22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Durn it… it seems I wasn’t the first to have the idea of using re-combined old public domain stories as scaffolding for creating brand-new Lovecraftian stories. I’ve just read of the new Classics Mutilated series: “an all-new prose collection of genre mash-up stories […] allowing a variety of writers to mix fantasy and horror elements with classic tales and icons.” The cover illustrates a Lansdale story that’s Mark Twain meets the Uncle Remus stories, channelled via Lovecraft.
22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in Housekeeping
Reading the (surprisingly few) Lovecraft blogs was interesting. I was immediately struck by posts written by different bloggers set only a few week apart.
Speculative Fiction Junkie says of his excellent book-reviews that he has: “an increasingly persistent suspicion that touting the virtues of books that few can afford to buy (when they’re lucky enough to find them at all) may not enhance to any meaningful degree the likelihood that those works will end up in the hands of new readers.” […] “$100 books with print runs of 200 make accomplishing this goal impossible as a practical matter”.
Which perhaps begs the question: is the literary Lovecraft really popular any more? Or is he slowly being fossilized in print? Continue reading
22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts
Just published: my book Tales of Lovecraftian Cats (2010). I experimentally used old and obscure public domain horror / fantasy stories as scaffolding to write new Lovecraftian stories. All the stories feature Lovecraft’s favorite animal — the cat.
In this experiment I take my cue from Lovecraft — who was 50 years ahead of the curve on transformative fan works and collaborative mythos-building — since he once wrote in a letter of 1933…
“Someone ought to go over the cheap magazines and pick out story-germs which have been ruined by popular treatment; then getting the authors’ permission and actually writing the stories.”
My book includes two new prequels to “The Horror at Red Hook”, and a new Randolph Carter story, as well as my translation and modern adaptation of the first English novel, Beware the Cat (1584). There’s a limited edition hardback (please contact me), and an affordable paperback edition available from the link above.
A free sample is here (PDF link). I’ve made sure to embed the fonts used, but you never can tell with Adobe — please comment if you don’t see an elegant layout. It probably means that the fonts didn’t embed properly.
22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in Housekeeping
Hello and welcome to this new weblog. To open the proceedings you will find — gibbering at the foot of the front page — over 100 freshly-collected and assiduously-located Lovecraft / Lovecraftian and related web links to magazines, events, publishers, and such like. Hopefully this list will be especially useful for small publishers seeking reviews, and authors seeking suitable fiction magazines.