“One might not think of our city as a muse,” began a recent review of my first YA horror novel The Midnight Games in a Hamilton magazine. But if you ask me, good horror novels, because they assume that monstrous secrets lurk behind the facades of everyday life, always convey a strong sense of place: I’m thinking of the New York City of Whitley Streiber’s The Wolfen, the Los Angeles of Robert McCammon’s They Thirst, or even the east coast…
Lovecraft biographer and anthologist S.T. Joshi has lost his cool air over the World Fantasy Convention’s decision to remodel their awards: HP Lovecraft’s biographer ST Joshi has returned his two World Fantasy awards following the organisers’ decision to stop using a bust of the author for the annual trophy – a move the Lovecraft expert called “a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness”. The change was announced on Sunday. It follows a year-long campaign led by the…
Earlier this month we invited Black Gate readers to enter to win one of two pre-release copies of Jonathan L. Howard’s new novel of Lovecraftian mystery, Carter & Lovecraft, on sale this month from Thomas Dunne Books. To enter, all you had to do was submit a one-sentence suggestion for the ideal Lovecraft team-up — and what dark horrors your dream team should investigate. We don’t have room to present all the entries here, but we can offer up some of…
For one glorious weekend each summer, Chicago stops being The Windy City and instead becomes Metropolis. The urban crime rate takes a giddy plunge, not for lack of playing host to some fairly spectacular villains, but likely because the bad guys are too busy comparing breathable fabrics with their super hero arch-enemies. Yes it’s August – ComicCon time in the city… Wizard World Chicago, commonly known as the Chicago ComicCon, is the annual bacchanalia of pop culture held at the…
Three Task Force Games: Starfire (1979), Asteroid Zero-Four (1979), and Valkenburg Castle (1980) Task Force Games, based in Amarillo, Texas, was one of the very best board game companies in the business in the 80s, especially for science fiction fans. They published the majestic Federation & Empire (and its follow-up, Federation Commander), Kings Bounty, Godsfire, Battlewagon, Armor at Kursk, Musketeers, and the RPGs Crime Fighter, Prime Directive (based on Star Trek), and the glorious Heroes of Olympus — among many, many…
Ramsey Campbell is considered one of the most important and skilled writers of horror fiction. His earliest stories, Lovecraft pastiches, were collected and published by Arkham House as The Inhabitants of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964) when he was only eighteen. Within a few years he was routinely being nominated for, and often winning, various major awards for his original works of contemporary horror such as The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and The Parasite (1980). He…
Anyone who has used the search engine Google more than once knows that it automatically generates ads based on your search terms that are then embedded into your search list. Aside from a little yellow “Ad” button, they look deceptively like more search results, tricking the unwary 2-a.m. web surfer into accidentally clicking on them and then being nightmarishly whisked off to some random retail site. The algorithm often creates nonsensical advertisements, proving yet again that we are still a…
The Doom that Came to Sarnath H. P. Lovecraft Ballantine Books (280 pages, February 1971, $0.95) Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo The Doom That Came to Sarnath was the second volume of H. P. Lovecraft stories published under the BAF imprint. It served as a bridge between the Dunsanian fantasies of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and the Cthulhu Mythos related titles that followed. Many of the stories in this volume weren’t published until years after they were written…
Bill Crider is reporting that Colin Wilson, the British author of over 110 books — including Ritual in the Dark (1960), The Mind Parasites (1967), The Space Vampires (1976), Science Fiction as Existentialism (1980), and the Spider World novels — passed away late last week. Wilson debuted in 1956 with a bestselling work of non-fiction, The Outsider, when he was only 24 years old. Written mostly in the Reading Room of the British Museum, while he was living in a…
H.P. LOVECRAFT? I sit here typing this while wearing a pirate hat and wig of long, black dreadlocks. Why this should be I feel inadequate to formulate into words, lest my attempt to do so come across as the disjointed jargon of a dullard. I will say this, though: I have seen the gibbous moon in lonely places; I have crossed putrid moats under dark mute trees to survey strange runes left by long-lost races, runes undoubtedly concealing eldritch secrets…