Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, on DVD

22 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in Films & trailers

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This post is “old news” — but over the last year or so I’ve been returning to Lovecraft and literary speculative fiction after twenty years, and am consequently finding a lot of new goodies. While I thought the BBC Radio 3 documentary The Strange Life of H.P. Lovecraft was rather good, I was rather disappointed with the feature-length film documentary The Eldritch Influence: the life, vision and phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft (2004 on DVD). So it’s good to now learn of another new feature-length documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Oct 2009 on DVD). It seems to have been very well reviewed and has won several awards — although awards these days are increasingly untrustworthy, skewed by politically correctness or a ‘me and my mates’ approach. Unfortunately the DVD is currently only available on a Region 1 (USA) DVD, and those of us in the UK will need a region-free player.

There are reviews at: Dread Central | Cinema Suicide | Scott Kenemore | Fatally Yours.

Alan Moore’s “Neonomicon”

22 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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The great bard of Northampton, England has the first part of a new Lovecraftian graphic novel out now, as a $1.99 preview sampler titled Neonomicon: The Hornbook (a “hornbook” is an old disused word for a school writing slate). The full graphic novel version of Neonomicon is apparently set for later in 2010, as a leather-bound limited edition of 3,000 copies.

The horror in Neonomicon is unfortunately said to be of the “gore” variety, thus breaking with Lovecraft’s hints and elisions to graphically show intricate nastiness — perhaps Moore is aiming at something in Continue reading →

Mark Twain meets Lovecraft

22 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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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.

Lovecraftian blogs

22 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in Housekeeping

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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 →

Tales of Lovecraftian Cats

22 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts

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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.

Welcome to this new weblog

22 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in Housekeeping

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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.