The Lovecraft Geek – episode 3

06 Monday Jan 2020

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Another item I missed in the Christmas ker-fluffle. Episode 3 of the new run of The Lovecraft Geek podcast with the venerable Robert M. Price, which he released just before Christmas 2019.

He refers to Lovecraft’s massive daily output of the written word as “graphomania”, a rare word I don’t think I’d encountered before and was thus pleased to learn. There’s also “typomania”, which I guess is the correct modern keyboarding form today, though it wouldn’t apply to Lovecraft since he deeply disliked typing. Also mentioned in the podcast is a relatively-soon re-publication of an old out-of-print Starmont critical book on the Lin Carter mythos and other works (Lin Carter: a Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism, No. 36), and the publication of the long-unpublished Annotated Lovecraft.

Public domain in 2020

02 Thursday Jan 2020

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Wondering what’s in the public domain from 1924? The mainstream media seem to be doing a very poor job of covering the matter this year, but I had a post back in the summer that looked into it in depth for the USA and elsewhere. As for Lovecraft…

for Lovecraft, 1924 brought publication of […] the notorious Eddy necrophilia collaboration “The Loved Dead”; and the ghost-written Houdini tale “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”.

This raises the question of if the Eddy estate can any longer prevent “The Loved Dead” (Weird Tales, May/July 1924) from appearing in U.S. collections of Lovecraft’s ghost-writing collaborations.

I also imagine the tale would, with a few additions and some tweaking, provide someone with an over-the-top comics adaptation in 2020.

“Lovecraft is all you need… turn off your mind and float downstream…”

02 Thursday Jan 2020

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I’m late in getting to the very trippy hippy-tastic poster for the release of the movie of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. The poster slipped out and got lost in the razzle-dazzle of the run-up to Christmas. The movie’s cinema release is on 24th January in the USA, so you should have about a month or so to catch it. Then the 4k Blu-ray and DVD is due a month later on 24th February 2020.

December on Tentaclii

01 Wednesday Jan 2020

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‘Tis the bleak midwinter, and in the grate the faint embers of the yule-log flicker and wither. My Patreon also withers, having lost two patrons since I departed from the daily posting schedule. If you can help out with just $1 or $2 a month, please, and so push it above the current $53… then then would be most encouraging for 2020. I still have hopes of $100 a month.

My thanks to my December patrons, though, who’ve enabled me to fortuitously acquire another two books. These being Lovecraft’s letters to Moe and to Bloch, bagged when I spotted them at £11-£12 Amazon “Warehouse Deals” inc. free shipping. So, half-price, basically. Slightly imperfect, with cover scuffs and slight bumping, but I don’t mind that. They’re perfectly intact otherwise. Thank you, also, to the Lightning Source print-machine maintenance elves… your scuffs have now saved me a bundle on three books! The Moe and Bloch books been added to the reading pile for early summer 2020.

I was able to hold back some snowy scenes from last summer’s very deep dive into Lovecraft’s College St… and these pictures became “Solstice special: College St. in the snow”. This proved to be a very popular post. I still have a few more such pictures, which may appear here when the the snows are chin-high this winter, plus another excellent no-snow picture that will appear here next May on the date that Lovecraft moved into No. 66 College St.

It was a quiet month at Tentaclii Towers. No new print books to notice, but scholarship noted here in December included the publication of the journal Dead Reckonings No. 26. I also made more additions to my “Open Lovecraft” page.

In games, I noted that “Open Cthulhu” is now online, which bodes well for the future of indie Lovecraftian RPGs.

It was good to see the release of Librivox’s audiobook anthology Lovecraft’s Influences and Favorites, and this collection provides a core around which a wider set of audio readings might be assembled.

Various bits of art were posted here, including a unique t-shirt ready .PNG for my Patreon patrons.

After the new(?) audiobook H.P. Lovecraft – The Collaborations from the HPLHS, the month’s big creative news was that the Game of Thrones writers are adapting the graphic novel Lovecraft (2003). It’s rumoured to be set to become a movie. I also undertook a quick survey of the big movies coming in 2020, and it seems set to be a far better screen-year than the lacklustre and disappointing 2019.

Lovecraft’s 2019: a year in brief review

01 Wednesday Jan 2020

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Lovecraft’s 2019: a year in brief review:

Wilum Pugmire, the delectable author and painstaking student of Lovecraft’s works, passed away and was sadly missed. Many produced obituaries and tributes to his life and work. The best of his Lovecraftian fiction was made available in the affordable edition An Imp of Aether, and I see that this is currently being translated into German for 2020.

BOOKS & AUTHORS:

In books we had, among others:

* Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (second edition).

* Ave atque Vale: Reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft (replacing Lovecraft Remembered).

* Lovecraft’s Selected Essays.

* To a Dreamer: Best Poems of H. P. Lovecraft.

* H. P. Lovecraft: Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja.

* H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully.

* The H. P. Lovecraft Cat Book. (His complete writings on cats).

* Je suis Providence (Tome 1 & 2), the fine new French translation of Joshi’s monumental Lovecraft biography I Am Providence. A German translation is also underway and partly in print in 2019 when last heard of. Vol 1. of the Italian translation Io Sono Providence: la biografia di H.P. Lovecraft shipped in 2019.

* There was a chunky new Portuguese translation of Lovecraft’s stories. The French also have a sumptuous and definitive new multi-volume translation-set, said to be coming in early 2020.

* Eighty Years of Arkham House: A History and Bibliography.

* The “first comprehensive checklist of Arkham House ephemera”, being published in two parts in Firsts: The Book Collectors Magazine. Part one has already been published.

* Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft.

* Bobby Derie’s collection Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others.

* Post Oaks and Sand Roughs collected the most autobiographical material from R.E. Howard’s work.

* Challenging Moskowitz. A book of new source material giving participant views of 1930s fandom.

* Frank Belknap Long’s memoir Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside appeared in a new affordable ebook edition.

* Providence After Dark and Other Writings, by T.E.D. Klein.

RESEARCH & MATERIALS:

The Brown University repository’s scanning work was joined by that of the Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University, the latter working on getting Lovecraft’s astronomical notebooks online. The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship returned, offering a chance for Lovecraft scholars to access the archives and collections at Brown.

The run of Weird Tales is now almost all on Archive.org, along with sister and related titles such as Oriental Stories and even a couple of Oriental Stories under its later name of The Magic Carpet. The run includes the February 1928 “Cthulhu” Weird Tales in crisp hi-res. Archive.org also now has Index To The Verse In Weird Tales. These scans are a very valuable research resource that should ideally now have more scholarly apparatus and tools wrapped around them.

Archive.org continued its valuable work, and made available items that would otherwise be unobtainable.

Rhode Island newspapers before 1923 should be online soon, after news of a $250,000 funding grant for scanning and digitisation.

Dealers L.W. Currey issued two substantial catalogues for what appears to have been a new 2019 influx of Derleth and Arkham House material.

JOURNALS:

Many journals published strong issues, including The Lovecraft Annual and Crypt of Cthulhu. Studi Lovecraftiani and Providence Tales produced substantial Lovecraft scholarship in Italian. The latter had two tributes to the Italian Lovecraft scholar and publisher Giuseppe Lippi, and a fine cover portrait of him. Non-English journals Brumal, Dimensione Cosmica, and Herejia y Belleza all had Lovecraft special issues. The long-running publication The Fossil continued to appear, covering the history of amateur journalism and with occasional articles of Lovecraft interest. I also discovered that in 2016 the fine Polish journal Creatio Fantastica had a Lovecraft special issue.

In the wider pulp field there were issues of: The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Fiction Studies which has changed scope a little and now has a wider remit; the annual Pulpster; and the book-a-journal Pulpourri. I was also pleased to see Monster Maniacs #1, a fan-scholarship journal on the history of American monster comics.

In 2019 NecronomiCon Providence once again provided a welcome opportunity for emerging scholars, in the form of its Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium, and the past proceedings of this were published as three affordable Lovecraftian Proceedings ebook journals on Amazon.

The usual range of individual journal articles and book chapters appeared during the year, and my “Open Lovecraft” pages link to those that are free and public.

NEW DISCOVERIES:

Tentaclii made numerous new discoveries about aspects of Lovecraft’s life and work, including several previously unknown memoir letters. These led me to a previously overlooked aspect of Lovecraft’s life in Providence — the friendly bookshop owner ‘Uncle Eddy’ at the Eddy bookstore on Weybosset St. Just a few streets over from the Public Library, Lovecraft had access to a large (20,000 volumes?) used bookstore. The friendly proprietor would open up the store especially for him, and was also the uncle of his best friend in the city.

At Tentaclii I also found a great many new pictures, especially of College Street, Providence, and even a possible new 1915 picture showing the young Lovecraft. Several free scholarly PDFs were also released on Tentaclii, as well as a revised map of “Lovecraft’s Providence”.

New primary material can still be dug up, and 2019 also brought news from S.T. Joshi that “a previously unknown batch of Derleth’s letters to Smith [have come] to light”. A new Robert E. Howard letter was also found in 2019.

EVENTS:

In NecronomiCon Australis, S.T. Joshi undertook a short speaking tour of Australia. Lovecraft’s cherished Lincoln Woods held a low-key Lovecraft event, and there were the usual Lovecraft walking tours in Providence.

In the Spanish-speaking world, Mexico staged a Lovecraft event and a major scholarly event was held in Madrid. The Germans staged the First Postgraduate Forum on Research in the Fantastic, albeit mostly focused on Tolkien for their launch year.

The annual PulpFest 2019 appears to have been a roaring success, and its online engagement and reporting was a shining exemplar of how such things should be done. Howard Days 2019 was a success in Texas, and the excellent videos went online for free soon after the event. In 2019 it was announced that the 2020 Howard Days have bagged Roy Thomas as guest of honour, a major coup.

NecronomiCon Providence 2019 appears, from a distance, to have been rather low-key and mostly interested in matters other than Lovecraft. But off-shoots such as the Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium and the Art Show appear to have retained their focus and been valuable for participants.

GRAPHIC NOVELS, ART NOVELS, ILLUSTRATION:

François Baranger’s Les Montagne Hallucinees, Tome 1 is a sumptuous graphic ‘art novel’ version of “At The Mountains of Madness”; in full-blown graphic novels, Gou Tanabe’s acclaimed Lovecraft manga adaptations began to see English book translation; the French ‘BD’ graphic novel Une nuit avec Lovecraft saw an English translation; Songs of Giants was a sumptuously illustrated edition of the best poetry of R.E. Howard, Lovecraft and others, and a worthy attempt to bring pulp-era poetry to the graphic novel crowd.

In wider art production and illustration there was of course much work done in painting, sculpture, graphic design, fonts and suchlike. NecronomiCon 2019 staged a substantial art show at the Providence Art Club.

AUDIOBOOKS, THEATRE, MUSIC:

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society issued H.P. Lovecraft – The Collaborations, an unabridged audiobook of readings, and so far as I can tell this was released in 2019. S.T. Joshi produced a highly abridged 8,000 word audiobook version of his Lovecraft biography, on vinyl LP from Cadabra Records. Librivox issued a compendium of readings of “Lovecraft’s Influences and Favorites”.

In podcasts, Ask Lovecraft continued to produce fine episodes that manage to be both entertaining and thought-provoking; The Lovecraft Geek podcast managed two new episodes (one later deleted); and The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society began what promises to be a long-running podcast series titled Voluminous: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft.

Audio dramatisations included Dark Adventure Radio Theatre’s Mad Science, adapting four Lovecraft tales in that line. Wayne June’s full recording of “The Shadow Out of Time” was discovered and recovered.

There was also a quiet boom in Lovecraftian stage theatre, which popped up around the world and in the unlikeliest places.

It was a fine year for Lovecraftian music, from highly acclaimed metal albums to full-blown orchestral works such as the CD of The Cities of Lovecraft. The latter also had several live performances around the world, including one performed by the Houston Symphony. Brown University offered a Funded Ph.D. in Music and Multimedia Composition, highly suitable for one lucky Lovecraftian composer seeking to work in Providence.

GAMES:

In videogames, the usual tidal wave of ‘Lovecraftian’ games surged through 2019. But the fair-minded reviews suggested these were distinctly better than past fare, both at the indie and the AAA ends of the market. Several of the larger titles managed to get past the initial hate-reviews, and did quite well in the market.

In RPGs there was a substantial effort to research and craft an “Open Cthulhu” resource for games, free of copyright and trademark entanglements, and this bore fruit in late 2019. At the commercial end of the market Chaosium seems to have thrived in 2019, though I shall have to leave it to gamers to survey their Lovecraftian output of RPGs — along with the wide range of indie titles.

There was a Lovecraft Birthday ‘InnFest’ festival in the Second Life virtual world, and a “best of” video was posted online shortly after.

MOVIES:

The big movie adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space” was critically acclaimed, seems to have done quite well financially (in that it has deals for cinema and Blu-ray releases in 2020), and appears to have spurred work on a trilogy of Lovecraft movies. “The Dunwich Horror” is said to be the next in line for a big screen adaptation. Also, the Game of Thrones writers are reported to have started writing work on what might be termed a Lovecraft ‘fantasy bio-pic’ movie.

2020 movies – the pick

30 Monday Dec 2019

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What do we have coming up in terms of cinema movies in 2020? In order of appearance through the year, my interest is tweaked by…

Underwater. Sci-fi underwater horror. Appears to be an Alien/Abyss re-tread, but it might be more inventive than that.

The Color out of Space. Major modern adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story.

Come Away. British fantasy drama apparently combining Alice in Wonderland with Peter Pan. Has a big-name British cast, although past experience suggests that’s not always a guarantee of success with such things. They can tend to be rather more ‘worthy’ than entertaining, and the child-actor casting can often go badly wrong (e.g. Nesbit’s Five Children and It in the 2004 movie version).

The Call of the Wild. Jack London’s doggy wilderness epic, seemingly done straight. A lot will depend on how convincing the CG is, as there’s going to be a heck of a lot of fur.

The Invisible Man. The title grabs me, but the movie turns out to be a “very loose” and modernised semi-adaptation ‘domestic abuse horror’ movie of the famous ‘early Wells’ science-fiction tale.

Onward. Teen heavy-metal urban-fantasy animation from Pixar.

The New Mutants. Another and apparently the “final” X-Men franchise movie. It can’t be worse than the last, can it? But we may be surprised.

Antlers. A ‘scary deer’ horror? Another 2020 movie, Antebellum, is apparently a ‘scary butterflies’ horror. I’m sensing a trend here. I wonder if the Welsh Film Fund would be interested in my old screenplay Sheep: the blood-baaaath?

Green Knight. Based on the famous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Artemis Fowl. Disney movie version of the books about a “12 year old master criminal” who does things like make supercomputers with stolen fairy technology. Apparently hugely popular among those born after 1990, and most likely to be appreciated by the under-14s and nostalgic 20-somethings. [Update: released, but apparently an utterly awful disaster]

BIOS. Unknown Tom Hanks sci-fi thriller, probably involving computer hackers and AI.

Morbius, the Living Vampire. A movie outing for one of Marvel’s supernatural/superhero characters. Likely to be middling summer fare, akin to the first Ghost Rider movie. I’d guess it may feed into a bigger spring 2022 Doctor Strange movie, which is said to have a strong Lovecraftian slant?

Monster Hunter. Apparently loosely based on a videogame. Probably just a mindless summer action romp.

The King’s Man. A Kingsman prequel movie. Looks like a very interesting start to the Autumn/Fall, and a welcome alternative to James Bond now that the November 2020 Bond appears to have gone the same way as Doctor Who.

The Witches. The Roald Dahl book, apparently given a “dark” adaptation for the “young adult” crowd — but the Guillermo del Toro screenplay promises quality for Halloween.

The Eternals. The first in Marvel’s hoped-for new mega-verse of movies, and based on the fondly-remembered space-gods comics series by Jack Kirby. It’ll be interesting to see how much they Kirby-ize the look of the movie, if at all, re: the possibility of blending film with the kind of toon-tech that brought us the recent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Dune. Another try at filming the famous science-fiction epic. Apparently this will only cover the first half of the first book, so presumably they anticipate a six or seven movie series if successful. Said to be visually ambitious in scale but twisting the story into politically-correct shapes. While you’re waiting, try the audiobooks.

The Croods 2. The first was a great bit of pure animated-comedy entertainment set in an amusing Stone Age, if rather forgettable after a few weeks. But I’d be up for more of that, provided they don’t pack it with eco-preaching.

Uncharted. A December movie and a spin-off from the videogame series, which features many ‘Lost City’ type settings in jungles and deserts. The December timing suggests quality. A lot will depend on how well they can mix machine-guns with mystery. I’d imagine that adding a slight Lovecraftian twist would suit the settings, and what are said to be ‘supernatural relics’, widening up the appeal of the movie version beyond the Indiana Jones crowd?

The Tomorrow War. Alien invasion meets time-travel, via military sci-fi. Again, the December slot inspires hope for some quality.

There’s no sign of the second ‘Young Tolkien’ bio-pic in the 2020 lists. Two were said to be filming, but only one has been released. There’s also no sign of the mooted adaptation of the early H.G. Wells horror The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Added to Open Lovecraft

28 Saturday Dec 2019

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* Y. Torhovets and M. Andronova, “Features of functional epithets in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft” (title translated), Studia Philologica, Vol. 1, December 2019. (Philological study in Ukranian. Examines and categorises Lovecraft’s use of “epithets used to appeal to sensory feelings” in the reader. Finds that his visual epithets predominate, compared to auditory and olfactory epithets).

* J. Bazile, “Ludoformer Lovecraft: Sunless Sea comme mise en monde du mythe de Cthulhu”, Science de jue, No. 9, 2018. (In French with English abstract. Examines the videogame Sunless Sea, seeing in its level design and “narrative architecture” an attempt to recreate “semantic continuity” with Lovecraft’s own approaches to narrative).