When I found this last weekend, I watched it obsessively a number of times. It just seems right. Not exactly a vision of prophecy, but for a myth of collapse it will do?

Apocalypse -Cthulhu- Now by Cthulinos [Youtube]
Apocalypse Now intro – In case you’ve forgotten the visual pun [Youtube]

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. According to the “I Write Like” internet toy,

“The first several hundred words of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” read like H.P. Lovecraft. And she didn’t mention Cthulhu once.”

That spooky resemblance between HPL and Matt Drudge makes more sense now.

Wherefore art thou, refudiate? Sarah Palin as Shakespeare by Carolyn Kellogg [Los Angeles Times]
Image: “One Nation Under Cthulhu” A response, artist unknown (drop a line if you know the credit) to “One Nation Under God,” [Jon McNaughton]

Had something else lined up for this week, but this hit teh internets as a breaking item of Yogsothothery a couple of days ago. And as Great Cthulhu is the Patron God of the Internet, who would deny it? And definitely check out the back.

If you are going to mod an instrument to look like the embodiment of humanity’s inevitable destiny to be an index fossil, you could do worse than to choose the ukulele. Like the dread lord, it emerges from the Pacific, and its call really hit the big time in the 1920s. Plus that whole Tiptoe through the Tulips thing seems right at home in a musical production of The King in Yellow.

Cthukhelele by Robin Stevenson [Twitter] via Neil Gaiman [Twitter] via Cory Doctorow [BoingBoing]

Arguably the most horrifying Cthulhu idol I have ever seen.

Cthulhu Bobblehead by stexe [Youtube]

Lovecraft-inspired music is nothing new, and it is usually subtler than this. But there’s clearly some love on display here. You can listen to their similarly-themed “Children of Dagon” at their Myspace. And I really like the revival bit, which works both with the message and the 1930’s HPL at home frame. Though the idea of Howard, having transitioned from his earlier fallen patrician attitudes to his New Deal-era quasi-socialism, listening to a southern fried revival is a little jarring.

On the other hand, while the study is stocked with modern Cthuliana, having a bunch of odd art and idols is not inaccurate in spirit. HPL did indeed collect and enumerate in his letters various artifacts and weird art in his possession, virtually all gifts from more financially stable friends. These items included some sort of two Maya or Mexican “eikons,” an African flint tool, an Egyptian ushabti funerary figure, a carved wooden Balinese monkey sculpture, a Japanese idol, a Chinese vase, and an Asian bird statue carved from black horn that Lovecraft dubbed the “Bird of Space.”

Cockfight Club – H. P. Lovecraft [via Youtube]

Two more pieces of Lovecraftian fiction for you this week. This time from well known author Neil Gaiman, so I suspect that you might have already seen them in some form. But if not…

The first story, A Study in Emerald (warning: PDF), is a Hugo Award winning short story from the 2003 anthology Shadows Over Bakerstreet, which feature Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes confronting H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. This story has also been collected in Neil Gaiman’s short story collection Fragile Things, but is presented online as a faux Victorian era document.

I Cthulhu is something different in approach. This is much earlier story of Neil’s, and is about Cthulhu’s personal history and, er, motivations I guess; it makes the Great Old One seem almost personable. As if Cthulhu had appeared on Parkinson.

Neil Gaiman – Short Stories [Neil Gaiman]

I think it is fair to characterise most Lovecraftian fiction, including a lot of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, as being bloody awful. A collection of often very interesting ideas badly written or poorly executed. (Yes, there is a difference.) Yes, I know that Mr Lovecraft was writing to be paid by the word, but that’s an excuse. I think it is also fair to say that many attempts at writing this form of existential horror try to elicit the horror from trying to describe the indescribable cosmic horrors. Which, well, just doesn’t work after you’ve read a couple of stories about unimaginable terrors. A fact that has been parodied in many places including Discworld and Baby’s First Mythos.

What does work with Lovecraftian fiction is when you take the ideas and form, and then pair them with other unimaginable, but real, horrors. Because then you can start to use these simpler ideas from fiction to analyse and explain something more complex and real. This folks is foundation of all good speculative fiction, and this is something that Charles Stross does really well.
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