All posts by David Hambling

Is The World’s Greatest Novelist a Lovecraftian?

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 »

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Not the End of the World

David Hambling is the author of two Mythos novellas, “The Elder Ice” and “Broken Meats” (available on Amazon), and a new collection from PS Publishing “The Dulwich Horror and others.”

“The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones… the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”
HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

I visited Josh a week after his world ended, bringing him a takeaway curry and six bottles of Cobra beer.

Josh had not been diagnosed with cancer. He had not suffered a stroke, or any of the other medical emergencies that set phones ringing at three in the morning. His wife was safe and healthy, not killed in a car crash. When I say his world ended, that’s exactly what I mean.

Josh’s Armageddon ran to a timetable, and we had been through the countdown. It had started months before, when Josh began sending me emails about the coming apocalypse, cut-and-pasted web collations studded with PHRASES IN UPPER CASE about aliens and quantum physics. Continue reading »

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