Two Exciting New Preorders Announced

WEAVEWORLD: 25 ANNIVERSARY EDITION by Clive Barker (Signed Limited Edition Hardcover)

Earthling celebrates 25 years of Clive Barker’s Weaveworld with the definitive edition of this dark fantasy masterwork. Weaveworld: 25th Anniversary Edition will be released late 2012 in a modest print run consisting of gift, numbered, and lettered editions:

hand numbered 1-350; signed by Clive Barker and illustrator Richard Kirk; leatherbound; fine endsheets; bound-in satin ribbon page marker; traycased; includes bonus appendix material printed in full color: previously unreleased art as well as an early treatment/synopsis and original typed and hand-edited manuscript pages for Weaveworld when it was inititally conceived as a children’s book

feature new typesetting and design, two-color offset printing on fine paper (likely 80# Finch), 7×10 inch oversized pages, and smyth sewing…and nearly 30 original pieces of art by Richard Kirk, who has illustrated other projects by Clive Barker as well as Earthling releases by China Mieville and Christopher Golden.

Time magazine calls Weaveworld “an irresistible yarn,” and Peter Straub says it is “pure dazzle, pure storytelling.” This 25th anniversary edition of Weaveworld will undoubtedly be the one to own and experience.

THE TWELVE by Justin Cronin (Signed Limited Edition Hardcover)

Deluxe Oversized Hardcover Limited Edition of 948 signed and hand-numbered copies bound in full-cloth and Smyth sewn with a satin ribbon page marker and featuring a full-color signature sheet

In his internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Passage, Justin Cronin constructed an unforgettable world transformed by a government experiment gone horribly wrong.

With The Twelve, the story continues…

n the present day:
As a man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos, desperate to find others, to survive, to witness the dawn on the other side of disaster.

Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, has been so broken by the spread of violence and infection that she continues to plan for her child’s arrival even as society dissolves around her.

Kittridge, known to the world as “Last Stand in Denver,” has been forced by loss of electrical power to flee his stronghold and is now on the road, dodging the infected, armed but alone and well aware that a tank of gas will get him only so far.

April is a teenager fighting to guide her little brother safely through a minefield of death and ruin.

These three will learn that they have not been fully abandoned—and that in connection lies hope, even on the darkest of nights.

One hundred years in the future:
Amy, Peter, Alicia, and the others introduced in The Passage work with a cast of new characters to hunt the original twelve virals… unaware that the rules of the game have changed, and that one of them will have to sacrifice everything to bring the Twelve down.

The scope widens and the intensity deepens as the epic tale of sacrifice and survival begun in The Passage surges forward in this breathtaking sequel.

Special Features Exclusive to this Collector’s Edition:
• epic cover artwork by Tomislav Tikulin
• at least ONE DOZEN black & white interior illustrations by Jill Bauman
• deluxe oversized design with a fine binding
• Smyth sewn with a bound-in satin ribbon page marker
• extremely collectible print run that is a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of copies of the edition you’ll see in bookstores — and you will NOT see our edition in chain bookstores!

Egyptian Lost Book … Found!

We here at Misky love old books. Perhaps as we get older, we wish we could live as long as some of these old relics!

We also get frustrated with libraries and museums because they can be simultaneously covetousness of their holdings, and yet careless. Here is yet another example. IT took scholars a century to uncover fragments of the very important Egyptian Book of the Dead. Amenhotep preserve us from bureaucratic admins who lock up important relics never to be seen again, and yet as likely sell them for $1 on the discard table.

The last missing pages from a supposedly ‘magical’ Book of the Dead from an Egyptian priest, Amenhotep, have been found after a century-long search – in a museum in Queensland.
British Museum Egyptologist Dr John Taylor said he was ‘floored’ by the discovery of the 100 fragments.
It’s the end of a worldwide search by archaeologists for the papyrus scroll – which supposedly contains spells to guide spirits into the afterlife. Read more

Written in about 1450 B.C. (B.C.E.) this 3500 year old document comes from the unusual historical era of Amenhotep II. It is an early example of a Book of the Dead manuscript that has several unusual features found on only four or five extant manuscripts.

Believed to be Amenhotep II

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2132755/Last-pages-magical-Egyptian-Book-Dead-museum-Queensland–worldwide-search-archaeologists.html#ixzz1sxgffUsz

Thank you, Dr. Taylor!

 

Just In, Back in Stock and In Low Supply

Here are a few titles that just arrived, back in stock or in short supply

 

PILGRIMAGE TO AZATHOTH by H. P. Lovecraft (Signed Limited Edition Hardcover bound in goat skin)

Bound in Black Goat Skin Viatorium Press announces a unique new edition of the prose poems of H. P. Lovecraft. Limited to 46 copies. Letterpress + laser printing. Folding plate. Bound in black goat. Pilgrimage to Azathoth has taken first prize in the 2011 Bookbuilder’s West design competition. Trim size is 5.5 x 7

The prose poems of H. P. Lovecraft, disguised within what appears to be a sinister occult tome; this design is a play on Lovecraft’s own imaginal grimoire, the Necronomicon. Arabic and English are poised side by side, expressing the themes and characters of the interwoven tales. The reader feels he/she is immersed in mystery, due to the bizarre symbols influenced by multiple ancient cultures. The occasionally unorthodox structure, and deliberate obfuscation, challenge the reader to explore the book as an aesthetic object, a machine of arcane sensation. The book is bound in black goat, and contains a large letterpressed folding plate.

The book is nothing short of amazing and is a must have for any serious Lovecraftian library.

These are in stock and in very short supply

 

 

MEDUSA’S COIL AND OTHERS Volume II by H. P. Lovecraft edited by S. T. Joshi (Signed Limited Edition Hardcover)

We are down to just a few copies of this title left!

Some of H. P. Lovecraft’s most fascinating work came from a time in his life that he was forced, by economic survival, to ghostwrite, collaborate and revise the work of others in the field. Here Lovecraft Scholar S. T. Joshi collects the best of these revisions and collaborations in a two volume set to be published this year from Arcane Wisdom Press. Medusa’s Coil and Others is the second of these two volumes. This edition is painstakingly annotated, and includes an introduction and bibliography by S. T. Joshi. The book is a must for the Lovecraft enthusiast and scholar alike. This limited edition hardcover will be strictly limited to only 150 hardcover copies. They will be signed by Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi and will be hand numbered on a custom signature sheet, featuring artwork by Zach McCain. We expect to be shipping these in late January reserve your copy now of this unique collection.

HE GHOST OF FEAR AND OTHERS: H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories edited by S. T. Joshi (Signed Limited Hardcover)

We are expecting to have several more of these in stock from the printers the first week of May. These have been going very quickly so reserve your copy soon before these are all gone.

THE GHOST OF FEAR AND OTHERS: H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories edited by S. T. Joshi (Signed Limited Hardcover)

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.

 

Contents:

• Introduction by S. T. Joshi
• Idle Days on the Yann by Lord Dunsany
• Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Man Who Went Too Far by E. F. Benson
• The Mark of the Beast by Rudyard Kipling
• The Sin-Eater by Fiona Macleod
• The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel
• The Phantom Farmhouse by Seabury Quinn
• One of Cleopatra’s Nights by Théophile Gautier
• The Stranger from Kurdistan by E. Hoffmann Price
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe
• Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen
• The Dead Smile by F. Marion Crawford
• The Ghost of Fear by H. G. Wells
• Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White
• Bells of Oceana by Arthur J. Burks
• The Wind in the Portico by John Buchan

This is a signed limited edition hardcover of only 150 signed and numbered copies.

THE KING IN THE GOLDEN MASK and Other Stories by Marcel Schwab (Limited Edition Hardcover) Import from Tartarus Press

‘The peculiar genius of Monsieur Schwob lies in a species of tremendously complex simplicity; that is to say that, by the arrangement and the harmony of an infinity of telling and precise details, his stories present the sensation of a unique detail.’
Rémy de Gourmont, Le deuxième Livre des Masques  Revered in the French-speaking world, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) deserves to be much better known among English-speaking aficionados of Decadent fiction. This new collection of fifty-one stories, including eight newly-translated pieces, aims to address that discrepancy. It brings back into print Iain White’s poetic translations of Schwob’s better-known tales, such as the title story ‘The King in the Golden Mask’, and adds newly-translated gems such as the astonishingly beautiful and haunting ‘The Wooden Star’.

Schwob was a one-off, but he was greatly influenced by English and American writers. He discovered Edgar Allan Poe whilst still a child, and he translated Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter into French. He crammed a great variety of literary endeavour into his all-too-short life, and was much admired by contemporaries such as Paul Valéry and Guillaume Apollinaire.

The King in the Golden Mask contains:

Translator’s introduction
Acknowledgements
From Cœur double: ‘The Strigae’, ‘The Sabot’, ‘Train 081′, ‘Arachné’, ‘The Veiled Man’, ‘Beatrice’, ‘Lilith’, ‘A Skeleton’, ‘The Fat Man’, ‘The Dom’, ‘The Amber-trader’, ‘Mérigot Marchès’, ‘The “Papier Rouge” ‘, ‘The Firebrands’.
From Le Roi au masque d’or: ‘The King in the Golden Mask’, ‘The Death of Odjigh’, ‘The Embalming-women’, ‘The Plague’, ‘The Milesian Virgins’, ‘The Sabbat at Mofflaines’, ‘Blanche the Bloody’, ‘The Flute’, ‘The Sleeping City’.
From Vies imaginaires: ‘Introduction’, ‘Empedocles, Reputed God’, ‘Herostratos, Incendiary’, ‘Crates, Cynic’, ‘Septima, Enchantress’, ‘Lucretius, Poet’, ‘Clodia, Shameless Matron’, ‘Petronius, Novelist’, ‘Sufrah, Geomancer’, ‘Frate Dolcino, Heretic’, ‘Cecco Angiolieri, Malevolent Poet’, ‘Paolo Uccello, Painter’, ‘Nicholas Oyseleur, Judge’, ‘Katherine la Dentellière, Whore’, ‘Alain le Gentil, Soldier’, ‘Gabriel Spenser, Actor’, ‘Cyril Tourneur, Tragic Poet’, ‘Major Stede Bonnet, Pirate by Vagary’, ‘Burke and Hare, Murderers’.
La croisade des enfants: ‘The Goliard’s Narrative’, ‘The Leper’s Narrative’, ‘The Narrative of Pope Innocent III’, ‘Narrative of Three Little Children’, ‘Narrative of François Longuejoue, Clerk’, ‘The Kalandar’s Narrative’, ‘Little Allys’ Narrative’, ‘The Narrative of Pope Gregory IX’.
‘The Wooden Star’
Cover illustration by Santiago Caruso

Killer Pythons… s..s..s..s

Beware the Killer Pyhons !!!

Recent news stories reemphasize that sometimes were are not at the top of the food chain, but that we are … food.

16 April 2012: “Police in urban Japan probed the death of a man whose body was found next to a 6.5-metre (21 foot) python. Shoji Fujita, 66, was found dead outside his home in Ushiku city, 50 kilometres (30 miles) northeast of Tokyo, with a reticulated python sitting next to him, a local police spokesman said. Fujita disappeared after telling his wife he was going outside to check the temperature of a locked reptile compound next to the couple’s house. After he failed to return, the woman found her dead husband with bite marks.”

6 April 2012: “The Burmese python is not simply a sit-and-wait predator. It has nearly exhausted all the mammalian prey in the Everglades, and has turned to eating birds. Now it is finding the nests and gobbling the eggs.”

27 March 2012: “A statue of the largest snake ever is now on display in New York. The titanoboa snake is thought to be around 60 million years old and is the longest and heaviest to ever have lived! Originally native to what is now Columbia, the titanoboa is believed to have been able to eat a crocodile in one gulp.”

2 July 2009: Police discover pet python that strangled a 2-year-old Florida girl in her crib, killing her. Sumter County Sheriffs office indicated the child died after being attacked by the snake, which belonged to her mother’s boyfriend and escaped from its aquarium.” (Trial began July 2011).

Ongoing: Battle to the death between Pythons and Aligators in the Everglades. Who will win?

Gator eats Python

Python eats Gator

To make matters worse, fictionalized spam has also circulated.

Unproven … April 2009 “In Indonesia a giant Burmese Python swallows a full grown man and while the snake was moving away it became stuck between fences and tried to go back and ended up choking to death. The locals of the village found the snake the following day and pulled it from the fences out into the open where it was cut open to reveal the adult male victim. “

(Caveat: We at MIsky advocate the respect of all life and biodiversity. However, this is a horror blog!)

Writer of the Fantastic: Shimon WIncelberg

In fandom the chatter has always been that the first several episodes of Lost in Space were the “best”. There are several reasons for this, for instance, the realization by actor Johnathan Harris that a pure villain on an adventure show had a short life span. He thus ingratiated himself with Irwin Allen and the writers to spin the show off in a campy and quirky direction. This eventually led to a “monster of the week” facing off with the three amigos – Zachary Smith, boy wunderkind Will Robinson, and the Robot.

So how does one explain the comparative genius of the pilot, and those first several episodes? Perhaps the dynamic acting of legendary Guy Williams (previously Zorro) with a top notch, experienced cast?  Maybe.  However, a notable difference was that the pilot – which later was sliced into those first episodes – was created by Shimon Wincelberg.

Shimon Wincelberg (1924-2004) was born in Kiel, Germany, and wrote for many 1960s and 1970s television shows. He was a refugee of Nazi Germany, and later became fascinated by Japanese culture (1959 Broadway play Kataki). He wrote under the pseudonyms of S. Bar-David, Shimon Bar-David, Simon Wincelberg, and Simon Wincelverg. If he submitted a story, and then wrote the screenplay or teleplay, he would use two different names for the credits. His first big break was a light science-fiction/documentary “On the Threshold of Space” (1956), a drama about the high-altitude experiments that were a prelude to the then-U.S. space program.

Leaving aside Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space temporarily, Wincelberg wrote two standout episodes of Star Trek: The “Galileo Seven” and “Dagger of the Mind”. The former involved a claustrophobic set with apish creatures killing off crew members one by one. In this situation, first officer Spock makes one logical calculation after another only to see total defeat looming before him. In the latter, another very cloistered set has a sociopathic psychiatrist using a special “chair” to do high-tech hypnotic lobotomies on otherwise strong-willed individuals.

Wincelberg clearly enjoyed writing intense person-to-person conflict, but also liked adding the exaggerated and fantastic elements that Irwin Allen also enjoyed. It seems clear that Allen had a fixation of gigantism as a cyclops was featured in the first set of shows (and pilot), and later did an entire series Land of the Giants, and disaster situations of which most of his career was built upon (Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure, etc.).   Allen sets were never shy on the expansive.  Removing those two elements from Wincelberg’s scripts, most of the scenes involve heroicism (John Robinson), romantic love (Mark Goddard/Marta Kristen), and realistic interpersonal conflicts.

Romantic chemistry?

Clearly this added a sense of drama that contrasted from many other subsequent episodes of Lost in Space.  Allen went to Wincelberg time and again, despite Allens’ desire for wide open vastness, and Wincelberg’s need to write close quarters interpersonal conflict.  Perhaps the contrast of the two together did bring “movie magic”.

A tense scene visualizing Wincelberg's writing

Allen tapped Wincelberg to do the pilot of Time Tunnel, also. The original script was known as “The Man Who Killed Time” (circa 1964), and involved a time traveler going back to the sinking of the Titanic. The unaired pilot (circa 1967) leaned visually heavily on the movie, Forbidden Planet as seen below in some comparisons.

Scene from Time Tunnel Pilot

Visually similar scene from Forbidden Planet

Scene from Time Tunnel Pilot

Visually similar scene from Forbidden Planet

 

Family Flees House They Say Is Haunted

There are a number of things that new tenants usually discover soon after signing a lease — pipes that leak, mice in the walls, noisy neighbors, angry ghosts that haunt the premises. A family in New Jersey is suing their landlord over one of these reasons… take a guess which one it is.

It was only on March 1 that the family of four had moved into the house in Toms River, NJ. But they tell the Asbury Park Press that they immediately noticed they may not be alone:

“The family would come home and find their clothes and towels ejected from the closets and strewn over the floors. Doors would creak open and slam closed in unoccupied areas of the house. Lights switched on and off without human intervention. At night, footsteps could be heard from the kitchen after everyone was tucked in and unintelligible whispering seemed to fade in and out of thin air, according to the couple…

However, such rationalism failed them after the events of March 10 — the night the family fled the house. [The couple] had settled into bed to watch television when he said his attention was drawn to a tapping noise against the set… A short time later, [he] felt a tug on the sheets over him and watched in bewilderment as the bedclothes began to slide off him. He then felt an invisible hand land on his arm. [She] claims she saw what looked like a shapeless dark apparition in the bedroom.”

Thus, the tenants decided to forgo the standard sacrificial offerings to Gozer and just file a lawsuit against their landlord, asking for their $2,250 security deposit back.

The landlord has filed his own lawsuit, claiming the tenants broke their lease and that the whole “I am Vinz Clortho,The Keymaster” thing is really just a ruse to get out of the contract because the couple is having financial problems and realized they could not afford the rent.

The couple counters this argument by pointing out they vacated the home and moved into a motel room after only being renters for one week.

“I would not have given anyone $4,000 (deposit and rent) to stay somewhere, just to pick up and leave seven days later,” one of the plaintiffs tells the Asbury Park Press. “I would not have hired a moving truck, packed and unpacked, had my mother take off time from work to watch the kids. The whole idea was to get a nice, big home for the kids.

One local paranormal research group says its investigation into the property is currently inconclusive, telling the Press that the “facts suggest a residual haunting from the past associated with a significant release of psychic energy, but not an intelligence.”

Meanwhile, a second investigator of ghouls and ghosts tells the paper that, “Out of all of the investigations we have done, this is where we came up with the most concrete evidence (of the paranormal) in close to 20 investigations.”

The landlord pish-poshes all this talk of otherworldly activity, saying that he’s owned the house since 1995 without complaint of spirits roaming the property.

You can read the entire article here 
http://con.st/10028908

The Booms of Wisconsin: Eerie Sounds In Clintonville

The Miskatonic staff has been watching this strange situation for several weeks.  Slowly, information is beginning to trickle in on theories.

Clintonville, Wisconsin is a typical heartland town of America. It wants no trouble, and they treasure their quiet.

At least since 18 March 2012, there have been many sleepless nights for residents, police, and city officials. On that night, a deep, rumbling sound – reminiscent of artillery shells or thunder – began. Hundreds of calls to experts, the military, and meteorologists left citizens baffled, and irritable.

Then, a strange coincidence happened. Despite some scientific theories of geologists who say that Wisconsin earthquakes probably do not cause weird sounds, a small earthquake happened precisely when the eerie sound occurred. So, was Cthulhu snoring in his sleep, or could it be earthquakes quivering through Wisconsin granite?

To find out, city officials finally leveraged a scientific study from a Michigan Technological University professor and his grad students.

One wonders why a geologist would not have already jumped on this to help fellow citizens, but as we discussed in an earlier blog post – scientists are sheepish to rush in if they don’t think there is a Leprechaun’s pot of grant money at the end of the rainbow. So kudos to the Michigan Technological University!

Waite and his team just made it in time to record a small earthquake at 8:09 p.m. on Thursday, March 29, 2012.

This was the second time an earthquake coincided with a series of grumbling booms. A 1.5 earthquake (large enough to be noticed up to 230 miles away) also coincided with deep booms.

In the absence of authoritative science, myths quickly spring up to attempt to answer the unknown.   Whether interesting horror stories will spring from these Wisconsin events the Misky folks don’t know, but this could be a new legend being born.

 

THE DEAD VALLEY AND OTHERS: H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories Volume 2 edited by S. T. Joshi (Signed Limited Hardcover)

THE DEAD VALLEY AND OTHERS: H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories Volume 2 edited by S. T. Joshi (Signed Limited Hardcover)

You can get more information and reserve your copy by clicking on the cover art below.  If you ordered GHOST OF FEAR AND OTHERS directly from us we will be able to match up your number with volume 2 of this edition.

Limited to only 150 signed and numbered hardcover copies.  Each story is hand picked by Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi, with introduction.

Here is the second volume in the very popular Lovecraft’s Favorite series.

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

 
Contents

• Introduction by S. T. Joshi
• The Diamond Lens by Fitz-James O’Brien
• The Horla by Guy de Maupassant
• The Moon Pool by A. Merritt
• Count Magnus by M. R. James
• The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce
• The Dead Valley by Ralph Adams Cram
• The Bad Lands by John Metcalfe
• Ooze by Anthony M. Rud
• Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb
• The Harbor-Master by Robert W. Chambers
• Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood
• Cassius by Henry S. Whitehead
• The Spider by Hanns Heinz Ewers
• Blind Man’s Buff by H. Russell Wakefield

The Horror of … Science!

Science has a real problem.

From at least as early as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, science in the guise as fiction has been king until recently.  The 1930′s through the 1970′s science fiction was the premier genre.  What happened?

Gobbledygook, technobabble, Frankenfood, doomsday weapons, and an ivory tower mentality has distanced scientists from the public on an even grander scale.

This writer grew up listening to and reading two incredibly talented scientific communicators – Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, both sadly gone.

Isaac Asimov

Carl Sagan

We still have beloved Steven Hawking with us, thankfully.  Where are their replacements?

In Universities “publish or perish” has become “get grant money or perish”.  As such, scientists have become as cloistered as monks, intolerant of anything that is not “orthodox’, and inbred.  They barely go outside to mix with ordinary citizens.  When they do, they pontificate, make us seem like idiots, are inflexible when they encounter different opinions from their establishmentarianism. On radio programs and television they continually lose debates on even the most mundane issues because – though highly educated – they can’t communicate!

We know what this scientist is getting ready to do ...

... but what horrors is this 21st century scientist cooking up? Would we understand if they told us?

And it’s not just me saying this, Alan Alda is.

As an actor, he was tapped to host many science shows eventually becoming producer. He struggled to make exciting science challenges palatable and understandable to the public on his many award winning shows.  He did not have a lot of help from his technical consultants.  They gave him graphs and mathematical formulas, and he asked them – but what does the average Joe or Jane get from all this work and expense?  Blank stares back.  He spent nights learning technical things so he could think of ways to make it interesting and relevant.  His scientific colleagues still weren’t getting it.  After years of enduring this from his science friends, he has launched a serious challenge to them.

Alda is launching the Flame Challenge, an effort to make science education more exciting and inspiring for children. Scientists are competing to explain the concept of a flame in scientific terms that an 11-year-old can understand. The  competition will be judged by 11-year-olds from across the country.

So, Mr. and Ms. Scientist – are you smarter than an 11 year old?

[Full disclosure:  Chrispy is in real life a scientist.  I have experienced first hand the blank stares when I have tried to explain "science things" and struggled to make math and science understandable to folks I have worked with.  Thankfully, I had Mr Wizard, Jim Hanna, Sagan, Asimov, and many others to assist me in being able to relate.  My college professors must have missed those shows and articles, 'cause they didn't help me any.]

MEDUSA’S COIL Shipping Update and More

MEDUSA’S COIL AND OTHERS Volume II by  H. P. Lovecraft edited by S. T. Joshi (Signed Limited Edition Hardcover)

 

We have received the tracking number from the printer and we should be receiving MEDUSA’S COIL and Others on the 11th of April. We will begin shipping them out as soon as they arrive.

ONLY 5 COPIES LEFT!!!

Some of H. P. Lovecraft’s most fascinating work came from a time in his life that he was forced, by economic survival, to ghostwrite, collaborate and revise the work of others in the field. Here Lovecraft Scholar S. T. Joshi collects the best of these revisions and collaborations in a two volume set to be published this year from Arcane Wisdom Press. Medusa’s Coil and Others is the second of these two volumes. This edition is painstakingly annotated, and includes an introduction and bibliography by S. T. Joshi. The book is a must for the Lovecraft enthusiast and scholar alike. This limited edition hardcover will be strictly limited to only 150 hardcover copies. They will be signed by Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi and will be hand numbered on a custom signature sheet, featuring artwork by Zach McCain. We expect to be shipping these in late January reserve your copy now of this unique collection.

 

Coming soon from TARTARUS PRESS is THE KING IN THE GOLDEN MASK and Other Stories by Marcel Schwab (Limited Edition Hardcover) Import

We are expecting these in late April early May.

The peculiar genius of Monsieur Schwob lies in a species of tremendously complex simplicity; that is to say that, by the arrangement and the harmony of an infinity of telling and precise details, his stories present the sensation of a unique detail.’
Rémy de Gourmont,
Le deuxième Livre des Masques
Revered in the French-speaking world, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) deserves to be much better known among English-speaking aficionados of Decadent fiction. This new collection of fifty-one stories, including eight newly-translated pieces, aims to address that discrepancy. It brings back into print Iain White’s poetic translations of Schwob’s better-known tales, such as the title story ‘The King in the Golden Mask’, and adds newly-translated gems such as the astonishingly beautiful and haunting ‘The Wooden Star’.

Schwob was a one-off, but he was greatly influenced by English and American writers. He discovered Edgar Allan Poe whilst still a child, and he translated Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter into French. He crammed a great variety of literary endeavour into his all-too-short life, and was much admired by contemporaries such as Paul Valéry and Guillaume Apollinaire.

The King in the Golden Mask contains:

Translator’s introduction
Acknowledgements
From Cœur double: ‘The Strigae’, ‘The Sabot’, ‘Train 081′, ‘Arachné’, ‘The Veiled Man’, ‘Beatrice’, ‘Lilith’, ‘A Skeleton’, ‘The Fat Man’, ‘The Dom’, ‘The Amber-trader’, ‘Mérigot Marchès’, ‘The “Papier Rouge” ‘, ‘The Firebrands’.
From Le Roi au masque d’or: ‘The King in the Golden Mask’, ‘The Death of Odjigh’, ‘The Embalming-women’, ‘The Plague’, ‘The Milesian Virgins’, ‘The Sabbat at Mofflaines’, ‘Blanche the Bloody’, ‘The Flute’, ‘The Sleeping City’.
From Vies imaginaires: ‘Introduction’, ‘Empedocles, Reputed God’, ‘Herostratos, Incendiary’, ‘Crates, Cynic’, ‘Septima, Enchantress’, ‘Lucretius, Poet’, ‘Clodia, Shameless Matron’, ‘Petronius, Novelist’, ‘Sufrah, Geomancer’, ‘Frate Dolcino, Heretic’, ‘Cecco Angiolieri, Malevolent Poet’, ‘Paolo Uccello, Painter’, ‘Nicholas Oyseleur, Judge’, ‘Katherine la Dentellière, Whore’, ‘Alain le Gentil, Soldier’, ‘Gabriel Spenser, Actor’, ‘Cyril Tourneur, Tragic Poet’, ‘Major Stede Bonnet, Pirate by Vagary’, ‘Burke and Hare, Murderers’.
La croisade des enfants: ‘The Goliard’s Narrative’, ‘The Leper’s Narrative’, ‘The Narrative of Pope Innocent III’, ‘Narrative of Three Little Children’, ‘Narrative of François Longuejoue, Clerk’, ‘The Kalandar’s Narrative’, ‘Little Allys’ Narrative’, ‘The Narrative of Pope Gregory IX’.
‘The Wooden Star’

Cover illustration by Santiago Caruso

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

Down to only a handful of copies left!!

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.

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.