Believe it or not, you have a new H.P. Lovecraft story to look forward to.
Well, new-ish. The recently discovered short story, "The Cancer of Superstition," was written by Lovecraft in 1926 as a commission for magician Harry Houdini. (It was a relationship that also produced the story "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" in 1924.) So, while it's an exciting prospect that there could be any new Lovecraft story in print sometime in the future, don't be surprised if it's not his purest work.
The story was found among the effects of Houdini's wife and assistant, Bess, and her manager Edward Saint. Potter & Potter Auctions of Chicago will sell the story as part of an auction of Harry Houdini memorabilia on April 9. Hopefully, the manuscript's next owner will have the good taste to have the story published so that fans can spend the next decade bitching about it online enjoy it.
You can read more about "The Cancer of Superstition" at Mental Floss HERE.
Frank Schildiner has shared an interesting essay over at pjfarmer.com that seeks to connect DARK SHADOWS to the work of H.P. Lovecraft. And this relationship is lot more complicated that you think.
Titled "The Great Old Ones and the Collins Family," Schildiner's piece not only attempts to connect the traditional vampires, witches and werewolves of DARK SHADOWS to Lovecraft's alien gods, but also takes numerous additional steps that connects both stories to the greater Wold Newton Family.
For the uninitiated, the Wold Newton Family is an intellectual exercise created by author Philip Jose Farmer in his fictional biographies "Tarzan Alive" and "Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life." The concept links hundreds of pulp novels, comic books, radio shows and other media into a single shared universe, using unintended "clues" provided in existing stories. For example, Margo Lane (the adventurer and companion of The Shadow) might very well be the sister of Lois Lane from the SUPERMAN comics.
Schildiner has taken the concept a step further, connecting the works of H.P. Lovecraft to the world of DARK SHADOWS in a framework that also tries to explain the sometimes conflicting narrative within the gothic soap. DARK SHADOWS makes this an easy pitch: the series' controversial "Leviathans" storyline was inspired directly by Lovecraft's work, though in refrained from directly using any of the author's characters or situations.
Schildiner isn't content to underline these already obvious relationships, though, and has written a ridiculously elaborate narrative that relates Joseph Curwen (of Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward") to both Nicholas Blair AND Count Petofi, establishes a bloodline connecting Angelique directly to Laura Murdoch/The Phoenix, and suggests an absurd fate for Victoria Winters that involves Marvel Comics' SON OF SATAN.
For real.
Some of it is pretty smart; other elements (such as Angelique's "true" designs on Barnabas Collins) undermine everything we know about the characters in some really awful ways. Schildiner has a deep knowledge of DARK SHADOWS' many storylines, but some of his ideas suggest he doesn't fully understand them. Still, it's worth a read for hardcore fans of the series.
I both love and hate these kinds of experiments. Continuity is the lifeblood of storytelling, but geeks are pretty famous for not knowing when to quit. The Wold Newton Family sometimes feels to me like the fictional equivalent of paranoid schizophrenia. The words "plot" and "conspiracy" are interchangeable, after all, and Wold Newton seeks to make a conspiracy of the written word.
THE LAST CASE AUGUST T. HARRISON, a short feature starring Jerry Lacy, is now available on Vimeo. The film stars Lacy (who played many members of the wicked Trask family on DARK SHADOWS) in the title role, a private investigator looking into a missing persons case. Here's the official summary:
"Set in and around Venice Beach, California - August T. Harrison, private eye, comes out of retirement to solve what seems at first to be a bizarre missing persons case, but as he digs deeper, he finds himself caught in the middle of a dark conspiracy involving the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Are Lovecraft's tales just fiction? Or do they hold the secrets of the cosmos?"
THE LAST CASE AUGUST T. HARRISON is available to rent from Vimeo. You can watch a trailer for the film below.
It's been said that the Gutenberg Press democratized writing, and that print-on-demand technology has done the same for publishing. Keep in mind that democracy have given us Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, while the other holds some degree of accountability for FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. I'll let you decide which one is better.
For those of you who thought PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES was the pinnacle/nadir of western literature, it was quickly followed by LITTLE WOMEN AND WEREWOLVES, a book with even less reason to exist. But neither of them have a shot for the title of "Strangest Book on Amazon." I spent some a few minutes exploring the darkest corners of Kindle Direct Publishing and have returned with these gems. And also a weird rash.
KANYE WEST: REANIMATOR Of Kanye West, who was my friend in college and after he dropped out, I can speak only with extreme sadness... So begins this epic cautionary tale of ambition and hubris. A bizarre mix of Lovecraft and hip-hop history, Kanye West—Reanimator reimagines the classic story "Herbert West—Reanimator" with everyone's favorite petulant genius cast in the titular role. In it, Kanye West attempts to reanimate a moribund hip-hop scene, only to come to the conclusion that his music is so powerful, it should be used to reanimate the dead. And who better to reanimate than those two legendary titans gone before their time—Biggie and Tupac? Hilarity and carnage ensue. LINK
TAKEN BY THE LIZARD MAN The Lizard-Man is a legendary creature said to be found in the rural swamps of South Carolina. He's a cryptid who has scales, and he has claws, and he has... me! See what happens when a city girl ends up with a flat tire in the wrong part of the swamp! The Lizard-Man won't be satisfied with anything but my total capitulation and he won't take no for answer. And believe you me, I was surprised at what he had to offer! Will I submit to the beast? Read to find out! LINK
BOOTY CALL OF CTHULHU Joanne Lagrasse is a newly graduated college student living the life. Well, if the life is sitting in your apartment all day trying to research monsters for a novel. The strange book her favorite professor gave her is full of ramblings by what must be a mad man, which makes for uneasy reading and a loner lifestyle. She pushes herself to go out to the beach, though she takes the tome with her. When she decides to ignore her professor's warning and reads a chant out loud, she finds herself faced with a giant monster and its lewd tentacles, each one eager to fill her holes. LINK
CORD'S FRANKENSTEIN LOVER Living next door to a “mad scientist” seems spooky enough till Cord discovers a “man-made man”—a Frankenstein-type creation—in Doctor Moroney’s basement while the doctor is out of town. Moroney has pre-programmed his creation to want sex and be well endowed for it…and the monster wants Cord as his mate! LINK
I spend a lot of time in the past. Ironically, I've got no taste for nostalgia, which is an easy distinction to make when you think of history as this living, monstrous thing. The past is only ever as distant as it wants to be and will bite you in the ass the moment you begin to take its appetites for granted. In the immortal words of Henry David Thoreau: "History shows again and again/how nature points out the folly of man/Go-go Godzilla."
April 2, 1924
During the course of my archival spelunking, I found an interesting classified ad purchased in 1924 by one H.P. Lovecraft (above). The writer lived briefly in Brooklyn, N.Y., from 1924 to 1926, first at Parkside Avenue before moving to Flatbush Avenue.
Lovecraft was married to Sonia Greene at the time, a marriage that technically lasted longer than anyone might have guessed. Lovecraft and Greene agreed to a divorce around 1926, but it was later discovered that H.P. never got around to filing the necessary papers to legally end their marriage. Oops.
While at the Parkside Avenue residence Lovecraft put up for sale ... well, just about everything save for the clothes on his back. Lovecraft might have sold these items more quickly had he added a bit of Lovecraftian flourish to the text, possibly referring to the Corot print as an "eldritch beauty" or something equally anachronistic. Is that joke tired yet? It feels tired.
The classified ad at the top of this post was published April 20, 1924, in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Below is a screenshot from Google Maps showing Lovecraft's Parkside Avenue address as it looks today-ish.
It's once again time to defend H.P. Lovecraft's literary significance.
This discussion has a way of feeling relevant no matter how many times it's taken place, which is a lot more often than you might think. Lovecraft's legacy has been one of perpetual ebb and flow, with each generation embracing and rejecting his work at an almost industrial rhythm. Our cultural relationship with Lovecraft is like that of a child to a parent: we adore him in our youth, reject him during the painful onset of "maturity," and return to him in later years with a measured sense of respect.
Writer Alan Moore appears to have reached the twilight phase of his relationship with Lovecraft. His new comic series PROVIDENCE functions as a treatise on Lovecraft's strengths. It's a follow-up to his controversial NEONOMICON, which insisted on discussion of the bigotry, misanthropy and sexual undertones of Lovecraft's golden age stories. Both series are meta-pastiches that involve variations of his characters and situations, though PROVIDENCE (so far) has been a lot more restrained than its predecessor.
In the video above, Moore speaks briefly about our newfound "cuddly" relationship with the elder gods, one that has transformed Cthulhu into a kind of "Mickey Mouse" mascot of horror. Cthulhu was a concept that once invoked fear in readers. Today, he's fodder for stuffed animals, action figures and sardonic bumper stickers.
The reevaluation of Lovecraft's work is a popular meme, one that began almost immediately after his death in 1937. Below is a review of "The Outsider and Others," the first collection of Lovecraft's stories from Arkham House. Even though Lovecraft had been dead for just three years when this piece was published, the review has that faintly apologetic air seen so often today in discussions about the author.
THE OUTSIDER AND OTHERS
By H. P. Lovecraft. Arkham House, Sauk City. Wis.
The late H. P. Lovecraft occupies a peculiar position in American letters. It seems safe to wager that, in the minds of more than a few critics, he occupies almost no position in the American literary hierarchy. This is not because Lovecraft was not a good writer. On the contrary, he could write plain and fancy rings around all but a handful of his contemporaries. In his chosen field he had no equal.
Lovecraft's undoubted abilities have remained more or less hidden for two reasons. The first is that his field is the supernatural and the weird, traditionally a limited one. The second reason, closely aligned with the first, is that almost all of Lovecraft's writing has appeared in a comparatively obscure publication, Weird Tales. This magazine, besides being one of the abhorred "pulps" has a highly specialized circulation and is rarely to be found in the ivory towers of widely known critics.
Lovecraft died in 1937. “The Outsider and Others" is a posthumous collection of his stories, edited by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth, themselves writers as well as fanciers of weird stories. Not all the stories included are truly weird, but all have an element of strangeness, an element which in some cages is utilized to attain a pitch of horror not far short of Poe's level.
Lovecraft possessed a freshness of imagination and a prolificity of invention scarcely surpassed by any other writer of the weird. In the course of his career he developed at least the outer symbols of a peculiarly horrible mythology, from which other writers have since borrowed. More than one of his stories approaches close to the borders of madness: It would be difficult, reading them, to believe that Lovecraft was quite sane, just as some of Poe's conceptions make one doubt his entire sanity.
A flowing, 18th century style contributes markedly to the effect of Lovecraft's tales. At times, this style burgeons a bit too consciously, and reading several stories at one sitting is likely to surfeit the reader’s appetite: but on the whole the writing holes up remarkable well.
Not the least interesting thing in this volume is Lovecraft's essay on "Supernatural Horror in Literature," a capable and scholarly piece which deals with the origin of the weird tradition in literature and its various ramifications to the present day. It fittingly rounds out one of the most significant books of the weird to appear in many years.
(Originally published in the March 24, 1940, edition of the Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star.)
The Lovecraft E-Zine will be live streaming THE LAST CASE OF AUGUST T. HARRISON this weekend.
The film stars Jerry Lacy (of DARK SHADOWS) in the title role, and Nathan Wilson as H.P. Lovecraft. It's directed by our friend Ansel Faraj. Here's a summary:
“August T. Harrison, private eye, comes out of retirement to solve what seems at first to be a bizarre missing persons case, but as he digs deeper, he finds himself caught in the middle of a dark conspiracy involving the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Are Lovecraft’s tales just fiction? Or do they hold the secrets of the cosmos?”
I wonder what H.P. Lovecraft would think about having his name inextricably linked with the word "tentacle." The guy was a bit of a prig and notoriously hated seafood, so it's a safe bet he would have resented his recent status as the Godfather of Hentai.
It's no surprise, really, that Lovecraft's most famous alien-god-monster Cthulhu was invoked throughout the write-up for ThinkGeek's latest novelty, the USB Squirming Tentacle. I'm not entirely sure Cthulhu even had tentacles, but whatever. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing.
I predict there are already videos of this toy "in action" on PornHub. Don't act like you weren't thinking the same thing.
If you're one of the sensible people who need something like a USB Squirming Tentacle in your life, you can get it directly from ThinkGeek HERE.
I can't say for sure that Narragansett Beer's "Lovecraft Honey Ale" will be any good, but I want to have inappropriate physical relations with its product summary:
Lovecraft Honey Ale is a reference to space mead consumed by the winged Byakhee, interstellar predators that first appeared in the famed Lovecraft short story, “The Festival.”
How can you not love that?
Thanks to his work recently entering public domain, H.P. Lovecraft is on the verge of becoming overexposed almost 80 years after his death. While I love the man's troublesome/troubling work, you can only endure so much Cthulhu-meets-STAR WARS mash-ups without risking permanent brain damage. Lovecraft has become a kind of mascot for horror fans in recent years, with everyone pretending he's some obscure writer only they know about. Fandom can sometimes be precious that way. (Full disclosure: I own between 3 and 6 Lovecraft-inspired T-shirts.)
While Lovecraft Honey Ale might ultimately taste like Nyarlathotep piss, they've certainly got their marketing strategy together.
“When the brewery was shut down, the spirit of Narragansett never died; it went underground, to a deep and dark place," writes Narragansett Beer owner Mark Hellendrung. "Since reclaiming our beer in 2005, we’ve worked hard to stay true to our roots. But after being in that dungeon for so long, we came back with some baggage. Just like the nameless protagonist from 'The Outsider,' we emerged in the light a little different. A little... strange. Think of this brew as our bold, our obscure, our tampered-with mind. It won’t be for everyone, and if it isn’t for you, you’ll know exactly who it is for."
I'm working to get my hands on a can of this brew and will let you know how it goes.
LINK
*I would have used "shitfaced" but ran out of characters in the headline.
Artist Patrick Dean spent the latter part of 2014 working on an online project called "Underwhelming Lovecraft Monsters." It started off pretty small, with Dean creating the kind of kooky caricatures the Old Ones might get while visiting the state fair (see right). Before long, he'd expanded the idea into fun (and funny) multi-panel summaries of some of H.P. Lovecraft's better-known stories. It quickly became my favorite thing on the Internet, but it seems the series might be going on hiatus.
"This might be the last one of these I do for awhile; I’m going to focus all my drawing time on a big project that I hope goes somewhere," Dean announced yesterday on his Tumblr feed. "Wish me luck and I’ll update this page periodically, I promise."
I hope we see more of this stuff in the future. With luck, he'll get enough of these strips banked for a collected edition in the future. If not, let me offer a "thank you" to Dean for helping me waste time surfing the Internet at work in a quality fashion.
Below is a quick index to the multi-panel strips at "Underwhelming Lovecraft Monsters." If you like what you see, make sure to browse the rest of the Tumblr feed ... there's lots more that's not linked here.
(Note: If you want to see Dean's take on Barnabas Collins, click HERE.)
Congratulations to the Collinsport Historical Society's own Patrick McCray, whose STAR TREK: THE CONTINUING MISSION episode "Cathedral in the Void" has been nominated for a number of Audio Verse Awards.
Patrick McCray and ENTERPRISE star Anthony Montgomery.
STAR TREK: THE CONTINUING MISSION is a fan-produced series of audio dramas that returned in 2014 after a two-year hiatus. The series chronicles the adventures of the USS Montana, a Federation ship under the command of Capt. Paul Edwards. Released in May, "Cathedral in the Void" combines STAR TREK with H.P. Lovecraft's "Elder God" mythos. The episode was co-produced and directed by Patrick McCray, who also plays the character "Lt. Cdr. Jack McGuire" in the episode.
You can find McCray online at The Collins Foundation.
* This "rising prop replica" of REGAN MacNEIL from THE EXORCIST is actually kinda terrifying. Today is director WILLIAM FRIEDKIN's birthday, btw. Via Entertainment Earth.
* 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly): "Zombies
are dead meat. No arguing that; it's their one defining characteristic.
But everybody focuses on that "dead" part like it's such a huge deal.
They often forget about the meat. Do you know what else is dead meat? Steak, hamburger, possibly even that red grease mush inside of Taco Bell food." Via CRACKED
* LARRY COHEN's 1982 B-movie gem Q: THE WINGED SERPENT is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. Come for the human sacrifices! Stay for the giant lizard monster! Via Amazon.
* Director UWE BOLL wants your money to make a sequel to POSTAL. Please don't give it to him. Via Kickstarter.
* A new trailer for CARRIE, the third adaptation of STEPHEN KING's 1974 novel, leaves little to the imagination. Should I live to see my 80th birthday, I calculate I'll have seen CARRIE remade a total of six times.
* ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, a romance/psychodrama about two vampires, sounds like it could be an interesting flick. It stars TOM HIDDLESTON, TILDA SWINTON, JOHN HURT and ANTON YELCHIN, who are all awesome. Unfortunately, the movie is directed by JIM JARMUSCH, who I pretty much hate. The guy can cast the hell out of a movie but, as a storyteller, he seems
to be trapped in his junior year of film school. ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE doesn't have a release date nailed down here in the U.S. (which screams VOD) or even an official website. Here's a review from The Hollywood Reporter about the film's screening at Cannes, which will have to suffice for now.
TOM HIDDLESTON and TILDA SWINTON in ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE.
