Monster trolls

15 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by in Censorship, Odd scratchings

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Evil sludge company and trademark-trolls, Monster Energy, bully a maker of a children’s storybook. They threatened to set their lawyers on the author of Albert and the Amazing Pillow Monsters, and have seemingly prevented him from publishing more such books.

Many readers of this blog are experts and historians of horror art and metal music. As such does anyone out know of any “prior art” on the Monster Energy “claw” logo + the word “Monster”, which would help invalidate such claims? The company began 2002, and I can’t believe there isn’t some sort of “prior art” on some old heavy metal album cover, videogame, or even a pulp magazine cover.

Update: I’ve already found Monster manual (1994). I’d imagine this would hold up quite well in court as “prior art” on the matter in relation to books and comics and suchlike.

Moi, Lovecraft

14 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Moi, Lovecraft is a new book illustrated by Yann Sougey-Fils, with texts by Jean-Christophe Malevil. H.P. Lovecraft returns to the hospital on 10th March 1937, and in the five days before his death he “tells his story in the first person”.

It’s from the tiny press Editions des Tourments, and runs 112 pages. It doesn’t seem to be using the letters translated to French, but I’m guessing it may perhaps be counterpointing scenes from Lovecraft’s “death diary” with happier scenes from his life? Nor is it clear how heavily the book is illustrated.

Anyway, Moi, Lovecraft is published in French in about a week’s time. The same artist has a 64-page colour ‘BD’ French comics adaptation of The Dreams in the Witch House, to be published by the same press alongside Moi, Lovecraft. 64-pages is standard in France, and as such it’s not quite what the Anglosphere would call ‘a graphic novel’ (compared to the 130 pages of art one would expect here, in a 152 page trade paperback), more of a long graphic story.

Big-budget Dunwich Horror movie in early development

10 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by in Films & trailers

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“H.P. Lovecraft Trilogy Being Planned by the Makers of ‘Color Out of Space’”, reports the movie-making world’s media. The news arises from an interview with… “SpectreVision’s Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah” who want… “at least three of them”. They have the obvious choice of The Dunwich Horror in the “early stages” of development, for a… “Lovecraft adaptation that truly capture[s] cosmic dread without the camp”. Sounds good, but it’s also said to be likely to be set in the near-future, and will have the inevitable political “messaging” that seems inescapable these days.

R.E. Howard letters going to POD

09 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in New books, REH

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The Robert E. Howard Foundation has apparently… “decided to re-print the Collected Poetry/Letters, as well as the sold-out books!” This was reported on the Forums after a reading of their Newsletter. Apparently the plan involves going to perpetual in-print print-on-demand for “The Collected Poetry and The Collected Letters”, presumably in indexed paperbacks and at affordable prices.

Great news, and hopefully there may even be Kindle ebooks versions too — but that last point is just my hope.

Wandrei’s Ivy Frost

07 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Haffner Press is to publish The Complete Ivy Frost by Lovecraft correspondent and one-time protege Donald Wandrei. A $50 hardcover with 700 pages of mystery-science-detective stories…

Rather than following the usual hard-drinking, trench-coated style of many of his contemporaries, [Wandrei’s] strategy was to mix the logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes with the technology of Lester Dent’s Doc Savage.

I’d never heard of Ivy Frost before, but I like the sound of him. These gun-blazing mystery-science stories all appeared in Clues Detective Stories magazine from 1934-37 (not on Archive.org), so one assumes that Lovecraft was aware of them. One wonders how may ‘little nods to Lovecraft’ Wandrei might have snuck into the stories.

Let’s hope for a Kindle ebook version in due course. In the meantime there’s also I.V. Frost: Tales of Mystery & Scientific Investigation which is a 270-page collection of pastiche stories by later writers, available as a budget Kindle ebook as well as a paperback from Moonstone.

In other news on Wandrei, S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated and he notes that the Lovecraft letters book…

Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja is soon to appear from Hippocampus Press.