Brian J. Showers' The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories Reviewed

Brian J. Showers has been known for awhile in the weird literary community as the main engine behind Swan River Press, an established publisher of macabre fiction and scholarship. How the managerial personalities behind weird presses will perform when they turn into fiction writers is always an important and often anxiety provoking question. Luckily, Showers, like Ray Russell of Tartarus Press, is a talented story weaver who can comfortably add weird author to his resume with the appearance of The Bleeding Horse: And Other Ghost Stories. This short story collection surgically attaches the traditional ghost story to the meta-fictional reality of Showers' native Rathmines, an archaic suburb of Dublin, Ireland.

In a slightly quaint, but enjoyable narrative style, Showers speaks to readers directly and invites them on a tour through his historical Dublin, a city he has studied extensively and warped to strange ends. The first two stories, "The Bleeding Horse" and "Oil on Canvas," are told in a fashion very clearly drawn from the folkloric ghost story. Sights, people, and events are meticulously footnoted in both tales, historical citations which set the scholarly tone of this work and only become more numerous in further pieces. "The Bleeding Horse" recounts the phantasmal presence of a wounded horse forever trapped in the horrors of England's Civil War as it rampages through a Rathmines pub. "Oil on Canvas" portrays a dead artist's frustrated, posthumous artworks. Both stories are soundly told and nicely atmospheric, but neither registers high on the weird Richter scale.

It is the collection's subsequent tales that really take the spotlight in a sudden ramp up that is as unexpected as it is unsettling. "Favorite No. 7 Omnibus" resurrects the colorful and eerie history surrounding a 19th century omnibus accident. This tale is the first sign that some dark force heavier than mere individual specters may be hanging over Rathmines. An omnibus accident's mysterious origins are posited from several interesting and terrible angles through the old records of the accursed individuals who were there. A black carriage and a monster are mentioned as possible culprits, and the latter horror becomes a component of Showers' engrossing interconnections in the subsequent story, "Meones' Beast." This tale, which is itself an authentic facsimile of old Ireland's monster slaying chronicles, carriers an extra bizarre meaning when considered in relation to the preceding story.

These nightmarish recurrences of symbols and objects through time are subtly wielded by Showers. Yet, once noticed, they make Rathmines' extended and hellish history very recognizable. "Quis Separabit" ties the curious disappearance of Ireland's Crown Jewels to an exceptionally violent and frightening presence at the Blackberry Fair. Showers' dubious marketplace is a natural venue for the sinister, and his ghost, when it finally makes its appearance, is an unusual and imaginative demon with Jamesian overtones.

At this point, note that these stories are being reviewed in the order they appear for a definite reason: each successive tale practically surpasses its predecessor by an entire order of magnitude. "Lavender and White Clover" seems to be story most strongly imbued with Sheridan Le Fanu's spirit, Showers' prime subject of study and inspiration in the weird field. He takes us to a new church's construction site in Rathmines, where a hideous discovery is made: a giant mummy whose lavender and white clover stuffed mouth suggests an attempt at barring vampiric power, or possibly an even worse hellish ability. However, this unnerving abomination is merely a prelude to the book's final and most adept tale, where its queer talismans again creep up.

"Father Corrigan's Diary" takes us into a local historical figure's final chapter through a series of diary entries. The story is well paced and exceptionally tense--an authentic descent into frightful chaos that does not fall into the cliches popularly associated with supernaturally corrupted Christian establishments. Showers' Corrigan is a sympathetic figure who meets a mystery he cannot begin to unravel as a chain of progressively more ominous events culminate in a brush with evil incarnate. As in other tales, the author gives urgency to his terrors by confining the story within a meta-fictional framework so populated with real places and historical asides that it seems like more than mere fiction. "Father Corrigan's Diary" is also a top example of what a modern ghost story in the luxurious tradition of the British Isles should look like. For Brian J. Showers, it is nothing less than a literary coup that places him next to only a handful of others (notably Reggie Oliver) this successful at giving new life to old ghosts.

The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories is, in the final analysis, a volume bristling with the dead. They haunt and threaten from the nearly forgotten corners of a phantasmal history that creeps into the psyche without regard to its veracity. Dublin's Rathmines seems too close for comfort, even if it is half a world away, after experiencing Showers' myths--damning legends that cannot help but raise fears about the shadows in one's own locales. However, this collection may have another unintended consequence: a sudden compulsion to seek out large quantities of lavender and white clover...just to be sure.

-Grim Blogger

Brian J. Showers' The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories Reviewed

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Art Heals Wounds: Followers for Algernon

The worthwhile Art Heals Wounds blog has done an excellent snapshot on Algernon Blackwood's weird works. It also gives a mini-review of a public reading of his stories done in the UK earlier this July. This post doesn't just summarize Blackwood's fiction, but succinctly and accurately presents the themes this bygone weird master hoped to convey. His appropriation of Nature as a mystical and sometimes terrible force, as well as his keen sense of human consciousness, are discussed. All in all, the article is more evidence in a mass file strongly indicating Blackwood's potential to enjoy an expanded readership.

-Grim Blogger

Art Heals Wounds: Followers for Algernon

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The Nightmare-Collision Art of S.D. Tullis

S.D. Tullis is a weird fiction writer and the winner of D.F. Lewis' "Win Immortality" competition for the latest and last edition of Nemonymous: Null Immortalis. The appearance of a new online gallery also shows that Tullis is a capable and interesting artist. His work to date is a curious blend: the horrific, the historical, and the nightmarish meld into an eerie aesthetic that reeks nostalgia and madness.


Stylistically, many Tullis works bring to mind the endlessly terrible collages pioneered by Harry O. Morris and Aeron Alfrey. Those photographers of outlandish and dark horror also draw on bygone sights from other ages, and then mutate them in a way mere time never could, but which hell itself might. In Tullis case, however, the historical elements seem like backdrops in a demon haunted world the peoples and places of the past would never guess existed around them. His take on "The Mass" above is an excellent example, and suggests an unlikely geographer's role for Tullis more than anything else.


But this is not his only role. Amid the indeterminable battlefields, mosaics, and cathedrals are pure horrors like the "Mossman." This creature inhabits a world tenuously balanced between horror and fantasy. In one way, the thing might be viewed as a product of nature warping analagous to Tullis' endarkening of history. If this is the intent, then nowhere is a safe harbor in the twisted vistas proffered by this artist. Civilization across the ages is corrupted, and the untamed wilds outside its grip are no better. His is a kingdom where terror and strangeness truly reign supreme over all realms.

-Grim Blogger

The Nightmare-Collision Art of S.D. Tullis

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Two Shorts: Cthulhu Waits and Great Cthulhu Live

This lego driven short features one of the less common methods of bringing Lovecraftian visions to life. The style appears to be modeled on a dream sequence. Legos aren't always the best medium for manipulating horrors, but they do have a unique look. Be forewarned: the volume on this video is a bit grating.



And, just for fun, a glimpse at what Cthulhu might look like in a couple major American cities:



-Grim Blogger

Two Shorts: Cthulhu Waits and Great Cthulhu Live

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Dead But Dreaming Reviewed

Dead But Dreaming is a newer volume of Lovecraftian tales as diverse as it is well recognized. For years, the story collection existed as one of the scarcest tomes in Cthulhu Mythos circles, with less than 100 copies released by the original publisher before they shuttered their doors in 2002. Its current incarnation is thanks to Miskatonic River Press, which decided to give into popular demand and re-issue this anthology in paperback, complete with updated commentary. Cthulhu Mythos fiction, as many know, is often a phrase that encompasses wonderful new yarns drawing off H.P. Lovecraft's ideas as well as the most trite pastiches. Fortunately, readers will find the former quality in abundance and little of the latter in this volume.

Fifteen tales edited by Kevin Ross and Keith Herber round out the collection. The authors' names, like the stories, are a broad variety that includes well known Lovecraftian writers as well as newcomers. Not surprisingly, this results in a vast range of settings and styles that is almost bewildering, but shows the sheer flexibility that can be applied to Lovecraft's cosmic horrors. Whatever else, the backdrops throughout the anthology are perhaps the most impressive. Cthulhu and his consorts, alongside more nameless Things, rear their heads in the distant past and future, during world wars and in cinema and haunted houses.

These are fantastically warped skeletons around which the meat of full stories wraps. A clear standout included in Dead But Dreaming is Ramsey Campbell's "The Other Names." It gives a semi-classic snapshot of disaster after a young boy finds a madman's Necronomicon in an abandoned house. Amid a dour social existence, Campbell's boy finds affirmation and horror in something that should not be. Darrell Schweitzer also deserves praise for his selection, "Why We Do It." A college student is bringing his university crush home to observe the old time religion practiced by the community he grew up in. The ending is fairly obvious a little way through, but it still comes off with a punch through Schweitzer's powerful and mournful prose. "Salt Air" by Mike Minnis centers on a familiar Lovecraftian setting: an academic environment where a Professor is forced to watch his friend and colleague fall to an obsession dangerously enabled by supernatural forces. Lovecraft's Kingsport comes alive in all its haunting majesty in this tale, forcibly resurrected by the emotional loss and repetitious phrases that echo the mist shrouded, hypnotic seaside town. Lovecraft himself shows up as a devious ghost in Lisa Morton's "The Call of Cthulhu: The Motion Picture," which carries cosmic horror onto the set of producers looking to bring Lovecraft's most famous tale to life. The film concept scores high for originality, and Morton's stylistic retelling of "The Call of Cthulhu" offers a nostalgic familiarity and something new for readers.

Several well spun tales use an adventurous twist that can, when done correctly, seem natural to Lovecraftian works. Stephen Mark Rainey's "Epiphany: A Flying Tiger's Story" tells of a downed American fighter pilot in the jungles of Southeast Asia who learns there are far worse terrors than the Japanese enemy. Rainey's story is a strong exercise in well paced tension and transition from a world that is horrible, but strictly human, to the inconceivable outre. "The Unseen Battle" perfectly blends mankind's squabbles over territory with outside alien taints. A native girl in a colonial territory encounters a half maddened soldier from the Battle of Ypres who is scarred by more than wartime shell shock, one who has brought his own dire enemy with him to a place far from the trenches. Brian Scott Hiebert's story utilizes the First World War again in a time honored tradition dating back to H.P. Lovecraft himself, but its infused with an exotic perspective and the Old Gentleman never would have used. "The Thing Beyond the Stars" by Robin Morris stars another adventurer, this time a captain of an interstellar ship sent in search of fellow humans and the Old Ones. Morris' narrative is an imaginative sci-fi piece that reads like a brief sequel to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," picking up after unleashed Shoggoths and cultists have decimated Earth and forced humanity off world. Naturally, escape from horror proves elusive no matter how far from their home world humans go, but Morris' deadly, ultimate horror is truly frightening and awe inspiring in the Lovecraftian sense.

While the majority of Dead But Dreaming's stories are excellent or at least passable, there are a few that miss the benchmark for various reasons. "Bangkok Rules" by Patrick Lestewka starts off promisingly with a professional hit man who encounters eerie rumors in his industry's circle, but takes a turn for the worse in its reliance on graphic gore. It seems more designed to shock and sicken than awe and terrify--critical aspects of anything measured as "Lovecraftian." Adam Niswander's "Bayer's Tale," though well written, feels too much like a Lovecraftian pastiche without enough implications for the world beyond his detective's murder scene. Finally, David Bain's "Under an Invisible Shadow" is wonderfully narrated, starting in a zombie apocalypse's aftermath. Unfortunately, the story is much too short, and its "Invisible Lovecraftian Terror" is an entity that seems Lovecraftian in name only.

All in all, one would not be mistaken to treat Dead But Dreaming as a Lovecraftian buffet. The overwhelming majority of tales served up are fine dining, and virtually all are worth trying. The anthology's reputation precedes it truthfully, and as longtime readers of weird fiction know, it is not often that rare books come back on the market, let alone as affordable as this. Purchases may also support the rising Miskatonic River Press, which primarily focuses on gaming materials at this point, but may conceivably look at new fiction anthologies, if sufficient and deserved interest in the original book materializes.

-Grim Blogger

Dead But Dreaming Reviewed

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H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Expands Its Tentacles

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, an immense gathering that normally occurs in Portland, Oregon, every October, has now expanded to a new base. For the first time, a smaller H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival will be held in Los Angeles on September 11, 2010, about a month before the prime annual event is held to the north. A block of selected favorites from past years of the Portland film festival is already listed on their website, and further details should be forthcoming as the date draws near.

-Grim Blogger

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Expands Its Tentacles

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Weird News: Russian Citizen Requests Exorcism for Mayor

A Russian's desire for her town's mayor to undergo exorcism is an especially bizarre intersection of politics and the supernatural. Dismiss her as eccentric, if you must. You wouldn't be wrong. But don't expect this to be an isolated incident. The economic hard times means a global rise in "off with their heads!" sentiment, which means a significant minority may start seeing their own rulers as demon employed miscreants.

-Grim Blogger

Russian Seeks Exorcism for Stubborn Mayor

-Grim Blogger

Weird News: Russian Citizen Requests Exorcism for Mayor

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Dracula Debunking Exhibit Opens in Bucharest

Bucharest's National Museum of Romanian Art is currently featuring an exhibit that seeks to debunk the more macabre legends surrounding Prince Vlad "the Impaler," the legendary basis for Dracula. The show runs until October 10, 2010, for any readers in Romania, the EU, or those planning to go abroad. It's also notable for mixing a supernatural literary icon with the blurred, near-mythic mists of Medieval history. A fuller description in English can be found in this article.

-Grim Blogger

Dracula Debunking Exhibit Opens in Bucharest

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Small Poe Watercolor Fails at Auction

The following news item presents an interesting contrast to Baltimore's Edgar Allan Poe statue. A newly liberated watercolor of the weird writer by A.C. Smith has failed to sell at an auction. These are the full details from the event last month:

BALTIMORE — A rare portrait of Edgar Allan Poe has failed to sell at auction.

The small watercolor by A.C. Smith is one of just three surviving portraits of the author and the only one that shows him as a writer. Poe looks robust and lacks the mustache that's familiar from a series of daguerreotypes taken in the final years of his life.

The portrait went on sale Friday at Cowan's Auctions in Cincinnati. The minimum bid was $15,000, but no buyers emerged.

Owner Cliff Krainik tells The Associated Press he's disappointed that it didn't sell. He says he hopes he can find someone who'll buy it and donate it to a museum. The portrait was shown publicly for the first time earlier this year in Baltimore.

It seems there is a limit to what Poe admirers are willing to pay and do for their idol's relics. It's happenings like this that help provide a balanced view of Poe's legacy. Whereas the statue places his popularity above any other weird fiction writer, it does not mean there's boundless adoration and interest in the man and his works. The portrait's ultimate fate may also unveil new implications about Poe's true place in the 21st century, depending upon if it ends up in a museum or sinks back into a private benefactor's obscure vault.

-Grim Blogger

Small Poe Watercolor Fails at Auction

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Urban Gestalt: The New Weird and Cities

A post over at the Urban Gestalt blog highlights the critical role of cities in today's loosely defined "New Weird" genre. The article is particularly interesting since it's written by an aspiring New Weird novelist, Brian Wood-Koiwa, who inevitably must pay close attention to the importance of urban places for meshing them into his narrative. The central role the urban holds in New Weird tales has been noted before, but it can't be reiterated enough, at least for pinning down the New Weird's elusive essence.

By all accounts, cities are common stages for odd happenings in works placed into the New Weird niche. China Mieville's fiction is regularly cited as literature which incorporates the urban with New Weird elements. But cities or city-like scenes also flash through the stories of Michael Cisco, Thomas Ligotti, and Clive Barker--all of whom have fallen under the New Weird label at one time or another. If it's possible at all to reach a consensus on what the New Weird means, then critics and fans should definitely focus on the city as a starting point.

-Grim Blogger

Urban Gestalt: The New Weird and Cities

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H.P. Lovecraft's Stellar Seafood Chowder

A humorous step-by-step piece on Brain Harvest details how to make your own Lovecraftian chowder. There are soups man was never meant to taste. Incidentally, H.P. Lovecraft himself was said to have an extreme aversion to seafood in his native New England. Even the master's stomach would churn at the thought of this spellbound recipe.

-Grim Blogger

H.P. Lovecraft's Stellar Seafood Chowder

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Robin Spriggs' Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist Reviewed

Robin Spriggs' new collection of prose poems, Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist whirls toward the indefinable. Prose poetry itself seems like an odd and engaging anachronism, and the effect is doubled when it is used as a genre-bending skeleton for Spriggs' strange and macabre content. This ambiguity and ethereal charm marks him as a flexible practitioner of the truly unknown and truly fearful, and his latest book collects his workings, somewhere deep in the hinterlands inundated with the weird, the fantastic, and the occult.

The selections inside Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist range from a few short sentences to story length passages. With few exceptions, Spriggs manages to christen his well written pieces with the symbolic depth of poetry in few words. Some stories read as occultic rites, while others make painfully truthful observations about existence. Yet, most of these prose poems are self-contained tales that resonate deeply with the inexplicable imagery and otherworldly vistas common to weird fiction's best. Added to this is the sense of interconnectedness between these stories, which really makes one feel as though they are reading some forgotten diary uncovered in an old chest. But whose? A madman's, a sorcerer's, or a demented poet's? The best answer is all of the above.

Pieces like "Liber I," "Liber Ba," and "The House of Nine" draw on a seemingly rich knowledge of real occultism by Spriggs. But within these rituals are other currents, parallel meanings that are forced to cohabit an incredibly limited space. Readers will uncover philosophical musings on the temporal and the imaginary, as well as a sense that they are eavesdropping on the author's most private concerns and self-reflections. Direct ties between this occultic wordsmithing and the book's pure fiction is not always obvious, but these intermittent passages bridge the gap between fiction and spiritualism, giving the whole of Diary a mystical potency.

Spriggs' fables, this collection's real center, are nearly as diverse as the project as a whole. "The Yordhla" chronicles the onset of strange entities seeking their lord, wrapped in curious and unsettling language very much at home in the weird genre. "Withershin," on the other hand, seems like the bastard offspring of magical realism and dark folklore in describing the leg altering curse that befalls a town's inhabitants. "The Brides," which gives readers a minuscule peak at ghosts from another world, is just as horror inducing in its rich imagery and melancholy mood. On another level, "Practical Magic" and "Through a Doll, Darkly" are nasty and hilarious prose poems very reminiscent of the late Thomas Wiloch's work.

Whether he is doing humor, thought exercises, horror, or magic, Spriggs hits the target about 98% of the time. A tiny handful of pieces fall short in their effect and purpose, however. "Lagomorpha" and "Charge of the Dung Beetle" are too short, and come dangerously near to breaking the spell woven by Spriggs' many excellent offerings. Fortunately, these weaker prose poems are exceptionally rare and mercifully short, and barely even figure into one's reflections on the overall journey--one worthy enough to be taken time and time again.

In an era where technology is abundant and attention spans are short (guess the correlation), prose poetry may well be due for a comeback. It is not impossible, however unlikely, to imagine the Stephenie Meyer readers of today becoming the weird fiction aficionados and creators of tomorrow. Writers like Robin Spriggs may be just the ticket to lead them there. Those who have never experienced the truly magical, frightening, and surreal before Spriggs may not come back after venturing through Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist, and those who have tread the strange many times will have one more uneasy stroll to take when Anomalous Books releases this collection in September, 2010.

-Grim Blogger

Robin Spriggs' Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist Reviewed

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H.P. Lovecraft: The Magician of Darkness

This video purports to be footage from an unreleased video game called H.P. Lovecraft: Magician of Darkness. In actuality, it's an experimental Lovecraftian short by Nicholas Kleban. The clip is shot in a style very reminiscent of other madness inducing urban legend videos floating around the internet. Kleban's work leaves a little too much to the imagination and terminates abruptly, but the style and effects displayed here are solid enough to pass it off as a creepy and fun hoax.



-Grim Blogger

H.P. Lovecraft: The Magician of Darkness

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Thomas Ligotti's Songs: Then and Now

Thomas Ligotti's Songs of Dead Dreamer has been well regarded since its original publication in 1986, a debut flare that fixed weird literature's eyes on Ligotti ever since. Now, a quarter century later, Subterranean Press has reissued the book after its creator passed it through a painstaking and risky revisionary process. Luckily, the effort is a success that magnificently avoids the temptation to transform old masterpieces too much, but alters them just enough to augment their quality. This final, definitive incarnation of Songs of a Dead Dreamer should be equal parts delight and relief to longtime Ligotti fans, and an instance where precision editing polishes and clarifies rather than demolishes and overhauls.

Make no mistakes: this version of Songs contains the same hapless and sardonic eccentrics, the same surreal settings, and the same grim fates as in earlier printings. The awful pillars of the nightmare universe long expressed by Thomas Ligotti remain untouched. But the bleak horror that throbs in each story is subtly adjusted to a different rhythm. The shrill voices of demons and dummies, the clicking of miracle claws, and the accursed breakdown of comfortable realities echo across the pages like never before. New wit enlivens old tales. Meanwhile, more baffling turns of phrase and events, which occasionally earned Ligotti criticism for being too inattentive to plot, have been changed, omitted, or replaced for comprehensibility.

Subterranean Press' Songs is structured in the same way as previous editions, with four sections loosely divided along theme. "Dreams for Sleepwalkers" contains four classic stories. "The Frolic" and "Les Fleurs" can both be looked at as stories of loves lost to supernaturally enhanced psychotics. The former tale (also the only Ligotti story so far to be adapted to film) sees an invasion into the mundane and secure life of a prison psychologist and his family by a mysterious inmate who enjoys violent frolicking. The latter work thrives on the eerie infatuation and jealousy of a lovestruck narrator entwined with a secret society dedicated to mystical botany. Both stories offer glimpses into uncomfortable, otherworldly realms that concentrate the strangest abuses of our own. "Alice's Last Adventure," which covers the time-warping meltdown of a mature children's writer's world, showcases Ligotti's creativity in drawing on Lewis Carroll's legacy for his own dark purposes. "Dream of a Manikin" comes unraveled in layered dreams when a psychologist suspects his wife's devious ideas about dimension-spanning selves are behind the identity confusion of a patient infesting his own life. In every case, the revisions to these tales function as gloss, often by highlighting imagery and ideas Ligotti wants the reader to digest.

In the book's next section, "The Nyctalops Trilogy" (named for the small press periodical these stories first appeared in), Ligotti's alterations are far more obvious and devastatingly effective. "The Chymist" and "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes" are marginally changed by exceedingly subtle twists that enhance their inherent hypnotic power. Ligotti's "The Eye of the Lynx," however, has undergone more changes than any other in the collection. For years, this abstract journey into a seedy brothel has perplexed longtime readers and Ligotti newcomers alike. Fortunately, the author has not been oblivious, and he has drawn on a mature skill set to craft what is almost a completely new story. Everyone may now revel with ease in the shameful pleasure, paranoid shadows, and black hunger masquerading as lust on stage in this tale. Moreover, the dramatic revision proves that Thomas Ligotti can still be a superior storyteller, if he chooses, in a time when his attention is presently turned to non-fiction (see his newly released The Conspiracy Against the Human Race for an example of his current endeavors).

"Dreams for Insomniacs" and "Dreams for the Dead" collect nearly a dozen more cherished stories of unique terror and awe. As with the others mentioned above, each has enjoyed differing degrees of revisionary input, but none as divergent as "The Eye of the Lynx." Yet, one gets the feeling that Ligotti's editorial sonar was cranked up to full, and careful changes were made only when they served to sharpen the dark surrealist blade that gleams and cuts throughout his oeuvre. It is often a nearly indeterminable shift of phrase, or the insertion of a single word or two into a familiar passage, that adds an extra rung on a ladder to melancholy twilight. And so, the unwelcome enlightenment in "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech" occurs amid actors and places that cannot be mistaken for anything but a great puppet show, and new descriptions by Ligotti underscore the nightmare of consciousness here. "Dr. Locrian's Asylum," whose eponymous building towers over an expired town, is fantastic and menacing in a newly subversive way, as are its haunted and haunting inhabitants. The dream-crossed structures in "The Sect of the Idiot" seem realer than before, and this enriched environment accents the Lovecraftian horrors who work their hypnotic rituals within and above these places.

Two more stories are worth mentioning for the literary sheen applied by their maker. "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror" rings with a stoic crispness previously unseen. Gone are a Professor's lighthearted remarks to his students, replaced by a blazing focus on the wisdom imparted in these uncanny discourses. "Notes on the Writing of Horror," an experimental tale-within-a-tale by Ligotti when he was playing with various styles, has also acquired a cruder and hilarious edge. The stylistic blurring between each story segment is stronger too, and helps integrate the frightful power throughout it, well before the demonic narrator is exposed.

Subterranean's Songs of a Dead Dreamer comes in both a limited signed hardcover and a trade hardcover for little difference in price. Intense demand for these revisions has already scarfed up every copy from the publisher at the time of this writing. If potential buyers move quickly, though, they will still be able to get copies of both editions for little markup via Amazon, Ebay, or Bookfinder. Songs is the first book of four planned "definitive editions" by Thomas Ligotti and Subterranean Press, and its successful launch means readers' demand may be higher still when the revised Grimscribe goes on pre-order for a 2011 release.

-Grim Blogger

Thomas Ligotti's Songs: Then and Now

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Weird News: Old, Unpowered Radio Broadcasts Voices from the Past

Put the probable idea of an easy hoax aside for a moment with this story. Just long enough to consider the weird atmospheric implications surrounding an unplugged radio that can transmit long dead programs from the past, or perhaps from another realm altogether.

It's Miller Time on 'Haunted' Radio

-Grim Blogger

Weird News: Old, Unpowered Radio Broadcasts Voices from the Past

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Nemonymous Ten: Null Immortalis

Nemonymous Ten: Null Immortalis has been released upon an unsuspecting world. Like previous volumes of the Nemonymous series--each one assembled and edited by the inimitable D.F. Lewis--this anthology contains short stories by various authors, many with strong ties to weird fiction. The book's content, if previous Nemonymous volumes are any indication, can be expected to contain an eclectic mix of sci-fi, pure weird, fantastic, and less definable genres.

Null Immortalis is notable for being the capstone book. Lewis plans to turn his attention to his own fiction once again, but he hasn't taken any shortcuts constructing this last Nemonymous. The authorial lineup is impressive, one that almost can't fail in delivering quality: Mark Valentine, Reggie Oliver, Joel Lane, Gary Fry, Richard Gavin, Joseph Pulver, and many more.

Traditionally, Nemonymous assigned its anonymous authors to stories online well after publication, and in the following volume. But because this is the final installment, authors are "denemonised" out of the gates--a fitting development that produces a thematic closed circuit when considering the nature of its predecessors. Will Null Immortalis succeed, and perhaps decide Nemonymous' fate? We'll all find out soon.

-Grim Blogger

Nemonymous Ten: Null Immortalis

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Slayer Placemat's Tour of Providence

The Slayer Placemat blog posted this photo enhanced tour log last month of a journey to Lovecraft's Providence. Like many HPL pilgrims, the blogger visited Lovecraft's old houses, the cemetery at St. John's Episcopal Church, sites around Brown University, and places Lovecraft imbued with a sinister fictional life in his stories. The self-directed tour wraps at Lovecraft's headstone--a practical necessity for Lovecraftian visitations.


The photo quality here is really excellent. Providence lends itself well to golden sunsets and elder structures, making it easy to see why it captivated H.P. Lovecraft so thoroughly.

-Grim Blogger

Slayer Placemat's Tour of Providence

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A Love Craft Art Show Clip

Artist Paul Carrick has uploaded this short clip from the opening day of A Love Craft, a Cthulhuvian art show running in Brooklyn, New York. The video records a short walk up to the gallery and the room where the event is being held. It looks like a modest sized exhibit with plenty of Lovecraftian sculptures and paintings filling the viewing area. The show's length means it will probably prompt more videos and images before it recedes into the time's mists.



-Grim Blogger

A Love Craft Art Show Clip

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