It came on a meteorite…

06 Monday Sep 2010

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Some strange things turn up on Etsy: how about a 6,000 year-old meteorite, carved into Loveraftian shapes, and placed under glass as a paperweight? Unfortunately the maker has also added some hippy-dippy crystals, but the basic concept is sound…

“Made with Hardened PVC, actual 4000 to 6000 year old Meteorite, fine Magnifying Glass Dome, Swarovski crystals, wood and felt base. Tiny Pink areas slightly fluoresce with Black Light. In with the Meteorite is a complex setting. Is it an Alien, Cthonian life form, Volcanic formations or, something even more terrifying…”

New Lynd Ward collection

05 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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The prestigious and beautifully-produced book series Library of America series is shortly to issue a slip-cased edition of Lynd Ward, Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts. Similar to and inspired by the wordless woodcut novels of Frans Masereel, and with a similar anarchist and autobiographical sensibility, but with a more refined style and a more gothic approach in some works. Among others he illustrated Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” (below) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Many of his works seem to chime rather well with the Lovecraftian sensibility. One could even imagine that a way could be found to pair selected Ward woodcuts (of which there are a great many to choose from) with selected Lovecraft stories, so as to bring the two into an interesting posthumous collaboration.

At least one of his novels, Gods’ Man : A Novel in Woodcuts is in the public domain, although it appears that the estate of Lynd Ward still makes claims (possibly spurious, since its copyright was not renewed) upon it.

Shopping with the Last Tuesday Society

04 Saturday Sep 2010

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Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors, London…

“The shop is perhaps best seen as an attempt to recreate or reinterpret with twenty first century sensibilities a 17th century Kunstkamera, a collection of objects assembled on a whim on the basis of their aesthetic or historical appeal, there is no attempt at creating or explaining any metanarratives or educating anyone, merely a display of naturalia and artificialia designed to give pleasure to the creators of the museum, who hope that you too will enjoy it.”

“Surprising numbers of our visitors wish to spend their time in trying to work out what is real and what is not. A distinction that we do not see, nor understand. Up until the Nineteenth century to call something original was to insult it, for if no one has done something before there’s probably a good reason, and so many people have done so much since then, and much of it to be regretted, that to be original or to claim to have something that is original can only really be seen as unlikely and extremely pretentious.”

Alan Moore on Lovecraft

02 Thursday Sep 2010

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A substantial new Alan Moore interview in The Skinny today, which has chunky sections on Lovecraft and Moore’s new graphic novel Neonomicon, which is set in Moore’s modern-day version of Lovecraft’s Red Hook…

“I wanted to do a story that modernised Lovecraft [ and via a blending with a police procedural approach ] actually put back some of the objectionable elements that Lovecraft himself censored, or that people since Lovecraft, who have been writing pastiches, have decided to leave out. Like the racism, the anti-Semitism, the sexism, the sexual phobias […] It is one of the most unpleasant stories I have ever written. It certainly wasn’t intended as my farewell to comics, but that is perhaps how it has ended up. It is one of the blackest, most misanthropic pieces that I’ve ever done. I was in a very, very bad mood.”

“why is Cthulhu […] humanoid? This is one of the questions we answer in the course of Neonomicon. And we do tell, I believe, a credible modern Lovecraft story”


Creative Commons portrait of Alan Moore by Javier Moreno, touched up by me and made B&W.

Grands Anciens (Old Ones)

31 Tuesday Aug 2010

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Lovely cover-artwork for a new French graphic novel, Grands Anciens (Old Ones) by Bojan Vukic and Jean-Marc Laine. The myth of the Kraken is given the Lovecraftian treatment, filtered through Herman Melville…

“New England, 1850. Ishmael is a young sailor who dreams of joining a whaling ship and going on an adventure on the high seas. One night in New Bedford, a fishing port overlooking the ocean, he met Herman Melville, a strange man who tells him the wildest stories — including that of the young captain Ahab, who once decide to go hunting the giant sea Kraken. But to raise it he first needed to find a certain sailor, a survivor of the Kraken attacks, who had kept a secret book of incantations and ungodly knowledge. Once this book is used, it conjures up ‘the Kraken’, which turns out to be far more monstrous than the worst nightmares of sailors or the dreams of human history.”

ActuaBD has interior art samples, and very nice they look too…

The first few pages are here…

A ‘making of’ set of character-sketches and pencil pages are here…

And I found a few more interior pages on a French book site…

The Mound

31 Tuesday Aug 2010

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Gongnardia has a new review/appreciation of The Mound, Lovecraft’s 29,000-word novella which was ghost-written for his revision client Zealia Bishop, who apparently never paid him for it. His work for Zealia Bishop was built around the barest of plot ideas and outlines — “slim plot synopses”, as they are referred to in the notes to Lord of a Visible World: an autobiography in letters. Undertaken late 1929, the tale has a modern man discovering the manuscript of a 16th century conquistador explorer in the Old West (Oklahoma). A vast underground civilization of extraterrestrial beings is encountered, and in the process a large sweep of geological ‘deep’ time is described. This makes The Mound (written 1929-30) an interesting “trial run” for Lovecraft’s own novella At the Mountains of Madness (written Feb/Mar 1931). This is one I don’t seem to remember reading as a youth, and it’s not one I’ve so far encountered in my current re-reading of Lovecraft.

The story doesn’t seem to have been done as an audio book, either free or commercially. But it is online here. The full and complete manuscript version only appeared as a critical edition in print in 1989, in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions from Arkham Press.