19 December 2023
[cthulhu] Road Closed – Cosmic Horror … Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
13 November 2023
[lovecraft] Phoning It In: 4 Times H.P. Lovecraft Tried To Describe An Unspeakable Cosmic Horror But Basically Just Described A Goose … ‘It walked upright like a man, yet it was clearly a beast. The thing’s leathery feet did not have the normal five toes that we humans have. It had FEWER than that. It had THREE toes. And yet, I hesitate to even call them ‘toes,’ for each digit was connected to each other by some sort of skin-like film. It was like some perverse spider had spun webs between each toe for some inscrutable reason known only to the mad gods that dream their furious dreams on the remotest fringes of forgotten galaxies.’
3 October 2023
[lovecraft] McCallum reads Lovecraft … Three albums of David McCallum reading H.P. Lovecraft stories recorded in the 1970s. ‘As a reading it’s pretty good, slightly edited but with the novelty of allowing you to hear McCallum recite the famous “As a foulness shall ye know them” passage from the Necronomicon. These commissions no doubt came about simply because McCallum was available but his Lovecraft recordings gain a deeper resonance in the light of his later exploits with Joanna Lumley in the haunted corridors of Time. Some of the malign forces that Sapphire and Steel face aren’t so distant from Lovecraft’s interdimensional “Old Ones”…’
11 August 2022
[lovecraft] H.P Lovecraft’s very bizarre hatred of Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights … TL;DR – Lovecraft was racist. ‘He seemed to filter all his untethered anxiety into the very building at 169 Clinton Street. “I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient thing – a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth.” Yet Lovecraft saved his greater fantasies for the neighborhood south of here. He eventually funneled all this tortured and deranged hysteria into his horror writing with the publication of “The Horror at Red Hook,” a story that literally depicts the neighborhood as a gateway to Hell.’
5 April 2022
28 October 2021
[books] How to Get Your Mind Blown by H.P. Lovecraft and Alan Moore in 7 Epic Steps … ‘If you get this far and you still haven’t had enough, go even deeper down the rabbit hole. (This is where I’m currently at) Read S.T. Joshi’s biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence. It’s over 1600 pages long. It’s IN-DEPTH. Realize that you didn’t actually know anything about the life and works of Lovecraft. Read each Lovecraft story again as you go through the biography and now you will understand the context of each story as you fully digest them. Then read the Moore books again. Get lost in the abyss. It was never a rabbit hole, it was a portal through time and space where your mind and reality melt and warp.’
12 March 2021
24 August 2020
[lovecraft] Arkham Board of Health Feedback On Miskatonic University’s Draft Plan for a Safe Campus Reopening … How is Miskatonic University coping with the Covid-19 Era? ‘Social distancing in classrooms – You write that “through queer and monstrous perversions of geometrical laws, students will be seated at blasphemous angles outside the curves of our dimensions, thus remaining safely six feet apart.” Please clarify whether safe distancing could be achieved without resort to “loathsome horrors beyond human conception.”’
1 July 2020
[books] We Can’t Ignore H.P. Lovecraft’s White Supremacy … Powerful look at Lovecraft’s racial bigotry, comparing with racism today. ‘But the need to “save” a man dubbed the “horror story’s dark and baroque prince” by Stephen King is itself questionable. His legacy is firmly planted. His cosmology sprawls from popular culture to niche corners of scholasticism. Complaints of a potentially tarnished reputation are more concerned with bolstering the illusion of Lovecraft as a sacrosanct figure. Even further, to divorce his racism from his literary creations would be a pyrrhic victory; what results is a whitewashed portrait of a profound writer. And from a criticism standpoint, what’s lost is any meaningful grappling with the connection between Lovecraft’s racism and the cosmic anti-humanism that defined his horror.’
5 June 2020
[books] H.P Lovecraft on 1918’s pandemic – Spanish Flu … Some interesting snippets on Lovecraft’s view on the big pandemic of his time. ‘H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 2 December 1925 – Influenza has not yet struck the east this winter, though it probably will before long. With freely accessible railways, one can’t segregate maladies of this sort nowadays. It’s odd, but despite all the repeated epidemics of the past decade, I’ve never had influenza. No doubt the gods are saving a deal of picturesque suffering for my very last days!’
24 February 2020
[movies] 10 great Lovecraftian horror films … The Thing: ‘In Carpenter’s film, what they encounter when investigating the wreck of a Norwegian exploration base is an otherworldly creature that can assimilate and take the form of any other living organism. The effects, done by pioneer special effects artist Rob Bottin, play a huge part in getting the audience to experience the same abject horror of seeing creatures that defy natural laws, that shouldn’t exist in a physical space. The creature, although seen, is not a single thing; it mutates and adapts. It, and its intentions, are unknowable.’
27 August 2019
[books] My Favorite Anti-Semite: H.P. Lovecraft … A well-written attempt to square the circle of being a Jewish HPL fan whilst dealing with his prejudices and bigotry. ‘Why did he at once obsess over spreading Jewish influence in the media and then encourage and enable young Jewish authors? Why did a man who believed in the evils of Aryan “mongrelization” marry a Jewish woman? If he believed that the only good Jew was an assimilated Jew, why did he admire the traditional Jewish imagination? I have no answers. Like so much of the forbidden knowledge and alien monsters that fill Lovecraft’s stories, bigotry is by its nature irrational, contradictory, and more than a little insane. His anti-Semitism seems illogical because it was illogical, the product of personal factors and frustrations about which we can but speculate.’
10 October 2018
[comics] How to Read Alan Moore’s Providence… a useful trail of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories onto Moore & Burrows Providence.
6 September 2018
[cthulhu] I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult … An Op-Ed from the “trembling corridors of the West Wing”. ‘The root of this problem, we believe, is in Nyarlathotep’s very essence. It is a being incapable of viewing Its servants as anything other than playground toys or troublesome fleas. Many may argue that we should have known this to be the case for the Stalker Among the Stars. And that might well prove true, to a point. We summoned the God of a Thousand Forms assuming the weight of responsibility would rein It in slightly, remind It to adhere to the Necronomicon’s nightmare prophesies first and foremost. If it was foolish to assume the Outer God would care so little about this dimension that it wouldn’t even acknowledge the Tome’s existence, well, call us fools. We still believe utter ruin can be brought to the land through the proper rituals and unhallowed traditions, not by this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-tentacles kind of governing.’
5 September 2018
[lovecraft] H.P. Lovecraft stories: an intro to Cthulhu, Necronomicon, Dagon & more … good overview of Lovecraft’s world … ‘My personal favorite Lovecraft story, “The Whisperer in Darkness” (read here) features evil crab-aliens, mind control, and disembodied brains in a tale so gross and weird I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into a hundred movies already.’
28 May 2018
[cthulu] Sorry, But I Don’t See How Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult Is Negatively Affecting American Discourse … 🙠Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! 🦠… ‘I don’t see any problem with the death cult’s High Priest getting a recurring op-ed in the New York Times. He worked hard to get where he is, and last I checked, this is still the country where, if you put in enough hard work, time, energy – and self-castration to please the abhorrent Anti-God, apparently – you can make it. The cult is a small but troubling percentage of our population, but we can’t just silence them because they call in eerie unison for a “Great Offering.” Yeah, if I was on the editorial board I might see about diversifying with another woman, or perhaps a person of color, or hell, even someone slightly left-of-center, but I imagine it’s pretty hard to quickly turn a ship as large as the USS Gray Lady. These institutions don’t change overnight. Unless Nyarlathotep wills it, I suppose.’
16 May 2018
[cthulhu] Why We’re Here – A Cthulhu Tract … By Fred Van Lente and Steve Ellis. ‘Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!’
20 February 2018
[cthulu] Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum … Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
“Fools!” said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. “We must prepare today’s youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods-not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!”
4 December 2017
[books] H.P. Lovecraft Gives Five Tips for Writing a Horror Story, or Any Piece of “Weird Fiction” … ‘The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain–a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.’
19 September 2017
[knots] 5 New Ways to Tie a Tie … includes The Lovecraft… ‘Summon a nectie from its slumber deep within the gaping void of your closet.’
19 May 2017
[politics] Conservative election manifesto actually the Necronomicon … Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! … ‘An eldritch tome of unholy secrets written by an insane medieval prophet has been launched to sweep the Conservatives into government this morning. The grimoire, attractively bound in a bright blue leather of unknown provenance, was launched at a press conference by the Prime Minister and several capering imps.’
8 May 2017
[weird] The weird poetry Google Translate writes when fed the same characters over and over … Don’t introduce A.I’s to the work of H.P. Lovecraft. It will end badly.
6 April 2017
[moore] Howard Philip Lovecraft – Utopia/Valhalla #1, April 1970 … As Providence #12 arrives – here’s Alan Moore on H.P. Lovecraft from 47 years ago … ‘Then apparently, another race drifted in from space. The star-headed CTHULHU, who came to Earth and waged war for a time on the Old Ones. But peace was made, and the children of Cthulhu were allowed to live in their frozen city at antarctica with their servants, the proto-plasmic Shoggoths. Eventually, they were defeated, and either imprisoned or banished by the elder-gods,. The basic theme for the Cthulhu mythology, is that it occurs when a mortal breaks the restraints placed upon him, upon which, the Old ones can operate both freely and terribly.’
28 March 2017
[lovecraft] Countdown apologises after letters round accidentally summons Cthulhu … ‘Broadcaster Channel Four defended itself from criticism and said that the letters drawn were ‘purest chance’. Concerns were first raised by viewers after contestants were challenged to twist the numbers 2, 2, 5, 6, 9, 25 and 75 through unholy geometries and cause the stars to be right. This was followed by a contestant winning a letters round with the ten-letter word “Yog-Sothoth” which regular dictionary corner guest Gyles Brandreth accepted was key and the gate and the opener of the way, and praised the contestant for managing to make a ten letter word out of only nine letters.’
16 March 2017
[books] The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans … ‘Barlow didn’t invent Cthulhu. He lived in Lovecraft’s great dream, but he never became a great dreamer himself. Until he got to Mexico, he was a serial abandoner of projects, who set out to do everything but left most of it unfinished. He was also too interested in reality: where Lovecraft had sublimated his fears and desires, Barlow had sex and saw the world. Rather than imagining dreadful Others, he took note of what other people were actually like.’
18 November 2016
[cthulhu] Look, All I’m Saying Is Let’s At Least Give Nyarlathotep A Chance … ‘But the die has been cast, and we’ve gotta roll with what we’ve been given. Like it or not, Nyarlathotep – God of a Thousand Forms, Stalker Among the Stars – is our Commander-in-Chief now. And you know what, Jerry? Color me curious. I know a lot of really heated rhetoric and seemingly reckless policy proposals have been bandied about over the past few months – that bit about “delighting in this dust speck you call Earth’s senseless suffering” still bugs me – but hey, the least we can do is see how He adjusts to His new responsibilities.’
23 March 2016
[moore] What Next For Providence? … Where is Alan Moore heading with Providence? … ‘Issues #5 and #6 are almost a two part story, where Black visits a city which is a major nexus of Lovecraft’s work, and intersects with several different stories, and many characters who act towards Black in an openly malevolent manner. I predict that #11 and #12 will be set in Providence, RI, and will feature Black’s inevitable doom after similarly intersecting with multiple stories and characters. “The Haunter of the Dark” has to appear. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward seems extremely likely’
7 March 2016
[lovecraft] Lovecraftian Oral: Dead Squid Can Have Sex With Your Mouth … LOVECRAFT WAS RIGHT! Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! … ‘Squid corpses, even when cooked, retain their sexual reflexes and have been known to inseminate our mouths. After eating calamari…a South Korean woman reported experiencing “severe pain” and a “pricking foreign-body sensation” in her mouth. From her tongue, inner cheeks, gums, throat, her doctor escised “twelve small, white, spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms.” These were spermatophores, whicih possess seriously tenacious ejaculatory apparati, and a cementlike body, which allows for their attachment to materials like the tongue, inner cheeks, gums…’
12 August 2015
[books] Necronomicon for Children – a lesser known work of Abdul Alhazred …
31 May 2015
[comics] Annotations for Providence #1 … notes on Alan Moore and Jaycen Burrow’s latest comic … ‘Page 17, Panel 3: “The Repairer of Reputations” in The King in Yellow is set in an alternate future New York in the 1920s, which featured legalized suicide chambers and a concluded European war with an American victory; this further reinforces the layered fictionality of Providence, where the reality of the comic book is not our reality, nor even Lovecraft’s.’
6 May 2015
[comics] Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence … annotations for Alan Moore and Jaycen Burrows not yet released Providence comic.
25 January 2015
[lovecraft] HP Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space … a look at how H.P. Lovecraft foresaw the future in one of his short stories …‘Lovecraft’s creature is a symbol of something that, at the time he wrote, was just coming into being. The prophecy develops through a number of rifts in the text, some of which align the extraterrestrial entity with technical innovations still nascent at the time the novella was written. For one we learn that the meteorite fell in 1882, which happens to be the year Thomas Edison switched on the world’s first commercial power station in New York City. Furthermore the scientists who study the meteorite discover that its chemical composition bears an affinity with silicon, a metalloid that, unbeknownst to Lovecraft, would enable the development of the semiconductor, without which there would be no digital age. Finally, the effect of the preternatural color on plants and wildlife is eerily prescient of radiation sickness-the radioactivity of electronic devices being common knowledge now. Through these and other elements, the story connects the advent of alien light and color to wider technological processes that have transformed the landscape.’
20 October 2014
[cthulhu] Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn!
2 September 2014
[books] All About Alienation… Alan Moore discusses H. P. Lovecraft … ‘What Lovecraft seems to be doing in works like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is attempting to embed the cosmic in the regional. He was doing his writing where he loved the New England landscape around him, he loved its history, he loved the way it looked, he loved everything about it. In that sense he was a very provincial person. He found his stay in New York unendurably horrific. But at the same time he was keeping up with the science of the day. And he understood the implications of that science; he understood the implications of relativity; he understood the implications of the quantum physicists; perhaps only dimly, but he understood how this decentralised our view of ourselves; it was no longer a view of the universe where we had some kind of special importance. It was this vast, unimaginably vast expanse of randomly scattered stars, in which we are the tiniest speck, in a remote corner of a relatively unimportant galaxy; one amongst hundreds of thousands, and it was that alienation that he was trying to embody in his Nyarlathoteps and his Yog-Sothoths.’
8 July 2014
[people] How’s H.P. Lovecraft’s lovelife? … ‘Her arms and legs bend in both directions so you can’t see if she’s facing you.’
24 May 2014
[lovecraft] Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum
“Fools!” said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. “We must prepare today’s youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods-not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!”
20 January 2014
[text] Cthuvian Ipsum Generator … A lorem ipsum generator from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos … ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’
10 December 2013
[lovecraft] Charlie Stross on what scared H. P. Lovecraft … ‘I believe that Lovecraft’s sense of cosmological dread emerged from the exponential expansion and recomplication of the universe he lived in-it eerily prefigures the appeal of today’s singularitarian fiction, which depends for its dizzying affect on a similar exponential growth curve. Lovecraft interpreted the expansion of his universe as a thing of horror, a changing cosmic scale factor that ground humanity down into insignificance.’
5 December 2013
[cthulhu] Alexis Madrigal on Big Data and H.P. Lovecraft: ‘…data is merciless. It will correlate all its contents. And then what?’
15 May 2013
[books] To Understand The World Is To Be Destroyed By It … Jess Nevins essay on H.P. Lovecraft … ‘Lovecraft did not create cosmic horror. He recreated it. Lovecraft desacralized cosmic horror, reinterpreting it through the lens of modern scientific theory and removing its Victorian moral assumptions. What Lovecraft created was a specifically twentieth century idea: the universe as an empty, materialist one, in which there is no spiritual meaning to any actions and in which human existence is not significant in any way. This idea has been enormously influential on creators of fantastic fiction, and is Lovecraft’s lasting legacy.’
9 May 2013
[am] Reasons I Do Not Dance: Alan Moore Interview … interview with AM on psychogeography and it’s connections with his work … ‘The author that first introduced me to [psychogeography] was the person I regard as being its contemporary master, namely Iain Sinclair, with his early work Lud Heat. Obviously, since then my appreciation of the field has broadened to include a wider range of writers. Some of these, like Arthur Machen, would appear to have been consciously applying something very much like Iain Sinclair’s conception of psychogeography as ‘walking with an agenda’, while others such as H.P. Lovecraft sought only to draw poetic inspiration from specific landscapes and their atmospheres, apparently without a conscious understanding of the way in which these fictions could be said to have emerged from the geography in question. Nor did Lovecraft seem aware that his imaginings, superimposed upon the actual territories of New England, were inevitably to become part of the way those territories were perceived and thus part of the place itself.’
27 March 2012
[books] H. P. Lovecraft: The man who haunted horror fans … BBC News On H. P. Lovecraft … ‘The Call of Cthulhu is the most famous tale of his invented mythos, which is itself a stage in Lovecraft’s attempts to create a perfect form for his preoccupations and for the weird tale. The mythos was also meant to counteract the over-explanation and lack of imaginative suggestiveness he found in conventional occult fiction. The following year Lovecraft wrote The Colour out of Space, which he later regarded as his best work. It tells the story of a strange meteorite that blights a farming community. “It was just a colour out of space”, but it is Lovecraft’s purest symbol, the strongest expression of his sense that the universe, and anything living out there in the dark of space or time, is indifferent to man.’
24 January 2012
24 March 2011
[books] Counting H.P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Words … ‘One of the things any fan of Lovecraft discovers early on is that Lovecraft was very attached to certain words. We either laugh or groan every time we hear something described as “indescribable” or called “unnamable” or “antiquarian” or “cyclopean.” And sometimes we wonder how many times he actually used the words…’ [via As Above]
16 April 2009
[books] Unspeakable Horrors – H. P. Lovecraft was a Racist … ‘Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
11 July 2006
[books] The Myth Maker — a profile of H. P. Lovecraft by Michel Houellebecq … ‘Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure “Victorian fictions”. All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant.’
23 January 2003
[reading] At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft … ‘Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.’