Chasing after Monster Talk

I’ve been catching up with the Monster Talk podcast from the worthy Skeptic Magazine. Recent episodes of interest to readers of this blog will be…

* MonsterTalk: The Call of Tut-Thulhu. “This episode spends a lot of time talking about the unusual connection between H. P. Lovecraft and the discovery of King Tut’s Tomb.”

* MonsterTalk: Teaching with Monsters. “Dr. Thor Hansen has been teaching a course at Western Washington University that uses monsters to teach science”.

* MonsterTalk: Spouting off about Gargoyles. “Mathew Duman, author of An Education in the Grotesque: The Gargoyles of Yale University.”

It’s one I hadn’t yet plugged into my recently-discovered OneCast podcasting app on my Amazon Fire tablet. OneCast is genuinely free and ad-free and is very nicely designed, if you were looking for such an app. It has everything you could want, except for an imaginary ‘YouTube subscriptions to MP3, then treated as podcasts’, which would get me regular shows like ‘Ask Lovecraft’ as podcasts. OneCast also has a feed set that discovered everything I wanted, once I learned that it doesn’t like phrases only keywords. For instance, to find ‘The Lovecraft Geek’ don’t search for the full name, just search for ‘Lovecraft’ and then hunt and peck among the ‘Lovecraft’ results.

Elder Props freebies

New on Archive.org… Elder Props (1981), an 84 page compendium of printable pages, presumably for use as photocopies made as RPG game prompts and elements. The artist has a nice clean toony ink style, which I like a lot.

If you wanted these in colour, look at Krita’s 4.0’s new ability to auto-paint line-art.

I see that the same book can also be downloaded from the site of the artist for free, though there’s it’s confusing labelled Evil Dead, which makes one think of tiresome video-nasty zombies movies of the 1980s rather than the Neconomicon.

The artist is still working, and has a similar product for the awesome Gravity Falls series. Also free Fonts

Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

A major new history book from Erik Davis (author of the superb TechGnosis) is always welcome, especially one edited and designed by MIT Press. His new High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies is pre-ordering now, to ship in July 2019. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a ‘Lovecraft chapter’ or two.

On the record

Most folks would be content to bung their new Lovecraft story reading on YouTube, along with the 30 others that now appear there each day. But H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon”, “The Cats of Ulthar” & “The Music of Erich Zann” does things more elegantly. A vinyl LP record, superb 12″ sleeve art, and a… “new original score by cinematic instrumentalists Anima Morte”.

Worth a peek just for the quality artwork by Karmazid.

The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth – now in ebook

My new short book The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth is now available on Amazon as an ebook. In 22,000 words it carefully identifies 135 points or ‘cracks’ in The Lord of the Rings and related material, ‘cracks’ in which one might write new fan-fiction stories…

The 22,000-word book is a side-project from my forthcoming scholarly book on Tolkien, and as a bonus this new ebook version adds ten more ‘cracks’ not in the print edition.

de Camp on the reception of his Lovecraft biography

From the Science Fiction Review in 1975, de Camp on what he left out of the Lovecraft biography

This will already have been encountered by those interested in Lovecraft’s young manhood and his attempts to enlighten the local Irish youth. But I wasn’t aware of the information given on the initial sales volume for the biography, and this may interest those looking at the early history of the Lovecraft revival in the 1970s.

The Shadow Out of Time

Here’s a glimpse of the style of the manga-style comics adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time adaptation, recently completed by Gou Tanabe in Japan. This book is apparently getting manga fans excited, and he’s said to have a cult following. Personally it’s not an art style I greatly appreciate, but it’s good to get a full-length adaptation of this major story.

Added to Open Lovecraft

Newly added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog…

* K. Dodd, “Narrative Archaeology: Excavating Object Encounter in Lovecraftian Video Games”, Studies in Gothic Fiction, forthcoming 2019.

* V. Sirangelo, “Sulla natura lunare di Shub-Niggurath: dalla mythopoeia di Howard Phillips Lovecraft a The Moon-Lens di Ramsey Campbell”, Caietele Echinox, Volume 35, 2018. (Short article in French on Shub-Niggurath in Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell. Part of a special issue on the Neo-Gothic).

Caietele Echinox‘s large archive of themed special issues also looks interesting, though articles need to be bunged through Google Translate unless you can work with English abstracts.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: The Biltmore

I imagine that people are making their hotel bookings about now for NecronomiCon. So here are two evocative postcards showing the main hotel which will host the NecronomiCon 2019 Lovecraft convention. One could almost imagine that the fellow in the drawing might be the Old Gent himself, perhaps taking a close look at the pigeons to check for signs of Yuggothian tendencies.

The hotel opened in 1922. While it may seem unlikely that Lovecraft or his friends ever lounged in the lobby here, one can imagine Frank Belknap Long’s affluent family staying there overnight. Though I know of no evidence that they did. A Spanish text I have suggests that when Barlow was travelling with his family they stayed in this level of hotel. But again, I know of no evidence they ever came with Barlow to Providence.

Possibly Lovecraft was more familiar with the park adjacent. It looks like the sort of place where one might have a pleasant wait away from the crowds, if a train was heavily delayed. Or could have served as a place to sit out with friends, while they recovered from their train journey enough to walk up the hill.

The hotel is briefly mentioned by Lovecraft in “Dexter Ward”, when Lovecraft evokes in fiction his own homecoming to Providence from New York…

“his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down to the terminal behind the Biltmore … It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.”

February on Tentaclii

All right, so… 1st March 2019. February is gone. Doesn’t time fly! The signs of early springtime are everywhere here in the UK, though the first leaves are not yet out and the nights are still shiver-ish.

Here at Tentaclii, February saw 10,000 words posted, even with the week’s holiday from daily posting at the end of the month. The most important post was one of the Friday ‘Picture Postals’, which became a lengthy and highly illustrated essay on an overlooked area of New York City during Lovecraft’s time there. Given that Sheepshead Bay and its environs was such an unusual and eerie terrain, it was rather surprising that other Lovecraftians had not already delved into the topic. The post now effectively serves as an additional chapter for my book on Lovecraft’s sojourn in New York in the 1920s, and will be added and footnoted if there’s ever a new edition. Those considering new fiction featuring Lovecraft in the 1920s might also take this unusual watery setting and run with it. The Dutch marshlands of New York at the turn of the century could also make an unusual ‘true-life setting’ for a non-scary children’s picture-book, though Gravity Falls-like elements might still be woven in.

I also found minor new supporting information about Lovecraft’s favourite coffee-house in New York. Numerous new books and comics collections were noted, including an important one on Lovecraft in Japan. Pictures that were new to me were were found, including three of the interior of the John Hay Library and a large new scan on the Brown archive of one Lovecraft’s boyhood publications. Five new scholarly items were found and added to the Open Lovecraft page. Various other useful things were spotted and linked, including the welcome return of The Lovecraft Geek podcast, and a series of in-depth insider posts on the state of the Lovecraftian RPG market in 2018. I also picture-researched and published a new game scenario “The Assemblage of Dr. Arnold Astrall”, and my Patreons have access to the pictorial .zip bundle for this with public-domain pictures.

As you can see, daily posting at Tentaclii has now started again, after a week’s break, and the blog is now Patreon-only.

My thanks to those who have decided to become or remain my patrons on Patreon. You have ongoing access to the Tentaclii blog, which now has nearly a decade’s worth of posts, consisting of around 2,500 back-posts. These contain millions if not tens of millions of words plus Web links, all searchable by keyword or phrase, thus providing you with a unique resource for your own Lovecraft studies and musings.

Please encourage others to access this unique resource — all it takes is $1 a month via Patreon.