The joey Zone
ROY V. HUNT. A Retrospective. Edited by David and Daniel Ritter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: First Fandom Experience, 2021. 144 pp. $45.00 tpb. ISBN: 978-1-7332964-6-5.
1.
I gave posthumous thanks to Leah Bodine Drake in my review of her recent Hippocampus omnibus collection two issues ago of this journal. She made me aware of Denver, Colorado’s Roy Vernon Hunt (1914-1986) through her review of fellow Denver Scientifiction fan, writer, and publisher Stanley Mullen’s Moonfoam and Sorceries (Gorgon Press, 1948). Happily, thanks to David and Daniel Ritter and First Fandom Experience (“FFE”) (firstfandomexperience.org) gratitude may be extended while contemporaneous.
This organization is doing important research, giving Credit Where Due to all of us fans, Past, Present and Future, from nascent talents cultivating art or writing up to Dirty Old Pros. Although decrying this collection of Hunt’s as “not fully comprehensive”, one is hard put to imagine any volume possibly more engaging or worthy of being on a shelf next to similar collections of Bok or Finlay.
The reproductions in this artist’s monograph are impeccable, from the restoration of faint empurpled mimeographed fanzines to white gouache stipple (Voice of the Imagi-Nation and Fantasy Advertiser covers). There is a ten-page section describing the various technologies used to produce early fanzines, from offset lithography down to hectography, while a four-page chronological index of work featuring Hunt’s art rounds out the text.
2.
At the age of 26, Roy Hunt was married with two daughters. So it was a more seasoned individual who debuted as an artist and writer in this period of Science Fiction’s First Fandom, putting out The Alchemist, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1940). It featured his review of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others. One might say it was somewhat positive:
“…it is the most outstanding volume of bizarre classics to be published… You will entirely forget that you are reading printed pages as you are swept completely into the outer realms…Only here can you get the full meaning of horror and nameless things out of cosmic depths and of time’s abyss. Here in this volume all the splendours and marvels of far-flung galaxies are laid before your eyes in an unending pageantry of weirdness…in this reviewer’s opinion and that of many fans, Lovecraft excels Poe himself.”
Printed separately by lithography and bound in The Alchemist, Vol. 1, No. 4 (December 1940), Hunt’s “Star Spawn” was a further—this time visual—tribute to The Outsider, in particular Virgil Finlay’s beautiful dust wrapper. Finlay’s seminal piece was made up of collaged bits of work done previously by him for Weird Tales, The American Weekly and other publications. Roy’s is a complete original illustration delineating that “unending pageantry of weirdness.” The art ended up in the collection of one Forrest J Ackerman, who knew a good thing when he saw it…
Hunt’s first professional work was an illustration for Robert W. Lowndes’ Mythos tale “The Abyss” (Stirring Science Stories, February 1941). A non-traditional drawing of Cthulhu followed in the fanzine Starlight, No. 1 (Spring 1941), bearing more than a passing ancestral resemblance to Ray Harryhausen’s Kraken surfacing much later in Clash of The Titans (1981). Could Harryhausen, a confederate of early fans Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, have had access to this publication?
Roy designed a superb cover for the Third World Science Fiction Convention (The “Denvention”) in July 1941 as well as the cover and membership cards for the Fourth (”Pacificon”) held in Los Angeles (1946). Another non-traditional take on Cthulhu was done for the cover of Fanfare, Vol. 2, No.2 (February 1942). This was the first art by Hunt that this writer ever saw as it is one of his most reproduced works. Printed in an ichoric emerald ink, a “vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural” backdrop has Cthulhu in the foreground, IT’s general outline less anthropomorphic than usually depicted, possessing the crouching form of “a dragon… [with] a pulpy tentacled head” surmounting that. This version shows up again as a “bas relief” in Hunt’s illustration for Lin Carter’s “H. P. Lovecraft: The Books” (Inside, No. 16, September 1956).
Hunt’s two very different versions of The R’lyehian are further argument that there can, if not should, be a multitude of visions of “forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught”.
3.
While working as a curator and artist at The Colorado State Historical Museum in Denver, Roy produced a series of woodcut prints on commission for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). He would use this medium in fanac going forward. The highpoint of his woodblock art had to be the cover of the first issue of The Alchemist published after WWII (Vol. 2, No. 1) in August of 1946.
A photo of Hunt published in Stanley Mullen’s fanzine The Gorgon, Vol. 2, No. 1 (August 1948) shows him in front of his bookcase. You can make out the spine of John Coleman Burroughs’ dustjacket for his Dad’s Synthetic Men of Mars (1940—enthusiastically reviewed by RVH in The Alchemist, Vol. 1, No. 2, March 1940). Also on Roy’s desk is a studio portrait photo of the writer A(braham) Merritt, who was an extensive correspondent with the budding artist (“There’s nobody I’d rather have want my photo more than you.”—Merritt to Hunt, August 20th, 1941). Merritt’s side of the conversation is published in Sam Moskowitz’s A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool (Oswald Train, 1985). It is hoped that someone (FFE perhaps?) could find and reprint Hunt’s letters in this dialogue. Roy apparently lobbied for Hannes Bok, acting as an intermediary, for the job of illustrating Merritt’s The Metal Monster (1920), perhaps in a definitive edition: “Thanks for the offer on Metal Monster and full edition…I like the black and gold idea…” (Merritt to Hunt, May 11th, 1941).
We need to ‘hear’ Roy’s letters!
Like Bok, a fair amount of Hunt’s art for fanzines has an Art Deco style prevalent at that time. Roy did contribute a bibliography of Merritt’s work to the premiere issue of The Gorgon in March 1947, Covers for another ‘40s fanzine Le Zombie not only show what appears to be the use of a litho crayon for additional shading but the influence of Alexander King’s voudon tableaus in William Seabrook’s Magic Island (1929).
4.
Roy seemed foremost to be a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, beginning with his enjoyment of Hal Foster’s adaptation of Tarzan of The Apes in the Sunday newspapers. Hunt aspired to “study under J. Allen St. John [ERB’s main illustrator]…I would set about copying [pictures and colored jackets] diligently”. This is especially evident in Hunt’s own cover design and typography. After high school, he had worked creating handcrafted marquees for theaters. His lettering shows the clear influence of St. John’s titles for Burroughs’ dust jackets (Capital ‘T”s especially looking ‘sword-like’. Not to mention St. John’s iconic redesigned logo for Weird Tales.)—a bespoke hand drawn jacket for John Taine’s novel The Gold Tooth being the best example (and superior to the actual printed edition’s design from 1927). While doing his wartime service with the US Navy, Roy actually ran into his idol ERB who was then serving as a war correspondent.
Hunt also recounted meeting the screen’s first sound Tarzan, Frank Merrill, in ERB-dom, No. 21 (July 1967). His cover for the 80th number of that same publication is one of this writer’s new favorites: A profile of The War Chief, Shoz Dijiji, rendered in concentric hues of a Colorado sunset. It transcends the influences of other artists, being a definitive illustration for a Burroughs work (1927) that is purely Huntian. I remember when this fanzine came out in 1975, this writer was less receptive to its cover’s style, preferring something more…Frazetta-like? With age comes wisdom. The art of Roy V. Hunt became then more than just the sum of his influences—Lovecraft, Merritt, Burroughs, Finlay, St. John, etc.—achieving that rare alchemy of being an inspiration to those of us who come after him.
All of those book illustrations for Mullen’s Moonfoam and Sorceries which started this appreciation are reproduced fully herein, yet one now needs the totality of the actual published tome in its dark blue inked silver wraps. The quality of art and accompanying research is strong proof to anyone interested in great Old School fantasy illustration that they also need Roy V. Hunt. A Retrospective.
The joey Zone
ARS NECRONOMICA 2022: The Visual Divine of the Dark Cosmos, Here and Beyond. Providence, RI: AS220 Aborn Gallery. August 11-28, 2022.
The biennial art exhibition Ars Necronomica is both an independent entity and part of a continuing tradition begun in 2013 with the regeneration of NecronomiCon [Providence]. With The Lovecraft Circle (including Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and others), HPL has rightly “been acknowledged as the godfather to collaborative creative culture…in this tradition of collaboration” the art show set out to “honor the legacy and life of a literary iconoclast” [This reviewer’s italics on the quote from the 2013 exhibition’s Mission Statement]. The convention’s 2017 Memento Book defined this further: “Each installment is a chapter in a larger story—our curatorial perception of not just a Lovecraftian aesthetic but how we see weird art itself.”
This year’s fifth perception has been held in conjunction with the convention itself now looking beyond H. P. Lovecraft “to all the latest authors and artists who are now expanding the field of [The Weird]” with admission that many of them now don’t draw “any influence from Lovecraft” (MOTIF magazine, August 3, 2022). Only 19 of the 50 pieces in the exhibit were Lovecraftian, let alone directly using his fictions as a narrative base. Of the remaining number were, however, several deserving wall space in any showcase, of Weird or otherwise.
Abomination takes many forms.
Foremost among these was Alan Brown’s watercolor with gouache entitled “Magic Moves,” boasting a hand carved figural frame and colour juxtaposition that itself appeared to render line in three dimensions. A depiction of Grendel (from Beowulf) as The Hanged Man of Tarot (also a grim leitmotif in William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley), it was a welcome return of this artist’s work to Ars Necronomica after his last entry in 2017. Brown bears credit for much of the better art on successful early pressings by Cadabra Records, starting with The Hound and especially The Lurking Fear, with a member of the Martense clan perfectly defined for that LP’s inner gatefold sleeve.
Rhode Island inkslinger Maegan Lemay was clearly the breakout star of this year’s convention. Designing NecronomiCon’s official t-shirt (which was rumored to have sold out by Saturday of the schedule), she was also responsible for the poster of one of the musical concerts held as part of the festivities. The band Cirith Ungol—despite their Tolkien derived moniker—has also used Michael Moorcock’s Elric on their record covers and Maegan depicted the albino Melnibonean and Stormbringer handily with her strong sword, er—tattooing arm. Lemay’s style displays skill similarly found in the work of, say, Brian Bolland or even FINLAY, this being evident in her submission to Ars Necronomica “The Abyss”.
Notable other pieces on display included that by Nick Gucker; a darker than usual painting by one of the exhibition’s co-curators, Jennifer Hrabota Lesser, “Where the Black Stars Rise;” Matt Jaffe’s original for John Langan’s collection Children of the Fang; and two works by the unfortunately recently deceased Marcello Gallegos.
In order to truly see a thing, one must first understand it.
More Mythos than these was the art of Liv Rainey Smith, a Portland Oregon printmaker without whom Ars Necronomica would not be the quality show that it has been throughout the years. Whether in wood or linocut, she carves out bold lines that delineate true knowledge of The Arcane. “Through the Gates” revisits a deity Smith had summoned for the 2013 exhibition, the great subterranean toad god Tsathoggua. Liv’s imprint on our Scene is worthy of many editions—A geas then upon her that they have an eternal run!
Originals of other published work on display included Jason Eckhardt’s scratchboard of “The Alert” (The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft) and Josh Yelle’s triptych for the Robert W. Waugh collections put out by the publisher of this journal. Sculptors contributed more of this Lovecraftian based art, from Karen Main’s circular polymer clay leering entity “GYACK,” to Gage Prentiss’ “Lake Expedition Fossil Specimen #44”, a crinoidian inhabitant monstrous in size, to exhibition versions of molds by stalwarts Jason McKittrick and Joe Broers. One is in constant awe of all those working in this medium, making the indescribable tangible.
From what secret regions of astronomy or time, from what ancient and now incalculable twilight…it reached this South American suburb…
From the boulevards of Buenos Aires, the home of Borges (from whom these quotes are taken), we were honored to welcome as this year’s Artist Guest of Honor Santiago Caruso. His oeuvre epitomizes the legacy and future of what should be Ars Necronomica. Caruso has illuminated the writings of Dante, Kafka, Schwob and Lautréamont, his paintings for Los cantos de Maldoror (2016) being the standout (“Among the best I’ve seen”, wrote 2015 Artist GoH John Coulthart). Con attendees may know Santiago better from editions of Chambers, Bierce, Campbell or Pugmire including his art. For this exhibition, however, eleven watercolors were torn or razored (then fortunately framed) from a 2022 notebook—all of them illustrating the work of H. P. Lovecraft.
In 2015, ARS Necronomica had shown a handful of Caruso’s work, some done in monochromatic scratchboard. His current medium glowed with colours giving additional sustenance to sentient miasmas emanating from below (“The Unnameable Cemetery”) or within (“The Witch House”—also used as the cover of this year’s Memento Book—it’s gambreled structure seemingly high lit ala director Richard Stanley). This reviewer’s favorite selection was “ ‘Til The Kingsport Cathedral” based on Lovecraft’s “The Festival”. The rolling sea and dark universe yawn upon another high house in the mist “gleaming out in the cold dusk” extending a spir’d finger towards “Orion and the archaic stars.” It is the Yuletide.
Yet more groundbreaking was another work illustrating “The Dreams in the Witch House.” Due to its deep incarnadined hues, it is difficult for even the finest photogravure to grant justice in reproduction to what was seen in persona: An accurate pictorial depiction of “the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex” obeying “laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos.” Santiago has accomplished no mean feat of taking us—to use the title of Fritz Leiber’s famous essay—through hyperspace with Brown Jenkin. This visual divination, along with his other ten offerings, have alone raised the bar on Lovecraftian as well as Weird art in general, going on from here into the beyond. A fuller (?) exhibition promised in 2024 may be possible, but no finer art can be perceived in our philosophy. We will not flinch in the hope of being proved wrong.
Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes.
The joey Zone
LEE BROWN COYE, Scrying Stones & Dolmen & Others: Chips & Shavings 1963-1964. Foreword by Mike Hunchback. Camillus, NY: Chiroptera Press, 2022. 78 pp. $36 tpb.
limited edition.
Scrawny and thin my dead come in
But looks are soon forgotten.
With respect to Ye Grizzled Shade, we can never unsee your art, Lee Brown Coye. The dermatology of a typical Coye (1907-1981) personage—revenant or living—is reminiscent of twisted sunbaked roadkill. His construction of architecture is all ingrown and fuzzy, the surrounding landscapes subscribing to a Wilmarthian permaculture. Lee’s influence can be deduced in superlative modern-day scratches with gleeful grue of GUCKER or the feathery shadows of FELTON. But there is only one COYE.
The cover of this newest Chiroptera Press offering is one of his most brutal table settings: “Murgunstrumm’s Work Room” from the title tale of Hugh B. Cave’s Carcosa collection of 1977. This wrapper belies its contents however—here be a quieter creep. Words etching a stillness unnerving:
Sometimes—minutes or hours later—a terrible silence woke him and he jumped from his chair. He looked at the clock. It had stopped and the tick sound was gone…The peepers had
stopped and though he could see the splash of rain against the window there was no patter. The kerosene lamp burned but dimly. The wind had gone down and he hung shivering in a vast nothing.
The eighteen stories comprising Scrying Stones are accurately described in the publisher’s prospectus as “less literary fictions than they are examples of American folklore” from “a time of horse drawn hearses and handmade coffins.” Coye could be properly classified therefore as a Regionalist, much like Lovecraft. Ten stories had been previously transmitted audibly in the Cadabra Record releases Where Is Abby? & Other Tales and Scrying Stones & Dolmen (2015 and 2018 respectively). These were read by Lee’s son, Robert Coye, who also corrected the texts in this volume before his death in June 2021. All had originally appeared as “Chips & Shavings” columns of the local Mid-York Weekly.
Four “Shavings” previously unseen or heard since original publication are: “The Black Dog”, a surprisingly sweet tale of a dog showing his owner where he should have been buried; “In Sight Fill My Soul”, a version of The Phantom Hitchhiker folktale, getting you to take her to a dance first; “Three Steps and About Face”, which describes the regimen of the ghost of a Continental soldier, albeit one only three feet high. Albeit just the mix of too many boilermakers with a dash of narrator; and “Spooked House,” being a standout melodrama not dealing in the supernatural, with but “little need to fabricate the morbid when reality was harsh and grim enough.”
The importance of this reprinted work is cemented by its title piece “Scrying Stones & Dolmen,” a set of correspondence between Coye and others in something of a roman à clef including “John Vedder” [Vetter]; “Anthony Davis” [August Derleth]; and “Andrew Rothman” [Rothovius]. This regards weird geologic and wooden constructs glimpsed in Central New York’s “Burnt Over District,” “a belt of territory which seems to stretch along the length of the Erie Canal and toward the west that has been productive of many strange cults and beliefs.”
Dead wood thus spoke to Lee Brown Coye and, as Mike Hunchback writes in his foreword, “he never stopped seeing those sticks in his mind, eventually drawing them over and over.” A treatise on the omnipresent crescent moons in those drawings remains to be conjectured. Karl Edward Wagner based a story upon this ‘conversation’–“Sticks” appeared in Stuart Schiff’s third issue of Whispers in 1974 (Here I might blasphemously proffer one of Stephen Fabian’s better illustrations appended to the yarn where this reviewer first encountered it, in the first Whispers anthology collection of 1977). In a blur, The Blair Witch Project (1999) culturally appropriated those twig-formed sigils. For that matter, the code in J. H. Watson’s treatise on the “Adventure of The Dancing Men” posits a runic predecessor.
The stories of Lee Brown Coye himself however will not only “live on through the long tradition of weird fiction small press adulation” but once read cannot be unseen. Nor in the posterity of print soon forgotten.
The joey Zone
ALLEN KOSZOWSKI, Dreams From The Dark Side. Introduction by Ramsey Campbell. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2023. 568 pp. $70 hc. ISBN: 9781613473207.
With it’s crimson-lit phantasmagorical dustjacket and matching top edge-painted signatures, this long overdue collection is a veritable visual Baedeker to the borderlands of horror and science fantasy, a fitting tribute to an artist who is a continual and vital inspiration to us all.
In 1986, one eye winked at me, the other was an empty socket. Out of the sentient stippled decay in the foreground of the cover to Joe Lansdale’s Dead in The West, this Old School Finlayesque approach by the illustrator, Allen Koszowski, definitely was not lazy art, being impressive in its myriad multi-dot universe.
I still have the tee shirt with a design by Allen that was also the cover of the Program Guide for the 2nd NecronomiCon in 1995, in those epochs held in Danvers, Massachusetts. Various monstrosities burrow through a copy of Alhazred’s holy writ and lurk behind the Revelations of Glaaki. There was an interior illustration by Koszowski for Guest of Honor Ramsey Campbell—they go way back. Meanwhile, yours truly got a Days Pass for working as a “go-fer” (some call that a “minion” nowadays) and had the “rough” assignment of hanging out and assisting at The Dealers’ Room—Eternal thanks to Marc Michaud for laying thet gease upon a humble scrivener!
Allen is one of The Three Musketeers of Necronomicon Press, which includes Jason Eckhardt and Robert Knox. Notable from that imprint was the cover he did for Josef Janzoon’s Final Diary Entry of Kees Huitgens (1995). It is a case of him successfully embracing The Surreal akin to his publishing mate Knox. Koszowski won The 2002 World Fantasy Award, the Gahan Wilson-designed Howard. A year later he himself was a GoH at World Fantasy and for that event did a notable portrait of Jack Williamson with his creations April Bell, Barbee in his true Smilodon form, and others, finally seeing print in this Centipede collection.
In 2013, as the Art Editor of The Program Guide for NecronomiCon Providence (The Next Generation), I had the honor of curating a new illustration of Wilbur Whateley by Allen Koszowski for publication.
*****
The first 25 pages of this book showcase portraits done for John Pelan’s single author collections he edited under the Midnight House and Darkside Press imprints. Thanks to Allen, this reviewer will be looking up work by Dick Donovan, Vivian Meik, and others. After these is the portrait of Lee Brown Coye we were proud to publish here first (Dead Reckonings No. 32). Wrapping up this section is the dustjacket for one of the works Koszowski justly rates among his best, for S. T. Joshi’s Sixty Years of Arkham House (Arkham House, 1999), depicting the many tomes billowing out of that seminal eerie edifice.
A back cover, superior to the fine front cover (also by Allen) in it’s striking simplicity, was that for James Van Hise’s Stephen King and Clive Barker: The Illustrated Guide 2 (1991): A fanged skull has each writer in an eye socket’s “reflection”—they being the eyes envisioning the macabre. Colored over in red upon publication, the detail shewn here is ever more evident. One of the standout pieces in this book is Koszowski’s illustration for “Queen of The Black Coast”, originally appearing in Van Hise’s Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard (1997). While the original printing of it in that volume was much larger, the range of greys done on coquille paper show up in greater detail here due to Centipede Press’ impeccable production values. A Howard fan should have this book on the shelf for this image alone!
Included in this volume is one of this writer’s favorite pieces by the artist, the cover for Hippocampus Press’ edition of Herbert S. Gorman’s 1927 novel A Place Called Dagon (2000). There is a whole series in Dreams featuring depictions of Cthulhu ITself (fitting)—the recent cover for Allen K.’s Inhuman #5 giving that Great Old One the true cyclopean dimensions.
*****
The early issues of the fanzine Midnight Marquee boasted some of Allen’s finest portraiture of film icons of fear and fantasti-film, such as that of Rondo Hatton from #37, its 25th Anniversary Issue. Another James Van Hise book was Serial Adventures (1990) presenting a superb wraparound cover featuring–In Glorious Black & White!—Lewis Wilson’s Batman, Victor Jory’s Shadow, The Spider, etc. Although the art is printed in this collection, I need to get the original book now as well—Koszowski Art is that good. Included in Dreams are a number of images seeing publication for the first time, a selling point if one was needed. Some feature depictions by Allen of the most interesting people with the most…worm eaten complexions. That said, this is not a fully annotated catalogue raisonne: A look at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (which in itself is incomplete!) proves that to be a production still many reproductions away from. An example of a piece missing in action is S. T. Joshi depicted in periwigged pastiche (May he always deport himself so!) of Virgil Finlay’s famous Lovecraft portrait on the cover of Classics and Contemporaries (Hippocampus Press, 2009). But anon for that. Thanks to The Artist himself for providing Credit Where Due on some of these pieces. “But I have been turning out a bunch of stuff…I can’t stop!”
More classics assuredly to come from someone who–may he long remain our contemporary!
The joey Zone
SAX ROHMER, The Whispering Mummy and Others. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2023. 295 pp. $20 tpk. ISBN: 9781614983798.
You know how dusk falls in Egypt? At one moment the sky is a brilliant canvas, glorious with every color known to art, at the next the curtain—the wonderful veil of deepest violet–has fallen: the stars break through it like diamonds through the finest gauze…
It has been a decade since these words were in legitimate print and they still shine like diamonds.
In 2013 Centipede Press published Brood of the Witch-Queen, a collection of fifteen short stories and Rohmer’s novel, Brood of the Witch-Queen. This collection, the twelfth title in Hippocampus Press’ Classics of Gothic Horror series, features the same stories as that volume lacking only the titular novel. The cover by Aeron Alfrey is a three-dimensional fever dream bearing a slight resemblance to W. T. Benda’s iconic design of The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).
Sax Rohmer (pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1883-1959) has resided for decades on this reviewer’s shelf alongside such writers as M. P. Shiel, Sapper, and Dennis Wheatley. Famous as the chronicler of That Most Honorable Eastern Physician, Rohmer neither originated “The Yellow Peril” trope (perhaps Shiel) or over extended stereotypes beyond their cultural shelf life (as much as Wheatley). Moriarty is more than matched by Holmes but Nayland Smith is a mere cypher compared to the charismatic Doctor. As with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan books however, this series is only a small part of the author’s total output.
Of the supernaturally infused novels S. T. Joshi mentions in his introduction, we should add Grey Face (1924) as worthy of revival, definitely using its original jacket depicting the title anti-hero’s hypnotic visage. What we have in this present volume are stories culled from Tales of Secret Egypt (1918), The Haunting of Low Fennel (1920), and Tales of Chinatown (1922). Sax is, geographically, all over the place, whether in London, Limehouse, the English countryside, or Burma. But his main port of call is Cairo. Saville Granger in the story “The Curse of a Thousand Kisses” is really just a stand-in for Rohmer. And the rest of us:
I had for many years cherished a secret ambition to pay a protracted visit to Egypt, but the ties of an arduous profession hitherto had rendered its realisation impossible. Now, a stranger in a strange land, I found myself at home…the only real happiness I ever knew—indeed, as I soon began to realize, had ever known—I found among the discordant cries and mingled smells of perfume and decay in the native city…it was the people, the shops, the shuttered houses, the noises and smells of the Eastern streets which gripped my heart.
Tales of Secret Egypt highlights the hubris of The Occidental which merits a role in comedy, more ofttimes, tragedy. Neither hero or villain, the self-appointed majordomo of this locale is one Abû Tabâh, “black robed, white turbaned, and urbane, his delicate ivory hands resting upon the head of an ebony came…a veritable presence…his eyes…like the eyes of a gazelle”. “The Whispering Mummy” has Tabâh and a negligible narrator help uncover the sleight of hand that is neither benevolent nor the sweet nothings murmured by a desert lich. Two outright weird tales, “In the Valley of the Sorceress” and “Lord of the Jackals” result in comedy and tragedy respectively, the first favoring Bast while the second engenders sympathy—certainly not for the main “protagonist” but the Lord of its title—Hayil Anubis!
Of the three Rohmer collections from which this material has been sourced, of most interest to readers is The Haunting of Low Fennel. Besides the aforementioned “Curse of a Thousand Kisses” (with its namedrop of William Beckford’s classic Vathek (1786)), is “The Master of Hollow Grange”. There is a great buildup of suspense in this story, only to have the author feint with the weak hand-off “That there were horrors—monstrosities that may not be described, whose names may not be written”! Although Joshi says “it’s supernaturalism is unconvincingly accounted for” this writer thinks the title story “The Haunting of Low Fennel” is a prime example of the writer at his most entertaining.
The employment of the stereotype of a blustering ex-military man is a characterization used in several Rohmer tales, in this case in the person of one Major Dale —“If Low Fennel is not haunted, I’m a Dutchman, by the Lord Harry!” Such comic interjections in these stories leaven the literal miasma of fear, as opposed to just annoying by juxtaposition. This miasma:
had the form of a man, but the face [was] not of a man, but a ghoul!…The chin and lower lip of this awful face seemed to be drawn up so as almost to meet the nose, entirely covering the upper lip and the nostrils were distended to an incredible degree, whilst the skin had a sort of purple tinge…
The dustjacket of the Pearson first edition of Low Fennel features this ifrit, albeit with less Pickmanesque physiognomy. The narrator deduces that the haunting is
something older than the house, older perhaps, than the very hills…something as old as the root of all evil, and it dwells in the Ancient British tumulus…Barrows and tumuli of the stone and bronze age, and also Roman shrines, seem frequently to be productive of such emanations.
Major Dale will have none of this folk horror:
Then is the place haunted by the spirit of some uneasy Ancient Briton or something of that sort, Addison? Hang it all! You can’t tell me a fairy tale like that! A ghost going back to pre-Roman days is a bit too ancient for me, my boy—too hoary, by the Lord Harry!
Tales of Chinatown’s 1949 Popular Library edition boasts a superb Rudolph Belarski cover depicting “The Hand of the Mandarin Quong”. This book also contains Rohmer’s finest short story, “Tcheriapin” with its fatalistic narrative of revenge employing “magic” somewhat prefiguring that in A. Merritt’s Burn, Witch, Burn! (1933). Reprinted many times – Virgil Finlay’s illustration for its appearance in Famous Fantastic Mysteries of July 1951 being notable – the plot of this tale need not be elaborated upon, suffice to say the dark beauty of its telling has a denouement as “hard as a diamond”. If there is one reason to add this Hippocampus collection of Sax Rohmer to your bookshelf, this and accompanying arrangements in adamantine are requisite to full celebration of The Black Mass that is classic horror.
Kathedral Event Center. June 2-3, 2023
The Nightlands Festival was one of the most singular events ever attended – an artistic quest through darkened sonic spheres only navigated by that surest vehicle — which is the single human voice. The dream of Jonathan Dennison, this “Celebration of Literary Nightmares” ran just one weekend this past summer. Dennison is the founder of Cadabra Records, an imprint of Spoken Art founded in 2015, an amalgam incorporating soundscapes with art and scholarship to complete each vinyl artifact. Held at The Kathedral Event Center—which operated as a Catholic church in a previous incarnation—the mid-century architecture was witness to a truly different sort of religious experience…
An Artists Alley reminiscent of the best pre-2013 NecronomiCons included Dave Felton, Matthew Jaffe, Jeremy Hush (purveying copies of Ekphrastic Beasts, a creature compendium for gamers which he contributed to), Paul Romano and Josh Yelle. Also vending was Matt Bartlett (whose work was performed in a pre-show reading midweek) and Mike “My Middle Name is HORROR” Hunchback (editor of Pulp Macabre). There were festival exclusives available from Cadabra and its publishing extension Chiroptera Press. Fittingly, a chapbook was created to mark the proceedings by Felton – “The Festival” – which was put into hands gratis of that inestimable illuminator.
The introduction of S. T. Joshi to the crowd opened the festivities. His presence alone was reason to attend this weekend as it has been far too long since he was a listed participant in any convention on The East Coast. Joshi gave a verbal foreword to the first spoken word performance, that being M. R. James “Count Magnus”. With a projection of Matt Jaffe’s painting for the Cadabra release (CADABR-91 [2022]) behind him, Robert Lloyd Parry, arguably THE James impersonator, gave a nuanced reading of “Magnus”, with any pauses and occasional silences in his delivery only adding to a perfect whole.
Next up was Jon Padgett delivering Thomas Ligotti’s “The Clown Puppet”, to these eyes apparently from memory (CADABR-86 [2022]). Jon (aka Dr. Locrian), a veritable Ligottian Evangelist, was a revelation himself. If you ever have a chance to attend one of his initially hilarious cum insidiously harrowing interpretations, do so with no hesitation. British character actor Lawrence R. Harvey followed with his fine rendition of Edogawa Rampo’s (A Japanese writer whose name is a takeoff from Poe) “The Human Chair” (CADABR-20 [2018]) accompanied by Slasher Film Strategy. His voice cut through the shadowed rafters of Kathedral like a knife out of a sheath.
After that was the first of the two panels scheduled in the Festival, this initial conversation being on “The Craft Behind Cadabra”. This writer did cameo interviews with Padgett, Harvey, Jonathan Dennison, and the next performer on deck, Andrew Leman of The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. They all described the process involved in creating each Cadabra product, starting with Dennison and how he chooses which particular voice to go with each record followed by the other panelists describing their initiation to the label.
Andrew concluded Friday’s schedule with a presentation of “The Lurking Fear” (CADABR-005 [2016]), giving a haunted account from the very first paragraphs. Even after the end of the first day, this reviewer remained gripped, enraptured, yet
I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the
terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in
life.
Mention must be made of Chris Bozzone, a soundtrack composer who started working with Cadabra in 2017. His contributions to our group pilgrimage provided the cohesiveness to the entire weekend’s aesthetic.
A repeat of Friday’s lineup doing equally strong material was the only way Day Two of the Festival could compare. Our love of horror and literature did not go unrequited! In some cases, performances even surpassed in intensity. Lloyd Parry’s reading of Cadabra’s upcoming release of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” held one increasingly spellbound up to that last cadence of “turning over and over on the waves like an otter”. Jon Padgett effortlessly managed another star turn with “Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel” (CADABR-97 [2022]). Laurence Harvey previewed an upcoming label release which includes Baudelaire’s “Litanies to Satan” (one of the high points of the Festival). Credit Where Due was paid in the second panel “The Art of Cadabra Records” including Felton, Jaffe, Yelle, Hush and Romano with additional teasers for a Cadabra release of “The Rats In The Walls” (a 4-lp boxset!) and Chiroptera Press publications of Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary and Crampton, with art by Paul Romano and Dave Felton respectively. Andrew Leman brought us all home at the end of the night – to Dunwich that is.
If the idea of sitting through two days of Spoken Word is still hard for you to visualize, let me accentuate: it just sang. This choir in the Kathedral – voices in performance and the response of attendees, all testifying to The Weird Aesthetic as one – made visible that dream that we will hopefully wake to again somewhere in years to come.