Incoherent Memoirs

I had just finished reading some Cthulhu stories and was wondering what to read next. In fact I was one chapter into a rereading of Casino Royale when a chance encounter at a second hand shop found me picking up a paperback omnibus edition of The Lord of the Rings . " This time ," I thought, " this time I'll crack it or just accept it's not for me." I should point out, I tried once to read it as a child, and gave up, it was too much for me. Tried again as a teenager, it didn't click for me and I gave up barely into 'Book One'. Tried a third time a few years ago and couldn't get past Bilbo's birthday party. So.... I've skipped ahead. THIS time I've started just after the four hobbits leave the Shire and actually begin their quest. And.... I am hooked. That wonderful feeling is gripping me, where I finally feel in on the joke, or a secret. It's tempting to blog my progress through it but I suspect to those who already read it lo

There is of course a vast library's worth (probably several libraries' worth) of pastiche 'Lovecraftian' and 'Sherlockian' books, and my strong suspicion has always been that the larger the quantity the poorer the quality. This suspicion has not abated since the explosion of self-published books popping up on Amazon and the like. And apart from anything else, how much of it does anyone actually need? Does anyone read them all? Are there individuals out there who only read books featuring Sherlock Holmes stories? Is there an avid Cthulhu fan who gets everything - everything - that purports to be an untold tale of HPL's Elder Gods? Perhaps. In fact, probably. The only collections of non-HPL 'Lovecraftiana' I think I'll ever need is Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and its 80s sequel New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and I have been dipping into both recently.  The original Tales was edited by August Derleth and published by Arkham House (though I was f

From At The Mountains of Madness comes "austral" :  a simple one this, meaning "from the South" (in this case, the south Antarctic) and "Nefandrous" (in context: a "monstrous, nefandrous analogy" ) This might be one of the most appropriate HPL descriptors ever, for on looking it up I read: " unmentionable, that ought not to be spoken of; hence, atrocious, appalling " And we all know how HPL loves to mention the unmentionable and speak the unspeakable!

Thinking again about 'The Thing on the Doorstep' has caused me to re-read it again since  this post . Luckily all HPL's stories are eminently repeatable and I found myself gulping the story down in a local café as greedily as I did my tea and cake. If not more so! One thing that I'd somehow not picked up on, when I was focussing more on the body-swap, were the connections to 'the Cthulhu Mythos'. There is the mention of three infamous books, including the Necronomicon - indeed, it's that eldritch tome which contained the spell making body-swap sorcery possible. But in one info-packed passage, a raving Edward Derby mentions hideous (and to HPL fans, familiar) creatures: "Dan - for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! [..] Ia! Shub-Niggurath! [..] The Hooded Thing bleated 'Kamog! Kamog!' [..] in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins [..] I saw a shoggoth - it changed shape...." This is shocking indeed