The Cosmicomicon

Publishing News: Full Table of Contents and Cover Image Finally Revealed for 'Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities', Edited by Henrik Sandbeck Harksen for H. Harksen Productions

2012-03-07T12:45:00.000-08:00

Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities cover by Paul Carrick

March should be a damn good month for devoted readers - and writers - of the Weird, the Cosmic, and the Lovecraftian.

Not only will it see the release of the Aklonomicon, compiled and edited by madcap talented Aklo Press founder Ivan McCann and the legendary Joseph S. Pulver, but it will also go down in barnacled annals of history as the month that saw the release of another monumental tome, titled Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities, edited by Danish Lovecraftian/horror fiction writer, editor, publisher, and Cyclopean pillar Henrik Sandbeck Harksen, released via his extremely active H. Harken Productions, which has several fantastic books coming out this year, including The Eltdown Shards by Franklyn Searight and the Lovecraftian anthology Whisperers in Darkness, among others, listed here.

My personal tie between the Aklonomicon and Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities also extends to the artistic realm, as Paul Carrick - the conjurer who unleashed the cover above - also provided original artwork for and based on my two stories in the Aklonomicon. As mentioned previously in The Cosmicomicon, I almost can't believe that my writing is now adorned, in even a small way, by Paul's art, which has been a favorite of mine since I first stumbled across the name "Cthulhu" in some tattered tome so many gibbous moons ago. Paul is a true Lovecraftian legend, and a proud ambassador and trailblazer in the visual interpretation of things often left partially/vaguely described. He's the terrifying Cliff's Notes of Cosmic Horror and Dark Fantasy, allowing the reader a mind-bending cheat sheet in the endeavor to visualize the unnameable, helping our feeble human minds to correlate a dangerous amount of its contents. What would we do without magicians like him?

Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities has been flying under the radar for quite some time, as Henrik isn't one to flash his impressive literary plumage. So, being the often overly enthusiastic fanboy of all of my esteemed colleagues, I'll do the shouting for him, by releasing the Table of Contents below, from Henrik's recent blog on the subject:

CONTENTS:

“Dancer of the Dying” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
“The Neighbors Upstairs” by John Goodrich
“Carcosapunk” by Glynn Owen Barrass
“Architect Eyes” by Thomas Strømsholt
“Slou” by Robert Tangiers
“Ozeelah’s Lake” by Morten Carlsen
“The Statement of Frank Elwood” by Pete Rawlik
“In the Shadow of Bh’Yhlun” by Ian Davey
“The Screamer” by T. E. Grau
“Night Life” by Henrik Sandbeck Harksen
“the guilt of each … at the end…” by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

As you can see, the ToC of this anthology is noticeably sparse, reflecting a devotion to showcasing larger works in the anthology format (penned by an exciting line-up of well known names, and some that are new to my eye). This focus includes my story, "The Screamer," which is my longest piece to date, and perhaps the most personal, as it deals with the strangeness (and worse) that can fester amid the white collar, office drone high rises of west Los Angeles. "Urban" doesn't necessarily just apply to gritty streets, blighted neighborhoods, and gangland gun battles, as a deeper horror can sometimes be found in the most unexpected places.

I'll go into a bit more detail about the story once the tome is finally released, and I once again send out a barrage of electronic smoke signals to possibly annoy and hopefully delight. But for now, I wanted to get this glimpse of what's coming for you out into the ether, and plant a spore in your brain as we creep toward the anticipated birth of Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities.

Watch this space for the release announcement, and in the meantime, hazard an occasional look out those cold, office building windows. You never know what could be taking place on the other side of the glass while we all face our computerized headmasters, counting down the minutes...

Publishing News: "Ignis Fatuus" Accepted for Publication in 'Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk', Edited by Lois Gresh for PS Publishing

2012-03-01T15:22:00.001-08:00

I'm pleased as punch and proud as pie to announce that "Ignis Fatuus" - a story I co-wrote with renowned speculative fiction writer, editor, and Call of Cthulhu scenario trailblazer (and editor of my forthcoming collection) Scott David Aniolowski - was recently accepted into the forthcoming anthology Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk, edited by Stoker and Nebula award winning, six-time NY Times Bestselling author and major literary/horror personage Lois Gresh, to be released as a deluxe, signed hardcover by the excellent British horror, fantasy and sci-fi indie press PS Publishing this coming winter.

"Ignis Fatuus" is a bit of a dark, Ligottian fairy tale, told through the eyes of an aging, book-loving curmudgeon who feels most at home in the ancient Irish cemetery near his home, far from the howling neighborhood children and mechanized society that he increasingly shuns in favor of the solitude of the buried dead. It was a blast to co-write, and is based off of Scott's fantastic original idea. I grabbed his coattails and hung on tight, riding just long enough to throw in some bloated prose and a smear of unnecessary adjectives. Even with all that going against it, the finished story made it over the wall. And who says envelops full of large bills can't solve all the world's problems?

I wasn't really sure how a collaboration would play out initially, as fiction writing is such a personal undertaking, where styles are so varied and rhythms unique. As a screenwriter in a former life, I occasionally collaborated with other writers on screenplays, as a script is such a purposely stripped down blueprint as far as stylistic flourish and ownership of language. Screenwriting is meant to be somewhat cookie cutter for all of us schmucks who hadn't yet established a "brand" and earned the right (aka "been allowed") to put a personalized stamp onto a cinematic written work.

But prose is different, as prose is one's own. Unique voice is encouraged, and almost unavoidable (unless imitation is actively sought). The internal is externalized onto the page. As such, one never knows how two different people will meld their voices into a duet. And while I think Scott is a dynamite writer, I never really got the impression that we were similar stylistically. But a funny thing happens when two are of one mind, and share a devotion for the same inspirations. Throughout the process, literary alchemy took place, and in the end, an organic synthesis was achieved. This resulted in "Ignis Fatuus" emerging whole and seamless, in that not even I can tell which parts are his, and which mine. That's a good collaboration. I enjoyed the hell out of it and am quite proud of the results.

While not much has been leaked into the ether as of yet about this project (as it's still quite early), this is the most recent announcement with details from Lois' blog:
___________________________________________________________________________

In no particular order, these are the contributors to DARK FUSIONS: WHERE MONSTERS LURK.

Cody Goodfellow
Nicholas Kaufmann
Mark McLaughlin
Darrell Schweitzer
Robert M. Price
Ann Schwader
Lynn Spitz
James Alan Gardner
Michael Marano
Lisa Morton
Nick Cato
John Haefele
Christopher Fulbright
David Sakmyster
Yvonne Navarro
Nancy Kilpatrick
Scott David Aniolowski & T.E. Grau
Norman Prentiss

We have a great lineup and some terrific stories in this anthology.

Abundant thanks to Weird Fiction Master ST Joshi and Fantastic Publisher Pete Crowther!

Lois

___________________________________________________________________________

There are many eminent names on that list - some with whom I've shared anthology space in the past, and others that I have haven't yet had the honor. I'm once again humbled to be included in the company of such talented colleagues. All authors will autograph tip sheets for the deluxe edition of Dark Fusions, which is damn exciting, and should edge this antho into "must have" territory upon release.

As for my "Ignis Fatuus" writing partner and I, it's my sincere wish to continue collaborating with Scott in the future on additional stories, as we have a few other ideas under construction in the pipeline, and will release them into the wild as time, schedule, and opportunity allow. It's always a joy to work with someone so inspired and talented, and I look forward with great anticipation to our next journey into the Weird places of this world, and others.

When not kicking ass, taking names, and guiding my first collection into bookstores, Scott David Aniolowski whispers from his beloved House of Secrets.

Finally, huge thanks to Lois for publishing our story in her fantastic anthology. Purchase her extremely well-timed Hunger Games Companion here, and the rest of her TWENTY-EIGHT (yes, 28) books right about here.

Keep your eye out (like, literally right out of your pulpy gourd) for Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk at the end of this rapidly unspooling year. In the meantime, PS Publishing is putting out wicked gold every week, so sign up for their updates at their visually stimulating website, pick up a few of their monstrous tomes, then lock your doors.

Coming Soon: Laird Barron's Debut Full-Length Novel 'The Croning' from Night Shade Books, Now Available for Pre-Order

2012-02-24T17:16:00.001-08:00

I love me some Laird Barron. Yes, I know. How very original. It's like saying, "Lovecraft did some good work," or "Kubrick really knew his way around a camera." Barron has garnered awards, accolades, and acclaim by the bushel basket, and all of it has been well deserved. Hype doesn't get you very far when the proof is right there stained in black and white. He has the rep because he's earned it.

Laird Barron was one of the first living writers of speculative fiction that I read after making the leap from Lovecraft (aka "The Foundation"), and ever since then, I voraciously read and carefully collect his works like I do the old Weirdling Masters of the Pulp Golden Age - or more recently, Grau Haus faves Thomas Ligotti and T.E.D Klein. He's one of those "instant classic" sort of writers, who only come along a few times a generation. Luckily for us, he came of literary age during our time, so we can all lean back in our nano-powered rocking chairs some decades hence, whistle through our noses, and let fly a nostalgic "I remember when..."

Barron just makes it look easy. His effortless blend of the coldly cosmic with the uncomfortable heat and grit of the natural world make the everyday happenstance or forgotten patch of flyover wilderness a brush with the brutally unsettling. Danger can lurk within any shadowed vale where the old psalms are still sung. Incalculable danger waits at the end of every weed-choked country driveway. Mankind has been driven quietly mad, and is seeking to bring down Everything by unlocking the doors that were never meant to be opened. Dread drenches the Barronic air, which is what makes his fiction so engrossing, and so terrifying. I sometimes heave a sigh of relief at the end of one of his stories - not because I'm glad it's over, but that I'm glad that the poor, unlucky sap I've just been reading about for thirty pages isn't me. It's like finally waking up after a seemingly real nightmare and kissing the bedroom carpet because none of it was real.

That's what Laird Barron does. He writes nightmares that we can walk away from. And thank the mute gods, we can walk back to them, as well.

We covered the release of Barron's last book, the novella The Light is the Darkness (with a titular nod to my current musical obsession Lustmord) - masterfully crafted, bound, and published by Infernal House and Miskatonic Books - through a review by Cosmicomicon regular Alex Lugo published here back in November. Today, I'm here to bring you news of The Croning, which is his first full-length novel, published by the good peeps at Night Shade Books (who most recently brought us the fantastic The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart, which contains the epic Laird Barron tale "The Men From Porlock", which will surely go down in the annals as one of the most celebrated stories in the modern era of the genre).

From the Night Shade Books presser:

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us... Coming May 2012

Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret...

... of The Croning.

From Laird Barron, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation, comes The Croning, a debut novel of cosmic horror.

The Croning can be pre-ordered now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other larger electronic outlets.

Laird Barron by JD Busch

Just a word of caution to procrastinators: Barron's books sell out rather quickly, so don't sleep on The Croning. You need to jump on this now, before you're combing eBay for out-of-print copies, cursing your lack of foresight while bemoaning your separation from the dark, strange places that only a few left on earth can show you.

Editing News: T.E. Grau Named New Fiction Editor For Strange Aeons Magazine

2012-02-21T16:18:00.000-08:00

"Rise of Cthulhu" by Tim Vigil

Sorry to go all third person douchey in the title. I played with several different iterations, but finally just went with the facts, as I couldn't wait for propriety to strike before sharing this hugely exciting news. Truly exciting for me, obviously, but also hopefully for you as well, as I'll endeavor to cull the darkest shadows, scrape the walls of the deepest crypts, and coax the shapes that uncoil in the indecipherable void for the best speculative fiction being produced today.

Actually, what the Strange Aeons brass and I have been discussing in terms of the sort of fiction that will define that section of the magazine could better be termed as "Strange" (which flows a bit better than "Aeony"). Thomas Ligotti - in a recent interview with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer's Weird Fiction Review - described his writing as being best defined as "uncanny," which differs slightly from your garden variety Weird lit. This is how I view the fiction that will be requested, and ultimately accepted, for publication in Strange Aeons. We want something totally unique, edgy, genre-defying. Something horrific, unsettling, eminently mind bending. It can be loud. It can be quiet. It can be both, or neither. We desire something uniquely Strange, which often means we won't know what we want until we see it. That's both terrifying and thrilling as an editor. As a writer, this is understandably frustrating, as specifics and genre/tonal guidelines are often helpful. Regardless, that's the queer path that Strange Aeons will be taking in terms of fiction, hoping to crack open some stunning new vistas into both the Beyond and the Within.

But back to my regularly scheduled giddiness... As regular readers of The Cosmicomicon can attest, I've been a gooey, tittering fanboy of Strange Aeons since I first stumbled across issue #3 last year, as it hearkens back to those gloriously violent, saucy comic and pulp fantasy mags of the 1970's, before the rise of irony and the submission of the fantastic in an effort to be cool. Bollocks to all that. Strange Aeons is a tongue kiss with the bizarre, a roared salute to doom amid a room full of reserved hipsters trying to keep their enthusiasm in check. It's a printed celebration of everything that is horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, which has transmuted into one gorgeous monster populating the cosmos with a multitude of young. In short, it's one kick ass mag, and based on the bold plans of the bossfolk upstairs, it's only getting warmed up. Luckily, I hopped on the caboose just as it sped from the station.

In honor of the occasion, I recently sat down with Strange Aeons Executive Editor K.L. Young - and by "sat down," I mean I e-mailed him questions from a sitting position, which he gracious answered from what I assume was a similar posture - to get a little background on the magazine, discuss the present, and get a glimpse of the future of the magazine as it prepares to take that next step toward crushing your skull. Enjoy!
___________________________________________________________________________

Hi, Kelly. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with The Cosmicomicon. To start thing off, give us a little bit of background on Strange Aeons and how it came to be.

Sure. Strange Aeons started off as Planet Lovecraft about five years ago. I kept finding all of these amazing artists dabbling online with Cosmic Horror and Lovecraftian themes, and they just weren’t getting any notice. So I started researching what it would take to publish these comics, and as I got further into it, I realized I could start publishing a magazine like the ones I dug when I was a kid – Eerie, Creepy, Heavy Metal and Epic.

After two issues, I had signed a deal with Enemi Entertainment and Haven Distro to get the book into comic stores all over the US, but there just weren’t enough sales to justify the cost of the printing.

Enter Rick Tillman, who was a filmmaker friend and fan of Planet Lovecraft. We sat down and discussed a complete re-launch of the book with a new title and new look, incorporating all the things we really liked about Heavy Metal and Epic Magazines from the Eighties, including fiction, reviews, game supplements and exclusive freebies. His input really cemented the “Strange Aeons look”. The magazine debuted at the Emerald City Comic Con in 2010, and we knew we had something special when we sold a couple copies to excited people in the elevator as we were on our way to the convention floor.

What is your earliest brush with Weird/Lovecraftian/Speculative (WLS) fiction? How did this influence you in your creative endeavors?

Life-long horror fan, here. My older brother would break me out of grade school to grab Slurpees (with the awesome plastic Marvel Heroes cups!) and watch horror matinees in Seattle. I read ‘Salem’s Lot in fifth grade and started devouring all the horror fiction I could find. This was 1979, ’80. I lived in a small town in the Pacific Northwest by then, and you had to hit up the used bookstores to find new authors. When I was thirteen, I found a battered copy of a Lovecraft collection called “Cry Horror!”, and from there it was all over. All of the short stories I was writing - horrible King rip-offs – became horrible Lovecraft rip-offs.

Following on the above, why did you choose to work in the arena WLS fiction, which seems to be such a niche market?

Ahh… I don’t think you ever really “choose” to work in the W/L/S arena… or any arena, when it comes down to it. Creative people gravitate towards the things they like, starting with blatant imitations and then growing and (hopefully) finding their own voice. Once I found out that there were other people interested in reading and writing and discussing this kind of fiction, I just naturally ended up here. I enjoy the company.

What is your take on the present state of the genre?

Good or bad, it’s stronger than ever. I see a lot of stuff that I really dig, and a lot of stuff that I don’t. The important part is “a lot of stuff”. But as I get older, I find I’m more excited about the things that have a subtle but conscious nod to Lovecraft rather than those that blatantly ape or mimic his work.

How would you describe Strange Aeons, and what is your stated or implied goal with the magazine?

Others have described it as “The illegitimate love child of a hot tryst between Heavy Metal and Weird Tales”, and I think that’s kind of cool. Originally, my goal was just to get these amazing artists and writers out to a larger audience. But now that we’re winning awards and publishing original material, I think we’ve decided to take things a little more seriously. We’re looking at getting the mag into more comic stores and bookstores (while they’re still around), and pursuing our digital options, while staying true to the fact that we’re one of the few publishers left that’s willing to print in full-size, magazine format.

Tell me a little bit about Anno Ktulu.

I am ridiculously excited about Anno Ktulu, a four-part story arc that runs throughout the 2012 issues of Strange Aeons. Think about what would happen if the superheroes you’ve grown up with – Superman, Batman, etc – had been published by Warren Comics instead of DC, and they populated the Warren world?

What if, instead of super villains, the heroes of this world evolved to fight the supernatural horrors of vampires, werewolves, and zombies? And then what if they had to face the ultimate alien evil in the form of Lovecraft’s Old Ones? How would Batman deal with the awakening of Cthulhu? How COULD he?

The story is all mine, the scripting is by Vincent Ferrante of Witch Hunter fame, and the artwork is Ben “1314” Hansen, who’s done some pretty cool work for a lot of companies, and a couple great covers for Strange Aeons.

Besides the four-part story arc, there’s a very cool Anno Ktulu “Zero Issue” coming out near the end of March, and this thing is awesome. Four short comics featuring the heroes of this horror-world, illustrated by Tim Sparvero, Ben “1314” Hansen, Nick “The Hat” Gucker, and John Fulton. And it’s oversized, like the old Marvel Comics Super Specials. I have no idea how we’re going to ship these things, but they look SO cool.

Anno Ktulu - Coming Soon

What is your submission policy for fiction, art, comics, etc.? What sort of creative material are you looking for from contributors?

We’ve always had an “Invitation Only” policy for fiction, mostly because we’re just really, really picky with the fiction we print. We’re a quarterly ‘zine, and there’s generally only one piece of fiction per issue. That’s only four pieces per year, so we really want to make them stand out. So far, I think we’ve succeeded. I’m sure our new Fiction Editor can fill in the details as far as that goes.

For comics, we’re looking for completed stories, five to fifteen pages in length. We don’t pair up an artist with a writer or anything like that – there’s just too much involved in that kind of stuff for a small-press like us.

We’re looking for all kinds of material – horror, dark sci-fi and fantasy, black humor, whatever you’ve got, as long as it’s interesting and well done. We took the name Strange Aeons as a nod to our Cosmic Horror beginnings, but also so that we could branch out into more mainstream horror and sci-fi. So, it doesn’t HAVE to be Lovecraftian to make it into the mag.

What is the publishing timetable for Strange Aeons? Meaning, when should fans and readers look for new issues of the magazine? Where is it available?

We’re extremely proud of the fact that we’re a small press quarterly that comes out with a regular schedule! We follow the seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, which gives us a little leeway if we want to release an issue to coincide with a convention or festival we’re attending.

Your best bet is to buy the magazine online at www.strange-aeons.com, or at www.arkhambazaar.com. There are a few comic stores across the country that carry it – and if you want YOUR comic store to carry it, let them know that we have retailer discounts!

How has Strange Aeons evolved from its inception, and what do you see for it in the future?

It’s definitely a more predictable beast. I think we were finding our sea legs with the first couple of issues as far as design and content went – and I’m very proud of those issues – but with the second year we really tightened our design down, and as we start our third year, I’m very excited about the content we have coming up.

We’re also gearing up to get the magazine into digital formats for eReaders and the like, and getting a more interactive website up.

Who would you rather face in a spirited, shirtless arm wrestling match? Present day Jean Claude Van Damme or "TJ Hooker"-era William Shatner?

Uh… present day William Shatner. I saw Van Damme recently and he still looks like he can kick ass. The Shat… not so much. And if he pulls anything, I’ll give him the Kirkie.

If you like Strange Aeons, and I sure as shite know that you do, go make it official by declaring so publicly here.

Then order, if you already haven't, Issue #8 here, which features incredible cover art by none other than Tim Vigil, encasing 56 pages of gorgeous black & white and color comics by Lee Davis, Eric York, Rob Corless, Phil McClorey, and Vincent Ferrante; short fiction by the award-winning Peter Watts, accompanied by illustrations from hunky teen heartthrob and soup enthusiast Nick "The Hat" Gucker; yet another limited edition 'Lost Lovecraft Film' mini movie poster replica; book reviews; "Forbidden Lore"; news of the Weird-o-Verse in the "Unearthed" section; and so much more. Also included in this issue is another exclusive rule-set for "Strange Aeons", the eldritch miniature game.

After that, look for the Beatlesque-sounding Strange Aeons Issue #9 to hit newsstands and the back of your eyeballs in May 2012, which will feature my debut as Fiction Editor. Whether it's a resounding success or a monumental trainwreck, I'm pretty sure you don't want to miss it.

Now Available - Chaosium & Red Wasp Design Team Up For Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land

2012-02-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

Straighten your twisted spines, Call of Cthulhu gamers and digital Lovecraftian vidheads, as after a year of wandering the moldering wastes, the hugely anticipated Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is now available for iOS, the resultant spawn of the perfect alchemy achieved by CoC legend Chaosium and brilliant upstarts Red Wasp Design. The game is a universal app, easily workable iPad, iPhone SD & HD.

I've covered the game briefly in the past, and so as to not sound redundant, I'll let the official Red Wasp Press Release do the writing for me:

The Stars are Right as 'Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land' Launches!

(for immediate release)

After a year of intensive development, the small indie team of Red Wasp Design have announced that their anticipated title, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land has launched on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The game is a turn-based strategy RPG inspired by the works of cult horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and developed in co-operation with Chaosium, the publishers of the cult horror role playing game, Call of Cthulhu.

The game is now out on iTunes and is a universal iOS app so the same game works for iPhone and iPod Touch both SD & HD and for iPad, and carries graphics optimised for each of those platforms. It is priced $4.99, £2.99 & €3.99 for the full universal app. The game's designer, Tomas Rawlings said, “We've put a vast amount of our time, energy and ideas into this game over the last year. It's been a long journey for us because we want to get it right. We're not a huge studio, but I hope that fellow gamers will appreciate what we've achieved with The Wasted Land.”

The game features nine 3D levels set in the trenches of World War One. The player controls a team of up to six investigators charged with uncovering a deadly inhuman conspiracy underlying the clash of empires of the Great War. Barbed wire, mustard gas and machines guns will prove to be the least dangerous thing that the investigators will encounter as they venture out into no-man's land to solve the mystery of the Wasted Land. As the game progresses, the player can build up the skills, weapons and equipment of the team to suit their playing style. As well as the physical danger, the investigators must guard their sanity against the myriad horrors that threaten to destroy it.

To stay in touch with the developers and get updates on the game, help and strategy guides and more you may want to connect to Red Wasp Design on Facebook, Twitter (@redwaspdesign) and on their site at redwaspdesign.com

Publishing News: Aklonomicon Unveils Cover by Dave Carson, Anthology Now Available for Pre-Order Direct from Publisher Aklo Press

2012-02-07T15:49:00.000-08:00

Aklonomicon cover art by the legendary Dave Carson

The day draws nigh, true Believers, when the language of Aklo shall be once again loosed upon this unprepared land.

For those new to this world, who have forgotten the last several cycles, Aklo is - according to ChtulhuWiki (courtesy of the beloved Yog-Sothoth.com) - briefly described as the following:

The Aklo language is a fictional language system which appeared in Arthur Machen's short story The White People. H.P. Lovecraft used the Aklo in a number of his stories, most notably The Dunwich Horror and The Diary of Alonzo Typer.

... Although Aklo can be used for communication its primary usage is in incantations and prayers...

"Incantations and prayers"... Conjuring. Magick. The language of Forgotten Gods sleeping in the shadow of dead stars, who can still hear the pleas of those who know how to ask as they dream their way toward us.

AKLO!

This foul gibbering of primal origin is spoken by warp riders Ivan McCann and Joseph S. Pulver, who have gathered together others of a similar ken, to sing their songs in nighted clearings dotted with curiously arranged stones. Together, McCann and Pulver have expertly orchestrated this unhallowed chorus like maestro Magi, transcribing these terrifying psalms into nearly FIVE HUNDRED PAGES of paeans to the dark, the dreadful, the unclean. Writers, poets, painters, illustrators, and other mad creatives from around the globe received the sharp, suddenly tap on the shoulder to add their pound of flesh to this newly minted black book, and all responded with feverish zeal.

Thus was born the Aklonomicon, populated by the finest practitioners of the darkly written and bloody visual arts, who have built a singular dread folio that should blow the nailed-shut doors off of all that has come before it. The unquiet ghosts of von Junzt, of Alhazred himself, will sit up and take notice once these pages are exposed to the outside air.

Ware the Aklonomicon, for it is unwholesome and able.

Ware the Aklonomicon, for it seeks to unmake you.

For those bold enough to wade in, neck deep, as the ground drops away below, the Aklonomicon can currently be pre-ordered by contacting Ivan McCann directly through his Facebook page. If you're not on Facebook, you are to be both praised and mocked in equal fashion. After this odd dressing up and dressing down, contact me at cosmicomicon@gmail.com, and I'll make the necessary arrangements to hook up your sweet-ass pre-order.

For more on the inestimable Dave Carson, check out his home page at Cthulhuart.com.

As noted in blogs previous (here and here), I'm blessed to have two respective tales published in the Aklonomicon, "Flutes," and "In the Cave, She Sang," both of which feature specially crafted artwork by Mythos icon and uncoiling nightserpant Paul Carrick (previously posted here).

Don't let this one slip through your cold, clattering claws, gentle readers. I'm a pretty excitable fella, but I can say without hyperbole that the Aklonomicon is going to be a multi-media, printed and bound EVENT that you dare not miss. The scope, vision and pure balls of this undertaking is something that will echo down through the ages.

You're not imagining things. Those strange whispers in a language both repugnant yet somehow familiar are real. Something small inside you remembers, even if everything else refuses. Aklo...

Get It, before It gets you. Or before we do.

Looking Ahead: Dark Tales for Bright Children, Coming from SlaughterHaus Press in 2013

2012-01-22T07:56:00.000-08:00

As I concoct, write, and assemble the stories for my first collection, I look ahead to so many amazing opportunities, in terms of anthologies and other projects.

The one that has been in the planning stages since I first decided to embrace the Weird and the beautiful Horror that has lurked inside me my entire life is a collection that focuses entirely on the terrifying experiences of children. Thus was born Dark Tales for Bright Children, an assemblage of short stories that Ives Hovanessian and I - under the collective moniker Grau Haus Nightmares - will unleash upon the unprepared public in 2013, ushering in a new era of dark, literary quality, from paper stock to cover, issuing forth from our SlaughterHaus Press, overseen by Ives and I.

Boldly into the night..... Look out for us... You've been warned.....

Squid Amongst the Goggles: EOD Archbishop Cody Goodfellow Rings in the Last Year on Earth at The Queen Mary Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast

2012-01-18T18:25:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday, whilst the majority of bipedal inhabitants of the western hemisphere were flocking to places of worship (churches, revival tents, sports bars, sports bras, shopping malls, etc.), so too were the devoted adherents of the West Coast Chapter (SoCal Lodge) of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, who undertook an open-air rite known in the common tongue as the "Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast" at last weekend's Her Royal Majesty's Steampunk Symposium, held in the Royal Salon amid the haunted timbers of The Queen Mary passenger liner, which is lashed - dead but dreaming - to the splintering edge of this bloody New World in Long Beach, California.

EOD Archbishop Cody Goodfellow - a rapidly rising figure in the Order (groomed by legendary unholy man Cardinal Robert M. Price) who hawks his celebrated Lovecraftian, Bizarro and speculative fiction as a way to afford dazzling religious frocks and ever-climbing headpieces for his far-too-infrequent public ceremonies - oversaw the Prayer Breakfast, giving his sermon, providing church news, and then the benediction, supported by the Amorphous Tabernacle Choir, of which I was a member. I was luckily able to hide my lack of pitch and stage terror behind a green, hardened leather Cthulhu mask and writhing foam tentacle (which served as one half of the eye popping "special effects" for a slightly rejiggered rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine").

After a hymn or two (accompanied by John "Froggy" Skipp on keys), Archbishop Goodfellow threw off his outer cloak like an Innsmouthian James Brown, adjusted his tentacular collar, and scooped up 75-80 extravagantly adorned Steampunkers into his scaly palm like so many brass and lace Skittles. Once in his grip, it took only a matter of seconds before the puppet master had them chortling into their murky, reconstituted "eggs" and shape-shifting hash browns, delighting young, old, and otherwise over the course of the 2 hour brunch, as he mixed in enough winks to Steampunkery into the sublimely Lovecraftian sermon on tolerance that many a corseted and goggle-chapeau'd attendee shouted out "Ia!" to punctuate a particularly salient - or oftentimes hilarious - point made in the oration. In short, he seemed to make believers of them all. At least for brunch last Sunday. But, that's a start...

Pictures are still trickling in, having a tough time passing electronic customs under the old Bush-era "heresy laws." For those needing a rare still shot to soak up all the masked goodness of my sweet moves, check out me handling my tentacle like a seasoned pro in this pic posted by Brian Bubonic on Flickr.

Whispers amongst the damp and legend-haunted halls of the EOD's SoCal Lodge tell of a planned second Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast in 2012, held at the third annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival - Los Angeles this September. Details are still coagulating, but if I was a betting man, I'd go "all in" on this going down nine months hence in San Pedro. There's something about that chewed up coastline of California, and its proximity to the South Pacific, that calls out for prayer.... and breakfast. I'm trusting the provender will be better - and far more recognizable - next time around, while the sermon and the message will maintain the brilliance that only the good Archbishop can summon from deep inside the mystical confines of his iPhone.

Mark you calendars, prep your knees for bending, and join us on the edge of the infinite this fall.

EOD High Cardinal Robert M. Price

"Transmission" Gets a Shout Out by Lovecraft eZine Founder Mike Davis in Interview with Innsmouth Free Press; Vote for LeZ at CWW

2012-01-06T16:42:00.000-08:00

It has been Innsmouth Free Press sort of week around The Cosmicomicon, as I was just pointed to a recent IFP interview with Mike Davis, creator and head honcho at the stellar Lovecraft eZine, in which he gives a little love to my story "Transmission," published this past summer in Dead But Dreaming 2 from Miskatonic River Press.

An excerpt of the entire interview with Mike is posted below:

IFP: What do you like to see in the slush? What don’t you like?

MD: I like cosmic horror, the feeling that reality is not all that it seems; I don’t mind references to Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, etc., but just throwing them into a story doesn’t make it Lovecraftian. There are some really great stories in the Dead But Dreaming collections and Lovecraft Unbound that are wonderful examples of what I love to see: The short stories “The Crevasse” by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud in Lovecraft Unbound, and “Transmission”by T.E. Grau in Dead But Dreaming 2 come to mind. [emphasis added]

I'm always so amazed and moved when my writing strikes a chord with readers. It makes all the long hours of planning, plotting, writing, tinkering, gnashing, rewriting, editing, and ultimately collapsing worth every second. I'm honored that Mike digs my work.

Also, please follow this link to vote for the Lovecraft eZine at the annual "Preditors & Editors Readers' Poll" sponsored by the Critters Writers Workshop. Mike is a swell guy (with obviously exceptional literary taste) and a true blue Lovecraftian, and his 'zine adds immeasurably to the empyrean fabric of the ever-expanding, yet always deferential, Mythos.

So do your part, take a few minutes, and place your vote on the side of quality and dedication. I, and Wilford Brimley, assure you that it's the right thing to do.

Anthology Open Call for Submissions Starting January 15, 2012: 'Fungi' for Innsmouth Free Press to Celebrate 'The Year of the Mushroom'

2012-01-03T13:48:00.000-08:00

Fungi cover art (c) by Oliver Wetter

With the chiming-in of the New Year, the holiday season is now sadly yet officially behind us, which turns our vision away from the magic in the air, to the sorcerous conjuring brewing in the mind.

As stories written in the rapidly fading Old Year burst forth from their tightly wound cocoons and blossom in anthologies and publications, a new swath of waiting display cases open up, eager for interesting, beautiful, and often terrifying specimens.

2012 promises to be a very exciting year rife with opportunities, both personally and throughout the overlapping Weird fiction and Lovecraftian multiverses, as more and more compelling books are in the planning stages by various major indie and small press outfits. As I write toward the release of my collection in late 2012/early 2013, I'll also endeavor to embrace as many anthology invites and open calls as I possibly can. It'll be a labor intensive tight rope walk, and I've already had to decline a few choice opportunities that in a "normal" year I would have jumped upon. But sadly, when time is limited and every creative move shaded by cold calculation, tough decisions must be made. 2012 has dawned as the Year of Opportunity for me, if I can stay focused, inspired, and continue down the path that has been hacked through the jungle by so many trusted (and trusting) friends and colleagues. As such, this is my year to raise my ink-stained banner, as it were, as room on the horizon has been made. Now, I just have to pitch strikes, and knock them down one by one. Heady times, indeed, and not without its share of anxiety. Need to keep that forked grip tight, and the sinker low and inside.

The first of the open calls that really piques my interest and plays to what I perceive to be my strengths as a writer is the intriguing anthology Fungi, edited by Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, for publication by Moreno-Garcia's stellar Innsmouth Free Press, which has lately produced such handsome tomes as Historical Lovecraft, and Future Lovecraft, and the Gothic fiction collection A Candle in the Attic Window, and puts out the tri-annual fiction review Innsmouth Magazine, featuring an array of some of today's top Lovecraftian scribes, available for free download at the IFP website.

I wrote for but didn't complete in time two respective stories for both Historical Lovecraft and Future Lovecraft (back when I chased every submission call I ran across, wrongly thinking I could finish any and all story to which I set my mind and energies). After two misses, I'm trying like hell to not blow the deadline for Fungi, as just the spectacular cover alone - combined with the impressive efficiency and professionalism shown by Innsmouth Free Press in the past - makes this collection definitely one of the can't-miss books of 2012, as both a writer and a reader of Weird/speculative/Lovecraftian fiction. On a more superficial level, a writer (or maybe just me) loves to have their work wrapped in a gorgeous bow, and that cover shown above by the genius Oliver Wetter (who also goes by Fantasio) is exactly that, and then some. Cover art counts, for writer and customer, and it rarely gets more eye-catching than Wetter's work.

From the official IFP submission call press release:

Days Micotic: Announcing Fungi for 2012
In 2012, Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia tackle the darkest of all horrors: fungi. William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night”, and its Japanese film adaptation, Matango, terrified and fascinated the editors. And now, they’re back for more.

Fungi is an anthology of dark speculative fiction (horror, fantasy, science fiction, and any other variant, such as steampunk) focused solely on the fungal. Full guidelines for the anthology will be posted in December (Don’t send anything, yet!).

In the meantime, we are trying to build a comprehensive mushroom fic list. Do you know of a story, movie, TV episode, or book that featured fungi in it? Add it to our little spreadsheet. The list will be used to compile a comprehensive database of fungi fiction, to be used as an appendix for the book. You can see the items we have already collected here.

Fungi will be released by Innsmouth Free Press as a special edition hardcover, paperback and e-book. Look for it in October of 2012, which we are gleefully dubbing “The Year of the Mushroom”.

About the editors:

Orrin Grey writes stories of the supernatural and macabre, which have appeared in a number of Innsmouth Free Press anthologies, as well as other venues like Bound for Evil and Delicate Toxins. His first collection, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, is due out from Evileye Books in 2012. His fascination with monsters and fungus, and fungus monsters, is longstanding and shows no sign of waning any time soon.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s stories have appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Evolve 2, The Book of Cthulhu, and a number of other publications. In 2011, Silvia won the Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize (in the Emerging Writer category), sponsored by Gloria Vanderbilt and Exile Quarterly. She was also a finalist for that year’s Manchester Fiction Prize. Together with Paula R. Stiles, she has co-edited Historical Lovecraft, Candle in the Attic Window and Future Lovecraft.

Fungi: Guidelines

What?
Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia tackle the darkest of all horrors: fungi. William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” and its Japanese adaptation, Matango, terrified and fascinated the editors. And now, they’re back for more.

Fungi is an anthology of dark speculative fiction (horror, fantasy, science fiction, and any other variant, such as steampunk) focused solely on the fungal. No happy mushrooms from Mario Bros. A fungus of some type must be a key element in the story, not just a throwaway element. A character can attempt to poison someone with a mushroom, mushroom cultivation may be of importance to the story, the dark patch of mould on the ceiling may begin to terrify an unhappy tenant, a group of people may consume hallucinogenic mushrooms, etc.

We are looking for a variety of settings and protagonists. Mushrooms sprout around the world, after all.

Oh, and if you can add a story, novel, movie, or TV episode with mushroomy content, please do it! We are keeping a spreadsheet, here.

Payment
•      1 cent per word for original stories.
•      Reprints paid at a flat rate of $35. Canadian dollars, eh. Indicate where and when it was published.
•      One complimentary print copy and one e-book copy provided.

Length
Short fiction up to 5,000 words.

Submitting

E-mail us at fungi.innsmouth AT gmail.com. Subject line: Fungi, [Title of your Story, Author's Name].
Do not send more than one short story submission at a time. If we reject one story, you can send another one.
Include a cover letter with the story word count, salient writing credits and any reprint information (if applicable). Yes, we do read cover letters, so include the information.
Attach story as an RTF (preferred) or Word document. Use standard manuscript format. Italics as italics, bold as bold. No fancy fonts.
Stories can be sent in English or Spanish.
Submissions are accepted from January 15 to February 15, 2012. Do not send anything before or after that date. If you do, we will ignore it.
Final story selection will take place in the spring of 2012. Check back for updates.

So, hug up to that toadstool, meander amongst the molds, and listen closely to the lichens. They definitely have a story to tell, and a firm place amongst the strata of Weird fiction and cosmic horror. HPL wasn't just whistling Dixie (can you imagine?) when he penned Fungi From Yuggoth, in which he famously wrote:

This is the hour when moonstruck poets know
What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
And tints of flowers fill Nithon’s continents,
Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.
Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,
A dozen more of ours they sweep away!

From penicillin to yeast to black mold and Cryptococcus, the smallest and most innocuous living things amongst us can either grant life, or take it, on a massive scale. That's the stuff that sets the mind a' wheeling, and the eager spores swirling out into the evening gloom.

That's the stuff of Fungi.

Book Review: By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends, a Novel by J. David Osborne

2011-12-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

J. David Osborne is a thief, a liar, and a drug addict. And, he's almost certainly insane.

I say this not because I want to disparage a fellow writer, or get dragged through libel proceedings, but because there is no other rational explanation for how Osborne wrote By the Time we Leave Here, We'll Be Friends (Swallowdown Press, 2010), a brutal, sometimes surreal tale set within a Soviet gulag, with such an unsettling incisiveness and an insider's verve. It's as if he's trudged the Siberian wastes of plasticine snow, and lived behind that black widow's web of barbed wire. He's tasted the chemicals and smelled the stink of trapped death, while facing down unending damnation inside a drape of junked out veins and tattooed skin.

He must have. There's no other explanation otherwise.

Maybe he's Alek Karriker, a Muscovite con turned camp employee, who courts daily death for being a traitor to his kind - a scabrous collection of petty thieves, rapists, murderers, and muscle for the Russian mafia - while contemplating the strange writing that appears on his walls through a hazy veil of opium smoke. The man with a secret inside of his neck.

Or maybe he's Ilya Bogrov, the socially challenged sociopath and bathing enthusiast, who floats through the gulag barracks, weaving through pockets of startling violence and camp politics like a deadly ghost, hiding his forehead from the world while biding his time, looking for a trail over the tundra.

Or he could be the hapless Pole Hipolit, passed around like a powergrab fucktoy, looking for a heart that had been removed long before he was sentenced to a living death inside a frozen prison melting under the weight of the monsters who inhabit it.

Or, perhaps he's old Anton Nikitin, the kindly guard, who only pines for time to read his paperbacks and to marvel at the wonder of the canine mind.

Or maybe he's Tatyana, Nikitin's German Shepherd, obsessed with digging a hole into the permafrost to find what lies beneath.

Or, in the end, maybe he's the calf, or the wolf that walks beside it, keeping its burning eyes on the prize... Maybe we're all calves, waiting for our invite to dinner...

It's hard to know who or what Osborne is, to craft such characters doing such things from so far away; or who we become as readers, when the cold and the drugs and the violence and chewingchewingchewing of sharpened teeth through masticated bread begin to spit-scatter our memories of a warm, free life like the blowing ash of burning, meatless skeletons. Snowflakes of atrocity, mixing with the ice, digging down into the earth.

We'll never know who he really is, or was, as J. David Osborne tells us that he's a twentysomething living in Norman, Oklahoma, rapidly building a career as one of the finest Bizarro writers of his generation. Hiding in plain sight, like a Soviet spy. A Cold War never thaws, no matter how much heat is applied...

Whoever he is, Osborne writes with the restrained punch of a barroom brawler adept in secretive martial arts. Garrulous haymakers peppered with quick, damaging blows, economically targeting the organs, taking out a joint, locking up a victim just long enough to smile in his face before flicking his cigarette and delivering a head butt.

His prose is like a 12 gauge blast of icy rock salt, flecked with gravel and forgotten bones, unloaded into your grill at point blank range. It won't kill you, but it'll cut you down, tear off that first layer of skin, letting you remember how it felt. As you lay on the ground, tasting your own blood and wondering just what the fuck just hit you, you feel a hand on your shoulder, helping you up and leading you back to the card game inside. Back into the warmth and the sweat and the stink and the glaring eyes. It's not time to die alone in the cold. There will be plenty of time for that later. Right now, we drink and burn opium. Plenty of time...

Chapters in the book are broken down into mini-scenes, almost vignettes, adding to the claustrophobia of the read and characters, suffocating amid the wide open tundra under prison gray skies.

Stand out sections among these are "Dead Cow Eye" and "Whale," which serve as sizzling plates of some of the best modern Weird fiction I've read in quite some time.

Osborne has a gift that he doesn't present like a preening peacock. He measures his poetry, leafing it in amongst the grit and grime like a patient painter. It's a strong, confident style, made all the more amazing by the fact that By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends is his debut novel. This bodes well for writer and us readers alike, as he is currently working on his follow-up. One can only wonder what he has in store for us next time; where he'll take us, and who won't be coming back.

I'm still mulling over the ending, as it threw me for a loop (and judging from the Afterword by Swallowdown Press head honcho Jeremy Robert Johnson, I wasn't the only one). Perhaps I'll read the book again, running from the sun and back to Siberia. The first soul in history who willingly returned to the gulag, filled with the the zeks and vors, the urkis and the sukas, all gathering around a battered furnace like shark-toothed moths, eying the history on each others' skin, looking for clues, looking for a weakness, looking for a way to pass the time before they die.

I don't know if By the Time we Leave Here, We'll Be Friends is Bizarro, The New Weird, speculative fiction, or what. I'm not that intelligent or well versed in the minutiae of genre labels to make this sort of determination. Nor do I care. What I do know is that this book, Osborne's first, is easily one of the best I've read this year, if not the last several.

So, in the end, perhaps J. David Osborne isn't a thief, a liar, or a drug addict, as all three pursuits are terribly time consuming, allowing little free time to write exceptional books. And perhaps he is totally sane, allowing him to contemplate insanity in a way that can be terrifying, because HE is terrified by what he sees and what can be. What has already been. Crazy don't scare, you see... I don't know. It's just a theory. I'm still working over that ending...

What I do know is that J. David Osborne is on the come - or hell, maybe even already arrived. A young Titan poised to stand at full height and cast his shadow over the muttering landscape that none will be able to ignore. He's a force, and I can't wait to see where he takes us next, and what friends and corpses will be waiting for us when we get there.

JDO - Moonlighting as an Abercrombie model when not gashing his name into the annals of the Weird fiction canon

(By the Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends features an amazing cover by renowned artist Alex Pardee, is published by Jeremy Robert Johnson's Swallowdown Press, and is available all over the innerwebs, including at Goodreads here, as well as Amazon a little to the left, meaning right here. You can find J. David's blog roundabout here).

Friends of The Cosmicomicon: Strange Aeons Wins Best Small Press Anthology of 2011

2011-12-15T18:12:00.000-08:00

"Rise of Cthulhu" (c) by Tim Vigil

We appreciate our friends here at The Cosmicomicon, and none have been nearer or dearer in this last year than Strange Aeons Magazine, which was the first (and hopefully not the last) print publication to cover this slice of swirling ether, featuring a write-up on The Cosmicomicon in Strange Aeons Issue 5 (giddily discussed by yours truly on the verge of a rhapsodic fit right here).

Tonight, I'm happy to report that this week Strange Aeons was named the Best Small Press Anthology of 2011 by From The Tomb Magazine, through their annual Decapitated Dan's Best of 2011, a coveted prize for devoted horrorheads and comic book nuts.

Witness and let loose your laurels (and possibly your morals):

Best Small Press Anthology: Strange Aeons Magazine

If you are a Lovecraft fan you had better have this magazine on your list of things to check out in 2012. No wait, why do you not know about this magazine yet? Strange Aeons is a quarterly title that deserves more recognition and needs to be on any horror comic fans radar. Combining the large monsters you expect with original stories on Lovecraftian themes this one is a can’t miss.

Honorable Mentions: Blokes Tomb of Horror Annual 2011, Strange Kids Club, ZombieBomb

So, please join me in raising your glass, and sounding out a hearty round of congratulatory gibberings and celebratory howls for natty gadfly K.L. Young, the mysterious Rick Tillman, the leggy and lascivious Nick "The Hat" Gucker, and all the rest of the Strange Aeons crew up Seattle way, who roll out the Weird and beautifully disturbing through pictures and words four times a year in ways that no one else can match.

I've said it before and I write it here again - Strange Aeons seems like a classic already, a prizefighter who burst from the womb full mature and swinging for your neck. It's a fiction, art, news, and dark animation magazine that feels like its always been around, and always will be. It's the New Pulp of the X, Y, Z, and Pie generation, currently clearing a bit of room on the mantle for the first of what will be many accolades to come.

Strange Aeons, Issue 7, cover art (c) by Mike Dubisch

'Tis The Season To Be Culty: Red Wasp Design Unveils Two Digital Cthulhuvian Releases Just in Time for the Holidays

2011-12-10T03:48:00.000-08:00

Ah, kids these days... Just nutty about the smart phone apps and the video games. And the hippity hop. But mostly the smart phone apps and video games... set to a soundtrack of the hippity hop.

Understanding this, and endeavoring to give "the kids" - meaning, well, EVERYONE with a mobile phone and a jones for electronic gaming - exactly what they want, Red Wasp Design, the critically acclaimed, proudly indie games development studio based in Bristol, England (home of the semi-mythical yet somehow still fully vicious Chicken of Bristol), has just released a brand new holiday-themed calendar app, and will be launching an anticipated video game in the coming months. What both share, aside from a digital womb nestled deep inside Red Wasp Design studios, is a celebration of the God(s)father of Cosmic Horror, one Howard Philips Lovecraft, and his beloved Golden (Greenish Gray?) Boy, Cthulhu.

Tapping into the whole "cute Cthulhu" craze that is morphing tiny, bright eyed children into unwitting fans of HPL's eternally grumpy and chronically sociopathic Great Old Ones, Red Wasp has conjured up a fun advent calendar app titled "Cthulhu Christmas Calendar" that is rooted in enough sanity-sucking horror to appeal to both hardcore Lovecraftians who eagerly snap up anything remotely Outer Goddish, and also those uninitiated few who appreciate cuddly monsters bent on cosmic destruction set in the cheery key of pastel and holly.

"Cthulhu Christmas Calendar" is now available for your iPhone, iPad, and Android phone (the latter of which is also easily purloined through this link to Amazon.com).

The "secret ingredient" to a successful fruitcake is finally revealed

Please note the official Red Wasp Design press release below, generously provided for The Cosmicomicon by Red Wasp's own Debbie Connor:

Press Release

Cthulhu's Crazy Nightmare Before Christmas (for immediate release)

Fans of the meme-monster Cthulhu and other creations of cult horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft can get a little extra help in counting down to Christmas, thanks to a new mobile advent calendar app. Titled 'Cthulhu Christmas Calendar', it features 25 original pieces of artwork - one for each day in December until Christmas Day. Each image presents a fun mashup of festive icons like Santa into the Cyclopean world of the great Cthulhu, the malevolent Mi-Go and the dark god Nyarlathotep.

Indie developer Red Wasp Design today released the Cthulhu Christmas Calendar for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android. As well as featuring a new and original creation of art for each day, it also features quiz questions related to the images. Fans will find out their 'Mythos rating' on the 25th when their scores are revealed along with the final festive- horror image.

The app is available now from the App Store for iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone. It is also available for Android from the Android Market. It is priced at:
iPhone & iPod Touch ($0.99/£0.69/€0.79) • iPad 1 & 2 ($1.99/£1.49;/€1.59) • Android Store ($0.99/£0.69/€0.79) • Amazon App Store (coming soon!)
There is more information on the Cthulhu Christmas Calendar page and you can chat about it with fellow cultists on its own Facebook page.

The Great Priest - The only Being sorta' alive who is impervious to the unbridled joy of party hats

_________________________________________________________________________

And now the electric lights dim and the candle smoke billows, as we turn our heads from the glittering holiday trappings and gaiety, and delve back a bit deeper, looking into our past for a glimpse into our future.

A dystopian land, wrecked by cosmic forces beyond human comprehension, but somehow distantly remembered. Monsters roaming the blasted hilltops. A handful of .30 caliber shells in your calloused palm. The sunlight dims... Figures dance behind the cover of smoking corpses. The battle begins anew. You are the last hope for us all....

This is "Call of Cthulhu: Wasted Land." This is what you've been waiting for, Lovecraftians. Check these badass sneak peek screen shots below:

Press Release First 'Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land' Screenshots Released (for immediate release)

Indie developer Red Wasp Design today released the first screenshots from their anticipated upcoming game, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land'. These screenshots are taken from the Standard Definition (SD) iPhone version of the game and are, the developer says, a work in progress. A High Definition (HD) version will follow. They show characters from the game under attack by the undead, and the Dark Young. As the characters fight these legions of horror they will have their sanity eroded away as the game's designer Tomas Rawlings noted, “Lovecraft and his peers created really iconic monsters that tap into our deepest fears. As huge fans of his stories, we've worked really hard to transfer the essence of these alien horrors into a game form. We're blending the core ideas of the classic role-playing game along with our experience of gameplay design all wrapped in our new 3D engine to craft what we hope is a gaming experience of malignant evil!”

Announced in May this year and set to launch initially on iPhone and iPod (both SD and HD versions), Red Wasp Design plan to infect other platforms such as iPad, Android, PC and consoles with their World War One themed turn-based strategy horror. The game has been developed in co-operation with Chaosium, the purveyors of the cult horror role playing game based on Lovecraft's work, Call of Cthulhu. The much loved RPG marks it's 30th year of publication this year, which Chaosium has been celebrating with the launch of a limited edition release of Call of Cthulhu. Dustin Wright from Chaosium said, "We're very excited to be working with Red Wasp Design to bring the Call of Cthulhu world to gaming devices. It's a great time to be a fan of H.P. Lovecraft gaming."

A final release date, pricing and other information has yet to be announced by Red Wasp Design, but you can be kept in the loop via Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/redwaspdesign), Twitter (@redwaspdesign) and on their site (http://www.redwaspdesign.com)

_________________________________________________________________________

Happy Holidays, fellow Lovecraftians, Weirdlings, video gamers, hippity hopists, and smartphonists. Red Wasp Design has everything you need... possibly sans the hippity hop, but give those folks time...

Publishing News: 'Horror For The Holidays' Now Available For Pre-Order from Miskatonic River Press, Just in Time for the... Well, You Know

2011-12-03T03:12:00.000-08:00

Greetings once again, gentle readers. I come to you inside the cozy bunker, deeply and happily entrenched in the wonderful womb of the holiday season, which at Grau Haus stretches from All Hallows Eve until the bleary dawn of New Years Day.

The holidays are a special time, aren't they?

Easter. Armenian Christmas. Hallowmas. All Souls Day. Lantern Festival. Tomb Sweeping Day. Children's Day. Ascension Day. Ash Wednesday. Pentecost. Boxing Day. (yes, I've done my hasty goddamn research)

Holidays, these. Sacred, all...

In a normal, well ordered universe, holidays are a lovely event. A time for celebration, mirth, warmth. Laughter and breathless anecdotes weaving through the pleasant tinkling of tiny glasses and clanking brown bottles. A lighted hearth, a backyard barbeque, a laden table surrounded by family, friends, and other loved ones. Shared times of collective goodness, all bound up in that all-important element of stolid TRADITION.

These are our holidays. They bring us a sense of stability and security. A normalcy in an increasingly confusing world.

But, to be frank, in the realm of The Weird, this won't do. Won't do at all.

Much like Hitchcock sought to bring horror to the mundane and everyday occurrences (such as innocuous flock of birds, or an innocent shower), so too do the writers of The Weird seek to undermine even the most blessed and innocent holiday. We want to bring Horror to your Holidays. And I think we have.

As we approach the Christmas, Hanuka, Kwanza, and a variety of other Christ/Santa/Father Christmas/Winter Grandfather holiday celebrations, it only seems fitting that Miskatonic River Press release their long await anthology, Horror for the Holidays, edited by renowned editor/writer and caretaker of The House of Secrets Scott David Aniolowski, which is now available for pre-order here. MRP Head Tentacle Tom Lynch just shared that print runs start early next week. So let's move those appendages, okay squids?

Take a gander at this impressive, recently released table of contents, and shudder at the collection of award winning and critically acclaimed scribes who have chosen to thumb their noses and other pointy bits at holiday conventions:

Horror for the Holidays
Table of Contents
Introduction by Scott David Aniolowski

TALES OF ROSH CHODESH
The Tomb of Oscar Wilde by W.H. Pugmire

TALES OF VALENTINE’S DAY
Love and Darkness by Oscar Rios
Be Mine by Brian Sammons

TALES OF PASSOVER
Cthulhu Mhy’os by Lois H. Gresh

TALES OF EASTER
And the Angels Sing by Cody Goodfellow
The Last Communion of Allyn Hill by Pete Rawlik
Mrs. Spriggs’ Easter Attire by Joseph S. Pulver Sr. and Tara VanFlower
Seasons of Sacrifice and Resurrection by Adrian Tchaikovsky

TALES OF MOTHER’S DAY
Mother’s Night by Ann K. Schwader

TALES OF THE FOURTH OF JULY
Free Fireworks by T.E. Grau
Doc Corman’s Haunted Palace One Fourth of July by Don Webb

TALES OF VJ DAY
Translator by James Robert Smith

TALES OF HALLOWEEN
Hallowe’en in a Suburb by H.P. Lovecraft
Moonday by Will Murray
The Trick by Ramsey Campbell

TALES OF THE DAY OF THE DEAD
El Dia De Los Muertos by Kevin Ross

TALES OF GUY FAWKES NIGHT
Treason and Plot by William Meikle

TALES OF REMEMBERANCE DAY
The Dreaming Dead by Joshua Reynolds

TALES OF THANKSGIVING
Entrée by Donald R. Burleson

TALES OF YULE
Keeping Festival by Mollie Burleson
Wassail by Tom Lynch

TALES OF CHRISTMAS
Krampusnacht by Joshua Reynolds
The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise by Thomas Ligotti
Letters to Santa by Scott David Aniolowski
Keeping Christmas by Michael G. Szymanski
The Nativity of the Avatar by Robert M. Price

As noted above, my humble contribution centers around the 4th of July, and gives what I hope is a new take on Independence Day. I'd love to provide more detail, but I fear it would give something away. Instead, pick up the tome, and dive in head first. Trust that it'll be suitably Odd and hopefully more than a bit shocking. It's what We do, you see...

In "Free Fireworks," I imagine it will look something like the above, and possibly the below, with a little added twist...

Happy Holidays, Weirdlings. Make it a bit brighter by bringing home some sacred Darkness, as it's all about the Balance.

Toys For Tots - Horror Style: Give a Gift to a Child, Win a Library of Signed Tomes

2011-11-24T01:22:00.000-08:00

Artwork (c) by David Anderson

Today is Thanksgiving, one of those distinctly American holidays with a past shrouded in blood and pain, but showing a pleasing face to the world that stands for something better - a dreamy ideal easily embraced that makes a holiday worth celebrating.

What I love about this day is that it forces us to stop looking at what might still be out of reach, and assess how lucky were are for what we do have. It's a time to give thanks. And so I shall.

I'm thankful for so many things. My dynamically talented, supportive, and unfathomably beautiful wife, who is my right hand in this journey through the dreamy days of my waking life, and that which only happens when I close my inner eye and my fingers start to dance. I'm thankful for my startlingly creative and perfectly formed child (she takes after her mother, that one), who surprises me on the daily with the magick she whips up inside that smallish head of hers. I'm thankful for my friends and family and friends who are family to me.

And I'm thankful for you - all of you, who take the time to read my hastily typed and poorly proofed blathering on various scattershot topics here at The Cosmicomicon, as well as spend hard earned lucre on my published work as it slowly spins into printed existence. I've been around the block a time or two - and halfway around the world - and in all of my travels, I've never encountered a warmer, more inclusive, and SUPPORTIVE group of people than those devoted to the creation, celebration, distribution, and/or consumption of what could be commonly referred to as "horror," but is increasingly known simply as The Weird. I'm honored and moved almost daily by the wonderful acts of kindness and approbation that I see taking place amongst this often mostly virtual community. It truly is inspiring, and for that, I thank you again.

As Thanksgiving marks the season of both thanks and giving, veteran horror master and bEast of Hell-singed poetics Joseph S. Pulver struck on a wonderful idea to inspire others to give a little to those less fortunate (and no matter how dire our straights, there is ALWAYS someone struggling more and in need of aid), while also offering a priceless prize to all involved that really is without precedent.

Ware the Stare of the bEast from the East

Joe aligned with Toys For Tots - one of the best charities going, overseen by the steely warriors of the United States Marine Corps - and called on all of his countless friends and peers deeply ensconced in the respective yet ultimately intertwined familial realms of horror/dark fantasy/Weird/Bizarro fiction and artwork to create a contest built on giving toys to needy innocents, with a promise of an entire mini-library of hand-signed novels, anthologies, CDs, and other media to those generous souls who make the time and effort to perform an act of absolute goodness. From this, Toys For Tots - Horror Style was born, and just in time for Black Friday, to balance the yin of consumerism with the yang of beneficence.

By donating a toy to your locale Toys For Tots outlet, you'll be entered to win one of the most valued and impressive collections of signed books I've ever seen.

Regarding the rules and how's and whereby's, I'll let Brother Joe explain, as only he can:

What is Toys For Tots ~ HORROR style?

This is a group of writers/editors/publishers of Horror/Weird/Dark fantasy/etc. who want to do something nice for needy children this year. Each contributor will donate a signed book(s) of theirs [any book, chap, collection, HC, trade, mass market, novel, mag, edited by, etc.][sorry, no “eBooks” as we cannot be certain the winner will have a reading device] and *ONE WINNER* will win them all.

Folks post the pics [2 pics] of them donating to THIS page. One pic showing them holding the toy, one pic of the toy in the box. Sadly, there are a few who might try to cheat and not put the toy in the box, so we need to see the toy really was donated. Take a pic of you holding the toy, then take a 2nd pic of the toy in the box. The donated toy will need to have a price point of at least 5 dollars. I thought a lot of folks have cell phone cams so pics would be easy to take.

How do you enter?

Entrants will need to post a pic of them dropping a toy into a “Toys For Tots” donation box and when all is said and done, say the day after X-Mas, we’ll pick ONE WINNER. Kids get a bunch of toys and we do a little good for those in need in hard times. And someone out there gets a very happy new year! !!

Can a family enter?

YES! You donate a toy, you’re in. Your SO donates one, they’re in! But only one entry per person!

I picked TFT as it’s fairly common and most everywhere in the States. Sadly, due to postage, entrants must live in the States. I also picked this charity as I couldn’t think of another charity where we could be certain we’d be putting something “hard” under trees this year.

We’ll have a predetermined number to pick the winner, between 100 -200 it will be #?, 200-300 will be #?, 300-400, 400-500, 1,000+, etc., etc. [Yes, I hoping for a lot of entries! !!] Then I’ll post the winner’s name here (after X-Mas) and they can message me w/ their address. Then the books will start coming. Each contributor will be mailing the book(s) they’re donating to the winner, so they will not all come at the same time. Books will begin to be shipped after JAN 1st.

We are not a part of *any* group or affiliated w/ any organization. This is just a group of writers/editors/publishers who want to do something nice for children! !! We picked TFT as it will put REAL toys under trees this year!!

Please share this and help spread the word. If you have a blog please consider doing a blog post about this, Tweeting as well. Sharing means word gets out and that puts more toys under trees! !! I know there are no bigger hearts than those of the horror community, so let it bleed!! !

No dealers or booksellers please. This is not for profit in any way, shape, or form. If we find out an entrant is a seller that entry will be not be considered for the drawing.

I’ll be posting what books the winner will receive and adding to the list as I get word of new additions.

Note to any writers and editors and publishers I have not contacted, if you would like to be part of this, please message me here on FB. We would love to have you be part of this! !!

To all the current contributors, my deepest thanks! You make me very proud to be one of you! !!

All my bEastly BEST! !!

Joe Pulver

Artwork (c) by David Anderson

As for the ever growing stash (keep in mind, this movement is only a few days old - more and more books will be forthcoming through contributions as Joe dislodges every rock, manhole cover, and hidden door within his neverending reach), here is the line-up of contributing authors/publishers/publications/artists and their offerings as of November 22, 2011 - a monstrous roster of notables that will only grow as the holiday season waltzes on:

* Paul Tremblay
* Jeff VanderMeer [a copy of FINCH and a copy of THE WEIRD]
* Simon Strantzas
* Jordan Krall
* A copy of the 1st issue of “Phantasmagorium”, edited by Laird Barron
* STRANGE AEONS magazine
* Gary McMahon
* Both DEAD BUT DREAMING and DEAD BUT DREAMING 2 anthologies from Miskatonic River Press
* Lois Gresh
* Nick Mamatas
* Daniel Mills
* Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
* C.W. LaSart
* Trent Zelazny
* Roger Zelazny
* John Claude Smith
* Innsmouth Free Press
* G. Edwin Taylor (artist)
* William Meikle
* Richard Gavin
* Ray Garton
* Kaaron Warren
* Jesse Bullington
* David Conyers
* Bruce Memblatt

I'll be updating this list in the days and weeks to come, so be sure to check back every so often to see how it evolves, ever sweetening the already extremely tasty pot.

This is what it's ALWAYS all about

Give thanks today, gentle readers, and hug those who are near and dear, for we've all been blessed with so very much.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

(Special thanks to the talented writer/artist David Anderson for the TfT - HS artwork)

Guest Blogger: Alex Lugo reviews 'The Light Is the Darkness' by Laird Barron

2011-11-11T20:35:00.000-08:00

A Cosmicomicon favorite returns, as Alex Lugo - who last reviewed W.H. Pugmire's Some Unknown Gulf of Night in early September - now turns his sights and voracious appetite for The Weird to Laird Barron's much anticipated first novel, The Light is the Darkness, currently available from Infernal House/Bloodletting Press in several magnificent incarnations. Bloodletting touts itself as "The finest in small press horror." After a brief glance at their author roster and the beautiful, exacting way they package their books, I'm leaning towards believing them. Presentation counts, especially in publishing. Books are always judged by their cover. Bloodletting Press understands this in spades, making sure the intrigue and quality of the packaging matches the writing waiting inside.

In the spirit of full disclosure, and to the surprise of none of my regular readers, I must admit that Laird is my favorite speculative fiction writer working today. So, upon reading Alex's review, I wasn't shocked by the effusive praise heaped on Laird's latest, and take his review as further reason to run - not walk - out into the bustling night and purchase this book straightaway. No one does it like Laird does. He horrifies as he teaches. He'll punch you in the gut, if only to show you a different view of the sky once you hit the ground. He's where we need to be right now.

But, enough of my stroking. Laird doesn't need it, as Alex explains below...

____________________________________________________________________________

Review: The Light Is the Darkness by Laird Barron

by Alex Lugo

Although I haven’t spent too much time on this mortal plane, I’ve spent most of it reading. Usually, I read horror, but I tend try to read a bit of everything. I just want the reader to keep in mind that I’ve read a great many books, and as such, I feel that I know what I am talking about. Having said that, I have just recently come to a conclusion that Laird Barron’s first novel, The Light is the Darkness, is a modern day classic. It’s up there with Frankenstein, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The Road. Why, you ask? I have a simple answer: the book is perfect. The characters are perfect. The story is perfect. Everything is perfect. Its only flaw is that it ended! The Light is the Darkness can be considered a mix of Lovecraftian horror, philosophy, science, existentialism, gritty-action, and blunt prose, but I’ll just call the book art.

There is no easy way to provide a synopsis of the story, but here goes nothing. Conrad, a champion of a modern-day, underground blood-sport competition whose matches are held across the globe, is traveling around the world in search of his sister Imogene, an F.B.I. agent who goes searching after the mysterious Dr. Drake, who killed their brother Ezra in some foul experiment. Along the way, Conrad learns the meaning of life, and begins a transition into something much more than human, which is a theme present in a couple other stories from Laird Barron, but never on such a grand scale as in The Light is the Darkness.

The book's prose is very blunt, elegantly simplistic, almost brutish, but the words themselves sing of a bleak, gritty world, with much bleaker, grittier themes. Barron makes you feel so small and insignificant, as if the cosmos and all the horrors within them are looking directly at you. The Light is the Darkness forces you to look right into the abyss, to jump in it, swim around, and come out realizing that what looked back at you may have been some mangled portrait of your own, alien self. There are scenes in this book that will haunt and scar the reader. There was one particular incident that gave me such chills, my eyes nearly watered. The book will not give you cheap thrills from the occasional gory episode. Instead, Laird Barron describes some of the most complex and primal actions in ways that scare the living daylights out of you, or make you recline in your chair and think for awhile.

The Light is the Darkness is as smart, scientific, and philosophical as it is eerie, horrifying, and downright disturbing. Think of it as a combination of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernest Hemmingway, and H.P. Lovecraft, and mix that with the bold, blunt, and tough style Laird Barron is known for. I won’t be surprised if there will be a Penguin Classics edition in a strange aeon or two.

If you’re a fan of Laird Barron, you need this book. Barron fans will appreciate his references to his past tales, such as "The Imago Sequence", "Six Six Six", "Hallucigenia", "Old Virginia", and perhaps even "Shiva, Open your Eye". I can also recommend this to honestly anyone interested in fine, complex, dark fiction. I cannot recommend this to lovers of a specific genre because it is a combination of so many genres. If you truly love literature, you will love this book. Not only is the books simply immaculate, but the design is impeccable. The book is published by Infernal House, which is run by one of the best publishers on this plane of existence, Larry Roberts. The book is bond in the most exquisite leather, and comes in a luxurious traycase. David Ho drew some fine illustrations for the book, my personal favorite being a mouth eating the universe. I could probably write an entire other review on the design of the book! Hopefully Larry Roberts and Laird Barron will work on another project in the future.

The Light is the Darkness shows how insanely godlike Laird Barron is as a writer. As noted above, this book ranks among some of the best books ever written, in my opinion. If you want a real treat for all of your senses, go pick up a copy of the Infernal House edition and immerse yourself. It is worth every single penny. For the design, the book is a ten out of ten, and for the actual story itself, I honestly cannot give it a number. It is that incredible. The Light is the Darkness will take you to the darkest corners of the earth, and when you come back from this adventure, you will go through a metamorphosis of your own.

The caterpillar enters the cocoon. Ouroboros bites its tail.

____________________________________________________________________________

Allow me to jump back in and piggy back on Alex's great review, if only to provide more information on The Light is the Darkness.

Miskatonic Books is also selling the book through this link, which takes you to the extraordinary lettered addition hardcover, with the following stats to support the detail photos below taken from the Bloodletting Press website:

Bound in Moroccan (goat skin)
The book will have metal corners and clasps on the boards
Exotic custom traycase
Sewn in silk ribbon marker
Custom signed signature sheet signed by both the author.
This edition will be strictly limited to only 26 copies.
And some very special surprises.

THAT is craftsmanship, my friends, hearkening back to a time when books mattered above all else, and were put together by artisans to inspire, to display, to keep forever, passed down through generations like heirlooms. I'm just so damn impressed by what Infernal House/Bloodletting Press is doing with their compendiums, and love that they will put out an ultra deluxe edition for twelve hundred bucks. I think that's a wonderfully ballsy move. And a 1000% worth it. May others take heed around the industry, re-elevating the bound printed page to its proper status in society. And may confident publishers like Infernal House/Bloodletting Press make a billion dollars.

Publishing News: 'The Screamer' Accepted For Publication in Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities

2011-11-10T16:43:00.000-08:00

I've had the ridiculously good fortune to be either published and/or accepted for publication in a number of stellar anthologies in 2011, and the latest is certainly no exception.

My story "The Screamer" - a sizable tale that attempted to hobble me a number of insidious ways during the birthing process - was recently accepted for inclusion in Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities, edited by devoted Danish Lovecraftian Henrik Sandbeck Harksen and published by his critically acclaimed small press H. Harksen Productions, with a tentative release date of January 2012.

While this auspicious occasion will mark the typesetting of my longest narrative to date (8,700 words), it will also count as the first time I'll be published in a language other than English (if a Danish version is released in addition to the English language version, which I'm assuming/hoping), and a Scandinavian language at that. As a proud Teuton whose ancestors finally skittered to a stop in the Schleswig Holstein area of northern Germany (just a catapult throw from the Danish border) before bailing for the New World, I've always felt a special affinity for Denmark, where - regardless of what that mother-loving emo Hamlet said - something is rarely rotten. Hell, for a number of mystifying and silly reasons, my dad claims to be Danish instead of German, so I could possibly be (great)grandfathered in as a full-on Dane.

Anyway, I'm very excited and proud to be a part of what looks to be a fantastic line-up of Cthulhoid asskickers, including several friends and antho comrades with whom I've shared a ToC or two in the past, and some new names that I'm very keen to read.

Here's Henrik's most recent announcement regarding the dread folio:

Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities (hplmythos.com Vol. 2) Update
As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post today, Vol. 2 of the much anticipated hplmythos.com Series, Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities, is scheduled for publication January 2012. I could probably publish it earlier but I want the result to be worthwhile — so I am going for the safer bet. The stories deserve the best possible design etc., and not something rushed through.
Here’s an updated Table of Contents:
CONTENTS:
“Dancer of the Dying” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
“The Neighbors Upstairs” by John Goodrich
“Carcosapunk” by Glynn Owen Barrass
“Architect Eyes” by Thomas Strømsholt
“Slou” by Robert Tangiers
“Ozeelah’s Lake” by Morten Carlsen
“The Statement of Frank Elwood” by Pete Rawlik
“In the Shadow of Bh’Yhlun” by Ian Davey
“The Screamer” by Ted E. Grau
“Night Life” by Henrik Sandbeck Harksen
“the guilt of each … at the end…” by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Believe me, it’s worth the wait!

For comparison's sake, here's an announcement Henrik made back in May , when "The Screamer" was still just a barely meeping fetus, looking for a way out of the womb inside my skull:

Announcement: URBAN CTHULHU stories found
I know you have been waiting, holding your breath — close to dying — wanting to find out what stories and authors you can find in Volume 2 of my hplmythos.com Series, Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities. Well, rest at ease at long last, my shadow friends on the web. The final decisions have been made, and here are the tales you will find:

CONTENTS:
“the guilt of each… at the end…” by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
“Dancer of the Dying” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
“The Neighbors Upstairs” by John Goodrich
“Carcosapunk” by Glynn Owen Barrass
“Architect Eyes” by Thomas Strømsholt
“Slou” by Robert Tangiers
“Ozeelah’s Lake” by Morten Carlsen
“The Statement of Frank Elwood” by Pete Rawlik
“Night Life” by Henrik Sandbeck Harksen
(I expect a couple of more confirmations, but will reserve the mentioning of those stories till I’ve heard from the authors;-))
I am really, really impressed by this collection. In all modesty (or not) I think this will truly be a fine addition to the Cthulhu Mythos & Lovecraftian publications that sprawl the world. And any interested reader will find tales that reveal a new, hitherto unexamined corner of this genre — the urban Cthulhu area. (And yes, the .com site will be updated with this information, but it will take a few days longer.)

A deeply felt thank you to all contributors.

Needless to say, I'm tickled a pleasing shade of pink about this one, and must say working with Henrik has been a breeze. His patience and trust, allowing me the time and space to explore every labyrinthine turn, and stare down every unnatural shadow in the room, was a wonderful experience. He's a fine one, he is.

As I creak toward a new decade of life in January, it looks like I'll have something other than bad joints and panicked feelings of mortality leering back at me. I'll have "The Screamer," waiting in a Nightmare City, holding its breath while I blow out the candles and cloak the room in darkness once again.


Artwork (c) by Jon Foster - http://www.jonfoster.com/#home

All Hallows' Eve 2011: Grau Haus, In Pictures

2011-11-09T18:38:00.000-08:00

I've yammered like a retreating jackal for well over a year now on these very pages, spilling out tens of thousands of words in fits and starts (mostly fits lately, with few starts), all in an attempt to purge my brain and hopefully entertain.

I'll very soon get back to my frantic typing in your general direction (yes, I know... this is the longest wind-up in pitching history), but in the meantime - as I gear up to swan dive back into the bloggy pool and paddle like mad for the deep end - I'll let a few pictures of the recently passed All Hallows' Eve at Grau Haus (birthplace and home of The Cosmicomicon) entertain your eyeballs, as the last howls of the season echo off into the ether. I'll spare the party shots (but know that it was epic), and focus on the design elements that were three months in the making, and are still be enjoyed this very minute.

All thanks goes to my Ives - Grau Haus High Priestess of Design, Sass, and Interesting Footwear - for creating new vistas of dusky magic, wrapped in a singular chicness that I've honestly never seen before. Never imagined could be combined so effortlessly with elements of horror. You can really see in her designs (ALL hand-made, BTW, and at such a tiny budget you wouldn't even believe me) her love of classic Gothic motifs, Poe, Tim Burton, Steampunk, Noir, and The Weird. It's an effortless blend that creates a whole new style of Dark Design all her own. She truly is the Queen o' Halloween.

Sit forward and enjoy while you can, my Darklings. Hallowmass 2012 is only 51 1/2 weeks away, and it's time to get to work on next year...

There She Is...

And there I am, Tebowing like my girl's life depends on it (which it did)


Sent off with a kiss, capping the perfect gathering for our favorite time of year

All Hallows' Eve 2011: A Look Back, and a Look in the Mirror - Finding Light in The Dark

2011-10-28T17:51:00.000-07:00

'Tis the Season for Family, both Addams and Grau

As anyone who doesn't still paint the walls with their own fecal matter could surmise, All Hallows' Eve is extraordinarily important to us here at The Cosmicomicon. In fact, it was just a little over a year ago that I first cracked this minty fresh tome of empty, eager pages, tapped my quill into the electronic ink well, and set off on my bloggish journey as the creator and (current) caretaker of The Cosmicomicon.

It's been one HELL of a year, in all the cuddly and sometimes grueling connotations associated with the word. But as we again hover just above the specters of the season, The Cosmicomicon and my career as a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and cosmic weirdness have never been stronger, both being hailed and well received all over the globe. I didn't know it at the time of founding this living and ever-mutating document, but The Cosmicomicon has grown larger than just my own personal dumping ground for inane musings, cool shit, and career happenings. It's become a HAPPENING itself. And I owe all of this to you, dear readers, writers, and overall supporters. I couldn't - and wouldn't - do it without you. The feedback has been amazing, both published and private. I'm humbled and proud to be the captain of this interdimensional voyage, and am thankful for all of my crew, including the stellar array of guest bloggers and commentators who have put their hard work and talents into this endeavor. Cheers to all of you beautiful bastards.

Turning my head from behind toward the mirror in front, we find a Trio of Weirdlings, captured in our near-natural habitat in the image above. That picture has truly become more than just three assholes mugging in our makeup. It has become a visual representation of who we are as individuals, and as a family. Us inhabitants of Grau Haus have truly EMBRACED the dark and the gothic, the monstrous. For us, it's not a celebration of anything negative or dreary, or even "evil". We're happier and goofier and more positive than your average bears. That pictures is an expression of who we are and what we love.

Basically, we find what could be described as "the dark" incredibly cool. It brings us comfort, and sparks our imaginations. It makes us smile, and talk, and create amazing things deep into the wee hours, fueled by this passion born of shadowed places and things that should not be. It's what we do.

Indeed, when Ives spends three entire months prepping for a Halloween party, designing and hand painting/adorning/hanging three miles of chic decor when not tracking down bizarre animals skulls, preserved bats, vintage apothecary jars, and industrial bags of webbing, in between banging out pages for her latest horror short story, you know this is no passing fancy.

When my seven year old daughter takes it upon herself to create a birthday card for H.P. Lovecraft, brings home drawings every single day of strange, hybrid creatures with names and complete backstories, and has focused all of her little girl obsession toward Monster High, you know that it's real.

We're a house devoted to The Dark. There's no other way around it.

For a writer of speculative fiction, nothing makes me happier than this organic leap in the direction we've all leaned for so long (including Angelina, who's first non-cartoon crush was on Ron Pearlman's Hellboy when she was just barely three... She'd literally blush when he'd appear on screen).

So, that brings us back up to the present, back to my comfortable chair at The Cosmicomicon and All Hallows' (mentally place the apostrophe wherever it feels the most comfortable) Eve 2011. This year, the sands in the hourglass are escaping like quicksilver, and writing deadlines loom darker and more foreboding than any lurker at the threshold, so the countdown to Samhain hasn't been as structured, nor as daily, as original intended. But, we will do our best to celebrate as much as we can the season and the reason behind the shrieks and howls, the moans and the growls. We also celebrate my choice to not pursue poetry as a serious endeavor, as evidenced by the preceding sentence.

Let's kick off our truncated All Hallows' Eve 2011 jubilee with a pictorial array from our recent Addams Family photo shoot, taken in Grau Haus by the dashing photog and classic horrorhead Trever Swearingen, who is another tentacle in our every growing family of Dwellers in The Dark...

The inspiration: Angelina IS Wednesday

When Ivy swoons, so does the rest of the world

Little Brothers Forever, recently described as "The Lovecraftian Power Couple"

Incredulous, of beauty so creamy and dangerous

It's a dance, a waltz, these steps we take

**** COSMICOMICON EXCLUSIVE!!! ADDAM'S FAMILY PHOTOSHOOT BACKSTAGE LOOK!!! COSMICOMICON EXCLUSIVE!!! **** (can you sense the excitement?)

Trever, in action. Me, inert.

Photog and creative director/makeup artist/model entranced by how handsome I am.

L.A. sass, dropping deuces like only she can, cuz...

... my Morticia was raised on Hollywood Boulevard, before it became Disneyland.

It's Friday. It's nearly Halloween. Find your best, truest mirror and see what sort of wonderful shadows are cast across your face. What looks back at you when you truly See yourself, without fear of retribution or damnation.

Loving the dark isn't bad. The dark can provide shade, a place to rest, a chance to dream. Things grow in the dark. You can, too.

Peering into your soul with my One Good Eye

The Cosmicomicon Exclusive: Sneak Peak at the Grau Haus Addams Family Photo Shoot

2011-10-08T05:28:00.000-07:00

We here at The Cosmicomicon - headquartered in the vine-ensconced confines of the Grau Haus Compound hovering ten feet above terra firma on the less hoody cusp of NorEastern L.A. - take All Hallows Eve VERY seriously. Indeed, we live it every single day, and the blessed month of October is our time to let down our proverbial hair - and beard - and howl at the goddamn moon.

This year, in our neverending attempt to out-do the last, we decided to stop denying the obvious and fully become the Addams Family in earnest for a photoshoot tomorrow, snapped by our very dear friend, elegant horror connoisseur and ace photographer, Trever Swearingen. The family photo will serve as the invitation for our upcoming Grau Haus Halloween Party 2011, which promises to be an epic event, combining the chic and the horrific, if my Ives has anything to say about it.

So, in order to bring my end of the shoot to life as Gomez Addams, a sacrifice had to be made.

Kinda like that, but more beardy and toward the face and neck and chops

No, not a virginal maiden, as I love my daughter too much, and have had too many "Parent meetings in the bedroom" with my wife Ives for her to qualify.

It was the beard. The goddman beard. My "deep thought" stroking tool. The tiny tribute to my Viking heritage. A weak sauce homage to Bearding worldwide (with a genetic bias toward the creative Germans, Elder Gods bless 'em).

The become Gozmez, even for a day, the beard had to go. My daughter actually wept when she saw me, sans-facial rug. That hurt. But, the life of artistic horror is all about hurt and tears - and sacrifice - so this bold and callous move had to be done. It'll grow back. I just hope my little girl's new mental scab will do the same. The poor thing couldn't even look at me. Chalk it up to bad parenting in the pursuit of the ideal Halloween greeting card. Some day she'll look back and thank me. At least I hope. But for now, I wish I had access to this savvy salesman.

In light of the above preamble, this is how the destabilizing event went down, which of course included a bit of facial hair shenanigans in the Grau Haus Green Dali Bathroom:

I've been begging my girl for a long while to let me rock some Biker chops, but she's always said no. Judging from the huge smile on her face in this photo, I'd say there's a pretty good chance they'll be making an appearance in the very near future.

Ives calls this "The Hetfield."

I am The Naked Face Now. All for horror's sake... Strangers glare, small children weep... What WON'T we do in service to the Beautiful Dark? Apparently, not much.

Look for another sneak peak, possibly tomorrow, depending on the tides, the winds, and the vagaries of photography on a Saturday night...

"Transmission" Gets Some Love from Two 'Craftian Giants

2011-10-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

As any regular reader of The Cosmicomicon knows by now, my story "Transmission" was published in the acclaimed anthology Dead But Dreaming 2 from Miskatonic River Press. That's the news already in circulation.

What's more recent is the reception "Transmission" has received, which has honestly blown me away and humbled me in identical measure. As I've shared on various platforms and shouted conversations, "Transmission" was the very first short story I ever penned since I dashed off some overly long and breathless heroic fantasy tale in my Honors English class my senior year of high school (which received an "A+++" and a note from my teacher encouraging me to pursuing prose writing, which I promptly ignored as I focused instead on God awful psychedelic poetry, music journalism, a humor/satire column, and finally a Lost Decade of screenwriting).

Since the release of Dead But Dreaming 2, friends, peers, and reviewers have responded favorably to "Transmission", which has lately included some of the biggest names in Lovecraftiana, most notably HPL scholar, critic, editor, and High Priest S. T. Joshi, as well as the Eldritch Queen of Lovecraftian Horror W.H. Pugmire.

Just today, a hastily scrawled note was slipped under my electronic door, containing a forthcoming review of "Transmission" (and I assume Dead But Dreaming 2) by none other than Mr. Joshi himself, who wrote:

"T. E. Grau’s 'Transmission' effectively utilises the remoteness of the parched Southwest to evoke horror—a horror that comes from the chilling and potentially cataclysmic messages heard on a radio transmission." - S. T. Joshi

Impressing Joshi, even in the slightest, is a major accomplishment, as not only is he the Kingpin of Lovecraftian academia and critique, but he's also a notoriously tough editor and discriminating reader, known far and wide for his strong opinions on the state of modern Lovecraftian fiction, and the quality of the many, many books he has compiled. That he even noticed my story is a coup. Drawing a positive mention is a feat I would never have dared contemplate.

Weeks prior, W.H. Pugmire, arguably the most acclaimed and sought-after pure Lovecraftian scribe working today, posted a review of Dead But Dreaming 2 at the amazon.com site, which included this lovely note about "Transmission":

"It astonishes me that 'Transmission' is T. E. Grau's first published story. He is off to a brilliant beginning. He has been working for a decade as a screenwriter in Hollywood, but that is a very different kind of writing than the short story form. This is one of the creepiest stories in the book, superbly told." - W.H. Pugmire

It might seem crass to share reviews of one's own story, but I really couldn't keep my yapper shut about this. I'm so incredibly thankful, and feel blessed and lucky (or blessedly lucky) to have received such a warm reception for my writing, especially coming from two Cyclopean Big Wigs such as S. T. Joshi and W.H. Pugmire. They're the swirling yin and yang of the HPL Omniverse, and I somehow managed to please both of them. Oneness has been achieved.

The positive cosmic hum continues, and I'm lulled to contentment by the song it plays. Thanks to ALL who have read and supported my work, and continue to do so, as more of my stories leak out into the candlelight. I'm indebted beyond words. It's the juice that makes the squeeze totally worthwhile.

Guest Blogger: Marc Nocerino Shimmies Down the Rabbit Hole, and Finds It Stuffed

2011-09-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

The Cosmicomicon is excited to welcome first time guest blogger Marc Nocerino, a writer, critic, columnist and "avid devotee of the weird and fantastical," who operates a killer blog titled The Random Musings of a Corpse-To-Be. He also just today unleashed a fantastic review of Joseph S. Pulver's The Orphan Palace at renowned sci-fi/strange tales/horror mothership She Never Slept.

Marc has stormed through the misshapen front door of the speculative lit scene like an escaped loony with his beard on fire. Look for more of his short fiction to start popping up in various shadowy corners very soon, as well as additional reviews, columns, and interviews published here, at She Never Slept, and across the roiling ether. He's a talent on the serious creep...

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"A Little Rant About Brits, Dead Animals, And The Creepy Bastards Who Stuff Them. The Animals, That Is."

by Marc Nocerino

I spend a *lot* of time on the Internet. Well, let’s call a spade a spade: I spend *far too much* time on the Internet. Every now and again, I find something that I just need to share. And not because I love it, but because misery loves company.

If you have too much time on your hands and want to spend some of it watching just how bizarre the British can be, check out British Pathe’s YouTube Channel. There, you can find ranting Nazis, turn of last century soft-core porn, racist-ass foreign relations, and other generally weird British shit. Oh those kooky limeys!

Hey, I bet this was created by an American

But today we venture into territory that makes my skin crawl and my entrails shudder. Today, my friends, we watch a video from the 1960s titled simply “Crazy Taxidermy Museum.” Truer words may never have been spoken. This scares me in ways that even Lovecraft never dreamed possible. I feel as if my soul was just given a handjob by a hooker wearing sandpaper gloves. If I thought that clawing out my eyeballs would make me un-see that video, I might just give it a try.

Do you, Mr. Whiskers, take Miss Kitty to be your
lawfully wedded dead puppet wife?

How are we holding these cups? We don’t have
opposable thumbs!

You think those stills are creepy??? Watch the video. My brain screamed What The FUCK?!? the first time I watched this clip, and it repeats that query (with the addition of Dear God, WHY???) every time I watch it again; which I must admit I can’t seem to stop doing. I honestly don’t know what it is about those stuffed cats and rabbits that I find so damned amusing. As abhorrent as they are, there is something cute about them too. They scare me, but they also make me want to get all cuddly. As soon as the video starts to play, its like Dr. Doolittle and Ed Gein are partying inside my brainpan.

I wonder what was in Potter’s pipe when he
decided to make this horrific shit?

--Psst, hey! What’d ya get on number 3?
--Fuck off, jack. Eyes on your own chalkboard.

So who stuffed all these dead animals, and why? The guilty party is one Mr. Walter Potter, an English taxidermist who displayed these ghastly dioramas at his personal taxidermy museum in Sussex, England. Potter picked up taxidermy as a hobby after his pet canary died, and although his first attempt didn’t turn out too well he kept at it, in a workshop loft above his father’s stables. He was inspired by the Nursery Rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” after his sister read it to him. He apparently took it quite literally, and after seven years of work he unveiled this monstrosity, aptly (if not somewhat illiterately) titled: The Dead and Burial of Cock Robin, in 1861.

Fuck me sideways, but that’s some creepy shit!

By 1880, Walter Potter had stuffed so many dead animals and created so many fucking freaky dioramas that he had to build a Museum of Curiosities to hold them all. And this is only the animals he stuffed as a hobby; he was also a professional taxidermist by trade at that point.

Potter died in 1918 when a small army of woodland animals tore him limb from limb in an attempt to liberate the desecrated bodies of their ancestors and relatives … God smote him for his abominations against the gentle creatures of the Earth… The great animal zombie outbreak of ’18 tore across the British countryside and all his creations rose from their scenes and perches to devour his brains…He finally succumbed to illness brought on by a stroke he had suffered a few years before. His museum contained approximately 10,000 animals at the time of his death, all taxidermied by Walter Potter.

I just have to ask… Do you think he really just happened to stumble across 10,000 dead animals over the course of his “hobby”, or was he responsible for an animal Holocaust?

In a perfect world, Potter would have been stuffed and mounted, but alas he was simply buried - although it was in the same graveyard he used as a model for his debut diorama.

Acknowledgments:
http://www.youtube.com/user/britishpathe
http://www.ravishingbeasts.com/walter-potter/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Potter

In the Wake of the Fest, in the Shadow of Hallowmas, The Cosmicomicon Gears Back Up

2011-09-24T02:24:00.000-07:00

"Moonlight off of Kingsport Light" by Todd Shearer

Greetings, wonderful Weirdlings and random readers of all stripes. Welcome back and to The Cosmicomicon. I brought pillows and a hookah, so make yourself comfortable.

The plasma ink well devoted to this electronic tome has been rarely accessed as of late, for a variety of daylight and moonlight reasons. The desk at my 9 to 5 (okay, 10:30 to 8) decided to bite down with vigorous intent on my girlish ankles with the dedication and ridiculous jaw strength of a rabid Rottweiler, while some very important and ongoing creative endeavors have taken all of my spare time normally devoted to regular bloggish excursions.

But that is all about to change.

I'm closing out a story of monstrous proportions in both theme and length, which will be sent out across the endless ocean of Atlantis via Carrier Nightgaunt in the coming few days. This piece is my longest to date (10,000+ words) and has been my most challenging, as a slow descent into corporate/urban insanity demands a deft waltz rather than a frantic jitterbug. I'm quite pleased with the end result and its showpiece destination, which I will share with you all very soon.

Also, the 2011 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival was held last weekend, and the giddy anticipation that built and spilled out over two wonderful days and nights kept me away from my photonic quill and out amongst the insanely living. My fantastic experience amongst Lovecraftians both local and imported will also grace this glowing parchment as the new week dawns.

Moreover, I have a dynamite Guest Blogger piece on tap, a bit of Call of Cthulhu gaming news, and various other tasty pieces waiting in the leathery wings, including an attempt to get back to airless fluff pieces devoted solely to my love and continuing fascination with the beautiful cosmos, and the undying horror of a Universe so unknowable and indifferent to the warm, blue marble that was kind enough to host our silly existence and bravely endure our noxious squabbles. At least so far.

All of this will lead up to what should be a spectacular October, including the The Cosmicomicon's 2nd Annual Countdown to Hallowmas, complete with holiday-appropriate stories of the weird and wondrous and spooky, culminating with a full report and photo spread taken in Grau Haus (as we did last year), featuring the unsurpassable design talents of the pale, raven haired Night Queen Ives Hovanessian.

We're on the cusp of wonderfully haunted times, my friends.

So, that's the update from your loyal leader of The Cosmicomicon. I thank you muchly for your patience and continued interest during these dry weeks of autumn harvest. The crops are still aging in the endless fields, just waiting for the roar of tractor engines and swirling blades. Then, the bounty will be spilled at our feet. That's my hope, at least.

Consider this creatively devoid message a public gathering of writerly hems, a repositioning in my angry chair, and a Cyclopean intake of oxygenated atmosphere before I plunge back down into the uncharted depths of the nighted void. For that is where the Dark Dreams are born and gestate in anxious cocoons...

I know that The Cosmicomicon is merely a simple blog devoted to my writings and musings, but I take what I do here very seriously, and never forget my responsibility to those who sacrifice their time to read what is written here. There is no greater honor for a writer than having readers who care. Thank you.

Determined and schnozzy, whilst contemplating the Land of Gucker, Joshi, and Sparkling Vampires

Keeping L.A. Weird: The 2nd Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Descends on San Pedro Harbor, September 16th and 17th

2011-09-16T00:30:00.000-07:00

Art by David Milano

What a difference a year makes...

At roughly this same time last year, I was nervously and hastily prepping for my first gig as roving reporter for Yog-Sothoth.com, tasked with gathering sound bytes at the 1st Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival - Los Angeles. It was September, 2010, and I had just had my very first Lovecraftian short story ("Transmission") accepted for anthology publication in the anticipated Dead But Dreaming 2 for Misktonic River Press.

Flash forward about 370 days, and I'm nervously and hastily prepping for my first Author's Panel at the 2nd Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, after serving as a judge of the festival screenplay competition. Dead But Dreaming 2 has been released to widespread renown, and I now have five stories coming out in four other anthologies and publications, as well as a deal in place to release my own collection of short fiction in 2013. And 2011 ain't even over yet. There's still much dark business to be done.

What a difference a year makes... But then again, nothing has really changed as far as my enthusiasm and wonder at this amazing scene of devoted Weirdlings. I just know my neighbors a little better, and they me.

From eager outsider a year ago to eager sorta' insider today, I journey down to edge of the continent later today to take in the opening day of the festival, held at the gorgeous Warner Grand Theater, celebrating its proud 80th birthday as a vibrant, art deco landmark the same year that Lovecraft's masterful "The Whisperer in Darkness" also turns fourscore, which will be properly commemorated this year by the showcasing of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's monumental adaptation of "Whisperer" on the vast, silvery screen, which is the anchor film of the entire fest, for soon to be obvious reasons. It's the HPLHS's most ambitious film to date, and promises to blow minds by showing what indie film can do when properly motivated for forces not of this side of the cosmos.

Under the wise and steady guidance of filmmaker and adroit mixologist Aaron Vanek, the festival is already growing, in only its second year. Based on ticket pre-sales, Vanek expects attendance to more than double, and this year, the festival is getting pre-press in such prestigious media outlets like this damn fine article published in the Los Angeles Times.

The scope of the festival has greatly expanded as well, as this year, an Author's Panel (seating me amongst my far more learned, experienced, and talented peers such as Cody Goodfellow, Michael Tice, Jenna Pitman, and Denise Dumars) has been added at Williams' Book Store across the street from the theater, as well as an expanded slate of films, including several short subjects, in addition to the usual slate of Lovecraft-inspired features new, recent, and from antiquity. The more classic offerings (shown Friday night) include indie genre film legend Roger Corman's masterful "The Haunted Palace" (1963), a delicious amalgam of Poe and HPL (based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward") starring horror icon Vincent Price, which was the first piece of true Lovecraftian cinema ever filmed (Corman will make a video appearance to accept his “Howie” award, an HPLFF tradition that honors filmmakers contributions to film based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft).

Howie Award winner and my wizened yet spry boyfriend Roger Corman

More impressive still, Vanek busted out some salty, eldritch Magick to wrangle a brand new 35 mm print of the 1933 time travel film "Berkeley Square." One of Lovecraft's favorite movies that he watched four times, "Berkeley Square" provided the creative impetus for HPL to pen one of his finest stories, "The Shadow Out of Time."

Saturday's slate is more contemporary, with "Cast a Deadly Spell," Spain's "La Sombra Prohibida" ("The Forbidden Shadow"), an exciting raft of short films (all entered into a contest judged by Hollywood heavyweight and devoted Lovecraftian Guillermo del Toro), and finally "The Whisperer in Darkness" closing the night, followed by a Q&A with co-writer/director Sean Branney and co-writer/producer Andrew Leman of the HPLHS. According to the Time's article:

"The exhibit of the film’s props, costumes and miniature sets will be on display in the theater’s Grand Vision Annex — attendees will be able to tour the exhibit during a VIP reception on Friday and at the closing night reception, which is open to all ticketholders on Saturday."

The number of vendors has increased, as well, with a diverse and kickass collection that includes Famous Monsters of Filmland , Fez-o-Rama , Badali Jewelry , The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, SighCo , Arkham Bazaar , David Milano , Joyner Studio , Strange Aeons Magazine, and Perilous Press & Mike Dubisch. On a personal level, I'm super excited that stellar artist and pal Nick "The Hat" Gucker is flying down on gaunt, nighted wings from mist huddled Seattle to exercise some creative demons, work on his tan, rep the fantastic Strange Aeons, and hand out bookmarks to celebrate the upcoming release of the Aklonomicon (which features my stories "Flutes" and "In the Cave, She Sang," both with exceptional art by Paul Carrick, previously written about in The Comicomicon here). The weepy man hugging will be the stuff of legend.

But, to quote the great Marty Di Bergi from Spinal Tap: "Enough of my yakkin. Let's boogie." Indeed... Boogie your ass down to San Pedro Friday and Saturday evening, if only to inform your curious soul that the present and future of Lovecraftiana is as vibrant, exciting, and sanity-threatening as ever.

(Get all your festival and ticket information here, as well as further vendor info here)

BTW, there will be several readings during the panel, including my beloved Ives honoring me beyond measure by giving velvet voice to one of my tales. You'll have to show up to find out which one...

Keep your eyeball smashed to this space in the days following the festival for a full-on report, complete with candid photos, embarrassing anecdotes, and clues to the location of a hidden body or two...

Guest Blogger: Alex Lugo reviews "Some Unknown Gulf of Night"

2011-09-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

The Cosmicomicon is proud to welcome back ace reviewer Alex Lugo, who offers up his review of W. H. Pugmire's latest inspired and fantastically original work Some Unknown Gulf of Night, which is, according to Bloodletting Press: "One of only 100 signed and numbered hardcover copies. Cover and interior illustrations by Matthew Jaffe."

Get your copy while it's still slippery and hot, and before it goes into a second printing, as everyone knows that owning a first printing copy of a legendary tome means your contributing greatly to your present and future sex life. Because, as John Waters famously uttered, "If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em." Don't be caught dead - or trouserless - without treasures such as this adorning your creaking shelves.

So now, as I often do and hope to do for the unforeseeable future, I turn my pages over to Master Alex....

____________________________________________________________________________

Some Unknown Gulf of Night

By W.H. Pugmire

Review by Alex Lugo

Some Unknown Gulf of Night is the latest, strangest, and undoubtedly greatest book thus far from modern master of the weird tale, W.H. Pugmire. Before even getting into the story itself, one must really appreciate the production and design of the actual tome. It is a very small book, a tad bit bigger than the novella line from Delirium Books. I have always favored over-sized books, but I feel that the small size of the book does it proper justice. It gives off this appealingly ghoulish cuteness, if that makes any sense. The publisher is Arcane Wisdom, the weird fiction imprint of Bloodletting Press. I proudly possess all of the Arcane Wisdom titles, and the owner, Larry Roberts, always delivers a fine production. Some Unknown Gulf of Night is no exception. Along with all the other books of Arcane Wisdom, it has an extremely low print run. Only 100 limited edition copies are for sale, and nearly all of them are gone, so if my review tickles your fancy, you should hurry over to Horror Mall to secure your copy before they disappear into the night.

Like most of Pugmire’s work, Some Unknown Gulf of Night is extremely Lovecraftian. What Pugmire does with this book is portray his own unique response to Lovecraft’s brilliant sonnet sequence, Fungi from Yuggoth. The book is split up into 36 numbered prose poems and vignettes spanning 191 pages, meaning this is Pugmire’s largest single work yet. Each segment is Pugmire’s own interpretation of that numbered sonnet from Fungi from Yuggoth. Many of the segments are connected, whether it is due to a recurring character, or a straightforward continuation of a previous segment. Other segments are standalone stories. My personal favorite was one of the standalone pieces, which centered upon a weird artist named John who inherits a house near Dunwich and is driven insane by the cosmic lunacy evoked by a strange photograph with which he is obsessed, and attempts to reproduce through his art. This madness carries over to his friend, who is the narrator of the segment.

Some Unknown Gulf of Night is not a book you read in one sitting. Although it is under 200 pages, the reader must think of the book as 36 different stories, each needing to be digested with the proper time, like a rich meal, served bloody and rare. To read it in one sitting is too much. There are segments in the book that are two pages long, but are so decadent and powerful that they alone have as much depth and wonder as a ten-page work. The brain of the lucky reader risks over-saturation, and the possible bursting of brain tissue, should they attempt to complete the tome in one, unbroken read, as Pugmire’s sumptuous and poetic style is something to be sipped slowly, like a fine aperitif.

While not absolutely essential, it will help if the reader is not only familiar with the Lovecraftian universe (as there are some explicit references to his places and characters), but also with Pugmire’s own richly crafted world as well, for there are many call-backs to Pugmire’s past work. For example, one of the most frequent characters is a red haired, black skinned girl (although oddly devoid of African features), who dons a yellow, silk dress. People familiar with Pugmire will know that this woman is Marceline, an avatar and soul-sister of Nyarlathotep himself. If you are not familiar with both writers, you might be a bit confused when you read this book, although enjoyment is assured, be you Lovecraftian/Pugmire novice or well-read sage.

Some Unknown Gulf of Night is a dream come true to fans of Lovecraft and fans of Pugmire. For the Lovecraft fan, you can expect all types of cosmic horrors, weird locales, and blessedly archaic phrasing. For the Pugmire fan, you can expect mentally deranged characters, beautiful prose, and disturbing atmosphere. What’s not to like? Gulf has a small page count, but it is thick with content. Gulf can be as disturbing as coming across a clown in the middle of the forest, but it can also be as beautiful as a misty Kingsport night. Gulf will disgust you, and caress you. It is a grand paradox of Lovecraft’s world, and Pugmire’s adoring view of it. I assure you that although this book is super Lovecraftian, it is beyond the realm of pastiche. Pugmire writes in a way Lovecraft never could, yet he pays homage to the master at the same time. It is something truly magickal and I honestly can’t explain it. The best way to discover those nighted and weirdly horrific things that Wilum H. Pugmire has carefully arranged in the shadowy corners is to pick up this fine work for yourself. You won’t be disappointed, nor will you be the same when you close the book as you were when you first opened it.
____________________________________________________________________________

by Alex Lugo

The Gorgeous Lovecraftian Legend

Coming in October: 'The Orphan Palace' by Joseph S. Pulver

2011-09-01T19:57:00.000-07:00

Back in my second year of college, when I was in the full grips of the lunacy of youth, fed by childlike artistic optimism and mountains of hallucinogens, I decided I wanted to change my major from pre-law to English Lit. I had decided to become a professional writer, so I needed to become a collegiate reader. Well, not so much "professional" writer, as I cared not a whit for legitimization or money. What 20 year old, moon-eyed moron does? But, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and more specifically, a poet. I wanted to grow a (pre-Hipster/Walt Whitmanesque) beard, rent out an attic from a kindly octogenarian, and write poetry that no one wanted to buy, but that I couldn't stop writing, because it burned through my skin from my soul, etching itself onto page after thick-fibered journal page like the finger of God.

Why such an irrational yet vastly (Big "R") Romantic life change?

The Beatniks, that's why.

The mad, howling writeniks of the Beat generation caught me in mid-pivot, and pummeled me to the floor, bloodying my knees and tearing open my skull. I loved the energy, the rhythm, the raw and wild fuckoffedness of their storytelling, structure, and prose. Of their lifestyle in general, which was all based around writing, music, expression, experience... This is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a Beatnik writer.

Of course, I didn't know at the time that I couldn't be a Beatnik writer because that era was long past, narcotics and driving safety laws were far more stringent, musty old octogenarians charged rent for their musty old attics, and people read even less poetry in the early 90's than they did in the late 50's. So, after coming to grips with needing a day job and reassessing that beard (settling on a Chris Cornellian soul patch instead), I reckoned I could assume the style of a Beatnik writer, but that soon seemed less and less desirable, the further and further away I traveled from that last gasp of childlike artistic optimism so particular to university, and especially that leering mountain of hallucinogens. Stuck without a literary rudder, I didn't know what sort of prose writer I wanted to be. So, I never became one. Instead, I became a music writer, then a satire columnist, then a screenwriter, then dangerously disgruntled. None of the former engage in much prose, and prose was what I wanted to do.

But what sort of prose? I loved reading Lovecraft, but I never dared attempt write like him, nor write THROUGH him. I didn't even think people did that back then, and that style of horror literature was so gloriously stodgy, standing in direct contrast to the Beatnik energy that I was still feeling in my bones when I finally stared down my path, clotted with so many narrow, distracting forks.

I wish, all those years ago, I would have stumbled across Joseph S. Pulver, just as he was thundering onto the scene. If I did, I would have had a 20 year head start on my real writing career, and spared the planet a forest's worth of shitty screenplays how hopefully recycled into the toilet paper that they truly were. Had I read Joe - and he insists on me calling him Joe, instead of the "Mr. Pulver" that he's due - it all would have been different. But, just as Blood Will Have Its Season, and just as the world can always be boiled down to Sin & Ashes, everything always seems to happen for a reason.

Joe writes like a modern day Beat after spending a week locked up in an unhallowed mausoleum, adding an extra edge of madness to the zig zagging, tea lid poetics. He's a gritty amalgam of neon noir scuttling beneath shadows moving in the uncaring skies above. He's a traveling salesman huddling in a cheap, semen stained motel, clutching a rusted canning knife in a blood drenched suit. He's the third day of a speed binge, when the commonplace things of the sunlight world become strange objects of terror, and death seems better than one more hour of this itching horror. He's an acid trip inside a charnel house. A peyote bud shot from a musket into the soft side of your willing skull. He's gristle. He's grizzle. He's dangerous beauty. Tentacles and lipstick. Stink and incense. Joe Pulver is like no other writer out there - a true singularity in a malevolent cosmos vast and often repetitively mirrored.

Now, Joe is ready to unleash The Orphan Palace this October, which threatens to take him - and us - to new heights of weirdish wonder anchored by the cold depths of depravity, all set in that patented Pulververse that has become his boot-heeled trademark, bringing poetic prose into the 21st century at the head of a murdered-out Ford Mustang, bristling with spikes and belching fully righteous Hellfire.

And as excited as I am to dig into the guts of this book, I have to comment on the cover of The Orphan Palace, as artist Peter Diamond seems to have set a new standard for book covers. Look up, gentle readers. This is an EXTRAORDINARY piece. Worthy of Joe. Worthy of each other.

As for the more on what lies within that amazing cover, please note the official press release from the Chômu Press website:

"Cardigan is heading east through the night-bleak cities of America and back to confront the past he has never escaped, as a resident of Zimms, an orphanage-cum-asylum and a true palace of dementia, presided over by the ‘Chaos Lord’, Dr. Archer. His odyssey is one of haunting flashbacks and disorientating encounters on the road as he leaves a trail of fire and destruction behind him. In the circles and dead-ends that make the maze of his madness, Cardigan meets bounty hunters, ghosts, ghouls, a talking rat, even a merman, and struggles to decide which will lead him to damnation and which to salvation.

With The Orphan Palace, Joseph S. Pulver takes the ‘weird fiction’ mythologies of Robert Chambers, Frank Belknap Long and H.P. Lovecraft, melts them in the crucible of his own unique noir poetry and cooks up a hallucinatory road-trip that is utterly unexpected."

Joe was kind enough to provide a bit of background and context for The Orphan Palace, brought to you in 1930's Courier, as Joe seems like a thick forearmed, bang the typewriter through wisps of cigarette smoke sort of guy:

"TOP was  written in 90 days (a complete draft -- 80+% of which was never changed  in any way, excepting typos) . . . It poured out at a pace I found  astounding, and at times taxing. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t turn off the words . . . I  had the opening and had penned the ending 1st, the rest, connecting the dots, was just steering the car from one coast to the other while trying to keep the wheels on the car as the byways turned into black tickets to nightmare. 

TOP is nighttime! Whiskey and madness, hate and pain as fuel, driving a man to dream his DARK dreams, and in them, perhaps find the revenge he believes will be a bridge to a land of quiet. 

Years ago, Michael Cisco recommended Marcel Bealu’s The Experience of the Night and Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side. I quickly read them. And came away with this lust to discover the “nature of night”. 10+ years later, TOP is my look at what lives and walks in the Blackness of the “American Night” Cisco sent me in search of. Cisco by the way, did the forward for TOP. Talk ‘bout honored and humbled!!!

My only rule going in was Night (and nightmare - as the mask of madness) is both a road and a forest, a jungle, so you better run (that was pretty much my plot) . . . No stopping, no looking back, run . . . You know where you want your feet to go, but can they take you there? Having read Last Exit To Brooklyn, Rechy’s CITY OF NIGHT, and On The Road, years ago, I felt each seethed. That’s what I wanted. A mad dash, take my poetics off the leash."

This is one of the most anticipated works of 2011/2012. Pre-order now from Amazon.com here.

You can often tell the much about a person based on the company they keep. In Joe's case, he and his decorated company sit tall at the Big Boy's table, populated by the best of the best in Weird, Dark, and Lovecraftian fiction. Indeed, the rogue's gallery that has lined up to issue praise for The Orphan Palace in particular, and/or Joe in general, includes the following:

“Joe Pulver is like the answer to some arcane riddle: What do you get when you cross one of Plato’s Muse-maddened poets with a Lovecraftian lunatic, and then give their offspring to be raised by Raymond Chandler and a band of Beats? His work caters to a literary hunger you didn’t even know you had, and does it darkly and deliciously.” -- Matt Cardin

“The Orphan Palace is not a story. With this novel, Joe Pulver wants to press your face right up against the horror, the crime, the sheer madness and absurdity of the cosmos, and rub your nose in it. He wants you to eat it like a dog eats its own vomit; he wants your face to be covered in black-shining stars and rainbow-filth when you’re done; he demands that you be changed by what you have consumed. This is not a novel. It is a unique literary experience.” -- Gary McMahon

“The Orphan Palace kicks you in the face and doesn’t stop. Pulver’s prose sees the world through a cracked lense of 60’s hedonism and 70’s grit, with a side order of unshakable terror. A serial killer novel that explores the dark side of America via Kerouac in a shell of cosmic horror. What he does is electrifying. I’ve never seen anything like it. My hair is still standing on end.” -- Simon Strantzas

“Joe Pulver’s poetic prose is hypnotic and intoxicating, so beautiful and strange that it transports the reader. Yet it does the work of creating fascinating characters and telling story. Story-telling is an art, and none are more accomplished than Pulver. Weird fiction’s primal duty is to fuck [alternative word: debauch] your brain and kiss your sense of wonder. This book has done that for me, as few horror novels have. Absolutely brilliant.” -- Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire

“The prose of Joe Pulver can take its place with that of the masters of our genre – E.A. Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti – while his imaginative reach is something uniquely his own.” - S.T. Joshi

“While everybody else in horror is still aping the shallow visual palette of cinema, Joe Pulver calls down a storm of psychotronic nightmares charged with the evocative depth and relentless pulse of the Devil’s music.” - Cody Goodfellow

"Mad, malevolent, and incantatory, The Orphan Palace reads like the hagridden fever dream of one who has not only stared the Abyss in Its black and fathomless face, but welcomed Its gaze in return . . . and become Its living embodiment. It is a journey to be taken by none but the bravest of readers, and by souls with an ardent desire to savor their own damnation." --Robin Spriggs

Joe, paying homage to his hero Robert W. Chambers

All those years ago, at that crucial time, had I read Joe, it certainly all would have been different... Now it's your turn, to gaze deeply into the swirling, aching dark conjured in The Orphan Palace. Now it's your turn to change your tomorrow by burning down your today.

Fear not, the coming of night. Joe warned you how it would be...

String Theory - The Beautiful Non-Euclidean Horror of Chiharu Shiota

2011-08-23T00:09:00.000-07:00

Any regular reader of The Cosmicomicon knows my love of the Japanese. The people, the land, the food, Bushido, the cultural emphasis on precision, and the almost genetic embrace of the Weird. The Japanese have and always seen the world differently than western eyes, and that's a wonderful thing.

So it surprises me not a whit when Ives introduced me to the gorgeous and sanity threatening art of Chiharu Shiota.

The canvas is half empty space surrounding commonplace objects of a life commonly lived, where both memories and the best laid plains got derailed by the emergence of something sinister and... growing.

The medium is simple black string, made into something monstrous, like a billion groping tentacles reaching into our reality from someplace vast and dark. Or an alien plague spreading with the force and tactics of a monstrous, primordial mold.

Ghostly, ghastly, spectral and oddly aggressive, Chiharu Shiota is tapping into something deep and profound, creating a colossal version of the end of things via innumerable and unnameable strands.

Much like art, horror is the sum of its parts, be they small or impossibly large... The few or the infinite...

The Genius at work

The Nativity That Reshaped The Universe - Happy Birthday, Howard Phillips Lovecraft

2011-08-20T00:04:00.000-07:00

Artwork courtesy of Marc Simonetti*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I never ask a man what his business is, as it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams." - H.P. Lovecraft

August 20th is the birthday of one Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who is, for my pasty pound of flesh, the greatest horror writer who ever breathed.

His writing and themes weren't without precedent, but his distillation and expansion on the Weird works of those who came before him is staggering. Call him the Quentin Tarantino of horror fiction - sponging up his myriad, groundbreaking influences, binding them at a subatomic level, and wringing out a totally new solution onto the parched, thirsty land, creating a new level of extraordinary, innovative creativity that dwarfs those who proceeded him.

I wouldn't be writing prose at this very second if it wasn't for H.P. Lovecraft. While that backstory has been told before, trust that it's the fierce, fearless imagination combined with the generous gesturing of sharing his boundless universe and Mythos that took me by the hand and led me down the Path I Was Supposed To Travel. For that, I'll always be grateful and indebted to the odd, complicated Gentleman of Providence.

I and my Weird writing peers are all Children of Lovecraft, but we will never outdo our Father. And that's fine, as sometimes the children shouldn't outshine the parent, especially when that Family Fountainhead changed the very fiber of thought, curving reality into a new, terrible, vastly interesting shape (of a decidedly non-Euclidean origin).

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lovecraft. You truly changed the world, the known (and unknown) universe, and all of us scuttling insects crawling and dreaming across the great, strange plains of reality. These last 121 years would have been been far more hollow and uninteresting without you.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind if fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

* (Find Marc Simonetti's AMAZING work here)

The Creation of Horror in Real Time, Straight From the Dark Heart of ol' Strange France

2011-08-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

We here at The Cosmicomion are always striving to bring you the best of the shadowed Weird, which, naturally, includes beautiful images of terrifying things.

Well, I think we hit the jackpot with "Transfiguration," a spooky as hell performance piece by French artist Olivier de Sagazan, brought to my attention by my friend Cedric Monget. Give it a look and ask yourself why the French are always so good and being so wonderfully odd.

(cue up Babel Fish and enjoy Olivier's amazing site)

The Horror of Talking Wood Made Flesh - or - Confessions of a Partial Pediophobic

2011-08-11T23:07:00.000-07:00

Much like unintentional humor is often funnier than an overly crafted joke, unintentional horror can often be the most terrifying. Trees, people on stilts, clowns, puppets, marionettes, mannequins, dolls, dummies, aging chimpanzees... Things not created for terror, but which strike fear faster and deeper than any masked serial killer or costumed haunted house employee.

Aside from clowns, who are obviously out to chew on my entrails, I've often been unsettled by inanimate things made to look like humans, large or small, kooky or straight. Hence, I think I suffer from a varying case of pediophobia, described by the all-knowing floating brain named Wikipedia as:

Pediophobia is a fear of dolls, or, more generally, of "false representation of sentient beings" such as mannequins or robots. The word is derived from the Greek word paidion, meaning "little child".

I don't find Chucky scary. Too obvious, and too easy to punt. I don't find robots scary. Even the "evil" ones. Too unrealistic. But unpuntable mannequins? Check. Add marionettes to that list. The strings make a good drop kick nearly impossible. And dolls. Not all dolls, mind you, but the super realistic ones that look like tiny pageant queens, with the sparkling, dead eyes. Yes, they, too, could easily be sent skyward at the end of my foot, but for some reason, those fragile looking damsels don't seem to be the type to bum rush a victim. They're creepers, these. They sneak up soundless when you're not looking, when your punt foot is safely wrapped under the covers. "Paidion," indeed.

Topping the list of this dainty horror show has always been ventriloquist dummies. Puppets are often scary, but ventriloquist dummies are the king shit of horrortown. There's something about the way they're constructed, the largeness of the eyes, the unruly shock of brillo hair, the gaping mouth silently pantomiming the speech of the slightly odd human underneath it. The human pulls the strings, gets the smattering of laughter, but I know that the wooden dummy isn't one. It's plotting a show of his own. It has lots of time to scheme inside a dark, airless box.

I'm too young to have enjoyed the black and white freak show Howdy Doody, but I'm not too young for Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, where I first encountered the raspy voiced demon witch Lady Elaine Fairchilde, with her harshly cropped, boyish hairdo, reddened nose and cheeks, and wide-set, cast eyes. And the fact that her mouth never moves, nor even opens, just adds to the terror.

But, Lady Elaine's yapper is frozen in a smug sneer of knowing malevolence, she doesn't qualify as a true ventriloquist dummy, many of which best her in the spooky department.

Witness this motley crew of smallish wooden monsters featured below, taken from this link:

Much like Babe Ruth pointing to the fence where he'd swat his homer on the next pitch, this dummy turned to the left and called his shot.

Ironically, the dummy has his wooden paw up this man's spine. Coincidentally, the dummy's costume-specific nickname is "Lil' Butcher"

I know what you did, The Great Lester. I know EXACTLY what you did. And it wasn't Great at all.

This family portrait brought to you by rictus, freakishness, and the most evil use of wood since the invention of the siege engine

Horror. Creeps. Awkward, thudding crawlies. Waiting barbarism in every carved notch, tiny shoe, and odd smelling swatch of fabric.

Sleep tight! Don't let the dolls bite!

William Hope Hodgson - The Forgotten Grandfather of Cosmic Horror?

2011-08-04T20:43:00.000-07:00

Reading within a long standing and proud genre like weird/speculative fiction is much like exploring rootsy musical genres like old country Blues, as one often works their way backwards and outwards like a spiderweb once they regain their feet after being leveled by that first, unexpected collision.

And so it has been with me and the Weird, moving out in the familiar pattern that so many fellow insects have traveled before me. Bullseye Lovecraft in the center, then work out to the next layer of web, populated by Pulp masters Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, then move wider through the auxiliary spiral, dancing past the members of the Arkham House Crew (as I'll greet them on the way back), and out into the anchoring strands built by the likes of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, M.R. James, Robert W. Chambers, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, and William Hope Hodgson.

Much ink has been spilled, both on those flickering pages and reams of others, about the majesty and sweep of Smith's fertile imagination, as well as the brawny, sinew-popping grit of Howard. These two sit at either hand of HPL for a reason, and I learned - and am still learning - much from their seemingly endless tales of weirdness and wonder, fantasy and horror. As I rapidly became familiar with those resting on the top rungs, I also wanted to see those who climbed the ladder first, offering a hand and shoulder and private whisper about the best way to reach the top. To find the better view of the Infinite. I wanted to discover for myself the somewhat buried Foundation for all vistas now laid bare.

And so, giving a respectful bow to the Dark Triumvirate, I packed light and journeyed out further into the web on hinterland strands of sticky, viscous silk, marveling at the new sights around me that all echoed back a familiar melody, still shiny and limber after all these years. I waded into Machen's murky moors with "The Great God Pan," and was amazed by the prose, and the simplicity of the powerful horror. Robert W. Chambers' "The King in Yellow" threatened to be one of the greatest works of weird fiction I'd ever read for the first third of the work, until it devolved, in my cretinous opinion, into boring, late 19th century Parisian art scene Romanticism.

And then I alighted on the thin, somewhat dusty strand populated by William Hope Hodgson, the little discussed English writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, who - through his often clumsy and ponderous prose - created one of the earliest, true cosmic horror stories I've run across in all of my reading in his novel "The House on the Borderlands."

Hodgson was born in Blackmore End, Essex, in 1877, and died in World War I at the tragically young age of 40. But, before he waltzed off this wet, silly rock, he left behind a collection of poetry and short stories deeply influenced by his interest in science fiction, horror, and his time spent at sea. Being of short stature, he was devoted bodybuilder (to defend himself from bullies, who soon found out that he was, pound for pound, one of the toughest men in Britain), and began his career writing articles about fitness in 1903. These didn't pan out, so - being influenced by his love of the writings of Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle - Hodgson shifted his writing focus to fantastical fiction, writing and publishing his first short story, titled "The Goddess of Death", in 1904. He found his place, and was hooked. Dozens of short stories and poems followed, and he gained notoriety more for the former than the latter (although his poetry was later published by his widow). In 1907, he published his first novel The Boats of "Glen-Carrig", which was received with no small amount of critical renown. Also that same year, he published "The Voice in the Night", which I have also read, and is a tasty bit of dark, nihilistic fiction featuring two of WHH's favorite tropes - aggressive fungi and the sea.

But, it was until two years later, in 1909, that - for my money, which is a bit light on silver - William Hope Hodgson truly broke down boundaries and ground a boot print into the virginal beach of cosmic horror, when he released his ambitious and slightly uneven second novel, The House on the Borderlands.

Though his prose is often clumsy and ponderous, and his plotting sometimes mystifying, Hodgson still proves to be a master dreamer in The House of the Borderland, creating situations and horrific threats that are truly chilling, especially for the time. The strange house perched perilously over the yawning pit, the detestable Swing Things, the besieged house - all good, solid horror. Even his river to nowhere to begin the story (which I thought was a original idea several months ago, as I was plotting out a short story of my own) is interesting and creepy.

But it's not until he takes a sudden, unexplained jag into stark, raving cosmicism later in the work that Hodgson suddenly rises above his fleshly height and cast an enormous literary shadow on all writers of cosmic horror who have come after him, including one H.P. Lovecraft, who - it is claimed - did not read Hodgson until 1934 - three years before his death, and hence, long after he had invented his vast cosmic rules and mythos - as WHH's books were out of print. Unless "out of print" means "every last copy was burned," I think it's still quite feasible, and wholly probable, that Lovecraft could have run across Hodgson's work, including The House on the Borderland.

Hodgson's seems to become bored with the terrestrial conventions of his own story about 3/4 of the way through, and then takes to the stars, and beyond, writing about abstract places, concepts, and creatures I don't think had ever been conceived in print before: "The Plain of Silence," surrounded by mountains with representations of mythological beast-gods, demons and other "bestial horror"; the Sea of Sleep; interstellar, phosphorescent fungus; malevolent string of globes with shifting faces; the Green Sun, devouring our dying universe... I don't want to give away too much for those who haven't read The House on the Borderlands, but what the Recluse experiences both in and outside of his corporeal shell is straight up, hard core cosmic horror, written at the first blush of the 20th century.

Lovecraft is always cited as the Father of Cosmic Horror. So, would that make William Hope Hodgson the Grandfather of the same?

Am I looking for an influence that isn't, and couldn't, exist? I'm not so sure about that...

The House on the Borderlands was released in 1908, when Lovecraft was a spry 17 years old. The same year HPL penned "The Alchemist," which is more a classical fantasy piece, leaning more on castles and sorcery than cosmic horror. As noted above, I've read accounts and been personally told that Hodgson's books were out of print by the time Lovecraft matured into the voracious reader and writer that we all know and love. But, when a book is out of print, it doesn't mean that it disappears into the ether forever. WHH's books remained, in private collections, and possibly in libraries. I've also read that HPL doesn't mentions WHH until a written in 1934. I've also read the HPL counts WHH as one of his influences.

So, doesn't it stand to reason that Hodgson could have had a profound influence on the mind bending cosmicism not necessarily first birthed by Lovecraft, but inherited, expanded and honed in equal measure into the so-called Lovecraft Mythos that we all consume by the truckload today?

If this was a "handsome-off"...

.... the debate would be over quickly.

I'm not positing some grand theory, and those far more deeply read and researched than I am will probably easily poke a hole in this contention, but I can't help but see and hear the echoes of Hodgson's The House on the Borderland in the later stories of H.P. Lovecraft, even before he supposedly first stumbled across Hogdson's work.

SPOILERS BELOW!!

Just to give a few examples, the amphitheater in the Plain of Silence reminds me very much of the Plateau of Leng in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and the gods who gathered and perched amongst the mountains above the amphitheater recall the Elder Gods who carved their images into the rock of Ngranek:

"All lesser thoughts were lost in the wish to see that carven face which might set him on the track of the gods atop unknown Kadath"

Even the ending of the story has a curious Lovecraftian ring, as The House on the Borderland ends with the Recluse hearing something approach as he writes, documenting his end on the page:

"Hush! I hear something, down--down in the cellars. It is a creaking sound. My God, it is the opening of the great, oak trap. What can be doing that? The scratching of my pen deafens me....... I must listen....... There are steps on the stairs; strange padding steps, that come up and nearer.... Jesus, be merciful to me, an old man. There is something fumbling at the door-handle. O God, help me now! Jesus--The door is opening--slowly. Somethi----"

This is a device used by Lovecraft as well, such as in Dagon (July, 1917), in which HPL writes:

"The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!"

I don't profess to be a Lovecraft or Weird Fiction scholar, but I was instantly struck by the seeds of cosmic horror in The House on the Borderland, which were made so famously flush a decade or two later by Lovecraft throughout his exceptional writing career.

So, bottom line, while it could be argued that the roots of cosmic horror go deeper than William Hope Hodgson, and were made thick and strong under the expert tending by H.P. Lovecraft, WHH certainly needs to be included in the discussion more often, and perhaps a bit more seriously.

Perhaps the weighty title "Grandfather of Cosmic Horror" is too generous, but certainly Grand Uncle isn't too far off the mark. This inspired and talented innovator deserves a prominent spot, and his share of the cake, at the grown ups' table.

Be a Good Weirdling: Vote for Miskatonic River Press and Yog-Sothoth.com for 2011 ENnie Awards

2011-07-20T15:36:00.000-07:00

As steamy July melts into sweltering August, we are now on the cusp of the annual Gen Con EN World RPG Awards (aka the "ENnie Awards"), which are described by their official website as "an annual fan-based celebration of excellence in tabletop roleplaying gaming," giving "game designers, writers and artists the recognition they deserve. It is a peoples’ choice award, and the final winners are voted upon online by the gaming public."

What does this mean to you? A whole hell of a lot, actually, as Miskatonic River Press - the publishing motherland of Dead But Dreaming 2, as well as several exciting, upcoming projects including Horror for the Holidays (edited by Scott David Aniolowski), W.H. Pugmire's The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep, and Dissecting Cthulhu (edited by S.T. Joshi); in addition to a whole slew of fantastic Call of Cthulhu RGP scenarios, monographs, and supplements - is up for an ENnie Award for Fans' Favorite Publisher.

Also of interest to all good readers, writers, and gamers of a decidedly Lovecraftian bent is the fact that Yog-Sothoth.com - which is THE meeting and discussion spot for CoC and the works of H.P. Lovecraft on the Internets - is up for an ENnie in the category of Best Podcast.

Follow this link to the ENnies Award Voting Booth and cast your gleeful ballot for MRP and YSDC in their respective categories. Also, feel free to vote in other categories if you see a favorite or familiar name. This is democracy in action, folks. Don't spit in the face of freedom. Puppies die and terrorists win every time an opportunity to vote is shunned.

The awards will be presented (hopefully to Tom Lynch of MRP and Paul "of Cthulhu" Maclean of YSDC) at a packed and breathless ceremony held on Friday, August 5th at 6:30 pm in the 500 Ballroom of Gen Con Indy.

So, as the blerg title suggests, please be a good Weirdling, and vote for the community website and the independent publisher that mean so much to me, to The Cosmicomicon, and to Lovecraftian gaming and fiction in general. These are OUR hubs, OUR platforms and champions, and we need to adorn them accordingly with the shiniest finery on the market.

Music Review: Goatfisted Writhes from the Black Metal Abyss with Self Titled Album

2011-07-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin has given us much in the way of unimaginable horror and violence that rises above your garden variety shooting spree or machete decapitation.

Disgruntled mama's boy Ed Gein turned townies into furniture on his farm in Plainfield. Necro playboy Jeffrey Dahmer was born in West Allis, moving shop to the city Schlitz built to become the Milwaukee Monster. Hell, Wisconsin spawns homicidal terror at such a clip they even wrote a book about it.

But that's just human murder and mayhem. The crass stuff of mortals. A deeper darkness born amid cold, alien chaos also lurks under the facade of quaint dairies and rolling fields, as Wisconsin is also ground zero of Arkham House, located in the unlikely village of Sauk City. Founded by August Dertleth, the enterprising, bull necked confidante of one Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Arkham House played a leading role in rescuing the mind splitting cosmic horror of Lovecraft's writings from the dust bin of the Pulp Age.

Approximately 85.9 miles from Sauk City and Arkham House HQ, up trusty US 151, is the picturesque hamlet of Fond du Lac, nestled on the sleepy shores of Lake Winnebago. This is a true bedroom community, in every sense. They even have a cute little lighthouse. But, as with much in this state, the cheery outer glow is all a facade, as Fond du Lac is contributing its own legacy to Wisconsin-born horror and inescapable darkness, as Fond du Lac is the home of Goatfisted, a Black Metal band bending knee and Ernie Ball strings to the writings and Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft.

Goatfisted's self-titled, debut album is a growling, crunching, 8-song dirge to the hopes of humanity in a universe proven to be cold and malevolent. This is D-tuned choir music for a mass blacker than anything birthed within the time of man. This is the metal soundtrack to the very last All Hallows' Eve. This is horror metal with a distinguished edge befitting the alienated gentleman of Providence who inspired it.

From band member monikers - Shogtha (vocals), Jhatanth (chief guitarist/bassist), Ren-Sothoth (drums, extra vocals), and Geth-Omog (guitar) - to lyrics inspired by the stories, themes, and characters of HPL, Goatfisted are true dyed-in-the-woolen-robe Lovecraftians, fusing dark cosmicism and indescribable horrors with thick, thudding guitars, hammer double bass drums, occasional (just enough) keyboards, and dynamic vocals into a fantastic brew of mausoleum metal. It's heavy, but balanced, technical without getting all Musicians Institute arpeggio wonky. And the lyrics are quite interesting and well crafted, demanding a line by line follow-along while the album plays.

The cover materials and art are top shelf, and engineer John Jones' deft production is surprisingly slick, but not overly so... In short, this album - this musical foursome in general - are record-store ready. As a music journalist three lives ago, I spent a decade listening to all manner of local band releases, from EPs to full length, full studio affairs purchased with mommy's credit cards. While I have no idea how long ago Goatfisted belched into being, the band already sounds like a million fucking bucks. Maybe their mommy's have credit cards, too. Or maybe they're just a talented, polished band, inspired by the Unnameable to record the hugely Listenable.

I enjoyed all 8 of the pieces, but some that stood out were "Black Stone Harvest," featuring nice, ribeye fat riffs, joined at the hip with just an echo of creepy organ music; "The Calling," which has some chugging guitar that moved the lower end of my spine back into alignment; and "His Return and Ascension," the song destined to be played by the Deep One house band at Cthulhu's eventual (re)birthday party.

"Dominion" is the last song on the album, and Goatfisted's coup d' grace. It shows a maturity and bare chested brass from the opening lines, as Shogtha spits out the measured promise, "The reclamation of soil and sea. As priest of Ancients, thou shall harken to me." As gritty as it is cosmic, like an artistic punch into the solar plexus. Goatfisted wants to open your eyes to new vistas, while pouring thunder into your ears to clue you in on what's coming, what has always been...

While listening to the album last night, my wife - whose musical taste ranges from Wu Tang to Slayer - walked into the office, raised her eyebrows and declared, "That fucking rocks." I just smiled, and thought to myself that if you're a Black Metal band, and a beautiful woman digs your sound, nothing this side of the Outer God Apocalypse can stop you.

Goatfisted, for the win.

Publishing News: Deal Struck For My First Collection of Short Fiction

2011-07-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

This update will be brief, as after a nine day layoff, mostly spent three-hole-punching the reptilian part of my brain, I don't want to pull a muscle by a sudden fit of exuberant blogging. BUT, without exposing to much, I do want to announce some truly spectacular news:

I recently struck a deal with an as-of-yet unnamed publisher to release a collection of my short fiction in early 2013.

/thud <------------- The sound of me falling out of my chair, as I STILL can't believe this is true

Yes, my very own goddamn book. 100,000 words dripped from my pen. It's every writer's dream, and it's apparently coming true in about a year and a half. And, as we all know, a year and a half goes by just like THAT!

/thsnep <------------ The sound of me trying to snap, as I never quite got the hang of it

The theme of the collection is horror and the weird, obviously, and the plan is to publish a combination of my Mythos and non-Mythos work, pulling together some of my previously published stories under one cover, but also featuring primarily new works. As much as I'm excited to unveil my most recent and upcoming Lovecraftian/cosmic horror tales, I'm also equally amped to finally write several of the more terrestrial horror stories I've been carrying around for a while, which feature nary a tentacle nor eldritch incantation, but do lean just as hard on the dread, the darkness, and the horror of the unusual that I find so comforting.

I wish I could say more, but I've taken a blood oath of secrecy, which involved dull, rusted canning knives and a series of deep and easily hidden cuts. Risking lockjaw and a possible severed artery will keep a mouth silent. Or maybe that's just the lockjaw.

So.... YAAAAY! I'm beyond excited, humbled, and blessed by this opportunity. While I think 2011 has allowed me to leave a scratch or two on the genre, I look forward to taking my best shot to gouge out a deep, beautifully jagged scar. Scars are interesting, and last forever... or at least until we crumble to dust. That's long enough for me.

And, since I always like to include a pretty picture with every post, here's something to brighten your day - "Bye Bye Apocalypse," courtesy of Laughing Squid and artist Budi Satria Kwan:

Keep your eyes on this space, as more developments unfold, and more secrets seep through from room where the canning knives are kept...

Publishing News: "Free Fireworks" accepted for publication in 'Horror for the Holidays' anthology by Miskatonic River Press

2011-07-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

This morning I received the wonderful news that my story "Free Fireworks" was accepted for publication in the anthology Horror for the Holidays, edited by Scott David Aniolowski, which will be published by this fall by Miskatonic River Press:

"When the footpads quail at the night-bird’s wail,
And black dogs bay at the moon,
Then is the specters’ holiday – then is the ghosts’ high noon!"

-- Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, Raddigore, Act 1

Holidays. Special days of commemoration and celebration. Feasts and festivities. Remembrance and revelry. But what dark things lurk just out of sight, in the shadows of those celebrated days? Forces beyond our comprehension, yearning to burst into our warm and comforting world and tear asunder those things we hold most dear. As the wheel of the year turns and we embrace our favorite occasions, let us not forget that beyond the light is a darkness, and in that darkness something stirs. Some nameless thing that brings us Horror for the Holidays!

Much like Dead But Dreaming 2 editor Kevin Ross, Scott is a well known and widely respected editor and writer of Call of Cthulhu RPG monographs, supplements, and source books, as well as Mythos short fiction (appearing with me and my proud compatriots in DBD2). He had some very kind words to say about my story, which thrills me to no end. I honestly can't wait to see what Scott has put together, as once again, some pretty damn big names are lining up to get into this twisted collective.

What an exciting last few months it has been 'round these bloody parts! I owe much to the good folks at Miskatonic River Press, and look forward to working with them for a long, long time. And from some rumblings issuing up from the catacombs, there might be more news in this department coming soon.

Keep your eyes pealed, and keep watching this space, when not watching the other.

Book Review: Dead But Dreaming 2, by Alex Lugo

2011-06-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

As most of you not living under a piece of rusted sheet metal or inside a Rapture shelter now know, Dead But Dreaming 2 thundered out onto the streets last Friday, and Alex Lugo, living in such close proximity to the home office of Miskatonic River Press, was one of the first individuals on the planet to receive his copy.

Fittingly, and just days later, Alex - being the voracious consumer of all manner of weird, speculative, and Lovecraftian fiction that he is - had not just read the anthology from cover to cover, but had also written up a review for publication here at The Cosmicomicon.

Big thanks to Alex (who had previously reviewed Jeffrey Thomas' novel Thought Forms in early May) for his review, and just know that although it might not seem that way, I IN NO WAY bribed him with filthy lucre, bauble, or trinket to write such lovely things about my story "Transmission." Either he's totally cracked, or possessed of exceptionally refined literary taste. I'm not certain which is true, and dare not contemplate... Instead, I'll just be grateful and humbled.

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Review of Dead but Dreaming 2

By Alex Lugo

Dead but Dreaming 2 is the second installment in a series of wonderful, Lovecraftian anthologies published by Miskatonic River Press. The first Dead but Dreaming was a cult hit, considered by many to be the finest collection of Lovecraftian and Cthulhu Mythos tales ever published. Knowing that, you can probably assume that Dead but Dreaming 2 has quite a lot of expectation to live up to, and it does. But, I'm very happy to report that it delivers on every single promise, and then some. Within the pages of this eldritch tome are 22 tales written by the modern masters of horror. Each story is a take on Lovecraftian themes, and each one is executed with impressive craftmanship. Honestly, there wasn't one piece in this collection that I disliked. Every single story evoked the power and the horror of Lovecraft’s mind bending realms, while also shining with originality.

If you're new to Lovecraftian and Cthulhu Mythos fiction, you may think it is impossible for a Lovecraftian tale to be original. Is it not just mere pastiche? Not at all! If one simply copies Lovecraft’s prose and clichés, the story will fail miserably. Conversely, a good writer of Lovecraftian or Cthulhu Mythos fiction must be extremely original so that his or her own ideas and style can shine through the master's shadow - ergo the reader sees more of the author’s voice than Lovecraft’s, but can still feel the vibe of the gentleman from Providence. Because of this delicate balancing act of tribute and discovery, I believe that the great modern writers of Lovecraftian fiction are actually more original than most of their fiction writing peers because they have to achieve a goal that is somehow familiar but not just another pastiche. It is because of this that Dead but Dreaming 2 is so great, because each tale is an exceptional, unique take on Lovecraftiana, and as such, the book overflows with impressive originality. Although I enjoyed every single story, three really tickled my fancy.

First off is "Your Ivory Hollow" by ye queen of eldritch horror, W.H. Pugmire. The tale is a semi-sequel to Robert Bloch’s "The Skull of the Marquis de Sade", and in the span of six pages, you become one of the pivotal characters in the story. Like the style of Lovecraft’s "Pickman’s Model", the speaker addresses you like you are an integral part of the unfolding story. This makes the tale more engrossing, and ultimately scarier. In only a half dozen pages, you will read of strange magick, infernal gems, suicide-inducing poetry, and utmost - insanity. Pugmire’s work never fails to amaze and enthrall me. His writing is like a paradox, as his tales both mystify and horrify the reader.

My second favorite story, although not in order of best to least best, is "Father’s Day" by Brian M. Sammons. This was my first time reading a tale from Mr. Sammons, and I am confident it shall not be my last. The story introduces the reader to a strange, nameless boy brought up by his mother, who one day decides to venture to Innsmouth, Massachusetts (the setting for Lovecraft’s epic tale "The Shadow over Innsmouth") to find his father. I will not spoil anything, but if you are familiar with Innsmouth’s abhorrent secret, you should get the gist of the boy’s situation. The tale is a sad mini-epic, and you will find yourself sympathetic towards a very strange boy who is far more than just "weird".

     Last, but not in any way least, is "Transmission" by T.E. Grau, proprietor of the unholy Cosmicomicon! This is T.E. Grau’s first tale published in print, and I can assure that there is much more to come! The story begins with a man wandering west to California. He does not look for fortune or fame, but simply a greater meaning to his shiftless, vagabond life. While driving in the deserts of Nevada, the main character picks up a radio transmission of what seems to be just another stupid religious fanatic crowding the AM dial. Yes, he is a religious fanatic, but quite the opposite of stupid. He is a messenger of the Meaning, something for which the main character has desperately sought, but the meaning of the Message, transmitted out into the desert night, is too horrifying and cosmic to even describe. The tale starts off with a rough and tumble prose style, which then becomes more mysterious, and, towards the conclusion, morphs into a tale of extremely well crafted atmospherics that is both mesmerizing and terrifying. The story ends with a twist that nobody will see coming. I can rightfully say that T.E. Grau is a strong force in weird fiction, and he has only just begun. Hear me and listen: T.E. Grau is THE one to watch!

      Dead but Dreaming 2 is an extraordinary anthology of fantastic, original Lovecraftian fiction. Within these pages you will find masterpieces of the weird tale from writers such as the incredible Donn Webb, and the remarkable Joseph S. Pulver Sr.

     If you have any level of interest in Lovecraft and weird fiction, this is the book for you. ____________________________________________________________________________

Publishing News: Dead But Dreaming 2 Shipping This Week, Last Chance to Pre-Order for Free Limited Edition Pugmire Bookmark

2011-06-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

A raven arrived on my window ledge just minutes ago, carrying word that Dead But Dreaming 2 is shipping internationally at the end of this very week.

This means that while we all know that you're going to buy this book, it would behoove (if not behoof, for my Midwestern readers) you to PRE-ORDER the book, like, TODAY, as in doing so, you not only get the book via the first wave of shipping, but you also receive this limited edition bookmark, hand signed in something dark and viscous by the right Queen of Eldritch Horror, W. H. Pugmire.

As you can see, the bookmark features Pugmire's actual signature (not a stamp), as well as a sneak peek at his debut tome with Miskatonic River Press, The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep, featuring cover and interior art by acclaimed writer, artist, publisher and Cosmicomicon guest blogger, Jeffrey Thomas. More on this in the coming days, once the furor around DBD2 has calmed a little... Track Pugmire's numerous Lovecraftian and Mythos projects, videos, and blog postings at his A View From Sesqua Valley.

A copy of the original, unsigned Dead But Dreaming recently sold for $150 on eBay (and signed editions have gone for well over $250), showing the demand for this collectors item made scarce and valuable due to the quality of the writing containing within, selected and edited by Keith "Doc" Herber and Kevin Ross. What will Dead But Dreaming 2 - again edited by Ross, albeit solo, after the tragic passing of Doc just two years ago - be worth a decade from now? Punch your ticket and find out, you curious cuttlefish.

As for the bookmark, it's sure to be an instant collectors item once the pre-order period is completed, so don't be snookered by indecision. Buy the book today, and get a snazzy, limited edition bookmark to hold your page while you shiver under your covers between Dead But Dreaming 2 stories.

There's no shame in being afraid. There is in losing your place.

Publishing News: "Low Hanging Clouds" Published Today at Eschatology Journal

2011-06-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

My second flash fiction piece, "Low Hanging Clouds", was published today at Eschatology Journal, the fantastic online journal of Lovecraftian and apocalyptic flash fiction. The site is run by devoted weirdling and editor Bruce Priddy (who recently joined forces with Mike Davis at the white hot Lovecraft eZine), offering writers a wonderful canvas on which to paint short, punchy pieces that can haunt, chill, or drill a hole through your forehead in under 1,000 words.

I wrote the skeleton of the story in a matter of minutes after arriving to work one morning in the middle of February (just days before "Downhill" was published in Eschatology, shared here), which is smack dab in the middle of the rare, three or four month window for rain in Los Angeles. That gorgeously gloomy, rainy morning, the top of the twin Century Plaza Towers that mark the white collar enclave of Century City (which boasts as its biggest claim to fame - at least in my mind - as being the primary location of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, almost immediately after it was constructed), and the upper floors of all other modest skyscrapers in the area, including my own office building, were swaddled tight by a thick layer of viscous, bright white clouds, that reminded me of a cappuccino, or, as my story details, something far more sinister but no less tasty.

I love finding the horror in the benign, the dread in the beautiful. From religion to home to a burst of welcome weather, disrupting the security of the common and cozy is one of my top goals as a speculative fiction writer. Yes, I'm an asshole. Just hopefully an entertaining and slightly interesting one. :)

Publishing News: DBD2 - Now Live, In Colo[u]r, and Splayed Across a Sheaf of Dead Trees

2011-06-12T00:31:00.000-07:00

I'll let the pictures tell the tale..

Dead But Dreaming 2 is shipping in a week (or so). More from my brainpan when it arrives, and I recover, with the aid of smelling salts, "essential salts," and maybe even a dash or two of garlic and onion salts.

DON'T MISS THIS BOOK!! I'm sensing that the first run could could go very quickly, based on the buzz from the street, and amid the swirling and unquiet ether...

Publishing News: Dead But Dreaming 2 Just Weeks Away From Worldwide Release

2011-06-06T21:02:00.000-07:00

Misktonic River Press announced today that Dead But Dreaming 2 - the much anticipated follow up to the critically hailed Dead But Dreaming (now considered a collectors item in the genre) - is just weeks away from hitting the streets.

A deciphered smoke signal from MRP Brass reads as such:

Currently awaiting proofs for Dead But Dreaming 2 from the printer. We're mere weeks away from shipping the book out!

Herein are 22 tales of Lovecraftian horror from the modern masters of Cthulhu Mythos fiction: Scott David Aniolowski, David Annandale, Donald R. Burleson, Cody Goodfellow, John Goodrich, T.E. Grau, Rick Hautala, Walt Jarvis, Erik T. Johnson, William Meikle, Will Murray, Daniel W. Powell, Wilum Pugmire, Joseph S. Pulver Sr, Pete Rawlik, Kevin Ross, Brian Sammons, Darrell Schweitzer, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Michael Tice, and Don Webb.

Folks, I'm telling you. This is one of THE anthologies - Lovecraftian or otherwise - of 2011, and beyond. The talent pool assembled is wickedly deep and monstrously dark, orchestrated by editor Kevin Ross, who isn't one to go for the obviously slithery, nor fall for repeated use of the word "eldtritch." This is Mythos fiction all grown up.

Don't miss out. Get Dead But Dreaming 2 when - or BEFORE! - the rest of the world does, lest you have to do the sad Charlie Brown walk all the way home for the remainder of your silly, ill-spent life...

Give a hoot. Buy good books.

Publishing News: A Blog About a Blog About a Blog and the Aklonomicon... And Paul Carrick

2011-05-31T19:27:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, I've written about Paul Carrick before. And yes, by now, everyone knows about my mad Mythos-crush on the artist who first allowed me to dare to dream what Lovecraft's creatures could be, in terms of scope, size, and texture. I mean, hell, just take a gander at my "Words in the Wheelhouse" section of The Cosmicomicon and witness how many times Paul's name - prior to publishing this blog - has popped up on these very pages:

H.P. Lovecraft (8) Lovecraftian (8) God (5) Miskatonic River Press (5) Publishing News (5) Cthulhu (4) Dead But Dreaming 2 (4) Paul Carrick (4) zombies (4) Aklonomicon

So, you as you can see, I place him in high regard, just below a Great Old One, and just above the trendiest new undead craze this side of preening teen vampires sporting eyeliner and crushing ennui. More seriously, this shows just what I think of Paul's work not just as an artist, but also as a devoted and long-time Lovecraftian. He's important to The Scene. He's part of the New Roots.

I've already spilled the beans about Paul supplying not one but two pieces of original artwork for my respective stories "Flutes" and "In the Cave, She Sang," which will be published this summer in the toothy, hugely anticipated anthology the Aklonomicon, edited by artist/publisher Ivan McCann and award-winning mad poet and bEast of Berlin Joseph S. Pulver Sr. for Aklo Press.

Well, Paul recently unveiled his two pieces created specifically for my work via his Nightserpent blog. I now return the favor, creating some sort of reverse linkage, blogging about a blog and a blog and now this blog that just makes my head hurt. But I sometimes like it when my head hurts. It means that I'm still alive, and often that something PROFOUND is taking place inside (or just acts as a reminder that I'm getting old and hangovers appreciate with age).

I first viewed his two Aklonomicon pieces a few weeks back, and have since peeled myself off the wall in gibbering excitement. Now that Paul unleashed his noxious babies into the ether, I figure it's my turn to beam a little with coattail-riding pride at the stellar work he has done, born - in part - by the imagery of my prose. So...

BOOM! JAM THESE BAD JACKS INTO YOUR BRAIN HOLES, SUCKAS!:

This first piece is for my story titled "Flutes," which gives a glimpse at what might go wrong when humans start smashing very tiny particles in giant machines deep under the ground.

This second piece is for my story "In the Cave, She Sang..." about the fateful night on New Years Eve, 1968, when Charles Manson trudged up into the hills of Death Valley with a few worms in his pocket to decide the fate of the world. It could have gone either way, until he heard that song in the cave.... This story was inspired by a seed implanted in my brain by one Mr. Pulver himself. As a way to pay homage, That Which Paul Wrought above is my nod to him by way of Mythosian avatar (no, not the animated series or the billion dollar movie, silly). It's beyond exciting to see what has only lived inside your (sometimes throbbing) gourd leap into line, color, and shadow and light. Into writhing, pulsating life. It's a writer's dream.

Keep your peeled grapes glued to this space for more announcements about the Aklonomicon and Aklo Press, as the summer heats up, trees die so books can live, and the nights get darker later, and far noisier, as things crawl to the surface to breath the humid air and bask under queer stars...

Ether Made Print: The Cosmicomicon Gets Write-Up in Strange Aeons #5

2011-05-26T00:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've been geeking out over this cover for weeks, as soon as it was announced by Strange Aeons Executive Editor K.L Young. Happily, it arrived - hugging Issue #5 - in my snail mail box just tonight, a full day earlier than expected. Behold, Weirdlings.... THIS:

In this incredible wrap-around cover piece, ace concept artist and illustrator Brett MacDonald truly captures the essence of the massive size and scale of the Cthulhu Mystique (did I just coin something there?), which was a key component in what originally drew me to H.P. Lovecraft's work in the first place. I've always been horrified by the impossibly large, the infinitely massive, the incalculably vast. Cthulhu, to me, always embodied that, as do the other Great Old Ones and, of course, their incomprehensible liege lords, the nebulous Outer Gods.

So, the freshly minted edition of Strange Aeons arrives, populating a gift basket (box) that includes a few missing back issues, and matching Strange Aeons T-shirts (scroll down to the bottom) of staggeringly different size, so my girl Ives and I can stroll through the neighborhood looking like two loons gone prematurely old-people-batshit, when dressing in matching outfits becomes the norm among the early morning power walking mall circuit.

This was a waiting package worth running a few red lights and treating the 110 Freeway like my own slice of poorly paved Autobahn. And it didn't disappoint... Lords above, didn't it ever...

Whenever I get a new issue of Strange Aeons, I always do the wide-eyed quick scan first, as I need to see and feel EVERY PAGE before I can cool my 8 cylinder engine long enough to actually read and absorb the entire magazine. So - after moving through the Eldritch Words and Forbidden Lore sections, amazing graphic novelry, Nick "The Hat" Gucker's fantastic "The Strange High House in the Mist" (oddly, a story I just read in our garden this last weekend) classic movie poster insert, and Robert M. Price's "Lost Gods of Lemuria" short story (art by Nick Gucker) - imagine my shock and awe when I flipped to page 48, the always interesting "Unearthed" section of Strange Aeons (fixed with the truthy sub-header: "How can you not already know about this stuff???"), and my already misty eyes were instantly drawn to the now-familiar image (created by artist/writer Ives Hovanessian) that not only hangs on our wall, but has truly become my eternal logo and Badge O' The Weird:

To the left of "The Ives Cthulhu" was this bit of delicious and totally unexpected verbiage:

"The Cosmicomicon! Author T.E. Grau's blog site is an electronic repository for all things cosmic, terrifying, and strange. In this little corner of darkened space, Grau explores the mind bending and possibly terrifying realities that await us as we push forward as a species, discusses speculative fiction, horror cinema and artwork, and tracks real-life news of the weird and unexplained. A must for Mythos fans, as Grau has his finger on the creative pulse of Cthulhiana."

You could have knocked over my oddly thick, sturdy ass with a feather. My wife and daughter had to fan me back to semi-consciousness, then we all took shots of Irish whiskey. Okay, TWO of us did. Angelina downed her cranberry juice like a pro. No chaser.

When I regained my rational senses, I noticed that on the same page was a mention of Nick "The Hat" Gucker's amazing blog, and on the next page was an advert for Joseph S. Pulver's masterful, nightmarish new tome Sin & Ashes by Hippocampus Press, together with glowing S&A reviews from such horror heavyweights as Laird Barron, Simon Strantzas, and Paul Tremblay. I felt like I was invited to a surprise party where all my favorite friends and heroes were in attendance. Yes, that might sound like a bit much, but that's how I felt.

Getting a surprise write-up in your favorite Lovecraftian magazine is almost indescribable, so I won't even try here. Simple words will fail me. But, what I CAN say is that I want to extend a HUGE thanks to Strange Aeons, and all my readers and fellow writers. This is a lovely moment, and one that I shall never forget. I tip my fermented Irish grains to you all. After all, it was in Gonzo that I was born, and in Lovecraft that I was baptized. The evolution continues...

IA!! IA!!

p.s. The preceding blog was written with my loyal and all-business battle bunny Cthulhu "Lulu" Grau guarding my feet from any underneath Dhole attack.

p.p.s. Always end a good blog with a bunny pic. Okay, not quite "end," because...

p.p.p.s Please check out Brett MacDonald's artwork. He's truly an under-appreciated genius. I mean look at this:


(c) Brett MacDonald

Win a Signed, Limited Copy of William Meikle's "The Creeping Kelp" from Dark Regions Press

2011-05-24T20:26:00.000-07:00

William Meikle is a Speculative Fiction force of nature, boasting ten published novels and over 200 short story credits in thirteen countries and multiple anthologies. Indeed, his commercial bibliography is as impressive as it is extensive.

Dark Regions Press is a top flight publisher of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, which was recently featured on these very pages, and will no doubt continue to be featured in the future here at The Cosmicomicon, as one of the most vigorous and active genre publishers going.

Put the two together, and you have a killer combination, and a cool contest that could win you a fabulous tome.

Indeed, just days ago, Dark Regions Press announced a competition to win a $45 Signed and Numbered Limited Hardcover of William Meikle's next book THE CREEPING KELP.

From DRP Central:

"Get a chance at winning a Signed and Numbered Limited Hardcover edition of our latest upcoming novel The Creeping Kelp by William Meikle with a retail value of $45 simply for making the cover art your default profile image on Facebook for a week and making a single Facebook status update on Tuesday, May 31st (that we will provide for you to copy and paste)."

The downloadable cover art can be found here, whilst their very "Like"-able Dark Regions Press Facebook page can be found here.

The book will be available for preorder on May 31st, 2011 (a solid ten days after the echoes of the thud that was The Rapture have dissipated) in Deluxe Hardcover (only THIRTEEN to be produced), Limited Edition Hardcover (50 to be produced) and Trade Paperback. Details of how and where to order will be available next week when Dark Regions make their announcement. I'll update here at The Cosmicomicon. Watch closely this roiling space.

As for "The Creeping Kelp," here's a primer, sent straight from the author's stained quill:

During World War 2 a scientist at the MOD genetically manipulates some seaweed to try to make a defensive, harbour-clogging weapon and incorporates some material from a beast found in the Antarctic on the Peabodie expedition. All too soon it is obvious they have created not a weapon, but a monster. The menace is controlled, but not without loss of life, and a sample sent by boat to the USA.

The sample is lost at sea, and for nearly seventy years all is quiet... until a storm in the North Atlantic frees the sample that has been dormant inside an old wreck.

Soon the new creature finds that is is hungry. Our plastics-oriented society has given it an abundant supply of food... more than enough for it to grow, and build, and spread.

All along the Southern coast of Britain coastal communities are overrun, and rampant mutated Shoggoths fill the Thames and head up river.

Can anyone escape the terror that is... THE CREEPING KELP?

Weaponized algae? Ravenous Shoggoths? Weird Old London battling forces From Beyond? Sign me the hell up.

Visit William's blog, as well as his snazzy website, and find out what the keen-eyed Scotsman sees as he gazes out upon the moaning moors, the Pictish ruins, and the centuried mists of the fabled North Sea.

Guest Blogger: Jeffrey Thomas Reviews "Engines of Desire" by Livia Llewellyn

2011-05-20T12:18:00.000-07:00

On this eve of long promised, righteous destruction, The Cosmicomicon continues its much talked about, days old tradition of bringing you the best guest bloggers working and lurking in the murky biz.

This week is no different, as noted author/artist and Punktown creator Jeffrey Thomas (featured recently in Alex Luggo's guest blog review on pages prior) marvels at the roar and hum of Livia Llewellyn's widely celebrated Engines of Desire:

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A Review of ENGINES OF DESIRE by Livia Llewellyn

- Jeffrey Thomas

It’s no novel observation that it’s always exciting to discover a writer you’ve never read before; what greater satisfaction could account for one’s love of reading? Sometimes the pleasure comes from discovering someone others discovered quite a while before you. Last month, for instance, I completed BRAVE NEW WORLD, and in January I came across this guy named Cormac McCarthy. (I always feel a bit late to the game when it comes to movies and music, too -- but better than never, and all that.) Other times, the author you discovered is relatively new, or at least wholly new to you. Recently, writers who became favorites of mine with just one book were Richard Gavin (with OMENS) in 2009, Otsuichi (ZOO) in 2010, and Simon Strantzas (BENEATH THE SURFACE), earlier this year. And now, maybe not too late this time, here I am discovering Livia Llewellyn, via her new collection ENGINES OF DESIRE (Lethe Press).

There’s a lot to admire here, and where to begin? I’m always impressed when a writer can work confidently within multiple genres or subgenres, and the stories in ENGINES OF DESIRE could be called a mix of horror, dark fantasy, science fiction -- though I wouldn’t blame Llewellyn if she’s as uncomfortable with such limiting categorizations as I am. Better to say, then, that she’s unfettered by genre. The stories tend to be either quite long or quite short, which again impresses; she’s going to let this story be the length it wants to be, whereas many other writers seem to weigh their efforts on the scale of whatever is going to fit the word range of the next zombie anthology. And where so many writers go through the motions of being shocking and edgy, Llewellyn makes them look like posers, writing as she does unflinchingly of infanticide, incest, madness and self-destruction. Her female protagonists are both empowered and compromised. Childbirth is a repeated subject matter, and repeatedly viewed not as a means of bringing joy and promise into the world but perpetuating the suffering of the doomed and damned.

Among the standouts in these ten stories, we have the grim, apocalyptic “Horses” (and I’ll just stop introducing each story as grim right now -- that’s a given; this is not a feel-good bunch of tales), about a woman discovering the most basic imperatives of a human being, at the hour of human extinction; “The Engine of Desire,” a chilling tale of erotic obsession, the reading of which is like watching a film of a tornado brewing in reverse, from terrible aftermath to the first churning storm clouds; the increasingly nightmarish “Jetsam,” one of my favorites, about the resonance of 9/11; “The Four Hundred Thousand,” about a future civilization where young women are used to spawn whole armies that serve as a metaphor for the pointless sacrifices of war; the eerie, icky, enigmatic “Omphalos,” about the implosion of a most insular family; and easily my favorite, the concluding novella “Her Deepness.”

“Her Deepness” is about as New Weird as New Weird can be, and again I hate categorizing here. That subgenre has been declared dead before it was even declared legitimate. I think some of those pronouncing it dead did so for their own purposes, owing to their competition with or envy of other authors whose future work they hoped to thwart by labeling it passé in advance. Politics, don’t you know. But categories do have their use when taken with a grain of salt, helping us stumble into the vicinity of things we’re going to like, and I was pleasantly surprised to find something of this particular flavor in Llewellyn’s book. “Her Deepness” could also be called Lovecraftian, but again that would be limiting it too much. It’s a dense, complex story about a sculptress with mysterious powers of shaping stone, called to the outer reaches of an impossibly vast, gritty, alternate Earth megalopolis to release a god-like being said to be trapped within rock, like some sentient fossil. In this tale most especially, Llewellyn indulges her considerable powers of description and setting, her ability to craft hard-edged characters who might not often be likable but are all the more fully real for that, her abundant and fresh imagination, her ability to generate an atmosphere heavy with a true sense of doom, and a prose voice full of glittering black poetry. Like many of the stories here, “Her Deepness” flirts with and ultimately plunges into the hallucinatory. It’s a heady experience. Forget I called it New Weird. Writing like this can never be passé, so I don’t want to run the risk of giving the wrong impression. I will say, I think Livia Llewellyn can hold her own alongside a China Mieville or a Jeff VanderMeer. I will say that much.

And I will say this: I have another favorite writer. Ah…so this is why I read.