Tonight we have two of Shoggoth.net’s editors over at Zombiepalooza Radio Live! Authors Sean Hoade and Matthew Davenport (me) are going to be interviewed tonight. Check it out and let us know what you think.
It’s a live feed with a chat room so feel free to ask us whatever questions you have.
Click here to watch the live feed!
Is the world’s greatest novelist a Lovecraftian – and does his new book prove it?
Haruki Murakami is a literary giant, described by Stephen Poole of the Guardian as “among the world’s greatest living novelists”. The Japanese writer is regularly tipped as the next Nobel laureate for Literature. His books, skating around the borders of surrealism, magic realism, fantasy and science fiction, sell millions and have been published in fifty languages. Murakami’s plots often revolve around threats from inhuman, paranormal beings of undefined power. He quotes Kafka, Doestoyevsky and Flaubert as his influences (1). But if you go deeper, is Murakami’s biggest and most formative influence HP Lovecraft? Continue reading
So? Is your Novel Half-Empty, or Half-Full?
Check in NaNoShoggo’s! I’m just broke my 25,000 word count and have the shiny new badge to prove it! Share your Badges! Tell us how you did, tell us about your story, even if it isn’t necessarily evil (I’m writing a superhero novel!). We wanna hear about it, and that’s what comments are for!
Are you rocking out? Or are you like this guy?
Cultists upgraded Clippy… now you’ll remember which version of “There” to use…
The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos by S.T. Joshi
Pre-eminent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi divides “Lovecraftian” stories into three categories in his book “The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos”. The first category he calls the “Lovecraft Mythos”, stories that capture the purest form of cosmic horror that author H.P. Lovecraft sought to evoke when he wrote his horror stories in the early 1900’s. Lovecraft Mythos stories include many of the tropes and themes that Lovecraft was fond of using, such as fictional geographies, particularly in New England; ancient madness-inducing tomes; scholarly protagonists; and god-like monsters and extraterrestrials that care little to nothing about an insignificant humanity.
The snow had come in thick and dry that year with the texture of cotton. It lightly covered the mountainous landscape and the rough hills making the scraggly pines seem soft, even mystical, in the moonlight.
Magdalene leaned her face against the cold glass of the Suburban’s window as they headed up the steep incline that led to her family’s new house. The move from town had been rough for her. The house, though at first had seemed creepy and unique, now seemed to be nothing but hard work and misery. She was not built for a wood heated dilapidated house, preferring her mother’s upscale city apartment which had a small knob that one could turn to make the house hotter or cooler. It had none of the chopping wood in the night cold, none of the piling wood in her arms, getting scratched by the spiky wood, no having to carry loads of wood inside to the foyer of the old mining mill.
The city place also had none of the weirdness that the ancient house her dad bought seemed to possess. With the old mine sitting less than 200 feet from their front door, Magdalene shivered. The gaping hole led down into a black world that no one alive knew about any more; only the dead miners could remember those paths through the great mountains. Her father never failed to remind her.
“Stay out of that mine, Maggie, it isn’t safe.”
I don’t know where I was five seconds ago, but it sure as hell wasn’t here.
That was the thought that pounded, and pounded very painfully, through my skull as I stared down at the small porcelain cup sitting only inches from my shaking hand.
My entire body hurt. It was a sharp pulsing pain that started at the base of my skull and coursed all the way down my body before the next wave would start. That didn’t change the fundamental truth of my situation, though. My hand wasn’t shaking because of the fire that was racing across my nerves. My hand was shaking because I sure as hell wasn’t here five seconds ago.
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