Trances of Twilight, & The Howler

Two stills from The Howler (with Roman Scott, wearing the beret, and me, below, encountering a wall); a Super 8 movie we made in 1987. The film originated with an H.P. Lovecraft poem, from his Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle.

Dual Weird/Horror HPL Events

Director Richard Stanley (with Brian Callahan), Q and A, after a showing of Color out of Space, closing night, H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, 2019. The movie presented a contemporary take on HPL's masterpiece; remaining mostly faithful to the bleak cosmicism of the original (with pathos, and a bit of humor, and scenery-chewing, from Nicholas Cage).   During the question session afterward, I offered a question about the appearance, in the film, of a copy of Algernon Blackwood's The Willows. 

Robert Corman and Victoria Price, talking about Vincent Price, filmmaking, and other matters, after a showing of The Haunted Palace, at the 2019 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. I also saw Robert Corman (with Andrew Migliore) in a discussion after a showing of X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (the first time I'd seen the film; he revealed, among other things, that Don Rickles was nervous at first, since it was his first movie).

I also took in Shorts Blocks 1 & 3, & the audience-involved Dark Adventure Radio Theatre production of HPL's The Lurking Fear, among other events.

Cody Goodfellow, reading at the Lovecraft at the Lovecraft (Bar) event, 10-19-19 (he appeared, along with a number of other performers, writers, and poets). Also pictured: John Shirley (who fronted the Screaming Geezers, appearing as a sort of punk preacher of chaos, and Adam Bolivar, who put on a grimly compelling marionette show).

John Shirley and the Screaming Geezers

Sarah Walker reading at the Lovecraft Bar (with John Shirley, and Wendy Wagner watching on the right). Jason V. Brock, and Nathan Carson, also read.

A trip I recently took, to Colorado, Nebraska, and New York City (and running into some traces of past voyages/stays in those places), had for bookends these two H.P. Lovecraft-inspired festivals/events. 

Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life

“It does seem slightly bizarre that two of Britain’s greatest writers of supernatural fiction, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, should be connected by dried milk.” (Ashley, p. 120).

 

I am immediately on board, with any book which included this sentence. Mike Ashley’s Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life (New York, Carroll & Graf: 2001), which appeared in Great Britain as Starlight Man, is an engrossing, profound portrait of Algernon Blackwood, writer, traveler, adventurer, spy, and mystic. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I first ran across Blackwood's short story The Willows in a Scholastic anthology, at the age of 11 or so; and even then the numinous prose stuck with me. Recently, I read Episodes Before Thirty, Blackwood's own memoir; a good baseline for regarding Blackwood’s outlook. Mike Ashley’s book further, and extensively, illuminated Blackwood’s history – doing outstanding work, especially considering the gaps in the paper trail from the author’s life. 

 

 Seemingly, the author knew everyone, encountering such disparate figures as P.D. Ouspensky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lord Dunsany, Gurdjieff, and Sir Edward Elgar, among others. With a life starting in the Victorian Age, running through two world wars, and then ending in the atomic age (in fact, as Ashley detailed, Blackwood was a frequent contributor to radio, and pioneering television broadcasts as well). The only minor concern I have with the book is that the discussions of various works (of which I still have many to read) include frequent spoilers. A rewarding and worthwhile adventure.

-- by Jonathan Falk, November 2018

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon 2018

l-r, Gwen Callahan, NECRONOMIDOL, Brian Callahan, Cthulhu Girl, 10-7-18

l-r, a spectral Andrew Migliore, the artist Skinner, Richard Stanley, Scott Connors, Darin Coelho Spring, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, panel discussing Clark Ashton Smith and the rapturous documentary on Smith, The Emperor of Dreams. 10-6-18.

Upstairs, at one section of the CthulhuCon.

I attended all three days of the 2018 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival; joining a panaroma of HPL festivals I have attended, starting in 1996. There were a panel or two, and a reading I wish I had seen, but I was pleased with Short Film Blocks 1, 2, 3, and 4. Among other events and films, this year's standouts include the performance by Necronomidol, the world premier unveiling of The Emperor of Dreams, and the surprise showing of a subtle, disturbing version of The Shadow over Innsmouth, from the 1990s, by Chiaki Konaka (the question session, assisted by a translator, afterward included a reference to a Arnold Böcklin influence in the film!). Overall another great festival.  

Algernon Blackwood's Episodes Before Thirty: Innocence and Experience in Old and New Worlds

Algernon Blackwood’s Episodes Before Thirty, from 1923 (a gift from a friend), was a revelation, to one who has previously read only his superb fiction. The book is a carefully-composed, thoughtful memoir, written by a man in his 50s, looking back on the travails and lessons of his youth; with an eidetic richness in its prose. The volume ran parallel to his fiction in some ways, in its concerns with the occult and supernatural, but offered other moods and elements, as well. Blackwood’s tales of supernatural mystery and occult events, provided my introduction to his writing. His powerful story, The Willows, which I read in a Scholastic anthology when I was about eleven, spoke to me, and stayed with me, even at that early stage of my life. 

Blackwood’s (by his own description) cocooned upbringing, with doting, yet austerely religious parents, was succeeded by harsh realities (contrasting with immersion in the spiritual qualities of the natural world, on a Canadian island, and other places), through his travels and various occupations in North America. The story begins in media res in New York City; with descriptions of tough living conditions reminiscent of George Orwell’s Down and Out In London and Paris. The autobiography also covered his childhood in Great Britain, and his introduction to Eastern thought, through a chance encounter with a volume of Patanjali.  From the future author’s immersion in the inferno of Tammany-era New York, to his succession of side hustles and jobs (including working as a journalist for the New York Times, and other newspapers), to his brief experiences with morphine (and one experiment with cannabis), to his transformative “meetings with remarkable men,” including attorney, poet, and mystic, Alfred Louis, the book provided a captivating experience.  Although, as a cryptic remark about occult experiences toward the end of the tome indicated, what is absent from the book was telling, also.

“These woods, this river, ruled the world, and somewhere in the heart of that old forest the legendary Wendigo, whose history I wrote later in a book, had its awful lair.”—p. 143

 -- by Jonathan Falk, June 2018

October Routine, at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival

On 8 October I experienced the day at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Portland, Oregon -- around the 14th time I've attended, off and on, starting with an early event in 1995 or so at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

 

 Q & A with participants in Lovecraft Under the Gun.

Tim Uren's extraordinary solo, dramatic interpretation of Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls.

Photos by JF.

Monster Trading Cards

A few of my monster trading cards from the early 1970s.

Algernon Blackwood letter, Nov 13/27

 

 

A letter from supernatural writer Algernon Blackwood, to an unknown recipient, on Savile Club stationery. The author mentioned his non-affiliation with the London Mercury. The reference to the individual soliciting a drawing from Blackwood is intriguing.  From my collection (gift of a friend).

Text: 

Dear Sir,

       I am in difficulty about finding time for the drawing you kindly suggest, as I'm getting ready to go abroad, but I have otherwise no (?) of any kind if you think it of any interest in my art. I have, however, no dealings with the "London Mercury" you mention (if I read you correctly) and I gather they have not commissioned the drawing have they?

      Perhaps you would kindly tell me how to reach Farnborough Rd -- from Marble Arch, say?  

                                                      Yours truly

                                                       Algernon Blackwood

"After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes." Algernon Blackwood, "The Willows"

William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912)

Over several previous months this year I read William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912). As with M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, of which I wrote in a previous post, The Night Land possesses a framework in which the central story is presented as a series of dreams or visions. The protracted march of the readers's eyes, brain, and hands through the lengthy book (if you read it in analog form, as I did) mimics the vastness of the desolate, cryptic landscapes, as the hero voyages across a future sun-less earth (someone once made a similar parallel with War and Peace). No matter how many times I read many of the sentences, I had difficulty grasping their meaning. "But of you I ask kind understanding, and to call me not a thing of conceit because that I did understand; for truly I knew my faults, even so well as you, that do know all of my going" (p. 280).  Is there a clearer way to phrase this? Repetitions in language and incident abound. The quote, which I have referenced before, from Dr. Johnson, about Paradise Lost, also applies to Hodgson's work: "None ever wished it longer than it is."

The Night Land is at the same time a stunning and brooding evocation of a moribund planet. Certain descriptions of the monsters and forces who haunt the Night Land, the hypnotic repetition of words such as "Monstruwacans," the suggestiveness of the journey "Down the mighty slope," the strange implications of multiple lives lived simultaneously, the Ballard-like ruin of a flying machine, all demonstrate Hodgson's curious genius.

Background photo by me: Yellowstone Park, 1975.

The Devil's Messenger

Last night I watched a DVD someone sent me years ago, of The Devil's Messenger, a three-part anthology with Lon Chaney, Jr, (directed by Curt Siodmak and Herbert L. Strock, and based on a Swedish TV series), who gestured palm-up, leered plaintively, engaged his eyebrows, and searched a Rolodex, as he played Old Scratch. I expected some execrable throwaway movie, based on the lurid DVD cover, but found myself engaged by the stark acting and sets, and effective supernatural concepts. The production felt like a sort of bridge between film noir, and the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits. The ending was exceptionally odd.

Lon Chaney, Jr., has no grave. 

The Devil's Messenger (1961)

image © 2003 Alpha Video

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival October 2014 (Best of)

Best of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival

4 October 2014 I queued up for the Best of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival at the Hollywood Theater in Portland. The festival occurred on a hot October evening. In due time I absorbed the nearly five hours of short films. The Falstaffian gent seated to my left obliquely involved me in a type of conversation. Through the darkened auditorium I viewed movies both old and new to me. Dirt Dauber I had seen, and it held up mightily with its surreal stream of humor and darkness. The Raven dramatized Poe's lines with littoral scenery and much emotion. The organizers included some good stop-action cinema, including an atmospheric Japanese version of The Festival. I also viewed not one but two versions of From Beyond, the intensely funny Doctor Glamour, a pleasantly understated version of W.F. Harvey's August Heat, and more besides.

The choices tilted heavily toward shorts from the last 5-10 years of the HPL Festival-- a few older selections would have been nice. But the event was mostly outstanding. The absence of the usual merchandise vendors made it a purely filmic night.

The evening proceeded without a thought of Lovecraft's racialism. This is because his legacy and influence result from his role as a writer. His racialist views have had little or no impact, as far as influencing others to take up similar beliefs.

Photos of me in Providence, Rhode Island, August 1986

Nyctalops 18 (1983) -- Clarence John Laughlin cover & Roman Scott Drawing

Illustration by Roman Scott, accompanying S.T. Joshi's essay On "The Book" (by H.P. Lovecraft)

I just ran across this copy (which I purchased in 1983) of Nyctalops 18 in my files.  Cover photograph by surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin (the issue contained his story The Cathedral of Evil as well).  Laughlin was STILL ALIVE at the time of this publication. Antiques Roadshow recently had a segment on the photographer.  The periodical (edited by Harry O. Morris, Jr.) gathered gothically surrealistic photography, art, collage, poetry and fiction.  Creators and critics represented included Thomas Ligotti, J.K. Potter (Google him and one gets a shitstorm of Harry Potter pages), Deborah Valentine, Richard L. Tierney, Billy Wolfenbarger, Sutton Breiding, Christine P. Morris, Ben P. Indick, Denise Dumars, and others.

Nyctalops also held a review of Oddities 3.  (I've posted all except one issue of Oddities on here):  

Calls itself metaphysical chaos and organicism.  Some comic strip format, but most of the pages are plastered with word-explosions that carom off at all angles, literally and figuratively.  Incomprehensible.

Nocturne, Autumn 1988

Symbolist, horror, and surrealist-infused magazine, which included work (some collaborative) by myself, Todd Mecklem, Denise Dumars, G. Sutton Breiding, Thomas Ligotti, Billy Wolfenbarger, i. arguelles, Bruce Boston, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Thomas Wiloch, and others. Edited and published by Michael J. Lotus and Vincent L. Michael.  Also published in its pages: an annotated translation of de Nerval's El Desdichado by Eric Basso.  The publication contained  photographs, collage, and various artwork as well.  The cover looks to be a vision from Gustav Meyrink's or Kafka's Prague.  I am in touch with a few of the writers and poets;  others have vanished.

The Early Long: The Hounds of Tindalos (1978)

Just not long ago absorbed, or re-assimilated, The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long:  wiki.  I recall the fundraiser to bury the author properly when he died in 1994.  I remember reading at the time (although this conflicts with the Wikipedia article) that Long's body was held for some time in cold storage at a funeral home.

I read only a few of the stories originally, reading the entire book this time.  The luminous cover by Rowena Morrill:  wiki, is as at least as memorable as the tome's contents.  

When I first read The Hounds of Tindalos and The Space Eaters as a youth, I ranked them on a level close to Lovecraft's own work.  Now, I see them as uneven pieces of writing.  The character of "Howard" in The Space Eaters, who is based on Lovecraft, is shrieking and supercilious (and "Frank" isn't much better). Were one to encounter "Howard" of The Space Eaters in real life, the person would invite a slap in the face.  If "Howard" is meant to have any similarity to Lovecraft, the portrait denigrates him.  The statements from the personage, dismissing Poe and Blackwood for instance, seem decidely out of character, when triangulated with HPL's actual letters.  The depiction is all the more puzzling when one considers that Long knew Lovecraft in person, and by correspondence, extremely well.  The description of one of the entities, like an thread-like, white arm reaching down from the stars, and running down a tree, and other moments, is effectively frightening. But the story possesses many clumsy turns and melodramatic touches as well. At the beginning, "Howard" discusses malign cosmic beings eating their way through space.  Just then, what do you know -- a guy appears out of the night who has encountered just such a creature.  What are the odds?

The Hounds of Tindalos is of a higher order than The Space Eaters.  Chalmers' description of his drug experience is febrile and transcendent.  The short story ends a bit too abruptly and choppily, though (although hey, James F. Morton shows up by proxy).  Some other pieces in the collection, such as Second Night Out, have their passages of effective supernatural writing.  But too often the work has flaws, at its worst becoming incoherently goofy, as with The Peeper (or for that matter in another book by Long, his HPL memoir, Dreamer on the Nightside). 

Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery (1962)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple nights ago finished re-reading Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery:  Eleven spooky stories for young people (and apparently for some big kids as well), from 1962.   I previously read it when I was about 10 or 11, gleaning the tome from the school library or the public library, can't recall which.  As with Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum (see entry of 6 July 2012), one of the aspects that fascinated me were the illustrations, in this case by Fred Banbery:  http://jaargang.blogspot.com/2009/10/creepy-beautiful-illustrations.html, http://illusstation.blogspot.com/2008/04/fred-banbery.html.  The whimsically disturbing Hitchcock faces growing out of furniture attracted some study.

 

While not quite up to the pitch of shock and fright of the Monster Museum, the Ghostly Gallery infected my imagination.  One of the two stories that affected me most during my initial reading were F. Marion Crawford's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion_Crawford) The Upper Berth, penetrated with gelid and extirpative dread.  The tale begins with a classic English ghost story framework (although Crawford was American, more or less), with a gentleman narrating the events over cigars...  Bit of trouble in the old Hindu Kush.  "He had about him, I thought, an air of rather dubious fashion:  the sort of man you might see in Wall Street, without being able precisely to say what he was doing there."  The second story in the anthology which impressed me the most in youth was H.G. Wells' The Truth about Pyecraft, which is amusing but now strikes me as more of a bagatelle than some of the other pieces.

Robert Arthur:  http://www.elizabetharthur.org/bio/rarthur.html, who apparently also ghost-edited the Hitchcock collection, along with the Monster Museum and some of the other Hitchcock-branded anthologies, is represented by no less than three good stories (ahem!):  The Haunted Trailer, The Wonderful Day, and Obstinate Uncle Otis.  Arthur's writing appears light-hearted at first, but contains some dark turns as one reads on.  Algernon Blackwood's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Blackwood) The Valley of the Beasts possesses one of the maestro's great atmospheric evocations of nature (the Canadian forest in this instance), but has a heavy-handedness about it at the end which places it at a lower grade than, say, The Wendigo.  Other (mostly) excellent works appear by Robert Louis Stevenson, A.M. Burrage, Lord Dunsany, and Walter Brooks.

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2013

 

Saturday 4 May 2013 transpired in part at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon.  Previously held in October with its lengthening crypic nights, the 83 degree heat outside wasn't the most suitable weather for the event.  I procured the depicted Ramsey Campbell edition of Whispers from 1982 (cover art by John Stewart).  S.T. Joshi and some other faces from previous fests attended were absent, but still found the wares and cinematic and other offerings congenial.  Saw the restored version of Clive Barker's Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut, with a Q & A session and some remarks afterward by the director, Russell Cherrington.   Well-constructed netherworld sequences, and a coldly detached performance by David Cronenberg in big round glasses,  but some of the rough cut scenes a little hard to appreciate, like watching a movie shot through a security camera or a night vision scope.    Really appreciated the work and dramatic flourishes of the live production by Dark Adventure Radio Theatre of At the Mountains of Madness, done like an old time radio show, with sound effects and some archival footage.

 

 

 

 

A few selections from The Journal of Thomas Cason (1979)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strange Eons by Robert Bloch

 

 

Just finished re-reading Strange Eons by Robert Bloch;  a fair amount of my reading of late tends to be reruns.  I can't remember where I bought this copy, but I got it new in 1979, probably at a B. Daltons or Waldenbooks.  This was a time when every mall worth its lack of character held such a chain bookstore.  I'd only read Bloch's Lovecraft Mythos novel once after I acquired it.  Just the faintest adumbration of the book returned as I absorbed it again.

The novel shows signs of having been written hastily, has some sections included for padding and possesses other problems.  There's a terrible deus ex machina- type contrivance, for instance, involving the attempted theft of a map created by Lovecraft, indicating the location of R'lyeh.  Just when the holdup is in progress, an earthquake happens, and a beam falls on and kills the robber.  Note:  the earthquake doesn't happen before or after the thief points his revolver -- it occurs just at the optimal time.  Very convenient. 

Despite the flaws, I discovered the book to be a reasonably good extrapolation of Lovecraft themes and stories, with a style reminiscent of Raymond Chandler more than Lovecraft.  The climax is pretty over the top, and doesn't present a truly cosmic, disinterested feel, as many of HPL's works do.  Before the reader arrives there, however, the three linked chapters ("Now," "Later," and "Soon"), taking place from, presumably, the late 1970s through the early 2000s,  present an original take on Lovecraft's fiction.  Bloch describes the sunny locale of Los Angeles and environs in a way which renders it suprisingly dark and mysteriously Gothic, unpredictably overswept by Pacific fog.  His prognostication of the early 2000s, including video pay phones, is off, but the future is notoriously hard to forecast.  Overall, uneven but worth cracking open.

Cover painting by David Hada.