HPLHS News & Events Autumn 2024

Featured Member

• October 1, 2024

Our Member of the Month for October, 2024 is David Brokaw of Portland, Oregon.

David says: “I am an HPLHS lifetime member, and longtime dreaded supporter of the eldritch arts. I also feel proud to have supported the acquisition of FB Long's papers for the library archives as well.

A short bio: I am 47 years old, a clinical pharmacist selectively poisoning my patients for their benefit, an accomplished pianist, and a book collector looking to get into publishing against my better judgment. I did leukemia and stem cell research for 10 years before pharmacy school. (I've seen stem cells turn into heart cells that beat in a Petri dish of their own accord....paging Dr. West!). I've often been called a blood-sucker or vampire by other people: For 20+ years I've used blood and bone marrow in my medical research or patient care. I always say that I don't need a Halloween costume this time of year! I've worked as a science & philosophy advocate in the past with the Center for Inquiry (Indianapolis), but I've made Portland my home for the last 10 years. I do freelance music on the side, solo, or with my group ARCO-PDX.

I've always loved fantastic and speculative stories, starting with ancient Greek mythology as a kid. About 15 years ago, I was browsing the bookstore shelves for something other than the usual SFF, and "The Dunwich Horror" title caught my eye. Uh-oh. That was it: hook, line, and Shoggoth. I simply could not get enough horror-reads after that. Reality started seeming like the real horror after a while. Now, I collect a wide variety of small-press Weird and Spec-Fic, and in the early stages of developing a publishing business with family. I've enjoyed immensely coming to Portland's Horror and Lovecraft film festivals for the last 10 years, but the stories are still the things closest to my bloody heart. (I highly recommend checking out Mark Samuels, the late British author of a collection called The White Hands. Fantastic stuff)."

The Whisperer in Toronto

• September 28, 2024

You can now stream our motion picture The Whisperer in Darkness on Tubi. But we're happy to report that the Toronto Public Library is hosting a screening in their Northern District Library on October 12 at 1pm. It's part of their "Cinematic Conversations" series.

"Join us for a spine-tingling film screening that masterfully blends horror and literary brilliance. Follow mythology professor Albert Wilmarth as he delves into eerie reports of bodies floating in the rivers after a historic flood. His investigation leads him to the reclusive Henry Akeley, who unveils a terrifying secret...."

GenCon LARP Pix

• September 28, 2024

Our friends at Chaosium have given us access to some of the official photos taken of the Cthulhu Lives! game that we hosted with them at GenCon in Indianapolis on the night of August 3rd. Our renewed thanks to Brian Holland and Bridgett Jeffries of Chaosium, Mark Meer, Joe Givan, and all the brave folks who joined us for that evening of auction-based horror!

The Shunned House

• September 28, 2024

All Kickstarter backers have now been shipped their copies of "The Shunned House" and remaining copies are available for purchase in our online store! Also now available is Night-Black Deeds, the enriched edition of the story!

Now Streaming

• September 1, 2024

If you have a device that will play DVDs, then the best way to watch our motion pictures The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness is by getting yourself the DVDs and playing them. That way you can enjoy all the special features that come with the films. But if, like a growing number of people, you can't do that, we're happy to say that the movies are now streaming on Tubi! We hope they will become available on other streaming platforms in the near future.

Featured Member

• September 1, 2024

Our Member of the Month for September, 2024 is Anders Lundgren of Alta, Sweden.

Anders says: “What a lovely surprise that the forces of randomness picked me as member of September 2024. I am very happy and truly honored.

My first encounter with H. P. Lovecraft came back in the late 1980s through Chaosium's classic RPG Call of Cthulhu. The enclosed reading list inspired me to look for books by HPL at the local library where I found a worn copy of the first Swedish Lovecraft collection called Skräckens labyrinter (Labyrinths of Horror). My introduction to Lovecraft’s singular world was "The Hound". This and the other selections like "The Lurking Fear" and "The Rats in the Walls" gave me an overview of his prose style and subjects. I was completely hooked. The fascination with the man and his works continues to grow now almost forty years on. My favorite story was then, and remains, the sublimely tragic "The Colour Out of Space".

One Lovecraftian anecdote that I think other members might appreciate happened to me in the ninth grade. Me and a couple of friends had managed to worm our way out of gym class on the proviso that we would take a long walk. As a lark I suggested we go to the biggest book store in my old home town of Norrköping and ask for the Necronomicon. We did but with unexpected results. Unbeknownst to us the Simon edition had been released recently, so when the clerk casually answered my query with "Yes, we have a pocket version that somebody ordered but never picked up. Would you like to see it?" jaws dropped all around.

These days I am a writer and connoisseur of the uncanny, living close to Ältasjön in Sweden with my wife. For a quarter of a century now I have written about films for Hemmabio (Home Theatre Magazine) and for the past couple of years have had my own column in Bild & bubbla (Image & Thought Bubble). I have also contributed essays to anthologies such as occultural journal The Fenris Wolf and, comics being my other great literary passion, titles such as Mignolaverse: Hellboy and the Comics Art of Mike Mignola and Judge, Jury and Executioner: Essays on the Punisher in Print and on Screen. In the past I have worked in a Spookshow, as a projectionist and film curator, comic book librarian and event organizer. In 2012 I founded the Stockholm H. P. Lovecraft Festival and in this endeavor have been very fortunate to work with Andrew Leman, Sean Branney and Mike Dalager of the HPLHS. Back in 2017 I presented my paper “Mike Mignola and The Lovecraft Circle - Inspiration and World Sharing” at the "Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium" during The NecronomiCon Providence. I am also an ordained Priest in the Church of Satan."

Cthulhu Lives! Content At Last

• September 1, 2024

Many many years ago, we kept records of all the games of Cthulhu Lives! that we played using a HyperCard stack. (If you're too young to know what HyperCard was, you can learn all about it here.) When the internet came along, we converted that stack into a website, and that was the original purpose and nucleus of the HPLHS site. It was full of graphics and other things that slowed down page loading in those days of dial-up access and modems, and when we remodeled the site in general to take advantage of faster speeds, that whole original section of the website was put into mothballs until we could improve all the graphics. We still haven't had the time to really do that, but we are happy to say we have at last finally restored some of that original content to this site. Only three of the 65 games are online, and even those are still a work in progress, but at least it's something. You can check it out by navigating to the Cthulhu Lives! section in the drop-down menus above by going to Productions/Games/Cthulhu Lives!, or you can just click here.