Category: News

Personal / Website News

New Episode of H. P. Lovecast Podcast

A new episode of our monthly HP Lovecast Podcast is online!

Angela Sylvaine returned to the podcast to talk about her debut novel, Frost Bite. The episode can be streamed at our Buzzsprout website, via the embedded player below, or through your podcast app of preference.

HPLCP Transmissions – Ep 26 – Angela Sylvaine and Frost Bite – H. P. Lovecast Podcast

Later this month we will be discussing Mimic 3 on the podcast, concluding our year tradition of diving into the Mimic franchise (Listen to Mimic and Mimic 2).

McFarland Horror Sale

My publisher, McFarland, is having a sale this month on their horror titles. If you use code HALLOWEEN2023 during check out you’ll get a 25% discount on the horror tiles. An entire list of eligible titles can be found here.

Numerous books I’ve been a part of are included in this sale. If you want to pluck something up I’ve either co-edited or contributed an essay to, now is a good time!

• Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern
• Horror in Space
• The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone
• Uncovering Stranger Things

Publishing Recap

Below is a recap of my publishing endeavors so far in 2023.

Published in February, this collection contains my essay “Dance or Dēcēdere: Gladiator and Industrial Music Sampling.”

Vernon Press Product Page

Published in May, this issue of Weird Tales contains my essay “When the Stars are Right.”

Weird Tales Product Page

Published in late March, the first issue of the zine Footage Fiends, contains my essay “Analisi Della Cosa: Found Footage in Caltiki and Italian Theater Going Practices.”

Limited to 50 physical copies.

Order via Patreon.

Published in early August, Dark Dead Things #2 contains my essay “Correlating the Contents: Mimetic Desire in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.”

Order via Dark Dead Thingswebsite.

Miscellaneous Tidbits

CFP: The Mummy Edited Collection

Michele is teaming up with Sean Woodard to do an edited collection on The Mummy series. They have a CFP listed at UPENN, but I am also sharing a copy below.

Editors: Michele Brittany and Sean Woodard

Contact email: mummybookproject@gmail.com

Abstract Deadline: December 15, 2023

Chapter Drafts Deadline: June 15, 2024

Essays sought for an edited collection focused on Universal Pictures’ The Mummy franchise.

The 1999 Universal reboot of The Mummy, starring the indelible duo of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, remains a tentpole of ’90s popular culture and cinema. Not only did The Mummy launch two sequels, a spin-off series, and a reboot, but it has lived on as a cult film, loved by fans for its mixture of horror, action/adventure, and humor. The film has also developed a strong meme culture on social media — one of the most viral examples contains a photo of a car bumper sticker proclaiming: “Honk if you’d rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece ‘The Mummy’ starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.”

While academic research has been focused on various releases of The Mummy (1932, 1959, 1999, and 2017), there has not been a singular scholarly text devoted to the film franchise. The recent “Brenaissance” in Fraser’s film career and the film’s anticipated 25th anniversary in 2024 make it an appropriate time to celebrate and re-evaluate the film.

The purpose of this edited collection is to place The Mummy into a cultural and theoretical context, as well as critically analyze the franchise, its connections to other genre films, and its continued influence.

We seek proposals for chapters that approach the subject matter with theoretical concepts that will appropriately meet the rigorous expectations of an academic work, but through a prose style that shall be accessible for both an academic audience and a general readership.  

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Resurgent interest in Brendan Fraser/“Brenaissance”
• Stephen Sommers as an auteur
• Representation of Egypt in popular culture and early filmic representation
• Eastern mythology/culture/religion
• Exoticism of non-western cultures
• Post/De-colonialism 
• Heroic representation
• Body horror
• Eco-horror/Ecocriticism
• Gender representation
• Toxic depictions in film
• Queer/LGBTQ+ representation
• Meme/GIF culture
• Psychoanalysis
• Generational nostalgia 
• Element of music/film scoring
• Genre hybridity
• Film cycles/reboots/retcons (such as The Scorpion King, The Mummy animated series, Universal Classic Monsters, Hammer Studios, Dark Universe, etc.) and related adventure/archaeological-driven films (such as Ark of the Sun God, The Sphinx, The Librarian franchise, etc.)

Please send abstracts of 300 – 500 words with a working title and five (5) keywords, accompanied by a short third-person author bio (100 words max), to mummybookproject@gmail.com as a Word document. Final essays should be 6,000 – 8,000 words in length, including endnotes and bibliography, and be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. The collection is being considered by a leading academic press.

Proposed Timeline

• October 1, 2023 thru December 15, 2023 — Call for Papers
• January 15, 2024 — Notification of abstract acceptances sent to authors  
• January 15, 2024 thru June 15, 2024 — Book chapters drafting period
• June 15, 2024 thru July 15, 2024 — Initial editorial review of submitted chapter drafts
• August 1, 2024 thru October 1, 2024 — Double-blind Peer Review Period
• October 1, 2024 thru November 15, 2024 — Contributor revision period
• December 1, 2024 — Final editorial acceptance decisions
• December 1, 2024 thru January 15, 2025 — Layout design, indexing, and proofing stage
• January 15, 2025 thru February 15, 2025 — Copies of chapter proofs sent to contributors for copyediting review
• March 1, 2025 — Final manuscript submitted in hard copy and digital formats to publisher

Editor bios:

Michele Brittany is a writer, editor, podcaster, and artist. She edited James Bond and Popular Culture and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Horror in Space: Critical Essays on a Film Subgenre. She co-edited Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern: Critical Essays and co-hosts H. P. Lovecast podcast with Nicholas Diak. She lives in Glendale, Arizona.

Sean Woodard (MA | MFA) is a PhD candidate in English at University of Texas at Arlington. He also serves as the Assistant Editor for Global Insight: A Journal of Critical Human Science and Cultureand the Film Editor for Drunk Monkeys. He has contributed chapters to the edited collections Journeys Into Terror: Essays from the Cinematic Intersection of Travel and Horror and Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad. His research interests include horror cinema, the American West, psychoanalysis, fairy tales, and film scoring.

Autograph Stuff

Here are some of the autographed treasures I shared on social media these past two weeks.

First up is my copy of Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. signed by longtime Wood collaborator, Conrad Brooks.

In the latter 2000s I contacted Brooks via his website and he reached out to me via phone. He actually thought I was a lady, probably because of my less-than-masculine voice. He let me send him all my Ed wood stuff for him to autograph (this book included) and he also sent me back some of his movies he directed himself and released via Alpha Video. He was a charming dude and we talked on the phone a few times, but I lost contact with him after we moved to California. I was sad to find out he died, one of the last vanguards of singular era of exploitation films.

Next, following along with classic exploitation, is The Complete Night of the Living Dead Film book, signed by John Russo.

Back in the latter 2000s Michele and I lived in Federal Way and our comic book shop was Spy Comics owned by Richard Spychalski. Richard was the man and we go to his shop every week to pick up our orders we made from Previews and stay well after the shop closed, talking with him and petting his dog Ollie. The bulk of my comic book collection was bought from Richard during this time.

This book popped up as something to order through Previews. The book is actually from 1985. I suspect Avatar Press, which was publishing some NOTLD comics, probably got a box of these books from Russo who has them sitting in his garage and asked for the publisher to sell them. Slap an autograph on them and a certificate of authenticity and voila! Anywho, I liked NOTLD well enough so I ordered this book with one of my previews orders and Richard was able to get it in for me.

I really, really miss having a local comic book store.

To go with my Mike Nelson autographed copy of Plan 9 From Outer Space I shared on 8/27, here’s my copy of Carnival of Souls signed by the MST3K alumni.

I bought this way back in early 20004 while living in University Place. This was an era I was hungry for more MST3K stuff, and at the time only Mike Nelson was doing anything like it. This version of Carnival of Souls was the first time I ever seen the cult film. It’s a great one – a very slow burn one.

#HorrorGameOctober

For #HorrorGameOctober I’ll be (well, am currently) playing two games: The Evil Within and The House of the Dead Remake.

There’s a theme to these two games: they both have lenticular covers!

Michele bought me The Evil Within as a yuletide gift way back in 2015. I played it for a bit, but something stopped me from getting too far in it. Something wasn’t jiving? I got distracted by another game? I’m not sure, but here I am 8 years later giving it a legit go.

The House of the Dead I used to play when I was a teen in the arcade at the Three Rivers Mall in Kelso. I never got far. The game was for sale dirt cheap on Amazon this summer so I plucked it up. I was able to beat it a few times, something I would never think I would do! The game made me feel very nostalgic. I’m going to give it a few more play throughs this month and score a few more Xbox achievements.

I am going to try and fit in a proper write up about these two horror games before the month ends.