A new Cthulhu artbook

30 Tuesday Oct 2018

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A new illustrated artbook edition of “The Call of Cthulhu”, in French translation.

This one is, according to one translated review…

a fully illustrated edition of grand paintings by French artist François Baranger, concept illustrator of movies such as Harry Potter, Beauty and the Beast, and videogames like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. […] Instead of blood, sharp fangs, mutilated bodies and other things we associate with terror today, Baranger emphasizes the suppressed, hidden horror that Lovecraft slowly escalates in such a masterly manner. It is not entirely unreasonable to claim that Lovecraft would give his ‘thumbs up’. […] The bound book is of a monstrous size (20 x 28 inches) [and] the quality of the edition is high for its price, with thick, shiny pages and a hard cover that should survive many readings.

Some of the illustrations are also available as movie-like print posters in limited editions of 120. I’m not sure if there are other painted illustrations and/or b&w pen-and-line illustrations inserted in the text, but “fully illustrated” implies that there might be.

The Encyclopaedia of H. P. Lovecraft as Character

30 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings

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Do we have enough “Lovecraft as character” appearances to do The Encyclopaedia of H. P. Lovecraft as Character, focussed only on the appearance of H.P. Lovecraft and his close circle as characters in stories, graphic novels, rock songs, games and more? I think we do. By now there must be at least a hundred such depictions of Lovecraft himself.

For instance, my recent Good Old Mac biographical book on Everett McNeil, the keystone Lovecraft Circle member, found ten such instances of him alone. And I haven’t even read the various books which treat the Lovecraft circle to a detective novel outing (such as the recent novel by Joshi), in which he likely also appears as a character. Nor the various table-top RPGs. McNeil had another depiction in one of the new graphic novels of Lovecraft’s life, He Who Wrote in the Darkness, and I would suspect he may also appears in the other new graphic novel Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H. P. Lovecraft (though I haven’t yet seen that). That’s just one often-overlooked member of the Circle, and yet there’s already material enough for an Encyclopaedia chapter.

It might be organised by date and by cultural milieu:

Lovecraft as ‘living character’; pre-1937.
The War Years: 1938-1949.
The Depths of the Cold War: 1950-1964.
The Counter-culture: 1965-1975.
The De-censorship Decades: 1976-1996.
Gone Global: 1997-2007.
Haunting the New Puritans: 2008-2018.
Lovecraft’s Circle as Characters.

Due to the estimated cost of making it I won’t be the one to do such an Encyclopaedia, but if the idea tickles both your fancy and wallet then please feel free to give it a go. Bear in mind that acquiring all the works needed to comprehensively make such a book will require either a vast collection and/or a very plump wallet.

Inktober 2018

29 Monday Oct 2018

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Each October, inkers all over the world do a ‘drawing a day’ challenge which goes under the title Inktober, and post with a (this year) #INKTOBER2018 tag.

Here are a few Lovecraft ‘Inktober 2018’ drawings that caught my eye on DeviantArt.

By Lipatov…

By trapperkeeper, really capturing that old-time pulp feeling, with the help of some ‘Kirby krackle’…

Guarded by CAdamsIllustration…

Migo by Persephoneblackdove

There’s still time to do the last few challenges, Double | Jolt | Slice, which all offer possibilities for pulpy Lovecraft fun.

If you’re new to digital drawing, on a desktop have a look at the free open source Krita 4, its Inking 101 starter guide and Wolthera’s free Inking Brush pack for Krita 4. The brushes in Krita can have real-time smoothing applied, so as to smooth the freehand strokes made by shaky hands. It helps to have a ‘draw on the screen’ pen monitor, which are expensive but Ugee makes good budget models (I have a £300 1910B). As an alternative you can probably pick up a used large Wacom digitizer pad for about £50, but make sure the pen is still with it and fully working.

There are of course many Android drawing apps for tablets, the best of which used to be Autodesk Sketchbook. That’s no longer on the Amazon Kindle App Store, so (unless you want to do a fiddly sideload of it) the translated Japanese app called Tayasui Sketches + is a good alternative choice for inking on a Kindle HD 10″ tablet.

‘The Decline of the West’ on Kindle

28 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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I see that S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West was made available as a Kindle ebook since the end of summer 2018, and now sports a very reasonable pocket-money price.

It’s the fullest account of ‘Lovecraft the philosopher’ and his wide range of influences in that field. Also the influence on him of what might be called ‘the phantasm of decline’ — that strangely popular but nebulous apparition that haunts gloomy intellectuals, and which leads them to believe that civilisational collapse is forever just around the corner. (As a corrective, see heavyweight books such as: Ridley’s The Rational Optimist; Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals; Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History, and my ongoing 2020 blog). Perhaps also Staring Into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization; and The Perennial Apocalypse: How the End of the World Shapes History.

Joshi writes clearly and precisely as usual, and the book is usefully untainted by airy academic genuflections toward the latest idols of literary-political theory. The Decline of the West was previously available as an oversize paperback, which has a two-column layout — which some may prefer for the task of ploughing through dense philosophical triangulations. On the other hand, the ebook is keyword-searchable, which means that Lovecraft scholars may want to own both editions — though you may chuckle at such a heavyweight ebook having a toy-like ‘stop-motion Cthulhu’ on the front cover. Such are the demands of trigger-finger ebook marketing today, I suppose — ‘no monster, no sales’.

Purchasers will also want to have on their Kindle the texts available from my 2014 blog post Lovecraft as Philosopher, these being a sniffy review of Decline of the West and Joshi’s magisterial demolition of the review.

More Moe

28 Sunday Oct 2018

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S. T. Joshi’s latest blog post reveals that the new Lovecraft Annual #12 has reached him, together with latest door-stopper volume of Lovecraft’s annotated letters. Joshi reveals that Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others has more than letters in it. It…

“contains numerous writings by Moe, Dwyer, and Loveman, and a letter by Starrett to Sam Loveman.”

Beyond the simple problem of wrangling a 628-page print volume thought a tiny modern letterbox by the regular postal service, I do wish that more of these Letters volumes were available as ebooks for the Kindle. Whence they would become keyword searchable, and one could make the font bigger and more readable etc. But only the Morton letters were briefly available that way, and even that volume has recently vanished from the Kindle store at both Amazon UK and USA. Thankfully the Morton ebook, purchased in 2017, is still on my Kindle.

Falling Felines

28 Sunday Oct 2018

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Falling Felines Research: the history book, successfully crowd-funding now.

If you can’t wait for the book, the author has a long blog post on the topic of lab research on falling cats.

It turns out that that aerodynamics, molecular physics, mathematics, mechanical control systems, and other branches of science and engineering were all strongly informed by the study of tumbling kitties which (of course) always landed on their feet. Perhaps Lovecraft was right (again), when he said that inherent in the very form of the cat lay cosmic secrets, a potent symbolisation of the universe, and that this was “just as true kinetically as statically”.

A quick search of Google Scholar and JURN shows that such research is still ongoing, and that the same science may yet inform the design of human-interacting robots, autonomous drones, space-elevator nano-ribbons, and many other sqwerky uses as yet undreamed. Robo-tentacles, perhaps.

10 Barnes

27 Saturday Oct 2018

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Illustrator Ysemay Dercon visits Lovecraft’s former home at 10 Barnes St, for Halloween. I like the ‘collected leaves’ idea.

Perhaps one could draw on the actual leaves, incising them with the tiny tip of a fine scratch-board pick? And then record their drying out and changing colours and crumbling into weirdness. Or how about shaping them subtly into tiny dreamland-ish face masks?