Tag Archives: H. P. Lovecraft

Frank Belknap Long at 115

Robert Bloch Hits 99

Robert Bloch was born on April 5, 1917, in Chicago. He passed away on September 23, 1994 in Los Angeles.

Although he will be remembered as the author of Psycho, and justifiably so, he was a writer of great range and depth. While I’ve found his novels to be somewhat hit and miss, I’ve almost always enjoyed his short fiction.

Bloch was a member of the Lovecraft Circle and published in Weird Tales, but he quickly moved on to other types of fiction than Mythos pastiche. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Bloch’s Mythos tales, but they were his early work.) He appeared as Robert Blake in Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.”

Bloch was adept at mystery, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. Bloch managed to infuse humor into some of the grimmest situations. His story “That Hell-Bound Train” won the Hugo Award in 1959. A favorite theme was Jack the Ripper, beginning with the classic “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”.

Bloch worked in Hollywood, and many of his stories reflect his experiences there. He wrote two sequels to Psycho which had nothing to do with the movie sequels. I’ve only read the first sequel, but it’s set almost entirely in Hollywood. I wondered how many of the scenes in it were based on actual events.

Anyway, Bloch isn’t as well remembered these days as he should be. Subterranean Press (among others) have published collections of his work in the years since his death, but those are starting to go out of print.

I’m going to read one or two of his stories this evening and toast his memory and literary legacy.

With the lights on and the doors locked, of course.

In Observance of Henry S. Whitehead’s Birthday

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Henry S. Whitehead was born today, March 5, in 1882. He wrote a number of stories for Weird Tales during its early years before his untimely death in 1932. Much of his fiction focused on the Caribbean, where he was stationed for a number of years as a minister of the Episcopal Church. H. P. Lovecraft visited Whitehead for several weeks in 1931. He had a great respect for Whitehead as a person and as a writer.

To mark the occasion, I read “The People of Pan”, which was first published in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. The story is available in Voodoo Tales The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, Clark Ashton Smith

Hearing Whispers Out of the Dust

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Whispers Out of the Dust
David J. West
ebook $3.99, paperback $14.99

Take the Mormon settlement of the West, mix in some M. R. James and H. Russell Wakefield, throw in a healthy serving of H. P. Lovecraft and a dash of Robert E. Howard, stir in Native American lore, bake in the desert heat and wash down with a lake formed by a damn, and what you’re likely to come up with something that resembles Whispers Out of the Dust.

David J. West has begun to build a body of work in the subgenre known as the weird western, and his most recent book is a solid addition to the field. It’s also one of his most ambitious projects to date. (And I absolutely love that cover.)

St. Thomas, Nevada was settled by Mormon pioneers, but the area had been home to the Anasazi and other tribes long before. The Mormons, many of them anyway, moved away when they discovered they were in Nevada rather than Utah and Nevada wanted to collect several years of back taxes. Still, the town survived until the Hoover Dam was built, and the waters of Lake Mead covered it up.

That much is historical fact. What David does is add a dose of fantasy which he blends so smoothly that you find yourself believing things you know can’t really be so. (At least you don’t think so.) The footnotes (endnotes, really) certainly add to the feeling of verisimilitude. David includes a number of photos he’s taken, which give you an idea of what the area looks like. Continue reading →

Take a Trip into A Lonely and Curious Country

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A Lonely and Curious Country
Matthew Carpenter, ed.
Ulthar Press
Trade Paper, 234 p., $16.95

As Matthew Carpenter points out in his introduction, Lovecraftian fiction has become a mainstay of the fantastic and weird fiction genres, with some of the best-written stories being published on a regular basis. A Lonely and Curious Country is no exception. (Mr. Carpenter didn’t say that, I did.)

The seventeen stories here are perfect examples of what’s going on in the admittedly large subfield of Lovecraftian fiction. They are disturbing, horrifying, Lovecraftian. In some the Lovecraftian element is quite prominent; in others, you don’t realize you’re in Lovecraft country until you’ve almost finished. I’m not going to try to give a one or two sentence summary of each one. Rather I’m going to focus on the ones that stood out to me. YMMV. One other thing before I start discussing the stories. Of the eighteen authors, I had only heard of three of them prior to reading this book (Webb, Price, and McNamee). There are a lot of good writers out there that I need to keep up with. Continue reading →

Lizzie Borden vs. C’thulhu, Round 2

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Chapelwood: The Borden Dispatches
Cheri Priest
Roc Books, 434 pgs.
Paperback $16.00, ebook $9.99, audio $29.99

It’s been decades since the events in Maplecroft. Lizzie Borden lives a quiet, reclusive life alone in her mansion. But she keeps up with events in the outside world through magazines, journals, and newspapers that arrive via the US Postal Service.

So when she starts reading reports of a serial axe murderer terrorizing Birmingham, Alabama, it gets her attention. (Turns out he’s one of the good guys. Really.) Especially when she starts to see other references to Birmingham, references about a dark cult that meets in an old church out in the woods at a place called Chapelwood.

Then she gets a telephone call from her old friend, Inspector Simon Wolf. He’s in Birmingham investigating the death of a friend, a priest who was gunned down on the steps of his church in broad daylight. Before he died, the priest had written Wolf, asking for his assistance.

Wolf thinks all of the events in Birmingham are related. And he wants Lizzie’s help. It looks like Lizzie is going to get to swing her axe one more time.

Continue reading →

H. P. Lovecraft Turns 125 Today

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One of the greatest writers of weird fiction, some would the greatest, was born on August 20th, 1890. I am, of course, talking about H. P. Lovecraft. It’s also my mother-in-law’s birthday (Hi, June.), but we won’t go there. It’s just coincidence.

There will be a number of tributes posted today. I’m going to take a slightly different approach here. I first encountered Lovecraft in an anthology I read in the seventh grade. The story was “The Doom That Came to Sarnath.”* I never really took an interest in the Mythos stories in my teens and twenties. Only in my thirties and forties did I start delving into the stories Lovecraft is most known for.

I’ve had conversations with more than one person in which they said as they’ve grown older, they find Lovecraft more and more unreadable. In general, they are talking about his prose.

Curiously, I find the opposite. Maybe I’m reading different stories. There are a number of major stories I haven’t read yet, but I don’t have a problem with Lovecraft’s prose most of the time. It’s an old fashioned style, much more lush that what is standard today. Maybe I read too much Dickens in school or something, but I don’t have a huge problem with it. I appreciate his work more with each new story of his I read. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Discovering Lovecraft by Paul McNamee

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Keith here. What follows is a guest post by Paul McNamee. Normally I wouldn’t intrude but I wanted to include a link to Paul’s blog. Now here’s Paul.

(First, thanks to Keith for the guest spot on Adventures Fantastic.

I am here promoting the new anthology, A LONELY & CURIOUS COUNTRY: Tales from the Lands of Lovecraft. The book is currently available in print from Amazon, and we all hope an ebook is soon to follow.)

Honestly, I don’t remember exactly when or which Lovecraft book I read first. It was the “old days,” the latter half of the 1980s. I was in college. I was interested in horror – mostly by way of Stephen King. And I still had an interest in fantasy – mostly by way of J.R.R. Tolkien.

There was no world wide web. In those days, I never knew what books were coming out. I would wander – mostly in the scifi/fantasy section of the bookstore. I would grab what jumped off the shelf at me.

The Del Rey editions of Lovecraft’s work were appearing on the shelves. The Michael Whelan art certainly caught my eye.

I believe it was THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH first. It collected tales that were more dark fantasy. But there was enough horror there to pique my interest in that vein, too.

I probably read another volume, possibly THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. Again, it was slanted more toward the fantastic but contained horror tales as well.

But shortly thereafter, I read THE LURKING FEAR.
Continue reading →

Report on Howard Days, Part 1: Thursday and Friday

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Robert E. Howard Days 2015 has come to an end. And while I have enjoyed them all, this has probably been the one I’ve enjoyed the most. There are a number of things that came together to make this one of the most enjoyable Howard Days for me. The weather couldn’t have been better. The high temperatures were in the low 90s, which means it was warm but not really hot, especially since there was a breeze and the humidity wasn’t too bad. Continue reading →