TC editors advertising (I refuse to use the term “pimping”) their personal literary items for sale has a long history here on the blog. Check out this post by Leo Grin (and several subsequent).
Times are dire here in serpent-haunted SEK. Musing on such, a decision was reached by yours truly. Time to lighten the load for the journey into the future.
Mythos Con, a new convention celebrating the life and works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, is scheduled for January 6 to 9, 2011, in Phoenix, Arizona. It will feature art, merchants, movies, panels and games. A large number of writers, artists and film makers will attend, including contributors to the Cimmerian print journal like Donald Sidney-Fryer and Chuck Hoffman.
You can find more details on the official website by clicking here.
Thanks to Grim Blogger for the heads-up.
Among Steve Tompkins’ many interesting blog entries written here on The Cimmerian, there was this piece about Lovecraft-inspired motions pictures. The movie he was looking forward to see (as I am), Del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness, is not even in production yet, but another story written by the Man from Providence should make it to the silver screen sooner. Thanks to Grim Blogger, I learned a few days ago that the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society had released a new trailer for their adaptation of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s horror/science-fiction short story first published in the August 1931 issue of Weird Tales, ”The Whisperer in Darkness.” The film is supposed to be released in October.
Beware, Howard fans, viewing the video embedded in this blog post (thanks to shieldbrother Al for helping out someone who is only semi-literate with computers) might be painful. To see the (impressive) effort of a bunch of enthusiasts, who are genuinely caring for the source material, with this attempt to adapt their favorite’s author creation into film format, is something we’re not accustomed too. No compromise, no update of the story to a contemporary setting in a lame effort to please a modern audience; just the honest attempt to adapt faithfully on the silver screen what was written in the tale. In short, a purist’s dream come true. Exactly what has always been needed for movies based on Robert E. Howard’s stories, and never been supplied. When will the Texan’s tales get this kind of treatment?
Author John Pelan, editor of Centipede’s Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, has included Robert E. Howard “Pigeons from Hell,” H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider,” C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau,” Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Dark Eidolon,” Fritz Leiber’s “Horrible Imagings,” Lord Dunsany’s “Thirteen at Table,” H. G. Wells “The Valley of the Spiders,” Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks“ and Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar” in The Century’s Best Horror Fiction.
This massive (one hundred stories, nearly sixteen hundred pages and over seven hundred thousand words of fiction!) two-volume set anthology by Cemetery Dance Publications is heading to the printer this summer. John Pelan did only one selection per author and has chosen one tale per each year of the twentieth century (1901-2000) as the most notable story of that year. Robert E. Howard’s masterpiece fits right in.
For those heel-dragging Luddites who still see no use in social/business networking sites, I submit this member’s entry at LinkedIn. Whilst I would aver that some of the info presented on the LinkedIn page of His Sleepiness might smack of both bravado and bragadaccio (and it also displays a poor command of the English language; which is understandable, considering his foreign national status), the bottom line is that The Big C is a mover n’ shaker with an absolutely fanatical grass-roots movement behind him. His message, in a nutshell, is “Change.” Now that he’s begun to use the Interwebs in a strategic fashion, I really don’t see anything that can stop him. Log in (while there’s still time) and become wild and free. The stars are right.
*My thanks to Metallica for the headline…
I was highly honored to be asked to contribute to “The Challenge From Beyond” yarn, along with you, Miss Moore, Merritt, and Long. I hope my share didn’t weaken the strength of the story too much. The rest of you did fine work, as you all always do. Appearing in a such a company will probably remain my chief claim to fame.
– Robert E. Howard, letter to H. P. Lovecraft, 5th December 1935
Twenty-three years ago today, the reign of Catherine Lucille Moore, the first Queen of Sword-and-Sorcery, came to an end. Miss Moore occupies a vital place in the history of modern fantasy and science-fiction, for not only was she one of the pioneering female speculative fiction authors, but she created what may be the archetypal Sword-and-Sorcery heroine in Jirel of Joiry. Howard’s famous self-deprecation notwithstanding, the fact Howard put Moore on the same level as Lovecraft, Merritt and Long gives an idea of just how great she was.
Being so new to The Cimmerian, I never met Steve Tompkins personally (living in Australia, I’d have found it hard) or, sadly, corresponded with him while he was still living. So all I know of him comes from my reading his posts and articles — but they say quite a lot. It’s clear that Steve Tompkins is a great loss.
I’ve been reading his contributions on The Cimmerian since I first became aware of the website, though I haven’t by any means perused them all, and won’t have time to before the anniversary of his death on the 23rd. But after reading just some of his offerings, I can fully believe the statement concerning him in About The Bloggers that “he was likely the single most well-read individual in all of fantasy fandom” and “one of the field’s most perceptive, unique and delightful critics.” These are tributes whose dead-on-target truth is conspicuous. Steve Tompkins had wit, perception, wide-ranging knowledge and a command of language that allowed him to express all these with enormous readability.
This means something — actually, a lot — to me personally, since Mr. Tompkins said very kind things about my work, even going so far as to compare Ravens’ Gathering with Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga — a compliment that literally made my jaw sag. If you haven’t read the Saga of King Hrolf Kraki as Anderson recounts it, and don’t, you’ll be robbing yourself.
Even an incomplete reading of what Steve Tompkins produced shows how broad his tastes were, and all of it was stimulating. “Green Hell, Golden Civilization,” about Fawcett’s discovery of unexpectedly great achievements in the Amazon basin by its native peoples, made me vow, “I have to find out more about this!” (and I will). His three-part essay, ”Derleth Be Not Proud,” (nice pun) showed genuine appreciation of Lovecraft’s work and a far more erudite knowledge of his influence than I have. It taught me plenty about it that I hadn’t known before.
“Thongor. Brak. Conan. One of These Things Is Not Like the Others … “ is such a spirited, passionate — and cogent — defence of REH’s unique quality as a writer that I’ll bet money, if an afterlife exists, Steve is hoisting a beer — or a large Jack Daniels — with Robert E. Howard right now, and that they are finding each other congenial.
That George MacDonald Fraser, Arthur C. Clarke and Charlton Heston were members of his personal pantheon along with Howard is further proof that we’d have been compatible. Maybe our opinions would have differed sometimes, but I can be sure that Steve’s would always have been well-informed and provided food for thought. With regard to the men mentioned above, I trust Steve Tompkins is having a drink with them too.
Considering that all of them are gone from us makes me remember some words from another MacDonald. John D., through the mouth of his high-level beach bum and retriever, Travis McGee. “They keep emptying out the world. The good ones all stand on trapdoors so cunningly fitted into the woodwork that you don’t see them until it’s too late. And they keep pulling those lousy trip cords.”
Exactly one year ago, on March 23, 2009, Steve Tompkins passed. Tempus fugit…
Morgan Holmes once wrote on the REHupa blog how he mourned the loss of his friend. He noted back then that some Cimmerian bloggers never knew Steve Tompkins. Indeed, I had not that privilege. When our managing editor Deuce Richardson asked me to join the shieldwall, one of my fears was that my English would not be up to the standards that TC’s readers were accustomed to. Steve Tompkins’ essays — his weekly production was above and beyond mere “blogging” — set a high standard. I don’t even think that my mastery of French equals his English skills, so how could my skills in the latter language be good enough to not disappoint? I would probably have had about the same feeling if Deuce had asked my overweight self to run after Usain Bolt!
Lovecraft was no fan of the cinema, and it could be argued that his disdain for moving pictures has been returned by a seemingly endless torrent of laughable and unfaithful film adaptations. Still, HPL was always a champion of the amateur artiste. Keeping that fact in mind, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to think that ”Uncle Theobald” (as REH called him) would approve of the ten-minute film recently posted to Youtube which adapts his tale, “The Silver Key.”
One would have to look hard for a more fitting story to commemorate the anniversary of the passage from this mortal coil by the Man from Providence. Lovecraft always seemed fond of the tale, and Robert E. Howard expressed his deep admiration for it at least once. While an “update” in temporal terms, the short film seems to capture a bit of the atmosphere that the Great Old One strove for.
The 14th of March is the nativity of Algernon Blackwood, who was a marked influence on H.P. Lovecraft. In a bit of cosmic coincidence, the 15th of March was an anniversary for the Rhode Island Raconteur, but it would mark that other defining day of a man’s existence on Earth. As with Gaius Julius Caesar, the Ides of March would see Lovecraft pass from this plane of existence through the Veil of Negative Existence.
Even since that day, the shade of Lovecraft has cast a dark shadow over the field of weird fiction–and in my personal reading.
