(Liminalities, Cycle 1, Part 2) In my novelette “Teeth” — first published at Thomas Ligotti Online, then in The Children of Cthulhu, and then in expanded form in my Dark Awakenings — there’s a scene where the narrator reads a notebook filled with ruminations on the convergence of philosophy and religion with cosmic horror, all interwoven…
Tag: H.P. Lovecraft
Liminality, Synchronicity, and the Walls of Everyday Reality
(Liminalities, Cycle 1, Part 1) A seminal moment in the formation of Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity came as he was treating a highly educated woman who, by his description, was locked in a rigid Cartesian rationalism that hindered her therapy. The basis of all depth psychotherapy is the airing of unconscious psychic content and…
To escape into twilight realms
(The above music was retitled “Escape” when used in the soundtrack for the film The Hours.) “They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded…
A Lovecraftian tragedy? ‘Prometheus’ may have finally killed del Toro’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’
The sad news is currently sweeping through the fantasy/SF/horror community and the movie-oriented corridors of the Interwebs: Guillermo del Toro has publicly announced that his long-anticipated adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is really and truly dead. What’s more, the (unintentional) culprit is Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus. Say what? I wrote a recent…
Recommended Reading 7
This week’s collection of recommended articles, essays, blog posts, and (as always) an interesting video or two, covers economic collapse and cultural dystopia; the question of monetary vs. human values; the ubiquity of disinformation in America and the accompanying need for true education of the deeply humanizing sort; the ongoing debate over climate change and…
Will Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’ be a Lovecraftian ‘2001’?
In the latest installment of Stained Glass Gothic, my intermittent column for SF Signal, I raise the question of whether director Ridley Scott’s forthcoming science fiction/horror film Prometheus will be, in effect, a hybrid film of ideas that invokes and resonates with themes previously explored by Stanley Kubrick (and Arthur Clarke) in 2001: A Space…
UFOs over China and fireballs over Peru: What the Lovecraft is going on?
So, you know, sometimes we really do need to ask ourselves whether and to what extent our new Internet-created ability to piece together all kinds of events and news reports instantaneously from across space and time is encouraging us to read false patterns of meaning into things. More pointedly, is that what I’m doing below…
Rhode Island School of Design now requiring incoming freshmen to read H.P. Lovecraft
Is it really possible that a modern-day American college has actively taken steps to transform the experience and education they offer their students into an overtly Lovecraftian affair? Why, yes, it is, much to my jaw-dropped astonishment and delight. Cue the sound of stars aligning. First, the wide-scope background: As reported by The New York…
Celebrating Lovecraft’s birthday and Ligotti’s un-birthday
It’s still August 20 in my time zone as I type these words, so it’s not too late for me to send out this year’s Lovecraftian birthday acknowledgment into the cyber-ether. Thus: Happy Birthday, Howard, wherever you are or are not. If it’s the former, if you really are somewhere, then I know you’re eternally…
The world riots, nations shudder, Cthulhu wakes
What do Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Eckhart Tolle, global economic collapse, Queensryche, Robert Bloch, Rage against the Machine, and proliferating riots around the world have to do with each other? Simple: They herald a period of cosmic, cultural, and human disruption.