For the month of October, we’ve had to flipflop out flagship episode with our Fragments episode. In this month’s Fragments episode we discuss Robert Eggers’ folk horror film, The Witch (2015).
Thumbnail by Michele Brittany
This episode can be streamed at the HP Lovecast Podcast Buzzsprout website or via your Podcast application of preference.
Bram Stoker Campaigning
For the first time ever, I am going to throw my hat into the ring for the Bram Stoker Award process. I have an essay called “Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft Through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth” that is eligible for the short non-fiction award. If you are a member of the Horror Writers Association that is recommending works and are curious about my essay, it can be read at Academia dot Edu.
AnnRadCon CFP
The CFP for the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference is now complete. It will be put online on Monday and I’ll be posting it at this website as well.
General Neo-Peplum News
Follow Me Down Table Top RPG
Drowning Moon Studios has started a Kickstarter campaign of their TTRPG called Follow Me Down.
The RPG is based on the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice and the Kickstarter page describes it as such:
Follow Me Down is a tabletop roleplaying game for two players [and is] divided into eight sections, called Books of the Dead, where the characters journey through different parts of the underworld in search of one another. It is designed to be GMless, with each player portraying two roles during the course of the game. In each Book, one player takes on the role of The Fates (in what would normally be considered the GM role) while the other player portrays a character based on the archetype of Orpheus or Eurydice. The two players trade off, alternating who is playing their character and who is playing The Fates, until they reach The Gauntlet of Hope and Regret to determine how their story ends. There is a final scene between Orpheus and Eurydice, called the Denouement, which reflects upon the journey the characters have taken, and their relationship to one another at the end of the game.
This past week we published not one, but two episodes of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast (due to timing: 4th Sunday and last day of the month).
Episode thumbnail by Michele Brittany
For the Fragments episode we took a look at the 1997 Guillermo del Toro’s film, Mimic. This episode can be heard on our Buzzsprout website or via your podcast application of preference.
Episode thumbnail by Michele Brittany
Next, our Transmissions episode also went up. This is our interview episode, and we talked to three folks, all three who are alumni of the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference:
Farah Rose Smith on their short story collections Of One Pure Will
Rahel Sixta Schmitz on their debut non-fiction book The Supernatural Media Virus
Kevin Wetmore on their newest book, Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters
This episode can also be streamed at our Buzzsprout website or via your podcast app of preference.
Exotica Moderne Cover Reveal
Issue 13 of Exotica Moderne will be released soon! House of Tabu has done a cover reveal:
This issue will contain my review of the book Cuban Cocktails. The pre-order page for this issue can be found at the House of Tabu website.
Of note, my article for issue 14 is in the can! It will be an interview with pinup model Miss Corsair Debonair. The interview is done and sent in, just waiting on photos to go with the article. That issue will be released in early 2022.
Issue 15 I hope to finally do my write up on Caltiki: The Immortal Monster.
Academic CV
Updated the About Me page to include a link to the newest version of my academic CV.
General Neo-Peplum News
Aegean RPG
Stoo Goff has a Kickstarter going for an interesting neo-peplum table top RPG called Aegean RPG.
The Kickstarter description is as follows:
Aegean is a tabletop role-playing game about a group of mythic heroes building a new, free city on the shores of the Aegean Sea. There are neighbouring cities to trade or war with, monsters to kill, gods to appease, deceptions, negotiations and bloody skirmishes.
The world of Aegean is an ancient Greece that never existed – a mix of mythology and classical history. The gods visit the earth and converse with mortals, granting gifts of magic and life to some and fear and terror to others. Fearsome monsters roam the lands and seas making every journey an adventure. Strange creatures, some mortal, others half-divine, can be found in the wilderness. These centaurs, nymphs and tritons teach, harass or ignore humans as their whim takes them.
The polis—the city and its surrounding lands—is your home and where your loyalties lie. Your polis is a recently founded colony on the coasts of the Aegean Sea. The leader is called an arkhon, a democratically elected ruler after the Athenian fashion, rather than the hereditary king that many cities still use. The polis sits in a precarious position, between many similar neighbouring states who may wish to trade, ally or make war.
Your character fits somewhere in this world, between the capricious force of the gods, the wilderness and the structure of the polis and its ambitions.
Gladiator 2 Being Written
An article at IndieWire says that Gladiator 2 is current being written and will be ready to hit production after Ridley Scott’s Napoleon movie is made.
Afterlives Podcast
Egyptologist Kara Cooney has started a new podcast in September called Afterlives.
It can be streamed on Spotify or your podcast application of preference. Newest episode talks about being an academia, so extremely helpful!
Recent Aquisitions
Figure I would jazz up my news my showcasing any new neo-peplum texts I pluck up. While at a Zia’s Records last week I happened upon two metal releases: Warkings’ Revolution and Ex Deo’s The Thirteen Years of Nero.
I’m enjoying both, especially the adventure metal sound of Warkings. That album is interesting in that in a true neo-peplum fashion, it’s blending genres/histories together: Vikings, Spartans, Templars, etc.
Mists and Megaliths is Welsh dark fiction author Catherine McCarthy’s second short story collection after her 2019 collection, Door and Other Twisted Tales. Released in the Spring of 2021, Mists and Megaliths contains ten stories of McCarthy’s distinctive voice that draws from personal anecdotes and Welsh folklore. This is a unified, singular collection, with stories featuring coastal and maritime settings, with nods to mountains, mining, and rock formations, and a reoccurring theme of dealing with loss, be it personal or abstract. McCarthy eases readers into her stories by providing introductory commentaries along with definitions for Welsh vocabulary that appear in the text.
Many of the stories in Mists and Megaliths pair well with each other, with overlapping themes and settings. For example, “Cragen” and “The Ice House” are complimentary stories that deals with the abductions of ones daughter by malevolent forces. “Cragen” takes a patriarchal perspective that is sorrow in tone while “The Ice House” is from the matriarch perspective and has a vengeful element. Two different perspectives on similar subject matter, and both executed marvelously.
“Jagged Edges” and “Coblynau” are another set of stories that pair well thematically. Both are from the perspective of an old man, reliving or remembering signifiant moments of their past. Of the two “Coblynau” inches out as the superior story, and that is because of how multifaceted and finely crafted it is. “Coblynau” contextualizes itself within a historic event: the Aberfan avalanche disaster of 1966 where a landslide from a pile of mining remnants (a spoil) flooded the town, destroying a school, and killing many folks, mostly children. The story’s perspective is from a venerable former miner who is committed to a retirement home. “Coblynau” has shades of Joe R. Lansdale’s Bubba Ho-tep in that both stories are critiques on how society treats their elderly by not recognizing their voice and putting them in an institution to keep them out of sight. As in both stories, the main character knows bad things are going on (a mummy vs. another spoil that threatens the town) while the employees of the retirement home refuse to listen. Both stories also have a creature-feature aspect as well, Bubba Ho-tep with its mummy and “Coblynau” with its titular impish creatures that help out miners when left some food. “Coblynau” is the most ambitious and complex story of Mists and Megaliths.
“Retribution” is perhaps the most “Lovecraftian” story in the anthology. A tentacled monster is imprisoned under a church in a mining town that starts to become corrupt. The town’s church is overtaken by the mine’s operators, who rapidly grow prosperous and more malevolent, their power possibly linked to the shackled creature, who like the character in “Coblynau,” is kept out of sight. Cinematically, the story has folk-horror aspects as found in the Dan Stevens film Apostle which is also about a town with an entity lurking within.
“Lure” is the most experimental story in Mists and Megaliths in that it is told through the second-person perspective. As you, the reader, an intrepid fisher-person, read the story/fish in a lake, a horrible backstory unfolds as you, yes you, did something unspeakable to a younger lady. The story is interesting in that it is, theoretically, a gender neutral tale, so it breaks down expectations of what type of person commits (sexual-assault) crimes.
Mists and Megaliths is not all doom-n-gloom, however, with “Two’s Company, Three’s a Shroud” being a lighthouse of comedy in the darkness. An older husband finds himself dead after eating a cholesterol-laden breakfast and discovers that his afterlife is mainly confined to his coffin, atop another dead soul’s coffin. Embracing an indifferent, matter-of-factly, perspective to the afterlife as found in movies such as Beetlejuice and An American Werewolf in London, “Two’s Company..” brings on the chuckles as the story’s protagonist attempts to make friends with his ghostly neighbor, but his boisterous personality is at odds with his neighbor’s more refined demeanor. Of course, the story ends on a note that there are things much worse than death when you have to spend eternity with someone that drives you crazy. “Two’s Company..” gets special mention for also dropping cameo mentions of older darkwave and gothic music acts, such as Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins. A reminder that the cool kids who listened to cool kid music eventually get old.
Sporting a fun alliterative title and containing distinct, focused stories, Mists and Megaliths is an excellent representation of McCarthy’s style and author-auteur elements. For American readers, the Welsh voice present in the stories adds an aura to the stories, given them a charm not readily seen in stories written stateside. Fans of L. T. C. Rolt and Arthur Machen will definitely be intrigued by this collection.
Notes
Michele Brittany and I interviewed McCarthy on our HP Lovecast Podcast, specifically on episode 2 of our Transmissions show, which aired May 31, 2021. The episode can be streamed at the HP Lovecast Buzzsprout website or your podcast app of preference.
