AL J.

Your post should probably go in the "Shameless Self-Promotion" thread.

     Hello horror fans! I would like to let you all know about my new book "Lycanthrope: Nature of The Beast" just published by Sapphire Publications. Its a werewolf novella like nothing you have ever read. If you love horror and love a new werewolf tale unlike anything you have ever seen you will love this new book. It can now be ordered at Projectpulp.com and will also be on Shocklines.com soon as welll. I hope that you all will check it out!

Edited by author 06-19-2005 05:30 PM
Has anyone been to nightmarethemovie.com? Is this movie based on a Lovecraft story?

All Lovecraft, all the time
Everyone's talking about Lovecraft and horror these days, but who knew he was a philosopher too?

For Houellebecq, Lovecraft is a poet of revolt, who glorified inhibition and found sexuality repulsive. His fantasies were fueled by a metaphysical hatred of life and a denial of the real. His universe includes "not a single allusion to two of the realities to which we generally ascribe great importance: sex and money." This could hardly be said of Houellebecq--although he does turn Lovecraft into his philosophical precursor. Houellebecq's HPL believes that the human race is doomed and our actions are as meaningless as "the unfettered movements of the elementary particles"--the very title of Houellebecq's 1998 novel. Lovecraft is an existentialist: "Life has no meaning. But neither does death."

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The Cineplex of Madness
I bet you never thought about H.P. Lovecraft's influence on modern cinema. The horror.

Mysterious creatures. Bizarre science. A dark, snowbound fortress. The occult. Tentacled, crustacean-inspired monsters. Hellish apocalypse. Primordial evil. Madness. Hellboy, the well-received latest film from neo-post-schlock auteur Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, The Devil's Backbone, Blade II), offers these and other delights, all of which are common motifs in the work of that impossibly influential champion of the strange: early-20th-century author/weirdo H.P. Lovecraft.

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By the sunken city of R'lyeh I sat down and wept
H.P. Lovecraft -- horror hack or eldritch artist? (Salon link)

"From the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent," reads the first line of the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Shunned House," but chances are Lovecraft, who died in 1937, wouldn't have appreciated the irony of his present position as American literature's greatest bad writer. There are two camps on the subject of the haunted bard of Providence, R.I., and his strange tales of cosmic terror. One, led by the late genre skeptic Edmund Wilson, dismisses him as an overwriting "hack" who purveyed "bad taste and bad art." The other, led by Lovecraft scholar and biographer S.T. Joshi, hotly rises to Lovecraft's defense as an artist of "philosophical and literary substance."

See also Neil Gaiman's "I Cthulu."

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Get ready, here comes the bandwagon

Scary books are the new trend in literary publishing according to this Guardian article.

Sad-eyed clairvoyants, the waking dead, and ordinary people gifted - or should that be cursed? - with second sight. Publishing trends are in themselves something of a phantom juggernaut, ephemeral yet overbearing, slow to get going and slower still to halt, but over the past 18 months, the occult has been oozing from the 'kidult' and horror shelves and into literary fiction.

Kidult? I'm frightened already... for the future.



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Elsewhere a Disenchanted Goth Throws Down Her Powder Puff and Black Lipstick, Crying into the Night:

You betrayed me, Anne!!! I'm going back to school to become a lawyer!



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Claude, you also see it a lot in the poet subculture, just not so much with makeup and costumes.

I know you're being tongue-in-cheek, Paul. But do you raise an interesting idea. Interesting to me, at least. I've often thought about the line where self-expression stops and costuming or "masking" (masquerade) begins, which is actually a way of hiding from the world, the opposite of actual self-expression. If there is a line, I think it's a broad one, but I also think it starts somewhere with the invention of a "persona" that one can project in lieu of the individual development of one's born identity. You see this quite a lot in the vampire subculture you mention.

Edited by author 01-31-2004 12:46 AM
I don't like where this article is headed. If the socially retarded, brooding, fashionable vampire subculture is replaced with a socially retarded, unbridled inner-animal werewolf subculture, I predict a rise in fit-of-rage, awkward geek-on-geek violence.

"Yes, it's time to throw out your black eyeliner and burn the crushed-velvet Value Village wardrobe. Vampires are passé."

So for the record: fangs on top, out; fangs on bottom, in. (I know what you're thinking, but I've lived there: Brampton is the perfect place for a horror writer to live.)



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