Incoherent Memoirs

Having mentioned 'The Thing on the Doorstep' recently it behooved me to have another read of it. My prompt was this note  on modern-day 'sex and Cthulhu' type stories. THING (I'll adopt that reference from here on), I said, was an example of just how disinteresting sex was for HPL as a literary device, and probably in life - for the plot of the story would give ample room for sexual content if HPL had been interested in exploring it. The central arena for this potential for sex is its theme of the mind/body swap - transference - possession - call it what you will. The narrator, Dan Upton, tells how his friend Edward Derby was preyed upon by the soul/mind of his young wife Asenath, who would swap bodies with him, lock 'him' in the attic, and go about in his body. When Edward rebels, having learned 'Asenath' is in fact 'her' own father Ephraim, he eventually comes to a rather sticky end... leaving Dan to clean up matters as best he can. This ...

I saw recently there is a new Lovecraftian comic book coming out, but it was immediately clear from the preview art that this is one of those stories that feel the need to add sex to the mix - some of the covers for the comic are positively pornographic! (interested parties can look for  The Girl Who Was Cthulhu  in their local comic shop - you may need to wear dark sunglasses when doing so) I suppose it's no longer a 'recent' trend to do this with HPL or his concepts - writers have been dragging the Elder Gods down into the world of earthy/Earthly sexuality since the days of New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. This new comic though seems to tie into a more recent theory in some quarters, that because of the apparent absence of sex from HPL's tales, this is really a sign that not only is sex present in sublimated form somewhere in the tales but that in fact the tales are therefore really all about sex. With literary theory you can of course 'prove' anything - the ...

I've been neglecting my reading lately, which always makes me feel somehow guilty. But the lure of Baker Street still holds true as I make my way through the Ronald Howard TV series (I should really say 'Sheldon Reynolds TV series' as he produced it, but you know what I mean). And one particular aspect of this series has got me thinking not only about Dr Watson's media portrayals but about the Dr Watson of the printed stories. H. Marion Crawford's portrayal is one of the best as far as I'm concerned. As with his co-star's Holmes, the portrayal is more of a kind of 'folk memory' version - plucky, brave, frequently laughing out loud, a handy boxer when fisticuffs are required, wonderfully exaggerated with his facial expressions - and Holmes' constant companion (even when shoving in earplugs to cope with his violin-playing). So yes, it's a bit broader than Doyle's original, but the spirit of it feels 'right' - this is not Nigel Bruc...