H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2016 San Pedro

SUPER happy to be able to promote this. I've gone two other times and both were fantastic - really looking forward to this year! If you're unfamiliar with the H.P. Lovecraft Film Fest and are a Lovecraft fan you can read my review of the first one I attended here to get an idea of the level that this fest takes it to. And as good as that initial experience was, my subsequent one was about ten times better, so that's really saying something. This fest improves exponentially with every passing year. And honestly, it's just a great round-up of Weird and Horror culture, as well as being a great time to boot, whether you're an HPL fan or not.

Among the vendors this year I happen to know that Josh Finney and Kat Rocha will be representing the wonderful 01 Publishing. Josh and Kat were our guests on the live stream of Drinking w/ Comics #31 last night and they were awesome! 01's line-up is kind of a dream come true for Lovecraft/Weird/Cyberpunk fans and if that sounds great or even the littlest bit titillating, I suggest you make an intro to their world with Josh and Patrick McEvoy's Casefile: Arkham "Nightmare on the Canvas", which made it into my top comics of 2015 and is an exhaustively researched mash-up of Lovecraft mythos and Noir.  Another great entry to the 01 world would be the Lovecraft-inspired prose anthologies Whispers From the Abyss, volume 2 of which is available in digital right now here or can be pre-ordered in print here. I only just got my hands on Vol. 1 and it looks fantastic and features stories by Josh, Kat, Silvia Moreno-Garcia as well as many others. And Vol. 2 features a story by one of my favorite writers ever, the inimitable Mr. Laird Barron.

X's For Eyes Pre-Order

Yet another reason to celebrate.

Laird Barron has a new novella coming out in a few weeks and you can pre-order it here. Over the course of the previous four years Mr. Barron has become my favorite writer, a man whose words move me in ways that feel ancient and endless. Over the course of four anthologies*, one novella and one novel he has become the first author in years that I re-read constantly. His loose-knit mythology has burrowed its way into my brain and I think that would make him happy. Surely it makes me happy, when it doesn't make me all-out paranoid that the eye of Shiva is staring back at me from the other side of some dark cosmic mirror that is probably focusing on me even as I write this...

If you don't believe me go here and, after subscribing to an amazing podcast, take forty minutes or so to listen to Mr. Barron's short story Frontier Death Song. I've listened to it countless amounts of time and it never becomes less affecting. Read by the inimitable David Robison, this is the perfect introduction to the cosmic pulp horror of Laird Barron's work.

Surreal Sermons - Laird Barron Interview

I have not had time to listen to this yet but I can't wait. I'm in the process of re-reading Laird's book Occultation and I'm planning on making something of a character map of it and his other books. There's a lot of overlap and I thought it'd be fun to kind of diagram out who recurs and what connections lay beneath the surface. I'd never heard Jeremy Maddux's Surreal Sermons before but am now planning on making it one of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. Here's the page, give it a listen and if you dig there's plenty more episodes.

The Children of Old Leech

image courtesy of WordHorde.com

News of The Children of Old Leech reached me about two weeks ago or so when Mr. Barron blogged about it and the news really made my day! A tribute to the mythos of Laird Barron (pre-order it HERE). Hot damn! Have I mentioned here, as I have repeatedly on Twitter, what a 'cosmic horror' phase I'm going through at the moment? It began with Nick Pizzolatto's True Detective, which in turn made me finally begin Robert Chambers The King in Yellow - a book that had been on my radar since acquiring the totally awesome coffee table book The Art of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos several years ago, the first place I heard of The King in Yellow. Laird Barron's work shares some of the DNA of these weird horror classics but it is very much it's own thing. Mr. Barron's skill with the short story is among the best I've encountered and every story I read by him is an absolute pleasure on the brain. He has several collections, not anthologies so much as what he so wonderfully calls mosaic novels. All of them are great. He also, thus far, has one novel and one novella. If you're unfamiliar with his work my suggestion is to just start at the beginning and work your way through it.

The Imago Sequence - mosaic novel
Occultation - mosaic novel
The Light is the Darkness - novella
The Croning - novel
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - mosaic novel

New Laird Barron Collection in April

image courtesy of http://darkwolfsfantasyreviews.blogspot.com/

About two years while I was still at the bookstore, one of my regulars recommended Laird Barron's "Weird Fiction" to me. That's a flag phrase with me. You may have noticed I'm a bit of a Lovecraft fanatic and Weird Fiction is, along with authors such as Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, a moniker most colloquially associated with ol' Howard Phillips . Also, there was something about the manner in which my customer described Barron's work - an immediacy and a sureness that imparted to me the idea that I would become a fanatic for this man's work as well.

I did.

image courtesy of goodreads.com

I began with The Imago Sequence and Other Stories. I read that so fast my freakin' head spun. It was a bit of work locating a copy, but in the interim of leaving the store and starting my new job some friends opened their own book store here in the Southbay, the-ever touted Bookfrog, and they were kind enough to order it for me (because they order everything and anything at request).

Next was Occultation, which came out shortly after finished Imago. Another anthology, Occultation was an even better, more consistant read. The infinitesimal tendrils of dread Barron had begun sowing through my heart in The Image Sequence were growing stronger in Occultation, and I was starting to get glimpses of the bigger picture behind the cracks and corners of his work.

image courtesy of grimreviews.blogspot.com

That picture came full on clear, complete with hideous gray eyes and wickedly aspiring teeth when The Croning was released some months later. Barron's debut novel The Croning is a deeply inspiring work that deftly examines the mundane yet terrifying aging process within the context of immortality, dark ritualistic aeons and things that go bump in the night. It is a fantastic first novel as both a stand alone entity and - what's more important to the fanatic in me - to the cosmic scope of the mythos Barron is creating.

image courtesy of imdiebound.org

Like Lovecraft, Barron's tales are in a shared world or Universe and overlap in sometimes obvious (i.e. character swapping) sometimes nearly invisibile ways. Like the fabled Butterfly Effect one character may do something in one story and it will reach fruition in another. This is Lovecraft-esque without falling into the admittedly overdone trap of writing within Lovecraft's world. This is a very talented author using that as the template and saying, "Now how can I do this, but make it my own?"

For two or two hundred more stories, I'm in.