Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Shoggoth's Old Peculiar by Neil Gaiman Journal. Fiddler's Green is happening, thanks to the hard work of a bunch of dangerously crazed people. There are lots of people here. It appears to be running more or less like clockwork, it's a real convention, and it's enormously fun. So far I've done a signing for the DreamHaven "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" book with Jouni, the dinner for CBLDF-winners, a reading of "Sunbird" and a bit of Anansi Boys, and a Mirrormask Presentation, and then worked with the auction crew going over all the swag and booty I brought in from home, figuring out what it all was and setting reserve prices and such. The convention book is a gorgeous thing. Tonight's big cool news is that Mirrormask will definitely be going to the Sundance Film Festival in January, which means that Dave McKean and I will be going there too. Journal. I was reading New Scientist this morning, catching up on the backlag of magazines that came in while I was travelling, and between the articles on How Eating Fruit Bats Can Cause Alzheimers and an article on copyright laws in which the Recording Industry Association of America states that proceeds from online file-sharing and music distribution "are known to fund terrorism" (although who knows this, and how it is known, and why they then don't prosecute the terrorists instead of twelve year old girls it doesn't say) I ran into an article called IS EARTH ONE OF A KIND? by Hazel Muir. It begins: Although many more planets are being discovered outside the solar system, none of them looks anything like our own planets. And it is possible that they formed in a completely different way, making our planetary system rather unique. . and I found myself puzzling what "rather unique" means, when used in a paragraph like that in a scientific journal. I think it means that our solar system is more unique than a solar system that is quite unique, fairly unique or a bit unique, but less unique than a solar system that is very unique, extremely unique or unbelievably unique. All of which, I suspect, must be less unique than a simple "unique", which means, of course, "one of a kind". I don't have a problem with gradations of uniqueness when used to describe hairstyles, dancers, or the taste of stewed fruit-bat, but in an article like that, it seems rather meaningless. Or quite meaningless. Or even meaningless. Jouni Koponen is a Finnish illustrator. For fun and for experience, he created an illustrated edition of my Lovecraftian tale "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar". He painted the cover. He did a dozen or so creepily hilarious scraperboard illustrations. He set the type and laid it all out. He sent me a link to the website where he was working on it, and I showed it to Greg Ketter at DreamHaven Books, and suggested that it might make a good chapbook. Greg agreed enthusiastically, and Jouni blinked a lot.. The chapbook will come out, in a limited edition, in time for Fiddler's Green. A hefty share of the book's profits will go to the CBLDF. You can probably find out more over at DreamHaven's slowly-being-redesigned-now-with-search-functions online neilgaiman.net bookstore. And I just noticed that they now have the Michael Zulli cover to the untitled next CD -- which I think will be called Speaking In Tongues -- up on their site. Hmm. And they've also put up MP3s of me reading "A Writer's Prayer " and " Nicholas Was. " as well, as tasters for the Warning Contains Language and the Telling Tales CDs, for anyone who's interested. (Click on the listen buttons on the front page). What is Donald E. Westlake's best novel? This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply. 1BookBindingBobby. 2TLCrawford. 3lorax. My favorite of the Dortmunder novels is What's the Worst that Could Happen?. I also very much like Good Behavior. Drowned Hopes is the darkest and by far the poorest; other than that, I don't have strong preferences. I just read them in the order that I found them, until I caught up. Bear in mind that the series started in 1970 and was always set in "the present" (so Dortmunder was more-or-less the same age in 2000 that he was in 1970), so if things like the absence of cell phones bother you you may want to stick with the more recent offerings. As for non-Dortmunder, Trust Me On This and Baby, Would I Lie? were entertaining but not nearly as good as the Dortmunder books, and I couldn't get into Humans at all. It was just nasty. Earbud Theater: Neil Gaiman’s Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar AUDIO DRAMA. Earbud Theater is a new audio drama podcast (without a podcast feed that I can spot). Casey Wolfe, who pointed it out to me, calls them “podplays” – which is a new word but and one that fits fine. The first episode to catch my attention is an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar ! Young American Ben Lassiter is touring the British coastline when he’s forced to take refuge from the rain at a pub in the town of… Innsmouth. Here he meets the peculiar Seth and Wilf who have something to teach Ben about life, Lovecraft, death and unspeakable horror. Adapted by Casey Wolfe and performed by Jake Borelli, Simon Verlaque, Rees Pugh and Joanne McCallin, please sit back and enjoy a pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar . I quite liked this 17 minute adaptation. It’s faithful to Gaiman’s original story and that’s always a good thing. But, I should point out the the MP3’s volume is too low – even wearing earbuds I had a hard time catching every bit of it. Incidentally, the beverage of the title is likely inspired by a real beer with an odd taste. Favorite non-Lovecraft Mythos story. This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply. 1UncleBear. I have two that stick in my head. Dagon's Bell, by Brian Lumley, which appears in the anthology Beneath the Moors and Darker Places. A good Deeps Ones story that expands on The Shadow over Innsmouth without stepping on it. Richard Riddle, Boy Detective in the Case of the French Spy by Kim Newman, which appears in the pulp anthology Adventure published by Monkeybrain books, which I will not spoiler by revealing its humorous Mythos connection. 2andyl. Dagon's Bell also appears in Lumley's collection Dagon's Bell, And Other Discords. It is very difficult for me to pick out a favourite (I really like the mythos stuff that Ramsey Campbell did as well). So I am going to pick something completely a little out of the ordinary and go for Neil Gaiman's Shoggoth's Old Peculiar which has been published as a chapbook and as one of the stories in Smoke And Mirrors. A story that is a combination of a Pete & Dud sketch and Cthulhu Mythos - what more can you want. 3parcequilfaut First Message. 4moondust. 5elvendido. 6slothman. 7Inkdaub. 8john_sunseri. "The Things That Are Not There" by CJ Henderson is a great one at novel length, and the same author's 'Juggernaut' is a great short story about the Hounds of Tindalos and how you kill them (hint: heavy artillery might work on just one of them, but for a bunch you need a somewhat. bigger. weapon). I thought 'A Study in Emerald' was brilliant as well. 9DavidConyers. I have several, "A Colder War" and The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, "Than Curse the Darkness" by David Drake, "Black Man with a Horn" by TED Klien, "The Tugging" by Ramsey Campbell, "The Star Pools" by AA Attanasio, "The Turret" by Richard A Lupoff, "Long Meg and Her Daughters" by Paul Finch, "The Barrens" by F. Paul Wilson, and "Suicide Watch" by Arinn Dembo. Well, that is a rather long list. David. 10Melmoth. 11Tarkeel. The one I liked best, was "Shoggoth's old Peculiar" by Neil Gaiman, printed as part of Smoke and Mirrors. It's not all that mystic and horrible, but very elegant. The Delta Green books are also rather good; i especially liked The rules of engagement. 12Withywindle_Books. 13bibliorex. 14twacorbies. Strangely, I never seem to pick up the Lovecraft "feel" from the author's own works. I often struggle through them wondering where that unique atmosphere that people rave to me about is hiding (I have quite a few friends who are devotees). Yet, when I read some pastiche of the Cthulhu mythos I think "Aha! This is what they're talking about." Specifically, a few works come to mind and yet they're not books at all, but text adventure games. I believe that the authors of each freely admit their intention on capturing a Lovecraftian feel: "The Lurking Horror" by Dave Lebling, "Anchorhead" by Michael C. Gentry, "Theatre" by Brendon Wyber and "Slouching Toward Bedlam" by Star C. Foster and Daniel Raupinto. Perhaps the experience of interacting with the story somehow clicked with me- since I myself was experiencing the feelings that Lovecraft described in his ill-fated characters. 15drwho. When you said _The Lurking Horror_, did you mean the Infocom game? 16slothman. 17goudsward First Message. 18deadguy. 19bluetyson. 20goudsward. 21weirdfictionforever. 22timjones. 23twacorbies. 24Baviv. 25bluetyson. 26Z-Ryan. 27xenchu. 28xenchu. 29paradoxosalpha. One of my favorites is a good one for Holy Week: "Acute Spiritual Fear" by Robert M. Price. It's in The Disciples of Cthulhu II. David Conway's "Black Static" is another that really stayed with me. The collection that I read it in, The Starry Wisdom, is really outstanding all the way through. 30drwho. 31unorna. Hi All, I've just joined your site - cooooooooool! #27. I agree. A brilliant story from a highly unusual collection! #2. Shoggoth's Old Peculiar - one of my favourites. Still can't seem to find the beer, though. 32bluetyson. 33CarlosMcRey. 34MarkAlexander. 35gryeates. 36JeffreySinclair. 37artturnerjr. 38whpugmire. 39paradoxosalpha. Thanks for the thread resurrection, W.H.! The stories you list at the end have all be treated in our Deep Ones discussions here, and I'd rate most of them better than my earlier picks in #29. I'll also join with the common admiration for Thomas Ligotti, now that I've read some of his stories. 40whpugmire. Perhaps the first Mythos tale not by Lovecraft, and also ye first to "feature" HPL as a character, in Frank Long's "The Space-Eaters." *spoilers alert* My buddy Joshi hates this story, primarily, I think, because of the use of the Christian cross as protection from an Elder Horror; which one thinks is totally non-Lovecraftian until one remembers that LOVECRAFT HIMSELF used this in "The Dreams in the Witch House." Long began his story with this quotation from the John Dee version of the Necronomicon: "The cross is not a passive agent. It protects the pure of heart, and it has often appeared in the air above our sabbats, confusing and dispersing the powers of Darkness." Amusingly, when August Derleth reprinted "The Space-Eaters" in TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS, he left out this introductory quote from Dee; it was added by Jim Turner in the re-edited 1990 edition of the book. The two main characters in the story are named Frank (the narrator) and Howard (the elder writer of weird fiction). For me, one of the really charming and fascinating aspects of the tale is the conversation between these two characters; for the story was written at the height of Long's friendship with HPL, and they had indeed spent much time together, so that one feels that Long has captured, intimately, what it was like to hang with Grandpa and listen to his talk about writing. However, the story also has one of my favorite scenes of horror in any Mythos tales: for the two writers are discussing how difficult it is to create an atmosphere of authentic horror that will chill ye reader's blood; & then a simple farmer relates the thing that happened to him, and describes a scene of MAGNIFICENT and keenly effective horror: "I was driving between the trees, keeping a sharp lookout for cars with their lights on too bright, coming right at me out of the murk, and listening to the foghorns in the bay wheezing and moaning, when something wet landed on my head." He describes how the thing felt, and then tells of the sponge-like think that hurls itself to his face. The world takes on a strange aspect. ""Funny how you can see in fogs--they seem to make night lighter. There was a sort of brightness in the air. . . . I looked at the thing, and what do you think it looked like? Like a piece of raw liver. Or a calf's brain. . . . There were grooves in it . . ." Long stirs up a sense of queer unease, of an encounter with the uncanny, simply yet superbly. Everything adds to the effect: the dismal moaning of ye foghorns, the weird mist and its brightness, the utter oddness of this wet spongy thing that fell from above, onto his head. The description gets weirder and weirder, and then this simple farmer shews the gents the wound on his head. "It's like a bullet-wound," he elaborated, "but there was no blood and you can see pretty far. It seems to go right in the center of my head. I shouldn't be alive." The story grows more and more outre. Yet it is all told is such a simple, straightforward manner. Part of the story's effect for me is personal; because from reading Lovecraft's letters I came to feel like he was someone I myself had met and liked enormously; his humor, his love of Literature, his determination to write good horror fiction--I found it all so admirable; and he lives in Long's portrayal of him in this story; so that when this good fellow expires at the story's end, it really hit me emotionally. And yet that death is told in one simply phrase: "But my friend was dead." Entirely effective, authentically Lovecraftian, a splendid tale all told.