Category: HP Lovecraft

“They say foul things of Old Times still lurk in dark forgotten
corners of the world. And Gates still gape to loose, on certain
nights, shapes pent in Hell.”

This is my favorite Robert E. Howard story, and in my opinion his best  Lovecraftian one, so I was delighted when I heard that Dark Adventure Radio Theatre was doing an adaptation of it. Although a downloadable version was available earlier, the CD with props finally arrived just before the holiday weekend.

In The Black Stone, an unnamed first-person narrator, acquainted with von Junzt’s occult book, Unaussprechlichen Kulten*, as well as the mad poet Justin Geoffrey’s “People of the Monolith,” takes his vacation in the location where the Monolith, or Black Stone, stands; this is in the mountains of rural Hungary, on an open meadow plateau above a tiny village with the intriguing name of Stregoicavar: the Witch Village. The age of this mysterious stone object is disputed; some claim a fabulous antiquity and puzzle over the strange markings upon in.

At Stregoicavar, the protagonist not only examines the Black Stone for himself, but learns something about its true age, the barbaric rites performed there on Midsummer nights long ago, and the reason why Justin Geoffrey went mad after his visit here — more than he really wanted to know.

The HPL Historical Society takes this tale and builds upon it, adding the usual spirited period dialog to enliven the audio drama and bestowing upon the nameless hero not just a name, but a character which DART fans are already familiar with: Charlie Tower.

This is not, however, the millionaire playboy adventurer we know from The Whisperer in  Darkness, Brotherhood of the Beast, and Dagon: War of the Worlds. He’s a younger man, freshly scarred and disenchanted by the earthly horrors of the first World War.

In the summer of 1919, young Charlie (played by Sean Branney) is hanging around Europe after the war in pursuit of various decadent pleasures. We find him in Berlin in a nightclub named Himmel und Hölle –Heaven & Hell — sipping champagne and chatting with an underaged Marlene Dietrich, when he hears a poet read Geoffrey’s “People of the Monolith.”

Continue reading “The Black Stone”

The Horror in the Museum was a story  that H.P. Lovecraft either co-wrote with Hazel Heald, or ghost-wrote based on an idea of hers (her version of events versus his). It appeared in Weird Tales coincidentally around the same time as the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum came out; the two have similar settings, although the “Horror” is a bit more horrible.

Like The Curse of Yig, this is one of those Lovecraft stories I know that I’ve read, but can’t say I’m extremely familiar with. In some ways, that gives it an advantage over stories like Rats in the Walls or Haunter of the Dark that I practically know by heart; I first listened to this Dark Adventure Radio Theatre audio adaptation without expectations or close comparisons to the original text, although I did  give the text a quick refresher read online after listening to it a couple of times.

This adaptation does stay fairly close to the original story, with the addition of one new prominent character and a bit of a twist at the end–neither of which is unusual for Dark Adventure. It also has one or two interesting things to say about achieving immortality through works of art. Not a unique sentiment, but in this particular case…

The audio drama begins with two Americans from Chicago visiting Madame Tussaud’s famous Wax Museum in London. Madame Tussaud’s is not the Museum of the title, where the Horror occurs, but it does introduce our two protagonists to it.

Steven Jones is an entrepreneur looking for a terrific new show to bring to the States. He isn’t very  impressed with the historical waxworks he sees, but his publisher friend and potential business financier, Eleanor Patterson*, notices that the queue for the Chambers of Horrors is very long.

Then they see one wax figure that does intrigue: Dr. Dee, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, astrologer, occultist, and reputed magician. In Lovecrafty circles, Dee is best known for his Latin translation of the Necronomicon. There’s something in the lifelike look and craftsmanship of this particular figure that leads Steven and Eleanor to inquire about the artist. They are given directions to the more obscure waxwork show of one George Rodgers.

Continue reading “The Horror in the Museum”

The Curse of Yig was a collaborative effort of H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop.  Bishop provided the idea of a pioneer in the Oklahoma Territory who was terrified of snakes. Lovecraft recrafted this basic concept, making it a psychological horror made manifest–and incidentally adding a new god to his pantheon: Yig, “an odd, half-anthropomorphic devil of highly arbitrary and capricious nature… not wholly evil, and was usually quite well-disposed toward those who gave proper respect to him and his children.”

But those foolish enough to harm the children of Yig (that is, snakes) could expect to feel the wrath of his terrible curse.

The text is online at https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cy.aspx

The story is one that I’d read some years ago, but not one of the Lovecraft stories that I could say I was extremely familiar with. I mean, I knew who Yig was when I first saw that Dark Adventure Radio Theatre was planning to do an adaptation of The Curse of Yig for their next audio drama, but could remember very little about who had been cursed, or why.

Listening to this new DART adventure before re-reading the text, I’m struck by how closely this adaptation has stuck to the structure of the original story, and I make note of the changes the DART guys have made to allow for the very different sensibilities of people nearly a century later.

Continue reading “The Curse of Yig”

The Horror at Red Hook was written in 1925, during that period when H.P.  Lovecraft was living in Brooklyn after his marriage to Sonia Greene. New York City came as a culture shock to this retiring Providence boy, especially given the diverse ethnicity of immigrants who came from all over the world. The story expresses something of his suspicion of foreign people who didn’t look like the kind of people he was familiar with, enacting odd customs and speaking in languages he didn’t understand, as well as reflects his general, personal unhappiness with his surroundings.

Lovecraft’s original story is about a man named Thomas Malone, a New York police detective who has been sent to recover in a rural part of Rhode Island after a traumatic experience involving the collapse of a brick building and the deaths of a number of people in the slums of Red Hook. He can’t even abide the sight of a brick building.

In this Dark Adventure Radio Theatre adaptation, Malone (voiced by Sean Branney) is under a psychiatrist’s care during his enforced stay in the country. His story is told as part of his psychotherapy; the doctor urges him to speak of the horrors connected to that experience–everything he’s tried so hard to forget.

Malone tells the doctor that he wouldn’t understand. He lacks imagination.

“To hint to an unimaginative man of a horror beyond all human conception, a horror of houses, and blocks, and cities diseased with evil dragged from Elder worlds…  I’d be pacing inside a padded cell instead strolling country lanes.”

But of course the doctor insists on hearing it, and Malone’s story of what happened in Red Hook unfolds in flashback.

Continue reading “The Horror at Red Hook”