Slightly belated festive greetings to all you posters! Here’s hoping you’re reading this with a wad of refried turkey jammed in your mouth and stuffing leaking out your nostrils, wearing an expression of stupefied joy as you slide gently into a food coma that will last you till New Year’s…
I’ve been passing much of the Christmas season (when I’ve been sober enough to read, that is) with Mr Lovecraft and his squamous entities from beyond the illimitable reaches of spacetime. For those who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, I mean Gollancz’s rather beautiful (and very heavy) collected edition of Lovecraft’s tales, the Necronomicon. For those who don’t know who H.P.Lovecraft is, read the wiki, buy the book and allow his purple-prosed tales of the macabre to caress your face like so many chilly wet alien tentacles. I haven’t read his stuff for years and I’m very much enjoying it on the re-read.
Oh, yes. The title of this post? That’s ‘Merry Christmas’, tortured by our vile Midlands argot into something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. God knows how it came about but somehow it’s slipped into the lexicon round where I come from. Gotta love the English language, it’s so elastic. It lets us writers get away with murder, frankly…
Necronomicon!! I have that, and I, uh, am still not very far through… See I can only read it when my brain isn’t tired. My god do I love it though. Lovecraft’s writing is simply undescribably good! I recently purchased a game called Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. It’s based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and so I figure I’ll read that story after I’ve played the game to avoid any potential spoils. It is a good game, a very good one. Lovecraft ftw
Ah, the Necronomicon. Got that for xmas myself. I love the stories, but I did have some trouble with the spell-checking… they do need a better editor. At one point they spell Necronomicon wrong! (I am a grammar fiend, shoot me).
English slang is proper mint, eh?
My lady, brilliant as she is, got me the Necronomicon for my birthday, after I freaked out after spotting it in a Waterstones. I was very happy to see The Hound in there. It was the first piece of Lovecraft I ever read, and always holds a special, terrible place in my heart.
@ Raihor – Yeah, I think the story will spoiler the game to some extent. Better leave off till you’ve got into the game a bit. It’s true, though, you can’t read Lovecraft when your head’s tired…
@ Tara – yeah, I noticed that too. It’s not necessarily the editor, though; it’s possibly the work of the typesetters who print the pages. It’s one of the eternal mysteries of publishing that you can have a perfectly clean, spellchecked and edited Word file and when it comes back from the typesetters there have been spelling mistakes magically inserted, words substituted for other words, and in the best cases, whole pages printed out of order. I just don’t know why it happens, and nobody else (with the exception of the typesetters, I presume) seems to know why it happens either
@ David – haven’t got to The Hound yet, and it doesn’t ring a bell, so I probably haven’t caught it in any of the previous anthologies. Looking forward to it now…
Heh, Lovecraft… saw that huge book around bookstores several times but they were always pretty much in tatters already. Why-ever that was…
Reminds me of a train-trip home one winter. The compartment I sat in was empty and I was just reading At the Mountain of Madness when a family with two kids came in and the kids started throwing around their plush polar bears.
It was a bit bizarre.
And sadly the wrong pole.
Also: Happy new Year!