CTHULHU CULT by Rick Dakan Shipping Next Week!

 

The wait is over! Next week we will be shipping the first book in the Modern Mythos Library series published by Arcane Wisdom Press.

This is a limited edition hardcover of only 150 signed and hand numbered copies. Each book has a full wrap around laminate four color dust jacket, custom color endpapers, illustrated signature sheet and is built to last generations!

This is #1 in our new Modern Mythos Series. Each title is hand picked and edited by Lovecrafian Scholar S. T. Joshi and award winning publisher Larry L. Roberts. These titles will be the best modern fiction in the Lovecraftian Mythos and will undoubtedly become one of the most collected series in the genre.

CTHULHU CULT: A Novel of Obsession by Rick Dakan (#1 in the Modern Mythos Library)

Synopsis:

Having fled town under a cloud of salacious scandal, Shelby Tyree has returned, a mysterious woman at his side and a strange new devotion to horror writer H.P. Lovecraft in his head. His childhood friends Rick and Conrad scarcely recognize Shelby, who has been transformed from a rakish dilettante into a zealous guru devoted to his own pseudo-religion. They take it upon themselves to discover what Shelby is really up to. Why has he founded his own church, devoted to a presumably fictional demonic alien? Is it possible Shelby’s lost his grip on reality or is somehow under the spell of this mysterious woman? Or is it possible that Shelby has uncovered some secret truths that man was not meant to know? “The Cthulhu Cult is a brilliant and scintillating novel of Lovecraftian terror. It grips the reader from the first page and develops a tremendous cumulative power.

Anyone who has the least interest in H. P. Lovecraft’s work will find The Cthulhu Cult a must-read.” –S. T. Joshi

One of only 150 signed and numbered hardcover copies.

Here is a sneak peek:

Color Endpapers:

Foil Stamp:

Editors: S. T. Joshi and Larry L. Roberts

 

Frankenstein Moon: Astronomer Says It Really Happened

At Miskatonic Books we are all about the truth that antiquarian horrors have shown us about ourselves and our world.  For generations, since Mary Shelley’s introduction to her book in 1831.  Several versions of how the story occurred have been given based on Dr. Polidori’s diary, and other recollections and anecdotes from the members of the party over a few decades.  Her’s was the most precise, most vivid, and most rejected – until now.

Letters and journals establish that Byron and Polidori arrived at Villa Diodati (Lake Geneva, Switzerland) on 10 June 1816.  By no later than 13 June 1916, Byron had proposed his challenge.  What happened next?

It was stated to be – of all things – a dark and stormy night.  Mary who was then only 18 was with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, her step-sister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori.  For amusement, they read aloud to one another ghost stories aloud.  Ever pompous, Byron challenged them to write a superb ghost story to transcend the maudlin efforts they had just read.

It seems clear that Polidori struggled for an idea.  His diary entry for 17 June stated “The ghost-stories are begun by all but me.”  He later came up with a vampire story which would have quickly vanished had it not briefly been thought to have been written by Byron.   What about Mary?  Could a mere lass have spontaneously created such a masterpiece in a few days?  Scholars felt her story romanticized and glossed by her maturing age.  Not so, as she declared in an edition of her book in 1831.

Temporarily unable to come up with an idea, a later conversation about the nature of life that lasted past midnight made her toss and turn.  She experienced some sort of vivid nightmare, or maybe a sleep paralysis attack.  In those waking REM moments, a mysterious man attempted to bring life to a cadaverous figure via a new type of  science.   When Mary Shelley finally came to herself, moonlight streamed in through her window. It was moment she would never forget to the end of her days.   She woke that same morning and dove in to write her tale. But what day?  How can we know for sure?

Texas astronomer, But Donald Olson, has uncovered the date for the “bright and shining moon” through her window.  Extensive research into still-extant local weather records from June of 1816, coordinating geography, and using sophisticated programs they calculated that a bright, gibbous moon would have cleared the hillside to shine into Shelley’s bedroom window just before 2 a.m. on 16 June 1816.

Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind Body Connection

Above, a Cauchemar caricature of a sleep paralysis induced nightmare of some sort.

Shelley Adler has written a book that is getting notice from many critics. Horror fans should especially take note of this one. She became frustrated that even clinical works were missing large portions of an historical mystery of nightmares, so she set out to do her own research. Along the way, she encountered tragic situations in which an immigrant population was one-by-one dying. Nightmares were killing them!

In the book Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind Body Connection Adler describes how 116 healthy Hmong men dislocated from Laos were scattered over a wide geographic region, yet all died in their 30′s. Doctors took a slight notice, and named this phenomenon Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome, and essentially filed it away. That was more than two decades ago. Adler, now a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, crossed paths with this data and determined that the Hmong were killed by their beliefs in the spirit world coupled with an odd genetic cardiac arrhythmia that many of their ethic group exhibit.

Her original thesis was determining the folk lore behind sleep paralysis and nightmarish apparitions and whether there were a medical, psychological, or tangible neuro-mechanical trigge that caused these common world-wide experiences.

(It seems likely that H. P. Lovecraft experienced some aspect of this after the death of his grandmother, and thus gave us the horrific night-gaunt of his fiction and poetry.)

Indeed, every place Adler looked every nation, every continent, and every significant sociological sub-group had vast folklore and descriptions of this experience. Each described the same effect: While waking rapidly from sleep, the person can’t move. They have fear, dread, chest pressure, and difficulty breathing. During REM sleep, our brain is supposed to disconnect and allow us dreams. In sleep paralysis, we awake and yet experience the full effects of REM.

In most of these cases, one of several events also occurs. With men, a disgusting, smelly, Old Hag appears and attacks sexually. In women, it is slightly different, but still with sexual excitation. One is powerless to defend against this until – by sheer will-power – one overcomes the invisible bonds. Time is suspended, so it is uncertain how long these events last – seconds or minutes? In 99.9% of all cases, the nightmare passes with no lasting physical effects. Not with the Hmong. They died.

Adler discovered that the Hmong had a mixture of Christian, indigenous, and other folklore and mythologies referred to loosely as tsog tsuam which had many rituals and shamanistic causes and cures to relieve and explain these attacks. Young men who slacked in worship were said to have the most prevalent episodes ending in death. Ancestral and evil spirits were unhappy. Many of these men had fought in guerrilla insurgencies sponsored by clandestine American funding. The Laotian communists won, and the remaining individuals fled ultimately to over 50 different American cities trying to locate areas that were most compatible with their homeland farming, or other practices. Naturally unemployment was high and families were totally isolated from their way of life. Their stress skyrocketed, as did loneliness, guilt, anger, depression. Many young men succumbed to this by experiencing nightmares and fatal chest pains. The survivors ultimately integrated into the lower echelons of society and began to be absorbed into the American experience.

The “nocebo” effect in the book’s title refers to the antithesis of a “placebo”, a negatively induced phenomenon due to a metaphorical sugar-pill. Remember the old adage, “If you are falling in your sleep, wake up before you hit the ground. Otherwise you will die.” The Hmong men, and perhaps many others, died from their psychopompic nightmares.

Image shows an incubus and a literal "night-mare".

Here is an article on the book.

The Amazon book and excerpts can be found by clicking here.

Wilum Pugmire Shows Off His Copy of Laird Barron’s Latest Tome

Wilum Pugmire showing off his limited edition hardcover of THE LIGHT IS THE DARKNESS by Laird Barron. If you haven’t read Laird Barron you are missing the brightest new star in the genre!

Now that these are in stock they are moving very fast and we expect to be sold out soon. If you haven’t reserved your copy get it soon.

Interesting Animated Rendition of Dagon

The Incredible Tale of “The Lincoln Legend”

A Melungeon family from 1920's Tennessee. Could this have been a genesis for the Lincolns?

In 1966, T. Peter Park was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and his friend, Raymond G. Frey, told him a perplexing story. A true FOAF (friend of a friend) tale, Frey had just visited his home in Kermit, West Virginia. There, an elderly physician who had once met one of the witnesses of the original events told the tale of “The Lincoln Legend”.

Having nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln or any of the President’s relatives, it was story of mutants, horrors, magic incantations, rape, and lynching. Truly a fantastic horror story, but purported to be accurate and factual. Peter was immediately fixated, and never turned loose of the story repeating it often to friends, and publishing it in the Anomalist. About 2005, Chris Perridas assisted Peter in deconstructing the story with the opinion that it was a type of folk tale representing a fin de siecle lynch mob scenario – common in West Virginia consciousness at the time. A number of ghost stories from that West Virginia era seemed similar to what happened to the Lincoln clan.

The story can be found in the Anomalist (click here) but it goes something like this (with a few explanatory notes).

The Lincolns were “standoffish, odd-looking people” who moved near to a small midwestern town (one suspects this was Kermit, W. Va. – Kermit was an isolated community near the border of Kentucky). They arrived in the 1890′s from perhaps Massachsetts. The family – father, mother, daughter and two sons – were squat and “froggish”-looking with “ugly” faces, pallid whitish skin, bulging “hyper-thyroid” eyes, and high broad foreheads.

This immediately suggested to Peter and also to Perridas that there was a Lovecraftian origin to parts of this story such as in “Shadow Over Innsmouth”, or that the story had been enhanced by someone who read Lovecraft between the 1920′s and the early 1960′s. Peter also thought that it might refer to Melungeons, a racial-type found in the Cumberland Gap area of the United Steates.

They exhibited odd, unfriendly personalities and prowled at night. Townsfolk were frightened of them.

In 1896 or 1900 – there was never a reason given for this divergence of dates – one of the Lincoln sons was lynched for raping and murdering the daughter of a prominent local family.

While usually lynching of rape victims was confined to the deep South, and to blacks, white men were lynched in Virginia and sometimes in West Virginia. It became very infrequent after 1910 in West Virginia. So this element rings true to the time period.

At the Lincoln youth’s funeral, his father cursed the town, and “threw a worm or slug at the girl’s father”, crying “Here is your doom!”

This was one of the oddest elements. No voodoo element or other shamanistic religions could be traced to “throwing a worm” despite a great deal of research. Use of tobacco or a tobacco plug was a more natural shamanistic Native American item, and possibly some substitution occurred in the oral transmission.

A little while later the dead girl’s father and brother died under mysterious circumstances, their bodies crushed to a pulp and covered with slime.

Perridas tried to trace this element to a “Weird Tales” or other pulp story with no luck. A giant snail is alluded to by the slime, but where this came from is unknown. It is highly unlikely that this is a true event.

Townsfolk kept having nighttime sightings of the dead Lincoln boy. Some townsfolk who had seen the Lincoln boy’s apparition later went insane. A posse sent to open the Lincoln boy’s grave found footprints leaving the grave. Opening his coffin, they found that the corpse was gone.

Perridas recognized this as a revenge ghost story motif, and suggested to Peter that the story was obtained by combining a lynching ghost story with 1930′s pulp material. Peter felt that this had merit.

Finally, the remainder of the Lincoln family moved out of town. The town suffered droughts, floods and tornadoes due to their mistreatment of the Lincolns.

This is one of the oddest folklore narratives to come out of West Virginia, and sadly, has not obtained the attention that it should have received by either Lovecraft or Fortean scholars.

1994 Illustration showing "froggish folk"

[Mr. T. Peter Park (b. 1941, PhD 1970) was an historian, a librarian, and contributed to many Fortean sites, and periodicals. He was a long time fan of H P Lovecraft, weird tales, and science fiction. He had a long running email list of Fortean items sent to friends and interested parties. Sadly, Peter disappeared from online sites several months ago. It is not known by this writer whether Peter ever finished his horror manuscript, "The Lincoln Symbosis: An Eldritch Tale" (circa 1999)].

Maurice Level, a Lovecraft Contemporary

We just got in our copies of TALES OF THE GRAND GUIGNOL by Maurice Level published by Centipede Press and as usual it is a beautiful publication. With only 100 signed limited edition hardcovers being produced we expect these to sell out quickly. Just click on the cover art above for ordering information.

This collection has a stamped cover by Jason C. Eckhardt and some interior black & white illustrations. The book is edited and introduced by S. T. Joshi.

• Limited to 100 copies, each signed by S.T. Joshi and Jason C. Eckhardt.
• One complete novel and over a dozen short stories.
• Ribbon marker, head and tail bands.

Here is a little about the author:

Maurice Level (August 29, 1875 – April 15, 1926), was a French writer of fiction and drama who specialized in short stories of the macabre which were regularly printed in the columns of Paris newspapers and sometimes staged by le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, the repertory company in the Pigalle district devoted to melodramatic productions which highlighted blood and gore.

Level’s short stories may be weak in characterization and motivation, but they are strong on obsession and violence. Their surprise endings are reminiscent of the stories of Guy de Maupassant. As editor John Robert Colombo noted in Stories of Fear and Fascination (2007), Battered Silicon Dispatch Box French critics see Level as the heir of the Symbolist writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; British critics, as the successor of Edgar Allan Poe; American critics, as the contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft. Of this fiction, Lovecraft himself observed in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945), “This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself–the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors.” Critic Philippe Gontier wrote, “We can only admire, now almost one hundred years later, the great artistry with which Maurice Level fabricated his plots, with what care he fashioned all the details of their unfolding and how with a master’s hand he managed the building of suspense.” Level’s stories, with their gratuitous acts and mindless brutality, may be seen as precursors of “thriller” fiction and “slasher” films.

The Conflict Between the Oral Narrative and Written Page

Woodcut of Gutenberg Printing a Bible

At Miskatonic Books we love the crisp feel of paper and love a well-told story. However, folks tend to forget that the typewritten page is an historically new phenomenon. Recently there has been great debate over what the canonical Lovecraft typescript should be, and whether or not additions to “the canon” by August Derleth or whether deCamp and Carter’s additions to Robert E. Howard’s Conan are acceptable storytelling.

From whence does this fundamentalist ire come? Some of it comes from the tension between printed pages and oral narrative. More comes from honoring a master’s work, and whether the disciple has rights to add or alter the original. It is as old as Aristotle versus Plato reproducing Socrates’ speeches; as old as Paul’s shout-out with Simon Peter.

Egyptian Portion of Rosetta Stone

In the earliest days of humanity, or in today’s non-literate societies, all stories were and are told by copious hand-waving, tonal inflections of the voice, and sometimes with mood-setting lighting. From authoritative story-teller to story-teller, legends and tales and priestly strictures were handed down. To prevent them from being altered too much, these were often set down in poetic verse to be sung, since people quickly discovered that stories could be recalled better once they were in verse form, and we now know that a very different part of the brain handles singing and speech rather than writing.

Story-telling in a Neanderthal Cave

Folklorists discovered a startling thing. Oral tales, even sung, vary greatly in verbiage from each telling by the same person, or from person to person, yet certain key phrases never change. Scholars have detected this very thing in comparing Homeric works with “his” other contemporaries, or in deconstructing different portions of the Old and New Testaments, or in analysis of Slavic folk songs.

As an example, let’s take the famous ghost story writer, Irish born Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1814 – 1873) who listened to old Irish ghost tales and spun them for an English audience.

(1) Drunken Irish patron tells ghost tale
(2) Singer of stories gives a ghost ditty over a swig of ale.
(3) LeFanu hears these several times and goes back home to jot the gist of them down.
(4) It’s time for a story for an English audience, so he bowdlerizes them, enhances the characterization and plot, and voila we eventually have something like Carmilla.

Or let’s take good ol’ H. P. Lovecraft. He opens up the Providence Journal, finishes the editorials ridiculing democrats in the legislature, gets infuriated over the hoi poloi letters to the editor, gets disgusted at crime-in-the-streets perpetuated by filthy immigrants, and then his eye catches an article about some dimwit rube who believes some balderdash about hollow earth theory, astrology, or -Pegana Save Us! – ghosts. This fresh in his mind, he writes down a little story about an old man who lives on a high rock. As he chuckles to himself, he adds traces of ignorant hicks, Potuguese vermin, spooky gothic mists, and on and on until he feels he has equal portions of satire and weird tale. Not satisfied, he erases his pencil scribbles, or draws a line through them and adds and subtracts.

Cuneiform "Text"

Flash forward 80 years, and we have all that swirl and posh condensed into a Del-Rey type-set paperback book. How isolated and different is that text impacting our 21st century imagination than if we were sitting in 1920′s Providence? In fact, scholars tell us that text in that DelRey book probably isn’t even the text Lovecraft intended for us to see! It is aberrant, different, and so how can we see what he really intended? So off we go to try to reproduce the precise and exact setting of – say – Rats in the Walls. But which one? His first draft, his last draft? The one that little Ruth Eddy heard distantly in her bedroom yet not seeing him? The one C. M. Eddy, Jr. heard in the living room as he sat there smiling at Lovecraft’s powerful storytelling ability, gesticulating and inflecting? The one that Muriel Eddy typed – though God knows how she read his pencil scratches. The one readers of Weird Tales read on that yellowing, brittle paper in the mid-1920′s? The one that fresh-from-being-shell-shocked G.I.’s read from Derleth’s Arkham books in the late 1940′s? The one psychedelic 1960′s kids read while strung out on Jefferson Airplane – or the band H. P. Lovecraft? It is all so very personal. That personal investment brings with it shock when someone else brings their very different personal viewpoint and begins to discuss it. This is the second layer of oral narrative – a narrative about the narrative.

In oral narratives, there is fluidity and sometimes compromise. A story is never told the same way twice. In fact we insist on variation of inflection and gesture in oral story-telling, otherwise we get bored. Yet there is nary a shred of doubt when it comes to precise texts. We know immediately when a word is missed in the Pledge of Allegiance, or a Robert Frost poem, or the Lord’s Prayer. It jars us.

Early scribes discovered the difficulty of precisely reproducing a text generation after generation – even Holy Script. Despite stern monitoring, and numerous checks and balances and counting regimen, they still skipped lines, added phrases, and made mistakes. Today, we want a perfectly edited and precise text accurately reflecting the antiquarian author’s exactitude placed on beautiful acid-free paper, inserted and stitched and glued into beautiful binding. And yet we weigh that against not being able to be there to hear the author read the original. Perhaps that is part of the price we pay,. We cannot be there, so we honor the moment we cannot experience by having the value of the book. We want so desperately to grok the original horror of the master story-teller.

The Death of Socrates - Jacques-Louis David

The conflict of the printed page and the oral narrative: We live in that dichotomy.

We must bring our hearts, our imagination, and our personal journey to the horror text and soar on fantastic flights of terror.

That is the power of books, and the power of the well-told horror story.

THE GHOST OF FEAR AND OTHERS: H. P. Lovcraft’s Favorite Horror Stories Vol I by S. T. Joshi

Arcane Wisdom Press is proud to announce our next book with the renowned scholar S. T. Joshi titled: THE GHOST OF FEAR AND OTHERS: H. P. LOVECRAFT’S FAVORITE HORROR STORIES, Volume 1

Remember that all purchases through Miskatonic Books get $5 media rate US shipping on any size order and 5% back in points to be used on future purchases. Advance order items do not have to be paid at the time of order, just use the “bill me” function at checkout and you will be invoiced when the book is ready to ship.

This will be a signed limited edition hardcover of only 150 copies.  The cover art on both title when set side by side will make one large work of art. We expect this volume to ship in December so reserve your copy now. Vol II will be announced early next year.

H. P. Lovecraft was a voracious reader of supernatural and fantastic fiction, and he was continually on the hunt for powerful and stimulating works in these genres. Many of the stories he read directly influenced his own writings. This first volume of H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories presents 16 stories that Lovecraft found to be of particular merit. Among them are the beautiful poetic fantasy “Idle Days on the Yann” by Lord Dunsany; Fiona Macleod’s grimly evocative “The Sin-Eater,” which influenced “The Rats in the Walls”; Arthur Machen’s grisly novelette “Novel of the White Powder,” which Lovecraft adapted for “Cool Air”; and M. P. Shiel’s “The House of Sounds,” which Lovecraft ranked among the greatest weird tales ever written. Also included are hard-to-find stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, E. F. Benson, Théophile Gautier, John Buchan, and others, as well as two stories from the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales (Seabury Quinn’s “The Phantom Farmhouse” and Arthur J. Burks’s “Bells of Oceana”). The volume contains an introduction by S. T. Joshi as well as notes on the individual stories, giving background on the authors as well as on Lovecraft’s appreciation of the tales and their possible influence on his work.

Miskatonic Books Gets a New Home and Facelift

Fellow lover of weird fiction,

For the past several months we’ve been busy building our new site at www.miskatonicbooks.com to better service all our customers who love weird tales, ghost, mythos and dark fantasy.

We have only scratched the surface of our inventory and will be adding hundreds of more books from your favorite genre authors and publishers daily so check back often.  Check out our featured author page here FEATURED AUTHORS

Like our old bookstore, our new site will cater to Lovecraftian fiction and weird tales in general. You’ll find our new site is easier to navigate, quicker checkout, and faster page loads.  You’ll also get $5 media rate shipping on any size order that ships in the US and 5% back in points to be used on future purchases for anything at www.miskatonicbooks.com

If you’ve ordered a book through our store at Horror-Mall your order is still valid and there is no reason to reorder on the new site. All orders placed through Horror-Mall will be filled as usual.

If you have any questions please feel free to email me at miskatonicbooks@me.com

Please click the banner below to check out our new site and be sure to subscribe to this blog to stay up to date on all the new titles at www.miskatonicbooks.com and our own publications through our Arcane Wisdom imprint.

Thanks so much for your continued support!