New Eldritch Tomes

  While I have not completed part three of 2018? More or Less, new items have passed thru the dark portal and appeared on my doorstep. First off the mages at PS Towers (their term) had a sale  on signed editions of The Dulwich Horror & Others by David Hambling, cover by Ben Baldwin.

Then a bookseller I have been doing business since, well it started via snail mail, had a sale. I got this lovely paperback I had been admiring for some time. Cover by Virgil Finlay.

But the item that really grabbed me was this Canadian Edition of Weird Tales. Weird Tales had a lot of interesting cover artists over years. A volume on Margaret Brundage appeared in an earlier edition of New Eldritch Tomes, and there were also artists like Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok. One of my least favourite artists is Lee Brown Coye, but I could not resist his bright red cover for March 1948. And we have Smith's Master of the Crabs, not to mention the rest of the lineup, a who's who of Weird Tales authors.

Illustration by Lee Brown Coye

Illustration by Lee Brown Coye

I had been reading some of Wellman's

 John Thunstone stories earlier today. 

Illustration by Boris Dolgov

Illustration by Boris Dolgov

Illustration by Boris Dolgov

Illustration by Lee Brown Coye

2018? More of less Part 2 (there will be a part 3)

  6. The Firebrand Symphony by Brian Hodge

"And slowly, as the ancient skull of Homo sapiens primoris watched on, I began to decipher the music of distant stars." (411)

In part one I covered two short stories by Brian Hodge, and after finishing my post began looking for a story about a giant skull that I wanted to include in part two. At the time I could not remember the author. But yes it was Brian Hodge. 

Our narrator is an artist who mixes sounds for use in movie soundtracks in a studio in the Cascades region of Oregon. His father was a musician, an acid rocker, who overdosed in a rented farmhouse in Vermont when he was 6. His mother a groupie disappeared and he was raised by his aunt and uncle. At one point he had a band whose avowed purpose was to burn down the world with their music. But eventually the band broke up. he married a Swedish music critic and founded his current company Megalith. When the story begins he is working on tracks for a movie called Subterranean. During a visit by his uncle Terrance, a retired professor from Boston he is given a massive skull some 350,000 years old. Terrance classes it as an  erratic enigmatics, an artifact that should not exist. It was uncovered during an archaeological excavation by Miskatonic University, who had enlisted Terrance for the dig. And therein lies the tale. To often mythos tales retread the same ground, so much so, that the creators of The Great Lovecraft Reread on Tor.com start each post with checklist of certain elements. While the mere mention of Miskatonic University seems to indicate Hodge is about to tread the path too often taken, he does not. Many familiar elements are here, Pop culture tropes, Charles Fort like artifacts, MIB like conspiracies, ancient astronauts, the weird astronomical knowledge of the Dogan tribe of East Africa. But Hodge welds them into something, new, fresh and unexpected. Many of these elements  fascinate me, add the archaeological element, I worked in archaeology for close to ten years, and this story was one I was almost genetically programmed to enjoy just like…, But I will leave you here.

7. Black Ships Seen South of Heaven by Caitlin R. Kieran

While Brian Hodge is a newer inclusion in my pantheon of Mythos Gods, the ultimate ruler, the daemon sultan at the heart of it all, remains Caitlin R. Kieran. And in honour of the latest photos from Ultima Thule, I had to include one of my favourite stories by her. The tale of what happens when New Horizons returns and the stars are right.

https://www.wired.com/story/new-horizons-first-photos-ultima-thule/


Nova also has put out a great program on New Horizons,
Pluto and Beyond.

http://www.tvweeklynow.com/news-blogs/news-blogs-RicksPicks/novas-pluto-and-beyond-covers-the-new-horizons-mission-in-real-time.htm

"New Horizons returned, ignoring its programming and using Pluto for a gravitational slingshot back towards the inner Solar System, hurtling across near vacuum and cold and all those millions of miles back to earth. The probe crashed somewhere in the Sahara, or the Caspian Sea, or Scandinavia. 

No one was ever certain, as tracking stations seemed to show it coming down in multiple locations. 

But it returned with secrets, and the scientists could grasp at straws forever and never have one iota what those secrets were. New Horizons returned, and R’lyeh rose, and the one sleeping there awoke. 

And The End began. 

Or the Beginning."

S. T. Joshi. Black Wings of Cthulhu (Volume Four) 

A brilliant tale combining elements of the mythos, with a Chicago now transformed into Hodgson's, the Last Redoubt from The Night Land surrounded by his various fungal horrors and doomed by the machinations of Lovecraft's Black Pharaoh. Keirnan shows us what exactly happens when R’lyeh rises and horrors roam the world.

Cover Credits

Children of Cthulhu, Dave McKean

Black Wings of Cthulhu 4, Jason Van Hollander, Gregory Nemec

2018? More of less Part 1

  Over on my Jagged Orbit blog I did a 2018 Year End Review which included purchases, posts and reading for 2018. As I noted there I do not keep a reading diary so my recollection of what I read in a given year can be vague.  What I have decided to do here is list ten titles I have read from 2017/2018 and just provide a brief note on what attracted me to them. I will do this in two parts because I do go on a bit. The stories are numbered for clarity, this is not my ranking of best to least. If I have posted on a specific title previously I will provide a link.

http://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2019/01/2018-year-end-review.html

Some titles I enjoyed recently:

 1. "The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon
Okay, this is probably my favourite HPL inspired story, period. You can find it online. I prefer the version in The Weird ed. by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. The story is narrated by Edward D. Satterlee the district attorney of Yuggoghey County, and a more world weary (mythos weary) narrator you would be hard pressed to find, include a clown worthy of Thomas Ligotti and the pathos of the primate and Chabon shows why he is a master story teller, and a big fan of genre fiction. 

"The line went dead. He was so keen to hang up on me that he could not even wait to finish his sentence. I got up and went to the shelf where, in recent months, I had taken to keeping a bottle of whiskey tucked behind my bust of Daniel Webster. Carrying the bottle and a dusty glass back to my desk, I sat down and tried to reconcile myself to the thought that I was confronted – not, alas, for the first time in my tenure as chief law-enforcement officer of Yuggogheny County – with a crime whose explanation was going to involve not the usual amalgam of stupidity, meanness, and singularly poor judgment but the incalculable intentions of a being who was genuinely evil. What disheartened me was not that I viewed a crime committed out of the promptings of an evil nature as inherently less liable to solution than the misdeeds of the foolish, the unlucky, or the habitually cruel. On the contrary, evil often expresses itself through refreshingly discernible patterns, through schedules and syllogisms. But the presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria."


The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (p. 905). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. 

  
My full (gushing) post here
https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/search/label/Michael%20Chabon

2. Copping Squid by Michael Shea

Here it is the gatekeepers and the strange house itself that forms the setting for the cosmic encounter, that drew me in and made this story something different. 

"The houses thinned out even more, big old trees half shrouding them. Dead cars slept under drifts of leaves, and dim bedroom lights showed life just barely hanging on, here in the hungry heights. 

    As they mounted this shoulder of the hills, Ricky saw glimpses of other ridges to the right and left, rooftop-and-tree-encrusted like this one. All these crest lines converged toward the same summit, and when Ricky looked behind, it seemed that these ridges poured down like a spill of titanic tentacles."

Shea, Michael. Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea (pp. 164-165). Dark Regions Press. Kindle Edition. 

  Next Brian Hodge is to my mind one of the best writers of HPL inspired stories working today. I did a full length post on his story "The Same Deep Waters As You, which also appeared in Tor.com's The Great Lovecraft reread. 

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Same%20Deep%20Waters%20as%20You.%20Brian%20Hodge

3. It's All The Same Road in the End by Brian Hodge

In his story "The Picture in the House" Lovecraft tells us 

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.^[5]"

But even less promising seems to the setting of Hodge's story. Brothers, Clarence and Will Chambers are searching for their grandfather Willard Chambers who disappeared some 50 years ago while collecting folk songs in Kansas.

"But now they’d let the distinctions slip away. From place to place, it wasn’t that different after all. They’d seen it all before and forgotten where. Everything was the same again. This was how things hid in open daylight, beneath the vast skies, out here in the plains of western Kansas. There was no need for mountain hollows or fern-thick forests or secret caves tucked into seaside coves. The things that wanted to stay hidden would camouflage themselves as one more piece of the monotony and endless repetition." 

or

"There had never been much point to going where people were so few and far between that the land hardly seemed lived in at all. It had once, though. The rubble and residue lingered. Along roads that had crumbled mostly back to dirt, they passed the scattered, empty shells of lives long abandoned. Separated by minutes and miles, the remains of farmhouses and barns left for ruin seemed to sink into seas of prairie grass. The trees hung on, as tenacious loners or clustering into distant, ragged rows that betrayed the hidden vein of a creek." 

Guran, Paula. The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction (Kindle Locations 1227-1231). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition. 

As someone who has spent a large portion of his life, living, working and travelling on the Canadian Prairie I think Hodge has captured the scope, vastness, desolation and physical isolation of the prairie beautifully. It may seem like one of the least promising setting for a tale of Lovecraftian cosmicism. But the elements are all there and wonderfully realized. There is nothing of the pastiche here, Hodge instead has captured the essence of Lovecraft cosmic indifferentism. 

4. On These Blackened Shores of Time by Brian Hodge 

Again Hodge uses another theme that informs the best of Lovecraft's work, the vast incomprehensible scale of the earth and the universe. As Lovecraft did At The Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, Hodge brings us the to the brink of the unknowable, the inconceivable distance that stands between our current mayfly lives and the deep time beginnings of life itself and give us a peek. I also found echos of the themes of Arthur C. Clarke, throw in a subterranean setting and fungus, who could ask for more.

5. The Night is a Sea by Scott Thomas

My wife is a huge fan of the magazine Fortean Times, so our household is well aware of the work of Charles Fort in recording the weird, the uncanny and the just plain odd. Here Thomas has captured the universe spanning scale of Lovecraft with the type of news items beloved of Fort. Indeed our narrator, Emerson a collector of the strange and mystical, is also the writer of the column Emerson Bridge's Journeys to the Border for the newspaper Free Worchester, producing columns taylor made for the pages of Fort's The Book of the Damned. Emerson loves to share the stories he has uncovered like that of the Ice Sisters, 

"As for the Ice Sisters… A boy searching for his missing dog found three dead women dressed in colonial mourning gowns lying in the middle of a field in the Coddington property. They were spaced evenly apart with their heads nearly touching, though their hair and faces could not easily be seen. Each had a dark wooden box enclosing her from the neck up, and underneath, shaped to the dimensions of the boxes and further encasing the women's heads were blocks of ice.  (11)

The story wanders happy along, as we follow Emerson, researching and relating stories as well as assisting in a search for a missing senior, until all the elements come together in a outstanding climax. This story is a wonderful fusion of Lovecraft and Charles Fort and any aficionado of the weird is sure to enjoy it. 

And now before beginning part two I must ransack my library, not for the Chaat Aquadingen or the Cultes des Goules, (which are right there in the C's) but rather a story about musical skulls that I want to include in part two. 

Happy 2019

Some seasonal links from Tor.com Happy Whatever you celebrate

Please enjoy what has become a quiet holiday tradition in the Tor.com offices: the reading of Neil Gaiman’s original story: “I, Cthulhu, or, What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9’ S, Longitude 126° 43’ W)?”

https://www.tor.com/2018/12/24/i-cthulhu-neil-gaiman

H.P. LOVECRAFT

THE LOVECRAFT REREAD

Merry Christmas From the Void: Holiday Poems

Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth

https://www.tor.com/2015/12/22/lovecraft-reread-merry-christmas-from-the-void-holiday-poems/

Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s Cat)

Little Tiger, burning bright
With a subtle Blakeish light,
Tell what visions have their home
In those eyes of flame and chrome!
Children vex thee—thoughtless, gay—
Holding when thou wouldst away:
What dark lore is that which thou,
Spitting, mixest with thy meow?

New Eldritch Tomes and John Linwood Grant

Often I find odd coincidences gather round me, invisible imps that perch on my shoulder whispering of dark conspiracies, secret organizations, the malicious internet bots that harvest my inner soul. Even the red lava lamp on my desk offers up heart stopping visions of some hellish landscape of the damned. Then they dissipate and I buy something, mention it to my wife and move on. This coincidence centred on an author named John Linwood Grant. 

As anyone who has followed this blog could guess I would have found the cover for Cthulhusattva above by Alix Branwyn almost irresistible regardless of the contents. And while I was ruminating on the purchase, I noticed a second anthology also edited by Scott R. Jones, Chthonic Weird Tales of Inner Earth. 

 I used the look inside feature and found Jones introduction to the work, a description of his reaction to a cave tour quite engaging. Then I continued, reading the first story in the collection, "Where All Is Night, And Starless".

I loved the story, Miss Allen is purchasing an old farmhouse on one of the Western Isles of Scotland, for herself and her father, a veteran of the World War I who is suffering from shell shock. It is an isolated spot, the house perched upon an outcropping of granite gneiss, a fact that reassures her father. After waiting through the two years of her father's recuperation, it is here that she hopes he will finally confide the true nature of his experiences. And he does.  Lieutenant Robert Allen of the 183rd Tunnelling Company had been commanding a group of sappers tasked with tunnelling beneath the German lines to plant explosives. One of the many risks associated with this strategy is encountering Germans tunnelling towards them. And despite the fact that they have been assured that they are far deeper than any possible German advance, they do detect the sound of digging. Soon Allen's command encounters not just vast caverns but enemy soldiers, or are they? I really enjoyed this story, it presented a fresh approach, it was nicely atmospheric and suspenseful and really engaged my interest. So I ordered both books and awaited the barking dogs that would herald the arrival of my package. I have to admit I did not ever notice the name of the author. 

It was while awaiting my books that I read Grady Hendrix's post on Tor.com on " The Terrible Detectives of the Victorian Era."
 

https://www.tor.com/2018/11/30/the-terrible-occult-detectives-of-the-victorian-era/

I have to admit a real fondness for the intrepid sleuths who protect us from vampires, mummies, ghostly hogs, and every possible manifestation of the unhappy dead. The exploits of John Silence, John Thunstone, Thomas Carnacki , Jules de Grandin, Lucius Leffing, Mile Pennoyer, Prince Zaleski, Cummings King Monk and Aylmer Vance among others form a significant part of my library. It was in the comments section I found the link to a really fun tribute to occult detectives by John Linwood Grant. I really enjoyed Grant's blog. It took me quite some time to figure out Grant was also the author of "Where All Is Night, And Starless" He also likes dogs. 

http://greydogtales.com/blog/the-singe-of-four-a-case-of-peculiar-detectives/#respond

Not all the stories in these anthologies are new, we have HPL's classic "The Rats in the Walls", and Ruthann Emrys excellent "The Litany of Earth", which I discussed here, 

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-litany-of-earth-by-ruthann-emrys.html

I found Jones comments below, (to paraphrase) that he had gotten tired of some manifestations of the mythos struck a chord with me as well. I am hoping that a different editor might bring a different perspective on Lovecraft's theme of cosmic horror and I am certainly looking forward to Grant's story in Cthulhusattva.

From the introduction:

"At some point (don’t ask me when it was, exactly, or what triggered the change) I just got tired. A profound enervation settled upon me, dank and heavy and dull. I mean, I had been at the game a while. Not as long as the Joshis or the Prices and the rest for whom the old-school colours of a Miskatonic U tie still hold heart-stirring meaning, mind you, but still, long enough. So, perhaps it was to be expected, this weariness. In the bones. A cloying, slightly greasy fog of exhaustion that clogged my frontal lobes whenever the Name was mentioned...

Yes, I was tired of Lovecraft.

And unlike, say, London, when one is tired of Lovecraft one is not tired of life. Not really. You’re not even tired of weird fiction. Or horror. Or even (dare I say it?) the Cthulhu Mythos. For there is still great, interesting, and engaging work being done within those (admittedly arbitrary) borders."

Cover by Lucas Korte

from the introduction:

"The cavern mouth awaits, as does the cistern with hidden depths, the tunnel that twists and writhes, the abyssal space that hums with unknown activity. Note the faint glow to the walls as you descend: mere phosphorescent fungi... or something more peculiar? There is a sound of rushing water that you can’t place, and the suggestion of drums and strange flutes in the deep. The rock vibrates beneath the soles of your feet, and your headlamp flickers, fails. But then, you knew it would, eventually. This place is not for you, but here you are.

Welcome to CHTHONIC."

Scott R Jones
2 February 2018
Victoria, BC

Recommended Links Lovecraftian Science and the Art of Tom Ardans

I am currently shuffling my Lovecraft material around, with a little help from friends. This always gets me in the mood to search out more items of Mythos interest. 


One of the first places I visited was Lovecraftian Science, a wonderful website dedicated to the science in H.P. Lovecraft.  

https://lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com/

Their current post; 

Cryptobiosis in Elder Things, Part 2 Traveling through Interstellar Space, features a beautiful (as elder things go) illustration of an Elder Thing by Tom Ardans. 

So the second place I visited was Tom's website My Vain Doodles, which features a plethora of really well executed illustrations of many different scenes and characters from Howard's work. I have not reproduced them here since I do not have permission, but I urge you to not only visit Tom's site but leave comments so he knows how much you enjoy his work.

http://tomardans.blogspot.com/

Some of my favourites so far:

https://tomardans.blogspot.com/2017/02/pickmans-model.html

https://tomardans.blogspot.com/2017/02/mi-go-anatomy.html

https://tomardans.blogspot.com/2017/02/yithian-biology.html

https://tomardans.blogspot.com/2014/04/yithian-again.html

https://tomardans.blogspot.com/2015/10/encounter-on-europa.html

https://tomardans.blogspot.com/2014/05/yithians-interrogating-peaslee-upon-his.html

I noticed Lovecraftian Science also has a tome available on Amazon which I will be ordering once I recover from Christmas. 

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1927673100/ref=ox_sc_act_image_1?smid=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB&psc=1

Recommended links: Episode 37: When Cthulhu Calls (Podcast)

In an effort to bring HPL: Beyond the Walls of Sleep into whatever century it is we currently inhabit, I thought I would look at some non-print aspects of the Lovecraft milieu. So I located a podcast, (description and link below) that looked Lovecraft's character Cthulhu (or is it really Howard's creation). I found this podcast enjoyable, Molinsky makes no secret of Lovecraft's flaws but captures some of the fannish enjoyment we get from characters like Cthulhu and the connections we makes between Lovecraft's various stories.

Eric Molinsky on his episode “When Cthulhu Calls”:
“I did an episode with Here Be Monsters, we did a collaboration, which was set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft. It was basically a fake episode, which starts out realistic—in fact, we did interview, I think, some kind of scientist, but eventually it got so ludicrous that I was interviewing H.P. Lovecraft’s brain in a jar, and it was making anti-Semitic comments toward me. And I could not have been more clear in the beginning that ‘This is going to start out real, but it is a radio drama.’ In the description on social media, in the description on your phone, it says ‘This is a radio drama.’ And I could not believe how many people wrote me and said, ‘I completely forgot. It was so believable that I forgot, and I’m really angry at you for misleading me.'”
Episode 37: When Cthulhu Calls

https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/when-cthulhu-calls.html


And remember:
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn