08 Thursday Nov 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
New, Lovecraftian Monster Book…
“over 300 monsters featuring exactly as they are appear and described in … the Cthulhu Mythos … drawn by talented artist Michael Bukowski“
25 Thursday Oct 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
Super news from S.T. Joshi. He’s to edit a collection of Clark Ashton Smith for Penguin Classics. Stories, but also prose-poems and poems. Let’s hope the forthcoming merger with Random House doesn’t see the planned roster for Penguin Classics affected.
Joshi has also…
“been asked to be the keynote speaker at a conference on weird fiction to be hosted by Birkbeck College, [University of] London, around November 8, 2013”
12 Friday Oct 2012
Posted in New books
A new Kindle ebook, Houdini & Lovecraft: The Ghost Writer, a novelization of a feature-film screenplay. Sounds interesting…
“It’s 1924, an era of emerging technology, but also of spiritualism and [stage] magic. Harry Houdini, the great conjurer and mystifier, well known as a psychic debunker, is hired to put together a team to investigate [plot spoiler]. Meanwhile, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is down on his luck [in New York, and] Houdini drafts the reluctant Lovecraft to join his team […] to chronicle the magician’s adventures in the paranormal.”
The author Ron Wilkerson has written a good deal of the newer Star Trek series, and…
“…was nominated for an Emmy as a part of the writing team on the seventh season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
25 Tuesday Sep 2012
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
The Smithsonian magazine has a long article on “The Great New England Vampire Panic”. The story is based on the work of a consulting folklorist at the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, who has documented…
“80 exhumations […] concentrated in backwoods New England, in the 1800s” […] “The public hysteria almost invariably occurred in the midst of savage tuberculosis outbreaks”
24 Monday Sep 2012
Posted in New books
The Sword and Mythos doorstopper anthology, set to combine sword-n-sorcery with Lovecraft’s mythos, is now fully funded on IndieGoGo. 42 hours left to “stretch” the project with some additional donations.
21 Friday Sep 2012
Posted in New books
Added to the Fiction Magazines section of the ‘Lovecraft on the Web’ links directory: Sanitarium. The first issue is reportedly almost ready, and it should be launching any day now.
21 Friday Sep 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Kim Holmes’s new 112-page graphic novel of “Pickman’s Model”, online for free or as a $10 paperback.
18 Tuesday Sep 2012
Posted in New books
A novel-length and Joshi-endorsed sequel to “The Colour out of Space”, The Color over Occam is now available in hardback. The blurb and synopsis don’t appear to suggest that it’s anything special, but according to Joshi it’s…
“one of the finest horror novels of any sort written in the last 50 years” — S.T. Joshi.
13 Thursday Sep 2012
Posted in New books
Another Three-Lobe Burning Eye zine (not to be confused with the forthcoming illustration-based zine-book). This one is a long-running magazine of speculative fiction. Web link added to this blog’s “Lovecraft on the Web” page, in Fiction Magazines.
12 Wednesday Sep 2012
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
William Koch has a detailed new review of Graham Harman’s new book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
“the book represents what seems [at first] to be an exceptionally idiosyncratic project, arguing that a position similar to the one [that the German poet] Holderlin fills for Heideggerian phenomenology should be occupied by H.P. Lovecraft for thinkers of Speculative Realism.”
06 Thursday Sep 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
I don’t normally cover table-top RPGs here. But something interesting has been funded with $25k on Kickstarter: Tremulus…
“Tremulus is a storytelling RPG where you and your friends get together and create a haunting story in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft’s works.”
Ok, so it’s about real storytelling. I’m liking it.
“easy to learn” … “there is nothing to memorize” … “the story isn’t written beforehand” … “You only need a pair of regular old six-sided dice, like you find in most family board games”.
I’m definitely liking it. Sounds like my kind of game. Although I’ve never seen the attraction of table-top RPGs, when there are videogames like Morrowind to be played. But if it’s as easy as the makers claim then Tremulus might even have potential for jump-starting stalled writers, by giving them some parts of a basic plot structure. Since it’s claimed that Tremulus…
“plays exceedingly well, with just one player. This complements weird literature perfectly, as there is often only a central, solitary protagonist.”
And since they now have $25k to play with, there’s a chance it could be a fairly sophisticated and Lovecraft-faithful project. Here’s hoping.
06 Thursday Sep 2012
Posted in New books
Ben Woodard’s Slime Dynamics is now listed as shipping in print format, from Amazon USA (although not yet the UK)…
“Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, videogames, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life but as the darkly vitalistic substance of life.”