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Episode 425 - Strange Eons - Part 4 (Patreon)

Published:
2018-10-27 18:21:01
Edited:
2019-01-04 01:38:54
Imported:
2021-07

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Content

Join us as we conclude Strange Eons by Robert Bloch!

Music in this show is from The Night Ocean by Repairer of Reputations – grab it now!

Special thanks again to master reader Andrew Leman!

Comments

Anonymous

'I'll See You Again in 25 Years' Laura Palmer Cthulhu

Anonymous

Great episode! re: The Necronomicon on microfiche. There was a short story by Will Murray in last year's "Tales From the Miskatonic University Library" collection called The Trillion Young; the story posits what would happen if some teacher's aid haphazardly catalogs and digitizes the university's "forbidden books" section and posts it to the internet (including the Necronomicon). It's a really fun read. Spoilers: it doesn't go well. Chris, according to my 2nd edition PHB, the 7th level Priest (Alteration) Spell you are looking for is called "Astral Spell".

Anonymous

Chris, exchanging your mind with another person is a NINTH level spell named Life Force Exchange. It clearly states that in The Complete Book of Necromancers. Get it together, man!

Anonymous
>>16657627

Astral (or the psionic science Probability Travel) will let you mentally project over long distances, but you'll need additional help to exchange minds. Wizards have the ninth level necromancy spell Exchange Life Force (from The Complete Book of Necromancers) while psionicists have a telepathic science named Switch Personality.

Anonymous
>>16657704

And yes, Fall of Cthulhu is a graphic novel series. The first three volumes are fairly good--some visually great sequences in the Dreamlands in all of them--but after that the quality sort of evaporates.

Jason Thompson

The whole idea that "Lovecraft could have become less racist if he lived longer" is interesting and I remember Gahan Wilson also addressing this in his story "HPL" but I gotta agree... wishful. It's possible he would have reassessed his anti-Semitism following the Holocaust, as a lot of American WASPs did. In general, though, it's hard to look at 40something white men and think "I bet they'll be more progressive once they get older!"

Anonymous

Lol, 'the vidphone'...so seventies! Thank you for for saving me from this schlock, boys! By the way, people aren't reading books because of their Apple vidphones.

Anonymous

Well. It had an ending. That's something.

Anonymous

Now we're at the end, I have a question. Bloch's basically done a mashup of Lovecraftesque but not really Lovecraft*ian* stuff here. Now the guys have been treating this quite sympathetically whereas Derleth, who arguably did the same thing, is always in for scorn. I get that Bloch never claimed to be writing in collaboration with Lovecraft as Derleth did, and in the end the difference between bad and kitcsh is subjective, but is this really any different from Derleth's work insofar as their place in the wider body of Mythos related fiction is concerned? Of course I'm only going from the excerpts that have been read out and haven't had a chance to read the text. Bloch in his other work shows himself a far more capable writer, technically speaking, than Derleth but just from what Mr Leman has read out this clearly isn't an example of Bloch at his best. Is that what makes the difference when actually reading these two texts?

Anonymous
>>16667966

To each their own Sanja, but I think Bloch's mashup is just fun (badly done but fun), whereas Derleth's posthumous collaborations always seemed to me to be self-serving, first financially and second reputationally. I know that ultimately Derleth must be thanked for saving HPL, for keeping his works in the public eye long enough for him to be "discovered." And some may find it funny to suggest finanical gain was uppermost in August's mind, but I have always seen him as a kind of Salieri to HPL's Mozart which is, of course, very unfair to Salieri. While Derleth was not a complete hack (there are a couple of stories of his which he took 100% credit for I find actually scary), he was not a good writer who recognized that HPL was (most of the time). However, my biggest gripe with AD is his attempt to put the Cthulhu mythos in a more structured format, some say more christian style of good and evil. While being a devout atheist, I was never bothered by that so much as reducing cosmic horror to collectible baseball cards. I so appreciate Chris and Chad going through Howard, Bloch, CAS and even Derleth but time and time agin I'm reminded as we hear Andrew (or whomever) reading those other pieces that they are all lesser. HPL captured the uncapturable, made real the unseen and none of the so-called Lovecraft circle ever really came close. What Bloch is doing here is lighthearted like a rather randy Christmas carol and should be taken as no more. Derleth tried to reduce Cthulhu to Aquaman and Namor's deity which is just so wrong on so many levels. He may have been trying to make the "difficulty" of Lovecraft's ideas more palatable to the reading public of the 30's, 40's and 50's or he may have just been doing what he belived HPL wanted them all to do in terms of Yogsothery, but it fails and fails so badly it hurts. Anyway, that's my take, but I'm sure there must be an August Derleth fanclub out there which is casting gods know what at me. Or more likely, that fanclub focuses its Derleth appreciation on his better works in detective fiction and especially historical fiction centered on Sac Prarie.

Anonymous
>>16666990

I think Faulkner was the one who said you need a beginning, middle and end, just not necessarily in that order. This story probably would've benefited from that approach.

Fred Kiesche

Listening to all the episodes in one go. Earlier you kept commenting on the "coincidences" (e.g. a scene that just happened to be a recreation of The Lurking Fear) or the cliches (e.g., the dynamite and the island), but I enjoyed the book and was reminded not only on innumerable CoC (or Trail of Cthulhu or Delta Green or The Laundry) adventures, but also the relatively recent Alan Moore - Jacen Burrows work of Providence (also earlier, The Courtyard and Neonomicon). I enjoyed the book and especially enjoyed the coverage.

Anonymous

I was wondering if you guys would consider doing a topics show on Delta Green. I’m not really familiar with it, though you speak of it as if it’s something very well known in the fandom. I’m guessing it’s like MI6 for weird phenomena?

Anonymous

As soon as I heard Andrew read the line "Don't think about it, don't ask questions," I knew we were listening to Bloch desperately addressing his readers 😊

Anonymous

Wow. That was a terrible story but an amusing series of episodes. It reminded me of the mostly forgotten Call of Cthulhu campaign “At Your Door”. Thankfully we live in a world where the Great Old Ones are checked by the ubiquity of HPL’s stories, including this podcast. Thanks for saving the world guys!

Anonymous

The ReverEND IS NYE (Nigh). Bloch had a sense of humor and is using it all over the place in this story.

Anonymous

This may have occurred to others as well, but the thing that I thought was genuinely clever in these stories was treating Lovecraft's writing as the kind of Lost Eldrich Knowledge™ so often featured in the Mythos stories. In Strange Eons, Lovecraft is treated almost like Alhazred.

Anonymous
>>16755016

Yes agreed, however as noted early in the series, this trope of post-Lovecraft writers using the idea that the HPL stories are real as the core premise of their own stories was done nearly to death. Since the advent of Mr. Patton Oswalt on the show introducing me to Michael Shea, I have been digging into some of his stuff. His novel circa 1987 The Colour Out of Time is exactly this same riff. Two erudite college professor types go camping for a weekend on a lake that was formed when the farm land from HPL's The Colour Out of Space was dammed. Strange, evil happenings are going on and they decide to go for help and track down the elderly living daughter of a farmer displaced when the area was dammed and flooded. She knows what is going on and makes them sit down and read the entire Lovecraft library or something before ominously indicating that it is all true. They then go out to battle the creature who still inhabits the sunken well on the property from Lovecraft's original story. So, the format has become a trope but in Shea's hands it is much less goofy and pretty well-written, but still a bit awkward feeling. The final cataclysmic battle is pretty enjoyable.

Anonymous

A third option for what to do with the problem of Lovecraft's stories existing in a post-Lovecraft mythos story-- besides having Lovecraft be a prophet whose stories are true or having an alternate universe where Lovecraft was never born-- is to have Lovecraft be a mythos entity himself, such as a face of Nyarlathotep, or a man possessed by a Yithian, or just a Yog-Sothoth cultist. Lovecraft-Nyarlathotep's plan might be to popularize the ideas and beings in the Necronomicon by writing initially obscure weird fiction that grows in popularity over time-- which might generate a kind of psychic energy for summoning the outer gods or something, but that leaves enough out or gets enough wrong so that the stories aren't actually helpful. This is basically how Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness deals with the problem: Sutter Kane as a stand-in for Lovecraft is actually an agent on behalf of the outer gods, bringing about the end of reality through his fiction.

Anonymous

After the marriage, would she be Kay Thulhu?