Name -- Genealogy -- Crime -- Education -- Music -- Audio -- Art -- Theatre -- Movies -- Television -- Radio -- Text -- Foreign Language -- Fiction -- Poetry -- Criticism -- Popularity -- Influences -- As Character -- "The Rats in the Walls" -- Science -- Computers -- Publishing -- Contemporaries -- Others -- A note to de Camp -- Salem -- Letters

Name
There's a "Yolanda Lovecraft" on the Greensboro (NC) housing board, and there's a "Selena Lovecraft" requesting comedy actors to send her(?) materials for a play being produced in New York (see 9 June 2000 Back Stage). *** To give himself freedom to engage in a variety of his projects, actor Nicholas Cage would like to take on the name of "Miles Lovecraft"; the first name is for jazzman Miles Davis (see the Los Angeles Times, 12 Nov. 2000, Calendar section, page 4).

Genealogy

A short review of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward merits mention under this heading because it is from the perspective of an actual descendant of Captain Abraham Whipple, who figures in the work.

Crime

The Spokane Spokesman-Review reports (5 April) that in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho an 18-year-old is alleged to have stabbed his father to death. He became fascinated with "Necronomicon: Book of the Dead,'' a horror fantasy "based on the writings of author H.P. Lovecraft."

Education

A course at Stanford titled "Time and Meaning" has "Cool Air" as a reading requirement and relates it to entropy. *** The University of South Florida Tampa Campus Library has a Lovecraft Collection in its Amateur Printing Associations Collection. Leather Or Prunella is one of the titles in the APA collection (see also "Publishing" below). (Having their own collections are Mike Resnick and Piers Anthony.) *** SUNY at Stony Brook offers the course "Body Horrific," which is about the uses of the body in horror literature and film. The assigned readings for Lovecraft are odd choices, given the subject: "The Street," "He" and "The Horror at Red Hook." I'd think more appropriates are "Cool Air" and "The Thing on the Doorstep."

Music

Terence Chua is known for (among other things) his ABBA-based Cthulhu filk. *** Anybody heard the Night Music for Lovecraft : Pour Contrebasse et Piano [for contrabass and piano] by Michel Zbar; published in Paris by A. Leduc in 1980? It is timed at 5 minutes, 20 seconds. *** Lurking Fear is "a Lovecraftian punk band." *** It appears there's a recording artist "Rating: * .P. Lovecraft" [sic] that has recorded music by Randy Newman. *** There's a suggestion that the Blue Oyster Cult was influenced by HPL in some of their songs--for example their reference to "Starry Wisdom"*** Rolling Stone's review of the British trio Electric Wizard and their Dopethrone (The Music Cartel) finds heavy doses of HPL.  *** A 1997 Women's Goddess Festival had music by Laurie Lovecraft, while elsewhere a musician named Lovecraft is profiled.

Audio

Several stories for listening are available at a general Lovecraft site, The Colour Out of Cyberspace. There's also games, stories, biography, and the Miskatonic Museum of Art ("See paintings by artists mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories.") *** (Gavin Smith submitted the following to the EOD mailing list): According to its composer, the Yuggothic Choir "is an artistic audio rendition of what a group of Yuggothic types would sound like if they were gathered together in a church."

Art

Comic book artist Enki Bilal acknowledges HPL's influence in an interview. *** "The Coffin" (Oni Press) is a comic book optioned to be filmed by director Guillermo del Toro (whose Mimic was based on a short story by Donald A. Wollheim). A review of the comic suggests a Lovecraft influence. *** A grotesque silver pendant named "Lovecraft" is for sale by Susan Fisk, while Bruce Aptly has a jewelry box.  *** Shoggoth and The Dagon are two smoking pipes on view at The Trever Talbert Pipe Gallery. *** Texas artist John Hernandez made a a free-standing, three-dimensional sculpture of a phage virus and titled it "Lovecraft." (A phage virus injects DNA into bacteria.) *** "A Faceless God" by Rebecca Star Kemp was entered in a 1998 contemporary art competition. *** Called "Japan's reigning horror manga artist," Junji Ito states that HPL "had a really great influence on me."

Theatre

A Shoggoth on the Roof: The Documentary was shown at the October 2000 HPL festival. "In 1979 the Other Gods Theatre, a troupe of Los Angeles thespians. . [used] the score of a classic American musical [for which] they adapted the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft into an all-dancing, all-singing theatre extravaganza: A Shoggoth on the Roof." *** "The Thralls of Cthulhu" by Cullen Johnson was performed in October in Burlington, Vermont. *** In Massachusetts (1998), Charlestown Working Theatre had a multimedia, experimental theater piece based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. *** Norman Robbins' murder-mystery play "Slaughterhouse" is set in the Lovecraft Room of the Usher country house. *** The musical of The Witches of Eastwick has a character yclept Franny Lovecraft.

Movies

Titan Entertainment has finished "The Terrible Old Man," and its "From Beyond" is going online. *** The Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft was awarded the special prize of $500 by the Academie Catavencu at the 9th International Festival of DaKino Film in Bucharest, Romania, in 1999. A screenplay, a "making of," and other stuff is available for Le Cas Lovecraft.  *** Vera Lockwood has died. She played in the 2000 production of the short Cool Air. *** French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Pulp Fiction : A Guide to Cinema, Television, Radio, Animation, Comic Books and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier should be worth consulting. Considering HPL's French popularity, and that the first named author has illustrated "The Festival" in a comic book, I wonder what can be expected? To complicate this, both authors interviewed Enki Bilal, who has written short stories influenced by Lovecraft. Bilal discusses his work with Michael Mann on The Keep.  They've also interviewed Robert Bloch. *** The Tennessean (30-01-01)states that the company, Visceral Productions, will do a low-budget film version of "Beyond the Wall of Sleep." *** New England actor and writer Tom Seiler is going to make a Lovecraft work that is going to be "set in one of the mills in Rochester [New York?]," according to the Associated Press.

Television

According to this site's online timeline, there is a reference in Dr. Who to a Lovecraft creation.

Radio

In Australia Tim Gadd had a two hour adaption of "The Call of Cthulhu" on 20 August 1990.

Text

A passage from "Celephais" that begins "There are not many persons who know what
wonders . . ." is at Lifestream, a health and nutritional site.

Foreign Language

Champs-Elysées (December 2000), a magazine for those learning French, notes that his "works have long been very popular in France" and suggests a site under the auspices of Arkadia. The accompanying CD gives the French pronunciation of the name tri-syllabically, as "Luv-ah-craf." *** I can't tell what is "Lovecraft's Homepage" because it is in Japanese  The description for it is "LOVECRAFT'S HOMEPAGE (Tochigi)-(2000/07) (wheeloftime, RandAl'Thor, comedy, Nynaeve, Egwene, Moiraine, Lan, mat, Perrin, Dragon).

Fiction

AlternaTime is a big collection of timelines, such as Lovecraftian Timeline, which puts the corpus together, though there's skimping on detail.

Poetry

HPL has cracked The Library of America by having two poems placed in a volume entitled American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (first volume).

Criticism

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database claims "Online access to over 50,000 historical and critical items." *** The Guardian newspaper has a book review of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. *** A 41 page article entitled "American Horror from 1951" is on the Net.  *** The first issue of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine had articles on HPL? One obvious example would be the use of the name Hastur by both authors. Bradley wrote an article on this topic. *** "Perhaps the most striving, consciously created single myth in scientific fiction is the story of the Elder Ones, the Great Race of the time before prehistory, worked out in a logical, consistent pattern in the stories by Lovecraft. This myth undertakes, like ancient folk-myths, to explain the beginnings of things, the races before man, the races that threaten man from a nether world, and the doom yet to descend."--J. O. Bailey, Pilgrims Through Time and Space, p. 318. This pioneering work was perhaps the first time I came across a reference to HPL in a critical work. The way Bailey talked in the book's introduction continues to make me wonder if he knew HPL personally. *** "Howard Phillips Lovecraft: El Extrano Morador de las Sombras by Carlos Flaqué de Monllonch" appeared in the Spanish Historia y Vida 1985 (205): 95-108. *** A discussion of horror in Writer's Market's online Writer's Encyclopedia begins the entry "Horror" with a discussion of the aesthetics proposed by Supernatural Horror in Literature. *** Not listed in S. T.'s 1981 Bibliography nor its supplement: David Lavery, "Dreaming Nothing," Parabola 5, no. 2:18-23 1980. According to a gloss, this article deals with the "background sound" of the universe, with reference to music (of the spheres?). *** A review, indifferent at best, of Lord of a Visible World has appeared in Choice (April 2001), a book review magazine aimed at librarians.

Popularity

Entertainment Sleuth lists him between Courtney Love and Linda Lovelace. This placement lends an appropriateness to the fact that there are sex stores name "Lovecraft." *** From the hall-of-fame site "Notable Rhode Islanders 1992," the induction reads: "The Late HOWARD P. LOVECRAFT...a great writer of supernatural fiction and a serious disciple of Poe, sincere artist, original thinker and outstanding in modern American literature, published throughout the world and translated into more than a dozen languages, a uniquely Rhode Island figure with some of his work set in the City of Providence, a significant New England regional writer."

Influences

New York Review of Books (30 November 2000) has a discussion of Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles (at last translated from French), which brings in HPL, since Houellebecq wrote a book on him, as I reported many a year agone. The reviewer (or is he paraphrasing Houellebecq?) compares one of the novel's protagonists with Lovecraft, who "is a racist out of misanthropic fear, a fear generated by the "machine" of modern life that knows no rules but competition and the survival of the fittest." *** Harlan Ellison's story "From A to Z, in the Sarsaparilla Alphabet" is arranged by lettered "chapters" (somewhat like the series of titles by Sue (H is for Homicide) Grafton. "Y is for Yog-Sothoth" refers to both HPL and CAS as creations of the afore-named entity. (Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2000). *** Tim Powers mentions him in an interview. *** Washington Post book review editor Michael Dirda was asked what literary parodies he would recommend, and part of his reply was "there's an amazing mixture of Wodehouse and Lovecraft in a little chapbook called Scream for Jeeves! Can't quite remember the author's name."  And Ben pointed out that in my last issue I couldn't spell the name correctly: Peter Cannon. (The name has been retroactively corrected in The Limbonaut 1.) *** There's a humorous reference by Avram Davidson to "legend-haunted Innsmouth." *** One of the characters in the recently published Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban reads HPL. *** The Last Trumpet (Wildside Press) by Stephen Mark Rainey is a collection of short stories each of whose premise has music inadvertently summoning creatures from beyond. The author has read "The Music of Erich Zann." *** Michael Chabon has won the Pulitzer Prize. As I reported in an earlier issue, a book reviewer for The Atlantic Monthly described one of his short stories as "an imitation of H. P. Lovecraft." *** Author of short stories and a novel (Mesmer), Tim Lebbon acknowledges "the wonderful Lovecraft," while Caitlin R. Kiernan lists him among her many influences.

As Character

In David Barbour and Richard Raleigh's Shadows Bend: A Novel of the Fantastic and Unspeakable (Ace: Putnam) HPL visits REH in Cross Plains, Texas. *** There's a rumor that the following book (sort of like the Necronomicon) might exist: Rastus Reilly: Or Dashiell Hammett, Charles Dickens, H. P. Lovecraft, Stan Laurel, & Oliver Hardy on Bad Acid (iUniverse.com, Incorporated, 2000) by Steve Kelly.

"The Rats in the Walls"

From The New Scientist (February 2001): "There is strong evidence of cannibalism among Britons living 10,000 years ago. But now archaeologists think Celts who fought the invading Romans 2000 years ago also ate each other, probably as part of a sacrificial religious ritual." A pit in Gloucestershire may have as many as 40 bodies.

Science

Imagine a scientific expedition to Antarctica written in the first person. Now imagine the expedition is collecting fossils. Finally imagine part of the title includes the words Mountains of Madness, and the last name of the writer begin "Lo." Put all this together and you have a book written by Australian paleontologist John Long that is titled Mountains of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey in Antarctica (John Henry Press, 2001). The prolific Professor Long (100 scientific papers) is the Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, Australia.

Computers

Different Elder signs and Chambers' Yellow Sign are available as screen savers.

Publishing

Some of Ken's Leather or Prunella and items by other fans are available at the National Amateur Press Association site, *** See a pulp forerunner and get an idea of HPL's childhood reading. The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book covers approximately 1860-1915, with titles, publishers, characters, authors, and genres. *** For a list of imaginary books--books that appear only in books--visit the Invisible Library.

Contemporaries

Frank Coffman has produced The Cross Plainsman: A Collection of Robert E. Howard Studies. *** Comic book artist Richard Corben and collaborator Simon Revelstroke have reinvented Hodgson's The House on the Borderland by turning it into a hardcover comic (published by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics). *** Clifford M. Eddy, friend and revision client, has had a collection of his work published. Several revised stories of his were published in The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966), one of which, "The Loved Dead," got Weird Tales banned from the newsstands. *** Here's a Dunsany site.  *** HPL had New England, but another Weird Tales writer had Haiti. There was enough about the subject to have a "Full Bibliography of Books and Shorter Pieces About Haiti by High B. Cave." It also references Pulp Man's Odyssey : The Hugh B. Cave Story by Audrey Parente. *** Clarification: Scientist Stan Thompson may have been the author of the Weird Tales story "Sport for Ladies."

Others

A recently translated collection by Argentinean fiction writer and poet Leopoldo Lugones, Strange Forces, brought HPL to the mind of the book reviewer.

A Note to De Camp

In Lovecraft, author L. Sprague de Camp speculated on the origin of the name of the author of the Necronomicon. "'Alhazred' is probably derived from 'Hazard,' the name of an old Rhode Island family connected with the Phillipses" (De Camp, Doubleday, 1975, p. 18). Maybe the five-year-old Howard had been influenced in his choice of naming an alter ego when he read about Oliver Hazard Perry, fellow Rhode Islander and the naval hero of the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. Even if the captain did fight against the British, he was also born on 20 August, the boy's birthday. That may have been decisive. [Belated addenda: the name "Alhazred" was suggested by a relative, and this fact undermines my notion.]

Salem

Peter Cannon's article on Salem in Scott's journal coincided with my first visit there. I had been in Boston, but it was here that I felt I was in New England. I was impressed by the number of Lovecraft names about, such as Curwen and Crowinshield. All the names I saw were associated with the houses, a majority of them mansions. An exception is the "Witch House," reputed to be haunted in the upstairs room where the children lived; I wonder if the sacrifice of the children in "The Dreams in the Witch-House" could be a reflection of this? The haunting account was relayed to me by one of the guides as I toured this house, which belonged not to a witch but to one of the judges who served at the Salem witchcraft trials, that monument to superstition and injustice. The house was slated for demolition around 1940, but was saved.

The association with witchcraft means business in Salem. The profile of a broomsticking witch is on the police cars, there are several tourist spots that celebrate the witchcraft trials, and stores cater to those who are either adherents of Wicca or to those who want to buy something that is associated with witchcraft. There are perhaps two-thousand followers who live in the vicinity, the biggest concentration in the world. However, I was told that there is an official movement to distance the city from this subject. On the main drag is the most crowded bookstore I've seen, the store not overlarge to begin with, titles piled high, some making towers, and a selection on tables outside seem to be the result of an overflow. This is not a place to be in during an earthquake, unless one envies the fate of the composer killed by a falling book.

The town boasted no awareness of Lovecraft himself that I could find. He must have enjoyed walking the historic district--if it existed as such in his day--and seeing the many mansions, which bore signs with the date of each building, the original owner's name, and the business or trade of the aforementioned. A lot of money was made from shipping, and by a freak of fate Salem became better known for its brief (9 month) fling with the witch mania than for its later wealth. I thought the evocative description in "Pickman's Model" seemed to fit Salem: "There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers."

You Call This A Letter Column?

I find that when I write this letter response section, several months have gone by, so I have to skim-read the EOD stuff a second time to freshen my brain. On my first reading I can think of replies, but by my not writing it down, I forget. I need to come up with a better method.

John: Paperback Parade began in 1986. Other issues have dealt with Max Brand, James Bond books, and had interviews with Richard E. Geis (who was my introduction to fanzines), Jack Williamson, Jack Vance, and Algis Budrys. I know that the Finlay cover for The Outsider was discussed in "Lovecraft's Illustrators" by John E. Vetter (The Dark Brotherhood, and Other Pieces).

Scott: I have one criticism of your journal--the covers are too close together. Otherwise, it is merely stupendous in the quality and the original source material you present.

Steven: Thanks for your interesting account of your introduction to HPL. I think you are too modest about yourself and too the other way about big name Lovecraftians, who are just fans like the rest of us.

       This has been the 31st issue of The Criticaster (April 2001, mailing 114) by Stephen R. Walker. Published simultaneously on the Net as The Limbonaut (no. 2).
 

The Limbonaut: 1