Alice at R’lyeh

24 Saturday Jul 2010

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I’ve found another Lovecraft “mash up”. Murray Ewing gives a long and useful account of self-publishing his Alice at R’lyeh, This is a new Carrollian nonsense poem, with illustrations, which imagines a combination of Alice and Lovecraft. Predictably, and as I know myself, embedding the required fonts in a PDF and getting it to print to the required page size was a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions. But in the end, he writes…

“I could get 100 16-page booklets for a little over £100 […] I went with www.thedigitalprinters.com […] I got the quote, uploaded my PDF, got an email back suggesting a lamination for the covers, okayed that, and then, a week later, I had my box of Alice at R’lyeh booklets. That moment — receiving your actual finished, physical copies, tangy with the scent of fresh ink and peppered with paper-dust — is the first heaven of self-publishing.”

The story of promoting it comes in Part two.

The Interactive Lovecraft – big new project at Vancouver Film School

23 Friday Jul 2010

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Interesting news from the Vancouver Film School. There’s an…

“unprecedented cross-disciplinary open-source project that’s tapping the expertise of students and alumni from programs across VFS. […] It’s called The Interactive Lovecraft […] creating a cutting-edge transmedia interactive magazine experience for the tablet marketplace, and laying the foundations of a model that future students will be able to experience with other public domain work as part of the Entertainment Business Management program. The end result – incorporating text, video, and games – will include adaptations of five seminal Lovecraft stories: The Call of Cthulhu, Dagon, The Dunwich Horror, The Rats in the Walls, and The Music of Erich Zann.”

There’s a video “making of” after the jump… Continue reading →

A Love Craft exhibition – photos

23 Friday Jul 2010

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Photos from inside the “A Love Craft” art exhibition, which has just closed in New York.

There’s also a less stand-offish set of visitor photos from Zazoo & Satori (a prolific tag-team for photographing all the fab NY shows, it seems) on Flickr.

Allison Sommers has her exhibition work online here and The Observatory Room has the full list of artists and a couple of other pictures online.

Fantastic Culture Preservation Society – launch

23 Friday Jul 2010

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Just launched, via Facebook (ugh) — the Fantastic Culture Preservation Society…

“Welcome to a fledgling network for the subcultures who appreciate horror, science fiction, and fantasy, which we hope will make up the Fantastic Culture Preservation Society. Through this network we hope to educate our community, and preserve our history.” […] “with the demise of many of the fan magazines … vast amounts of information about a substantially large subcultural movement is at risk of being completely lost.”

It seems at the moment to be very movie-oriented, an area I would have thought was already amply covered by the film archivists, various national film organisations, and indie DVD publishers. But it may expand and develop in future. And it does raise a valid point about the need to preserve archival copies of blogs and suchlike before they vanish (as they tend to do).

If you’re interested in the preservation of early videogames and associated material and fan works, there’s the Video Arcade Preservation Society and the UK’s National Videogame Archive.

[ Hat-tip: Theo Fantastique ]

Gore no more

23 Friday Jul 2010

Posted by in Films & trailers

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I’m no fan of modern gory horror movies — but it’s disappointing to hear that the proposed Guillermo del Toro feature-film version of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountain of Madness” has been canned. Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth etc) has instead officially announced that he’s signed up with Disney to write, produce and direct a movie version of their Haunted Mansion theme-park attraction. Which sounds like mindless Saturday-morning popcorn kiddie fodder, although I guess that in his hands it may achieve the heights of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. As to “Mountain of Madness” it seems the studios executives simply wimped out on in the end, despite Toro’s promise of adding buckets of teen-friendly gore…

“it’s very difficult for the studios to take the step of an R-rated, tent-pole movie, with a tough ending and no love story.”

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, on DVD

22 Thursday Jul 2010

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.