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Lovecraftian webzine by the

NUEVALOGIA DELTENTÁCULO

Special Issue

- English Edition -

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La Estela de Luveh-Kerapt Special Issue English Edition, nº 2. Termidor 2007.Lovecraftian webzine by the Nueva Logia del Tentáculo (NLdT).Director: Henry Armitage (Eulogio Ga. Recalde). Collaborators: Sean Branney, Andrew Leman, Daniel J. Gall, Miquel Rof, ÀngelSvoboda, Tyndalos (Carlos Blanco), Cyrus Llanfer (...) and Ebenezer Holt (AntonioBlázquez).Editor: Ebenezer Holt.

web: dreamers.com/logiaforo: gritos.com/logiae-mail: nuevalogia_lovecraft@hotmail.com

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Cover. Tormenta sobre Providenceby Ebenezer Holt .....................................1

Talk about their Projectsby Andrew Leman y Sean Branney ...............3

The rediscovery of the frontierby Daniel J. Gall......................................5

Plate XIIby Cyrus Llanfer ......................................8

DemoniosComic by Miquel Rof................................9

Galeones de Lengby Ebenezer Holt ...................................12

Lupo Valpurgisby Ángel Svoboda ..................................13

The picture in the houseComic by Ebenezer Holt.........................14

Contraportadaby Tyndalos ..........................................23

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On July 13th 2007, in Theatre Banshee, we have performedthe play "Power": Nick Dear's new witty and sophisticated tale of therise of history's legendary Sun King comes to the Banshee July 13.Thrust upon the throne of France, young Prince Louis learns whatit takes to wrest power away from his aristocratic courtiers. Harshlessons in the politics of money, sex and power pave the way for aprince to become one of the world's greatest (and spectacularlyexcessive) monarchs. This humorous and wicked play reminds thatthose who would weild power must be prepared to pay the price.

It's set in the court of King Louis XIV of France, and it's a verydifferent sort of play for us. It seems to be going well. I am part ofthe stage crew for the first two weekends, so I haven't actually beenable to watch it myself, but it sounds good from behind the scenes.

In terms of Whisperer, things are moving along, although moreslowly than we had originally intended. We're still working on thescreenplay and hope to have it locked up soon; these always seemto take far longer than we would like.

In early June we made a trip to Vermont and Massachusettsto look for locations. We saw some amazing places, including theactual environments where Lovecraft set the story: the West River,Brattleboro, and many others. We were able to locate a number oflocations that should work very well for us in terms of filming. We'llbe shooting the Vermont portion of the story in several small towns

Andrew Leman y Sean BranneyTalk about their Projects

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in the mountains of Vermont. Part of the movie also takes part atMiskatonic and we looked at several locations which could work asthe university. It looks like we'll end up shooting some at SmithCollege in Massachusetts and Southern Vermont College inBennington, Vermont, and the combination of the two schoolsshould make for a great Miskatonic.

Our plan was originally to go to New England in August andshoot our exterior scenes. We decided though that it would makemore sense for us to start shooting our interior scenes first here inLos Angeles. So we'll be working on those through the fall and win-ter and then we'll take our cast and crew to New England in thespring when the snow melts. (Assuming that there's snow!)

We are still in the early phases of production design, talkingabout the Mi-Go, their alien technology, miniatures and puppets,and other aspects of the film. We've got most of the crew from TheCall of Cthulhu on board for this project. When we made The Callof Cthulhu, we didn't really have anything else to do but work onthat movie. These days though, the HPLHS is a bigger operation andwe have to invest a lot of time and effort into running the businessso things aren't moving as quickly as we'd like.

Now that our newest play is up and running, Whisperer movesto the front of the line again and we expect to get a great deal doneover the next six weeks. Hopefully we'll be ready to begin shootingin the early fall and embark on the grand voyage that is the makingof a Lovecraftian film.

Your friends, Sean and Andrew

by the H. P. L. Historical Society

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It was in 1935 that Howard P. Lovecraft first traveled beyondthe Mississippi and into the West. He had an ominous artifactwith him, bearing the signs of great and mighty Cthulhu. In Texashe visited the home of friend and colleague Robert E. Howard, andtogether the two set out to consult Clark Ashton Smith, anotherprominent member of the Lovecraft circle, in order to shed somelight on the nature of the artifact.

Unfortunately, that particular voyage happened only infiction (1). The real Lovecraft never made it further west than NewOrleans, which he visited in June 1932. This would be the grea-test distance he ever put between himself and the small circlearound his hometown Providence in which he spent most of hislifetime. Lovecraft's life unrolled almost exclusively in NewEngland, and the same goes for his fiction. Other American wri-ters of the 1920s and 1930s would routinely bring their protago-nists to Europe, or they would take them deep into the streets ofthe American metropolis (2) - Lovecraft, on the other side, re-dis-covers the dark of the New England hinterland and there installsa new frontier of civilization on which he stages many of his stron-gest stories.

By the time Lovecraft was at his most productive, the fron-tier had already been, more or less officially, closed. Over centu-ries it had been the most important site of American history. As

they moved further out into the West of the continent, each gene-ration of settlers would extend the frontier concept, carrying theirnotion of civilization ever deeper to new frontiers. In 1893 then,American historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously observed(3), in response to a census report, "the closing of a great historicmovement." The continent was explored to its borders, the fron-tier had vanished: if American civilization would henceforth makeany serious progress, it would have to be overseas.

Not so for Lovecraft. He was aware of the problematicimplications of technological progress, of course, and occasionallyfaced its horrors in his prose, for example when he has his demonscientist Herbert West work a bloody trail on the battlefields ofWorld War I. Often, however, he would move his characters into

ByDaniel J. Gall(Hug the Shoggoth)

Bamberg University (Germany) http://hugtheshoggoth.wordpress.com/

The Rediscoveryof the ffff rrrr oooo nnnn tttt iiii eeee rrrr

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most traditional areas of the American homeland, there to disco-ver the horrors that all too optimistic writers of history would for-get. In short, he re-invented the New England frontier territory, asthe Puritans had known it, and re-established an experience ofthe American site as endangered and fragile as that of the Puritansettlers who had witchcraft, magic, and other deviations from thebarely dominant culture always just lying in wait in the middle oftheir colonial society. Only decades after the Arbella had landedthe Puritan settlers in Massachussets, in 1630, colonial societywas in grave dangers and the settlers had to invest their time intoexiling the newly arisen dangers. Heresy and witchcraft had to beexpelled from the community, so as not to confuse the Puritanbody of believers. Charged with the former of these, famous rene-gade theologian Roger Williams left Massachusetts and came tofound Lovecraft's native city, Providence. Witchcraft, on the otherhand, had been around even since the 1630s, and reactionsagainst it finally mounted to what became known as the SalemWitch Trials (1692): an exercise of colonial power that would killdozens of people. Puritan life at the frontier would be a communalexperience, locking people together in a rigid moral and ethicalcode to secure the survival of the community.

Lovecraft acknowledges these traditional frontier values in theopening paragraphs of his 1920 story, The Picture in the House(4), but gothicizes and turns them into a hotbed of horrors, unle-ashed, as the story will tell, in a cannibal excess. He turns hisback here on more traditionally gothic sites - like Rhine castles -and dispatches his narrator as an explorer into the backwoods.The frontier is very close to the heart of civilization - the narratoris on a daytrip by bicycle and cannot be gone more than a fewdozen miles - but it is systematically fenced off and to be reachedonly by "remote, devious, and problematical" (p. 35) roads, or rem-nants of roads. A conventional sense of place and geography isuseless out there in the wild where things bear an organic imprintof evil, as "honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travelersso slyly and hauntingly" (p. 35). Despite his misgivings against thesite, the narrator has the explorer's fascination for the unknownother and devotes a lengthy paragraph to his description of thecannibal resident of the unwholesome building he has taken refu-

ge from the rain in. At once majestic and shabby, the old man isthe noble savage that the narrator-colonizer has been looking for,and interestingly enough he resembles the natives depicted in thecopy of Felipe Pigafetta's Regnum Congo (The Kingdom of Congo)lying on the table, in that both share an uncanny white-ness (theNew England cannibal has a towering white beard, obviouslycovering most of his face and torso, and bloodshot, blue eyes) and,of course, their cannibalism.

For a short, playful moment, the cannibal accepts the narratoras colonizer and hears him give an ad hoc translation fromPigafetta's Latin, then however grows into a position of power overthe narrator. Turning away from the written word and on to theillustrations, the old man explicates his fascination for the bloodytheme of the volume, especially for the ominous twelfth plate in it,an illustration by Belgian artist Theodore de Bry which shows anexplicit battle scene as well as a cannibal butcher at work. Thefascination for the bloody scene has, for the old cannibal, anobviously strong sexual component (5). He is rambling on in a"shocking ectasy" (p. 41) and assumes the narration in an intru-sive way. The naïve and childlike joy that the narrator wondersabout quickly turns into a cannibal lust that the narrator cannotcounter. He will henceforth be a silent listener to the old man'sever more explicit and sexualized confessions to his cannibalism.

"What d'ye think o'this - ain't never see the like hereabouts, eh?When I see this I telled Eb Holt, 'That's suthin' ta stir ye up an'make yer blood tickle!' When I read the Scripter about slayin' - likethem Midianites was slew - I kinder think things, but I ain't gotno picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it - I s'pose 'tissinful, but ain't we all born an' livin' in sin? - That feller bein'chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at 'im -[…]" (p. 40)

The Puritan belief in an original sin that every human sharedin is still echoed by the old man, but he no longer seeks remediesfor it: the biblical scripture (or scripter, as Lovecraft puts it herein a fake Yankee accent) will not satisfy him, nor will the otherPuritan classics that he has standing, obviously unread, on theshelf, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and CottonMather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Out in the woods, at

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the first frontier the Puritan settlers met originally, their project ofcolonizing the American site and making it a moral example to theworld fails and is here turned into a gory exercise of necrophilesexuality. Almost as in an answer to the reprobate morality, thescene is resolved, strikingly, not by any intervention of the narra-tor, but by divine intervention. Some instance - maybe theChristian God frustrated with the perversion of Puritan ideals -has finally enough of it and destroys the house with a "titanicthunderbolt of thunderbolts" (p. 42).

It remains unclear how and why thenarrator would escape that blast. He origi-nally traveled the frontier country as a gene-alogist, then turned into a colonizer andfound himself overstrained with the task: thePuritan cannibal savage prevails and isextinguished only by force from above.Contrary to American tradition, the frontierin Lovecraft's world is indeed a final frontier.This is true in a geographical sense. Placeslike Dunwich, Innsmouth, or the cannibal'sresidence in The Picture in the House, lie atthe end of all roads, cut off from moderninfrastructure, no longer noted down onmaps, or even on street signs: just barelyoutside the city life, the terrain becomes oncemore inaccessible as it had been for the 17thcentury settlers. It is also true in a socialsense. The cannibal's pornographic lust forthe naked and violently disassembled bodiesin Pigafetta's book is far outside the expe-rience values of the narrator. The cannibal isthus erecting his own border - one of necrop-hile perversions - and has both the narratorand the readers drawn against it, unable toresist his gory excursions. The frontier inAmerican history traditionally saw Christianpreachers carry out the gospel into the wild.At Lovecraft's version of the frontier, the gos-

pel is one of cannibal excess: progress is no longer a possibilityand humankind devours itself - or would if not a force from aboveintervened with a thunderbolt in the very last moment. After all,one at least has to survive to tell the tale of the downfall of civili-zation.

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(1) Barbour, David, and Richard Raleigh.Shadows Bend: A Novel of the Fantasticand Unspeakable. New York: Ace Books,2000.

(2) See, for example, Ernest Hemingway's AFarewell to Arms (1929) or John DosPassos' Manhattan Transfer (1925).

(3) Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontierin American History. Tucson: TheUniversity of Arizona Press, 1986. 1-2.

(4) Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. The Call ofCthulhu and other Weird Stories. NewYork: Penguin, 1999. 34-42. All furtherreferences to the story are to this edition

(5) Namias, June. White Captives. Genderand Ethnicity on the American Frontier.Chapel Hill: The University of NorthCarolina Press, 1993. 88-89Mujer caníbal de Leonhard Kern, 1650

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Publicación electrónica de la NLdT

© 2007

web: dreamers.com/logiaforo: gritos.com/logia

e-mail: nuevalogia_lovecraft@hotmail.com

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