Lovecraft Annual

Hippocampus Press recently launched a new scholarly journal, Lovecraft Annual, edited by S T Joshi.

Here's what you get for your US$15:

• Lovecraft Read This, Darrell Schweitzer
• Lovecraft and Lawrence Face the Hidden Gods: Transformations of Pan in “The Colour out of Space” and St. Mawr, Robert H. Waugh
• Memories of Sonia H. Greene Davis, Martin H. Kopp
• Letters to Lee McBride White, H. P. Lovecraft
• The Negative Mystics of the Mechanistic Sublime: Walter Benjamin and Lovecraft’s Cosmicism, Jeff Lacy and Steven J. Zani
• Unity in Diversity: Fungi from Yuggoth as a Unified Setting, Phillip A. Ellis
• “They Have Conquered Dream”: A. Merritt’s “The Face in the Abyss” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Mound”, Peter Levi
• The Master’s Eyes Shining with Secrets: H. P. Lovecraft’s Influence on Thomas Ligotti, Matt Cardin
• Thomas Ligotti’s Metafictional Mapping: The Allegory of "The Last Feast of Harlequin", John Langan
• Reviews

Link (via Grim Reviews).

Mechathulhu

I picked this up off io9 but apparently it's been out for a while. It's a pen-and-paper RPG that splices Cthulhu with mecha, and it looks... okay. The mythos talked much about ancient alien wars, and stories like Whisperer in Darkness show Lovecraft's interest in high technology, but the idea of Elder Things firing shoulder-mounted rocket launchers at waves of pissed Shoggoths doesn't really appeal.

Still, the art looks nice, and given that few people in Sydney appear to play, or even know about, Call of Cthulhu, I'm up for a game -- drop me a line.

Link.

Virtual Lovecraft museum

Don't know how I missed the significance of this all those years ago, but the CD version of Infogrames' very wonderful Shadow of the Comet features a standalone virtual Lovecraft museum. It's huge, with lots to read and look at, and it serves no other purpose than to educate players about Lovecraft -- all in early-90s pixel art. Genius.

Chaosium still holds the rights, but it doesn't appear to be on sale anywhere. Drop them a line and ask.

Plague on the way

Penumbra: Black Plague is due out over the weekend. Apparently the hideous combat interface is gone and the action sequences are minimal, which were the only things wrong with the otherwise excellent first episode, Overture.

Don't bother with the demo Grab the demo first, then head over to GamersGate after 11 February for the full version -- demo save games are compatible with the commercial release.

Link.

More Mountains of Madness

Del Toro talks Mountains of Madness.

Link.

"Lovecraft is rock and roll"

Neil Gaiman interview from The Eldritch Influence.

Laboured love

The boys at Zoetrope Interactive love their Lovecraft. Their latest game, Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, is a dripping tribute to HPL. It's a first-person, point-and-click, panoramic, step-wise adventure horror game that has more HPL references per second than any other game, including Mike Gentry's Anchorhead. But the dodgy interface, broken game mechanics, sketchy English translations, and limp plotting conspire to make this the opposite of good.

Link.

Commonplace Book Project

Peter Nepstad, the man behind commercial interactive fiction effort, 1893: A World's Fair Mystery, is putting together a compilation of 'interactive adventures based on the unfinished story ideas that H.P. Lovecraft collected in his "Commonplace Book"'.

I tried out David Whyld's The Cellar, which had sparkling prose, a moody atmosphere, and a showstopping bug that put me in an unwinnable state.

Link.

The Whisperer in Darkness

Coming Soon: The HP Lovecraft Historical Society's latest flick, based on the story by the same name. After the crazy-good Call of Cthulhu, there's no reason not to fork out for this one.

Link.

Lorem Ipsum

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