The Faces of Science Fiction

04 Sunday Nov 2018

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Frank Belknap Long, from the 178-page photobook The Faces of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Press, 1984), now on Archive.org. The same photographer did a sequel similarly full of high-quality photographic portraits, The Faces of Fantasy, in 1996.

As well as Long, The Faces of Science Fiction book also has photos of others linked to H.P. Lovecraft and/or Robert E. Howard — Robert Bloch, Donald A. Wollheim, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber.

An Indian in Europe

03 Saturday Nov 2018

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Five lessons Shweta Taneja learned at Europe’s biggest sci-fi and fantasy convention, a fascinating write-up by an Indian science fiction author encountering the bare-bones DIY approach…

“Authors at Indian festivals are mollycoddled. At one of the first festivals I attended, the Chandigarh Literary Festival, the kind organisers sent an SUV with a teacher and two children and bouquets to the Chandigarh airport. From that moment, everything was managed by an army of literary festival organisers. Not so in Europe.”

I imagine he might have had a somewhat different experience with a more genteel upmarket literary festival, outside the urban areas, of the sort with nominally-paid interns and hospitality budgets. But even then, it would probably be a bit more stripped back than in India.

I wonder what Lovecraft would have been like at an urban mega-vention? I mean, he was used to the demure micro-meetups of amateur journalists and then various later convivial cafe meetings of ‘the circle’. But an enormous fan-o-rama of thousands? I’d suspect he would have been the uber-notorious one in the dark glasses and pompadour hair, being smuggled by a security detail through subterranean access tunnels, to pop up through a trap door beneath the main stage. The big keynote speech given, he’d press the button to auto-sign everyone’s ebook, and then be whisked off to the waiting helicopter. Either that, or he just wouldn’t have gone to such things.

Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: Providence Opera House

02 Friday Nov 2018

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Providence Opera House (green board and canopy, on the left of the picture). It was a 1,500 seater.

“… we were acquainted with Mr. Morrow [Robert Morrow], the lessee & manager of Providence’s chief theatre — The Providence Opera House — (he lived directly across the street) so that it was not thought too shocking to let my aunt take me to see something [on the stage, when a young boy in 1896]” — H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Kleiner dated 16th November 1916.

An impression of the pre-show hustle and bustle the boy Lovecraft might have encountered on arriving, before the age of the motor-car…

Some may doubt that the boy Lovecraft was in one of those carriages. Yet, at this time his family still had a horse & carriage and a live-in coachman to drive it.

Getting Heavy

01 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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For this Halloween, Are You Morbid? XXXVI: A Heavy Metal Podcast offered listeners “Lovecraft Returns”. This being a two-hour discussion survey of the best Lovecraft heavy metal music, which sports track titles such as “In the Maze of Kadath”.

This is a “part two”, though, and follows last year’s three-and-a-half hour Lovecraft-a-thon Are You Morbid? XV – Lovecraft & Metal: A Beginner’s Guide, with lots of expert discussion about the music and where to start. Skip to around the ten minute mark, to get past the usual basic “Who is Lovecraft?” intro for metal folk who’ve (somehow) never heard of him. For those who feel they may need to skip over certain sections, the links above go to listennotes.com. The “…” on the sidebar there opens up to offer an MP3 link, and if you then right-click on this your Web browser should be able to force an MP3 download.

In the case of “A Beginner’s Guide” the track-listing also categorises the tracks by metal type, for those who have not yet correlated the mind-bending differences between Symphonic Black and Blackened Drone/Sludge/Doom Metal.

Sadly there appears to be no Spotify playlist for these track selections, and so perhaps someone might want to spend time combining these two ‘Are You Morbid?’ Lovecraft lists into one. And then posting a link to the playlist. Possibly www.playlist-converter.net can help with that, as it appears to be able to take a plain-text band name – track name list and turn it into a Spotify playlist, though I don’t trust it enough to give it Spotify account access. I’ve partially cleaned the combined list for such a conversion, removing accents, type brackets, dual track names and sending the “Everything” bands to their own list…

BAND NAME | TRACK NAME

Olyphant – Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
Terrible Old Man – Cosmic Poems
Terrible Old Man – Fungai from Yuggoth
Back To R’leyh – The Awakening
Last Fight of the Primordial Revenant – Prophecies of a Dying World
Aldebaran – Dweller in the Twilight
Swampcult – The Festival
Fiendlord – Neuromancy
Ripping Corpse – Dreaming With the Dead
Nile – Those Who The Gods Detest
Septic Flesh – Sumerian Demons
Morbid Angel – Gateways to Annihilation
Infinite Spectrum – Haunter in the Dark
Shoggoth – Mythos
Dreamlongdead – Madnessdeadgrave
Alkaloid – Liquid Anatomy
Lurking Fear – Out Of A Voiceless Grave
Colosseum – Chapter 1: Delirium
Chthe’ilist – Le dernier crepuscule
Hesper Payne – Unclean Rituals
Great old ones – EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy
Obed Marsh – Innsmouth
Catacomb – In the Maze of Kadath
Arkham – Chapter III
Fiendlord – Neuromancy
Hypnos – Arcane Moon
Astrophobos – Remnants of Forgotten Horrors
Crafteon – Cosmic Reawakening
Ancient Niggurath – Horrors and Wonders
Barabas – The Arrival of Yog-Sothoth
Ultar – Kaddath
ceremonial castings – Cthulue
Bal-sagoth – Starfire Burning upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule
Brown Jenkins – Dagonite
Brown Jenkins – Death Obsession
Swampcult – An Idol Carved of Flesh
Swampcult – The Festival
Them Vultures – Weird Tales
Giant of the Mountain – Moon Worship
The Lurking Fear – Out of the Voiceless Grave
Philosopher – Thoughts
Beast Conjurator – Summoned to the Abyss
Beast Conjurator – Strange Aeons Comp
Smothered – The Inevitable End
Yogth Sothoth – Abominations of the Nebulah Mortiis
Nile – Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka
Massacre – From Beyond
Innsmouth – Consumed by Elder Sign
Cosmic Horror – Tales of the Macabre
Coffin Birth – The Bowels of Chaos
dawn of relic – Lovecraftian Dark
temple of the demigod – the great old ones
the uncreation – Dreaming in R’lyeh
Serapheum – Serapheum
Obed Marsh – Innsmouth
Thergothon – Stream from the Heavens
Aldebaran – Dwellers in Twilight
Aldebaran – Buried Beneath the Aeons
Solemn They Await – Sanctuary in the Depths
throng of shoggoths – The Cosmic Reconfiguration
Catacombs – In the Depths of R’lyeh
Innzmouth – Lovecraft’s Dream
Tyranny – Tides of Awakening
Tyranny – Aeons in Tectonic Interment
The Disciples of Zoldon – Blackened Theological Tome
Ripping Corpse – Dreaming with the Dead
Revenant – Prophecies of a Dying World
Deathchain – Death Gods
Aarni – Bathos
Shoggoth – Mythos
Tentacle – Ingot Eye
Skyler Alexandre – Whispers in the Dark
Arkham Witch – Legions of the Deep
Arkham Witch – I Am Providence
Mad God – Tales of a Sightless City
Evangelist – In Partibus Infidelium
Evangelist – Doominicanes
Black Temple Below – Into the Black Temple
aeon sphelion – Visions of Burning Aeons
tortured spirit – Arkham Sanitarium
Keziah – The Ocean Is Not Silent
evoke thy lords – Escape to the Dreamlands
Living Death – Protected from Reality
Mekong Delta – The Music of Eric Zahn
Payne’s Grey – Kadath Decoded
Back to R’lyeh – The Awakening
Back to R’lyeh – Last fight of the Primordial
Back to R’lyeh – The McMurdo Expedition 1909
Infinite Spectrum – Haunter in the Dark

EVERYTHING: BAND NAME | ALL TRACKS BY…

The Great Old Ones – Everything
teen cthulhu – Everything
Drowner – Everything
Portal – Everything
Puteraeon – Everything
Sulphur Aeon – Everything
Azrath-11 – Everything
Colosseum – Everything
fungoid stream – Everything
eyes of leigeia – Everything
Space God Ritual – Everything
Tyrant’s Kall – Everything
Yzordderex – Everything
Bretus – Everything
space mirrors – Everything

Twirls in time

01 Thursday Nov 2018

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A couple of delightful time-twirlings caught my eye today.

Christina Hess Illustration imagines a domestic time-travelling Lovecraft in England with a loving Jane Austen, and morning tea served by a tame tentacular beastie. Presumably that’ll be the ‘Jane Austen and zombies’ Jane. And Lovecraft is definitely developing an ‘Innsmouth look’.

Fantasy map-maker Robert Albauer mashes Lovecraft’s monsters with the medieval Crusades. Hmmm, yes… I can see a fruitful mash-up of R.E. Howard’s Crusader stories with the Cthulhu Mythos, if that hasn’t already been done. (Update: yes it’s been done, Simak did something similar in his LOTR-Lovecraft mash-up novel Where Evil Dwells (1982). More recently there was a Dark Ages + aliens mini-series of comic books).

Thanks for reading Tentaclii

01 Thursday Nov 2018

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I hope that you, dear reader, have enjoyed October with Tentaclii and have found it a good way to lead up to Halloween. I count 82 posts here, for October 2018. If you can support me with a $ or two per month via Patreon, it would help greatly in terms of keeping things rolling here.

You might also usefully mention Tentaclii in social media, and especially useful would be a link from your blog sidebar, please.

You can also publicise and/or order one of my books or Lovecraft posters/stickers, if you don’t already own the set!

Thanks for reading!

Halloween Postcard Special: along the Innsmouth shoreline

31 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Maps, Picture postals

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Below are a selection of Lovecraft-era postcards from the shoreline at Newburyport, Lovecraft’s base model for the town of Innsmouth in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

Mostly toward Joppa and Plum Island, the stretch of shortline that runs about a half-mile to a mile south-east of the main town, along the Merrimack River waterfront.

“Newburyport is one of the most hauntingly quaint towns in America [… it has a] spectral hush & semidesertion […] In Haverhill, 8 miles up the Merrimac [River], they call it ‘The City of the Living Dead’ [Among its other features, he noted] the unpaved sidewalks on pre-Revolutionary streets with rotting, half-deserted houses south of the Square. When I first saw Newburyport I mistook the central square for a mere neighbourhood shopping centre, & kept on the car (it was a trolley-car then) in the expectation of reaching some real ‘downtown’. Only when the line ended — at the ‘Joppa’ fishing hamlet — did I realise that the half-deserted square I had passed through was actually ‘downtown’!” — H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters IV, pages 259-260.

Lovecraft apparently got off at the end of the line, presumably toward the islands end of the Joppa stretch, and walked back to town. If he had followed the line further he would have found the route hooking around east and over to the islands resort area, such as it was, which was more to the east of the town as the crow flies. He probably didn’t step out to the Plum Island section except on postcards, or perhaps on another trip or from the train or bus. Though he did accidentally go to “the end of the line” on the tram on his first visit, that being out on the edge of Plum Island. He then walked back into town.

Also, the old railway track…

“Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge of the river-gorge.” — “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

For further details on Newburyport and Lovecraft, see Chapter 3 of David Goudsward’s book H. P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley (2013). Also the book Legends and Lore of the North Shore.

Want more postcards and a map? See my earlier Old Newburyport post of 2014, which also has couple more pictures of Joppa.

Call of Cthulhu game released

30 Tuesday Oct 2018

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I’m not taking much notice of videogames here, but the new Call of Cthulhu, released today, is so big it merits an exception to the rule.

The first reviews are out, for the major new videogame Call of Cthulhu (Cyanide Studios, 2018), which makes a serious attempt attempts to embody and package Chaosium’s Cthulhu table-top RPG game into a single-player narrative-driven mystery-horror videogame.

Big ambitious games such as this are best played on the PC desktop about 18 months after release, when multiple bug-fixing patches and mods have fixed their inevitable release-day problems. At that point there are often DLC expansion chapters to be had, and the overall price is cheaper.

But, on initial release today, the fan-boy and magazine reviewer sentiment seems to be broadly favourable. Though many of the (often spoiler-packed) reviews chafe at the usual Big Game gremlins…

* Unconvincing and stiff character animations, on characters that have to be low-poly so they can run on consoles.

* Characters are generic, and sometimes tell you about stuff that hasn’t yet happened in the game.

* Decent voice-acting, but some East Coast Americans may notice inconsistent dialogue accents.

* The stealth mechanics could benefit from a buff up.

* Some tiresome ‘key collecting’, a couple of annoyingly obtuse puzzles.

* Lacks ‘action’, for gamers who expect machine-guns and monsters every 30 seconds.

* The muted and gloomy colour palette and environments of the New England coast (Darkwater Island in 1924, standing in for Innsmouth) also spur some gripes, from those who might have preferred a more vividly-hued game.

But gamers are used to such things, and for a big RPG none of the gripes are really specific to this title. Generally the game looks like it’s made a fairly good landing on its first day, and is getting healthy amounts of praise. If the PC Windows version can be modded, and/or gets heavily patched (Cyanide Studios are good on that, I hear), infrequent game-players may well find that it’s worth a look this time next year. It’s probably likely to be more impressive to those who only play three games a year, than to the jaded seen-it-all-before types who play three games a week.