The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.303: The London Horror Festival Ephemera

As per Monday’s post, I only attended one event from this year’s London Horror Festival, which continues to run for a few more days; on that occasion, I picked up a copy of this years’s programme, which includes a few pieces of Lovecraftian fare, including Asenath’s Tale - one of the highlights of the London Lovecraft Festival which took place earlier in the year, and which you can catch at the Red Lion Theatre for the next three days.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No. 302: Tentacular Ritual Wand

This tentacular wand was used in the invocation and evocation of monstrous cosmic entities during a series of occult workings which took place in North London during the early 2000s, and it is rumoured that the owner of the wand disappeared suddenly and unexpectedly towards the end of this cycle of rituals; to this day, the other participants in these occurences refuse to talk about events surrounding the apparently-disasterous culmination of this sequence of esoteric workings. Through a series of extremely strange circumstances, this curious item has found its way into my possession. 

The thing resonates with the nauseous astral vibrations of the blasphemous cosmic abnormalities it was used to call up, such that few can stand to remain in its presence for more than a few minutes.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.301: Providence - The Shadow Over Lovecraft

I have avoided the London Horror Festival this year, largely on account of the fact that I’m not entirely convinced that the festival really takes theatrical horror seriously, given that the majority of the plays being presented this year explicitly frame themselves as horror-comedy. The festival has been going more and more in this direction in the last couple of years and, whilst I don’t have anything against horror-comedy, it is something which is difficult to do well; indeed, all of the productions I saw in 2017 and 2016 which fell into this category were not only lazily-written, but lacked a solid understanding of the genre, going instead for the comedy angle based on the assumption that horror tropes are relatively easy to make fun of. Even so, it is still the case that if you try to make fun of something lazily and badly, you are going to produce a bad, lazy play.

Providence: The Shadow Over Lovecraft does, indeed, address its subject matter from the standpoint of (almost) physical comedy - I went to see it because I felt that I should make the effort to attend at least one performance of something from the festival this year - but also because, despite its comedic tenor, the play had received some excellent reviews during its run at the Edinburgh Fringe.

And I have to admit, this is one of those rare occasions where the comedy is effectively integrated into a sense of horror - in this instance, in the context of a whistlestop tour of Lovecaft’s life and philosophy, with Edgar Allen Poe as the tour guide, and poignantly incorporating the deep flaws of both Lovecraft and Poe as a commentary on the failings of the modern world. Whilst unintentional, the play’s focus on Lovecraft’s antisemitism - anchored as it is in the play to some of his more virulently genocidal outbursts - functions as a powerful pronouncement on the recent tragic events in Pittsburgh, and on how we have come to find ourselves in this particularly terrifying contemporary moment.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.300: Elder Thing Pod

This curious, fossilised object was purportedly discovered upon a nameless plateau near the centre of the Antarctic continent at some point in the 1930s, and was forwarded to me by Prof. Prentiss of Miskatonic Unversity’s Faculty of Geology and Earth Sciences. Since its recent rediscovery within the faculty’s archives, three graduate students tasked with determining the nature of the fossil have either died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances. The item currently sits in my cabinet of curiosities, where its malign, antediluvian influence is held in check by sigils of aversion and powerful apotropaic wards.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.299: The Gods of Easter Island

I had a pleasant surprise ths morning when I discovered The Gods of Easter Island and other Poems  on my doorstep: a CD produced by Fedogan and Bremer, collecting some of Robert E. Howards best weird poetry, and read by the redoutable Donald Sydney-Fryer. Nice.

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.298: We Don’t Go Back

Folk Horrorists in recent years have recognised some significant points of intersection between Folk Horror and Lovecraftian horror - I have contributed in a small way to occasional online debates  around this issue, and last year’s The Horsingdon Transmissions were my own attempts at opening up the space in which Folk Horror, Urban Wyrd, Speculative Horror, and Lovecraftian Cosmicism overlap and co-exist (as something of an aside, I’m laying claim here to having established a new category of horror with The Horsingdon Transmissions: Suburban Wyrd).

In any case, I’ve finally found time to start reading  Howard David Ingham’s We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror, which contains a short (but instructive) section on Lovecraftian Folk Horror - indeed, the relative brevity of this section would be one of my criticisms of the book (along with the fact that it is otherwise a little overlong - probably on account of it stretching the definition of what constitues Folk Horror to encompass films whose inclusion here is, perhaps, questionable); these minor points aside, We Don’t Go Back is a thoroughly enjoyable read, and a useful starting point for those wishing to investigate the field of cinematic Folk Horror.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.297: The Eye of Hastur

Back in the 80s, gamebooks were a big thing, with many a young person getting their first taste of fantasy roleplaying through the likes of the now classic Fighting Fantasy series; indeed, the genre focus of many of these books was epic fantasy along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons. Horror did, however, occasionally rear its ugly head, and with the success of the Call of Cthulhu rpg, the Fighting Fantasy series went on to include an entry of (largely non-Lovecaftian) modern horror in the form of the (now classic) House of Hell; there was also the short lived Forbidden Gateways series, which tried to transport something akin to the Cthulhu mythos into the gamebook format; however, other than occasional nods to Lovecraft, this was pretty much  all there was by way of Lovecraftian horror in gamebook format (not forgetting, of course, the solitaire scenarios which Chaosium produced for Call of Cthulhu).

Until now. Until The Eye of Hastur - the first (and here’s hoping the last) of the Make Your Fate series. Granted, this seems to be written with young adults in mind, but I can’t see that it would take your average twelve year old more than fifteen minutes to successfully navigate what counts for a plot here to the conclusion of the book (I can attest to the fact that it takes about ten minutes fir your average, intellectually-challenged fifty-year old to attain this lofty goal). Add to that a woefully askew understanding of the Cthulhu mythos. Hold on to your sanity indeed.

One to avoid.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.296: The Void

Whilst 2016’s The Void evidences a strong Lovecraftian tone, it is Lovecraft filtered through the aesthetic and directorial lens of John Carpenter, with shades of Assault on Precint 13 and Prince of Darkness, as well a signifcant nod to the practical effects of The Thing; there is also a touch of Fulci there, with echoes of The Beyond in The Void’s denouement. So, whilst The Void presents itself as an orginal piece, it is also very much a homage; even so, it is a fine movie which should appeal to Lovecraft and Carpenter fans alike.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.295: A Map of Dunwich

A fascination with the cartographies of the unreal almost seems as if it might be an intrinsic predisposition within ‘typical’ geek psychology. Of course, the modern progenitor of the trend of mapping fantastic realms (or at least the person who popularised it) is Tolkien - although I think prior to this Lovecraft and Howard had already been informal sketching out the topographies of their worlds; even so, since the Tolkien explosion of the 60s and 70s, it seems to be an unspoken rule that, for any work of epic fantasy to be considered complete, it has to come with a map.

This trend has, perhaps, been less the case with sci-fi and horror: in the former instance, due in part to the vast scope of the fictive space often surveyed; in the latter instance, perhaps as a result of the seeming banality of the real/everyday world upon which horror eventually intrudes (and in both cases - as with the best fanasy [M. John Harrison’s work being a case in point] - there may be more of an interest in charting the complex interiorities of the protaganists rather than those of their physical environment).

In addition to which, the literature of horror does not often lend itself to the extended develoment of a world or locatin in the same way that multi-volume works of epic fantasy do. Lovecraft is, of course, an exception to this - especially where the imaginary New England of his Cthulhu mythos is concerned. Even so, Lovecaftian cartographies are rarely included in published volumes of Cthulhu mythos fiction; however, the one place where such cartographies are present is gaming products. Hence today’s offering: a map of the rural region Dunwich found in Chaosium’s supplement of the same name for the Call of Cthulhu rpg.

For my own part, I have a particular fascination with collecting maps of Lovecraftian realms, and I’m hoping to direct this interest down a more scholarly route - perhaps by way of developing an academic project focusing on imaginary cartographies and world-building in geek culture...

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.294: Ritual Death Whistle

Possibly of antique Mesoamerican provenance, this ritual death-whistle - sent to me for safe-keeping by Prof. Joseph Broers of the Miskatonic University’s Department of Archaeology - formed into the semblance of some hitherto unknown squid-like deity; it is rumoured that those who heed the whistle’s keening wail are, forever after, afflicted with disturbing dreams and spontaneous, horrifying visions of some vast and monstrously antediluvian city rising from the depths of the oceans to herald the end of all things.

Needless to say, this strange artefact is now safetly ensconced within my cabinet of curiousities, where its malign influence can be contained by powerful apotropaic sigils and formulae of warding.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.293: The Great God Pan (Redux)

As if I don’t already have enough versions of Machen’s The Great God Pan, this hardback edition by Oxford University Press not only comes with a very nicely-designed cover, but is both very affordable and, along with the eponymous novel, also collects pretty much all of my favourite Machen tales - in addition to which, the volume contains some rather interesting annotations.

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.