Kenneth Hite

American History Reaches Its Natural Culmination

2009-07-09T03:37:15Z

... in the form of The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated, idiot guidance by me and graphic illustration by the redoubtable Shepherd (Stagger Lee) Hendrix. I've seen the art, and I wrote the script, but I haven't gotten my author's copies yet, so this will have to be but a bare and insubstantial plug.

* As a side dish, then, I offer you The Cimmerian's meaty and richly sauced review of The Day After Ragnarok. For those not familiar with the pre-eminent home of Robert E. Howard discussion on the Web, I offer you The Cimmerian.

[RECIPE] Too Good For Facebook

2009-07-04T21:12:29Z

Every so often, I'll post an abbreviated menu to Facebook, usually while in a state of self-satisfied repletion. But this recipe is what it says up there on the tin. In honor of picnics in honor of the Fourth, here's the best deviled egg recipe I've ever made, by far:

DEVA'D EGGS

12 eggs, hard-boiled, halved, yolks separated

6 TBSP mayonnaise
1 1/2 TSP curry powder (we're dangerously low on Penzey's Maharajah blend, and I may have to devote an afternoon to cloning it. Or break down and buy another jar)
3/4 TSP garlic paste
1/3 TSP celery salt

1/2 TSP salt (or more to taste)
1/4 TSP fresh ground black pepper (or more to taste)
1/2 TSP lemon juice (or more to taste)

Dump your yolks in a big glass bowl, and mix in the next four ingredients. Then comes the slightly tricky bit with the salt and pepper -- don't over-salt the things; over-peppering them is more forgivable because the curry powder will give you some breathing room there. Once you've got the saltiness where you want it (or just a little below that, ideally), add lemon juice to brighten the flavor -- there will be a kind of hole in the top notes that slowly adding lemon juice will fill. If you over-lemon it, you can add another TSP or so of mayo to smooth it back out in the middle register.

Then take your little spoon and moosh the filling back into the hard-boiled whites, making sure to accidentally split one or three of them so that you have to eat the failures. (I usually have mollpeartree do this part -- only the willpower of someone who's quit smoking is up to the task of filling deviled eggs. If it were me doing it, this dozen egg recipe would result in about five eggs left over for company.)

One could, I suspect, make a slightly lighter version of this with olive oil in for the mayo, though you'd want to cut the amount by half or more, and you'd risk making it too sweet -- maybe some chili pepper would cut through that, but by now, you're talking about a whole different recipe, really. So I'd just stick with the mayo, myself.

Twenty Tales

2009-07-03T09:57:54Z

Presented for discussion and disputation; the order is approximate, and the titles are not final. But they're damn close.

10 Best Stories About Cthulhu Not By H.P. Lovecraft

“Nethescurial,” by Thomas Ligotti
“Worms of the Earth,” by Robert E. Howard
“The Deep Ones,” by James Wade
“The Terror From the Depths,” by Fritz Leiber
“Recrudescence,” by Leonard Carpenter
Strange Eons, by Robert Bloch
“Only the End of the World Again,” by Neil Gaiman
Move Under Ground, by Nick Mamatas
An Evil Guest, by Gene Wolfe
“Final Draft,” by David Annandale

10 More Best Cthulhu Mythos Stories, Not By H.P. Lovecraft, Not Necessarily Involving Cthulhu

“Sticks,” by Karl Edward Wagner
“Than Curse the Darkness,” by David Drake
“Details,” by China Miéville
“The Franklyn Paragraphs,” by Ramsey Campbell
“Black Man With a Horn,” by T.E.D. Klein
Résumé With Monsters, by William Browning Spencer
“The Seven Geases,” by Clark Ashton Smith
“The Courtyard,” by Alan Moore
“The Perseids,” by Robert Charles Wilson
“The Thing That Walked on the Wind,” by August Derleth

Columbus Daze

2009-06-30T04:07:31Z

Back from Origins today, and between my aching feet, piled-up work, and general sleep-dep, tonight was all about lying around with mollpeartree and watching Wanted. Oh, Angelina Jolie -- how you taunt me.

But even better than Angelina Jolie in tight leather on the top of a speeding El car in Chicago shooting around corners was winning the Best Non-Fiction Work of 2008 Origins Award for Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales. This was especially gratifying, as it's my first Origins Award for a project that was substantially my work -- although I have no delusions about righteousfist's crucial role in the book. And, indeed, I also owe many thanks to you kind folks, for reading the Tour in its initial form in these pixels, commenting, improving those posts with suggestions, and (speaking of suggestions) suggesting I collect the blog Tour into a book in the first place. So thank you all very much.

You can see a short film by wordwill on the Award here. It's a delicate little tone poem of a piece, and speaks volumes of the quality of his friendship (and his narrative skill, even in such glancing, almost calligraphic form). Given that wordwill and jtidball were also nominated for their superb ludoparemiography Things We Think About Games, I can't tell you how much it means to me that he put this together.

I was also deeply touched by my warm reception at the "What's New With Pinnacle" seminar, which Shane Hensley generously invited me to attend. I am not used to being applauded for thanking potential customers and making a potential product announcement. (Not even for anything specific, just: "Day After Ragnarok won't be my last Savage Worlds setting.") Savage Worlds is a great game, and if the audience at that seminar was any indication, it breeds great fans. And there was a song. Two songs.

Let's see, what else? You saw righteousfist and the game playwrights at the fantastic Burgundy Room, where I think the highlight this year was probably the Roasted Lamb Lollipop with Lemon-Fontina Enriched Risotto, Black Walnut Pesto and Red Pepper Relish. Unless it was the Asparagus, Pattypan Squash, Baby Zucchini, Raddichio and Smoked Mozzarella Ravioli with a Madeira Reduction.

I got some more half-price Osprey Books, did a podcast and a bit, helped out at the Hero Games booth (and as always, many thanks to dtwatts for his hospitality at booth and hotel), and chatted with a host of good friends. I love this convention, and after four successive lunches at North Market (with Jenni's Ice Cream for dessert each time), and a pint mojito or two with rockin' yukon_jack, I love this city.

Can't wait to go back next year.

Putting the "Art" Into "Antarctic"

2009-06-17T10:33:32Z

* Have I mentioned my next children's book here? I think I may have -- it's The Antarctic Express, a mashup of At the Mountains of Madness and The Polar Express. Well, you can see a lot of the art for the book, in various stages of completion, at the blog of the book's artist, Christina Rodriguez. I have been extraordinarily fortunate with the artists on these books, I gotta say.

* Speaking of art, I've got Mike Perry sketches from Day After Ragnarok to show off, too.

* Also, the energetic Aron Head at the blog Ideology of Madness (where, "If we geek about it, we speak about it") has not only posted an interview with me, but is hosting a contest to win a copy of The Day After Ragnarok in PDF and print. There's some Nathan Furman art from that book there, too, if you're unsated. The giant is particularly neat, methinks.

* And I don't think I've mentioned the map in these pixels yet, have I? The final version has a few tweaks and modifications in it (Yes, I know "Okhotsk" is spelled wrong...) but this should give you a nigh-finished taste. Plus, I do so like linking to maps at the end of a bunch of asterisky plugs.

No Time For Love, Doctor Jones

2009-06-09T15:43:09Z

It's been a busy fortnight here at the Ambipartisan Manse. We've had visits from the delightful schlafmanko, my Mom, the Un-Maker, and the Best Plumber in the World. We've had frustratingly fewer visits from the Muse, as it's been catch-as-catch-can on the writing time around here. All of which takes its toll on LJ posting.

I am not insensible of the pain this causes you good people.

So here are the titles of the posts I would have posted over the last fortnight or so, if this June weren't shaping up to be so very much like my average May -- namely, horribly busy and over-committed.

Actually, Paramount Marketing Division, That Pretty Much Was My Father's Star Trek.

Today, I Am Canadian (Letting people who care know that I'm on Facebook. So far, I'm still resisting Twitter.)

Tori Spelling's Cthulhu Actually Kind of Horrific, But Not In The Way You'd Think

Watch Alien Raiders Now Or The Kid Gets It

With Up, Pixar Demonstrates An Uncanny Ability To Blend Tone While Maintaining A Powerful Thematic And Narrative ... Squirrel!

Ragnarok Available At the Touch of a Button

2009-06-02T19:37:02Z

Which is to say that I know I owe you good people many, many posts, but I'm happier than I can tell you to announce that my "Conan the Barbarian: 1948" meets "Quatermass and the Giant Snake" Savage Worlds setting, The Day After Ragnarok, is finally available from Atomic Overmind.

The print version will be at Origins, we devoutly hope, but surely you all are the kind of savvy, Web 2.0-enabled consumers who will rush right out and get it in PDF.

So, A Month Ago, I Was In Paris

2009-05-28T06:35:45Z

What with one thing and another, I never did post about Actual Paris here, did I? (Although Montreuil, where the convention was held, is RightNext to Paris, so much so that we ate in Paris on the Friday night by dint of walking five blocks. So "I know a little place in the 20th." Anyhow...)

Monday was Walk Around In Paris day, with the able aid, guidance, and companionship of gbsteve. Our initial target was Nicolas Flamel's house in the Marais, somewhere or other. We alit at the Bastille Metro stop, where they don't have the Bastille any more, of course, and started walking. The first statue we ran across turned out to be that of Beaumarchais, who combined a busy career as a playwright with illegal arms smuggling to America -- if you're looking for Frenchman Zero to thank for our independence, he's the guy, since he shipped us arms before we had any powder mills up and running. So I thanked him, and off we set. It took a good bit of a while to find Flamel's joint, and I think we were both thinking very fond thoughts of Baron Haussmann as we navigated the literally medieval street layout. We finally found it, but Nicolas and the Mrs. had stepped out in 1418 or so, and the brunch was 18 euro, so we moved on.

From there, we set out toward the Seine and I gawped at a river I knew better than any other river I'd never seen. The only comparable experience I've ever had -- of lengthy, culturally reinforced deja vu -- was the first time I went to Los Angeles. Even New York hadn't made such an unexpected impression on my optic nervous memory as Paris had, apparently. From there we angled back east to the Ile St-Louis, stumbling over the Pompidou Center unawares-like, which is not something I'd recommend. It actually looks far worse in context. Given how much of Paris looks like the Belle Epoque, having something that looks like a pile of HVAC spang in the middle of it is just an insult to everyone concerned. Even if it were an Academie du HVAC, much less an art museum.

On the Ile, we learned that the old Conciergerie prison, the one that held Marie Antoinette, was the only thing open in Paris on a Monday. No doubt to thwart the treacherous Habsburgs with their habit of escaping on Mondays. But we took a pass and crossed over to the Ile-de-Cite, where Notre Dame was open on Monday. Very, very open; full of people hawking candles and 5-euro tape tours and postcards and everything; enough to make you want to knot up some cords and go to work on 'em. But still, open. So in we went, pushing our way past the money-changers and their ilk to ...

... the spot where the nave and transept cross, between those two rose windows, below the paten of the Virgin, where people's lives have attained meaning for 800 years.

The hair stood up on my ankles, ladies and gentlemen.

Having thus more than exorcized the Pompidou, off we went to the Rive Gauche to goof around and find the famous Shakespeare & Co. English-language bookshop, which isn't the one with F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the one with William S. Burroughs, though it's named after the one you're thinking of. There, I did not buy a book. I did not buy at least two books, and up on the second story, you can't buy any of the books because they're left there for louche poseurs to read. I fit the criteria, but we didn't have the time for me to read a whole biography of the Mitford sisters.

'Cause we had to re-cross the Seine on the Pont Neuf (or was it Pont Alexandre III a.k.a. "Pont Where Sean Bean Nearly Screws Up The Arms Deal in Ronin" -- we crossed both), past the Tour de Saint-Jacques, which was as unexpectedly delightful as the Pompidou was unexpected and dreadful, and off to the Longue Marche, from the Louvre through the Tuileries and onto the Champs Elysee. In all fairness to I.M. Pei, easily the laziest of the major modern architects, the Louvre Pyramid isn't as terrible as one might think once you see it in proportion. The Jardin des Tuileries was quite beautiful, of course, but the strictly ordered and ranked trees, and the even white dust and lined paths reminded me that Paris is a city permanently stamped by three dictators -- Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Napoleon III. If you had to pick three dictators to shape your city, those are two good ones (and Napoleon can be counted on to loot nice things for you), but it gives Paris a different character than any American city, or London, or Helsinki. It's not un-similar to Moscow in that regard. Perhaps if I got to spend more time there, I'd see what emerges in the negative space that the Bourbons and Bonapartes left.

The big delight after the Tuileries was the obelisk of Ramesses II in the Place du Concorde, marking (anchoring?) the spot where the guillotine worked during the Terror, where royal heads rolled. Somehow, I hadn't known that King Louis-Philippe was a Tim Powers fan, but there you have it. And from there, up the Champs Elysee to the Arc du Triomphe. Which was almost the first place where we actually could see the Eiffel Tower; for a 900-foot-tall tower, the iron lady is awfully demure.

Digression on Paris sightlines: Everyone knows about the big ley, running from the Louvre basin through the Arc du Triomphe all the way to the Arc du Laptop Metal or whatever they call it in La Defense. But the whole city is set up for them, between Haussmann's boulevards and the low profile of the city proper. Everything except churches is three and four stories tall, built (as I mentioned) in roughly Second Empire style. There's one skyscraper in the whole city, the Montparnasse, and it's homely and I didn't bother getting any closer. Plus, the whole city is laid out in a bowl. So the sky in Paris is huge, like the sky in Omaha or Oklahoma City, except when you look down BANG you're in Paris. Very strange, to this Chicago boy.

From the Arc du Triomphe, we gave our aching feet a rest and rode the Metro to the Opera, which is as silly looking as you'd think. ("My Empress, the style is 'Napoleon III'" was the reputed explanation the architect offered to an aghast Eugenie.) Neither of those pictures shows it, but there's a ramp running right up through the front doors from one side, so Napoleon could ride his carriage right into the building. Also, it's too small for opera; it hosts the ballet now. But, on the bright side, it has a hideously scarred fiend in the basement.

Nearby, gbsteve and I found a bistro where I could eat duck confit (having subsisted on traditional French kebabs and sushi all through the con), and then he deserted me for London. So I gambled a stamp and rode the double-decker tourist bus all around the rest of Paris that I'd missed -- I got to see the Eiffel Tower up close and personal, featuring machine-gun-toting guards, and Rodin's Thinker peeking over the wall at the Musee Rodin (it's out back, up on a big pedestal), and the Trocadero, and the jaw-droppingly handsome Palais de Chaillot. (And yes, I do feel dirty for liking that fascist building so very, very much. But it's just perfect for the site.) By that time, it was getting colder, and I had no boon Anglophone companion, and I was running low on sleep and euro, so I took the Metro back to Montreuil and made an early night of it. I need to return to Paris when I have more euro and Anglophones. Sleep and warm still optional.

And speaking of modern architecture that actually works, the international departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport does.

In Memoriam

2009-05-25T17:52:33Z

Robert Munroe (Ensign, Lexington militia, KIA 19 April 1775, Lexington Green)
Brent S. Cole (CWO, 1st Bn, 82nd CAV Bde, 82nd Airborne Div, KIA 22 May 2009, near Tarin Kwot, Afghanistan)

And all in between.

In France and Oakland, They Consider Me To Be Literature

2009-05-19T20:19:28Z

Just a quickie to post up two more interviews, or rather an interview and a half:

* Here's an interview I did at the convention in Paris, with the Scifi Universe website. The questions (from Nicolas Lamberti of SFU) are in French, my answers are in English, and then the doughty gbsteve renders them in la belle langue. It's a video interview, so you can amuse yourself during the French parts watching me twitch and squirm like a Treasury Department official -- I think I may have watched too much Firing Line at an impressionable age. Also, before you ask: no, I don't know what the deal is with my hair. Even for my hair, it's looking remarkably bad.

* This one, thank God, is just audio; better yet, it's audio with me, chrishanrahan, foxbat, and Brian Isikoff. It's the second half of that very long 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction podcast we did at DunDraCon way back in the day. So enjoy!

Night of the Loving Dead

2009-05-17T09:16:54Z

Tonight, mollpeartree and I went up to the Angel Island Theater to see Revenants, by Scott T. Barsotti. It's the latest production by Chicago's very own Wildclaw Theatre, which faithful (not to say obsessive) readers of this blog will recall is the company that more than successfully mounted Charley Sherman's adaptation of Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House this winter.

Without spoilering anything, I can say that the play is a thoroughly successful melding of the relationship drama and the zombie apocalypse; neither component was bolted on after the fact, and each provides vital momentum and plot turns for the other. WildClaw's Witch House also concerned apocalypse, though interestingly a less personal -- and more cataclysmic -- one than Lovecraft's story. It, also, featured a relationship drama, although one cast as a parallel investigation -- a despairing Thin Man story where Nick and Nora meet only for the catastrophe.

Revenants, by contrast, is all about contact -- enforced contact, as Gary and Karen, two survivors of a zombie apocalypse, are hiding out in a basement with Gary's wife Molly and Karen's husband Joe -- both of whom are zombies. (They're essentially chained up, like the experimental subject in Day of the Dead. And while I'm inside these parentheses -- isn't it strange that we now have an essentially universal understanding of a zombie apocalypse? You still can't make a vampire movie without setting it up, but "zombie apocalypse" is apparently like "country house murder" or "Thanksgiving dinner." It's a stock event you set drama against, not drama itself any more.) Joe and Gary are long-time best friends, and Karen believes that Joe is "alive somewhere in there." Karen's feelings toward Molly are far more ambivalent, which introduces only the first unbalanced moment in the steadily collapsing gyre that is common to all good zombie films. Except, weirdly enough, 28 Days Later. Hmmm. Oh, and Shaun of the Dead, which is a comedy in genre and in structure. Revenants, however, is horror in genre all the way -- especially if the notion of missing, broken, or mutilated love is horrific. In structure? Harder to say. Certainly harder to say without spoilers.

The WildClaw team does their apparently standard great job with the production -- lighting, set design, blood work, makeup are all well above what you'd expect for off-off-Loop drama. The cast is also good, with the standout being Jenny Strubin's Karen. Brian Amidei is probably the best actor on stage (based on his Witch House chops) but the role of Joe calls for little more than presence, alternately menacing and brutalized. Oh well, nobody takes a part as a zombie for the dialogue. Which, I should point out, is always good -- menacing gutturals, contrapuntal groans and growls, and just the tiniest torturous hints of humanity. The director, Anne Adams, balances the zombies (mostly in the background) and the survivors (mostly in the foreground) deftly -- there's always something going on, and nothing is ever blocked or walked over. There's a gun, which gets used, although mollpeartree thought the immense pair of loppers on the wall violated Chekhovian law.

In other words -- go see it; it's playing through May 24. See it with someone you'd shoot through the brain, or chain up in the garage, should it come to that.

Free Books Now Too Expensive

2009-05-08T07:47:43Z

In the grand tradition of economic journalism (and indeed, of faultless economic theory), I report a sign of the Crash purely based on my own selfish concerns.

I'm choking back bitter, salty tears at the prospect of not doing Book Expo this year, despite many kind offers of couches scattered across the Five Boroughs (well, across Queens) where I can crash.

My normal hookup for a badge, Chaosium, won't be going, and none of my other expedients have borne fruit.

While the cost of a badge is pretty reasonable considering all you get for it, between badge, airfare, and the ancillary costs of meals and trippy Tribeca movies and drinks and such, the total cost of all those beautiful free books tips the scales in this time of Austerity.

I shall have to console myself with Chicago in late May, live vicariously through rdansky, freeport_pirate and lemuriapress, and buy Owen Davies' Grimoires: A History of Magic Books with my Amazon Associates money rather than score it from the kindly folks at OUP direct.

But it shan't be the same, somehow.

Meanwhile, Back In America

2009-04-26T22:38:57Z

* I've been hired by gmskarka as line developer of Adamant Entertainment's upcoming line of licensed Call of Cthulhu products. First up: This Scepter'd Isle: Call of Cthulhu in Elizabethan England and Shadows of the Red Hand, a gangland Chicago setting book. So that should be fun.

* I've been nominated for two Origins Awards: for Trail of Cthulhu (Best Roleplaying Game) and Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales (Best Non-Fiction). Given the high caliber works on display in both categories, this is one occasion where it actually is just an honor to be nominated.

* Topically drifting back to La Belle Cité, tomorrow gbsteve and I go in search of Nicolas Flamel's house. And I, most likely, gawp like a tourist the whole way there. I shall have to dine alone that night, as the worthy Dempsey will be deserting me in the afternoon to go to a creative writing class in London. The Rue d'Auseil will have one last chance to draw me into le void cosmique.

Paris Is Worth A Twelve-Hour Convention Hall Stint

2009-04-26T06:56:15Z

Long day at the con yesterday, interspeckled with fine convo with angusabranson, autographing, and discussions of RPG theory with Olivier Caira, who yesterday debuted Jouer avec l'Histoire, a critical anthology on the topic of historical roleplaying. Well worth perusing, I suspect even moreso if you read French.

Dinner yesterday was sushi with gbsteve, about which I cannot be negative. The salmon was excellent.

I omitted, in my telegraphic report night before last, to note that I ate a dozen escargots. Herbed in olive oil, rather than garlicked; quite quite nice.

Jules Verne Was Right

2009-04-24T22:23:12Z

I am typing this post on my TV in my hotel room.

Slowly; laboriosly; and on a French keyboard; but nonetheless; it is being accomplished<

My French hosts wanted to get pizza; but I talked them into trying French food instead; whuch worked pretty well in the final analysis< Certainly; the Roquefort sauce on my sirloin worked<

Convention tomorrow/

Things We Know About Paris So Far

2009-04-24T08:40:13Z

1. I am in it, or possibly in Montreuil.

2. It is a simply gorgeous day.

3. The existence of lunch can be inferred, but will require a bold solo expedition to confirm.

4. I will be dining tonight with my French publisher Valerie, assuming we can find each other, and assuming I don't eat lunch in the Rue d'Auseil by accident and vanish into the primal chaos.

5. The Romans called it Lutetium. Technically, I already knew that, but this seemed like an extraordinary thin gruel of facts without some padding.

6. More later! If you're planning to attend GenCon France, look me up at the 7éme Circle booth.

Sic Transit Gloria Vegas

2009-04-19T17:23:27Z

Vegas eight months after the Crash is still Vegas, which means it has changed dramatically since last I was here. The construction cranes have pulled back to more easily-defended ramparts like the City Center and the Fontainebleau; McCarran Airport is almost tolerable; drink prices are up a little bit; the Seafood Buffet at the Rio is now distinctly second-rate rather than joyously middlebrow. Waiters, dancers, casino folk -- they all look a little wild-eyed, a little desperate, a little more like the visitors. The Crash has taught Vegas how the rest of the country lives, and they don't like it much.

Neither do I; I love this desert Pandemonium, this reverse Arcadia built on tamed water and lightnings summoned up from the bowels of the Earth by Herbert Hoover after the last Crash.

What will spring from the alkali this time around?

At a distinctly mediocre breakfast yesterday, rsdancey and I speculated about alternate history for a town without history -- what if the Sands had preserved its famous marquee? People already snarl traffic so much capturing 1959 on their cell phones that the city has had to put up a special "scenic overlook" lot for The Sign. What if the Flamingo had preserved one or two or five of Bugsy's original bungalows? How much could they charge for them now, even now? What is coming down, or not being built, that we'll long to remember here, in sixty or fifty years? What happens in Vegas doesn't stay anywhere, especially in Vegas.

Last night, I heard M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," with its distinctive droning riff; "Straight to Hell." We're already here, and we just can't remember it.

Dave Arneson, RIP

2009-04-08T21:16:30Z

My eulogy is here.

The FAQ After Ragnarok

2009-04-07T20:57:01Z

If you're interested in The Day After Ragnarok, my upcoming "Conan the Barbarian: 1948" meets "Quatermass and the Giant Snake" setting for Savage Worlds, I answer a number of fan questions on that very topic at the Atomic Overmind blog site, here. (There's more previews throughout the blog, too.)

Just think! Answers about Ragnarok, and you don't even have to trade your eye to Mimir for them!

* Plus, as a special added bonus, 45 minutes or so of me rambling on -- with Brian Isikoff, foxbat, and chrishanrahan -- about DunDraCon, large-format gaming, and the wonderfulness that is Kevin Allen, Jr's Sweet Agatha, is available for your listening pleasure, as the latest 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction has been up for a while now. I've just been delinquent in plugging it. Shockin', I know.

Hooking The Hook

2009-04-06T01:20:26Z

Having just on the spur of the moment written up "The Hook" for GURPS Horror 4e (both as psycho killer and as tulpa, of course), I should probably get this out of my system so I can dive back in and write up the lilitu.

So, it seems to me that Snopes.com is on to something when they suggest a connection between the Hook urban legend and the Texarkana Phantom killings in 1946, despite the inconvenient fact that the Phantom used a .32, not a hook hand.

But 1946 is right at the beginning of the AM revolution in American pop radio, and Texarkana is right in the middle of the zone where Brunvand traces the Hook story to before it goes national. (The Hook debuted in a "Dear Abby" column on November 8, 1960 -- talk about your prime-time position for an ambitious young tulpa!)

My extremely tentative reconstruction is that some AM night-time DJ (maybe on a religious station; maybe in between "border" records) mentions the Texarkana "Lover's Lane" killings, spreading the "Lover's Lane Killer" meme out across the central U.S. Maybe it's a "border blaster" station, or maybe it's some now-forgotten syndicated show. The meme connects up with the general "sex killers use knives" motif that English-speakers get from Jack the Ripper (Francophone sex-killers, from what I understand, come from Landru, and strangle their victims, so take that, Dr. Freud) and perhaps some now-forgotten paperback, true-crime pulp, or B-movie about a hook-handed killer.

Some time in 1955, all that came together: Some kid is about to go necking, and his cool older brother (a true-crime maven -- or just someone who went to a lot of drive-in movies -- and an "underground radio" fan) tells him, "Hey, you might want to watch out for the hook killer. He kills kids alone at night on Lover's Lane." And the rest is history, and Dear Abby.

What I'd really like to do is sit down with the Paperback King lemuriapress, and the Midwest's Horror Goddess chebutykin and see if we could maybe get another magnitude of resolution on this, but I shall have to settle for LJ posting it.

Paris Green (And Eldritch)

2009-04-03T11:43:15Z

Just a quick heads-up in between stabs at GURPS Horror 4e -- everybody remembers that I'm going to be at GenCon France, a.k.a. le Salon du Jeu de Société de Paris, oui?

It's on the 25th and 26th of April, and I'll be hanging about at the 7ème Circle booth doing Tsathoggua knows what. My Monday the 27th is currently free, so if you're Parisian and interested in showing me La Belle Cité, look me up!

Twenty-First Century Horror

2009-03-27T04:07:35Z

At some point, I trust not too far distant, I'll be completing my Fourth Edition revision of GURPS Horror by revising the Bibliography of the third edition.

I just finished checking that work, and in it I refer to exactly two works of horror from the 21st century:

A History of Terror by Paul Newman (not that Paul Newman), and
Declare by Tim Powers.

This seems thin, even for a book written in 2001. I call upon you, sprites and hobgoblins, to inundate the comments section with worthy works of horror created in the 21st century (for the purposes of this call, we'll count 2000 as this century) in any medium: non-fiction (studies of horror, or of horrid things like plagues), fiction, comics, television, movies, and video games.

(You don't need to mention Let the Right One In, as we all know it's going into the new bibliography already.)

If you have strong recommendations for horror anime or manga, I'll take them from any century, as the bibliography currently has nothing in either category.

Thanks much -- and let the right ones in!

Keith Herber, RIP

2009-03-14T06:34:41Z

Keith "Doc" Herber, author of many marvelous Call of Cthulhu scenarios and campaigns -- The Fungi From Yuggoth, Spawn of Azathoth, The Trail of Tsathoggua and much more besides -- died early this morning.

It wasn't all globetrotting horror. Herber's Return to Dunwich revisited Lovecraft's questionable town and provided unpalatable answers, in one of the two or three best books ever written for the game. In that book, Herber took his place with Ramsey Campbell as a chronicler of the human half of the Mythos; it's a paean to despair more immediate than some purists' disdainful "cosmicism" would allow. (And it has giant monsters in it.)

Doc also helped design "Raid on Innsmouth," one of the most revolutionary scenarios ever for any game; and his "Haunted House" is a dungeon crawl to make the saints weep. He wrote the first Clanbook: Tremere, which is considerably better than you'd expect, even if you were expecting something by Keith Herber.

He left game writing for years, fed up with the myriad miseries attendant on it. And then he got back in, starting Miskatonic River Press to publish Mythos-related books and games.

A little while ago, he sent me review copies of his two latest books. Full reviews of both remain forthcoming, but I can tell you that if you play Call of Cthulhu you won't regret going ahead without me and getting New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley. Doc contributed one of the six scenarios there, set in "Foxfield."

And even if you don't play, do pick up his newly re-issued Dead But Dreaming, an anthology of Mythos fiction edited by Keith Herber and Kevin A. Ross. It's among the best Mythos anthologies ever published; it's almost certainly the best one of the decade. Adam Niswander and Ramsey Campbell are only the highlight names.

But the name that means the most, the guarantee of quality, of actually caring what goes between the covers -- that name is "Keith Herber."

Art's False Borrowed Face

2009-03-10T12:14:41Z

So the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has decided that the "Cobbe Portrait" is an authentic painting from life of William Shakespeare in 1610.

I don't think so. It doesn't look much like the Droeshout First Folio engraving that we know has to be an authentic likeness (since about 25 people who knew W.S. personally signed off on it), and even less like the "Chandos" portrait that the National Portrait Gallery has (somewhat controversially) proclaimed an authentic portrait from life of the Bard. (Peter Ackroyd likes the Chandos portrait, as does Charles Nicholl.)

The whole case for the Cobbe portrait, as presented, has only four legs, none of them particularly sound.

1. The painting is, if the scientific testing is to be believed, from 1610. That narrows it down not a whit. There were lots of people in 1610 who could afford both a fancy ruff and a portrait. (Shakespeare was, admittedly, one of those people by then.)

2. The Cobbes are distantly connected to the Earls of Southampton, one of whom (the 3rd) was Shakespeare's patron. The key word here is "distantly" -- a Cobbe cousin married the 3rd Earl's great-grand-daughter.

3. The Cobbe "family tradition" identified it as a portrait of Shakespeare. The Cobbe "family tradition" has also identified it as a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh. Who, quite frankly, it looks a lot more like than it does Shakespeare. (That said, Raleigh was in the Tower of London in 1610.)

4. It is very like the "Janssen portrait" in the Folger Shakespeare Library, which has been identified off and on as Shakespeare. Leaving aside the fact that the Janssen portrait was altered in 1770 to make it look more Shakespeare-y, throwing the whole "identification" into a cocked hat, if the Cobbe is the original, and is from 1610, then it absolutely can't be by Cornelis Janssen, who was only 17 in 1610, and not even living in England at the time. Either the Folger is wrong about everything, or Stanley Wells and the Birthplace Trust are. Either way, its likeness to a painting that it debunks is no good argument for its authenticity.

[REVIEW] The Veritable Key of Solomon

2009-03-09T07:21:43Z

[ahem]

The Veritable Key of Solomon

edited by Stephen Skinner and David Rankine
Llewellyn Publications, 2008, $65
446 pages, hardback, black and white

Opening grimoires at random is probably not the wisest thing one can do, but in this case, the results were worth it:

For games of chance, you could draw the Characters under the auspices of Jupiter, being one of the more fortunate amongst the Planets, as well as the ones under Mercury, because Jupiter governs all sorts of riches.

The design for the Talisman I am giving on the following page will, therefore, be extremely effective for adding luck to games, especially if you work on it under a Constellation of Jupiter not in any Opposition to Mercury and that it is dominant in the Heavens and in a friendly aspect with Venus.

This doesn't mean "roll up your character while the GM is watching, and you'll probably get away with more, but make sure your girlfriend knows where you are all night," although reading it the day after Daylight Savings steals an hour of my sleep, it sort of seemed like that. What does it actually mean? Well, it means: If you want to cast a Luck in Gambling spell, do it at a time auspicious for Jupiter, not crossed by Mercury; Venus will give you a bonus. In short, it's GURPS Cabal. For reals, yo.

This is one of the three Keys of Solomon that Skinner and Rankine have translated, footnoted, and goosed into this single volume -- a veritable Key of Solomon indeed. The Key of Solomon, for those of you who came in late, is probably the single most important grimoire in post-Renaissance European magic, and it's so famous that S.L. MacGregor Mathers picked it to sew together from a slew of manuscripts in the only previous English edition.

As you can tell from the phrase "slew of manuscripts," there were a bunch of different Keys around; one of the great features of Skinner & Rankine's volume is that they provide a lengthy and scholarly introduction discussing the four main families of Keys (and the fifteen separate "text-groups" descended from one or another copy). This volume prints entire mss. of three of those Families; ratmmjess will thrill to the notion that at least one of these three manuscripts almost certainly belonged to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and appears in the novel Zanoni, which is what started the fad for Solomonic grimoires that caused Mathers to hocus together his own version. (In further delightful synchronicity, the Chicago publisher L.W. deLaurence pirated Mathers' edition and inserted ads for his own tie-in merchandise into the spells!) Most of this material doesn't appear in Mathers' Key, although Skinner & Rankine include a few of Mathers' greatest hits ("Of the Experiment of Invisibility," "How to Prepare Extraordinary Experiments and Operations," etc.) as a kind of appendix to their first Key in the volume.

So the Key is famous, and important. What's it good for? Well, assuming you want to conjure up angels and planetary spirits and just a few demons, it's good for that -- or, at least, no worse than any other grimoire is. (Except maybe the limited-edition version of this volume from Golden Hoard, which has color plates instead of black and white ones. If color is important to your conjuring needs. But if you can afford that version, you hardly need to be dickering with spirits for hidden treasure.) Otherwise, it's fascinating inspiration for games -- Lovecraft's six or seven Necronomicons pale in comparison to the 144 (and counting!) versions of the Key that Skinner & Rankine have identified. Each one with slightly different pentacles, recipes, instructions, and invocations -- maybe this one in Czech has the right pentacle, but only the 15th-century Greek version (the oldest one known to exist -- the Key likely entered Italy from the Byzantine Empire, either right after 1453 or right before) has the correct invocation. Imagine trying to assemble one working Necronomicon from a hundred parenthetical, partial, mis-translated, mis-transcribed versions. (Not even including the ones featuring product placements by canny Chicago hucksters.) This, it seems, is how to occult a tradition.

Into this morass, Skinner & Rankine stride swinging. Their footnotes are almost uniformly excellent; I can't vouch for the translation (not speaking French or knowing the original), but it certainly reads properly grimoire-y. The pentacles are plentiful, as they should be, and the editors even include the original illustrations drawn by the scribal copyist, a French scribe from a landed family named Fyot. Msieu. Fyot was apparently sitting and copying demon-calls by hand during the Reign of Terror -- not these specific demon-calls, as these mss. date from 1796, but still. (Said illustrations contain a lot of insects and bugs, by the way. Just saying.) The actual magic is probably way too much of a muchness for games per se, although it can certainly serve as flavor-text and inspiration. Just like some game books, in other words. If you want a grimoire, this is literally the grimoire. You can't do any better than that -- just tell those demons that King Solomon sent you. And, er, keep my name out of it.