Happy Birthday Howie!

Tomorrow, August 20th, is Howard Phillips Lovecraft's birthday.

(I'm posting this a day early because some of us have to work in the morning!)

I'm way too lazy to do the math, so somebody figure out how old he would have been and let me know.

Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, at 9:00 a.m. in his family home at 194 Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry in America back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.

More HERE.

And if you haven't done so yet, treat yourself to a viewing of The Call of Cthulhu, released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society!

The Red Tree

Do you like Neil Gaiman? Clive Barker? Poppy Z. Brite? H.P. Lovecraft? Good, then you'll like Caitlin Kiernan too. Caitlin's been around for a while, churning out works of primal horror such as Threshold, Silk and Low Red Moon.  She also wrote one of my most favorite Lovecraft inspired short stories: "A Redress For Andromeda" which you really should dig up if you can manage it.

Now she's back with The Red Tree, the story of Sarah, a grieving author who abandons Atlanta for rural Rhode Island, renting a broken down house out in the boonies. When she finds a half finished manuscript in the basement, left behind by the previous owner (who later killed himself) she becomes obsessed - just as he had - with a humungous red oak tree growing on the property. Is the tree Evil Incarnate, or is Sarah just losing her mind? Or both?

I'm not finished with it yet, but I gotta tellya - I have a hard time putting it down at night. It's so melancholy and autumnal (despite its summer setting) and yet crazy intense and downright freaky. Perfect reading for the upcoming Halloween season.

Church of Cthulhu

Holy Holy... Holy SHIT!!! My sanity!!!