Incoherent Memoirs

Part 3 - 'What the Red Glare Meant' Having spent the first two instalments in doomed group attempts to locate the 'lurking fear' in the environs of the Martense Mansion, our hero has been understandably affected by events, and is now embarking on his attempt solo, but with an increasing hysteria: I stood digging alone and idiotically in the grave of Jan Martense [...] I believe my mind was partly unhinged. We believe him. Just as much as HPL's stories involve some breaking through between the line that separates our universe from those of sundry weird terrors (including the Elder Gods and so on) so too do they frequently involve a sane and rational character breaking through nearly (or fully) into full-blown madness. As our narrator (still un-named even at this point) digs further and further physically, he also seems to be digging further and further into insanity. Certainly any entirely rational person would stop digging after reaching the coffin itself... but he ...

Part 2 - A Passer in the Storm Undeterred by the mysterious vanishing of his friends at the end of Part 1, our (still unnamed) narrator makes a second attempt at locating this 'lurking fear', and this time he has a plucky reporter in tow. The end of Part 1 saw HPL indulging in what's been dubbed his 'adjectivitis'. Part 2 features more (much more) of the same, as well as what we might call his 'noun-and-adverb-itis'. Typical of these tendencies is the second paragraph: As I shivered and brooded [..] I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horrors - one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint daemon scratchings we sometimes hear on the faintest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. HPL's first critics outside of the Weird Tales fan world were pretty scathing of this tendency. It was one of the factors in his not really achieving a literary reputation until after his death. ...

I recently finished re-reading the Sherlock Holmes canon, in un-annotated editions. My main reason for doing so was that I realised for some years I was only ever reading the stories in annotated editions - either in the Oxford editions, the Baring-Gould 'Annotated' or Klinger's 'New Annotated' - to say nothing of various scholarly books. So in a sense I wasn't really reading the stories 'as intended', and I found that my thoughts and impressions about them were being 'guided', in a sense, by those of others. (I admit I cheated once or twice and looked up certain details, mainly the ones mentioned earlier in this blog, i.e Watson's medical treatments in ENGI and the geography of LADY) My first impressions are once again a boundless admiration for Conan Doyle and his achievement, the sense of a really 'real' world, characters and settings. Yes, there are inconsistencies (isn't the whole world of fan-scholarship built on those?) wh...

The four-part serial nature of 'The Lurking Fear' (first published in instalments in 'Home Brew' magazine) makes it a handy story to look at if you wish to examine how it is that HPL achieves his effects, how he keeps his readers coming back to the tales again and again. It's not only that each instalment progresses the story, though that's certainly true, but also we can see how HPL's artistry accommodates plot - how he himself mingles a 'home brew' of adventure, horror, mounting dread and even humour, like an expert chef... * Part 1 - The Shadow on the Chimney "It was a dark and stormy night...." The loveable cartoon beagle Snoopy usually began his literary efforts with these words, and hackneyed as they are, hitting the reader right away with some tempestuous weather is a sure fire way of imbuing your tale with instant atmosphere. And here HLP does just that:  There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop...

After a long time spent away from an active participation in 'organised fandom', of any kind, I thought I'd dip my toe back into it by trying out some recent publications. The Lovecraft Annual for 2023 is the first of the Annuals I've read in a long time but I quickly found myself losing patience with all the footnotes and references from/to previous published articles. Nothing wrong with that? Well all of them seem to refer back to S.T Joshi and most of them are articles that can only be found in obscure (dare I say 'eldritch'?) fanzines from another continent 40 years ago (i.e early 80s issues of ' Crypt of Cthulhu' , whatever that might be!). This may feel like quibbling. Joshi is, after all, pretty much the world's foremost HPL scholar. But surely there are other viewpoints out there which essayists can rely upon to back up their arguments? The most accessible article was one on the world of HPL t-shirts, which I was surprised to find is an extre...

The Holmes stories are linked forever with the Victorian age, but those written in the early 20th century sometimes surprise the reader with little details that snap you out of the eternally Victorian atmosphere with which we often come to them. The most obvious of these is 'His Last Bow' . Published after the outbreak of The Great War, but set on its immediate eve, it's the detail of the motor cars that always make me jump. Motorcars! In a Holmes story! There's already a "huge 100-hp Benz car" (Baron Von Herling's) blocking the lane to Von Bork's place. And here comes Watson and (a disguised) Sherlock Holmes trundling along... in " a little Ford" . Where they have acquired this vehicle is not known, but its size is again emphasised when Von Bork sees "the lights of a small car come to a halt" - and later, after the success of their mission, when Von Bork's trussed-up bulk is "hoisted [..] into the spare seat of the littl...