The gorgeous-looking new edition of Lovecraft’s stories from The Folio Society, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, has this really effective (and kind of gorgeous in its own right) promotional video to go with it. Sadly, I don’t have $120 to spare. But with illustrations by Dan Hillier — who comes off quite…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
What a shame the world isn’t just driving over hills and never coming to a town
The sun was gone. The sky lingered its colors for a time while they sat in the clearing. At last, he heard a whispering. She was getting up. She put out her hand to take his. He stood beside her, and they looked at the woods around them and the distant hills. They began to…
Our Craving for Apocalypse: ‘Dispatches from the Ruins’ (short video)
This brief video essay on the source of our collective craving for “the awful futures of apocalyptic fiction” is really well done. Skillfully executed and thought-provoking. A worthwhile investment of five reflective minutes. Here’s the description: In the first two decades of the new millennium, stories of the post-apocalypse have permeated pop culture, from books…
Doc Severinsen Performs “In the Court of the Crimson King”
For eight minutes of pure, unadulterated awesome, here’s Doc Severinsen, from his 1970 LP Doc Severinsen’s Closet, performing King Crimson’s “In the Court of the Crimson King.” No, this is not a hallucination, although it may represent some kind of ripple in the Matrix. Many thanks to Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds for unearthing this,…
‘Videodrome’ and Marshall McLuhan: The New Flesh meets the New Media
Here’s the ever-reliable Nick Ripatrazone discussing the inspirational influence of Marshall McLuhan on David Cronenberg as the latter was conceiving and making 1983’s Videodrome, which Ripatrazone characterizes — correctly, I think — as “perfect viewing for 2017 — the year a man baptized by television becomes president.” The article also provides an able introduction to…
WE SLEEP – John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ as Prophecy (video essay)
Love this video essay from filmmaker (and former Buddhist Studies scholar) Daniel Clarkson Fisher. Perhaps you will, too. It’s great stuff, excellently conceived and executed. Perhaps I don’t agree with absolutely all of the political statements made in it. But I agree with enough of them. And anyway, it’s about Carpenter’s They Live. So what…
My introduction to Jon Padgett’s ‘The Secret of Ventriloquism’
As I have mentioned in the past, my good friend Jon Padgett’s debut horror fiction collection The Secret of Ventriloquism, featuring an introduction by me, is a very special piece of work. It has been gratifying to see how events in the several months since I last talked about it have borne this out. Rue…
Horror encyclopedia: My work is (almost) done
This week I finished the primary body of editorial work on Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears. It has been my all-consuming focus on this vast project that has kept The Teeming Brain mostly dormant for most of 2016. I just now counted and saw that…
Book news: ‘The Secret of Ventriloquism’ by Jon Padgett
Maybe someday I’ll have more time to start tending The Teeming Brain again and stop leaving these gaps of weeks-turning-to-months. That time may still be a while off, however, since I’m currently buried under the equivalent of two and a half full-time jobs, what with the horror encyclopedia project eating up so many so-called “extra”…
‘The Starry Wisdom Library’ becomes an audiobook
Remember The Starry Wisdom Library, that unique Lovecraftian book project helmed by rare books expert Nate Pedersen, released by PS Publishing in 2014, and containing my faux scholarly commentary on the imaginary occult tome titled Daemonolorum, along with a plethora of similar fake commentary on other imaginary occult books by the likes of Ramsey Campbell,…