Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.39: Fear the Future!

Today's item is a set of H.P. Lovecraft tarot cards, produced by Mythos Books and published in 2002. Apparently these are a bit of a rarity. These are one of five sets of Lovecraft-themed tarot cards I own, along with two Lovecraftian ouija boards - all of which, no doubt, will make an appearance here at a later date. I have to say, though, that there is something a little curious about basing an oracular system upon Lovecraft's cosmic futilitarianism; indeed, I have only used these once, and what I read in the cards on that occasion makes me fear not only for my own future, but also for that of the entire human species...

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.38: Illuminatus!

The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson isn't something that tends to register on lists of Cthulhu mythos fiction, despite the fact that this countercultural classic not only includes mention of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones (the 'Lloigor') as part of a complex conspiratorial melange, but Lovecraft himself makes an appearance whilst Yog Sothoth has a not insignificant role to play in the denouement of the trilogy. I'm also convinced that Charles Stross' use of Yog Sothoth in his novelette A Colder War was inspired by Shea and Anton Wilson's horrific treatment of that entity as 'The Eater of Souls' in the Illuminatus! books.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.37: A curiously stoppered bottle and a tale of necromancy

I acquired this item from an artist-sorcerer who currently resides in or near an English coastal town of questionable repute. It contains certain essential saltes, about which I will not speak here – other than to say that there exists a Fraternal Order whose members are party to the truth of the matter, and who will recall that, some years ago, I undertook a certain journey to a certain burying-ground, at which certain artefacts were buried, and from which certain materials were procured, thence to be apportioned out to the adherents of that Dark Brotherhood. These things aside, I always ensure that the correct formula (in the descending mode) is to hand when dealing with the contents of this vessel.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.36: The Magical Revival

Whilst the Simon Necronomicon is probably the best known (not to say most notorious) Lovecraftian occult text, it was predated by Kenneth Grant’s The Magical Revival. If not the first book to interrogate the Lovecraftian milieu from an esoteric standpoint, Grant’s work offers (at least to my mind), some very creative insights into occult uses of Lovecraft’s fictive mythology. That said, Grant’s writing is at times all but impenetrable – especially if one goes into reading his work unprepared (some nominal knowledge of Aleister Crowley’s life and work is useful, if not necessary).

I discovered The Magical Revival (in the original Fredrich Muller edition) in my local library around the age of 11, practically alongside the Derleth volumes I have previously documented. I barely understood it then, but read it because it mentioned Lovecraft. That the local librarian allowed my 11 year old self to borrow a book of weird, spooky occult shit might seem a little odd; but then all the librarians in my library were hippies and this was, after all, Britain in the 1970s, when it was quite acceptable for Doctor Who to scare the shit out of children at teatime, and when the youth of the day were subjected to a barrage of public safety films involving children dying horribly on farms. And quite right too.

I eventually began collecting Grant’s Typhonian Trilogies (nine books in total) in the 1990s when Skoob Books began reissuing his older work as well as printing the final, previously unpublished volumes of the trilogies. I am fortunate in possessing a complete set, including the extremely rare final two volumes. Fortunately, Starfire Publishing are current republishing the trilogies in their entirety. The edition presented here is the Starfire printing.

All in all, I owe a significant debt to Grant, as his work proved formative in helping me develop some of the key theoretical orientations that informed my doctoral thesis which, in turn (for better or worse), led me to where I am now.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.35: I am a patron of Yog Sothoth!

Today's offering is an Elder Sign cloisonné badge which I received for my patronsge of Yog-Sothoth.com. I became a patron of the site when owner/administrator Paul of Cthulhu (who I finally got to meet at NecronomiCon 2015) introduced the scheme a good few years ago, and am proud to remain a patron to this day. If you are not familiar with Yog-Sothoth.com, it is without doubt the premiere website for Lovecraftian gaming (with a key focus on The Call of Cthulhu rpg), and has built up a wonderful community over many years. The Yog-Sothoth.com team were also early adopters of the podcast (they were podcasting well before it became the popular media format it is today) - indeed, it was through the site that I heard my very first podcast.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.34: Still no hot water, but at least I have this...

I remain without the luxury of hot water, so it seems appropriate to display this vanity pack which I 'liberated' from the bathroom of my room in The Old Court Bed & Breakfast, where I stayed during my second trip to Providence in 2011 - a hostelry located almost opposite from the real world analogue of the Shunned House on Benefit Street.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.33: 'They are lean and athirst...'

Aside from being incredibly busy this week, I have have just discovered that I have no hot water in my apartment! That said, a week of cold showers in unlikely to cool my ardour for things Lovecraftian - although expect greater brevity where my posts are concerned over the next few days.

Today's piece is a rare example of one of those most curious of mythos beasts, the Hounds of Tindalos, having been given sculptural form. This is by the redoubtable Joe Broers - I love the sense of langiud menace that inhabits the piece.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No. 32: The Arkham House Companion

Despite my passion for things Lovecraftian, I’ve never been much in the way of an Arkham House collector (I estimate that I own about 25 Arkham House books). That said, if there is one thing that could possibly inspire me to collect Arkham House titles, it would be Sheldon Jaffery’s The Arkham House Companion – a detailed listing (with commentary) of  every Arkham House book published up until, I think, the mid-1980s. I picked this up from The House on the Borderland (a specialist bookshop in Peterborough which, sadly, is no more) sometime back in the early or mid-1990s.

In those heady, pre-internet days, hunting Lovecraftiana was much more of a challenge; there was a certain savour when one occasioned upon a rarity at a secondhand bookstall or charity shop which one rarely encounters since the advent of Amazon, ABE books, and the ready availability of previous rarities in digital format…but this was, as my father is sometimes still prone to wax lyrical about, ‘back in the olden days’.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.31: Arkham Horror

Today’s post marks something of an early landmark in the Lovecraftian Thing A Day series of ‘microblogs’; and now I have managed to submit at least one blog post per day for the entirety of January 2016, I’d like to take a little bit of time to explain what this is all about.

Whispers from the Ghooric Zone started up back in 2013, and has, at best, been rather erratic with regards the regularity of posts. I resurrected the blog (for the second time) back in November 2015 (in part inspired by my time at NecronomiCon in Providence that year). Whilst I had a lot of ideas (along with plentiful notes) for some of the things I intended to talk about, work and life interceded to such a degree that I wasn’t able to submit the intended weekly posts. I write regularly, but even so am a slow writer at the best of times – but I am also a great believer in the dictum that writing begets writing.

So, in a fit of pique and frustration at lack of progress with the blog, on  New Year’s Eve 2015 I determined that I would embark on the present enterprise: the intention being that, daily for the entirety of 2016, I would present an item or object from my collection of Lovecraftiana along with a short commentary on the piece – in part as a placeholder for what would hopefully become regular posts on more substantive topics (yet to appear!), but also as a means of encouraging me to engage in regular ‘creative’ writing via the pressure I’d put myself under by doing this publicly and via social media.

On which point, I am fully aware of how egocentric the daily presentation of my collection of Lovecraftian odds and ends might appear – and indeed it  seems pointless  denying that is the case. Even so, the series so far has proven very productive personally: some of the items have evoked memories of times and events That were all but forgotten; others have led to short forays into a kind of flash fiction, leading me to wonder if I might be able to create some kind of narrative continuity throughout the series, perhaps facilitating its transformation into another kind of creative work. In the former case, I’m quite surprised by just how odd certain of my experiences around the Lovecraft milieu have been; with regard to which, in the latter instance, I will leave it to you, good reader, to judge which of my stories really are accounts of genuine experiences, and which are fictions…

…And so on to today's Lovecraftian Thing A Day, which I acquired, at the age of 19, from Games Workshop’s original store at Dalling Road in Hammersmith during the Summer of 1987. Unfortunately that copy met its demise due to a severe case of mold in the early 1990s: the one displayed here I picked up about 6 years ago on eBay. I bought the original copy a couple of months before I was to leave my familial home for the first time and head off to the University of Leeds to begin a Religious Studies degree:  a move that was to have a significant impact upon the overall trajectory of my life and career, as doing religious studies led me directly to the study of anthropology (I am now a lecturer in that discipline at Goldsmiths College, the University of London); it was also in Leeds that I first encountered the contemporary esoteric practice of Chaos magick, which in turn has led me to explore the intersections between Lovecraft and esotericism for the better part of my academic career. Whilst I was never directly involved in Chaos Magick in Leeds during the time I was there (I returned to London in 1995), I was often on the periphery of the scene: at one time I worked next door to Id Aromatics – an aromatherapy shop where I used to pick up copies of Chaos International, and which was either owned or managed by Dave Lee (who later become the head of the Illuminates of Thanateros). For a time I lived on Burley Lodge Road, virtually opposite to the notorious UK occult shop The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. This was also where I bought my first copy of the Simon Necronomicon as well as Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut. Towards the end of my time in Leeds, I also had the opportunity to meet Brian Ward, who supplied the Lovecraftian illustrations to Carroll’s book – and therein lies a tale which I will relate as part of a later Lovecraftian Thing A Day.

These thing aside, Arkham Horror resurrected my love for gaming (which had waned as I entered my later teenage years) and inspired an interest in solitaire gaming which continues to this day – certainly one of the threads which will continue to weave itself through this series is the degree to which Lovecraftian tropes have become integral to contemporary tabletop gaming culture.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.30: Nightgaunt! Nightgaunt!

I received this Nightgaunt statuette as a gift some years ago. Nightgaunts have always been one of my favourite of Lovecraft's creations which, thinking about it, is a little odd: they are, after all, also one of the more conventional beasts of the Cthulhu mythos in their resemblance to the traditional devils of Christian iconography (horned, bat-winged and barbed of tail). What distinguishes them, of course, is their hideous facelessness...

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.29: Cacophony

In parts almost unlistenable - and virtually musically-unclassifiable - the first (and perhaps best) Lovecraftian concept album: Cacophony by British anarcho-punk popular beat combo Rudimentary Peni. 'Gentlemen Prefer Blood' in which, apparently, Michael Nyman meets a fireman, is one of my favourites. This aside, the album is lyrically rich and, at least in my opinion, musically very Lovecraftian (but in an atonal-piping-mindless-Daemon-Sultan kind of a way). Listen. Enjoy. Let your ears bleed.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.28: Lovecraft and Spare

I have to thank Michael Chislett, writer of Machenesque strange stories and Clark Ashton Smith aficionado, (and, as I understand it, occasional wanderer through the haunted terrains of New Cross) who, a few years ago, pointed me in the direction of the subject of today’s post.

In a letter from Smith to Lovecraft from sometime between February and March 1934, Smith reveals that Lovecraft was aware of the work of occult artist Austin Osman Spare. For those unfamiliar with Spare, he inhabits a key position in the Lovecraftian 'Nightside’ occultism of Kenneth Grant (who in turn has played a central role in popularising occult interpretations of Lovecraft’s work). Apparently Grant also introduced Spare to Lovecraft’s writings, supposedly leading Spare to produce a couple of paintings inspired by Lovecraft (detailed in Kenneth and Steffi Grant’s Zos Speaks!, in which reproductions of said paintings appear).

The following quotation from the letter in question indicates that Lovecraft’s knowledge of Spare came from a magazine or newspaper article:

     'Your mixed assortment of clippings went back with the books. Among these, I was especially
     taken with the drawings of the London artist, Spare. The man certainly must have had a vision of
     paganry and demonry! His drawings remind me of Machen’s “The Great God Pan.” He’d
     certainly be an ideal illustrator for that story, and also for “The White People.” There is grand
     literary material in those ruins.’

So it appears that the clipping Lovecraft sent Smith contained samples of Spare’s work; if the statement regarding ‘ruins’ also pertains to this, it offers a tantalising hint as to the identity of the image or images in question. An intriguing little literary and artistic mystery, I'm sure you’ll agree. A cursory review of missives from the same period in the other volumes of Lovecraft’s letters I possess seem not to include any other mention of Spare. In any case, the above quotation can be found on page 254 of The Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith which, of course, is today’s Lovecraftian Thing A Day. You’re welcome.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.27: Castle Amber

It's a virtual truism now to say that Lovecraft and gaming have become almost inextricably linked, with Lovecraftian themes and tropes populating much of the world of rpgs, board games, card games and video games. I've previously indicated the important role played by The Call of Cthulhu rpg in popularising the mythos and leading many people to Lovecraft’s writings. And whilst Tolkien is rightly cited as the key influence upon much of the fantasy gaming genre, Lovecraft is never far behind (or, in today’s case, lurking in the background by proxy).

Thus I present one of my all-time favourite pieces of Lovecraftian gaming history: Castle Amber, an adventure module for the Expert edition of Dungeons & Dragons published by TSR in 1981. Whilst this is a (wonderfully sandboxy and Poe-esque) gaming simulation of Clark Ashton Smith’s fictive medieval French province of Averoigne, Smith’s tales of this imaginary region make a good few references to the mythos – some of which make their appearance here. Except for the occasional hobgoblin, this module is also notable for its avoidance of typical Tolkienesque fantasy fare: no orcs, elves, dragons or dwarves here.

Less a scenario than a mini-campaign, I spent many memorable hours wandering the strange environs of Chateau d’Amberville and the ghoul-haunted woodlands of Averoigne.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.26: The Mask of Cthulhu.

After completing Derleth’s The Trail of Cthulhu, the next mythos tome I read – also in my local library in the above Neville Spearman edition - was The Mask of Cthulhu. I'm less fond of this than Trail, although Mask is notable for introducing Hastur as an actual mythos entity. Whilst Lovecraft mentions Hastur and the Yellow Sign, he does so fleetingly and with no clear indication of what these things are. As such, later mythos interpretations of Hastur – especially those found in The Call of Cthulhu rpg – are almost entirely dependent on Derleth. Again, I think this highlights the significant influence of Derleth on the rpg setting and, insofar as the rpg has been responsible for introducing many people to the Lovecraftian milieu, on the popularising of the mythos more generally.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.25: A Curious Postcard.

I received this curious postcard - sent anonymously from Dunwich - not long after I returned from Providence in 2001. Who could have sent it? And why? And, more to the point, what of the cryptic yet sinister Conradian inscription? Sadly, dear reader, these questions remain unanswered to this day - and perhaps they are best left so.

Lovecaftian Thing A Day No.24: An Atlas of Fantasy

In the very first post in this series I noted that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction acted as my formal introduction to Lovecaft's fictive universe, but that I had heard rumour of the Old Gent prior to my encounter with that volume. Today I present J.B. Post's An Atlas of Fantasy, published in 1973 by Mirage Press (and reprinted in an amended/expanded edition by Ballantyne In 1979). I believe that this was one of the sources of my very first encounters with the Lovecaftian milieu, containing as it did the famous Gahan Wilson map of Lovecraft's Arkham, a map the Dreamlands, alongside various maps documenting the strange worlds envisaged by others of the Lovecaft circle.

I found ths book in my local library - which, in retrospect, seems to have been on par with the Restricted/Special Collection of the Miskatonic Unversity Library with regards to the kind of eldritch tomes of forbidden lore I was able to peruse there - sometime around (I think) 1977. I distinctly recall being very taken by the the Frank Utpatel map of Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley, which led to an almost decade-long quest to track down Campbell's mythos tales (only realised in 1987 with Graftons UK paperback release of Cold Print - more of which at a later date).

I picked up this copy of An Atlas of Fantasy from the much-mourned Fantasy Centre in Holloway Road, London: until its closure, probably one of the last bastions of independent horror/fantasy/sci-fi bookselling in the British Isles (another matter to which I am sure to return).

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No. 23: A Map of the Dreamlands

This is one of my favourite decorative pieces: a massive (3ft by 2ft) framed print of Lovecraft's Dreamlands by Jason Thompson of Mockman Press. The map, in fact, includes locales not just from Lovecraft, but Lord Dunsany, Brian Lumly, Gary Myers, and others. It is a wonderfully evocative piece, and forms something of a centrepiece to my study here at Ghooric Zone Towers.

Sometimes I find myself driven almost obsessively to study the many fascinating features of the map, with a view to penetrating the nameless secrets which are doubtlessly encoded within its design. On those occasions, I almost feel as if some mystic gateway or hidden portal has wrested my consciousness from out the world of the commonplace into those very lands of wonder and horror which the map depicts. On account of the scratching and tittering that sometimes emenates from the wall behind the map, I cannot help but wonder if I have brought something back with me from those strange reveries and fantastic journeyings...

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.22: Happy Birthday REH!

As it's Robert E. Howard's birthday today, I thought something both REH & HPL related would be fitting: my (partially-read) copies of A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, published by Hippocampus Press. Sadly, this wonderful two-volume set (which includes the extant correspondence between these two giants of weird literature) currently appears to be out of print.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No. 21: Lovecraft Pyrograph

This is a pyrograph of Lovecraft by my friend Jason Tobias Oliver. I had the opportunity of watching Jason put the finishing touches to this piece in his studio about a year and a half ago. My photograph doesn't really do it justice – particularly the subtle blue-green glaze that has been applied to the image. This forms part of a series of pyrographs depicting key figures in modern occultism and horror which Jason Tobias has produced.

Lovecraftian Thing A Day No.20: The Hound

I acquired this curiosity - a jade amulet depicting a grotesque winged hound - from Joe Broers. Rumour has it that it was used in the foul rites of the corpse-eating cult of Leng. Since it has been in my possession, my sleep has often been disturbed by the weird baying of some distant beast which, nightly, seems to creep a little closer...

I think I also correct in saying that Joe's version of this amulet also appears in Arabi, a found footage short film merging Lovecraft's 'The Hound' with 'The Statement of Randolph Carter'.