06 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Curious… Amazon UK and USA each have a listing for a paperback of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, issue 10.2, dated 15th December 2019. It appears to be live (not a pre-order) and available to purchase in paperback, but offers no table-of-contents and nothing else has appeared online about it.
05 Wednesday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Another survey of some of the best new Lovecraft art on DeviantArt, since my last look.
The Call of Cthulhu: Tale of Inspector Legrasse by DieNCry.
The Terrible Old Man by tomimt.
Pickman’s Model by nightserpent.
Cthulhu creatures, concept sketch by PRED-ALEX.
Hastur, the King in Yellow by hubertspala.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft by Tipthehat.
Howard P. Lovecraft by KipiMichaelis.
And one I missed in the summer, C’mon, Howie -let’s wrassle! by Loneanimator. Imagining what might have happened had Lovecraft and R.E. Howard met in Texas.
05 Wednesday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
DMR surveys Famous Fantastic Mysteries & Other Cool Mags with a focus on the art and Virgil Finlay in particular.
I don’t think there’s ever been a Catalogue raisonne for Virgil Finlay. Perhaps there should be.
04 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
Just launched, the Fiverr Book & eBook Publishing Store. An organised portal-page, leading to Fivver people who will help you publish your book.
04 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Willis Conover Jr.’s Science-Fantasy Correspondent: One, 1975, with a cover illustration showing the entrance to Lovecraft’s final home at 66 College Street. 100 copies, and no No.2. The substantial ‘zine contained Kenneth Sterling’s “Caverns Measureless to Man” memoir-tribute to Lovecraft, among others.
The pictures above are the best I could find, and are larger than other online copies of the cover. One can thus better discern what appears to be the ‘impression of a ghostly figure’ passing across the hallway. A larger and crisper scan would be more useful here, but the ‘zine is not yet available on Archive.org or the online fanzine archives.
04 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A very quick glance at the titles for the usual annual tidal-wave of Lovecraftian videogames, these being those set for the first half of 2020…
* The Innsmouth Case. Hard boiled detectives in Innsmouth, interactive story-based and apparently with “comedy” elements. Cue the “Hmmm, something smells fishy here” jokes.
* World of Horror is a retro text Lovecraft adventure game with b&w manga-style pictures.
* Moons of Madness, Lovecraft in outer spaaacce! A big game delayed from 2019, but promised for 2020.
* Dead Static Drive. A Lovecraftian car-racing game.
* Transient, apparently Lovecraftian cyberpunk. Get ready to strap on your “cosmic radio” headsets.
* It seems the acclaimed The Sinking City is also getting some return-luv as new PC players get past the hate-reviews to find it, and as previous players revisit it with the new gaming PC / graphics-card they got in the January sales. There are also new items for the game such as the long-awaited October 2019 PC patch, free DLC character outfits, and the November 2019 noir reshade mod.
I probably missed a few, but in the absence of a blog-a-list of such things from a hardcore gamer who knows the territory, this’ll have to do.
Also noted in the quick search were tabletop games, such as Fate of Cthulhu, and it seems that the boardgame The Gate of R’lyeh (2019) is gaining ever-more positive reviews.
03 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Bobby Derie surveys “Farnsworth Wright’s Favorite Weird Tales”. Lovecraft’s own list is included is the essay, for comparison. The master had trawled his personal file of Weird Tales back-issues, most likely over Christmas 1929/30, and sent the ‘top six’ to Wright in Jan? 1930…
“Beyond the Door” — Paul Suter.
“The Floor Above” — M. Humphreys.
“The Night Wire” — H. F. Arnold.
“The Canal” — Everil Worrell.
“Bells of Oceana” — Arthur J. Burks.
He also remarks “I’d include [Frank Belknap Long’s] “Black Druid” if it were published.”
03 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in Historical context
The Miskatonic Debating Club & Literary Society on Lovecraft vs. “Sax Rohmer”, making the case that Sax Rohmer borrowed from Lovecraft, or at least used the same old travel-guide that Lovecraft had used for “Under the Pyramids”.
03 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Clark Ashton Smith: A Comprehensive Bibliography, newly announced, with details and a draft cover. Among other things…
It also chronicles the burgeoning field of Smith criticism, from books and pamphlets about Smith to newspaper articles from local papers to analyses in academic journals.
02 Sunday Feb 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Under their Black Wings has a useful overview review of Discovering H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, with a focus on “The Derleth Mythos” by Richard L. Tierney.
For those looking for a paper copy I’d add that you should know that there was a “revised and expanded” edition in 2001, so be sure not to get the earlier edition from eBay. Also that the revised edition is now in a budget £3.80 Kindle ebook.
01 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in Historical context
Another panorama from Lovecraft’s city, as it was in his youth… and we’re all aware of how he loved his sweeping vistas. One wonders if this was an actual view from a tower, perhaps a view known to Lovecraft, or if a hot-air balloon was involved.
A rather dour picture in b&w, and I’ve done my best to subtly colorise it.
Update: If you want to load up Photoshop, I’ve found a coloured version with better colour…
31 Friday Jan 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraft as character
Dark World Quarterly’s new post “Mark of the Monster: Jack Williamson’s Lovecraftian Lapse” takes a look at the May 1937 Weird Tales cover-story tale “The Mark of the Monster”. Reading it, one glimpses the possibility that editor Farnsworth Wright hoped he had found a somewhat more downmarket and pliable ‘Lovecraft Mk. II’.
But a few issues later the published letters from readers called the cover-story a stolidly written formula shocker, found its clunky ending unworthy of Weird Tales, and observed that the story was… “a blurred carbon copy of late HPL’s classic The Dunwich Horror”. The experiment doesn’t appear to have been repeated.
A few months later one can find Wright trying a different angle on Lovecraft. Tucked away in the back of the August 1937 issue of Weird Tales Wright ran the short and more amusing “The Terrible Parchment” by Manly Wade Wellman. This is not a ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale, though he’s certainly strongly there in the background and is named several times, and there’s a footnote indicating this is a Lovecraft-tribute story. Yet it does feature one of his key creations, The Necronomicon. As such, it would probably merit at least a footnote in a hypothetical “Lovecraft as Character” encyclopaedia.
I suspect there may be more ‘tributes’ and tangential nods like this to be found, before the war broke out and Derleth and his lawyers began firing off warning letters. It might be useful for a future Lovecraft Annual to have a complete survey and chronology of such creative reactions to Lovecraft’s death, April 1937 – summer 1939? I don’t have the collectable source material to be able to do that, but those with a large collection might consider such a thing.