Potboilers from the Pit of the Amazons!

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Unnamable

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The Amazon recommendation system is still dumb, despite supposely being trained in my tastes for years now. I wish for Lovecraft scholarship therefore I will like… Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out. Er, no.

I think the general problem arises from lumpen categorisation systems, which are auto-sorted according to publisher supplied metadata and then parsed by artist/writer. It serves publishers well to make their tagging of a product as broad as possible. But a recommendation system needs to be able to make fine distinctions of taste, and do so even within artists. Such as knowing that Ziggy-era Bowie is not the same as Tin Machine-era Bowie. Or that Midge Ure’s Ultravox is mass-market pap compared to John Foxx’s Ultravox.

Atlantis and the pulps

16 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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A clearly-delivered 30-minute video lecture on the influence of the myth of Atlantis on R.E. Howard, by pulp history scholar Jeff Shanks. Including discussion of the Atlantis fringe authors, who Lovecraft eventually got around to reading circa the mid to late 1920s.

Lovecraft had of course written an early Atlantis story in “The Temple” (1920), in which the Prussian narrator suggests the sunken city was the forerunner of Ancient Greece.

He commented to Clark Ashton Smith in June 1926 about his reading of The Story of Atlantis (1896)…

[he writes that he is undertaking new reading] of vast interest as background or source material — which has belatedly introduced me to a cycle of myth as developed by modern occultists and sophical charlatans … I only wish I could get hold of more of the stuff. What I have read is The Story of Atlantis [1896]… by W. Scott Elliott.

He then attempted the germ of an Atlantis-meets-Roman Britain story in his fragment “The Descendant” (c.1927)…

Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the raths and circles and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest.

But this would have rather improbably placed Atlantis somewhere just off his beloved ancestral Cornwall and Devon. One suspects that even Lovecraft balked at the task of turning the homely Isles of Scilly into the evil-haunted remnant mountain-tops of a sunken Atlantis.

Dreams of Cthulhu, a H.P. Lovecraft Circus Spectacular

15 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Dreams of Cthulhu, a H.P. Lovecraft Circus Spectacular, Seattle, USA…

dreams

“Shortly after a series of earthquakes, Ann Wilcox starts having unprecedented dreams of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. As the weeks continue, these dreams intensify causing her to wonder if these dreams are real or if she is going insane. With aerial, modern dance, and burlesque performances by Kelly Ward, Jennifer Lottes, Morgue Anne Morrighan, Anton Lukyanov, Carla Petrulli, and Warren Woo. Tickets only $10.”

September 17th at 9:00pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/1493031914269527/

September 19th at 7:30pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/1467226573558249

September 20th at 9:00pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/821277337917025

September 21st at 5:00pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/639084652866322

R.E. Howard audio books

15 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., REH

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Update: link-rot repaired, August 2023.
Update: added mention of a book of Conan tales by Lin Carter / de Camp, October 2018.

If you can’t afford the excellent Tantor audio books of Conan, there are now some free R.E. Howard unabridged audio stories with semi-pro and listenable narrators…

Howard’s Conan stories in free audio, ordered in story-world chronology:

* “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”

* “The Tower of the Elephant” (abridged, semi-dramatised)

* “The Tower Of The Elephant” (unabridged, narrated)

* “The God in the Bowl” (unpublished during his lifetime)

* “Rogues in the House”

* “Black Colossus” (the story text at Project Gutenberg)

* “Queen of the Black Coast” (also on YouTube)

* “Shadows in the Moonlight” (and part 2)

* “A Witch Shall Be Born”

* “Shadows in Zamboula”

* “The Slithering Shadow” (aka “Xuthal of the Dusk”)

* “The Devil in Iron”

* “The People of the Black Circle”

* “The Vale of Lost Women” (unpublished during his lifetime)

* “The Pool Of The Black One” (no longer online as free quality audio, see the full text at Project Gutenberg)

* “Red Nails”

* “The Jewels of Gwahlur” (aka “The Servants Of Bit-Yakin”)

* “Beyond the Black River”

* “The Black Stranger” (unpublished during his lifetime, aka “Treasure of Tranicos” after re-working by de Camp, to have it fit better between “Beyond the Black River” and “The Phoenix on the Sword”)

* “The Phoenix on the Sword”

* “The Scarlet Citadel” (and part 2 3 4 5 6 and 7)

* The Hour of the Dragon (aka Conan the Conqueror, a novel)

“The God in the Bowl” and “The Vale of Lost Women” — unpublished during his lifetime — don’t show Howard writing at his best. And “The Slithering Shadow” and “The Devil In Iron” are said to be far from the best of the Conan stories.

There is also a Books for the Blind audiobook of the collection of stories Conan the Swordsman (1978). This collection of briskly-plotted gap-fillers for the Conan chronology is from Nyberg / Lin Carter / de Camp. Their stories successfully mimic Howard, only lacking some of the small telling details that he carefully wove into his stories. Their book has, in the book-order:

~ “The People of the Summit” (after “Rogues in the House”) (begins at 1 hour 12 minutes into the book reading) (good)
~ “Shadows in the Dark” (after “Black Colossus”) (good)
~ “The Star of Khorala” (after “Shadows in Zamboula”) (a long story, but a lesser one – very skippable)
~ “The Gem in the Tower” (between “The People of the Black Circle” and “The Pool of the Black One”) (excellent)
~ “The Ivory Goddess” (before “Beyond the Black River”) (mediocre)
~ “Moon of Blood” (after “Beyond the Black River”) (excellent)

For those who can afford them, Tantor’s audio book collections of R.E. Howard’s original Conan and others use the modern Del Ray texts and are read with excellence:

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian.
The Bloody Crown of Conan.
The Conquering Sword of Conan (full free-sample story).

Also from Tantor:

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane.
Kull: Exile of Atlantis.
Bran Mak Morn: the Last King.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.

Sadly it seems Tantor can’t sell into the UK, and nor are downloads available through Audible.co.uk. So Brits will have to go to eBay and pay a premium (the days of bargains on eBay are long gone, as are the days of cheap trans-Atlantic shipping), or have an American friend buy them for you and send them over.

Also by Howard in audio…

The collection Solomon Kane: Red Shadows and three Solomon Kane poems read by a Shakespearean actor.