19 Saturday Jan 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
I’m pleased to see that the graphic novel Une nuit avec Lovecraft (‘One night with Lovecraft’, October 2018) is now available for free in its entirety, online at the website of the artist. The French edition is also on Amazon UK and US in print only, and — since it’s free in French — I feel able to note here that there’s a free English translation to be found on LibGen, the sister site of SciHub.
19 Saturday Jan 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Winner Of London Lovecraft Festival’s New Writing Contest Announced…
Orange Shade Productions and the London Lovecraft Festival are pleased to announce that the winner of the first “Writing Lovecraft” competition is James Goss, who submitted “The Collectors of Screams,” a Mythos-expanding work set in a very strange office in the twenties. Goss is best known for his work on universe building within Doctor Who, but in addition to his rich body of work in this area he’s also written plays including “The Gentlemen of Horror” (about the friendship between Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) and a much-produced adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The play will be given a staged reading at the Old Red Lion on the closing night of the 2019 London Lovecraft Festival (5pm, Saturday 9th February 2019).
I wonder if he was where the Peter Capaldi -series Doctor Who had so many of its Lovecraftian ideas from? See, for instance, the episode “Heaven Sent” (Series 9, Episode 11) which so obviously used and reworked Lovecraft’s plot details for “The House of the Worm”.
18 Friday Jan 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Snagged from an eBay listing. I like this take on the Chtulhu idol. Apparently a prop made for a LARP.
18 Friday Jan 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
This post is a follow-on from last week’s Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Rhode Island School of Design.
Rhode Island School of Design’s Pendleton Museum was an annexe to its main galleries and a favourite Providence spot for Lovecraft. It was a ‘must-see’ stop on the tour of the town given to his visitors, partly because entrance appears to have been free. The interior appealed greatly to Lovecraft because it was a faithful recreation of a Colonial era house. It was said to have been based on the Edward Dexter house in arrangement.
Pendleton House” [opened 1906] … “sedulously maintained in order to give the visitor a faithful picture of Georgian interiors as they really were.” — Letter from Lovecraft to Kleiner, 1919.
Attached to the [Waterman St.] museum proper is a perfect reproduction of a colonial mansion, containing the finest collection of American colonial furniture in the world.” — Letter from Lovecraft to Galpin, 9th August 1936.
When Lovecraft talks about a perfect Colonial interior, this is the sort of exemplar he has in mind at the level of the upper-classes. Albeit in richly plain colours, creams and warm polished woods, brass and flashes of gold gilding, rather than the dour black and white seen here.
Pendleton Museum or Pendleton House had its public ‘entrance through Waterman St.’, rather than its own frontage. Visitors would have had to walk through the Rhode Island School of Design galleries in order to reach it.
It was set to be matched with a long-anticipated Colonial style courtyard garden, but this was delayed again and again until finally the plans for it were drawn up in 1933, and the Garden was eventually realised until 1934. One assumes that Lovecraft was likely to have attended the opening event for the Garden, but I don’t know of any record of that.
17 Thursday Jan 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
New and public from the School of Music at Ohio State, “Musical Affect and Embodiment: Fear, Threat, and Danger in the Music of The Lord of the Rings“…
recent research in music perception, speech prosody, and animal ethology was reviewed to create a list of musical techniques that might communicate fear and threat. […] Musical analyses of the soundtrack accompanying the Nazgul demonstrate abundant use of these and other factors […] in the context of the soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring.
Those who are unfamiliar with Tolkien, or who are unable to get past Bombadil or The Council of Elrond in the first part, may not readily associate him with horror. But he has many such elements and does them very effectively. In The Lord of the Rings there are The Black Riders, the Barrow Wight, the flying Nazgul, the tentacular Lurker in the Lake, the Balrog, Moria, the Dead Marshes, the Way of the Dead, Shelob, Sam in the high pass above Mordor, and Mordor itself. There are also horror elements in Merry’s account of the Ent attack on Isengard, the attack on Crickhollow, the battle of Helm’s Deep, and several encounters with wargs. Forests also have their eerie elements.
The essay looks specifically at the early scenes on Weathertop, and includes a handy table of the conclusions of previous research on the matter…
17 Thursday Jan 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Vintage cassette audiobooks, currently on eBay (not from me) along with “The Lurking Fear” in the same format.
16 Wednesday Jan 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The new issue of the open access journal Brumal has appeared. Vol 6, No 2 (2018) is ‘Horror and the Fantastic’. English abstracts, then Spanish, Portugese or French texts. On a first pass, the specifically Lovecraft items are:
* “Towards a classification of space in fantastic horror texts”. In which… “we outline three sorts of spatial categories: the natural, the supernatural, and the preternatural spaces, and take incomparable English-speaking authors as a starting point, such as H. P. Lovecraft” before moving on to consider Spanish writers.
* And a review in Portuguese of the book O Fantastico: Procedimentos de Construcao Narrativa em H.P. Lovecraft (2017). [trans: The Fantastic: H.P. Lovecraft’s Procedures of Narrative Construction]
The book can be obtained from Brazil and I see it was also reviewed recently in Revista Abusoes. It appears to be a two-volume Masters dissertation from 1979, which gathered dust for nearly 40 years before being rediscovered, hailed as something special, and published.
15 Tuesday Jan 2019
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
The short film “Miskatonic 1927” in full, a selection for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2018. “H.P. Lovecraft & Clark Ashton Smith begin an English translation of the dreaded tome The Necronomicon.”
14 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in New books
Marvel comics veteran Roy Thomas has an auto-biography of his life in Conan comics, and his wider fascination with the Conan character. DMR Books has a good review of the 296-page Volume One, which quietly scaled the walls of the Elephant God of Amazon just before Christmas…
Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian (Volume One), by Roy Thomas. In this book, Roy shares not only his memories of writing the first 53 issues of the comic book (Volume Two will cover the rest of his more than 100 issue run), but his own obsession with Conan and his creator.
I expect this book might be usefully paired with Barry Windsor-Smith’s The Freebooters, for an insight into the role of the artist in sword-and-sorcery comic-book making. Despite the publisher pitching this as simply a trade paperback collecting the Freebooter stories from the BWS: Storyteller magazine, it’s far more.
The IGN review explains…
This collection is unlike anything I have ever read. Part comic, part behind-the-scenes article, Barry Windsor-Smith’s The Freebooters is definitely unique. […] Most trades* these days give a slight glimpse into the creative process, but not like this. Readers will see unfinished pages, progressive pieces showing rough sketches to final, colored pieces. We also get a narrative that guides us through the thoughts and decisions that BWS made.
* = a trade paperback book collecting a series of comic books or strips, usually formerly issued in episodic pamphlet comic form to comics shops and collectors. Also abbreviated to ‘tpb’.
14 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in Historical context, REH, Scholarly works
“Conan and the Little People: Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s Theory”, another fascinating new ‘correlate all the contents’ essay by Bobby Derie.
14 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in Scholarly works, Unnamable
A new paper “The sounds of plants”. The researchers…
demonstrate, to our knowledge for the first time, that plants emit sounds that can be recorded from a distance. We recorded ~65 dBSPL ultrasonic sounds …
Since certain fungi also attract night-insects, it would be interesting to know if some of those also produce sound.
H.P. Lovecraft on the sounds emitted by the Mi-Go fungus race in the woods of Vermont, in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931)…
It is more than two years now since I last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder [sound recording]; but at this moment, and at all other moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.
13 Sunday Jan 2019
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Forthcoming books from McFarland, picked from their new Spring 2019 catalogue:
* Journeys to the Underworld and Heavenly Realm in Ancient and Medieval Literature. (Seems relevant to an understanding of the wider context of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and others) (Already published)
* The Detective and the Artist: Painters, Poets and Writers in Crime Fiction, 1840s-1970s. (First sections likely to be relevant to an understanding of the context of “The Call of Cthulhu” and others) (February)
* The Horror Comic Never Dies: a Grisly History. A short history of 150 pages, seemingly fannish but deeply informed. (February)