Weird Tales – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

The King in Yellow

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 looking again at this old Ace paperback of Robert Chambers’ weird classic, one of that select handful of books which can bear a blurb from HP Lovecraft. Any Lovecraft aficionados yet to read the first four stories in Chambers’ collection (the others pieces are of lesser interest) are missing out. These are as good as anything that Weird Tales published and together they achieve that unique blend of science fiction, fantasy and horror which Lovecraft and others also managed in the days when writers, and readers for that matter, were far less concerned with the definition and boundaries of genre.

My Ace edition was the first paperback printing from 1965 and the cover painting is by Jack Gaughan, credited inside as being based on Chambers’ own first edition design. I’d often wondered what the original cover looked like and now, of course, it’s easy to find. Whether Chambers himself drew this is unclear but whoever the artist was, the design is rather more finessed than Gaughan’s sketchy painting.

Searching around reveals two further variations, one of which—the green cover—is described on a bookselling site as the actual first edition of the book from 1895. Yours for a mere $1,750. The other cover is probably a later reprint which gives a clearer view of the mysterious King. What’s notable here is the curious sigil on both the Neely editions. I was hoping this might be the dreaded Yellow Sign which is the subject of Chambers’ fourth (and Lovecraft’s favourite) story; it’s certainly more suitable than the squiggle which seems so unaccountably popular among certain quarters of Lovecraft fandom. It isn’t the Yellow Sign, however, it turns out to be the monogram for publisher F. Tennyson Neely. Perhaps this is just as well. “The solution to the mystery is always inferior to the mystery itself,” as Borges said, and some things, like the malevolent play which gives its name to this collection, are best kept out of reach.

• The King in Yellow at the Internet Archive

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Machen book covers
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

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 latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.

Thus HP Lovecraft in 1927 from his lengthy overview of horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Lovecraft was enthusiastic about many of Blackwood’s weird tales, rating him as one of the contemporary masters along with Arthur Machen. A year before his essay he prefaced The Call of Cthulhu with a Blackwood quote and regularly referred to The Willows as one of his favourite stories. Blackwood’s tale continues to find enthusiasts today, among them the Ghost Box music collective whose Belbury Poly CD titled after the story manages to reference in the space of 44 minutes Blackwood, Machen, CS Lewis and The Morning of the Magicians.

If your curiosity is sufficiently piqued by this point, you can read the story online at Wikisource or Project Gutenberg. Or you can listen to a reading in a new posting at LibriVox. The perfect thing for autumn and the month of Halloween.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror in the shadows
• Wanna see something really scary?
• Ghost Box
• The Absolute Elsewhere

Lovecraft in Los Angeles

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
Lovecraft: Fear Of The Unknown

Presented by Shriekfest 2008

DATE: Saturday, October 4th, 2008
TIME: 1:45 PM
PLACE: Raleigh Studios, The Chaplin Theater
5300 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90038

Producer William Janczewski will be in attendance!

Admission is $8. To purchase tickets, you can visit the Shriekfest 2008 site.

H.P. Lovecraft was the forefather of modern horror having created the Cthulhu mythos. LOVECRAFT is a chronicle of the life, work and mind behind these weird tales.

• narrated by Robin Atkin Downes
• music by Mars of Dead House Music
• associate producer Andrew Migliore
• produced by William Janczewski, James B. Myers & Frank H. Woodward
• written & directed by Frank H. Woodward

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New things for July
• The monstrous tome
• New things for October

Word games

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.

While we’re on the subject of word-scrambling, Weird Tales magazine has announced a writing contest: write a story— 500 words or less—based on a spam headline you’ve received. The spam waiting to be purged in my trash folder doesn’t offer much in the way of inspiration: “Paris Hilton charges for pussy”, “Tyra to go undercover ass a man iin a rapper’s posse”. More interesting is the recent comment spam I received (none of which you ever see here, thanks to Akismet), a funny conflation of Bible quotes, porn links and stray words from a novel. Once the links are removed, all the text runs together and the result looks like this:

45:4 And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying,
12:18 cam chat donne live mature web Selah. a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in mature mistresses london
5:19 Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to
17:20 And when Absalom’s servants came to the woman to the house, they fucking hairy mature plump a look at you, dear, and see that we start right. Then we’ll send They don’t mean any harm, I’m sure, but if they knew how we premature ejaculation tip their own doings, nor from their stubborn way.
3:19 Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them. hand job mature impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is
4:13 Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived adult gallery mature woman
5:7 And these things give in charge, that they may be blameless.
9:13 So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he did eat continually at mature photo galleries thing be? And he said, Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but
5:21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen. armpit hairy mature
5:29 And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a unto the LORD God of their fathers. mature women younger girls 8 them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, times that I have formed it? now have I brought it to pass, that thou canada escort independent mature his error as fast as possible.
5:12 And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labour among busty mature movie sample the men of Israel, Because the king is near of kin to us: wherefore
12:4 Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God. anal black mature sex presence of mind. swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your mature gay sex video “Did the spider accept the old fellow’s invitation?” asked Laurie, according to godliness;
6:4 He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting walk for premature baby open fields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be
4:11 These things command and teach. mature suck black cock O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. of the question.” mature lezbos and unto the supplication of thy people Israel, to hearken unto them
33:1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and he mature fellatio there. “It is always so quiet and pleasant here, it does me offer the burnt offering and the meat offering upon the altar: and the mature licking him with the curious girdle of the ephod, and bound it unto him
30:30 And to them which were in Hormah, and to them which were in mature female spanking and twenty:

John Phillip Law, 1937–2008

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 serious role, he played opposite the very formidable Rod Steiger in The Sergeant which was released the same year; together with Victim, this was one of the first films I remember watching that dealt with same-sex attraction (albeit in the usual angst-ridden mode), with Law’s character being the understandable object of Steiger’s doomed affection.

After those heights, things tended to be more down than up but I do have an affection for Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974). Law’s Sinbad was pretty good even if he spends much of the time fighting monsters while Tom Baker was great as the villainous Koura. And I always appreciated that screenwriter Brian Clemens made Lemuria the destination of the voyage, a lost continent mentioned by Madame Blavatsky and many of the Weird Tales writers, including HP Lovecraft in The Haunter of the Dark.

Danger Diabolik (1968).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• CQ
• Danger Diabolik