Gibbous

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

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Excellent, I see there’s even more quality Lovecraft videogaming set to ooze up from the depths…

Gibbous is a Lovecraftian videogame done in a “traditional 2D animation style” and runs to some 60 hand-painted traditionally-animated scenes of the city of Darkham with 70 “fully voiced” characters. Including a talking kitteh who has been zapped by the Necronomicon. A tome which various cultists in Darkham would very much like to obtain.

The game looks great, and sounds like fun. It seems to be a sort of LucasArts Day of the Tentacle, as if art-directed by junior illustrators at Disney and written by Lovecraft operating in self-parody humour-mode.

Though it remains to be seen if it’s as laugh-out-loud funny as Tentacle, as smoothly animated as old-school Disney, and can avoid the sort of game-stopping head-banging puzzles that so often break story-flow in such games. But the game has been in development for many years, has produced a demo, and it looks like quality. It’s due on Steam for the PC on 7th August 2019, and may be one for Lovecraftians to play along with young relatives who enjoy the likes of Gravity Falls.

Release: 7th August 2019 on Steam.

Update: 16th August and it’s getting very good reviews all round. A classic?

The general approach and cat-character makes me think vaguely of a more glo-paint-coloured Inkscaped version of the Ghostworld title, a game that Microsoft had in development in circa 2013/14 but which they squished while it was still in development.

On Buzrael

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New discoveries

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A small unsolved mystery has long lurked in the text of “The Dunwich Horror”. The name “Buzrael” is used by the Rev. Abijah Hoadley when evoking the source of one of the “cursed Voices”. These Voices having been heard coming from under the ground near Dunwich Village, and thus preached against by Hoadley in a fateful sermon of 1747.

Joshi’s Annotated Lovecraft deems the name invented, and his Penguin Classics edition of Lovecraft states the same. Klinger follows, stating “unknown”.

I can now reveal that the name was invented, but not by Lovecraft. He took the daemonic name “Buzrael” from the satirical squit “The Funeral of Benedict Arnold” (Anon, 7th Oct 1780), in which the devil is deemed to have written a letter to congratulate his daemon emissary Buzrael (this being the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold) for subverting America. This letter was deemed to have been plucked from Arnold’s dying hand before the flames took it, and duly published as a public duty in the Pennsylvania Packet.

Lovecraft would have known this satiric letter from reprints in one of several standard early American history books, such as A Short History of the American Revolution. The earliest I can find it reprinted is in the collection Diary of the American Revolution: from newspapers and original documents (1860).

The name of course evokes ‘Buz—’ as in ‘buzzing’, thus lending itself easily to the idea of ‘strange noises’. The real Hoadley was the intellectual spark who lit the flame which led to the armed revolution in New England, and a man vehemently written against by Pope and Swift — as I reveal in my fourth book of Lovecraft in Historical Context essays. I can see no further connection between the real Hoadley and the real Arnold, although in this transitional period of Lovecraft’s writing the idea of linking the devil and the American Revolution was obviously on Lovecraft’s mind. For instance, as S.T. Joshi has noted of “Dexter Ward” (written 1927)…

the threat of Curwen and his unholy alliance with the devil becomes, according to Lovecraft’s retelling, the first spark of the American Revolution.

Kittee Tuesday: German ship-cats

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

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Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

German ship-cats by Gerhard Marcks, a 1921 signed print. At this point in time Marcks was starting a six-year employment in a “teaching position at the Bauhaus school in Weimar”.

A later book reprint, with far less fidelity than the signed print and also illustrating how digitising scans of books can further degrade fine detail…

Oriental Stories, Winter 1932

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Odd scratchings, REH

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Newly on Archive.org for the first time, a good crisp scan of Oriental Stories for Winter 1932, Farnsworth Wright at the helm of this Weird Tales clone, and Robert E. Howard providing “The Sowers of the Thunder”.

The letters page has mention of The Cross Plains Review in Howard’s home town. A title obviously well known to Howard scholars, but it’s new to me. Howard thus appears to have had a strong local friend in the form of the town’s newspaper editor, something I hadn’t known before. It led me to find that there are now digitized scans of this newspaper online in PDF from a university, albeit the 1920s and 1940s and not the 1930s.

I also found a rather nice painting of The Cross Plains Review editorial building as it would have been…

Call: ‘Penumbra’, a journal for criticism and scholarship of weird fiction

15 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in New books, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi is back from his Australian tour and his blog has just updated.

He’s wittled his Lovecraft biography down to a mere 8,000 words and has committed the results to a vinyl LP record! This is due for release shortly, with music — and I assume also with graphic design and sleeve-notes of the sort that will please the vinyl collectors.

Joshi also notes an Italian translation of the first volume of I Am Providence is due for October 2019, with the dust-jacket sporting an affordable “29 Euro” tag. The second volume of the German language translation is less certain on the date, but is reported as likely to appear at around the same time.

News also of a new Joshi editorship, of …

a new magazine to be published next summer by Hippocampus Press: Penumbra. This will be an annual magazine, consisting of up to 100,000 words, chiefly devoted to criticism and scholarship of weird fiction (exclusive of Lovecraft), but it will also include a small amount of original fiction (about 30,000 words in each issue).

Submissions are invited.

The Fossil #380 – July 2019

15 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Out now, The Fossil #380 (July 2019), free in PDF.

The issue contains items of Lovecraft interest…

1) an essay by Ken Faig, looking in detail at Lovecraft’s acceptance of the NAPA silver ‘honorable mention’ medal for “The Street”. He solves a decade-long puzzle on the matter, with the aid of access to a previously inaccessible January 1922 amateur publication.

2) in a following note, Faig also briefly considers the assertion that in 1937 there was a lost ‘primary’ Lovecraft publication…

a “small booklet of poems” by Lovecraft entitled Science Fiction Bard, published by Donald Wollheim

3) a bibiographic and biographical follow-up to a Wilson Shepherd article, which appeared in the previous April 2019 issue.

Podcast: Into The Weird

14 Sunday Jul 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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Into The Weird: A Marvel Bronze Age Comic Book Podcast is a new one to me. It’s an ongoing audio survey with ten episodes, to date. The show surveys the weird-horror elements depicted in the classic (and, often, no-so classic) Marvel Comics output of the 1970s. Their latest podcast discusses the Lovecraftian in Marvel’s Doctor Strange, specifically in two Marvel Premiere issues from 1972.

“It does not permit itself to be read…”

13 Saturday Jul 2019

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This event may interest those with deep thoughts about ‘the unreadable’, especially in relation to ‘lost’ medieval libraries and books. Note that the organisers also state they’re interested in modern imaginative evokings of such medieval things. This concern sits at the edge of wider debates about intellectual ‘dark matter’ and the transmutation of modern archives into publicly accessible forms.