Books With Words In Them

Murder, Gods, and Art

February 13, 2018 // 0 Comments

So I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here… The Wicked + The Divine: 1923 Special by Kieron Gillen and Aud Koch At times, I think The Wicked + The Divine is brilliant. It’s an exploration of mythology and godhood, well-researched and with hidden depths that reveal themselves when you really look at the gods the various cast members represent. And I love crap like that. At other times, I find The Wicked + The Divine tedious. It’s also a meditation on [...]

Fewer Secrets, More Mysteries: A Look at Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier

November 7, 2017 // 1 Comment

So I had kind of stopped thinking about Twin Peaks for a while. I mean, I’m doing a slow re-watch of the original series, and plan to watch season three again after I’m done with that. So I’m not so much done thinking as I am wool-gathering. But either way, I’ve been giving my brain a rest. I had come to enough of an understanding of the various mysteries to satisfy myself, and had decided that I wasn’t going to come up with anything better until I’d had time [...]

Alan Moore’s Jerusalem: The View at One Percent

September 13, 2016 // 3 Comments

So it’s been a busy few days in the world of Alan Moore news. Over the weekend, he announced his retirement from comics (which he’s done before, so we’ll see how that goes), and today saw the release of his second prose novel, Jerusalem (which is what I’ll be talking about today). It’s a massive thing, Jerusalem, weighing in at 1266 pages. Long enough to be considered a genuine epic. Heavy enough to be considered for use as a doorstop. It took Moore ten years to [...]

She’s a Wonder

October 28, 2014 // 0 Comments

Halloween being a national holiday here on the Nerd Farm, we’re taking a little vacation this week. But just so as not to leave you with no funnybook diversions in the meantime, we thought we’d do a little link-blogging instead… Yesterday, NPR had a long-form interview with Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, a look at the character’s creation and at her creator, William Moulton Marston. Marston was a psychologist, the creator of the polygraph, [...]

Reports from the Field

November 16, 2013 // 0 Comments

I am notoriously bad at self-promotion. I don’t navigate the blogosphere well, I keep my social media limited to actual friends, and I tend to just put my stuff out here on the web and hope someone finds it. I am a neanderthal in an online world of cyborg super-promoters. But this one time, I figure I’ll toot my own horn in the one forum I have for tooting. Because what the hell, huh? I started up a fiction blog. It’s called Reports from the Field, and you can check it out [...]

Countdown to Halloween: The Music of Erich Zann

October 25, 2013 // 0 Comments

“The Music of Erich Zann” isn’t, honestly, one of HP Lovecraft’s truly great stories. It’s relatively early work, written well before that great mid-career surge that would give us stuff like “The Call of Cthulhu” or “The Colour Out of Space.” It’s not paced particularly well, and it probably hints at its horror at little too vaguely. But something about it appeals to me. Something about Lovecraft’s concept of a wild weird [...]

Countdown to Halloween: The Wendigo

October 18, 2013 // 1 Comment

For the weekend, a slightly more substantial slice of horror for you. Algernon Blackwood was a prolific writer of ghost stories and weird fiction, and a favorite of HP Lovecraft. Most famously, and perhaps most successfully, he wrote about the terrors of the natural world, the vastness of the wilderness, and how very small mankind is in comparison. One such story is “The Willows,” about two men caught out in a flood. But tonight I thought I’d share Blackwood’s other most [...]

A Very Lovecraft Christmas

December 15, 2012 // 0 Comments

In my continuing attempts to scare up some Christmas cheer around the nerd farm, I decided to turn to HP Lovecraft for inspiration… Aahh! I feel more Christmassy already. Also a bit less in control of my mental faculties… But hey! What’s a few sanity points between friends? Let’s have another! Perhaps something a bit more modern, and less… melancholy. Heh. Okay, so those songs aren’t actually from HP Lovecraft himself, but rather the HP Lovecraft Historical [...]

A Babel of Sound and Filth: A Few Words on Lovecraft and Racism

November 20, 2012 // 0 Comments

Sometimes, it’s not easy being a fan of HP Lovecraft. I love the Lovecraft aesthetic. The horrid tentacled beasts, the amphibian terrors, the shapeless mass of the worker-shoggoths. The cosmic, atheist terror underlying it all, the horror of the idea that mankind is an insignificant speck on the ass-end of existence, all our great works amounting to nothing in the vastness of space-time. Douglas Adams could make jokes about that sort of thing fifty years later, but when you read [...]

Lovecraft in Brooklyn

November 6, 2012 // 5 Comments

HP Lovecraft spent the years of his brief marriage living unhappily in New York City. It was a period of great failure and loss for a man who saw more than his fair share of those things in his life. He was unable (or perhaps unwilling) to find work, his marriage failed, and his xenophobia (always keen) soared to new heights as he was exposed for the first time to the Great American Melting Pot. Most of his fiction from this period is baldly racist, boiling up as it did out of his increasing [...]