Category Archives: Podcasts etc.

Morgoth’s Review on “Nyarlathotep”

29 Wednesday Sep 2021

Posted by in Censorship, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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New on Archive.org today, a Morgoth’s Review podcast lecture on “Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep And Our Changing World”. This turns out to be a YouTube podcaster with a slightly-difficult accent and obvious high intelligence, who has discovered Lovecraft’s fiction via the Warhammer game of all things. Here he’s bowled over by Lovecraft’s prose-poem “Nyarlathotep”, and points out the congruence of the short tale with our current times, and many pithy points are made. An entertaining and illuminating view from a Lovecraft newcomer.

But worthy of automatic censorship? He does seem to be from that wing of the Christian-Right which believes in the existence of evil-as-an-active-force (but presumably doesn’t frown on the likes of Warhammer as an abode-of-demons?). But there’s nothing objectionable in his lecture and partial reading that I can hear. Nevertheless spotting it popping up on Archive.org made me aware of the existence of the curious ‘Deemphasized Collections at Internet Archive’ category, to which the lecture has presumably been auto-added by bots rather than the uploader. The category includes “Adult and Mature Comics” and “Vintage Men’s Magazines”, and in general is an amazing collection of weirdness and smut. All of which is presumably suppressed in searches. But which Archive.org then allows you to search all in one go, very conveniently for some.

Here ‘lovecraft’ means something very different, though a search for his name does sometimes give a few results in contexts other than a tawdry scan of a 1970s Busty British Bar-maids Vol. 1 and suchlike. For instance I see that Thomas Ligotti’s acclaimed The Conspiracy Against The Human Race and even Lovecraft’s Collected Works languishes in this suppressed category, nestling against the ‘Ancient Aliens’ Collection and other such high weirdness. Possibly the crap front-cover and the word “Conspiracy” in the title were enough to damn a great writer, but who can fathom the unexplained caprices of censorship these days? A lone copy of a 1920s Weird Tales is even consigned to the category, once deemed suitable fare for juvenile readers and distributed to every city news-stand in America.

Horrorbabble’s “The Space-Eaters”

05 Sunday Sep 2021

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Horrorbabble has released the fun and pulpy Lovecraft-as-character story “The Space-Eaters” by Frank Belknap Long, as a new audio reading of 70 minutes.

The appearance of this in Weird Tales for summer 1928 had header art obviously meant to illustrate Lovecraft himself. Possibly the earliest public ‘cartoon-izing’ of him, outside of the fanzines and his letters? I don’t know of any comment he made on seeing the artwork, but he did later note in passing that the tale had provoked two pages of very effusive letters in Weird Tales.

Also recent, Horrorbabble’s five-part audio reading of “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

Dune

03 Friday Sep 2021

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The first movie for the Dune adaptation has been screened. According to a Variety summary ‘epic world-building visuals, but the story drags under its own weight’ is the broad view from the critics at the screening. Though, as you might expect, Variety also looks at Twitter and gives the impression that it has been astro-turfed with gushing and squeee-ing. If you were thinking of trying to get into the audiobooks before the movie arrives on your screen, I puzzled out the order / readers back in 2018.

“The Dwellers Under the Tomb”

26 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH

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MPorcius enjoys and comments on an R.E. Howard horror story new to me, “The Dwellers Under the Tomb”. It’s found to be both complex in plotting and also a little hokey. But fun, and as MPorcius observes it offers several Lovecraftian riffs…

This is a fun story … we see such common Lovecraftian elements as a recovered diary that explains … plans and explorations. Also wall paintings that provide insight on the history…

Lauric Guillaud (in the book The Barbaric Triumph) adds that it is set in “Dagoth Hills” cemetery, in a nod to Lovecraft, and his description further suggests it has a great many Lovecraftian elements and approaches. But stops short of actually naming Lovecraft’s creations. It thus doesn’t feature in collections of Howard’s mythos stories such as Robert M. Price’s Nameless Cults.

The R’lyeh Tribune also noted the strong Lovecraftian approaches and themes. Adding that the tale is “consistent with Howard’s evolving theory of human devolution” and suggesting its use of the wall paintings was a response to reading Lovecraft’s then unpublished and rejected “At the Mountains of Madness” (early 1931). Very interesting.

A little research then finds S.T. Joshi suggesting, looking at the story’s approach and tone, that it was written for a particular market — one of the throwaway… “‘weird menace’ horror pulps such as Terror Tales”. It was presumably found too complex in plot for their readers, and was thus sent over to Weird Tales. There it was rejected in early summer 1932, as the magazine wobbled in the deepening Great Depression. The tale only saw print in 1976 in Lost Fantasies #4. After that it was picked up by the popular Howard paperback collection Black Canaan in 1978. In the early 1990s it was adapted by Roy Thomas for comics in the b&w Savage Sword of Conan #224, and judging by the cover he gave it a Conan retrofit and a vaguely Aliens-like monster makeover.

The R.E. Howard Foundation Newsletter has more recently published a facsimile of one of the two extant drafts, Draft A.

Is there an audio version? Yes, at YouTube. A fine reading in 50 minutes, as “The Dwellers Under The Tomb”.

Greg Staples illustration for the tale, in a Del Ray collection of Howard’s horror tales.

Sadly on hearing the story turns out to be not so fine. The main problem is the very hokey and incredibly creaky dialogue between the two nondescript investigators, although the reader of the audio version does his best with it. Then there’s the ‘lookalike brothers’ sub-plot, which is both too convoluted and too throwaway once the monsters appear. The best part is the final third in the tunnels, and the Lovecraft-infused momentary glimpses of the monsters as the tale’s climax begins to reveal their nature. It reminds me a bit of “The Tomb” and “The Rats in the Walls” as well as “Mountains”, and if you wanted a story in which Howard might be seen as poking a little fun at Lovecraft then this could be the one. Although it feels like the intention was not to poke fun but to have fun, by throwing some Lovecraftian ideas into a quick mish-mash of a pulp story. One intended for a cheap-thrills market, where Lovecraft would probably not see it if published.

By Crom! It’s Roy Thomas…

24 Thursday Jun 2021

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From Howard Days 2021 The Cromcast now has the keynote speech by Roy Thomas in audio.

Those interested in comics as they are in 2021 will also find much interest in an outstandingly interesting podcast interview with Kristian Donaldson (Supermarket, The Dark), including an account of a month-long road-trip that ping-ponged between military sites such as Area 51 and hippy communes in the South-West. He’s getting a new self-funded digitally-created graphic novel out of the curious tensions he felt between those communities. The interview is very long, but downloading and then playing it at 1.2 or 1.3 speed and deepening pitch works nicely (the AIMP player can do that with ease). The .MP3 download hides here…

Robert E. Howard Days 2021

17 Thursday Jun 2021

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Adventures Fantastic brings the first report on the 2021 Robert E. Howard Days event in Texas, and has pictures. The delayed event managed to go ahead, complete with veteran comics writer Roy Thomas as guest of honour.

There’s a Robert E. Howard Days 2021: Cimmeria reading video on YouTube, the Cromcast has a full recording of the “R.E.H. in Comics” panel, and doubtless other recordings will be online soon.

Robert Aickman biography forthcoming

14 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by in New books, Podcasts etc.

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The journal Wormwoodiana No. 36 will ship shortly, and now has a table-of-contents. The same post has news that an estate-approved biography of acclaimed British supernatural/weird writer Robert Aickman is…

essentially finished, and we now need to explore the best way of seeing it published

Aickman was also a key leader in the post-war restoration of the extensive but neglected British system of inland canals. The restoration was a magnificent success, and now offers a vast network for off-road walking and cycling in leafy surroundings. The system also supports a thriving narrowboat hire industry, especially in the Midlands, bringing affluent tourists and their cash to all sorts of out-of-the-way rural places. Lovecraft the-conservationist-and-walker would be been very pleased that his beloved British Isles had seen such a remarkable and suitable transformation, and that it had been led by a weird author whom he would have deeply admired.

Portrait of Robert Aickman by Ida Kar, National Portrait Gallery. Here newly shadow-lifted and colourised. The painted step and can on the shelf above are traditional painted British canal-ware.

If you can’t wait for the biography, there are said to be two published auto-biographical books, The Attempted Rescue (1966) and the posthumous The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (1986). But how much they have to say about the writer rather than the conservationist, I don’t know.

For those who want a quicker overview and a clear focus on the weird writing, the recent 30-minute audio documentary / appreciation “The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman” (2017) is available at Archive.org.

Incidentally, perhaps some Aickman specialist can tell me this: what exactly was his connection with the English West Midlands? Certain small certain factors I’ve casually noticed in the past suggest he had some sort of connection with the Wolverhampton -to- Burton-on-Trent arc of Staffordshire, just above Birmingham on the map.

Long and Voluminous

10 Thursday Jun 2021

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The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s Voluminous podcast takes a peek into the cache of Frank Belknap Long letters recently acquired by Brown University. The letter being read and discussed had previously been published in abbreviated form in Selected Letters III. Their accompanying blog post tracks down some of the relevant art and allusions. Apparently creamed cottage cheese was disliked by the normally cheese-loving Lovecraft, on account of its “rude” appearance.

Vintage American promo button (badge).

The H.P. Lovecraft Book Club podcast has this week also taken a look at the Letters from March-July 1932, including Lovecraft’s reactions to the death of his aunt. There is also the earlier look at Letters, January-March 1932.