This Aslan statuette, with a beard made of tentacles, probably wouldn’t fly with fans. (AI art)
Tag: H. P. Lovecraft
Read what C. S. Lewis Read
(Lewis Bits and Pieces)
The Librarything site (of which I am a member) has a section for the books read and/or kept in personal libraries by famous writers, and C. S. Lewis’s is here. There’s 44 pages to it, each page hosting 50 books… so yeah, there’s a lot, especially of history, natural history, religion, and philosophy. But taking …
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park [Review]
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park World concept by Trevor Roberts Begun 2019 This is a different kind of review as it’s not for a book, movie, or game, but a shared concept world. The Mystery Flesh Pit is the creation of Trevor Roberts, a concept artist and writer who started playing around with the idea …
Children of the Elder Things, or Echinoderm Horror
As I talked about here, H. P. Lovecraft’s Elder Things were such a unique creation both of their time and for SF in general that their caliber was not duplicated for many years. There were echoes of them in the BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) of the lurid SF pulp covers of the 1930s through the …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/30/22: Shunned Locations (Lovecraft IV)
Miskatonik University may be the most beloved of Lovecraft’s imaginary locations. This Ivy League college, known for its library of occult books and daring expeditions, lies near a river of the same name which runs through imaginary Arkham, Massachusetts, * which Lovecraft based on Salem. He even drew his own map of the city to …
The Art of the Elder Thing (Part III)
In this post I’ll examine Elder Thing depictions done in different media and styles. This is an Elder Thing stripped down its basic elements: starfish head, wings, cucumber body, five tentacle legs. I’m guessing it’s a petroglyph painted on some exposed shale rock, which since has been desecrated by bird poop. The creator of the …
The Art of the Elder Thing (Part II)
In Part II of this series I’ll be taking a look at the Elder Things interacting with their natural environment — either the snowbound Antarctica of At the Mountains of Madness, or their titanic cities of long ago. This illustration of the creatures shows them checking out a ship that has been stuck in the …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/23/22: Shady Characters (Lovecraft III)
Humans in Lovecraft’s universe did not fare very well. They were transformed into monsters or disembodied brains, driven mad by forbidden knowledge, or became cannon fodder against ancient gods. That’s for the male humans. Female humans fared better. Mostly, by keeping out of his stories. But when they appeared they were witches, or the mothers …
The Art of the Elder Thing (Part I)
The Elder Things are one of Lovecraft’s crowning creations, an exercise in speculative biology that also includes the Yithians (The Great Race) and the Mi-Go, also known as the fungi from Yuggoth. These trifecta of beings stand the test of time even today of what an alien intelligence could be like. Lovecraft based his creatures …
The Happy Couple
“With these tentacles, I thee wed…”