Bite-Sized Blog: Adventure Author News

Preview of "Kalina & the Baba Yaga," which goes on sale from Black Hearted Press on Hallowe'en 2012, with a launch party at 55 Parnie Street, Glasgow at 7pm.

Another round-up of links and musings before Hallowe'en, featuring Conan novelisations, Howard reviews, Howard-inspired poetry, Machen, Lovecraft, Lewis, Saunders and Smith.

Manilla Road: Metal Ambassadors to Weird Tales

I still need to finish that retrospective on Manilla Road's sonic tributes to Robert E. Howard, but then I found this recent interview, and I'm so thrilled I can barely type.

WC: It's like there's something in the collective mind of people that brings them all to a certain topic at the same time.

MS: That brings to mind that I saw an ad for a new Conan movie that's gonna come out in 2009. I have no idea who's in it but just the thought of another Conan movie is like "Well, I hope they do it right this time".

Watkiss has a rival for my man-crush affections: Mark "the Shark" Shelton, you are my Metal Hero.

MS: I do,too! My favorite movie of all time is "Jason and the Argonauts". I'm stuck on it just like I'm stuck on my old Judas Priest albums like "Stained Class" and "Sin After Sin".

WC: This computer generated stuff of today just doesn't have the personality of what Harryhausen did.

MS: I agree. I still like the original "King Kong". (chuckles)

WC: We better get back on track or we'll spend all night talking about this stuff.

MS: Yeah, I have a feeling we could!

Scratch that: Metal Icon.

WC. I know you've had whole albums where the lyrics are inspired by Poe and Lovecraft. What are some of your favorite stories by those authors?

MS: My favorite Edgar Allan Poe story is "Mystification". It's one you don't often find in the "Best Of" collections. There's a collection out there right now...I can't remember the name of the publisher...that's called "The Complete Poe" and it's a good one to get because it's got everything he's ever wrote. "Mystification" is not one that shows up as much as "Masque of the Red Death"...which would be my next favorite Poe story, by the way...but there's a lot of Poe's own personality in that story. I think he envisioned himself as one of those characters. It's a really good story and I thought he made statements through his storyline that were really statements about himself. That's why we did a song "Mystification", because that story hit me so hard.

As far as Lovecraft goes, my two favorite stories are not the usual Lovecraftian stories. One is a short story called "The Tomb" that I love completely. It's written in almost an Edgar Allan Poe style and I think Lovecraft was after that and he did it just splendidly in that story. That was one of those stories where you could really see where H.P.'s roots in the horror genre were. He proved it in that story. The other one,strangely enough, is his more Mary Shelley strain of work: "Herbert West, Reanimator". (laughs)

WC: If I remember right, Lovecraft didn't think too much of that story himself.

MS: He hated it. I don't think too many people knew about it until the movie started coming out. Jeffrey Combs I thought was really good in the Lovecraft movies. "From Beyond", he was great in that. You know, I actually acquired the original Necromomicon Press versions of "Reanimator". They were just little short stories that originally appeared in "Weird Tales". I've got a little booklet that was put out by Necronomicon Press that was all the little short stories put together. I just thought the whole thing was great!

WC: "The Color Out Of Space" was my favorite Lovecraft story.

MS: All of his work's really incredible. His real ethereal stories are so far out there that nobody could ever write like that, I think.

WC: The one guy who equalled if not surpassed him when it came to weird visions was Clark Ashton Smith.

MS: Clark Ashton Smith's pretty good. My favorite of all time, just because of the way he mixes reality with the supernatural, is Robert E. Howard.

WC: Yeah, he dabbled in just about every genre you could think of.

MS: Just about everything. Sports stories, Westerns...he was all over the board. His unedited works that are coming out now are just incredible. The Conan stuff is great, the King Kull stuff is pretty good stuff. Not as good as Conan, I believe. I love the Bran Mak Morn stuff, Solomon Kane...

Scratch that: Metal Heroicon.

And man, Wormwood Chronicles isn't that bad himself, giving Clark Ashton Smith props!

HPLHS's The Whisperer in Darkness

This is seriously awesome stuff.  That Mi-Go is unlike any others I've seen, and it's great.  The acting's pretty solid across the board, too.  It looks like a most worthy successor to Call of Cthulhu.

The only thing working against it is that the team seems to love their CGI Mi-Go so much that it's in danger of being over-exposed.  Lovecraftian horrors work best with suggestion, where you never really get a good look at them: glimpses of Things That Should Not Be.  Think of how effective the supernatural menace of Night of the Demon was (assuming you walked into the theatre five minutes late and thus didn't have the film spoiled by the early reveal), or the xenomorph in Alien, specifically because so little of them was shown.  As such, I hope the Mi-Go aren't seen quite as often as the trailer suggests.

Thomas Ellison Is Not Well: Robert E. Howard and Norman Bates

So, we've had Howard compared to Tweedledum, Al Capone, and now Norman Bates.

Of course!  How could I not see it before!

Oh, that's right...

Robert Bloch was inspired to write Psycho after reading about Ed Gein’s exploits but I contend parts of the novel were inspired by Robert E. Howard’s last days as chief caregiver for his sick mother.  In Chapter Nine, Norman Bates realizes he will always be mommy’s little boy.  The only time Norman feels like a somebody is when he’s lost in a book.  Robert E. Howard could never escape being mommy’s little boy, either.  When he was writing for pulp mags or letters to friends, Howard was Two-Gun Bob, Terror of Cross Plains.  Howard had fans, admirers, and editors who wanted to publish his stories.  But in the end, Howard was just Hester Howard’s frightened little boy.  On June 11 1936, Robert E. Howard shot himself moments after he learned his mother would never awaken from a coma.  Why did the creator of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and many other characters end his life when he was so close to being free from the burden that had crippled his writing for so long?  Maybe Norman Bates is right  when he says “I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times.”

Lovely.  I don't see this ending up badly at all.  That said, I can see how someone could make the Bates-Howard connection if one bases it on Bloch's misconception of Howard the Oedipal, but it's clear that Thomas Ellison is saying that Bloch was basing it on fact, not misconception.

Yog-Blogsothery

Once again in lieu of a real post, I present another link. Courtesy of Huge Ruined Pile (of what?  Rags?  Books?  People?  THE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW) I've been introduced to this delightful little blog, a catalogue of Lovecraftian beasties.  My favourites are the artist's interpretation of the Voonith, Elder Thing, Yekubian, the other Whately brother, and what I believe to be the dreaded Anthropornis megalbus, though they're all really cool.

One of these days I'll be filling this blog with my scratchings: pictures, sketches, whatnot.  There's this "sketch-a-day" phenomenon on DeviantArt where a bored artist would draw pictures of a character every day for a period of time.  I might do that, get drawing again.  I have to at least catch up to One Last Sketch's Lurking Humour.  But then, I'll have to think up a name for my comic series...

H.P. Lovecraft's The Silver Key

OK, seriously, how many Lovecraft fan films have we been blessed with?  Quite a lot, I'd wager.  And they're good, real good.

Us Howard fans really have to catch up.

Swords Against the Outer Dark interviews Andrea Bonazzi

There's something about this chap that seems starkly familiar...

but I can't quite put my finger on it...

I dig Andrea Bonazzi's work. Those of you who've read my old Cimmerian entries might remember "The Letter of Glen Schuyler Hoffman," a fun little Weird Tales jaunt that recasts Lovecraft, Howard and Smith as paranormal investigators.  This was directly inspired by Bonazzi's photographs, where he digitally juxtaposes photographs of famous authors alongside sculptures inspired by their stories: most notably, the Weird Tales Troika.  Not just the Weird Musketeers: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe and even Tolkien receive the Bonazzi treatment.  You could make a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from them!  Well, Swords Against the Outer Dark has an interview up with the very clever chap.

I simply can't overstate how phenomenally cool his work is.  Lovecraft beside an unearthed Elder Thing tablet, Smith next to a blasphemous idol, Howard beside an uncanny statue! There's even a picture of the Weird Musketeers together, which ignited ideas of an alternate universe where they leave fiction aside to become Cthulhubusters, defending the earth from the machinations of the Black Ring, the Church of Starry Wisdom and the Brothers of the Yellow Sign.  They travel the world, sometimes teaming up with the Inklings, their British compatriots.  Sometimes they go off-world, to Almuric, Cykranosh, Yag, Yekub, Yuggoth and beyond, or to other dimensions of space and time - the Dreamlands, Zothique, the Outer Dark.

Plus the man made a Cthulhu pipe.  A Cthulhu pipe.

Ce n'est pas une pipe.

C'est glorieuse.

I must possess one.

Now, if only he could do some stuff with C.L. Moore, A. Merrit and Arthur Conan Doyle...

Triangulation: Blackwood, Lovecraft, Brackett, Burroughs, "Conan" and more

This was a crazy week. So many important dates to consider!

Triangulation: Jim Lad, Lil' Leo, Weird Tales Troika, Momo, and Painbrush

Getting back in my stride, I think.

Monday sees an interview with James Purefoy. I am totally sold on Jim lad, which is amazing considering how much I disliked him in "Rome": turns out, you're not really supposed to consider Marc Anthony a swell chap. Jim lad, though, he's awesome. I'd love to meet him and say "job well done" on his Blackbeard, the best performance of Teach between him and Angus McFadyen.


Tuesday's scoop is Leo Howard cast as the Littlest Barbarian. As with Momo, I'm not fighting down the urge to vomit in rage, even though there are certain problems. Give him blue contacts/digital colour correction, give him a more Cimmerian hairstyle, and he could work. His theatrical martial arts styles means he has great control over his body and strong athleticism: I can definitely see him climbing sheer cliffs, felling hawks on the wing, spearing wild beasts and killing Picts at a 10th-grade level. I still think he's too cute, though.

Thursday brings us an update on the Howard-Lovecraft-Smith poetry books. I can't help but be a bit disappointed. On the Howard side, I lament the absence of "Cimmeria," "A Word From The Outer Dark," "Red Thunder," "The Bell of Morni," and the Solomon Kane pieces, which is strange, since "The King and the Oak" appears. Amazingly, not a single one of the Smith poems I thought would be foregone conclusions--“The Hashish Eater, Or, The Apocalypse of Evil,” “Lament of the Stars,” “The Titans in Tartarus,” “The Sea-Gods” and “The Song of the Worlds”--made the cut, not even the stupendous "The Hashish-Eater," which utterly bemuses me. I was also woefully inaccurate in guessing stories for the Lovecraft collection, where again, none of my predictions--“The Cats,” “Providence,” “The House,” “Festival,” and “The City”--are present. I'm also surprised that Lovecraft's epic "Fungi from Yuggoth" is represented by only a handful of its thirty-six chapters, especially since Lovecraft's poetic output is considerably smaller than that of his Texan and Californian friends. Still, these books weren't meant to be "the complete Howard/Lovecraft/Smith" Weird Poetry collections, and the omissions might well be the result of copyright and public domain issues.


Friday, Momo Spaketh! There's a minor controversy over at the Robert E. Howard forums, as his mention of hoping Conan could get him a role on Pirates of the Carribean rubbed some REH fans the wrong way, the implication being that Momo viewed Conan as a mere "stepping stone" onto more worthy projects. I think it's a bit of an overreaction: more likely, Momo was simply saying what other jobs he'd like to do, and I'm sure being Conan would be a springboard if it was any good. Just talkin' bout his job. Besides, i can officially never make fun of him again after seeing his mammy's face. Her little smile will haunt me whenever I think of poking fun at Momo. Damn it.

That was originally going to be my Saturday post, but yet again, I posted too early. Rather than cash in one of my "week off" chips, I decided to put together a quick one for Saturday. I'd been meaning to mention Strom's wonderful and touching memorial to Dan on The Cimmerian, but never got around to it: I wanted it to be more than just a link and a paragraph. Still, it's more important it's on TC at all than worry about its content.

Triangulation: The Letter of Glenn Schuyler Hoffman

A little bit of fun for Samhain.

There are two major inspirations for this post: my own weird idea for Howard, Smith and Lovecraft to roam the world fighting crime and solving Cthulhoid mysteries, and this marvellous video based on the work of Andrea Bonazzi. I very much hope Mr Bonazzi doesn't mind my use of his artwork in such a blasphemous exercise.

I might turn "Weird Tales Investigations" into a mini-series of its own. It'd be of the same scary/absurd nature of Sam Raimi's horror more than anything else, but chock-a-block with references and allusions to pulp fiction. There's already a popular counterpart for the Inklings in Here There Be Dragons (which I haven't read, but really should) featuring Tolkien, Lewis and Charles Williams going off on high adventure, but apart from certain works which I won't dignify by naming, nobody's really done the Weird Tales Troika.

Of course, the holy grail is the one that few people really consider: a Howard/Tolkien mashup. Bob & Tollers fighting off modern Morgoth cultists, battling the "nameless things" that gnaw in the deep places of the earth, uncovering the lost histories of Middle-earth and the Hyborian Age. Deuce'll probably kill me for trying to mash-up the two again, but I'll think of some copout.

Until then!