Pseudopod 172: The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft

[Scattercat]

Check out The Chinatown Deathcloud Peril. In that novel, Lovecraft is... Lovecraft. A weird tales hack who was never successful in his own lifetime and died young of stomach cancer. The fact that Lovecraft's bit - but essential - part in the book happens against a backdrop of a half-Chinese warlord with plans to murder New York via teratogenic poison gas and the pulp authors who have to stop him is sheer brilliance.

Does it involve a zeppelin?

[ElectricPaladin]

Check out The Chinatown Deathcloud Peril. In that novel, Lovecraft is... Lovecraft. A weird tales hack who was never successful in his own lifetime and died young of stomach cancer. The fact that Lovecraft's bit - but essential - part in the book happens against a backdrop of a half-Chinese warlord with plans to murder New York via teratogenic poison gas and the pulp authors who have to stop him is sheer brilliance.

Does it involve a zeppelin?

I'm trying to remember. I don't think so. It's a shame - really, with a Zeppelin the book would have been perfect.

[Scattercat]

Sounds pretty entertaining anyway.

[DKT]

I'm almost positive I've read this story somewhere else, previously.  If not, it was one that was similar enough to be verging on plagiarism.

This particular story was first published in ChiZine. And, as Square1 mentioned above, is intentionally a riff on another story. So, it's possible you read it somewhere else

And now you all have that reminded me that Paul Malmont's book is one of those that has been languishing on bookshelf that I really, really need to read.

[MacBean]

Not up to Pseudopod's typically high standards. Not in the least.

It's sooo up to their standards.

Personally, I wouldn't classify MOST of what PP runs as horror. They just don't have the components required to unsettle many people. Now, that being said, the stories ARE generally dark in nature. Just not anything near scary.

This one is just like all those others.

Except that I liked it.

Wow. I couldn't disagree more.

[H. Bergeron]

Alright, I know everyone's already piled it on about the accent, but... seriously?  Are you kidding me?

I'm FROM Vermont.  And while, admittedly, I'm not from the parts of Vermont (more east and into farming and rural communities) where they tend to have strong New England-style accents, that was nowhere near ANYTHING you'd hear here.  At best, it occasionally strayed, I think, to something sounding like Massachusetts as done by one of the Kennedy family, but... it was painful.  A previous poster mentioned being embarrassed by bad southern accents, as he (or she) was from the South, but I've never actually been embarrassed myself about people pretending to be from my area of the USA.  Until today.


THAT being said, I enjoyed the story - it was occasionally difficult to understand the collector, but I didn't have any trouble understanding him when he was yelling from inside the brain in the past.  An interesting little tale, and the collector's motivation is so strange as to be fascinating.

[Splurgy]

I hope it's not too cruel to say that this story should have been on escape pod. It was very well written, but rather than scary it was funny. Funny in a good way though.
Of course a lot of the humour came from the accent (I thought it sounded Swedish at some points, and sort of Texas-meets-Germany at others) but there were other images involved. I got the giggles (appropriately) at the "sex thing" part but the funniest part of the story by far which I thought was meant to be the scary bit was when the Lovecraftian monster ends up in the old bloke's body and starts flopping around and screeching.
So yeah, I really enjoyed the story. The only thing that really detracted from it was the extended passages of the letters; I appreciate they served to set the scene but they seemed out of place and I felt my attention wane.

[the_true_morg]

Not up to Pseudopod's typically high standards. Not in the least.

It's sooo up to their standards.

Personally, I wouldn't classify MOST of what PP runs as horror. They just don't have the components required to unsettle many people. Now, that being said, the stories ARE generally dark in nature. Just not anything near scary.

This one is just like all those others.

Except that I liked it.

Wow. I couldn't disagree more.

and i agree with Macbean. i thought the story was the hope for any fan fiction homage story. time traveling, forces of evil, life and death, magic. all within a contained few minutes and not a lot of turning into a long drawn out series. loved the story

[TrapperDan]

Just listened to this one as well, it is what happens when you bank up 20 podcasts.
I have liked the reader in many other tales, this time i almost jumped over board. Some voices are good for some settings, some are good for others.

I wanted to like this story, in fact i think once i think about it without the reading i do.  I have been listening to a HP lovecraft literary podcast, and they have been talking quite a lot about the man personally. This story was another neat little perspective, i think it could have had a more sutiable reader.

[Fenrix]

Listened to this one while working yesterday. Sure the one accent was wobbly, but I found the remainder of the production and voice work quite nice. The story did a good job of paying homage to HPL and HPL's style and form all in the same story.

Thumbs up from here.

[gelee]

I'd like to read a story about H.P. Lovecraft that, I dunno, cast him as the leader of an exploratory team of spacefaring scientists or something.

You are in luck!  A guy named P.H. Cannon wrote a few short stories featuring Old Grampa himself:
The Lovecraft Papers
It appears to be out of print, and it's set in a New York slum, rather than space, but, yeah, pretty much what you said.  He also did some very funny parodies of P.G. Wodehouse with a Lovecraftian twist, which some have labled H.P.G. Wodecraft.  It's not high art, but fun, especially for fans of turn of the 20th century weird fiction.