17 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH
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.
16 Wednesday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts
H.P. Lovecraft appears as the ‘big reveal’ at the end of the recently-released serial comic Die #16, and now makes a sustained as-character appearance in the current issue #17. Die is based on a popular RPG game, it seems.
In the comic he is deemed to have died in 1919, after blinding himself because of the horrors he was seeing and learning about. He is here the blind ‘Master of Dreams’ who serves as brief ‘realm-guide and info-dump’ for the super-hero-like RPG team. I say brief, but he appears for 14 pages, which all look superb and are kind of fun. Lovecraft is then rewarded by the team by being easily killed with a single head-bash, because he is “no longer needed” (no… I couldn’t figure that bit out, either…). His death (again) unleashes his hordes of nightmare creature-dreams on his dream-realm and thus on the team. Moral: ‘Don’t kill the Master, because it will unleash his horrors’, I guess.
But then the team just teleport away from the monsters (erm… Wellsian centipedes?) and the brained Lovecraft. Which was rather lame, I thought. Die has superb art and interesting fantasy-horror concepts going on, but possibly some too-easy get-outs. But perhaps that’s the way it is in the table-top RPG version of Die. Don’t like a NPC character? Just kill him off… In trouble? Just teleport away…
I guess now we wait for the trade-paperback for this Die story-arc to see how it all plays out and if it makes sense when read in full. The trade is due early November as Die, Volume 4: Bleed, with 168 pages.
15 Tuesday Jun 2021
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
Another few picks from the new or recent Lovecraft art.
The Music of Erich Zann by Rabbitstein.
Howard Lovecraft-Process by Red-Rus. And the final finished version.
H.P. Lovecraft, Prophet of the Great Old Ones by Airen90. Adapted from one of the several ‘stage magician’ movies, I’m guessing.
Lovecraft by YlarchC. Imagining Cage playing Lovecraft himself, in a TV movie.
Cthulhu Rises by Silberius. (Lovecraft and Sonia in New York City, 1925 at the genesis of “Cthulhu”).
The Cats of Ulthar (BW) by UnworthyReturn.
Alhazred Encounter 10: The Temple of Ong by Tillinghast23. There’s a large series of these, depicting the many quests of Alhazred. Also a similar Fungi from Yuggoth set from a few years ago, and an Ashton Smith set.
Egypt 04 by Blik1976.
Abdul Alhazred by Mgenccinar.
Also noticed was Solomon Kane in the Ruins by ArtofReza.
14 Monday Jun 2021
Posted in New books, Podcasts etc.
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.
13 Sunday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
You’re likely to need a tongue like an eel, to do justice to reading aloud Lovecraft’s poetry translated into Swedish. But it’s good to know such a book exists.
Kosmofobi : Dikter om varldar bortom was new from Aleph Bokforlag in 2020, with 176 pages and 10 illustrations…
The book collects all the author’s surviving horror and fantasy poems. These are published in the original side-by-side with Swedish interpretations in free verse. There is also an essay by the prominent Lovecraft expert Robert M. Price, written especially for this Swedish edition.
Also from the same publisher, Jens Heimdahl’s illustrated “Dream Quest”, Soekandet efter det droemda Kadath (2020, 2nd edition). According to the publisher…
Something of an art book, solidly illustrated by Jens Heimdahl, who also has a section on the author and analyzes the story.
They’ve saddled it with a cover with poor ‘shovelware’ typography, but here are some samples of the art…
12 Saturday Jun 2021
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Speaking of Science Fiction is a chunky collection of 31 interviews with primarily science fiction authors, and some interviewees were also known as editors and anthologists. The interviews were done by Paul Walker via letter and took place 1969-74, first appearing in print in the New Jersey journal Luna between 1972 and 1976 (or between 1970 and 1976, depending on source). The book was published in paperback by Luna in 1978 with illustrations of each author by Dave Ludwig, and there was also a hardback edition with dust-jacket.
For the sake of future searchers, here are the TOCs for the 425 pages, via a sales listing …
I looked into the book because a long-ago zine had mentioned a Frank Belknap Long interview and, as it also had portrait illustrations depicting each author, there was the double-promise of interesting Long/Lovecraft content. But the TOCs show no Long, only Bloch. And since there was never a reprint, additional interviews cannot have been added later.
The book is not currently on Archive.org and there are only a few Luna Monthly titles there. In which the only pulp-era writer interview is Edmond Hamilton, the resident rocketeer at Weird Tales. But there is also also “A Day with Ray Bradbury” by different interviewers, and the young Bradbury counts as a pulp writer. I assume that the interviews mostly appeared in the premium Luna Prime journal, of which Archive.org currently only has a 1970 edition with no interviews in it.
While looking for the title I found a similar title from the period, Speaking of the Fantastic, with interviews conducted by Darrell Schweitzer. This became a series of books, which can currently be had as affordable print-on-demand paperbacks via Amazon.
11 Friday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals
This week on ‘picture postals’, the man himself. As seen on a series of postcards issued in France under the ‘Dessin Jullian’ imprint, by artist Bernard Jullian and presumably self-published. I’ve been unable to discover dates or any biographical data on Jullian, but the cards appear to be classed as vintage — so perhaps before 2000. These are part of a colour postcard series that included portraits-from-photos of Bram Stoker, Arthur C. Clarke, Poe and other famous writers of the imagination. I’m usually averse to portraits-from-photos, which are nearly always so obviously portraits-from-photos, but here the artist has evoked something of Lovecraft’s arch intelligence.
Also R.E. Howard, from the same series…
10 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
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.
10 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Unnamable
≈ Enter your password to view comments.
09 Wednesday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts
Hijos de Cthulhu digs up another entry for the hypothetical ‘Lovecraft as character’ encyclopedia.
In June 1983 a theatre show called ‘Lovecraft’ premiered at the University of Seville [in Spain]. The show was presented by the University Theater Group “Puppets”, founded in 1979 by various students and professors of the aforementioned University. It was described as…
“A deep and serene music announces that the show begins. Mad and tortured Lovecraft, mysterious and human Lovecraft appears on stage. “We do not intend to do a biographical work on Lovecraft, we have simply been impressed by some visual features of this character that appears to us full of contradictions.”
I wonder if the script and staging directions are still available? They might make for an interesting translation in the Lovecraft Annual 2022, or one of Joshi’s other journals?
08 Tuesday Jun 2021
Posted in Historical context
Here’s a view of Lovecraft from 1950 that escaped the A Weird Writer in our Midst collection of early Lovecraft criticism and commentary…
Erroneous in facts, but a valid example of what some in 1950 might have thought of Lovecraft. What was Literary Lamas of New York (1950)? Archive.org doesn’t have it, so I can’t tell if the author went on to more commentary on Lovecraft, or if it was an isolated remark. The book appears to have been a coruscation of the pre-war and wartime mistreatment of talented writers by New York City publishers.
07 Monday Jun 2021
Posted in Odd scratchings
Arthur C. Clarke’s chunky book Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998, now on Archive.org in open PDF. Not a great scan, but you can see what you would get if you were to pick up the hardback for $8 used on Amazon. It appears there is no ebook edition other than this Archive.org scan, at least in the UK.
The book opens with an essay on Dunsany, and also includes a “Tribute to Robert Bloch”, “Save the Giant Squid!”, and a short survey of fierce gay warlords and generals in history.