Chevalier.

THE EXTENDED UNIVERSE

“Lovecraft Heroes of Fiction”, interview of Patrick Marcel.
“Cthulhu from 7 to 77 eons, or Lovecraft in comics”, by Alex Nikolavitch.
“Adapting Lovecraft to a video game …” interview with Jean-Marc Gueney.
“For a handful of tentacles … HP Lovecraft at the movies”, by Sam Azulys.
“Lovecraft in images…”, interview of Francois Baranger.
“Lovecraft in images…”, interview of Nicolas Fructus.
“Lovecraft in images…”, interview of Philippe Caza.
“Role play: Lovecraft and the world of gaming”, interview of Editions Sans-Detour.
“Role play: Lovecraft and the world of the game”, interview with Cédric Ferrand.
“Lovecraft and them”.