Much of Coulthart's work is inspired by mysticism and Lovecraftian horror. He has frequently collaborated with comic book writer Alan Moore, and illustrated David Britton's Lord Horror, a Lovecraft-themed book so controversial, it was declared obscene and banned by a Manchester magistrate. Coulthart's 2006 book, The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions includes selections from Lord Horror, as well as illustrations based on Lovecraft's own stories and attempts to visually represent the cosmic entities he describes.

[John Coulthart via Dark Roasted Blend]

R'lyeh
Cthulhu Rising
Azathoth
The Call of Cthulhu — Opening Page

The Haunter of the Dark — Federal Hill
The Haunter of the Dark — Inside the Church
Yuggoth
Dagon
R'lyeh

Nyarlathotep

Shub-Niggurath


Yog-Sothoth

The Dunwich Horror — Wilbur Whateley

FilthyLuker creates whimsical sculptures and installations, with pieces that include anthropomorphized trashcans and easy chairs, adding eyeballs to bushes and trees, and giant banana peels placed in the middle of the road. His "Octo" installations are perhaps the most inspired, offering all the fun of a B-movie with none of the property damage.

FilthyLuker's DeviantArt [via WebUrbanist via Neatorama]

Octopied Building

B-Movie in the Sun
Octo Street
Tragic Bus
Octo
Mutate Britain

Way before the advent of comic books or paperback novels, our geeky forebears got their fill of escapist exploits from those descendants of the penny dreadful, the cheaply printed, but oh so delectable pulp magazines. Starting with Argosy in 1896 and peaking in the 20s and 30s, the pulps or dime novels were a fecund morass which nurtured the genres of Science Fiction, Westerns, Crime Drama, Historical Romance, Mystery, and Horror as well as the Science Heroes that developed into the Superheroes we see conquering the box-offices of today.

I was born at least a generation and a half too late too experience the pulps when they came out, but they do figure in my memories as a very young reader. Visiting my Great-Aunt Vicky and Great-Uncle Bob at their used bookstore in Maine I would beg to spend the night in the attic. With a flickering Coleman lantern I'd wile away the hours devouring Pogo comics, the Heinlein juveniles, and the adventures of none other than The Shadow. My favorite lullaby was a pair of pearl-handled .45s blazing into the night. Even now Lamont Cranston/Kent Allard's terrifying laughter echoes through my fondest memories. But I digress, constantly.

This anthology of all previously unpublished work tears out of the gate with Joe Lansdale's "The Crawling Sky" The Reverend Jebediah Mercer from the novel Dead in the West is once again Hell-bent for leather hunting down eldritch horror in the East Texas badlands. Here the Rev gives an accounting for himself:

I am on a mission from God. I do not like it, but it is my mission. I'm a hunter of the dark and a giver of the light. I'm the hammer and the anvil. The bone and the sinew. The sword and the gun. God's man who sets things right. Or at least as right as God sees them. Me and him, we do not always agree. And let me tell you, he is not the God of Jesus, he is the God of David, and the angry city killers and man killers and animal killers of the Old Testament. He constantly jealous and angry and if there is any plan to all this, I have yet to see it.
...It is my lot in life to destroy evil. There is more evil than there is me, I might add.

Oh. Yeah.
How's that for a cover letter? Try reciting that over a few belts of whiskey at your local watering hole in your best approximation of a Nacogdoches drawl. The results can be quite efficacious. I need more Rev. Mercer stories.

The Weird West feel is also strong in "Quiet Bullets" by Christopher Golden, but owing more to Rod Serling or Ray Bradbury than H.P. Lovecraft. Golden takes us back to those simple innocent times of being ten years old and all the fear and confusion that entails mixed with the cozy chills a really good ghost story can deliver. The creepiness continues as we discover something terribly wrong with William F. Nonaln's "Perfect Nanny" and pull back the lid of what we think we know in Cherie Priest's "Catastrophe Box". Ms. Priest was inspired by a case of real-life psychic researcher Harry Price (1881-1948) but her conclusion goes way past mere table-rapping at séances or wimpy cold spots.

The wild times to be found in the pulps didn't have to rely on fantastic elements. Plenty of gritty two-fisted tales were inspired the the greed and savagery to be found in the all too real mean streets. "A Gunfight" is David J. Schow's homage to Donald Westlake, a breathless blow by bloody blow report of a hardened criminal's desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of the Mob. FPS games are rarely this exciting. Tim Truman, the artist who collaborated with Lansdale on the infamous Jonah Hex comic books in the late 90s and did the cover illustration for Son of Retro Pulp Tales also has a story here. Turning away from the rotten core of the Big Apple, "Pretty Green Eyes" is a piece of hard-boiled nastiness of moonshiners and corrupt strike-breakers in the old West Virginia backwoods of Truman's own family history. Although this is his first published all-prose fiction, no one familiar with his work will be surprised to find he hits every crime pulp note square in the jaw. "Border Town" also draws from it's author's roots. James Grady presents a snowbound Montana train station in 1938 with a woman on the run and rat-bastard Nazi spies.

Speaking of fascist monsters, we veer back towards the bizarre for Matt Venne's "The Brown Bomber and the Nazi Werewolves of the S.S.". I'll just let the over-the-top title speak for itself adding only that the final paragraph was surprisingly stirring. Plunging even deeper into the lurid ridiculous potential of pulp are "The Forgotten Kingdom" "The Lizard Men of Blood River" by Mike Resnick and Stephen Mertz respectively. Both these adventures of Lost Cities and Nearly Nekkid Native Princesses have tongue thrust full through cheek. Resnick's hysterical pun-spewing rogue, the Right Reverend Lucifer Jones was probably the class clown at the same seminary Reverend Mercer went to. It seems in this day and age we can't take the Great White Hunters or Jungle Explorers seriously any more — somehow I feel Shia LaBeouf is all to blame. I wonder if a serious reinterpretation of Allan Quatermain or the like can still be done. Maybe he's as off-limits as another favorite of mine, the sinister Fu Manchu. It seems a shame really.

There's only one story here with Rocketships and Bug-Eyed Monsters and that's this one humble offering from Harlan Ellison. Yeah, you read that right, Harlan Muthafuckin' Ellison!. If his story intro is to be believed, "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" was originally penned in 1991 for a Bantam Books project that never saw the light of day. It's a wild take on the old fairy tale set in a seedy Mars colony with exploited native labor and an ancient artifact men and martians would kill for. A dark reflection of 1940s cosmic dreams that would not be out of place along side some of the "New" Space Opera of today. But what it really reminded me was the kick-ass thrills I got when I first read Deathbird Stories. This is pure balls out Ellison. I don't know if I'd want to be stuck in an elevator with him, but he writes a damn good story.

With four or five the stories being quite excellent and great fun to be had all the way through, Son of Retro Pulp Tales is way ahead of the curve and a mighty satisfying read. I wish Subterranean would come out with more affordable trade paperback editions, but that's just how they roll. In every one of these stories you sense the pure glee the writers had in shaping these cheap thrills from their own fond memories. This has the sense of wonder, adventure, and just plain fun that should never go out of style.

Son of Retro Pulp Tales will be available any day now directly from Subterranean Press,
or from the Usual Clowns.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the agents of Shadowskeedeeboomboom as Chris Hsiang. He has the power to cloud his own mind and as yet lacks a boon companion. What a surprise.

The Alps-like landscape revealed with cutting-edge imaging technology is a reminder that the Antarctic was once a thriving biosphere. That's why HP Lovecraft set his famous short story "At the Mountains of Madness" in an Antarctic mountain range hidden by snow, which had once held a thriving civilization. There's nothing like digging up 14,000,000 year old mountains if you want to find some weird alien life. According to a news report on the findings:

The imaging comes from a gruelling effort by Chinese glaciologists to probe the mysterious realm beneath the East Antarctic heights, one of the most forbidding places in the world.

In 2004-5 and again in 2007-8, the team hauled deep-penetrating ground radar around a box-shaped sector, measuring 30 kilometers (18 miles) by 30 kilometres, at a point called Dome Argus, or Dome A.

Dome A lies at 4,093 metres (13,302 feet) above sea level and has an average annual temperature of -58.4 degrees Celsius (-73 degrees Fahrenheit).

Beneath it is an ice sheet between 1,649 and 3,135 metres thick that smothers the Gamburtsev mountains, a range named after a Soviet geophysicist, Grigoriy Gamburtsev, who detected the peaks in 1958.

The radar reflections revealed "classic Alpine topography" similar to Europe's Alps, showing that once there were river valleys that cut their way through the mountains.

Later, these valleys were gouged and deepened by glaciers.

"The landscape has probably been preserved beneath the ice sheet for around 14 million years," says the paper.

Guillermo Del Toro was at one point going to direct a version of "At the Mountains of Madness," though the project seems to have fallen by the wayside. Maybe this discovery will reawaken his interest.

Via AFP

I don't read much horror, but I enjoy it when I do; I love the Great Old Ones such as William Hope Hodgson and H.P. Lovecraft, there's Clive Barker of course, Joe Lansdale and Dan Simmons have some powerful stuff too. I've recently discovered Joe Hill and am entranced by his style. (I understand his father has written some books as well.) When a horror story really works for me, I throw the book against the wall with a shriek and hide behind the sofa. Then, trembling, and in tears I crawl across the floor in supplication and pick up where I left off. Laird Barron does this to me.

It seems the best horror conveys an utter hopelessness against the Unknown. All the extensive arcane lore, mad skills, or big guns we might have is futile against that which lurks in our nightmares. Lovecraft's Cthulu Mythos is legendary for its vast eldritch deities brimming with power, but generally oblivious to humanity's petty actions. Woe betide the hapless mortals who opened the wrong book or wandered through an innocently shambolic ruin. Like Lovecraft, that Eskimophobic shut-in from Providence, Mr. Barron's tales peel back the flimsy facade of reality and the Universe suddenly boils over in maggots, chitinous genitalia, and biting eyeballs.

Although clearly a student of the master's themes, Barron has his own voice, which is about as far away from H.P.'s fussy antiquarian style as you can get. The writing in The Imago Sequence has been hard-boiled in mescaline, like Jim Thompson tripping his balls off. Rather than adopting Lovecraft's bestiary of unpronounceable space gods, Barron has devised his own collection of creepy creatures. One major but as yet unseen figure is the malevolent entity that some worship with the name Belphegor. In at least three of the stories he uses an interesting theme of Lovecraft's: Scary Old People. They could be a symbol of ancient knowledge and the and the impending fate that awaits us all, or just childhood memories of having to kiss wretched Great-Aunt Mildred. Either way Barron reminds us to respect our Elders, otherwise they will eat our brains.

Many of the stories take place in the present day in the American Northwest particularly around Olympia and Eastern Washington state. There are some notable exceptions. The previously unpublished "Procession of the Black Sloth" is a bleak disorienting descent into Hell set in Hong Kong. A grizzled Pinkerton agent tracks down a vicious killer to a Gold Rush town in "Bulldozer", it could be described as Cthulu in Deadwood. "Hallucigenia"is about a wealthy man trying to come to grips with a bizarre and horrible incident that has left his life shattered. It made me think of the best of Clive Barker, only better. The title story deserves to hang in the same nightmarish gallery as "The Picture of Dorian Grey" and "Pickman's Model". "The Imago Sequence" is a notorious trio of photographs sought after by rich and eccentric collectors. One of these sends his agent, an ex-wrestler turned kneecap-busting debt collector, to hunt down the mysterious third image. His investigation uncovers a labyrinth of conspiracy, crime, and macabre cults, or something even worse.

No wan, scholarly dweebs here. Barron's protagonists are often Big Tough Guys. These bruisers have seen hard times and done whatever it takes to survive them. Of course this can't prepare them for what the author has in store for them. From each opening line you know these guys are Doomed — but you're compelled to follow them to their fate. And readers really will feel for them. These aren't cookie-cutter macho cartoon goons. Each one is a nuanced and complex character with interesting backstories. Men who struggle to make sense out of a world that's bigger and more dangerous than they realized, and then they end up in a Laird Barron story. Tragic really.

The imagery in The Imago Sequence is especially vivid. Barron's language can be disturbing brutal, but always quite lyrical. He cites the poet Wallace Stevens as another influence. He claims to be working on a novel and I know for a fact his publisher is eagerly awaiting it. I am too. Horror fans will enjoy these creepy, terrifying and beautiful tales of damnation. Certainly scared the crap outta me and I liked it.

You can purchase The Imago Sequence from Night Shade Books
or support your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the mindless gibbering dancers as Christopher Hsiang. He is sleeping with the lights on although he knows it will be of no help when They come for him.

In “Carrion Re-animating!” you play Herbert West and have captured and killed several of the local townsfolk for your depraved experiments. But when the relatives of your victims show up on your doorstep looking for their lost loved ones, you need to quickly reanimate the corpses before they call the police. If you match the wrong zombie with the wrong relative, the relative is zombie chow. If you are too slow in getting them their zombie, the relative calls the cops. A moustached narrator tells West’s story from an armchair, adding a touch of Masterpiece Theater to Lovecraft’s world.

The game is available as a free download from Zombie Cow Studios and is sadly Windows-only.

Carrion Re-animating! [Zombie Cow Studios via The Escapist]

Twilight Creations are known for their dark themed games, the most famous of which is probably Zombies!!! Knizia has won numerous awards for his "European style" board and card games, including Samurai, Lost Cities, Lord of the Rings and Kingdoms. His games tend to be interesting mathematical puzzles with some sort of theme loosely overlaid. This can work very well (Lost Cities is a fantastic game), but I'm not sure it will make sense combined with a cosmic horror back story.

Each player will work to line up numbered tiles on the game board, trying to rack up points and simultaneously block their opponent from getting points. I'm sure it's a great game, but in this case, the theme seems to have been very loosely applied. It's basically a math game with a picture of Cthulhu printed on the background of the board.

In all fairness, the game isn't actually out yet - just some preview pics of the board, so maybe there's a ton of awesome cultist powers or investigator abilities that flesh out the theme. Plus, it could offer a nice alternative to marathon games of Arkham Horror. Image by: Twilight Creations.

“To Mars and Providence” by Don Webb: Set in Lovecraft’s hometown, “To Mars and Providence” blends Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It’s an apt conflation since Lovecraft’s short story “At the Mountains of Madness” helped popularize the concept of ancient astronauts, the notion that creatures from afar arrived on Earth long ago, and, as with Wells’ buried Martian invaders, they will one day emerge to destroy humanity. Lovecraft himself is the star of Webb’s tale, and is still mourning his father’s death when the Martian invaders touch down on Providence’s Federal Hill. He soon learns that the Martians have arrived on Earth not for some desperate land grab, but because they are fleeing Mars’ fearsome sleeping Elder Gods.

Charles Stross’ Bob Howard Series: Stross’ tales of Bob Howard, an agent for a British secret intelligence agency known as The Laundry, are frequently described as Lovecraft meets James Bond. Magic exists as a form of applied mathematics and it has all sorts of dubious uses, such as summoning beings from other dimensions and yoking demonic beings to mechanical bodies. Another Stross story, “A Colder War,” poses an alternate history of the world where the Antarctic expedition of “At the Mountains of Madness” actually happened, and a follow-up expedition leads to increased Cold War tensions.

Parallelities by Alan Dean Foster: Max Parker, a tabloid reporter, finds himself traveling uncontrollably between various parallel universe. In one universe, he wakes up to find that the Elder Gods have taken over the world, just as Lovecraft’s stories predicted. Despite the awesome terror and regular human sacrifices, most humans on this Earth go about their business as usual.

Shadow Scourge by Mark Ellis: The post-nuclear holocaust universe of Ellis’ Outlander series is already replete with tyrannical gods. Mystical creatures from Sumerian and Celtic mythology have manipulated humanity’s fate since the beginning of time, and now live among us. But it isn’t until the 13th volume, Shadow Scourage, that the series’ heroes must content with Ocajinik, an ancient force living beneath the bayous of Lousiana who echoes the Old Ones of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

“Maureen Birnbaum and the Looming Awfulness” by George Alec Effinger: The titular character of Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson engages in a genre-bending romp through space and time. In the penultimate tale, Maureen (Muffy to her friends) is sent back in time to fight off the Lovecraftian horrors of Yale University. And, when she relates her adventures to a friend back in the present, she takes a moment to poke fun at Lovecraft’s somewhat florid writing style:

"Bitsy, have you noticed that my narrative style has become like, you know, dated, clumsy, and ornate?"

“Pickman’s Modem” by Lawrence Watt-Evans: Published in the anthology Cthulhu 2000, Watt-Evans updates and parodies Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s Model,” about a artist who painted brilliant but disturbingly ghoulish works. Instead of paintings, the narrator is disturbed by postings on an online bulletin board, whose author is in the thrall of a demonic piece of machinery.

“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.: Campbell is another writer inspired by “At the Mountains of Madness.” His fictional team of researchers also travels to Antarctica, where they find an alien spaceship buried beneath the ice. And, as if in imitation of an Elder God, it starts to devour everything in its path. “Who Goes There?” has enjoyed a long legacy of its own; it inspired Howard Hawks’ film “The Thing from Another World” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

The Spiraling Worm by David Conyers and John Sunseri: Like Stross’ books, The Spiraling Worm combines the Cthulhu Mythos with spy thriller trappings. Seven interconnected stories follow Australian Army Intelligence Mahor Harrison Peel and US NSA Agent Jack Dixon as they battle Lovecraftian monsters intent on having humanity as a snack.

The Tommyknockers by Stephen King: Much of King’s work is strongly influenced by Lovecraft, with extradimensional beings invading small New England towns. But The Tommyknockers, inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” is the most clearly rooted in science fiction. A novelist from Maine discovers a long-buried alien pod, which, when opened, begins its conquest of humanity, transforming them into the aliens who left the pod behind.

The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson: Wilson wrote several fantasy stories extending the Cthulhu Mythos, but, with The Mind Parasites he takes Lovecraft’s ideas and makes them his own. Much as the sleeping god Cthulhu touches the minds of some men in dreams, the parasites of Wilson’s novel live in the consciousness of human beings, gradually draining our life force and threatening us with annihilation. But unlike the hopeless protagonists of Lovecraft’s stories, who must either forget what they know or surrender to madness, Wilson’s heroes push forward, trying to save the world by improving the cognitive powers of mankind.

“A Study in Emerald” by Neil Gaiman: The 2003 anthology Shadows Over Baker Street challenged writers to place a Sherlock Holmes story against the backdrop of the Cthulhu Mythos. Gaiman created a Victorian era tale with an alternate history twist: the Great Old Ones awoke on Earth several hundred years earlier and, after a war with humanity, rule over all mankind. The Old Ones portray themselves as benevolent, though immortal and autocratic, leaders, but some humans in London are starting suspect that they are, in fact, soul-gobbling monsters. Gaiman also authored the much more humorous study “I, Cthulhu.”

Vade Mecum is a 160-page hardcover book with full-color art. And the art is amazing, really helping to evoke the gloomy, decadent world of CthulhuTech. This is definitely not a game for young children (if you couldn't tell by the cover). Further enhancing the "futuristic Lovecraftian" atmosphere are seven short stories, so there's plenty of backstory to flesh out your campaign (so to speak). For more hardcore gamers, there's plenty of crunch for the $39.99 cover price, including, "more than a dozen new unspeakable horrors, including the option to portray corpse-eating ghouls as Characters."

I'm not sure anything else in the book will top that, but it also has over 20 new "machines of death," a bunch of new magic rituals, a system for psychic powers, and three new professions. It could be interesting to play a Zoner, a character who starts out insane. Or perhaps you'd prefer portraying the lovechild of a human and an otherdimensional being. There are detailed fighting trees that allow you to chain together certain moves for devastating attacks, and those attacks can target specific body parts with the hit location chart. It's all fun and games until someone suffers a "Genital Injury." Ow.

Apparently, the CthulhuTech core book has been selling very well (the first printing sold out), so if you're looking for an RPG that's quite a bit darker than the usual swords and wizards affair, there are some kindred spirits out there. Image by: Catalyst/Widlfire.

Jenna MacNipperson (Cameron Diaz) is a spoiled daddy's girl on vacation in Cancun. When her island-hopping party boat runs aground on the ancient city of R'lyeh, she accidentally awakens the slumbering Cthulhu (voiced by Terry Hatcher), The Thing which cannot be described. One look at MacNipperson's Manolo Blahniks and Cthulhu knows they will be BFF - literally, for all eternity. From Cyclopean masonry and non-Euclidean architecture to Rodeo Drive and Hollywood afterparties, the world is their oyster as these two outrageous debutantes embark on the Final Shopping Spree.

But one man wants to ruin the fun: detective Hutch Fleming (Martin Lawrence). This uptight officer of the law wants to nail the girls for credit card fraud, as well as a series of mutilation murders. Wacky misadventures ensue when Cthulhu and MacNipperson avoid Fleming's bumbling justice. When the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu and a host of cultists show up, you know the fun is just getting started. I smell franchise!

If you head over to the Science website, you can see a slideshow with a bunch of the winning images, plus a podcast about the competition, and more info about the methods used to get the images.

There's an amazing 3D illustration of the human circulatory system and some innovative infographics, but my favorite is probably a cancer cell imaged with an electron microscope surface scan. After each scan, an ion blast shaved 20 nanometers off the cell, then another scan was taken. You can see a reduced scale version of the resulting 3D masterpiece at left, but be sure to check out the full-size version over at Science. Images by: Science/NSF.

Winners of Science Visualization Challenge announced. [Nobel Intent]

There's just something so perfectly absurd about combining a shambling horror with a cutesy saying that gets to us. It might be hard to take a tentacled beast that has come for your soul seriously after seeing some of these, but we wouldn't mind seeing them pop up as comments from time to time. There's a bunch already up at the Lolthulhu website, and you should feel free to make your own. Of course, it's a lot easier to find a picture of a cat doing something strange that it is to find a photo of a Shoggoth. [Thanks, Kit!]

According to the CthulhuTech Web site:

CthulhuTech is an innovative storytelling game that started out as a combination of two popular genres. The first was that of cosmic horror, made popular by H. P. Lovecraft and culminating in the modern day with elements of Mike Mignola's Hellboy and John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. The second was that of giant mecha Japanese animation, made popular by such series as Robotech, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Rahxephon.

In fact, Paramount if you're still listening, just give the Cloverfield monster some sort of a blaster or missile pod in the sequel. Then we promise we won't complain. Check out Wildfire's CthuhuTech game on their site, where you can order everything you need to open dimensional portals and summon demonic forces. We didn't see any Shoggoths with armaments, but when you combine these two genres, you just know it's coming.

Cthulhu Tech

We're well aware of the fact that it's difficult to try to tackle Lovecraft from any angle, but why would you try to make things harder for yourself by sticking Tori Spelling in your movie? If this was a retelling of Lovecraft starring bitchy girls who can't find the proper shade of lip gloss at the local L'oreal counter who then get eaten by some sort of lurking horror, then we'd get it. However, it sure looks like they're trying to be serious in this trailer, which for the life of us we can't really wrap our heads around. Especially once Donna Martin appears.

"Someone get down to the Peach Pit, quick! We've opened a portal to R'lyeh!" Yikes. Someone must have dialed in a favor or had some serious blackmail material for this one. We still prefer the Donna-free Cthulhu movie, which manages to be engaging despite being silent and in black and white.

Cthulhu the Movie [official site]