A curious regional British anthology has been announced: Cthulhu Cymraeg: Lovecraftian Tales From Wales, from the Welsh SD Publications. Due in the Autumn.
Cthulhu Cymraeg: Lovecraftian Tales From Wales
12 Monday Aug 2013
Hounds abound
11 Sunday Aug 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
A perfectly-delivered free reading of Lovecraft’s near-hilarious over-the-top story “The Hound” (1922), courtesy of Lawrence Santoro at Tales to Terrify.
Above: from “The Hound” adaptation by Steve Beach.
Could be neatly followed by the free reading of Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds Of Tindalos” (1931) by Lewis Morgan.
Far Off Things
09 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in New books
Far Off Things, the first volume of Arthur Machen’s autobiography, has been published by The Three Impostors as…
“a scholarly, high quality edition in a limited run of 250 copies.”
The price is £18.50 for the UK, £23 to the USA (about $40?) including shipping. A similar run of the third volume, The London Adventure, will follow in the same format if there are enough sales of the first. Then followed by…
“Things Near and Far, finishing the set. We know that the books are ‘out of order’ 1,3,2 but we thought the publicity from The London Adventure would help us secure enough cash to secure the third.”
It came from the backwoods…
09 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Historical context
Below is The New York Tribune article of April 1919, on the newly-established (formed 1917) rural police for New York State, which inspired Lovecraft to try The Catskills as a setting for horror stories. I’ve highlighted and overlaid the next-page section of the article on Catskill Mountains degenerates (though strictly speaking they’re actually Schoarie Mountains degenerates, a little north of the main Catskill Mountains). The first effect of this article on Lovecraft was to directly inspire his story “Beyond The Wall of Sleep” (written at some point between April-Sept 1919, published October) then “The Lurking Fear” (November 1922)…
Audio book readers may find it useful to know that the pronunciation of the Slater/Slahter surname should rhyme it with “doubter”.
Incidentally, the following Google search modifiers will give you a speedy way of searching just The New York Tribune digital copies at the Library of Congress website…
site:http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/ keyword or "key phrase"
Solomon Kane (2009) finally available in USA on DVD
08 Thursday Aug 2013
Posted in Films & trailers, REH
Cool, I just heard that Solomon Kane is finally out on DVD in the USA. I’ve no idea what delayed this fine 2009 movie, or stopped it getting to the cinemas in the USA. I can only imagine that there was perhaps some spurious legal challenge by a copyright troll, going on behind the scenes?
Thanks to Lovecraft is Missing for the new review of the DVD. I saw the movie way back in 2010 in the UK, and enjoyed it. I thought it was a fine and respectful evocation of R.E. Howard’s Puritan hero, beautifully designed and lit, and well acted with good period accents. The flaws were not very many, but were annoying: two jarring jumps in the plot during the first third, as if the makers hadn’t filmed quite enough material to bridge the gap; many lost opportunities to visually foreshadow the distinctive look of the main bad-guy (for instance via having his minions wear his face as crude tattoos or scrawl it on walls etc); and the ending is a little too “Mines of Moria cave-troll battle” (in a cheesy kind of way, in that it resembles LoTR far too strongly).
The plan was apparently that Solomon Kane would have been the first of a trilogy. Africa was mooted as being the next stop. But Puritan New England, and a slight blending with the historical back-story of Lovecraft’s Mythos, would have seemed a much better choice. Anyway, due to the bizarre and unexplained four-year hiatus in actually getting this movie to a U.S. audience, it doesn’t seem we’ll get to see the next two movies.
The Shadow knows… it’s a turkey
07 Wednesday Aug 2013
Posted in Odd scratchings
John Carter of Mars, and now The Lone Ranger, have both flopped. Actually, they’re not that bad, certainly not bad enough to be put in the same cone-of-shame as Howard the Duck, Dick Tracy, The Shadow, etc. Just a bit bland and instantly forgettable. But together their failure has cost Disney somewhere around $400m in direct losses, not to mention the lost opportunity costs in terms of tying top talent to turkeys. Sony’s Doc Savage is set for 2014, though it seems to be the only old-time pulpster set for release next year. If Doc Savage tanks too, then I guess we won’t be seeing too many big-studio movies of near-forgotten pulp fiction and old-time radio heroes in the next decade or so. Or maybe ever again, as the cultural demographics of nostalgia move inexorably on to 90s toys, 00s videogames (Morrowind: the movie — want!), and superhero comics.
The Pnakotic Atlas
07 Wednesday Aug 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
The Pnakotic Atlas is a planned $5 app of all of Lovecraft’s fictional and used-in-fiction places, with HPL’s fiction annotated with geo-codes and then wrapped up as a device app. The developers, Audacious Software, are currently seeking artists to provide “visual depictions for each location” on a profit-share / retain-copyright basis.
Directory of Current Scholars of H.P. Lovecraft
07 Wednesday Aug 2013
Posted in NecronomiCon 2013, Scholarly works
It would be great if one of the results to come out of NecronomiCon Providence 2013 could be an up-to-date online directory of active researchers. Perhaps titled something like ‘Directory of Current Scholars of H.P. Lovecraft’ (DOCS-HPL). Listing basic email and website details, any university or association affiliations, plus a short list of the top ten main current-and-planned areas of research interest for each person.
Perhaps someone might undertake to get a well-designed paper form circulated to all scholars at NecronomiCon 2013, with a main-lobby drop-off box for completed forms? By “well-designed” I mean with a clear check-box system that enables rapidly focusing down on types of personal research interest within the general taxonomy of our research areas, to save a lot of pondering and hair-splitting and “I’ll have to get back to you on that”. The Taxonomy might be cribbed largely from S.T. Joshi’s excellent indexes and might look like:
Lovecraft -> Biography -> His relationship with… -> Everett McNeil; or
Pulps -> Publishing Industry -> Censorship; or
Philosophy -> Contemporary Developments -> Speculative Realism; or
Lovecraft -> Fan Cultures -> Contemporary -> Cute Toys.
Could be a good ice-breaker for someone, and someone who’s tech-savvy might even input the data straight into the database via a portable device — and thus save a lot of transcription time later on. MS Office Excel-to-Omeka would be one good off-the-shelf solution to put that together, and to get it online in an easy-to-maintain and elegant form. Omeka is mature and is specifically designed to present online academic collections, and it works a lot like WordPress.
Pristine pulps
06 Tuesday Aug 2013
Posted in Historical context
A fine set of archive pictures of pulps sitting pristine on newstands and in tobacco stores. This one from January 1925, showing Argosy All-Story Weekly alongside Snappy Stories, The American Magazine, and others.
The Conservative, complete run reprint
06 Tuesday Aug 2013
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Arktos has a new complete book collection of The Conservative, Lovecraft’s own journal which ran between 1915 and 1923. I seem to remember this run has been reprinted before. Yup, I just looked: there was a 1976 Necronomicon Press collection of c.400 copies in two variants, edited by Marc A. Michaud and with a Foreword by Frank Belknap Long. In 1990 S.T. Joshi also published a selection of essays from The Conservative, also from Necronomicon Press. I doubt this new one is a facsimile edition, or else the blurb would have said so.
Lovecraft Country
05 Monday Aug 2013
Posted in Podcasts etc.
A new free Arkham Gazette pilot issue #0… “dedicated to the Lovecraft Country setting for [the RPG game] Call of Cthulhu“, with a focus on the roads, which might inspire fiction writers as well as gamers. To celebrate there’s also a shakily-recorded MU Podcast 037 — Graveyards, Turnpikes, and Lovecraft Country.
Free book on the early pulps
04 Sunday Aug 2013
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Now free, Sam Moskowitz’s 1970 book Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of “The Scientific Romance” in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920. On Archive.org, with .ePub and Kindle .mobi versions available.
Put the Munsey magazines in context with SFFAudio’s .mp3 podcast interview with Robert Weinberg about the history of pulps before Amazing. Starts at 5:54.