Three Children in a Marianas Trench-Coat

Earlier, I was discussing the rule that one shouldn't criticise a solution unless one was prepared to offer an alternative. As I am not the only Lovecraftian in my circle, the discussion swept over whether Yog-Sothothery was an exception, which reminded me of some strange realisations I had as a younger man about the casting …

His Black Tongue by Mitchell Lüthi

Lüthi tells four tales of very different people facing threats in very different worlds that are united by a sense of how fragile humanity’s control is in the face of a vast universe. This collection contains two novellas and two short stories, spread across genres but united by a sense of dread. His Black Tongue: …

The Thing From HR by Roy M. Griffis

Griffis inverts the classic Lovecraftian trope of humans amid an incomprehensible universe, portraying human society as a thing incomprehensible to an eldritch monstrosity. The hierarchies of the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones exist within gulfs and spans incomprehensible to the human mind but they exist; and when humans interact they must be put …

Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

Lovegrove delves deeper than the immediately recognisable traits of a Sherlock Holmes story, delivering a plausible perspective on how the consulting detective might react to the discovery of Lovecraft’s incomprehensible and hostile cosmos. As Dr Watson’s famous stories will tell the world, when he returns from Afghanistan in 1880 to recover from serious injuries, his …

Squamous Decay

Cold winds howl around me! A claw tears at the very fabric! Foulness spreads! The black abyss gapes ever closer! By which of course I mean that we are having our decking replaced, so there is a craftsperson prying up rotten boards and carrying them through the house to their van with the resultant wind-tunnel …

Music of the Congruent Spheres

Sometimes alien stars strangely align, raising up things that cannot be put down. Such as this rather fine collaboration on a Lovecraftian dance club by Cibex and Midjourney. Is it better not to speculate what arcane blasphemies might creep forth from that miscegenation of musical samples? Or set sail into the smoke-machine dark voids of …

Whispering the Darkness

As perspicacious readers might have inferred despite my reticence in openly discussing the matter, I am not unfond of Lovecraft's work and cosmic dread in general. So, I was most joyous to discover Matt Hundley's film-length adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness; while it is not perfect, it inclines strongly toward my preferred approach in …

The Most Awful?

Between the alien structures that are abstruse debate over mythos taxonomy and the endless mud plains that are emotive debate over whether someone should read his works at all, I sometimes chance across more interesting artefacts, such as the question whether worship of Cthulhu is foolish or wrong. I say probably, but not for the …

Season of the Cultist

Haiku are closely associated with Zen, a philosophy which suggests human life has no intrinsic elevated value and reality is not as most people perceive it. Although often rather less bleak in expression, this view of existence will be immediately recognizable to Lovecraft fans as very similar to cosmicism. So, as I like both haiku …

Behind Superficial Mutability

On Saturday, I played through Bit Golem's Dagon game. As some of you will know, I am a casual player of computer games rather than one who seeks to speed run them or plays into the early hours of the morning; so my having completed the game the same day I started (in fact within …