Last Sunday, we dusted off our hymnals and sewed octopi to our Sunday best and stormed the Queen Mary to host a Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast on the Queen Mary as part of Her Royal Majesty’s Steampunk Symposium. Bishop Robert M. Price blessed the Esoteric Order of Dagon’ s new San Pedro chapter, and Brother Darrell Schweitzer kindly granted permission to pilfer from his unholy hymnal.
After the blast-goggled and bemonocled audience had been beaten into submission with recycled hash browns, I took the stage in front of the inconceivable Amorphous Tabernacle Choir (Mike Dubisch, Carolyn Watson Dubisch, Ted E. Grau and soloist Laura Lee Bahr) and organ-grinder John “Froggy Mason” Skipp, all of whom acquitted themselves with uncanny resilience for a troupe that had never rehearsed or met each other before. The ensuing event (video HERE) was a rousing mixture of white-hot blasphemy and tepid powdered eggs.
With Dagon’s aid, we are looking forward to a larger, more elaborate Prayer Breakfast (with waffles and bacon) to coincide with the Lovecraft Film Fest in LA, which will return to San Pedro September 28-29. The last one was a huge hit, and this year promises to crush it, in no small part thanks to an awesome secret project to be revealed shortly. Thanks to Symposium organizer Lady Kimberly and to LARPmeister Aaron Vanek for summoning us to come serve up the weird word.
Good news for those who never picked up one of our nifty but limited Spike Team Texas shirts, or who simply wore theirs out… They’re back! Thanks to Sam McCanna and Skurvy Ink, you’ll be able to scare away pesky girls and show solidarity with America’s most infamous post-human military unit from Cody Goodfellow’s Radiant Dawn. With its striking heraldic design by Eisner-nominated comics artist/colorist Jeromy Cox, this badass shirt could eat all your other shirts if not properly contained, but it’ll be worth it for all the sideways squinty stares you’ll get at gun shows. Kill ‘em all and let Cthulhu sort ‘em out, and be on the lookout for more mutant casual wear from your friends at Perilous Press.
At long last, Perilous Press’ epic struggle to bring a single affordable yet awesome illustrated novella to market has borne lopsided, freakish fruit! We will be breaking out the first carton of the spellbinding new Harrison peel eldritch espionage yarn The Eye Of Infinity this Friday and Saturday at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, and will have it up for sale on our site and at other fine online booksellers as soon as we can.
SF Crowsnest recently interviewed David about EOI and the challenges of writing scary stories in a country where everything is ridiculously oversized, venomous and trying to kill you all the time. And a recent review of EOI by Shane Jiraiya Cummings summed it up thusly: “The Eye of Infinity is the epitome of modern Cthulhu Mythos fiction: tough, probing characters facing unfathomable beings and making impossible decisions. It’s round two in the biggest fight we’ll ever face – humanity vs. cosmic horror – and this time, no one is going to escape unscathed.”
Working with Brian Stableford on his new book The Womb Of Time has been a pleasure and a privilege, but sadly, we’ve never actually met him. But our UK friends will get to hoist a mug with the man and get him to sign the limited edition of WOT at a free British Fantasy Society event in London on June 3rd at Southwark’s infamous Mug House. Supplies of Womb Of Time will be limited to what we could fit in one flat-rate box, so try to arrive early. Thanks to Brian and to event host Martin Roberts, another godlike geezer we’ve never shared a beer with…. yet.
If you’ve never dropped a book in the bathtub, you probably enjoy reading on a Kindle. We don’t, but if you do, our earliest releases, Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk are now available for Kindle, with other e-book formats dropping shortly.
My writing output has totally cratered for the last several weeks, since I quit smoking. At times like these, it’s very easy to imagine giving up on my other most-debilitating vice, and quitting writing altogether. Then something like this happens, and the broken brain almost starts working again…
The Womb Of Time is ready to ship.
The Eye Of Infinity is currently at the printers.
We’re hard at work on new, secret projects, about which, hopefully, we will soon have news.
In the meantime, please enjoy Michael Shea superfan Patton Oswalt trying to use Copping Squid as a beard.
Celebrity endorsement!
Womb of Time is in our hands and looks great. We’ll be shipping the limited editions soon. As always (*sigh*), thanks for your patience.
Blog should be fixed now…in the sense that taking out all customization is a “fix”. Screw pretty, let’s talk!
Okay…back to work.
EDIT: Lies! Respond link for blog doesn’t seem to work.
My dog eating an In N Out Double-Double
It’s taken longer than our usual sedimentary pace to wrap up and reflect on this astounding convention. When you go to a convention a month, they start to blur together, but Mythos Con was a monument, and hopefully a milestone on a new road to Cthulhuoid hegemony.
From soup to nuts, this show was the dream and brainchild of Adam Niswander, with the bittersweet undertaste of a last wish. Adam’s health has been fading, but he’s worked like a man possessed to bring together the greatest gathering of Lovecraftian writers, editors, artists and fans in history. And for the most part, it came together beautifully, even if the latter group failed to show up in the numbers expected.
Mythos fandom is a rarefied sub-ghetto, but its passionate intensity has made small gatherings like Portland’s Lovecraft Fest into magical events supercharged by the shared love of cosmic horror. Even if the con lacked the hoped-for masses of consumers––and there were a lot of factors keeping them away, from the economy and post-Xmas fatigue to the cost of the hotel and the fact that Arizona objectively sucks––the excitement was more than just contagious. It was inspiring and revelatory.
Panels spoke to the whole spectrum of Lovecraftian entertainment, from gaming and films to comics and high literary criticism. Scholarly titans like Robert Price and S.T. Joshi dropped old school weird knowledge, while cool kids Wilum Pugmire, Kelly Young, Peter Atkins and Ramsey Campbell kept it from feeling like school. We were thrilled to finally meet some of our much-cherished colleagues like Matt Cardin, Lois Gresh and Michael Cisco (whose readings should come with a Thorazine chaser) and very sad to miss friends who had to cancel, like Michael Shea and the inimitable Weston Ochse.
For us, Mythos Con was an acid test of our New Millennium Mythos line, and we think we passed. An early debut of our new book, The Womb Of Time by Brian Stableford, met with high praise and brisk sales. We sold almost everything we brought, and Adam and I got to hold an audience hostage in our first panel together. (Apologies to W. Paul Ganley, who had to play third wheel at our solipsistic love-feast.) We were delighted to initiate a strategic alliance with Arkham Bazaar, who should soon begin carrying Perilous Press titles. And we were proud to dedicate ourselves to doing whatever it takes to bring this convention back next year.
If you love the Cthulhu Mythos, you’re probably a black sheep even in the fandom circles in your community. If, like us, you’re frustrated by the obscurity of this thing of ours, there is now a slate of outstanding events that offer the chance to connect with the best of new Mythos fiction, and to take a hand in shaping its future. If events like Mythos Con are to continue––and Yog knows they deserve to––people need to get out and attend them.
And buy us drinks.
Adam and I are packing our lederhosen and our green cards for the pilgrimage to the inaugural Mythos Con in temperate, tolerant Tempe, Arizona. How excited are we for this unprecedented confluence of arcane insanity? Not nearly as much as this guy, but this con might just be too good ever to happen again, and we’ve got a lot to celebrate. We’ll have copies for sale of our latest release, The Womb Of Time by Brian Stableford, we’ll be holding down a table with the inconceivable Mike Dubisch and we’ll be blasting a lot of exciting news about upcoming projects with top Lovecraft scholar and inexhaustible party animal S.T. Joshi. And if these guys are any kind of men at all, I’ll be signing my gruesome new comic short Stumped! in the latest issue of Strange Aeons. Thanks and praises to Adam Niswander for conjuring up this awesome event, and a Voorish gas face for any self-respecting cultist south of Kadath who chooses to miss it…
Last Sunday, we dusted off our hymnals and sewed octopi to our Sunday best and stormed the Queen Mary to host a Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast on the Queen Mary as part of Her Royal Majesty’s Steampunk Symposium. Bishop Robert M. Price blessed the Esoteric Order of Dagon’ s new San Pedro chapter, and Brother Darrell Schweitzer kindly granted permission to pilfer from his unholy hymnal.
