Salute to Virgil Finlay

Before there was a Boris Valejo or a Frank Frazetta, a young illustrator burst upon the scene taking teenagers collective breaths away.  Classic, but innvoative, Virgil Finlay made a living illustrating and influencing generations.

Auburn Calif., Sept 27th 1937.   Dear Virgil:… Your drawing for The Death of Ilalotha was quite good, I thought, especially in the rendering of the lamia and her monstrous shadow. I liked also the one for Psychopompos in the same issue of W.T. The Shunned House illustration in current W.T. is superb.

What better honor than from the pen of another amazing artist – Clark Ashton Smith!

Actual Ten Shilling Note Used by the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations

Lovecraft was a big fan, and Finay of HPL. So much so, he drew him as a Lord of the Manor, periwig and all.

Lovecraft thought this was quite a hoot.

There seemed to be no job too small, as with this 1937 item.

As the years went on, was Finlay influential? Chrispy can’t ay for sure, but a clip form George Pal’s movie, War of the Wars (who was also a fan and freind of Walter Lantz, Woody the Woodpecker fame and aded several images of Woody in the film) looks uncannily like that illustrated by Finlay for Lovecraft’s Colour Out of Space. See for yourself.

Virgil Finlay faded from our world on January of 1971. 

His fans missed him, as did his peers.  Donald M. Grant’s Virgil Finlay was the first book devoted to the man and his work. It contained an appreciation by Sam Moskowtiz, and a checklist by Gerry de la Ree – de la Ree, a once-stalwart of Indie publishing and very influential would go on to publish six hardback collections of Finlay drawings starting with The Book of Virgil Finlay.

Giant Gila Monsters of Horror!

We live in a rhombic world.  How do Gunsmoke, John Ford, gila monsters, and WWII OSS intersect?

Ken Curtis.

Most people today don’t recall television’s long running Western, Gunsmoke.  It was usually a “guest star of the week” antagonizing the slow-to-anger Marshall Dillon who provided justice to a lawless territory.  The pressure of series television on a star is tremendous, even then, so a cast of quirky characters were portrayed by veteran character actors.  One of the most notable was Festus as portrayed by Ken Curtis.

Curtis (1916-1991) started his career as a singer from Colorado, and his father was an actual sheriff.  Early on, Curtis was Sinatra’s back up singer in Tommy Dorsey’s band, and when Sinatra defected he stepped up.  Curtis’ career eventually led to two events:  marrying John Ford’s daughter, and singing with the Sons of the Pioneers in westerns, thus typecasting him forever.  Curtis featured or filled the background with John Wayne and in many other Ford epics.

Joe Lansdale Book Inspired by Drive-In Movies

Edgar Ray Kellogg (1905-1976) was a Navy officer with the OSS when he, too, met Ford.  Kellogg went into the special effects department at 20^th Century Fox heading the unit and was tapped to direct two B-movies primarily for the Baby Boomer teen crowd.

From at least the 1940′s Hollywood was in a panic over competition from television, and the little box forced Hollywood into wider screens, air conditioned theaters, Panavision, adult themes, and special effects.  In 1959, new special effects were coming to Hollywood and Ken Curtis produced, while Kellogg directed a quirky little B-movie with many as-yet unknown stars.  It seemed primarily filmed to see what special lenses could do with a model set and a gila monster turned loose upon it.

Likely influenced by The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953, first solo-Ray Harryhausen stop-action) and The Blob (1958), it was teamed with a second film to fill the “drive-in” movie screen as a twin-bill.

While even in its day it was a weak film, it didn’t need to be good drama and it’s reasonably sure Curtis realized this.  IT was most likely expected to make a run, and then get tossed.  However, nostalgia and late night TV in the 1960′s resurrected it into a cult classic inspiring young people to what could be done on very cheap budget and hand-me-down film equipment.

Movies such as these inspired Joe Lansdale to do a book (1988) on the genre, and in 2009 Monstrous: 20 Tales of Giant Creature Terror appeared.

A trailer for The Giant Gila Monster

And Ken Curtis singing a song he featured decades before:  Tumbling Tumbleweeds.

Frank Belknap Long (Sr. & Jr.)

Lovecraft was fond of Frank Belknap Long, Jr.  So much so, he often called him “Belkapius”.  It is somewhat unfair to look at an individual only through the eyes of HPL, so here’s a little extra information that might round out the long career of the weird tale writer.

Long, Jr. grew up in a relatively privileged environment, since his father was a dental surgeon in New York.

One supposes it all started a few years after Frank Belknap Long, Sr. graduated from the New York College of Dentistry (10 March 1892).  On  20 November 1895, Dr. Long and his dear bride, Miss May Mansfield Doty, joined hands and were wed.  The bride wore a gown of heavy white satin with flounces of point lace.

As nature took its course, Frank, Jr, came along on 27 April 1901.  Sadly we lost him in 1994, but he lived a long and productive life.

At first, he was a champion and practitioner of the weird tale.  While Lovecraft remained to his last day challenged to write the ultimate weird tale, time marched on and the atomic era dawned.  While the venerable Weird Tales hung on for several decades, the new rage was Scientifiction (later Sci-Fi, coined allegedly by Forest J. Ackerman).

Long embraced the new writing style, and for a time put out both weird tales, horror, and Scientifiction.  It is little known that he also wrote neo-gothic stories with the pseudonym Lyda Belknap Long.

After HPL died, Long missed him. As the years moved by, he thought of his long-ago friend and finally came out with a very readable memoir. Sadly, it has never been reprinted, and like so much of Lovecraftiana, it is hard to acquire, and expensive. In it he told a classic few stories.

Once, HPL was sitting in a cemetery with Long, and Long said, “Look, Howard.” In the coolness of the crepuscular darkness, wisps of moisture coiled. Long thought they resembled ghosts. Lovecraft pshawed this notion, and went into a scientific explanation that added a different kind of chill to the supernatural evening. However, HPL was just as quick to conjure weird out of the mundane. Once he went to a museum with Long, and upon touching part of an Egyptian exhibit went rapturous over evil and long dead Egyptians on a rampage.

Just as some have “heroes of the faith”, we honor the antiquarian thread of horror as it twists and turns through history, time and space. On this occasion, today, we celebrate a firmly woven thread of the tapestry: Frank Belknap Long, Jr.

Below are a few title of Frank Belknap Long, Jr. we have available at Miskatonic Books

Click on any of the cover arts below to get more information on the title

New Reggie Oliver Title Announced

MRS MIDNIGHT AND OTHER STORIES by Reggie Oliver (Limited Edition Import)

Click here for ordering information: MRS MIDNIGHT

A TV reality show host helps to restore an East End music hall and uncovers the dreadful secret of Mrs Midnight and her Animal Comedians. . . . A historian travels to Switzerland to ghost the autobiography of an exiled Balkan king and encounters a sinister cult. . . . The Master of an Oxford college tries to introduce a dubious piece of modern sculpture into his college chapel with dire consequences. . . . A strange meeting takes place on a playing field between an officer on leave from the trenches and his former headmaster. . . .
The settings and characters in Reggie Oliver’s fifth collection of ‘strange’ stories are as varied and unusual as ever, though, as in previous volumes, the theatre forms the milieu of a number of his tales. But the theatres are not just English ones, in the provinces and the West End: one is on the Black Sea; another in post-colonial Kenya. Themes are equally varied, but underlying all is a deep sense of the spiritual under-currents just below the surface of everyday existence, and the precariousness of ‘normality’.
‘…by miles, the best living exponent of the spooky yarn,’ Barry Humphries.

Reggie Oliver is an English playwright, biographer and writer of ghost stories. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.

Mrs Midnight and Other Stories contains:

• “Mrs Midnight”
• “Countess Otho”
• “Meeting with Mike”
• “The Dancer in the Dark”
• “Mr Pigsny”
• “The Brighton Redemption”
• “You Have Nothing to Fear”
• “The Philosophy of the Damned”
• “The Mortlake Manuscript”
• “The Look”
• “The Giacometti Crucifixion”
• “A Piece of Elsewhere”
• “Minos or Rhadamanthus”.
• With illustrations by the author.

Mrs Midnight and Other Stories is a sewn hardback of 381 pages, printed lithographically, with head and tailbands, and d/w.

Ed Lee!

Ed Lee is the boldest, bad-assest horror writer to ever dip a bloody quill.  Sometimes termed by indie horror fans as “Siction” (sick fantasy horror fiction), Ed Lee pushes the @#$% envelope past the paper-cut level and goes for the jugular – though most of the time he aims for parts more nether.

When I (Chrispy guest writing today) first was introduced to true Indie horror by (Miskatonic Books Blog host) Larry, I thought I’d seen it all.  Not even close.  I didn’t realize you could place body parts in those positions, and in those ways (ugh) with blood and censored as lubricant.

I had to frequently stop and wash my brain out.

Then, once I figured out the pace and rhythm, I began to (God help me) understand Lee.  Beyond victimization, there was a bit of nobleness in his female protagonists.  They endured.  Perhaps all sex was deviant?  Just how deviant could it be?  Through mystical, paranormal, and supernatural evil, passion was distorted to perverseness, but enduring brought a type of redemption.

But Lee is also fun.  He is a UFO afficianado, it seems, as he often adds the alien element to the mix.  Cryptozoology comes to play sometimes, as does horrific mutations.  He must have been a B-movie fan at one time, becuase he wrote the short story “Night of the Vegetables” in White House Horrors (1996).  After reading Monstrosity, I will NEVER, no NEVER !! get into a jungle stream.  My testicles are shriveling just recalling what happened in that story.  Listening to the audio of Big Head is an experience like none other.  But my favorite to date?  Trolley No. 1852.  Gods of Pegana, Lovecraft in a Mythos brothel?

The Cross of Carl

The title of this is a throwback to an even earlier day, as it is lengthy:  THE CROSS OF CARL: AN ALLEGORY. THE STORY OF ONE WHO WENT DOWN INTO THE DEPTHS AND WAS BURIED; WHO, DOUBTING MUCH, YET AT THE LAST LIFTED UP HIS EYES UNTO THE HILLS AND ROSE AGAIN AND WAS TRANSFIGURED.

Post-modern, 21st century readers might not find this to their liking as it is filled with allegory, religiosity, and is set against the dimming memory of WWI.  However, before one snarls over this, one might think of Steve Alten’s latest book Grim Reaper,  some of Michael Laimo’s works, or even Brain Keene’s Dead Sea.  Are they any less grotesque, allegorical or religious?

An L. W. Currey review summarizes the plot, “… a dawn advance on ‘Hill 50,’ {he} receives several wounds (all described, as are the wounds of nearby soldiers, with an almost nauseating vividness) and passes out in the enemy’s trench. In the second, mistaken for a corpse, he is taken to a rendering plant where the remains of soldiers are ground up, boiled down in a giant vat and separated into useful products: pig food, oil, manure etc. Carl wakes up and barely manages to escape from this place. In the third section he wanders on the moor, his mind unhinged — or, from a different point of view, purged of earthly restraints — finds a broken shovel, digs his own grave and lies down in it. In the final section, two generals come upon him the following morning and listen to his visionary rambling, then shoot him as a dangerously subversive figure and put him back in his grave. “

Walter Hubbard Owen (b. 1884) was originally from Glascow, but lived in Buenos Aires.  Essentially a merchant, he was comfortable enough to write frequent fiction and poetry.  He was blind in one eye, and while he did try to enlist, he was rejected.  In principal he was a pacifist, thus pressing the horrors of war in this book to shock the reader out of glorifying it through patriotism.

Below is a Cross of Carl book review e-clipping by Bruce Catton (the Civil War authority) from the 22 August 1931 Florence Alabama Times-News (col. 4, p. 2).    Catton, after 1925, wrote syndicated book reviews for the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Enterprise Association.  Click the image to expand it to a more readable scale.

Brain-eating Amoeba Kills 3 This Summer

ATLANTA (The Blaze/AP) — It happens every year. However isolated and rare, each summer a brain-eating parasite kills water-goers, usually children. This year is no different: two children and a young man have died already from an amoeba that lives in water, health officials say.

This month, the rare infection killed a 16-year-old Florida girl, who fell ill after swimming, and a 9-year-old Virginia boy, who died a week after he went to a fishing day camp. The boy had been dunked the first day of camp, his mother told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Those cases are consistent with past cases, which are usually kids — often boys — who get exposed to the bug while swimming or doing water sports in warm ponds or lakes.

The third case, in Louisiana, was more unusual. It was a young man whose death in June was traced to the tap water he used in a device called a neti pot. It’s a small teapot-shaped container used to rinse out the nose and sinuses with salt water to relieve allergies, colds and sinus trouble.

Health officials later found the amoeba in the home’s water system. The problem was confined to the house; it wasn’t found in city water samples, said Dr. Raoult Ratard, Louisiana’s state epidemiologist.

The young man, who was only identified as in his 20s and from southeast Louisiana, had not been swimming nor been in contact with surface water, Ratard added.

He said only sterile, distilled, or boiled water should be used in neti pots.

The illness is extremely rare. About 120 U.S. cases — almost all of them deaths — have been reported since the amoeba was identified in the early 1960s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About three deaths are reported each year, on average. Last year, there were four.

There are no signs that cases are increasing, said Jonathan Yoder, who coordinates surveillance of waterborne diseases for the CDC.

The amoeba — Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL-er-eye) — gets up the nose, burrows up into the skull and destroys brain tissue. It’s found in warm lakes and rivers during the hot summer months, mostly in the South.

It’s a medical mystery why some people who swim in amoeba-containing water get the fatal nervous system condition while many others don’t, experts say.

But the cases that do occur tend to be tragic, and there’s only been one report of successful treatment.

“It’s very difficult to treat. Most people die from it,” Ratard said.

__

AP writer Stephanie Nano in New York contributed to this report.

IA!!!!!!! YOG-SOTHOTH!!!!!!!!

Wilum Pugmire opens his contributor copies of SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT and a copy of CRAWLING CHAOS!

What’s So Great About Indie Horror?

1.  You meet the neatest people.

2.  You get to read the rawest, purest, unvarnished horror ever.

3.  You get to see the new-new thing BEFORE anyone else.

4.  Independent horror is run by small business people who CARE about horror.

5.  You have a chance to get carefully made, signed first editions in limited runs.

Arguably, all major book publishers are connected to or run by one of two conglomerates who care only about rapid release, mass market, fast read, cheap books.   There is nothing essentially WRONG with that, but if you LOVE books, and GOOD cuting-edge and thought provoking horror then you are going to have to read independent sponsored horror books.

To make the cut at the BIG BOX stores, and GIANT publishers is like wining the iron man competition, and a lot of luck.  Do you really think today’s movie stars are the best actors who ever lived?  No, they are the LUCKIEST actors who ever lived.  It’s the same with writers.

For every Ann Rice and Stephen King, there are innumerable writers who work on their craft and are worthy to be read.  Independent horror provides the training ground where the next great writers generate credentials, fan base, and have a chance to do cutting-edge horror.

Imagine you were a little kid picking up the first 1960′s Marvel comics, or on the set of King Kong with Ray Harryhausen learning how to do stop action, or getting those first 1920′s issues of Weird Tales.  That is today’s scene of independent horror.  Horror is not dead, it is already reforming with the abilities of new artists who are chomping like hungry zombies to scare you in ways you never imagined.

Scout out this new scene.  Pick out your new, favorite artists and writers.  If you are new to horror, we hope you also get a taste of the old classics, and we would be proud to have you learn more about Miskatonic Books.

Incredible Adventures

Contemporaries (1915) praised Algernon Blackwood’s Incredible Adventures:

Incredible Adventures is a book such as no other man could conceivably have written a book for those who wish to escape from the beaten path of common place fiction of the day – Argonaut

Masterpieces of atmosphere built up by elaborate descriptions and the magic of an unusually rich style – Independent

It reveals in full measure his great gift of imagination his fine literary quality and his remarkable power in dealing with the supernatural – Philadelphia Public Ledger

It has now been nearly a century, and critics and fans alike still love Blackwood’s stories. It begins simply enough on page 1: Poor, proud, ambitious, he realised that fate offered him a chance when the Secretary of State for Scotland asked him if he would give up his other pupils for a year and take his son, Lord Ernie, round the world upon an educational trip that might make a man of him.

Later, classic Blackwood takes over to set the dark and mysterious mood: The mystery of the place was pretty thick about me just then. It was the fall of dusk, and the ghost of slanting sunshine was as unreal as though badly painted. The garden stood at attention all about me. I cannot explain it but I can tell it I think exactly as it happened for it remains vivid in me for ever that for the first time something almost … – ah, but more would be telling!

 

 

Hippocampus Edition (2004)

 

With a scholarly introduction by scholar S. T. Joshi, this is one you may consider to add to your collection.  Simply click on the image for more information or go to Miskatonic Books now (click!)