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Weird Tales, October 1933. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. • Michael Moorcock’s novels are being republished this year by Gollancz in a range of print and digital editions. Publishing Perspectives asks Is Now a Perfect Time for a Michael Moorcock Revival? • Related: Dangerous Minds posted The Chronicle of the Black Sword: A Sword & Sorcery [...]

Japanese poster (1982). At The Quietus Steve Earles looks back at John Carpenter’s visceral and uncompromising The Thing which exploded messily onto cinema screens thirty years ago. It’s always worth being reminded that this film (and Blade Runner in the same year) was considered a flop at the time following bad reviews and a poor [...]

…the growths of that garden were such as no terrestrial sun could have fostered, and Dwerulas said that their seed was of like origin with the globe. There were pale, bifurcated trunks that strained upwards as if to disroot themselves from the ground, unfolding immense leaves like the dark and ribbed wings of dragons. There [...]

William Hope Hodgson and Harry Houdini. Work this week has had me scouring the Internet Archive’s scanned books more than usual for source material. You’ll see the fruits of that in due course but the search turned up a small book from 1922, The Adventurous Life of a Versatile Artist: Houdini, an anonymous account of [...]

Thanks are due to Ty Reutel for alerting my attention to this one. I’d no idea that the great Virgil Finlay had illustrated Tarzan but here’s the proof, one half of an interior drawing for The Quest of Tarzan in Argosy Weekly for 1941. That’s the first surprise, the second, of course, was that Finlay [...]

weird, a. 1. Having the power to control the fate or destiny of human beings, etc.; later, claiming the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny. Originally in the Weird Sisters = †(a) the Fates; (b) the witches in Macbeth. 2. a. Partaking of or suggestive of the supernatural; of a mysterious or unearthly [...]

At the Mountains of Madness (1979) from Halloween in Arkham by Harry O. Morris. • Golden Age Comic Book Stories always pulls out the stops in the run up to Halloween. In addition to a wonderful collection of Harry O. Morris collages, Mr Door Tree has also been posting Virgil Finlay’s illustrations for Edgar Allan [...]

While chasing down Virgil Finlay’s illustration for Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space earlier this week I came across another Finlay drawing I’d not noticed before in a book I’ve owned for years. Makes me wonder what else is lurking on the shelves. Finlay’s depiction of Salomé was an illustration for Waxworks, a story by [...]

Cover illustration by CC Senf. In her mind the queen Nitocris was seeing a ghastly picture. It was the picture of a room of orgy and feasting suddenly converted into a room of terror and horror, human beings one moment drunken and lustful, the next screaming in the seizure of sudden and awful death. If [...]

That essential journal of esoteric culture, Strange Attractor, announced a fourth number this week sporting a psychedelic cover which may be the work of Julian House (no credit is given on the SA site). As to the contents: From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in [...]

Clark Ashton Smith’s weird fiction is reprinted more often and more widely than his poetry so it’s convenient for those curious about his verse that the Internet Archive has two volumes of early work. Odes and Sonnets is from 1918 and features embellishments by illustrator Florence Lundborg whose grape-devouring peacocks nod towards the fin de [...]

Conan the Adventurer aka The Barbarian (1965). How to appraise Frank Frazetta? In November last year I wrote about this Conan portrait for an SF Signal Mind Meld feature on favourite book covers: The covers that launched a thousand imitators. Lancer’s series of Conan books in the 1960s were the first appearance of Howard’s barbarian [...]

Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) has long been a favourite of mine since I first discovered his weird tales in ghost story collections, still the place you’re most likely to find his work. His ghost stories are frequently superior to the more celebrated MR James (who edited a Le Fanu collection), they’re less [...]

Halloween approaches and as a precursor it’s a great pleasure to be able to post a selection of interior illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, courtesy of Will at A Journey Round My Skull. Der Orchideengarten was a German magazine of weird fiction which ran for 51 issues from 1919 to 1921 and whose existence today is [...]

Will at A Journey Round My Skull turned up some gold this week in the form of several covers from a German periodical, Der Orchideengarten, which ran for 51 issues from 1919 to 1921. This is generally credited as being the world’s first fantasy magazine which makes its unaccountable obscurity all the more surprising. Both [...]

Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink beneath the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa. Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is Lost Carcosa. The King in Yellow, Act i, Scene 2. Rearranging the bookshelves this week had me [...]

Light play on the river Thame by net_efekt. …the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities. The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the [...]

Frank H Woodward’s excellent documentary about the life and work of HP Lovecraft receives a screening in Los Angeles at Shriekfest 2008 on October 4th. As mentioned earlier, this is easily the best film to date about HPL and features several illustrations of mine. Wyrd is proud to announce the L.A. Premiere of the documentary [...]

Wordle is a Java-based web toy which generates random arrangements of words from any text input. This is the result after pasting in the opening of the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses and playing around with the colour and font settings. Fun, but as far as web-based toys go I prefer the abstractions of Bomomo. [...]

Pygar the angel, Barbarella (1968). John Phillip Law, who died on Tuesday, was featured here last year in a look at Mario Bava’s crazy live action fumetti, Danger Diabolik (below). Law made that film the same year as he played a blind angel in an equally crazy slab of Sixties’ decadence, Barbarella. In a more [...]