2025-04-11: Stray thoughts

I have not kept up with the site, nor with the 'one short story a week' thing mentioned in my last post, due to large-scale life changes. However I am now getting settled into my new place, getting the art up on the walls, and adjusting to having a frankly unprecedented amount of free time. The reprehensible urge to once more write fiction ferments inside me, but we'll have to wait to see what, if anything, comes of that.

I recently got Gou Tanabe's adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" and found it pretty good. As with his take on At The Mountains of Madness, it's the non-human stuff he really excels at, not that the human/mundane stuff is bad. But the history of the various prehuman alien factions in Mountains is what sells it, and similarly the R'lyeh etc. stuff is the juicy portion of "Cthulhu." There is comparatively less of that in this story than in Mountains, though, so for the most part it does come through as "just" another take on the story. And you know what, that's worth it in my book! I really love this story and think it's a masterpiece. I remember (or think I remember) Ken Hite waxing poetic on its quality on either the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast or on Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff and his passion on the subject resonates with me. There's a reason reading Lovecraft as a teen completely took over my brain; the semi-epistolic, piecing-together-of-fragments setup is for whatever reason just a supremely favorite framework for fiction for my tastes and "The Call of Cthulhu" just works. So, to circle back, if you enjoy the story for its own merits, you'll likely enjoy Tanabe's take on it.

Along with Tanabe's adaptation, I also picked up Mike Mignola's new collection "Bowling with Corpses". This was really excellent. I've been a strident believer in the supermacy of Hellboy and the BPRD series, but I do feel like things started getting a little hairy around the time the latter's Plague of Frogs arc ended and transitioned to Hell on Earth. I still dug Hellboy a lot right up through the end of Hellboy in Hell, but the lore density felt, to me, like it started getting really heavy, and the post-apocalyptic storylines in BPRD worked a lot less for me. There's some very specific magic in the Mignola/Arcudi/Davis days of BPRD that easily rides high right alongside the best of Hellboy. I don't know if this is a full-on case of needing to let things die, or if I just lost interest in the direction the stories' evolutions went, but regardless, I've been largely out of touch with a lot of the latter-day Mignolaverse stuff. Bowling for Corpses, then, was a real treat, as it's a very clean slate for Mignola to ply his ever-more-excellent art and short-folklore-story skills upon. It really took me back to what I loved and found most alluring about the early Hellboy and BPRD stuff. Looking forward to more stories from these new Lands Unseen, although I do hope the worldbuilding and lore doesn't get too creaky.

Thanks to the main dude J.R., I've been listening to Wayne June (RIP) read Brian McNaughton's fantastic collection Throne of Bones. Man, this thing is killer! Very unique setting and preoccupation with ghouls, very nasty, just really really great. I can't recommend it enough. I'll definitely be picking up the book for my own collection, but I can't overstate how good the audiobook is, there's nothing like listening to 14 hours of Wayne June talking about how good ghoul pussy is.

Aside from that, prior to the move I burned through a few of Richard Stark's Parker novels, which are extremely excellent crime fiction. Heists going right and going wrong, and Parker as an unflappable hardass who always gets the job done with mechanical, inexorable determination. He's a bastard, and he never goes straight or has a moral development, which works superbly in the genre. They're quick, highly enjoyable reads that are almost certainly at your local library -- check em out.

Well, that's about it for me for now. As always I've been reviewing movies over on letterboxd, besides that we'll see what happens now that I've got a little more mental and emotional breathing room. Hang in there everybody!