The Taint and other Novellas By Brian Lumley

The Taint and other Novellas By Brian Lumley

This is a collection of novellas sent in the world of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a master of macabre horror. His writing is often called "cosmic horror." H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by Arthur Machen a writer of macabre stories.

The stories in the novellas for the most part follow the pattern of the stories in Lovecraft's works. This collection is focused on the Cthulhu mythos, stories about strange and terrible beings from other dimensions and the far stars. The elements of fear to the point of madness, monstrous slimy octopoid things, forbidden occult tomes, shadowy places at the edges of this world, and places too horrible to imagine are in these stories.

There is a real sense of nameless dread. Brian Lumley does this well. He has written a wide variety of horror books. His main hero is the occultist Titus Crow who prevents dark things from entering our world from the dreamlands and the Cthulhu mythos. Lumley has a website at
http://www.brianlumley.com/

The first story is a story about the god of the winds who bears a son in the frozen north. The story is called Born of the Winds. This is a story where everyone even the hero dies in the chill.

The Fairground Horror is a story of greed and folly. Hamilton Thorpe acquires a collection of terrifying antiquities from his mad brother. His greed blinds him to the increasingly terrible things happening around him. He is warned but does not listen and succumbs to a gruesome death.

In many of the stories, the protagonists are given chances to quit what they are doing, but they do not due to their own personal failings or curiosities.

The opening story, The Horror at Oakdeene is about a man studying strange psychological cases in an insane asylum. He himself becomes drawn into the madness of the patients and eventually after experiencing something unspeakable becomes a patient himself.

All of these stories have the terrible guttural language of things that came before man. There are short dark poems and reminders to not name the things which dwell in the dark.

The Taint is the feature story of the volume. The Deep Ones who themselves are often fishlike monstrosities have acquired the science of genetic engineering and have learned to pass themselves off as normal men. One of their number leaves Innsmouth and has two children, one human looking and one deformed and piscine. The story is excellent.

Lord of the Worms is the story of how Titus Crow, Brian Lumley's main hero becomes a master magician and defeats a maggot infested, evil, ancient wizard.

Rising With Surtsey is the story of a man who becomes obsessed with books about old ones. He reads fiction and occult books about Cthulhu and slowly turns into one of their priests. He ends up killed by his own brother.

The final story is The House of the Temple. It is the story of an accursed family, The McGilchrist's. An inheritor goes back to destroy his old ancestral home and goes mad in the process.

This is an excellent collection of novellas. If you like horror, especially cosmic horror you will enjoy this collection. Cthulhu, an octopoid alien monstrosity features in the background of many of these stories sitting in the bottom of the ocean in sunken R'lyeh. These stories have a strong suspense element to them, they are not just go and fight the monster. They are reminders that there are things which we should not see and places and knowledge best left alone.

Bob Eggleton did the cover art for the book. He also did several small internal illustrations; most of these are about an inch and a half acros, a skull with tentactles, a winged octopuss, and a monsters eye. Bob Eggleton has an art blog here: http://bobsartdujour.blogspot.com/ / (Bob's Art of the Day)

Classic Thoughts

Poe's Grave at Westminster

There is a new collection of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction , H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction. The tome
collects all 68 of H.P. Lovecraft's Stories. I think it is something which we should definitely get. Jonathan Carroll also has a new book, The Ghost In Love. I rather enjoy Jonathan Carroll's writing.

To start the day, I am getting a poem:

Where Once Poe Walked by H. P. Lovecraft

Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,

Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;

Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,

Arched high above a hidden world of yore.

Round all the scene a light of memory plays,

And dead leaves whisper of departed days,

Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.

Lonely and sad, a specter glides along

Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;

No common glance discerns him, though his song

Peals down through time with a mysterious spell.

Only the few who sorcery's secret know,

Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.

Right now, I am sitting at the computer at my local library. I took a short walk up the hill to the library. It was very cold outside. Still, I need to walk every day if I am going to lose more weight. I returned the single book I took out last time.

Today I picked up a few more books to read. The first book is a mass market paperback, Necropath, A Bengal Station Novel by Eric Brown. The book intrigued me because it on the blurb it said there is an evil alien cult. Evil alien cults in science fiction are very campy and often entertaining.

I also picked up two book on negotiating. Things have been a little sticky here and there when talking to people at work. I have to be careful. I picked up, Guerrilla Negotiating Unconventional Weapons and Tactics to Get What You Want by Jay Conrad Levinson, Mark S.A. Smith, and Orvel Ray Wilson. The Guerrilla Marketing series is very popular at our library in the business section. I also picked up Teach Yourself Negotiating by Phil Baguley. Teach Yourself Negotiating looks like a basic outline of the process of negotiating.

It is comfortable and warm in here, while it is very cold outside.

I am back this afternoon. I have finished reading The Taint and Other Novellas by Brian Lumley. One of the most interesting aspects of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos are the occult books which drive men mad. A lot of them are purely fantastic creations with malevolent intent. This is a chart of what is real and what is false in the mythos chronicles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos_miscellaneous_books

Some people actually believe that some of H.P. Lovecraft's fictional horror books are true. People are quite gullible with these kinds of things. It is easy to cook up nonsense and sell it as something truly nasty. It is not particularly benevolent. A few of his fake horror books are being sold as real occult works. This is a nice article from The Straight Dope debunking the truth of his made up books. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1934/was-h-p-lovecrafts-necronomicon-for-real

There is also a Miskatonic University Library in H.P. Lovecraft's books. Being a librarian, I find it rather fascinating. It is in the fictional town of Arkham in Massachusetts. It is headed by the heroic librarian, Dr. Henry Armitage who defeats the Dunwich Horror, a short story by Lovecraft.

Truman Capote A Christmas Story

Truman Capote, 1959

One of the friends of the library is a storyteller. She did a trial run for a program of reading stories for adults. She read the short story, A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. It has a ghostly quality to it which I found quite applealing. She read for about an hour. She mostly reads to elders, often in the nursing home setting. http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/capotechristmas.html

This morning, I spent a bit of time with a colleague designing a brochure on services available at our library. It will take up quite a bit of time to do it right.

I also spent some time going through Baker and Taylor's Paperclips which is a catalog of mass market paperbacks available through the distributor. It is going to be rolled into Forecast in the future which is the monthly list of forthcoming titles from Baker and Taylor.
http://www.btol.com/pub_details.cfm?id=30

The reorder list of titles which were damaged is done as well. Today was a productive, but very predictable day again. I did not get any chance to do any weeding today.

On the way home, I read some more of The Taint and Other Novellas by Brian Lumley. It is a collection of Lovecraftian stories. I don't want to spoil it by commenting on the stories until I have finished reading all of them. There is the constant reminder of "cosmic horror", or that we are mere tiny things in the immense darkness of the universe. H.P. Lovecraft considered himself to be primarily a poet. The Fungi From Yuggoth is his long work. It is a long, strange, and frightening poem.
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/library/stacks/literature/lovecraft/poetry/fungi.htm

Lovecraft was supposed to have gotten his idea for Cthulhu from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, The Kraken:

The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Good Morning, Manga Sixty Years of Japanese Comics by Paul Gravett

H.P. Lovecraft and his Wife Sonia Green.

Good Morning

Two books came in for me to read yesterday, The Taint and Other Novellas by Brian Lumley. This book is printed by Subterranean Press which is a specialty horror publisher. They print nice affordable copies of quality horror, science fiction, and fantasy titles. http://www.subterraneanpress.com/ . The other book is a mass market paperback, Dead To Me by Anton Strout.

I was a bit tired on the train this morning, so I did not do any reading. Last night, I tried to take a break from doing my short yoga session and my body rebelled. I did it so I could get to sleep.

This morning is not too bad, I did some more work on my reorder list. I am discarding the books as I compile the list. Things are fairly smooth right now.

Today was very typical. I weeded a lot more books today. I also made several phone calls. I am trying to get a local organization to do a presentation on protecting your home from foreclosure for local homeowners. I think I might have a local agency lined up.

You might call today rather inane. I had one of those absolutely normal conversations that say absolutely nothing. I was talking about the merits of having a little black address book. It was uttlerly typical. I'll probably pick up a new one for work tomorrow.

Manga Sixty Years of Jpanese Comics by Paul Gravett

On the way home, I read more of Manga Sixty Years of Japanese Comics by Paul Gravett. This book definitely is for adults. There are some pictures which aren't for children. I could never really understand the idea of Shonen Ai, books for teenage girls about pretty gay guys in high school. Just as odd to me is the lolita style of manga with highly sexualized young girls. These are not things which we can buy for our public library in America that readily.

A while ago we had some problems with men looking at Sailor Moon on the internet. There is something a bit creepy about it. It is not typical for Americans. There are some cultural differences which make some of what would be fairly innocent in Japan to be rather odd in the United States. A comic like Princess Knight by Osamu Tezuka which features a girl who dresses as a boy to pass as a knight wouldn't be that readily accepted in the childrens room which is what it is written for.

Although, The Rose Of Versailles looks like something we might get for the adult room. It is about a cross dressing woman in the time of Marie Antoinette. We keep Ranma 1/2 in the adult section, although it is really for teens because of the comic story of water turning the character from a boy into a girl then back.

There is a decent section on sports manga, something which I could never really get into. The boxing manga, Tomorrow's Joe is featured prominently in the section on sports manga. I really haven't read that much sports manga. Although, we did buy a few issues of Harlem Beat, a basketball manga.

There are a number of manga which are shown which we already have, Maison Ikkoku, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, Akira, Vagabond, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Black and White which we already have in our library. I think I want to read Parasyte. I have not read many horror manga.

In a way this book was a trip down memory lane. It reminded me of the anime cartoon I used to watch with my friends when I was a teenager, Robotech, as well as the classic anime , Space Cruiser Yamato.

The illustrations are beautiful, full of action and color. Look through this book just for the illustrations. Although, there are some sexy comics in the book, there are no tentacle monsters.

I think the book is a nice survey of quality titles from the beginning of manga. If you want to learn the basics of what manga is, this title would be a good title to read. The copyright on the book is 2004, so manga is much more popular and varied now. The cover has a picture of Astroboy on it.