At The Mountains of Madness film script reviewed

I just came across this review of a slightly old version of the script for Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella. Read the review and weep quietly to yourself as you realize a great story built entirely on atmosphere and the protagonist’s lack of comprehension is turned into a standard Hollywood monster-chases-people movie.

Happy Birthday Howard Phillips Lovecraft

In honour of Lovecraft’s 120th birthday today, you should go listen to The Haunter in the Dark as read by Andrew Leman, part of the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast.

Lovecraft the spectral realist

Lovecraft has one again become bedside reading for me. I found this quote the other night in “The Shadow Out of Time” and thought I’d share:

Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature?

I love it.

The Nameless City

In honour of H.P. Lovecrafts birthday today, I give you “The Nameless City” (Note: There is much Lovecraft to be found at WikiSource):

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see..

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.