Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.292: The Streets of Arkham

As something of a companion piece to yesterday’s offering, today we present The Streets of Arkham, an expansion for Fantasy Flight Games’ Mansions of Madness (kind of Lovecraftian dungeoncrawler in which players investigate the interior of various New England mansions with a view to unearthing the horrors of the Cthulhu mythos). Like Gates of Arkham, The Streets of Arkham relocates the action from the inside of crumbling old manses to, well, the streets of Arkham. Also shown above is a star vampire (cf. Robert Bloch’s The Shambler from the Stars) - one of the suitably-tentacular miniatures which comes with the expanion. Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.291:Elder Sign - Gates of Arkham

Elder Sign is one of the games which most frequently hits my gaming table these days - particularly as it is relatively fast-playing, solitaire-friendly, and generally does the job of replicating the feel of some of the larger, longer and more complex entries into Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Case Files game series - even more so with Gates of Arkham: an expansion to Elder Sign which provides s new deck of cards allowing players to leave the confines of the Miskatonic Museum (the focus of the base game) to explore the city of Arkham itself, in effect turning Elder Sign in a more readily playable mini-version of Arkham Horror (a game which I’ve never managed to completed in under four hours); Gates of Arkham also ramps up the difficulty to provide more of a challenge to seasoned players. In all, if you are looking for a lighter version of Arkham Horror (at least until the third edition of the game drops), Elder Sign with the Gates of Arkham expansion may well be your thing.

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.290: The Way of the Worm by Ramsey Campbell

I was very excited to discover ths morning that The Way of the Worm - the third and final volume of Ramsey Campbell’s Lovecraftian masterwork, The Three Births of Daoloth - had arrived on my doorstep; unfortunately, this will need to be set aside for the time being, as I currently have two other books on the go - and as much as it would make for fine October reading, I may hold off from starting The Way of the Worm until December, as I think it would also constitute a choice piece of horror for the Christmas season.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.289: In The Mouth of Madness

After its mention in yesterday’s post, it seems apposite to turn the focus firmly on John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness as one of the most signifcant Lovecraftian movies of the 1990s - and one of the better pieces of Lovecraftian cinema produced thus far.

As something which, initially, sets itself up as a piece of schlocky horror, In the Mouth of Madness transforms itself into a staggeringly original low-budget, reality-warping mess of a movie in which a (meta-)fictional variant of Lovecaft’s own fictions literally write themselves into existence; and whilst cosmicism may not be entirely front-and-centre here by way of traditional Lovecraftian tropes, there are a few tentacles along the way - as well as a fairly effective, though briefly-glimpsed (which is probably why it is so effective) manifestation of the movie’s analogues of the Great Old Ones; there is also something of a (pre-Ligotti) Ligottian feel to In the Mouth of Madness by way of the film’s tacit central conceit: that human beings are but empty ciphers - insubstantial puppets dancing unknowingly to the monstrous tune of inscrutably alien forces.

And in the final analysis, In the Mouth of Madness presents us that terminally-important question - a question which is perhaps the only question that is and has ever been worth asking: do you read Sutter Kane?

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.288: John Carpenter Live

This evening I had the pleasure of watching horror maestro John Carpenter perform live at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire; as afficianados of the man will be well aware, Carpenter not only directs but scores many of his own movies, and in the 80s innovated a trademark soundtrack style of brooding, minimalist electronica - the influence of which can be seen within the current trend of 80s cinematic revivalism (notably, Carpenter's work is a key inspiration with regard to both the visual aesthetic of and the theme music to the wildly popular Stranger Things). Carpenter's soundtracks have also significantly informed the modern electronica sub-genre of synthwave.

Whilst Carpenter's body of work spans the continuum of horror and sci-fi styles, his 'Apocalypse trilogy', including The Thing, The Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness, constitutes a cornerstone of modern Lovecraftian cinema.

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.287: Servants of the Star and the Snake

If there is one figure in the history of contemporary esotericism who has fundamentally shaped the contours of Lovecaftian occulture as it exists today, it must surely be Kenneth Grant. The Servants of the Star and the Snake, edited by Henrik Bogdan, is a newly-published collection essays by artists, occultists, academics - and those whose oeuvre straddles multiple of these fields - celebrating the corpus of both Kenneth and Steffi Grant; needless to say, Lovecaft’s presence is felt throughout, but his presence looms especially large in the excellent contributions of both Stefan Dzicklewicz and friend of the Ghooric Zone, Alistair Coombs. Overall, a superb and important collection whch will be of interest to Grant afficianados as well as scholars of contemporary occultism.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.286: Cthulhu Hack Dry-Erase Character Sheet

Just a quick one for today, as I’m runnng late with today’s offering - the latest addition to my stash of Cthulhu Hack rpg stuff: a set of A5/postcard-sized dry-erase character sheets.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.285: The Conspiracy Against The Human Race

If you missed Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against The Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror during its initial publication, you can now immerse yourself in his spectacularly bleak non-fiction disquisition on the futility of being in this re-issued paperback edition, published by Penguin.

Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.284: Arkham Horror - The Card Game Player Board

Todays offering is a rather nice lasercut mdf player board designed for Arkham Horror: The Card Game. The board comes with a plain mdf finish, so I painted it a suitably-eldritch shade of green - now I just need to make use of he damned thing by getting a game of ths too the table...

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.283: Blood on Satan’s Claw

Over the past few years, Folk Horror has become a Big Thing, as evidenced by the publication of numerous texts theorising this newly discovered genre, the emergence of a hugely popular Folk Horror Revival Facebook group, and the appearance of numerous Folk Horror-themed blogs (including last year’s The Horsingdon Transmissions - that also intersected with the categories of Urban Wyrd, Speculative Horror, Lovecraftian cosmicism, and Ligottian nihilism). But I digress.

Recently, I decided to undertake a rewatch of some of the foundational ‘texts’ of Folk Horror, starting with the film by way of which the term was coined: Blood on Satan’s Claw. Whilst the film doesn’t betray any explicit Lovecaftian influences, it struck me as being very Machenesque in parts - to the extent that I can’t help wondering if Machen’s work had an influence on the film.

I, for one, couldn’t help draw comparisons between the character of Angel Blake to both The Great God Pan’s Helen Vaughn and the unnamed narrator of The White People; the fact that local children are also inducted into monstrous rituals which the adults of the village mistake as ‘games’ also resontates with tropes found both in The White People, as well as in some of Machen’s tales which invoke the Tylwyth Teg of Welsh legendry. Whilst the film’s plot seemingly deals with a category of Judeo-Christian demonic evil, the origin of that evil in a plough furrow (and in the form of a strange, inhuman skull) perhaps speaks to a different, more primal and earthly horror; Machen’s notion of Sin (with a capital ‘S’) - treated in The White People as a horrifying transgression of the natural order - also seems apposite here, especially so given that both Machen’s ‘Sin’ and the manifest evil in Blood on Satan’s Claw lead - a la The Novel of the White Powder - to irruptions of physical corruption upon the human body. But then perhaps I’m reading a little too much into this...

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.282: The Weird and the Eerie

The Weird and the Eerie was Mark Fisher’s final book - and a fitting eulogy to its author.

Mark and I both worked in two of the same institutions, and I knew him in passing - he also invited me to give a paper at the Lovecraft-themed Weird Theory symposium held at Goldsmiths back in (I think) 2007. I hope he didn’t regret that, as the paper I delivered was, frankly, fucking awful; even so, that event exposed me to an emergent body of academic philosophical theory in which Lovecraft was placed front and centre, and has led me to a far more mature and nuanced theoretical understanding of Lovecaft’s intersections with occultism and popular culture (a radically-revised version of my Weird Theory piece will, hopefully, be appearing in a volume on accelerationism and the occult next year).

In any case, The Weird and the Eerie is an outstanding set of bite-sized essays which pointedly analyse the categories of weird and eerie fiction, and trace the development of those categories in the work of classic authors of the genres such as Lovecaft and James, as well as in that of more contemporary artists such as Mark E. Smith and David Lynch.

Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.281: The Immaculate Void

Brian Hodge’s The Immaculate Void dropped through my letterbox earlier today, and I’m already a third of the way through it. I’m not rntirely sure where this is going, but The Immaculate Void is revealing itself to be an outstanding piece of modern cosmic horror, which intertwines the very earthly horrors perpetrated by a serial child murderer with the inexplicable disappearance of one of Jupiter’s moons...

Definitely one to check out.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.280: The Fourth Kind

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Despite not being held in high regard by many sci-fi or horror fans, The Fourth Kind is not only one of my favourite horror movies, but also an excellent cinematic treatment of Lovecraftian themes - albeit unintentionally so. In the latter regard, as an attempt to fictionalise some key contemporary ufological themes (particularly as they pertain to the notion of ancient aliens), The Fourth Kind draws upon Lovecraftian tropes only insofar as the likes of Jason Colavito (and to some extent myself) have tried to trace the historical interweaving of pulp Lovecraftianism into what has come to constitute modern ufo conspiracy lore.

Dealing with alien abductions which appear to be afflicting the citizens of the small town of Nome, Alaska, The Fourth Kind also recapitulates a kind of Lovecraftian verisimilitude via its use of a partially-documentary style - an affectation used as the means of reinforcing the movie’s claim that it is based on a true story (which it is not); a Lovecraftian aesthetic is further evident in building a sense of nameless, existential dread specifically by not showing the aliens, but instead presenting the viewer with the horrifying aftermath of encounters with them: this is powerfully represented in one scene where, as a consequence of his experiences, an abductee is driven to murder his family before taking his own life - in relation to which, The Fourth Kind frames the existence of aliens in the context of a typically Lovecraftian anti-religious nihilism which echoes Charles Fort’s dictum that we are property.

In summation, The Fourth Kind is an existentially-dark and underappreciated Lovecraftian gem of a movie, and one of the best cinematic takes on ufo and abduction conspiracies in recent years.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.279: Cthulhvian Ritual Candle Redux

The above item is a companion piece to yesterday’s offering - and was purchased from the same mysterious purveyor. The blood-red wax feels warm to the touch, and the current owner has reported experiencing strange dreams of vast, sunken, antediluvian cities designed according to a wholly alien set of architectural principles.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.278: Cthulhuvian Ritual Candle

Made from a strangely-translucent wax, this ritual candle (which seems to depict some amorphous, tentacular monstrosity) was acquired under somewhat mysterious circumstances from a nameless vendor somewhere in Providence, Rhode Island, toward the end of 2017. At present, the item is in the possession of a Doctor of the Material Sciences, who is currently investigating the curious properties of the waxen substance from which the peculiar idol is fashioned.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.277: Silurid Miniature Madness

Malifaux - a small-scale skirmsh mniatures wargame with a Wild West/Steampunk/horror theme - was a game I played with some regularity about 7 or 8 years ago; I even participated in a tournament back in tne day (placing second-from-last). My favourite models in the game were always Malifaux’s Deep One analogue, the Silurids: primordial aquatic humanoids who arise from the swamps and lakes of the world of Malifaux when the stars are right.

The above model is one of my favourites from the original Silurid range: the Silurid Brood Mother. Whilst I never had the opportunity to field the Brood Mother in any of my games, I recall that in the first iteration if the rules, a unit of three vanilla Silurids made for a pretty effective alpha-strike kill-team (that being a wargaming technical term). I never managed to work out how to use them effectively to that end, though.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.276: Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’

Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond is in my top five favourite horror films of all time (which also includes Berberian Sound Studio and - perhaps somewhat controversially - Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem), and is the second entry of Fulci’s classic ‘Gates of Hell’ trilogy, all of which I saw as part of a Fulci triple bill one Sunday afternoon at the Prince Charles cinema in Leicester Square (and I can’t think of a better place for a first introduction to Fulci). As with The City of the Living Dead (the first entry into the trilogy), The Beyond lightly references the Lovecraft mythos - although the latter movie’s Lovecraftian roots are also evident in its oneiric qualities (opting for nightmarish mood over plot), and in the bleak hopelessness of its denouement; for the very same reasons, this is a challenging film for those expecting standard horror tropes presented in the format of a linear narrative - but a masterwork nonetheless.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.275: The Dark Brood

My visit to the Tabletop Gaming Live event last weekend also netted me the most recent Cthulhu Hack rpg supplement, The Dark Brood: a sourcebook covering the use of Shub Niggurath in games of Cthulhu Hack. Shub Niggurath is perhaps both the entity which is most often mentioned in Lovecraft’s fiction, but also one of the more obscure of the beings of the Cthulhu mythos, and certainly The Dark Brood offers solid advice in terms of how to use Shub Niggurath and its progeny as the focal point of scenarios.

This being an OSR supplement, it also includes random tables. Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.274: Cthulhu Invictus

This is the third iteration of Oscar Rios’ Cthulhu Invictus, which transports both Lovecraft’s fictive mythos and the investigative tropes of the Call of Cthulhu rpg to the setting of Classical Rome - a setting for which Lovecraft himself expressed a cultural and aesthetic attachment.

For my part, I’ve long harboured the desire to run a game of CoC in an ancient Romano-British setting, so it is rather surprising that it has taken me so long to procure a copy of Cthulhu Invictus; regardless, this is a very fine volume, which is not only carefully researched and chock full of useful information for both players and Keepers of the game, but is also beautifully illustrated with full-colour art throughout (of particular note is the front cover, which playfully references Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, and which also drew me to this volume).

The pdf can be purchased here from Golden Goblin press; it should also be available in hardcopy - along with a Cthulhu Invictus Keeper’s screen - sometime in the not-too-distant future.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.273: A Night in the Lonesome October Audiobook

We return once more to that time of the year marked by some Lovecraftians by an annual re-read of A Night in the Lonesome October: Roger Zelazney’s whimsical novel of talking animals, classic horror and literary icons, and a strange ritual whose outcome on All Hallows Eve may decide the fate of the world - all told from the perspective of a watchdog called Snuff.

Helpfully divided into 31 chapters (if one ignores the prologue), it has become something of a tradition to read a chapter of the book each day throughout October. The version of the book showcased here is the wonderful audiobook version, narrated by Zelazny himself - a nice alternative to hardcopy or ebook editions if audiobook is your thing (although this iteration is, of course, missing the 31 Gahan Wilson illustrations which grace each of the chapters, and which add so much to the experience of reading the novel).

I purchased a downloadable version of the audiobook from a US website some years ago, the location of which currently eludes me - it does, however, appears to be available in CD format from various sources, and is also available on YouTube. In any case, if you have not read A Night in the Lonesome October, now is the perfect time to acquaint yourself with this playfully strange sojourn into the October Country.