[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3fEU-Bo6Sw&w=560&h=315]
Overshadowing
26 Wednesday Jun 2019
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Category Archives: Podcasts etc.
Podcast: Subway fear
20 Thursday Jun 2019
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc.
In the new Pessimists Archive podcast, each episode outlines a mass panic about new technologies or products — a panic that sooner or later proved to be unfounded.
Their The Subway episode seems relevant to Lovecraft and subways and similar tunnels. For instance in “Nyarlathotep” (1920) Lovecraft has… “Another [column of people] filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.”; Pickman paints a study called ‘Subway Accident’ featuring monsters climbing into the subway through a “crack in the floor” of the subway; and the climax of “At the Mountains of Madness” famously makes the comparison with a subway train. There was also Lovecraft’s general and growing dislike of subway travel when in New York, and then what appears to be his fear of using them by late 1925 / early 1926. One can also see broad comparisons between subways and the various other tunnel networks in his fiction.
For further reading, see my essays on “Lovecraft and the Subway” and the wider “It Emerged from the Subways! On the genesis of the monstrous under New York City”, in Walking With Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26.
Dark Adventure Radio Theatre: The Lurking Fear
19 Wednesday Jun 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Almost upon us, the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre dramatised full-cast edition of The Lurking Fear should be shipping/releasing in a day or two…
Downloads of The Lurking Fear will become available when the CD begins shipping. That date is currently estimated to be 21st June 2019 and may change.
You may also enjoy accompanying this, or preparing for it, with my free Annotated “Lurking Fear” PDF.
If you want CDs rather than downloads, you can also get a Boxed Set with old-time radio case that neatly holds four CDs…
When you provide your billing and shipping info at check out, please use the Customer Comments box to tell us which shows you’d like.
By which method you can pick up Fear plus another three CDs you may have missed, such as The Horror at Red Hook; The Haunter of the Dark; and The Rats in the Walls, among others.
Bear in mind that these are radically re-worked as 1930s style radio dramatisations, as if the broadcast rights for Lovecraft’s stories had been purchased by a slick New York radio theatre. This may not be to your taste if you prefer straight Wayne June -style readings of Lovecraft, so if you’re new to Dark Adventure you may want to listen to some samples and trailers… before you send your PayPal balance spiralling gibbering into the black gulf of cosmic nothingness.
More Howard Days 2019 videos
18 Tuesday Jun 2019
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works
More new videos from Howard Days 2019, kindly made and posted by Ben Friberg.
“Carney and Emmelhainz talking about their new role as editors of The Dark Man, the journal of Robert E. Howard studies” and new developments. The journal is being put on a regular schedule, and will be expanded in range to include papers on other Howard-era pulp topics. After this presentation there’s some news about the circa 2020 (affordable paperback) publication of Howard letters and poems, with all the known poems in perhaps three volumes. Then the session ends with an update on the ongoing Conan commercialisations, such as comics and games, in which the audience learns that Conan has now joined Marvel’s Avengers team of superheroes.
2. “The History of Project Pride”, on the locally-led and increasingly successful 30-year project to preserve Howard’s legacy in Cross Plains. A great listen, and you’ll learn a whole lot about the town and its spirit.
The Glenn Lord Symposium videos are also being posted, short presentations from scholars from the symposium element of the Days, but I’ll do a linking post on those once they’re all up.
The trailer, keynote speech and a major panel were all posted a few days ago.
Future City
17 Monday Jun 2019
Posted in Podcasts etc.
The Lovecraftian Murray Ewing has a new sci-fi soundtrack, Future City, inspired by the Terran Trade Authority (TTA) books of the 1970s. Judging by the samples the music might be described as ‘upbeat synthwave, but without many of the trance-ier overtones’.
Here’s a spread from the free Digital Art Live magazine’s issue 13 which had a mini-feature on the Terran Trade Authority, and which showed covers from all the books. TTA took science-fiction paperback covers of the 1970s, and re-purposed them to illustrate the timeline of an imagined space-faring future.
Howard Day 2019 – the first videos
16 Sunday Jun 2019
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH
The first of the video recordings are up for the Howard Days 2019, the major annual event which celebrates the life, work and home-town of Robert E. Howard…
1. Scene-setter, event trailer:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIXQ1XhF458&w=560&h=315]
2. Keynote Speech by Guest of Honor, author David C. Smith:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O0sGBUKlgU?start=234&w=560&h=315]
3. One-hour panel: “Kull, Conan, Kane or Bran: The Original Sword and Sorcery Characters”.
New CD: Sonnets of the Midnight Hours
15 Saturday Jun 2019
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.
News of the new Sonnets of the Midnight Hours, a Fedogan & Bremer audio CD. Graham Plowman provides the musical score, underpinning theatrical readings of a cycle of 47 poems from Donald Wandrei. Who H.P. Lovecraft held in very high regard, along with the artist brother Howard. The poems arise from circa-1927, with Wandrei under the influence of both Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.
This is a type of fantastic that mixed both science and fantasy, and that was common with the Lovecraft circle. You don’t get this sort of imagery after the Campbellian science fiction take over in the late 1930s. … His sonnet cycle is what probably sent H. P. Lovecraft off to create the “Fungi from Yuggoth” cycle that started appearing in Weird Tales in September 1930. Robert E. Howard produced his “Sonnets out of Bedlam” probably influenced either by Wandrei or Lovecraft or both.
[Picture: Howard Wandrei’s cover band illustration (front) for a 1964 collection of his brother’s poems.]
For modern print, Sanctity and Sin: The Collected Poems And Prose Poems Of Donald Wandrei (2008) seems the book to get, and can still be had at an affordable price in paperback.
Herbert West: Reanimator – a two-hour reading
22 Wednesday May 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
This week’s The SFFaudio Podcast #526 is a full two-hour unabridged audiobook reading of “Herbert West: Reanimator” by H.P. Lovecraft, read by Jim Moon. Apparently it’s a re-run of a Hypnogoria podcast that I can’t immediately find and may no longer be available. “Herbert West” was of course the serial ‘shocker’ that Lovecraft wrote for Home Brew.
Looking for the Hypnogoria original of this audio reading, I was pleased to discover Hypnogoria: Microgoria #65 – Shiver and Shake and the Creepy Creations of Ken Reid. 33 minutes of podcast surveying a British master of fun cartoon monster-creation.
Ken Reid has a series of handsome book re-issues, Creepy Creations Vol 1., Faceache Vol 1: The First Hundred Scrunges, and Ken Reid’s World Wide Weirdies Vol. 1. His work will be fondly remembered by those of a certain generation.
I wonder if anyone still has that old cardboard “dial-a-monster” picture-frame from that time, which one could get through the mail and I for one had a copy of (long lost, now). It was an early generative work, as millions of unique combinations were possible, there being circular dials which would swing a variety of eyes, hair, chins, noses etc into the picture-frame portrait. They were designed so they would all more or less seamlessly blend together.
New book: A Place of Darkness
22 Wednesday May 2019
An interesting sounding new book of cultural history from Kendall R. Phillips, A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema (Spring 2018). It steps beyond the movie industry’s early history and surveys the wider currents which each distinct cultural milieu both drew on and drew around itself…
“He shows how early cinema [1890s onward] linked monsters, ghosts, witches, and magicians with Old World superstitions and beliefs, in contrast to an American way of thinking that was pragmatic, reasonable, scientific, and progressive. Throughout the teens and twenties [1910s and 20s], Phillips finds, supernatural elements were almost always explained away as some hysterical mistake, humorous prank, or nefarious plot. The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, constituted a substantial upheaval in the system of American certainty and opened a space for the reemergence of Old World gothic within American popular discourse in the form of the horror genre [the famous Universal monster movies, 1931 onwards], which has terrified and thrilled fans ever since.”
It’s being well reviewed. Sublime Horror has a sturdy review, and also a free one-hour podcast interview with the author.
The White Tree
20 Monday May 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
It’s interesting to see that the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society / Dark Adventure Radio Theatre are branching out into new HPL-alike audio adventures. Their The White Tree runs 72 minutes with their usual full-cast and full-FX approach, and the story sees…
The police inspector who once probed the mysteries of the Cthulhu cult on a case that leads him once again into the foreboding bayous of Louisana.
It’s © 2016 and on release seems to have been CD-only with a prop-pack. But I’ve now noticed it because it’s been released to Audible for download, dated “26th March 2019”.
Solomon Kane and vampires
03 Friday May 2019
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH
I take no notice of ‘Awards’ these days, literary or otherwise, for the obvious reasons. But I’ll make an exception for the annual Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards.
Perusing the nominations led me to the short appreciation of an R. E. Howard vampire story, “Nosferatu Necronomica – Solomon Kane in the Hills of the Dead”.
This in turn led me to discover that Tantor has kindly given away a free and complete and unabridged reading of the same story, from their paid audiobook The Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane, in .MP3 download.
Archive.org also has the free Weird Tales, August 1930, with “Hills of the Dead” in full.
A major new audiobook
28 Sunday Apr 2019
Posted in New books, Podcasts etc.
I’m pleased to hear that audiobook makers Tantor have popped out a 17 hour audiobook of Joshi’s In the Land of Time: And Other Fantasy Tales (Penguin Classics, 1986), in which Joshi presented his ‘best of Dunsany’ selection. Amazon USA and UK ‘knows nurthing’ about this at present, but Tantor’s site has details, stating a 26th March 2019 publication date and offering a link to a download purchasing site that doesn’t appear to be run by Amazon.
Formerly Trantor (as in Asimov), Tantor did the excellent Conan and Solomon Kane audiobooks, so the quality should be top notch. However, someone should tell them that keyword “Joshi” gets no results on searching their site, and that Tantor are damn difficult to find via regular Web search.