23 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in New books
The doorstopper Future Lovecraft SF anthology (Innsmouth Free Press, 2011) has just popped up on the UK Kindle Store. Nice price, too — just £3.29. Americans and Canadians can get it on the US Kindle store for $5.18. If you can’t afford even that low price, the Press is currently calling for reviewers.
22 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
I’ve added a new bookseller to my ‘Lovecraft on the Web’ list. It’s Cold Tonnage, whose new list leads off with a new Tartarus Press limited-edition of Robert Aickman’s Dark Entries (originally 1964).
There’s also an article on Aickman titled “Some Notes on Aickman’s Plays” by Douglas A. Anderson, in the Tartarus Press journal Wormwood #17. Just published, #17 leads with “World Gone Wrong: H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology of loss (part one)” by Joel Lane.
21 Monday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A new point-and-click “hidden object” PC game, Mystery Stories: Mountains of Madness…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HUAfICN9lg&w=420&h=315]
20 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
A Lovecraft machinima movie has won the Grand Prize in the 2011 Machinima Expo (machinima is amateur 3D animation storytelling, rendered in real-time with a videogame engine). Phil Browne’s adaptation of The Haunter of the Dark was made with the real-time animation software iClone. Here’s the film with the director’s commentary…
[vimeo 32303090]
And here’s the original…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyqoNvcmEcM&w=640&h=360]
20 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
The director’s cut of the recent BBC adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is out now, with an extra 30 minutes which were cut for the broadcast…
“This 2011 adaptation comprises 5 episodes, originally aired on BBC Radio 4 Extra […] an additional 30 mins of mystery-filled audio within these five episodes”
19 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted in New books
Today in the UK both The Financial Times and Guardian Books notice the new wrist-breaker anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Amazon UK currently has the book used for as low as £10.
It weighs in at 4lbs, and 750,000 words. So… can I get a Kindle version? No, of course not. What a waste of great publicity. All those potential sales from newspaper reviews just flushed down the drain or diverted to Pirate Bay, because there’s no Kindle version. Seriously, do we need a mass “one-star review” campaign on Amazon, to force publishers to give readers Kindle versions of new books?
Anyway, the chronological anthology looks interesting (even if the only Lovecraft in it is “The Dunwich Horror”, often regarded as a failure), and Weird Fiction Review has a handy table of contents.
18 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
18 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A weighty new 232-page collection of comic book adaptations of Lovecraft, The Lovecraft Library Volume 1: Horror Out of Arkham, due 6th Dec 2011 from IDW. Introduction written by Robert Weinberg.
Volume 2 is currently out as a series of traditional comic-book part-work pamphlets, as “H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror” (includes a 100-page adaptation “The Dunwich Horror”, plus other stories), and these will then presumably also be collected into a single volume at some point in 2012. When put together the two volumes should bring us over 400 pages of new comic book adaptations of Lovecraft tales.
17 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Scholarly works
An interesting new empirical / industry-structure analysis of the rise of SF in America: David Reinecke, “From the Pulps to the Stars: The Making of the American Science Fiction Magazine, 1923-1973”. Princeton University CACPS Working Paper #44, Fall 2011.
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Marina Warner’s new book on magic and the reception of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, reviewed…
“The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. These dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy became inseparable from “nigromancy”.
Of obvious relevance to much weird fiction from the 1920s and 30s, and Lovecraft’s use of mad Arab wizards, etc. Warner is not your usual theory-clotted lit crit academic, she’s a proper historian and independent scholar.
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH
A free unabridged audio reading of perhaps the most Lovecraftian of Robert E. Howard’s stories, “The Black Stone” (1931). The new recording was kindly made by Cthulhupodcast, over the summer in July 2011…
Above: Illustration for the story, by British artist Greg Staples
A ten-page comic book adaptation appeared in Marvel’s Savage Sword Of Conan (March 1982 issue).
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Scholarly works
The New York Times obituary for Les Daniels — horror author of Providence, and “one of the earliest historians of comic books” with books such as Comix: A History of Comic Books In America (1971).
Also… “The subject of his master’s thesis was the horror author H.P. Lovecraft” and he wrote on Lovecraft for the local Providence press. It seems S.T. Joshi has a section on the Daniels vampire novels, in the book The Evolution of the Weird Tale. Joshi also suggests, in one interview, that Daniels’s Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (1975)… “is probably the best we have, but of course it is very much out of date”.
