Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Nine Yards of Crazy

In the latest episode of our well-laid podcast, Ken and I talk Crate Man, secret maps, prepping Cthulhu and the raid on Powell's.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The Whacking Shovel

In the latest episode of our punctilious podcast, Ken and I talk Lovecraft film fest, newbie-friendly rule books, punctuation and Cagliostro.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: History is Replete With Idiots

In the latest episode of our privateering podcast, Ken and I talk d20 Cthulhu, piracy, setting clichés and True Detective.

World War Cthulhu

The title says it all: Cubicle 7’s newly released fiction anthology World War Cthulhu combines tentacled cosmic horror with the 20th century’s darkest era. Edited by Jonathan Oliver, it includes such darkling luminaries as Greg Stolze, Sarah Newton, and World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar.

My story, “The Egyptian”, reveals the wartime career of infantry sergeant Tyler Freeborn, formerly of Miskatonic University, and his uneasy bond with the title character, an on-again, off-again soldier who fights with terrible ferocity. If  your only concern is to get your unit through the war, and Nyarlathotep reports for duty, do you turn him down?

Grab it as an ebook download from the Cubicle 7 web store.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Watch Out, Boys, He Has the Power of Transcendentalism

In the latest episode of our golden, leafy podcast, Ken and I talk Lovecraft's Vermont, new nerd TV, RPG music and Emerson's Transcendentalism.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: You or Shub-Niggurath Walk Out of The Room

In the celluloid-addled latest edition of our star-studded podcast, Ken and I talk Toronto film fest, GUMSHOE tips, and the Oklahoma Azathoth monument.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The Marshy Aunt

In the latest episode of our exquisitely marinated podcast, Ken and I talk backstories, August Derleth, chef cheats and the roots of Nazi Occultism.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Riesling and Dirigibles

The latest episode of the Golden Geek-nominated podcast that's sweeping the gamer nation, Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, now wings its way toward your earbuds. Join us as we fling open the inaugural doors of the Cartography Hut to contemplate maps we have known and loved.

In a frenzy of construction, we then throw caution to the wind and cut the ribbon on Politics Hut, in which we look at the current US Presidential election from the Republican and Canadian points of view.

Ask Ken and Robin prompts us to consider: can comedy and Lovecraft coexist? (Thanks for the question, Monica Valentinelli.)

Finally, Ken faces his most daunting Ken’s Time Machine yet as Time Incorporated asks him to prevent Prohibition.

Cthulhu and Me

Benjamin Hayward asks for my cthredentials:

You've been posting often about H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu on Twitter, Facebook, and here. Would you mind doing a blog entry talking about your first exposure to, favourite part of, interest in, and history with H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos?

I am among the first wave of readers who caught the Lovecraft bug from gaming. Call of Cthulhu came out when I was in high school; I bought it right away and was soon off to the Orillia public library to track down their copy of the Arkham House anthology The Dunwich Horror and Others, with its Lee Brown Coye cover. When Sandy Petersen’s game helped spur a resurgence of interest in Lovecraft, I grabbed the paperbacks as they showed up in the small Ontario city of my birth.

The story that I find most brilliant, innovative and influential as a piece of writing is “Call of Cthulhu”, with its documentary realism and disorienting, stories-within-stories structure.

The one that scared me the most was “Whisperer in Darkness”, perhaps because I mentally set it in an area I knew well from my childhood—not New England, but the stark landscape of Ontario’s Muskoka district. I also retain vivid sense memory of my first reading of the subtle and brilliant “The Color Out of Space.”

Lovecraft interests me on a couple of levels. The kid in me loves the outlandish details of its creatures. The geek responds to the quasi-continuity he builds as he adds to his corpus of stories, so that knowledge of one informs one’s responses to others. The group collaborative aspect with his peers is also appealing—and the reason the mythos sits in ambiguously in the public domain for anyone to play with. I appreciate him as an exponent of intellectual horror: it is as much about our fundamental aloneness as the fear of being torn apart by a star vampire or hound of Tindalos. In his mature work he is also a top-notch stylist, marrying prose to content in an uninhibited way we could use more of today.

For all of these reasons, I am glad to get to dip my toes in the icy Lovecraftian pool, both with works for Trail of Cthulhu, such as The Armitage Files, and as editor of the upcoming Shotguns v. Cthulhu fiction anthology for Stone Skin Press. There are also some other short fiction projects in the offing, which I’ll announce when the stars are right.

Olympian/Cyclopean

When seen as concept drawings or CGI animations, Wenlock and Mandeville, the mascots of the upcoming London Olympics, look merely bizarre. As if they, like the 2012 logo, sprang from an advertising agency in-joke run disastrously out of hand. Or perhaps resulted from a concerted effort to create the most peculiar and unrelatable mascots in sports history. However, now that they're all over the city of London in plush toy form, their Lovecraftian heritage becomes all too apparent. I mean, one of them has a head full of tentacles, for Hastur's sake!

Over the course of Dragonmeet, Ken, Simon, Steve Dempsey and I strove to pin down their exact rugose branch of the Cthulhoid family tree. Finally, over tagine and rosé, we worked it out. Wenlock and Mandeville can only be an advance delegation of the insane flautists who orbit around Azathoth, reflecting back on him in atonal, aural form his limitless madness. In other words, I think we'd better check the alignment of the stars for ominous coincidence with the date of next summer's opening or closing ceremonies. I wasn't placing any credence in this whole Mayan end date business, until I saw at bin full of these fuzzy horrors by the exit to Foyle's bookshop.