Lovecrafter 11 / 12 (2023)

05 Tuesday Sep 2023

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Details of what’s in the annual German-language double-issue magazine from the German Lovecraftians. Printing soon, and it should be available to buy shortly.

Lovecrafter 11: special issue on Lovecraft’s poetry.

* Following the recent German publication of the volume of poems Fungi by Yuggoth and other poems, an article “will present and discuss the translation and book in as much detail as possible”. [Sounds like a ‘making of’ article?]

* Form fanaticism and nostalgia in Lovecraft’s poems. [Probably about his passion for old metres, poetic forms and subject matter?]

* Lovecraft’s graphology. [His penmanship, or otherwise, and presumably also trying to divine personality from the handwriting?]

* ‘Mushroom Gardens in Bloom’ – a review of H.P. Lovecraft’s Fungi of Yuggoth and Other Poems (German edition).

Lovecrafter 12: special issue on Robert E. Howard.

Parallels between “Howard’s biography and the protagonists of his stories”.

A look at “the origins and relevance of the barbaric in more detail”.

An article which “roves through the sunken temple complexes and black stone structures that leave us so unsettled in the context of cosmic horror”.

“Digital Horror Upgrade 2.0”, in which Dennis Grob examines a number of obscure and often unknown videogame titles.

And various RPG gaming material.

PulpFest 2023 presentations

04 Monday Sep 2023

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A useful round-up of the presentations at PulpFest 2023. Including, among others…

* Weird Tales on radio – old-time radio expert Karl Schadow looks at radio adaptations of stories that appeared in Weird Tales.

* Weird editors – a panel celebrating the magazine and anthology editors of the weird. There’s a recording.

* Doc Savage and his offspring – Doc Savage had “several imitators who would follow him to the newsstands”. Who knew Doc had babies? There’s a recording.

Recent and forthcoming comics

04 Monday Sep 2023

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Time for a look at comics.

The delayed single-volume Lovecraft: Unknown Kadath collected comics series / graphic-novel should be shipping in about two weeks, just in time for the ‘student grant-money arrival’ season. Also to be available as a Kindle ebook. I see there’s also to be a French single-volume edition of this recent Kadath series of comics, with the French translation due early November 2023.

There’s also a French graphic novel or ‘BD’, Le dernier jour de Howard Phillips Lovecraft (‘The Last Day of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’). No page-count that I can find, but presumably it’ll be the usual ‘BD’ length and large page dimensions.

Set to ship just before Halloween 2023…

Romuald Giulivo and artist Jakub Rebelka bring us the dreamlike story of Lovecraft’s final moments in the form of interior dialogues, [in which he] revisits his imaginary lands, memories, his anger and his grey areas. We follow the last journey of a complex and tortured man [who is] convinced that only a comforting eternal night awaits men at the moment of their death. But isn’t an author inherently immortal thanks to his stories of which we are the custodians? Constructed like a strange Gothic cathedral, Lovecraft’s Last Day is an extraordinary graphic novel turning the end of a man into the beginning of a myth.

Sounds good, though only in French. One would have thought that the French ‘BD’ industry would have installed a streamlined AI-assisted insta-translation system by now. They must be missing out on a large chunk of revenue by not doing so. They have so much quality content and back-catalogue material. For grown-ups, self-contained complete stories, great art. Many English readers would gladly pay $10 for that, in ebook.

Later in the year, we have a new maybe-perhaps shipping date for Gou Tanabe’s mammoth H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth graphic novel manga adaptation, in the English Dark Horse translation. Like the single-volume Kadath, this has been much delayed. But Amazon is now suggesting possible UK in-your-hands delivery by 7th December 2023.

By the way, I was able to read The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence graphic novel. Hmmm… entertaining in a ‘Neil Gaiman meets Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’ sort of way. Very beautiful artwork and lettering. But not really about the Lovecraft I recognise.

And it looks like the older graphic novel / comics biography Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft is now firmly out-of-print. Time for a new affordable e-book edition from PS Publishing?

Free cheese

03 Sunday Sep 2023

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For Halloween the videogame pinball-table emulator Pinball FX will release a Pinball M version. M for “mature”. This will have a free table…

The free table is an updated, ‘unrestricted’ Director’s Cut version of the Lovecraft-inspired Wrath of the Elder Gods table that’s already available in PinballFX.

The model seems to be that the money comes from those seeking additional digital pinball tables, to be played inside Pinball FX. The one-minute YouTube video demo for ‘Wrath of the Elder Gods’ makes it look pleasingly cheesy, as a pinball table should.

The Commonplace Book

02 Saturday Sep 2023

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New on Archive.org, H.P. Lovecraft – Commonplace Book – Transcribed by R. H. Barlow in a digital fan edition…

I wanted to make the original document available here in the Archive, and so here it is (with a new cover image made by me)

This seems pertinent to the late-summer season of large moths…

There’s also a fan compilation of Hannes Bok’s Science Fiction Illustrations, newly on Archive.org.

The finger of god…

01 Friday Sep 2023

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This week’s ‘picture postal’ from Lovecraft seems appropriate for the season. The season when the first leaves first begin to fall, crisping and chattering along the walkways in the wind.

At the ‘town’ end of Angell Street, Providence.

I hadn’t before realised that in winter or early spring the leaves would be off the trees when the boy Lovecraft arrived at the town end of his long and beloved Angell Street. The lack of leaves would reveal the steeple of the First Baptist Church through the trees, as seen here. The bright white church would serve as an elegant visual herald of the beginning of the busy centre of his beloved Providence.

Thus the church was not cherished by Lovecraft simply as a nice piece of architecture (“the finest Georgian steeple in America” etc), but would have been intimately connected with his childhood sense of liminality. It stood on and marked the border between his ‘home street’ on the hill and ‘the home city’ in the busy centre below.

My thanks to the Providence Public Library for the scan. Here some spotting and side-wear has been lightly and partly repaired, and the picture colourised.

Lovecraft as a small boy had also attended the Sunday School, presumably held in a room in the church ‘meeting house’ itself…

I was placed in the ‘infant class’ at the Sunday school of the venerable First Baptist Church, an ecclesiastical landmark dating from 1775 [and “my mother’s hereditary church”]; and there resigned all vestiges of Christian belief. The absurdity of the myths I was called upon to accept, and the sombre greyness of the whole faith […] caused me to become so pestiferous a questioner that I was permitted to discontinue attendance.

It thus had a further significance for him, as the place where he had rejected Christianity.

“Through the Gates of the Silver Key”

31 Thursday Aug 2023

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New on Librivox, a public-domain audio reading of the brilliant “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”. This being the joint sequel, written with E. Hoffmann Price, to Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key”.

Price supplied the core plot outline, and some of the Necronomicon quotes, Lovecraft then went to work on a massive makeover which left less than 50 words of Price’s original standing. Price’s original can be found in Crypt of Cthulhu #10 (1982, not online, aka ‘Ashes And Others’). There used to be paid digital downloads of the old Crypt issues, but it looks like the store has now gone. This loss appears to have wiped out not just the older issues, but also the 2017-2022 run.

However, Price’s original can be seen in decipherable scans at the Brown Digital Repository.

An AI-powered pseudoarchaic English fixer?

30 Wednesday Aug 2023

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An interesting thought. What if an AI could be devised that would replace all the interminable and wearying pseudo-archaic 19th-century English (thee, thou, thine, thy, ye, whither, shalt, etc) in old fantasy and historical tales? And thus make such old works of fantasy far more readable and listenable for moderns? It shouldn’t be too difficult to cook one up, and the AI might only be needed to proofread the result for sense, to make sure the find/replace had worked properly.

Lovecraft at King Manor

29 Tuesday Aug 2023

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Last year’s Archtober talk “Lovecraft at King Manor” is running again this year for Halloween. Aka “King Mansion”, “King’s Manor”, in Jamaica, New York.

Also in Halloween news, the much-anticipated kinda-Lovecraft horror movie Suitable Flesh reaches some U.S. cinemas on 27th October 2023. Very loosely based on “The Thing on The Doorstep”, apparently. Set in the modern day, “super-gory” and “erotic”, and it moves “outside the lines of depravity and good taste” (cue publicity-still of a louche teen boy smoking and wearing handcuffs). Sounds like modern shock-horror for the teen gore-hounds, and far from Lovecraft’s emphasis on atmosphere and subtleties.