Twenty-seven

H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers by RJ Ivankovic
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I spent two years in real time playing weekly sessions of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, Chaosium's campaign based on HP Lovecraft's story 'At the Mountains of Madness'. I got this for myself and each remaining player who made it through that grueling adventure as a holiday present/badge of honour.

Its rhymes are sometimes a bit contrived, but they hit all the highlights of Lovecraft's story while referencing the later expedition of their campaign.

It is a delightful book, with lovely Seussian illustrations, and it still conveys the horror of Lovecraft's story although it is simplified in verse. I would highly recommend it, especially after reading Lovecraft's story or playing the Chaosium campaign. I will say as a group we were scarred by that adventure, and this brought back memories of what happened and beyond, particularly the musical tones heard in the distance...but I should not speak of such horrors.

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Full citation: H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers by RJ Ivankovic, 2024, Chaosium, 142 pp. ISBN: 978-1568824956

I love this. And despite the fact that it's set up as a children's picture book, it was 142 pages, so not just a tiny book.

Hmmm...

I have obviously read too much Lovecraft. My zombie octopus mount from my Habitica task app reminds me of Cthulhu, and the desert rock companion looks suspiciously like a shoggoth.

Here is the book

I love annotated texts. :)

Our game master gifted us with the perfect Cthulhoid book!

No, not the Necronomicon. No, it's Goodnight Azathoth, by Kenneth Hite, with illustrations by Christina Rodriguez. This adorable tome, based off the popular children's book, Goodnight Moon, is chock full of Lovecraftian references:



This joins others, such as The Antarctic Express, Where the Deep Ones Are, and Cliffourd the Big Red God. Our game master, YKWIA, wants him to do a version of The Giving Tree with Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. :)

Found it!

It was under the laptop bag in the bedroom. Now I can take it to the library tomorrow before work, before they open, so that I don't get charged for another day. And when I get paid on Thursday I'll pay the fine. Pesky book on woodland gardening, I tell you.

By the way, someone in my general vicinity is apparently a fan of HP Lovecraft as well, for whenever I go onto the laptop, like I am now, one of the Wi-Fi connexions that pops up says 'Miskatonic'. I wish I knew which neighbour it was. I wonder if they ever heard of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. Ach, well. Not all of us can be mystical ninjas and witches fighting off venomous serpent men in the Amazon. :) Good night!

Lovecraft gets his due, in tiny scale :)

Tiny Octopus-Like Microorganisms Named After Lovecraft's Cthulhu

Newly discovered tiny octopus-like microorganisms have been named after the fictional monsters created by American horror author H.P. Lovecraft. The single-cell protists, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque, live in the gut of termites and help them digest wood.

Here is the actual article:

Cthulhu Macrofasciculumque n. g., n. sp. and Cthylla Microfasciculumque n. g., n. sp., a Newly Identified Lineage of Parabasalian Termite Symbionts

Anyone familiar with HP Lovecraft should recognise Cthulhu. Cthylla, while part of the Mythos, was created by Brian Lumley, who also wrote the very creepy Necroscope series. They rather remind my of hid description of a Wamphiri more than great Cthulhu, to be honest. What do you think?

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

Yes, Edgar Allan Poe created the words above, but HP Lovecraft filled them with true horror. I am so happy that 'Unshelved' chose an adaptation of HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness to spotlight in their weekly 'booktalk' comic strip. That story sends chills down my spine every time I read it, and I've played through the Chaosium roleplaying module, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, which was horrific not only in what was experienced but in the sheer amount of weekly sessions it took to get through it. If I never actually eat pemmican or wear reindeer fur, I will count myself blessed. :)

PS

It's the anniversary of HP Lovecraft's birthday. It also would have been my parents' 45th wedding anniversary, but they only made it to 16. However...Sunday is my aunt and uncle's fortieth anniversary, and I wish them all the best. (Yeah, August has always been a busy month in my family, at least when I was young. My parents were both born then, as was an uncle, and a grandfather, although I never knew him [he was estranged from my father much as I am], and the two anniversaries.)

I love my birthday present

Okay, yes, my birthday was in April, but my present didn't come out until July:

It's a parody of Clifford the Big Red Dog based on the HP Lovecraft tale, 'The Dunwich Horror', which is one of my favourites, as a librarian, Dr Armitage of Miskatonic Library, figures prominently. One of my Cthulhu characters is even related to the Whateleys (which is not a particularly good thing). Librarians figure well in "Cliffourd the Big Red God (the title name being a nod to Lovecraft, who like me, favoured old spellings and the ever-present British 'u'). There is one page where Wilbur is listing Cliffourd's bad points and he points out that librarians don't like him.

And there's the end, of course, but if you haven't read 'The Dunwich Horror' I won't spoil it for you.

Anyway, thank you to YKWIA! Thanks to him this is the latest in my Mini Mythos collection. There's also Where the Deep Ones Are, based on 'The Shadow over Innsmouth' and a parody of Where the Wild Things Are and The Antarctic Express, based on 'At the Mountains of Madness' and a parody of The Polar Express. If you are familiar with Lovecraft, I highly recommend them. If you aren't, quite frankly you won't get it.

Hee Hee

I present to you...

Re-Animator, the Musical

--way, way, off Broadway (actually, it's in Hollywood). For more, check out their news page.

'Funny. Bloody. Tuneful.'
'Open seating. Come early and sit up front in the "splash zone."'

It's based on the 1985 cult classic, which was in turn based on the story by HP Lovecraft. Now it's a musical. It's the first time I've wished I was close enough to return to Los Angeles for a night. (I went on a school trip in the late 70s and was NOT impressed.) :)

"RE-ANIMATOR" tells the story of Herbert West, a brilliant young medical student who has created a glowing green serum that can bring the dead back to life. What should be a medical breakthrough results in hideous monstrosities and ghastly consequences. "I guess he just wasn't fresh enough," is West's constant refrain as his quest for fresh subjects results in the murders of half the faculty of the medical school.

George Wendt (Norm from 'Cheers'), plays the dean of the medical college. Thanks to Jenny Reiswig (@bmljenny), for the link.

Okay, this time I really am going to bed. 'Night.

But is there an Elder Thing city waiting below?

I know, HP Lovecraft's Miskatonic Mountains were based on the Transantarctic Mountain Range, but there's also the 'ghost' Gamburtsev Mountains, a sub-glacial range in Eastern Antarctica, which I thought were very interesting. Who knows what could be lurking beneath?

Antarctic Ice Sheet Preserves Invisible Mountain Range

Buried deep beneath East Antarctica’s ice sheet, the Gamburtsev Mountains are the world’s most invisible range. New research suggests that overlying ice like that hiding them from view today could have preserved their rugged topography for the past 300 million years.

A thoroughly library kind of day

Today I:

1. Worked on a grant that has helped keep the library books updated (my budget mostly goes to keeping the medical journals afloat, leaving little to spare). I need to report on what I've done this year so far, what I plan to do in the remaining months, and I also have to get together what I plan to do for next year so hopefully we can get it again.
2. Sent a rush interlibrary loan to another library.
3. Did the data entry work. I actually didn't have a chance to do any insurance verification today because there were some fairly complex things to enter for my regular post-library work.
4. Took some books back to the branch library I use. I was asked if I was a librarian (all three books I checked out had librarian in the title). So I chatted a bit with the lady there.
5. Picked up two books and two 7-day DVDs (since I can watch DVDs on the TV again). The books are Crimes by Moonlight, which is edited by Charlaine Harris (author of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, of which I finished the latest novel as of yesterday). It's a 14-day book, so I must remember to take it back earlier than normal. But it's a collection of short stories, so I should be able to read them in that time. There's also Tall, Dark, and Dead, part of a series I've never read by Tate Hallaway. As far as DVDs, I got Whale Rider, which I've wanted to watch for some time, and Flags of Our Fathers. My own grandfather was at Iwo Jima, the subject of the film. I'm hoping to understand more about what went on there through it.
6. Found the name of a collection of short stories related to the Sookie Stackhouse universe and downloaded that to my Kindle while I was there.
7. Went to leave and saw the poster to the right. Now, as a good citizen I can see why reporting suspicious behaviour could be considered patriotic and good. But it was a little creepy to see an appeal to inform on others in a library. It seemed to have shades of, well, not dystopia, but some sort of control of the citizenry through information. That's how it struck me anyway.
8. Found a copy of American Libraries in my mailbox when I got home.
9. Checked out something online I saw in 'American Libraries Direct'--an e-mail newsletter I get--that is really, really great if you're an HP Lovecraft fan. It's a webcomic that started back in 2008 called 'Lovecraft is Missing'. I've read chapter one, which brings me up to installments from January 2009, and I'm hooked. It's spooky. The art and writing both capture the flavour of Lovecraft's work. And the central character is a librarian whose job is to acquire books so they do not wind up in the hands of cultists who would do unspeakable things with the knowledge.

Anyway, that was my day so far. How about you?

This is great

Thanks, Brenda, for sharing this with us before the Cthulhu game...

Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum

ARKHAM, MA—Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the district's monthly meeting Tuesday.

"Fools!" said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. "We must prepare today's youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods—not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!"

That's just a snippet. Be sure to read the whole piece if you like Lovecraft. It's from The Onion. :) I particularly like:

"I'm not totally sold on his plan to let gibbering, half-formed creatures dripping with ichor feed off the flesh and fear of our students. But he is always on time to help set up for our spaghetti suppers, and his bake sale goods are among the most popular."

And like every Lovecraft story I've ever read, the moment of full horror appears in Italics. They did a great job.

Reading

'The Black Cat' by Edgar Allan Poe. I haven't read that one in years. I forgot how totally creepy it was, but then it is Poe, and he is a master at the genre, and a huge inspiration for HP Lovecraft as well. They both had a very good sense of showing the small leap from sanity to madness.

Heh, heh, heh

Neil Gaiman and a bunch of other folks have been coming up with Lovecraftian ice cream flavours on Twitter. Which is funny, because ice cream is particularly popular in Arkham in our game of Call of Cthulhu, and we're convinced it 1) has mind changing properties and 2) it is derived from the milk of Shub-Niggurath. :)

My favourite so far is 'At the mountains of mintyness' by @davidmulqueen.

Heh, heh

Wanting that perfect Lovecraftian snack for a Call of Cthulhu game? Look what I found (honest!) at the local grocery:

Yes, you read that right...'New England Supernatural Granola. :) For those of you not in the know, HP Lovecraft's well known fictional town of Arkham was located in Massachusetts (it was modelled off of Salem), firmly in New England, and was the setting of his Miskatonic University and the various adventures connected with the town and college.

For Josh, my late lamented Call of Cthulhu character, killed by a shoggoth near the South Pole to save humanity

'Shoggoths Away' by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets

While on a flight one day I passed over the polar city
And curious zipped down to see what I could glean
Behold the nightmare pit that splashed with piping shapeless monsters
I packed them in the bay of my B-17

Shoggoths away
That's what I say
Shoggoths away
Hey, hey

Nobody wants my mindless iridescent protoplasms
They said to fly them out and drop them in the sea
I tried to sell them on their mimicking adaptive powers
"Why don't you get your oily tendrils offa me?"

Shoggoths away
Today's the day
Shoggoths away
Hey, hey

Yes they can form and unform countless limbs and sensing organs
Like a stomach turned inside out and salient
I picture countless plastic beasties falling from the sky and
Dropping like sacks of wet cement

Yes, this is a real song and a real band, named for a line in one of the first HP Lovecraft stories I ever read, 'The Tomb', and which does Lovecraftian-inspired music. The band is from British Columbia and has several albums available from Amazon, where you can preview their music, including the one above. Go to their official site for more.

I will unfortunately be nowhere near Second Life then

(I go onto Second Life once in a blue moon, after all, and I work/have plans that day.) According to Through the Filter of a Victorian Aesthetic there will be a presentation of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's radio play for 'The Shadow Out of Time' on Thursday. I have to admit, I'm sorely tempted to buy the packaged set of HPLHS's Dark Adventure Theatre's four plays, which includes 'At the Mountains of Madness', 'The Dunwich Horror', 'The Shadow Out of Time', and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'. I love radio plays, and I love Lovecraft. I unfortunately don't have $80 to spare just now, though. But still...it's tempting. (If you already have a CD or so, you can mix and match, even get the wooden box, all at different rates, which I think is pretty nifty.)

One day late, but I must acknowledge an anniversary (and not my parents', which it would have been their 43rd)

Happy birthday, HP Lovecraft
(August 20, 1890-March 15, 1937)!

I have enjoyed your wonderful stories and those based upon them for 18 years now. You were only four years older than I am now when you died of intestinal cancer. I wish you had lived to write more, but also to see your creations' effects on other writers and in other media.

I am intrigued, not so much

by the fact that director Guillermo del Toro (of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth) is working on the Hobbit, although that's nice...but rather according to:

Q&A: Hobbit Director Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Film

he also has plans for...Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, as in, the story set in Antarctica which served as the basis for the module of doom we played. Yay!

Apparently Ron Howard also has a Lovecraft film in the making, but I'm not sure what that is.

Both have Universal, with its funding, behind them. Often Cthulhu Mythos films are low-budget and exceedingingly 'B' status. I'd like to see a film that really captured the creepiness of Lovecraft, although that can sometimes be difficult with American special effects-driven movie-making. So much of Lovecraft's expertise is in leaving some mystery and allowing the sheer horror to slowly creep up on the reader until the last slip of sanity is taken.

(Although I will say, it helps to read 'The Rats in the Walls' when you really do have rats in the walls, late at night and moving about, which scared the daylights out of me with all the sounds, and of course, I didn't know what I had going in that student ghetto house at the time, so my mind tried to tell me it was squirrels. For all I know, the damn rats had hands, too.)