Am I RETURNING to blogging?

Hmmm? It's been a hella long time since I've put fingers to keyboard on this digital diary of my nerdtastic explorations and musings. Does anyone care? If I can get ONE person to comment in the positive ("Yes Adam! Post something!") then I'll get back to it pronto (I'd love to review Skyrim for all the world to see!)

But should I bother? Lemme know what you think.

In the meantime, something to keep you warm - a pic of Linda Harrison as Nova from Planet of the Apes (1968)...

Blogging is hard

For anyone following this blog (5 of you?) my sincere apologies; I know I haven't posted in forever.

I'm going through some stuff, some minor & major personal challenges that prevent me from making this as regular as I wanted. Blah blah - excuses excuses. I'll get back ASAP. I mean, I read He and everything!

Tuesday October 18th, 2011 - The Crawling Chaos

The Crawling Chaos by H. P. Lovecraft & Elizabeth Berkeley
Published April 1921
Illustration by idesignpre

Being something of a Lovecraft purist there are a handful of things about his work that I am wary of. Two of my biggest qualms are August Derleth's treatment of the Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraft's collaborations with other authors.

I've mentioned before my distaste for Derleth's contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. Don't get me wrong - without him no one, literally no one - would have ever heard of HP Lovecraft. He published collections of his stories which were almost totally forgotten in yellowing back issues of niche magazines. I have read his work and loved it because of August Derleth. And I don't think he was a bad writer! I'm no expert but I'm sure I've read some of his stuff in the past and enjoyed it enough. It's just that he started futzing with the Cthulhu Mythos in a way that makes one think he never really got HPL's work to begin with. He added things like the classical elements into the mythology; Cthulhu is water, Hastur is air, blah blah blah. He added the concept of good and evil into this realm, and other writers ran with that. In modern Lovecraftian gaming you can use crosses and holy water against these enemies because Derleth allowed traditional Christian tropes to sneak their way in. Lovecraft created things utterly alien, in both form and philosophy, and these purely human ideas are simply not part of the Mythos. Great Cthulhu, slumbering in the sunken city of R'leyh has no human motivations or feelings - that's one of the things that makes him so terrifying. That and the fact that he's like 200 feet tall.

Lovecraft's collaborations are a bit harder for me to hate outright. There is at least one fully ghostwritten story that I know of - Under the Pyramids, supposedly written by Harry Houdini but written entirely by HPL. There are some stories where he is clearly the chief writer and others where he may have really shared the work load. Then there are the dubious works where in HPL might make a suggestion of a story to someone in a letter and later that someone writes a story - or whole novel - put Lovecraft's name on it posthumously and sell books (Derleth being guilty of this a few times.)

My story today seems to be a true collaboration, a tale of cosmic horror and a dreaming journey. Our narrator is using opium and in the depths of his trip he seems to travel to another world. He is seeing a massive, shocking destruction of a world through enormous waves and storms. The writers paint a gorgeous and frightening picture of a world slowly being ravaged by the elements. There are hints that ancient gods might be behind the scenes, and that age-old civilizations have been destroyed and reborn.

This was a short little poetical journey that was interesting and fits well in the Cream Cycle. I can't say that I'm a big fan - it was a little simple and lacked a certain weight - but I have to say I will need to give some of his collaborations a look now. Though August Derleth is still on my shit list.

~~

I read The Crawling Chaos in this narrow little book called The Doom That Came To Sarnath. Ballantine Put out ten or so of these slim little volumes that basically collect all of HPL's major work in these nice, pocket-sized books in the 90's. The covers are details of a larger work by Michael Whelan that is featured on another collection of his work. I have several of these little guys. Publishers have been doing that for a long time; I have another half set of them from much earlier, each with a really shocking and ugly cover. Nice. Oh, and whose a lucky boy? Me, that's who. In the 90's I had gotten into non-sport collector cards - like baseball cards for nerds and such. One set was of illustrations by the aforementioned Michael Whelan. I happen to still have two cards that feature that painting. How many people can say their bookmark is a little mini version of the book cover they are reading? Huh? Not many I bet. NOT MANY.

~~

NEW FEATURE!!! I'm going to start sharing links to websites I find that are totally appropriate to the theme of this blog, and for the 31 Days of Lovecraft especially.

First up - an amazing catalog of illustrations of Lovecraft beasts called Yog-Blogsoth. I can't get enough of this thing. Beautiful illos of nearly every creature from Lovecraft's stories, with the descriptive text from each story. I keep getting lost in this site! Thanks goes to Sean Nelson for pointing me to this.

Monday October 17, 2011 - American Horror Story Review

It's been far too long since I've posted; my Mom is staying with us and these last few days have been lovely and full to brimming with stuff. But rest assured even if I don't make an entry everyday I am definitely having an October full of Lovecraft.

Now I know what you're thinkin'; American Horror Story, the new horror show on FX, isn't all that Lovecraftian - what gives? It might just be the state of mind HPL's stories have put me in but honestly I think this show has some very deep, old school, Gothic ideas going on that might reveal themselves to have a touch of Mythos-esque taint on them.

The show starts Dylan McDermott and Connie Briton as a married couple gripping with, bare minimum, two apocalyptic things that have wreaked havoc on their psyches; the difficult miscarriage of there second child and the subsequent affair the husband has. We jump to months later and they are heading to LA with their teenage daughter to start a new life in an old Victorian-style house. And yeah - there's a whole lot of "bad juju" in that house.

I watched the pilot on Saturday evening with my wife - the mother of our two year old and a certified doula - and my Mom - mother to four grown kids. The opening sequence of the show takes place in 1978 when a little girl with Down's syndrome tells a pair of rambunctious twin boys the abandoned house they're about vandalize is going to kill them. "You're gonna regret it," she warns. As the boys gleefully smash up the house they come upon the darkened basement and jar after jar of - wait for it - baby parts. Yes, you read that right. Dismembered parts of babies in formaldehyde. It's all very clinical, seen in half glimpsed flashes, but there they are. My Mom didn't like this - she's sensitive. The twins then have an encounter with something in the basement - a small, furry, bestial humanoid. The twins do, indeed, regret going into the house. After this opening scene a brilliant, lengthy title sequence plays out, again with some disturbing imagery of children. My mother left the room - too intense! Ha!

Let me say before going any further that I think the show is, as of the pilot, one of the best horror TV series ever. It is dark, disturbing, beautifully written and the creators know something about the genre. The show has gotten under my skin and I can't get it out of my mind (did I see something in that one moment in the basement, something about that kid's face seemed wrong... - and who was in that suit! What was going through her - OK, gotta move on. But I can't!)

But what's so Lovecraftian about American Horror Story? To radically overly simplify it it's a haunted house story. There is, buried deep into the backstory, a far reaching taint of evil in the foundations of the house. The mural under the wallpaper in the music room is a depiction of something old and profane - demons whispering to wisemen, people in shocking grimaces hanging at the end of nooses. This taint of evil might be ancient, reaching back centuries, or millennia. What we see as a shapeshifting maid (the wife sees a middle-aged hausfrau, the husband sees a sensual young woman) could be the current incarnation of an age-old entity. And the furry thing in the basement half-glimpsed in shadow and stobelight is very much like Lovecraft's "rat-thing" in Dreams in the Witch-House or the host of unspeakable beasts beneath the Brooklyn apartment building in The Horror at Red Hook.

I've stated before that HPL was not a believer in religions - was fully an atheist, really, as am I - so the crosses held up against evil in the mural suggest they may be playing in the traditional playground of devils and Satan, holy water and hallelujahs. That's fine - it's a fun mythology albeit one that loses some of it's power once you leave the trappings of religion behind. It's one of the reasons I've been so attracted to Lovecraft's work; the horrors of the unknown are much more frightening when you know there is nothing that can stop them.

I'm watching the series with an eye open for things that suggest an origin of cosmic horror - not something from space but rather from Outside, as Lovecraft might say. I highly recommend you give the pilot a try - if you are not too sensitive.

Friday October 14th, 2011 - The Nameless City

The Nameless City by H. P. Lovecraft

Published November 1921

Illustration by Giacomo Carmagnola

Category: Cthulhu Mythos/Dream Cycle

One of the things I love most about fiction - literature, movies, TV, the whole bloody lot - is the temporary escape it gives me. For a brief few moments I can feel my way across the floor of an enormous, pitch black chamber filled with open pits, each one home to an unseen, snarling beast. I can fly with the shantak-bird or watch a town turn to dust. It's not like I'd like to live in these places! Well, I'd maybe visit them (with a shotgun and a little button that says "Press to get the hell out of here.") But there are many places I'm glad to have visited in those moments reading stories, and The Nameless City is an excellent example of one such place.

Our nameless narrator, an explorer of some kind, is tramping through the desert on a camel as he approaches the nameless city. We are very early introduced to the most repeated, most popular and most famous quote from the Gentleman Of Providence.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

My take on it is this: If you can bury it, and it can lay there for millennia, it's not really dead if somehow death died also. Even simpler: Don't turn your back on an ancient dead thing. That's sufficiently creepy for my taste.

If he means something beyond that I haven't puzzled it out.

He reaches the nameless city and Lovecraft sets the scene for us. The city is built into the sandstone walls of a valley. Again, as in many great horror tales, we are led into a place as isolated and remote as the Moon - there will be no hope of calling for help. So of course our narrator enters a tunnel...

"It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have had such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness, and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle feet first along the rocky floor, holding my torch at arm’s length beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it high above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which has made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places."

Lovecraft paints this gorgeous scene for us - the shadowy chambers and temples, all with frescoes and friezes and symbols of things older than humanity, of things thoroughly inhuman.

It's a fantastic trip into a bizarre, ancient, alien city. At risk of cheapening it, think of it as a bone-dry sequel to The Temple. Highly recommended.

~~

I read this story in one of my first volumes of Lovecraftiana - my well read The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams Of Terror And Death - a fantastic collection of his late work in triptychs of the Dreamlands. I've done some research now about this area of his work and it's very detailed and fascinating; it really reads like a very dark version of Wonderland or Neverland.

Wednseday October 12th, 2011 - Guest Blogger Alex Livingston Talks Antarctic Aliens

OK, Gentle Readers - a guest blogger today! Here is a excellent article by blogger and writer Alex Livingston about the relationship between Lovecraft's only novel, At The Mountains Of Madness, the work considered by many to be his greatest, and the 1982 John Carpenter film The Thing. I have to say I think The Thing is probably the best example of Lovecraft in film, - despite it not being strictly related to an HPL story. Alex breaks it down for us. Enjoy...

Can we talk about The Thing and At The Mountains of Madness?

I re-watched John Carpenter’s masterful thriller last week, and as MacReady and Doc puttered around the Norwegian camp, finding abandoned research documents and an empty coffin of ice, I could not help but see Dyer and company investigating the wreckage of the Miskatonic research party’s tent city. Something was found deep in the ice. Something weird. It looks like it came to life. And it didn’t say “take me to your leader”.

A great setup for a story, to be sure, but one that serves as more than simply a catalyst for a thriller. In order for these tales to make sense, a few facts must be in place in the development of the story world:

o Aliens exist.

o They are much, much older and much more technologically advanced than we are.

o They have no respect for our lives, and can kill us very easily.

o We are only alive because they either have not noticed us or have yet to put their plan for our eradication into motion.

What better place than Antarctica for a story about mankind’s isolation? As our understanding of the universe grows, the perceived importance of our presence in it diminishes. We’re a blip. An oddity. Closer in intellectual advancement to a crow breaking a shell with a rock than to the horrible powers which exist beyond the borders of our knowledge. Indeed, the aliens themselves are so foreign-looking that we can barely understand what they are, be they Lovecraft’s anemone cucumbers or Carpenter’s tentacle-flailing blood beings. And they’re here, hidden in the dark places of the world we thought was ours.

The authors take their stories to very different places, and the success of each could be related to the times in which they were released. Mountains(1931) came about when the edges of our world were still only starting to be explored; Byrd’s expedition started in 1928. To find a massive city with the impossible geometry of German impressionist movies, one in which hieroglyphs reveal that humankind started not in Eden but at the hands of cold alien biologists, was terrifying. We have found the edge of the world, and it reveals to us that there is no God.

By 1982, we were fine with that. Alone in the vast, dark universe? Sure. So the focus moved from external to internal. We humans have nothing to trust but each other, and can turn on each other with very little prodding. This is a post-McCarthyism tale, in which the enemy is not some mad beastie but our own incapacity to work together. Fear rules, and it will undo us all. It forces us to ask ourselves what we would do if placed in such a situation. Would you kill everyone, just in case they were duplicates? Would you trust your friends, perhaps trusting them too much? Would you run out into the cold and die, to hell with the rest of humanity?

These stories may strike different chords, but share a completely modern worldview. Someday we will find the truth about our existence, and that truth will be one of terror.

__

You can find more of my thoughts on The Thing here. http://galaxyalex.com/?cat=14

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011 - The Temple

The Temple by HP Lovecraft

Published

Illustration by David Saavedra

This story is in the form of a letter found in a bottle. During World War I a German U boat becomes damaged and loses control, alighting upon the ocean floor somewhere in the Atlantic. They've almost forgotten the strange dead youth they found clinging to the outside, with the intricately carven ivory disc in his pocket, or the testimony of a witness that says once in the water the young man came back to life and swam away with great speed. No, the captain is more concerned with the sunken city with it's mighty temple in the depths, and the unearthly glow coming from it...

The Temple, an early story by Lovecraft, has the feeling of an adventure horror story rather than the traditional slow burn, creepy tale he normally writes. None of his other works include vivid descriptions of naval battles or savage Prussian discipline aboard a submarine. Our German captain (we are reminded he is German very often - he constantly tells us) is alone quite quickly on the submarine and suffers his fate with only his journal as company. I found myself reacting to the extreme isolation of the situation more so that the captain. He is a tough, emotionless guy and seems, in his bottled note at least, to be almost nonplussed by what will be his ultimate fate in what must only be Atlantis.

I liked this story a lot - didn't love it but it was a strange little journey story written before Lovecraft entered into Cthulhu country or the Dreamlands.

Oh and a note about Atlantis. Many years ago I read the submission requirements in the small print of an issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. One of the first things it said was "No, and we mean no, stories about Atlantis. If you send us a story about Atlantis we will commission a dozen short stories by today's greatest writers to write long, detailed accounts of how you were slowly and brutally killed. Don't even mention Atlantis in passing, or any variation (Lemuria, Mu, etc.) Seriously enough with the Atlantis." In the 60's and 70's the theories and fiction about Atlantis was at a fever pitch and one can only imagine the sf mags at the time had reams of watery manuscripts. I for one kinda like Atlantean stuff and wouldn't mid a bit more.

~~ My book stack is shrinking (though it's still Cyclopean, don't worry!) Last night it was late so I started reading it in bed through Stanza, an iPhone app. It's a little like a Kindle app but for free or more obscure books. Thousands of free books, stories, poems, plays, everything is available from several free sites, accessible and downloadable through the app, as well as more current books for a fee. For a fan of Victorian ghost yarns, Gothic horror stories and Pulp-era weird tales - stuff that's in the public domain! - Stanza is quite literally your best friend. I say buy the books at the used bookstores but keep the digital copy handy as well. Love my Stanza!