Tag Archives: lovecraft mythos

Dance of the Damned

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Arkham Horror: Dance of the Damned by Alan Bligh.

Alan Bligh Dance of the Damned

Here’s another novel rooted in the Arkham Horror gaming milieu of pulp-era Yog-Sothothery. The prose is not always good. In fact, it can be pretty awful: “He hefted the heavy shotgun onto his shoulder. Pausing to turn the light off, he cursed once and left it. Better to light a candle, as they say” (301). The book is littered with eggcorns and misplaced apostrophes. But author Alan Bligh cultivates some fine moral ambivalence in his characters, and his story is genuinely intriguing and scary. I read the closing arc of the book with real excitement, and found the ending satisfying.

Like fellow Arkham Horror novelist Graham McNeill, Bligh divides his action among locations in Arkham, New York City, and Kingsport, and both authors deploy the terrible old man of H.P. Lovecraft’s eponymous tale as a character in the last location. Of the two, I found Bligh’s old man to be more engaging and better woven into the fabric of the story.

Although there seemed to be a lot of different plots at the outset (partly resulting from a demand of the gaming novel genre, to involve multiple identifiable protagonists from the games), Bligh succeeded in pulling them together for a single coherent crisis with its resolution shrouded in mystery. Although it’s by a different author, I’ve already started reading its sequel in “The Lord of Nightmares Trilogy”: The Lies of Solace [via]

The House of the Octopus

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The House of the Octopus: Essays on the Real-Life ‘Cthulhu Cult’ of the Pacific edited by Jason Colavito.

Jason Colavito The House of the Octopus

Well, who knew? Jason Colavito has unearthed some late-19th-century accounts of cults involving an actual octopus god in the South Pacific. The sources are proto-anthropologists and scholar-missionaries, whose accounts often acquire the tone of a travelogue, and come close to the narrative tone used by some of Lovecraft’s scholarly protagonists. There is nothing here to contradict “The Call of Cthulhu,” and the notion of a sleeping-not-slain cephalopod deity is practically confirmed by these pages.

Of particular note is the Samoan temple ruin referenced in the title of the volume. The “House of the Octopus” (O le Fale o le Fe’e) was evidently distinctive for its stone vertical supports, a design otherwise absent in the island environment where plenty of trees were to hand for building pillars. Although the cuttlefish god continued to be reverenced, this site was already in long disuse by the 19th century, and the writers represented here had the opportunity of discovering it as a “lost” site (with the aid of knowledgeable locals).

Colavito has provided a rather minimal editorial service here, pulling the five source essays together into a single, brief volume that he has issued through lulu.com. His foreword provides little more than a reassurance that the materials are in factual earnest. He seems sure that Lovecraft didn’t know about the Samoan cuttlefish cult, but I have to wonder. See, for example, the reference to the Australian Buddai in “The Shadow Out of Time” for evidence of HPL’s study in this sort of material.

At some point, optical character recognition (OCR) was used to gather these texts, and they have suffered for it. Insufficient care was taken to eliminate artifacts like “rougli” for “rough,” and “cither” for “either” (both on p. 5, with many more to come). The cover design is attractive and appropriate, featuring a detail from an Enoch Arden engraving of 1869, and the book is a slim, convenient digest for the use of latter-day Miskatonic University students. [via]

Verve post about Simon’s Necronomicon mentions Aleister Crowley and more

Recent The Verge post by Joseph L Flatley about Simon’s The Necronomicon (which I tend to call The Simonomicon) at The cult of Cthulhu: real prayer for a fake tentacle mentions Aleister Crowley. There’s also mentions of The Magickal Childe bookshop, Kenneth Grant, Austin Osman Spare and more.

“In 1945, a 20 year old Kenneth Grant spent several months working as the secretary for Aleister Crowley, a ceremonial magician, author, mountain climber, and possibly even spy for British intelligence during World War I. Crowley’s books are key texts of modern occultism, and his reputation as “The Wickedest Man In The World” or simply ‘The Beast’ has given him pride of place in any number of heavy metal songs — not to mention a choice spot on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album (the top left, chilling with Mae West and Lenny Bruce). At the end of his life, Crowley was unable to afford a secretary, so he let Grant fill that role in exchange for magical instruction. For a short while at least, Grant was The Intern of The Beast. By the time he passed away in 2011 at the age of 86, Grant had produced nine volumes that constitute what he called ‘The Typhonian Trilogies,’ which explored the connections between all manner of occult systems — incorporating voodoo and tantra and elements from the work of 20th century magician and the artist Austin Osman Spare.”

A Season in Carcosa

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews A Season in Carcosa edited by Joseph S Pulver Sr, from Miskatonic River Press.

Joseph S Pulver Sr A Season in Carcosa from Miskatonic River Press

This book is one of a tiny number (probably in the single digits) to focus on the elaboration of the jauniste weird, a literary tradition with its seminal irruption in The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. Far more enjoyable than the sort of pastiches and retreads that are common to the Lovecraftian “mythos,” these stories take motives and inspiration from the source material, but they are invariably discrete and original approaches to madness and terror. The dread play itself mutates into opera, film, radio, children’s television, tribal folklore, and other media. The metafictional qualities of the original Chambers stories (and the cousin-kisses they received from later Yog-Sothothery) have led many contributors to bring in other literary allusions ranging from Antonin Artaud to C.S. Lewis.

Materially, the book is no great shakes. The cover art is attractive enough, but the paper and binding are print-on-demand quality, and it could have used much more thorough proofing to attend to the ubiquitous typos. It almost avoids the nonsense “Yellow Sign” that originated in game graphics, but the damned thing still appears in the midst of the letter o in “Carcosa” on the spine! The book’s greatest unmet desideratum is some information on the contributors, most of whom were new to me.

Stand-out pieces included the hallucinatory Victorian American period piece “MS Found in a Chicago Hotel Room” by Daniel Mills, the erudite surrealist “Theater and Its Double” by Edward Morris, and the psychotic crescendo of “Whose Hearts Are Pure Gold” by Kristin Prevallet. The sardonic present-day story by Cody Goodfellow, “Wishing Well,” reminded me a great deal of the work of Chuck Palahniuk, and was certainly one of the volume’s best.

All of these stories are suitably eerie and perverse. Perhaps as many as a third of them culminate with the incoherent collapse of the narrating perspective, which doesn’t seem excessive given the importance of madness and destruction to the Carcosan mytheme. There’s no special value to reading all of these stories in a continuous effort. I took one significant pause in the course of reading them, and the experience might have benefited from a couple more hiatuses. I strongly recommend the collection to those who are “into this sort of thing.” [via]

 

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The Dark Lord

The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic by Peter Levenda, from Ibis Press, may be of interest.

Peter Levenda The Dark Lord from Ibis Press

“One of the most famous — yet least understood — manifestations of Thelemic thought has been the works of Kenneth Grant, the British occultist and one-time intimate of Aleister Crowley, who discovered a hidden world within the primary source materials of Crowley’s Aeon of Horus. Using complementary texts from such disparate authors as H.P. Lovecraft, Jack Parsons, Austin Osman Spare, and Charles Stansfeld Jones (‘Frater Achad’), Grant formulated a system of magic that expanded upon that delineated in the rituals of the OTO: a system that included elements of Tantra, of Voudon, and in particular that of the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon, all woven together in a dark tapestry of power and illumination.

The Dark Lord follows the themes in the writings of Kenneth Grant, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Necronomicon, uncovering further meanings of the concepts of the famous writers of the Left Hand Path. It is for Thelemites, as well as lovers of the Lovecraft Mythos in all its forms, and for those who find the rituals of classical ceremonial magic inadequate for the New Aeon.

Traveling through the worlds of religion, literature, and the occult, Peter Levenda takes his readers on a deeply fascinating exploration on magic, evil, and The Dark Lord as he investigates of one of the most neglected theses in the history of modern occultism: the nature of the Typhonian Current and its relationship to Aleister Crowley’s Thelema and H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.” [via]