07 Monday May 2012
Posted in Unnamable
Miskatonic Books is having a Hippocampus Press summer sale…
“over 70 titles at 40% to 70% off cover price”
I spotted An Epicure in the Terrible / Lovecraft Encyclopaedia / the Collected Essays series at 55% off. Lovecraft’s Library is 40% off.
06 Sunday May 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A super mix of live-action, green screen backdrops, and animation, from the UK’s The Lone Animator. He’s created a fine 15-minute adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time”…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7jp1CT1h6c&w=560&h=315]
06 Sunday May 2012
Posted in New books
A very positive Barnes & Noble .com review of Laird Barron’s Lovecraftian novel The Croning…
“The Croning is one of the very best horror novels that I’ve read in decades”
04 Friday May 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A new Entertainment Weekly interview with the director of the stage musical adaptation of Herbert West—Reanimator.
03 Thursday May 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The Allentown Art Museum in the USA has a large exhibition on now, “At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic“…
“…the most comprehensive exhibition of fantastic art to date, it will also be the first time that this discipline has been presented on such a large scale.”
The show runs through the 9th of September 2012.
03 Thursday May 2012
Posted in Historical context
Discovery News has a new web article on the history of the relationship between humans and the star Algol. Algol appears as the location of the climax in Lovecraft’s fiction in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919)…
“You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence — you who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Demon-Star.”
Lovecraft gives Algol as the location for a nova star, Nova Persei, which had indeed happened in fact…
“On 22 February 1901, the discovery of a naked-eye nova, Nova Persei, was announced.” — from: Agnes Mary Clerke and the Rise of Astrophysics, p.145.
S.T. Joshi says in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia that the…
“account of the nova [was] taken verbatim from his [Lovecraft’s] copy of Garrett P. Serviss’s Astronomy with the Naked Eye (1908).”
My recent book, Walking with Cthulhu, also examines possible borrowings from Serviss.
I’ve also just now found that Popular Science ran a long article on “New Stars” in January 1919, and the story “Beyond The Wall of Sleep” was written in the Spring on 1919. The article was triggered by the then-recent naked-eye Nova Aquilae, and recalls the Nova Persei of 1901…
27 Friday Apr 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Super work visualising At the Mountains of Madness, by Marc Simonetti…
This cover for a (new?) French graphic novel takes the same approach of placing small figures to convey the scale, but Simonetti conveys a sense of “precarious” and “unbalanced” far better…
27 Friday Apr 2012
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Teller of Weird Tales has scanned and cleaned illustrations of Lovecraft stories, “by William F. Heitman or attributable to William F. Heitman”, which appeared in Weird Tales magazine. This one is for “Hypnos”…
26 Thursday Apr 2012
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Those interested in vampires might like the new BBC Radio 3 series-ette on Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Available to those in the UK via Listen Again, and to the rest of the world via bittorrent.
25 Wednesday Apr 2012
Posted in New books
Interesting new book on Lovecraft’s treatment of the feminine, in Italian by Renzo Giorgetti, Lovecraftian Archetypes: the eternal feminine. The English summary…
“In the study of the work of H.P. Lovecraft one theme seems always to be neglected: that of women. In Lovecraft’s intellectual odyssey and his dreaming, always lost in seas of fantastic creation, this theme seems almost deliberately forgotten or relegated to a corner of his conceptions. But on closer examination the female appears numerous times: transformed, concealed, disguised, but ever-present and ready to play a key role. Whether it be ordinary women, or goddesses, monsters and entire civilisations, the female has her place in the Lovecraftian universe, exercising with a magical influence a magnetism towards the unknown and the unfathomable, and always ready to unleash surprising and unexpected potentialities.”
24 Tuesday Apr 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
As Google gears up for the augmented-reality gaming home, delivered to wireless AR glasses straight from the Web browser (no DVDs involved), Philip Reed muses on why augmented reality horror doesn’t work…
“its scares, for technological reasons, need to be telegraphed. If a scary face is going to come out of a book, that can be scary. But when the game requires you to meticulously create a scenario in which that is possible, it’s easy to guess what’s coming, and the simple surprise — and subsequent scare — is lost before it ever comes.”
21 Saturday Apr 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
