Amid all the awful echoes left by the Middle Ages in Western Civilization, none is stranger than the screams drawn by the Black Plague of the 14th century. The nation culling illness left its eternal mark in art, writings, and collective memory, passed down generation-by-generation, wrapped in distorted shadows. The Plague Doctor remains a particularly eerie reminder of nameless ancestors who suffered premature internments under the pathogenic scythe.
Today, we can only imagine his great beak and glassy eyes leering down at the pale faces of the dying. Unfortunately, this menacing figure was no supernatural force. That would have been an anti-miracle too elegant for this world.
The doctor himself, often a second rate or newly commissioned physician, likely trembled inside his frail costume. Everyone instinctively senses contamination, whether germ theory is officially on the books or not. Then, as now, the doctor's bio-hazard suit induced panic. And Plague Doctors certainly shared the fears of the unguarded, since their herb filled schnozes offered little real protection against the terrible malaise.
Perhaps the Plague Doctor remains scary and strange because it's as much a portent of the future as it is a ghost from a bygone age. In 1915, men released new horrors into the air, requiring a similar face mask for protection. Like virulent plague, airborne chemicals still haunt us as arch-daemons, joined by nuclear radiation and other modern terrors. Fear warps the face as well as the mind in each instance.
The Bubonic Plague is long passed, but its horrors endure (see The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death for a full stomach churning history). Western art, including the weird and surreal, continues to carry the legacy of this European reaper. But no aesthetic symbol will ever top the genuine creepiness instilled in the cloaked doctor. He was an ominous horror who once walked the Earth like an animal headed Egyptian deity, heralding doom for millions. And he has walked again since 1350, in greater force than ever before with the teeming variations arisen in the Great Wars. By natural or contrived disaster, he may yet become a familiar sight again, known to all in his final magnificent form.
The Starving of Saqqara is a curious sculpture, possibly pre-dating Egypt, that first surfaced in the 1940s. The sculpture shows two gaunt figures entwined, rendered in a ghostly whiteness. The piece is protected by Concordia University, which has sought a solution to the mystery for decades. This public exhibition is the latest attempt to drum up attention and support for giving the figures greater scrutiny.
While the likeliest origin lays in pre-Dynastic Egypt or outright forgery, more offbeat and chilling suggestions have arisen. Some believe the statue depicts Atlantean refugees. Human sacrifices, famine, and catastrophe in great antiquity draw further speculation as inspirations for the statue. The over-sized heads and gaunt frames are particularly unsettling.
Ancient civilizations coughing up the odd relic have frequently appeared in weird fiction, with horrific results. The Starving of Saqqara is a fear given form, showing what idols from Lovecraft's Atlantis, Lemuria, or other nameless cities might look like. Those moaning faces and unnatural bodies suggest a macabre secret best forgotten by time's merciful ignorance.
The mystery surrounding the statue is reminiscent of the untamed niche centered around Out of Place Artifacts. See Michael A. Cremo's book, Forbidden Archeology, for a full look at the strangeness surrounding humanity's deep past. Whether or not one dismisses Cremo's claims as pseudo-science, they're great exhibits for falling headfirst into a long tradition of weird, Fortean oddities.
With the most recent and tragic nuclear accident in Japan, many look on with fearful anxiety at the effects of radiation. Weird fiction readers may naturally turn over their libraries for a strange and timely overlap between real world events and literary horror. In such a quest, H.P. Lovecraft's tale, "The Colour Out of Space" is the holy grail. Scholars have noted since the advent of nuclear terror that Lovecraft's "blasted heath" holds an uncanny resemblance to nuclear fallout.
Having died in 1937, nearly a decade before the atom bomb, his story couldn't have actively drawn in radioactive anxieties that lay years in the future. That, however, doesn't mean poison from strange elements couldn't have had any hand at all in Lovecraft's thinking. He was widely known as a strict materialist, and eagerly devoured the scientific developments of his day. By the 1920s and especially the 1930s, the effects of radiation first began to come into scientific light. Marie Curie had already performed her pioneering experiments with radioactive elements earlier in the century.
Lovecraft also lived during an age of "radioactive quackery" in America. Highly dangerous technologies, from radium baths to x-rays for shoe fitting, were all in vogue with medical professionals as a way to promote health. Bob McCoy's book, Quack!, gives a full overview of freakish machines and products incorporating radium and other hazardous materials. Although connections between these devices and radiation sickness were slow to materialize, causation was slowly getting recognized in Lovecraft's era.
"The Colour Out of Space" contains stark passages that cannot help but bring visions of post-apocalyptic, fallout covered landscapes to modern readers' minds. One look at what happens to the Gardner family's livestock after the land is poisoned sounds like a post-Chernobyl Ukrainian farming community:
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages - and death was always the result - there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs.
Nightmarish, poisoned landscapes such as this make radioactive inspiration behind this story plausible. In actuality, though, Lovecraft probably knew little about radiation sickness, like most intellectuals in the pre-Hiroshima age. S.T. Joshi and other scholars have suggested the life sapping, deteriorating fate of the Gardners was inspired by Arthur Machen's tale, "The Novel of the White Powder," a notable piece in The Three Impostors.
Just because a nuclear component probably wasn't a direct influence on "The Colour Out of Space" doesn't mean an end to similarities between Lovecraft's story and radioactive poisoning. Consider this a case where literature is irrevocably re-defined by discoveries and historic developments that occur well after its origination. A nuclear undertones still churn behind film adaptations of the story, such as The Colour from the Dark. Visual art driven by the tale's imagery, when it's not focused on the otherworldly color, also depicts decay related to radiation sickness.
H.P. Lovecraft may not have intentionally dreamed up the dreadful consequences of unleashing the atom. Yet, in a way, he prophesied something very similar, giving readers a contamination scenario equal in horror to those in the bleakest emergency handbooks.
An artist known only as Corax or Rick recently uploaded a very impressive video showing the creation of a Shoggoth on paper. What's more, it seems the artist was armed only with a humble pen and pencil. No mere amorphous blog, the Shoggoth depicted here is an intricate obscenity. The thing is also at the height of its ferocity, ablaze with the sharp teeth, eyes, and other strange organs detailed by H.P. Lovecraft.
Artwork like this will always have an underground or guerrilla/grassroots quality. Lovecraftian artwork continues to gain attention, but the widening pool makes exposure for less known pieces harder to get. Still, perhaps one day this type of content will appear in art volumes such as, The Art of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, alongside the work of the seasoned professionals.
Zenescope Entertainment is set to collect several issues of H.P. Lovecraft's The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West into a graphic novel this summer. The comic series spearheaded by Joe Brusha and Ralph Tedesco begins by basing itself on Lovecraft's infamous serial, "Herbert West: Reanimator," and then takes a number of liberties. For instance, the story is modernized, narrated by West's girlfriend, and focuses more on his upbringing and obsession with conquering death - all elements left vague or off stage entirely by HPL.
The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West offers a more serious treatment of the Re-animator saga than other adaptations, like Stuart Gordon's comical Re-animator movie franchise. West is humanized by tragedy and relationships, a major departure from the aloof dweeb he's often portrayed as. In many ways, his obsession as driven medicine man rather than mad scientist is no less grim...or disastrous. Chronicles also introduces re-animated dead who are clearly influenced by the recent zombie mania, offering a somewhat different take on Lovecraft's resurrected ghouls.
Graphic novels continue to be a prime outlet for H.P. Lovecraft's influence in overlapping genres. Look for The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West in July.
-Grim Blogger
Chronicles of Dr Herbert West Graphic Novel Set for July
H.P. Lovecraft famously turned his sharpest critical implements to great works of horror in his treatise, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Overlooked by many is his mention of a work we're all compelled to read at one point or another in higher education: "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Aside from selections by Edgar Allan Poe, this is the only exposure to weird fiction for the masses, and an introduction to the genre for those who let dark fancy take hold later in life.
Gilman's unforgettable tale recalls a room-bound woman's spiral toward madness at the hands of her obsession with figures inside the nauseating yellow wallpaper around her. The tale has passed muster as an American classic, and wears its literary credentials proudly after being examined over the years as a feminist, Gothic, and psychological horror piece.
How did Lovecraft react to this story, first published when he was little more than a year old? The plug he gives it in Supernatural Horror is brief, but illuminating:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in The Yellow Wall Paper, rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined.
He places her squarely in America's weird tradition, close to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and many more obscure figures. Clearly impressed by the story, one wonders if Lovecraft viewed Gilman's roadway into madness as a model for his own work. Like her notoriously unreliable narrator, plenty of Lovecraftian characters end up in such bizarre and twisted circumstances that the reader wonders if their minds weren't deluded to begin with.
Speculation has also surfaced that HPL's respect may have appeared in other ways. The Gilman family name that appears in both "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "Dreams in the Witch House" may have been inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but evidence is scanty. In any case, Lovecraft clearly admired her ability to conjure strange imagery and depict a convincingly deranged mind, and viewed "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a prototype for the harrowing symbolism in later supernatural literature.
-Grim Blogger
HP Lovecraft on The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Weird horror fiction is again enjoying a strong presence on the Stoker Award ballots. Finalists for each category were announced earlier this week. Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron head up the purely weird, for superior achievements in non-fiction and short story collections, respectively.
Laird Barron's nightmare stirring collection, Occultation (reviewed last year), is a strong contender amid fierce competition. It's battling Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars, among others. Another Barron tale shows up in Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, and a finalist for superior anthology.
Thomas Ligotti's pessimistic assessment of human existence, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (reviewed at length here), faces three other works in a death match. This nomination and potential win is near perfect timing for the book, which sold out its first edition in late 2010. Conspiracy is due for a paperback re-release by Hippocampus Press later this spring. Ligotti holds the possible advantage of being a previous Stoker winner, with numerous past nominations and several outright wins, thanks to The Nightmare Factory in 1996 and My Work Is Not Yet Done in 2002.
Voting for the awards should conclude by late March. Here's a full list of the finalists:
Superior Achievement in a NOVEL:
HORNS by Joe Hill (William Morrow)
ROT AND RUIN by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster)
DEAD LOVE by Linda Watanabe McFerrin (Stone Bridge Press)
APOCALYPSE OF THE DEAD by Joe McKinney (Pinnacle)
DWELLER by Jeff Strand (Leisure/Dark Regions Press)
A DARK MATTER by Peter Straub (DoubleDay)
Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL:
BLACK AND ORANGE by Benjamin Kane Ethridge (Bad Moon Books)
A BOOK OF TONGUES by Gemma Files (Chizine Publications)
CASTLE OF LOS ANGELES by Lisa Morton (Gray Friar Press)
SPELLBENT by Lucy Snyder (Del Rey)
Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION:
THE PAINTED DARKNESS by Brian James Freeman (Cemetery Dance)
DISSOLUTION by Lisa Mannetti (Deathwatch)
MONSTERS AMONG US by Kirstyn McDermott (Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears)
THE SAMHANACH by Lisa Morton (Bad Moon Books)
INVISIBLE FENCES by Norman Prentiss (Cemetery Dance)
Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION:
RETURN TO MARIABRONN by Gary Braunbeck (Haunted Legends)
THE FOLDING MAN by Joe R. Lansdale (Haunted Legends)
1925: A FALL RIVER HALLOWEEN by Lisa Mannetti (Shroud Magazine #10)
IN THE MIDDLE OF POPLAR STREET by Nate Southard (Dead Set: A Zombie Anthology)
FINAL DRAFT by Mark W. Worthen (Horror Library IV)
Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY:
DARK FAITH edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon (Apex Publications)
HORROR LIBRARY IV edited by R.J. Cavender and, Boyd E. Harris (Cutting Block Press)
MACABRE: A JOURNEY THROUGH AUSTRALIA’S DARKEST FEARS edited by Angela Challis and Marty Young (Brimstone Press)
HAUNTED LEGENDS edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas (Tor)
THE NEW DEAD edited by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s Griffin)
Superior Achievement in a COLLECTION:
OCCULTATION by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
BLOOD AND GRISTLE by Michael Louis Calvillo (Bad Moon Books)
FULL DARK, NO STARS by Stephen King (Simon and Schuster)
THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY by Stephen Graham Jones (Prime Books)
A HOST OF SHADOWS by Harry Shannon (Dark Regions Press)
Superior Achievement in NONFICTION:
TO EACH THEIR DARKNESS by Gary A. Braunbeck (Apex Publications)
THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE by Thomas Ligotti (Hippocampus Press)
WANTED UNDEAD OR ALIVE by Jonathan Maberry and Janice Gable Bashman (Citadel)
LISTEN TO THE ECHOES: THE RAY BRADBURY INTERVIEWS by Sam Weller (Melville House Publications)
-Grim Blogger
Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron Stoker Finalists for 2011
On the outskirts of underground literature lives a strange creature, dragging behind its thin frame the noisy trappings of weird fiction, Japanese tradition, and less definite identities. Cannibalism is just one of its obsessions, part of a chemistry set aimed at blowing up old literary forms and making them anew. Its name is Justin Isis. In his debut collection just published by Chomu Press, I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, Isis performs an exorcism against the demons of literary convention and demolishes the casing that binds taboos others are afraid to even mention. The book serves as an almanac of obsession, where paperdoll characters are drawn like moths to the simmering flames of their conscious and unconscious desires.
This volume of ten stories rockets into a borderland between the surreal and the ultra-lucid. I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like is not weird horror, surreal literature, or Japanese fiction, though there are all elements of all three strongly embedded in each tale. If a noctuary written by alienated youths living in contemporary Japan were pieced together, it would look a lot like this book. It also functions as a masquerade of opposed elements, where pessimist philosophers, teen idols, and sexual deviants are encouraged to hit the disco floor, without fear of tarnishing their own reputations. Isis' ability to connect these elements through rich symbolism and unlikely scenarios is impressive, and all the more so since he wears a newcomer's badge.
Although the supernatural is used sparingly, or not at all, depending on one's interpretation, horror is generously employed throughout the collection. In “Nanako,” for instance, the narrator confronts the larger-than-life face of a classmate he has obsessed over. His grisly reaction is horrible, on one level, but also reveals the depths of his soul and everyone else's incessant will to dissect idolized mysteries. Meanwhile, Isis makes the spectral Manami of “Manami's Hair” into a strange and dreaded presence. When the unseen character finally shows up at the tale's conclusion, one senses a collective shudder run through the pages. For Manami is not just a curious shadow blinding the female protagonist, but a hinge inhabiting wraith who makes readers question whether anyone is living, not just sleepwalking, in this story.
Justin Isis introduces recurring haunts and characters who seem oblivious that they are breaking social taboos. When seen from a slightly different angle in each story, it lends the collection a distinctive flavor, not unlike the forbidden delicacy of the book's title. “A Design for Life” flips the passion of a college student for a student group's director into unlikely territory. This tale represents a rare case where one of Isis' characters fails to have his self-gnawing obsession realized. A dazed, shabby old man turns up repeatedly, providing light comic relief as well as enacting the story's final micro-apocalypse.
“A Design for Life” nicely illustrates the way Isis drags strangeness on stage from unpredictable corners, and his effective destruction of self-hood – if his characters indeed possess an identity beyond their frenzied obsessions. “The Garden of Sleep” takes this one step further, as an older gentleman throws himself into bringing a teen transvestite’s gender transformation to fruition. This story winds down in a somewhat predicable betrayal, but Isis' prose has virtually mastered the art of rumination. His characters' strained meditations leave them singed, gruesomely exposed to the reader, yet simultaneously frozen as text-bound metaphors from an offbeat Zen parable.
Three other tales in I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like are even more blatant at communicating the hyper-original worldview of Justin Isis. “The Quest for Chinese People” begins when a pizza maker realizes just how many Chinese people actually populate the globe. This “Chinese epiphany,” besides being one more obsession, carries with it the sanity warping power of a Lovecraftian existential crisis. Surprisingly, the enormity of China and its denizens can be just as effective a mental splinter as Great Cthulhu's existence. This is the most extreme example of Isis' thought-play – turning the absurd into an idea with real gravity.
“The Eye of the Living is No Warmth” reveals how Isis can string the most disparate elements into a coherent narrative. Here, one follows a duo of overgrown juveniles as they set out to defend the honor of a pop idol scandalized by the media. This almost Quixotic adventure reads like a conversation between the ideal outsider with normality, and references obscure female sirens in the same breath as a re-imagined Conspiracy Against the Human Race, without seeming ridiculous. “A Thread from Heaven” again takes us into the ethereal school system, where an artistic schoolboy idolizes an aloof Korean who spends his time enraptured in a carefully edited Bible. The novella length piece explores alienation, modernity's social chasms, and religion, among other themes, but seems charged with a tense, bizarre relationship between the two teen boys as well as emotional poles of boredom, longing, and terrific disbelief.
No less than three stories in this collection carry some variation of the book's title. “I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like Unauthorized Egg Model Book Cover” suffers from brevity and vagueness of purpose. The fragmentary story introduces a captivating classmate and an old woman who has her history re-made. Is the vignette an introduction, or mini-tale added as an afterthought, perhaps inspired by the book's cover illustration? Hard to say. This is a minor hiccup, though.
“I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like” centers on two self-absorbed youths who talk about art and commit a couple wanton cruelties – nearly as an afterthought. Almost, in fact, as a commentary on adolescent boredom and indifferent cruelty. Finally, “I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like Etc.” is an engrossing transition to the wonders of meat for two vegetarian sisters. Like a demented manga with endless mental visuals generated by Isis' measured prose, one sister's new found taste for flesh leads her toward a date with delicacy. Or is it destiny?
Reading these imminently re-readable tales the first, second, or tenth time often feels like a lucid dream. I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like runs on otherworldly logic, and Justin Isis seems a backstage manager. Really, however, Isis is the architect – an odd, sometimes unbelievable role. With few errors or soggy concepts, he represents the rare author who shows up to the scene totally formed. This collection will be difficult to surpass with subsequent tales or novels, but then, its very existence proves Isis is a capable magician, with a talent for giving his unique headspace life on the pages and inside other skulls.
-Grim Blogger
Review: I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like by Justin Isis
Events carrying on H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror are spreading like Cthulhu's extra-dimensional tentacles. Portland, Providence, and Phoenix have earned their eldritch stripes by hosting HPL themed festivities in recent memory. Now, New York City is due to hold the H.P. Lovecraft Festival from March 17, 2011 - April 3, 2011. The weekend anchored shows consist of live performances of six Lovecraft stories by Radio Theatre. Here's the rundown:
PROGRAM A: MAR 17, 18, 19, 31 APR 2 @ 8pm MAR 20 @ 4pm
PICKMAN'S MODEL - Just how does the artist Pickman get such remarkable detail in his horrifying paintings?
DAGON - a man is shipwrecked on a strange island where he finds a lost world of fish people.
FROM BEYOND - a mad scientist goes where no man has gone before.
THE BEAST IN THE CAVE - a lost cave explorer is attacked by something in the dark.
PROGRAM B: MAR 24, 25, 26 APR 1 @ 8pm APR 3 @ 4pm
THE DUNWICH HORROR - A seminal work in Lovecraft's famous Cthulu Mythos wherein a backwoods family worships the ancient ones who will return one day to destroy mankind.
THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN - a weird pianist plays maddening music that is indescribable.
The group plans to continue further Lovecraftian performances in the fall. Lovecraft inspired live dramas are a small, but growing trend, possibly prompted by the audio recordings of the past, such as Dark Adventure Radio's At the Mountains of Madness. However, theater goes one step further by giving full visual and audio life to Lovecraft's horrors.
Tickets are available through the H.P. Lovecraft Festival page, and start at $18 per event, with specials to see all six performances for a bargain. Ironically, Lovecraft loathed New York City, but perhaps the theater event can double as a sort of exorcism, banishing the grim tension between his Cyclopean artistic vision and the City that Never Sleeps.
Amazon's Kindle and similar e-book readers have seemingly inaugurated truly marketable and enjoyable digital print products for the first time in human history. Now, e-books are flapping through the online voids like vengeful night gaunts, offering both dangers and opportunities, and weird fiction is no exception. As is so often the case, the Lovecraftian is at the forefront of literary horror's march into unexplored territory.
H.P. Lovecraft was an unapologetic bibliophile, and his love for books is shared among many weird horror readers. One need only look at the successful small presses producing sturdy to luxurious tomes to know that weird fiction readers are more bibliophilic than the general public. Even so, Lovecraft's work has already gotten a foothold in digital media. The reasosn for this can be narrowed down to two: Lovecraft remains magnitudes more popular than any other weird writer, living or dead, and the majority of his work has been public domain since at least 1997. This means practically anyone can throw together their own Lovecraft collection and begin selling it, and many enterprising fans have done just that.
A growing list of forty H.P. Lovecraft books for Kindle is already posted on Amazon.com. These range from simple re-compiled collection of several dozen stories, to full books with stories, plus original essays, biographies, and commentary on his work. What's really different, and potentially a game changer for print publishers, as well as readers, is the price. Full sets of Lovecraft with extras can be purchased from $0.99 to under $10. The wonders of great Cthulhu have never been so cheap, nor as portable, nor as accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
Lovecraft may be the flagship of weird horror in e-books, but he's not alone. Not surprisingly, a couple major Lovecraftian anthologies have split published their books in print and electronically. One is Black Wings: Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, which features many authors carrying on the Lovecraftian tradition. Other celebrated weird writers closer to Lovecraft's era have also made it to Kindle. Broader anthologies like Classic Tales of Horror mix and match eerie tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, and more. Meanwhile, a handful of weird fiction publishers have decided to test the online market with contemporary fiction that goes beyond the purely Lovecraftian. Chomu Press has issued their newest releases in Kindle format alongside paperback. This is a revolutionary break for some of their authors - the first time writers such as Reggie Oliver, Mark Samuels, and Quentin S. Crisp have appeared in a cheap, easy, and unlimited form.
While the e-book rising is certain to cause anxious worries and uncertainties among weird fiction fans who also appreciate well made books, there's little reason to quiver, and much to celebrate. Print publishers like Tartarus and Centipede will continue to offer hard to find weirdscribes in stunning hardcovers. In time, these publishers too may decide to put the likes of Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, and Wilum Pugmire on Kindle, while high quality books continue to ship out the traditional way. Moreover, the misty success offered by e-publishing is just now becoming visible. Weird horror has always been a hard sell to the mammoth publishers. But perhaps we will one day see authors and publishers from the black pits stepping over the mangled corpses of the great print houses, much like millionaire authoress Amanda Hocking has recently done, in large part thanks to e-books.
-Grim Blogger
HP Lovecraft on Kindle and Weird Fiction Publishing's Future
Home crocheted Cthulhus, the vanguard of the Cutethulhu movement, have established a new organized resource for spreading their soft tentacles across the world. Cthulhu Chick has set up a dedicated hub for promoting these creations of eldritch warmth. Despite an exterior that will make many testify to their cuteness, isn't there still some terrible power in them? Remember, an idol is an idol, regardless of age or construct. Check out Cthulhu Chick's gallery of her creations as they spread their woolly shadows across the world, or get your own at her website.
When I saw the latest images from Charlie Sheen's mental digression, I couldn't help but wonder if he had peeked into the Necronomicon. Or, perhaps, he'd picked up Simon's Necronomicon while seeking a terrible enlightenment, and found to his dismay that he would have to turn elsewhere for truly arcane wonders.
Come to think of it, this particular Sheen mask holds an uncanny resemblance to the first edition cover of Thomas Ligotti's Grimscribe. With less hair and some sedatives, the Hollywood actor may be on the fast track to uncovering two and a half conspiracies against the human race - an intellectual step up from his earlier pursuits of 9/11 mysteries. But he'll need a few more than that to fully catapult his brain out of that withered face and into the merciful blackness.
The "Metronomicon" photos (with a name clearly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon) comprise a highly unsettling and underexposed series by Russian artist Alex Andreyev. Moscow's extensive underground network has long encouraged artists' nightmares - most recently sweeping readerships in Russia and beyond through Dmitry Glukhovsky's dark sci-fi novel, Metro 2033. However, Andreyev's work is a bit different.
If someone emptied out the skulls of H.P. Lovecraft, Franz Kafka, and Yevgeny Zamyatin, the deleterious result might look something like these images. Andreyev's over-sized insects and warped locomotives recall much. They remind us that marvels like Moscow's extensive transit system are human entryways into an underworld both mysterious and horrifying.
Many of these pieces represent a loathsome clash: the ultra-modern with the prehistoric. Nothing seems more ancient and out of place than enormous insects in a techno-bureaucratic shrine. Other photographs give a more direct nod to Lovecraft, with tentacles casually plugged into passengers' heads, and tunnel dwelling horrors that may well represent the Providence writer's unfathomable Dholes.
Like the best grim artists, Andreyev also shows us how commonplace the macabre and terrible can be. None of his Moscovites are shocked at the strange happenings around them. Workers in bio-suits get along as best they can with otherworldly monstrosities. His people take an express ride through horror every day, between homes, jobs, and errands. And so do we.
Meanwhile, the shadow circus filling the Metro is as bleak and oppressive as the out-of-place creatures that reside in the darkness. There's a noticeably dystopian aura to the whole business. If the tyrannical Benefactor of Zamyatin's novel, We, had been able to employ otherworldly things that slither and titter, rather than an advanced form of social conditioning, then this Metro might be a glistening slice of that world. Kafka's frightful power rests in the exposure of the surreal and terrible all around us, and he, too, used Cyclopean insects to make his point in tales like "The Metamorphosis" (don't hesitate to pick up Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories immediately, if this tale is unfamiliar).
When you really get down to it, Metronomicon is an appropriate name for this exhibit. Alex Andreyev's magic is his ability to show us other worlds hidden from blind eyes, much like the feared Necronomicon. While the visual, rather than the literary, is his chosen medium, consider him a kindred spirit with Kafka, Zamyatin, and Lovecraft. All have expressed, in one way or another, the unquenchable black tyranny that pervades this cosmos.
Yahoo Answers has never ceased to create wildly ridiculous Q & A sessions. Now, the well known vapidness of some posters has touched Lovecraft. No, the anonymous poster wasn't referring to The Call of Cthulhu film, or even Jason Cottle's Cthulhu, when this question was brought up several weeks ago:
Cthulhu must have been a hell of a movie? I mean come on, did people actually create a cult after watching it? I heard that they did but it just doesn't seem right. (Yahoo Answers)
It seems this is one case where H.P. Lovecraft's own creation has escaped its literary identity and creator. Luckily, other users were quick to tidy up the record on Cthulhu's origins. Funny as it may be, knowing Cthulhu without recognizing who made it is likely to become more common. The tentacled entity has become a viral icon in His own right, removing a great deal of literary context and history for those who can't be bothered to look it up - or don't know where to turn.
Impressed by the many Lovecraftian parodies and the currently dormant Weird Fic News on Twitter, I decided to climb aboard the latest techno-bandwagon. What will you find on the Grim Reviews Twitter account? Plenty!
I see dozens of bizarre articles, images, and other media every day that I don't have time to post or comment on here, but it could easily be shared with a quick tweet. Plus, you'll find exclusive tips, observations, and updates that don't make it to Grim Reviews. I expect this will also help me deliver the latest breaking releases and other news from the world of literary horror in a more timely fashion. You might hear about a new release in a Tweet, and come back a few days later to find the full review on this blog.
If you're an avid follower of dark wordsmiths and sanity stirring curiosities like I am, why hesitate? Follow Grim Reviews on Twitter.
Connoisseurs of weird horror are fortunate to live in a time when skilled wordsmiths are so plentiful. However, seers of the truly black, dreadful, and bizarre, remain as rare as they come. Mark Samuels is one name that stands out among the priestly class in supernatural literature. Never content to just shape the fearful ideas conceived by others into his own tales, Samuels is a literary psychonaut, most interested in exploring and inventing outre realms previously hidden to the masses. His previous short story collections, The White Hands and Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes, delved into crazed fault lines first glimpsed by H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, places where the broadcasts of a deranged, rotting psyche invade our world. In The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales, Samuels has actually entered those obscene places, and returned with souvenirs mankind can barely understand, but certainly can fear.
Unintentionally or not, this book is the finest themed horror collection produced by Samuels. The UK author hits his readers in waves of recurring manias focused on decrepit barriers in time, as well as virulent languages that infect mind, body, and books. Samuels skillfully cross-pollinates exotic ideas with equally exotic places, reshaping curious locales to contain or mirror his uneasy philosophies. Many stories take place in forgotten sectors of Mexico and Eastern Europe, while others are in British neverlands - venues where the ignorance of many toward these places acts as a sort of charm. Yet, even Brits, Mexicans, Slavs, and Magyars will recognize Samuels' weirdly enriched cities only as warped versions of home.
"Losenef Express," which opens The Man Who Collected Machen, is the first stop in a globe trekking journey to digest Samuels' strange knowledge. A hard drinking, embittered American seeks to escape his writerly woes in a forgotten and decayed town, Strasgol, somewhere between Poland and Ukraine. As usual, trouble comes to alcoholic Yankees very easily, but no booze could prepare Samuels' fiend for a train ride with living corpses. Rather than flesh eating zombies, the horrors here are more akin to Stefan Grabinski's insane imaginings on the rails, as is the displacement of time and space fully experienced in a final surreal twist, once the train arrives in Losenef. A decadent and foreign edge is deliciously added to the atmosphere with every sensation, from the overpowering absinthe-like liquor, to Strasgol's ancient, decaying balconies.
Another tale, "A Question of Obeying Orders," captures the same elegant, yet distorted European atmosphere. A German soldier deserting his unit during the First World War encounters another living corpse in an old couple's home. The warrior begins to pursue the creature. This time, though, what begins as an enjoyable, but unremarkable re-telling of the vampire legend is brilliantly turned on its head. There are abominations, but they seldom have one mask in Mark Samuels' stories, and never familiar ones.
"Xapalpa" and "A Contaminated Text" use Mexico as a backdrop for their macabre happenings. In a rather Lovecraftian tradition, an overworked student visits "Xalpapa" for a mental break from his labors. Unfortunately, a severed head venerating cult, an ancient graveyard, and bleak looking pinatas disrupt what should be a vacation. In Glyphotech, Samuels speculated on what a Lovecraftian apparition in Mexico's culture might look like. It seems this cross-bred fascination is continued here, in a more subtle form. "A Contaminated Text," which introduces another damned book in the Lovecraftian and Jamesian tradition, hideously expands on an old technique. Rather than just sitting on the shelves harboring forbidden knowledge, The Abyss of the Voola spreads its diseased contents into other books, and soon throughout a library in Mexico City. The Voolans, malicious squid-like creatures residing in the hollow earth, function much like stereotypical demons. But rather than being one more race of Cthulhoid horrors tormenting mankind, Samuels instead uses them in a philosophical exercise illustrating the innate strangeness and, yes, horror of language and books.
"THYXXOLQU" furthers the concept of a toxic language in Mark Samuels' own unique apocalypse. When gibberish begins corrupting the books and mouths of those around him, a Londoner attempts to solve the mystery. Though it offers little relief, the full horror is unmasked in conspirators more jarring than the Voolans. "THYXXOLQU" is an infectiously unique story. "The Black Mould" offers an alternate Armageddon, and can be examined as a rare gem of weird science fiction. For this story, Samuels combines aesthetic cues from H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, to recount the history of an encroaching, self-loathing mold slowly spreading across the entirety of an already diseased universe.
The Man Who Collected Machen would be a deceptive title if it didn't feature stories that toy with the hopes and anxieties of the bibliophile. Its titular story, "The Man Who Collected Machen," plays with the dangers of collecting those wonderful, musty, and always expensive rarities so common in the weird fiction genre. There are always other fanatics, no matter how obscure the texts, and Samuels' oddball collector of Arthur Machen books should give one pause before they plunk down hundreds of dollars or go to the other side of the earth for their next limited edition horror tome. "Glickman the Bibliophile," rather than elevating books, is a bibliophile's worst nightmare. Here, mindless vandals who savagely attack books are revealed as unwitting servants in a grander conspiracy seeking to undo modernity's accumulated, overflowing knowledge. The story might even be read as social commentary on the uncertain fate of printed materials, in a time when e-books are exploding in popularity, and retail titans imploding beneath the frightful onslaught of endless changes.
Time's oppressive haze torments Mark Samuels, and his mental anguish becomes our own in several other stories. "The Age of Decayed Futurity" exposes the Reassembly Cartel, yet another pack of supernatural conspirators. Static, the dead, and mind control are appropriated, misshapen, and combined by Samuels in exceptionally interesting and horrific ways, as his Polish novelist mistakenly tries to use the ultimate conspiracy for her art. Another look at time's ravages, particularly the conquest of the present by death, is offered in "Nor Unto Death Utterly by Edmund Bertrand." Unlike other pieces, Samuels elects to use a dated style heavily inspired by Gothic writers and Edgar Allan Poe, with the pen name of his dark scribe from past stories (an Easter Egg for longtime readers?). "The Tower" discusses philosophy, time, and society under the symbolic guise of a hallucinated, mysterious tower. This is quite different than the collection's other stories, but brings the book to a satisfying conclusion by synthesizing the many mind-bending exhibits one last time.
Mark Samuels has always been an innovator, and weird horror is always in desperate need of such figures for its own endless mutations. Like celebrated visionaries, past and present, Samuels' work may one day contaminate texts well outside the horror genre. His chief problem, like other writers has always been exposure. Luckily, The Man Who Collected Machen is available in ample quantities from Chomu Press, in an affordable paperback that expands on its previous incarnation by the unreliable Ex Occidente Press. The old edition only had a print run of less than two hundred - far less than runs of Samuels' other out-of-print books. Thanks to Chomu, his nightmares are prepared to lift off like never before...assuming Samuels' words are not already the dominant echoes from another epoch, designed to enslave today's minds to the will of the grave.
-Grim Blogger
Review: The Man Who Collected Machen by Mark Samuels
London will see a larger Lovecraftian event than usual when H.P. Lovecraft Reanimated takes place in April. The bash is set to feature a Lovecraftian cabaret, with comedy performances, discussions, and live readings performed by the Fitzrovia Radio Hour. H.P. Lovecraft Reanimated is also set to function as a book launch for SelfMadeHero's latest graphic novel, The Lovecraft Anthology, Volume I.Their previous efforts in weird comics include At the Mountains of Madness and Nevermore, based on Edgar A. Poe's fiction.
Here's the important details about time and location:
• DATE: FRIDAY 15 APRIL 2011, 8-12pm
• VENUE: THE HORSE HOSPITAL, LONDON WC1N 1JD
• TICKETS: £12 early bird, normal price £14.45
