RIP: Hugh B. Cave

 

Groups

     A book group has formed in Richmond, Va. to discuss HPL’s works.

 

Occultism

     Fortean Times 184 (2004) features HPL on the cover and in an article by Daniel Harms.

 

Names

     A seventh-grade teacher named “Miss Lovecraft” appears in a short film based on the story “Late Bloomer” by Clay McLeod Chapman. *** In Mongolian a rock or rock formation is spelled “chuluu” (see Mongolia, published by Lonely Planet).

 

Music

     He appeared in a song by the Scottish band, The Vaselines (see The Japan Times, 20 June 2004 ).

 

Art

     A color illustration of “Lady Lovecraft” appears in the article “Costumes by Animal X” by Janet Wilson Anderson (Fiberarts (Sep/Oct 1990).

 

Comics

     Volume 10 of Horror Classics includes “The Thing on the Doorstep” as well as  works by Clark Ashton Smith and others. *** August Derleth’s “Wentworth’s Day” has been translated into a French comic story by Soulières Editeur, a specialist in youth literature.

 

Anime

     The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917 by Jonathan Clements has several references to HPL. The lead of Alice in Cyberland (1996) comes from Miskatonic College, there’s the criminal Yog Sothoth (Dream Dimension Hunter Fandora, 1985), a race of female clones called the Cthulhu (Iczer-One (1985)), and Armitage III (1994) draws names from “The Dunwich Horror.”

 

Theatre

     The Mystery Plays contains two one-act plays, the first of which is “The Filmmaker’s Mystery” about a horror movie director who has adopted a Lovecraft story and is haunted by a fellow passenger of a train crash. One line quoted from the article is "We are forever brushing up against an invisible world of secrets, an intangible universe." (see the 7 May 2004 issue of the Hartford Courant.) The play’s wright is Roberto Francisco Aguirre-Sacasa, a student at the Yale School of Drama.

 

“The Call of Cthulhu”

     Here is a foreshadowing of the uplifted island episode in this “true” eyewitness story carried in an old newspaper. The Houston Post (2 May 1897) has a letter from John Leander who stated that an elderly sailor named Mr. Oleson said that he and some companions were shipwrecked on an uncharted island in 1862 when a gigantic airship with wings crashed into a cliff side. There were 12 foot alien bodies inside, which were thrown over the side of a cliff. The sailors were eventually rescued but all died on the voyage back save Oleson, who had the only proof of his experience, a ring from the creature’s thumb. (From Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illnesses and Social Delusion by Robert E. Bartholomew (McFarland, 2001), p. 214.) Coincidentally, in its Scandinavian origin, the name “Oleson” is like the fictional Norwegian sailor “Gustafson” in “Cthulhu.” 

 

Science

     I wonder if Fritz Leiber’s “Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin” is given its due in Science Par Ceux Qui Ne la Font Pas [Science by Those Who Do Not Do It], for this 2001 work from Quebec University alludes to “The Dreams in the Witch-House.”

 

Publishers

     Contrary to S.T.’s gloomy statement of a few years ago, the Library of America is coming out (in 2005) with H.P. Lovecraft: Tales. Next year, also, Hippocampus Press promises Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, with the Joshi/Schultz annotations.

    

Influence and Allusions

     Bob Howard is the hacker narrator of The Atrocity Archive (Golden Gryphon), by Charles Stross. Howard works for a British intelligence agency whose purpose is to deal with Elder Gods. http://www.goldengryphon.com/revatrocity1.html *** An article in the New York Times about Brooklyn crime tales mentions HPL and quotes from “The Horror at Red Hook” (“Brooklyn Crime Tales Flavored by Neighborhood” by Dinitia Smith, 24 June in “Books,” and available online). *** The e-book Eldritch Blue: Love and Sex in the Cthulhu Mythos (Lindisfarne Press, 2004) has a foreword by erstwhile Ofian James Ambuehl. *** In I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (Metropolitan, 2004) Emmanuel Carrère writes of “the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, which Phil had devoured as a child and which I like to believe determined his choice of career—for they determined mine” (p. 109).

 

Long

     After contacting Paul Buhle about his comment that in Manhattan, HPL was “closest to Jewish science fiction-writer Frank Belknap Long, who granted me an interview in 1976” (From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture, Verso Books, 2004, p. 120), the author noted that he misstated Long’s affiliation.

 



 

This is the thin, 41st issue of The Criticaster (August 2004, mailing 127) by SR Walker.  Eventually published on the Net as  The Limbonaut (no 12).