UNIVERSAL HARVESTER makes one understand prey animals that stand absolutely still as their doom descends — yet all the while as you are experiencing that slow sense of mounting dread and menace you cannot identify, there is still that all pervading wise and reassuring voice.
That’s what I love about the Lovecraft mythos – a book, a painting, a sodding colour that can break you and I think the Yellow mythos really concentrates on that.
The pleasure of watching both a stylistic and an intellectual force emerge and take shape provides its own enjoyment. However the jouissance one derives from reading Barlow’s later tales, where he mastered the alchemical marriage of fascination and dread in such exquisite proportions that a single tale keeps his name alive…
“Calls for Submission” is more than a collection of short stories. It is the showcase of a writer with a deliberate and considered world view, intensely honed craft, and a calculated message.
Steve Bean has created a game that does exactly as described on the tin. A perfect one shot game that plays in 3 to 5 hours, it hews true as an homage to the vision of Mac George’s Black Sun DeathCrawl while carving out its own unique territory and vision.
Levenda keeps one eye fixed on the fact that while we are dealing with a story that grapples with the outbreak of mass hysteria among poets, artists and dreamers, this was a story that was placed within a pulp magazine and this also invokes its own requirements and traditions be brought to bear.
The value of a book such as The Weird and The Eerie is that it endows us with new eyes with which to view those works we are already familiar, offers us fresh avenues of approach and simultaneously points us towards new treasures we have yet to excavate.
I’m sure you can call to mind dozens of times within horror fiction the protagonist reacting “with dawning realization”. Padgett has managed to capture that feeling and evoke it in such a way that you the reader, not one of the characters within a fictional story, experiences this dawning realization.
Baader is elegant in evoking the strange in simple, unadorned lines. It’s this simplicity that disarms. His characters are instantly believable with just enough detail provided for the reader to identify with yet not so overloaded it hampers the imagination. He trusts his reader’s intelligence instead of pandering to them.
If ever there was a Lovecraftian Kickstarter to pluck at your purse strings, Rise of the Elders: Cthulhu is perfectly poised to be such a beast. A tactical RPG inspired by the work of HP Lovecraft that can be played offline on your mobile phone or PC combining the accessibility of a videogame, the tactical depth of a board game and all the flavor of a tabletop RPG.
Lovecraft told his tales with beings from space, the ocean and other weird environments, but cosmic horror doesn’t need tentacled horrors from beyond time – it resonates with us because we see it all around us every day.
“To evoke a demon is a sordid, dangerous affair. Call loudly over the dense cathode with offers of bleating lambs, and sometimes a fiend scratches back against your tar-paper reality.”
I am very pleased to share with you this conversation with Julien Jauniaux. When I saw his short “An Eldritch Place” I knew immediately it would strike a resounding chord with the readers of Lovecraft eZine and those lucky enough to have seen it at Portland’s HPLFF.
This is what I would call a near perfect beer and pretzel game. There’s enough depth there to keep you on your toes and laughing the whole way to the abyss.
“almost insentient, almost divine” is a collection that will be treasured by readers for decades to come, and doubtlessly recommended to those looking for an introduction as to what makes this genre special.
The Lovecraft eZine 