I changed the blog header a little while ago. My friend and cohort Roy Huteson Stewart very kindly let me use a cropped image from his superb artwork for our forthcoming Aleister Crowley graphic novel, Crowley: Wandering the Waste.

Page 43 to be exact. Roy’s pages are things of rare beauty and insight.

From Lynch on Lynch by David Lynch and Chris Rodley.

The good people at Innsmouth Free Press have posted a short interview with me wittering on about Lovecraft.

It’s worth a click just to guffaw at the picture of me with one side of my face looking confused and the other looking mildly irritated. How this impromptu chimera of expressions came about, I have no idea.

Issue five of Innsmouth Free Press was released a couple of days ago. It includes my pulpy Lovecraftian story Beneath The Cold Black Sea.

Really nice cover by M.S. Corley.

You can grab the pdf or read online here.

Captain Haukelid (Kimber Pocket Edition, 1955)

Snagged last Sunday in Dublin. What a brilliant cover.

Wellington Quay, Dublin.

Second Edition, Considerably Enlarged (1827)

And in summing up…

. . . out on my daily trudge though the town, happily passing the varied and numerous derelict buildings, when what did I spot?

Christian graffiti!

I bet if I’d written “Jesus was a slavery condoning twazzock whose father liked to dress up as a ghost and get 13-year-old girls pregnant” on that wall, it’d be frowned upon. Yet my message would be just as valid, not to mention just as historically verifiable.

Still, you’ve got to admire the stencilling. It’s a tidy job, if nothing else.

Last Friday I bought Electronic Music in the Classroom, the new album from Jon Brooks, released under the assumed identity of D.D. Denham. It’s a bloody gem of a record.

I’ve heard and liked Jon’s The Advisory Circle stuff but I must admit that the main reason I bought this album was simply down to the fact that it’s been put out under the name D.D. Denham. Even before clicking on the preview samples I knew that I was going to like this, as it was obvious that the composer has been influenced by the same films as myself.

I don’t know why but this record makes me feel like it’s 1984 and I’m six years old and off sick from school, watching British kid’s tv in the mid morning and feeling like I’m getting away with something.

Available via iTunes, Amazon and Bandcamp.

I keep coming back to this.

Thinking always of my island in the Hebrides[12], which I suppose I shall never possess nor even see. Compton Mackenzie says even now most of the islands are uninhabited (there are 500 of them, only 10 per cent inhabited at normal times), and most have water and a little cultivable land, and goats will live on them.

[12] This is the first reference to Orwell’s dream of living in the Hebrides, to be realised in 1945 when he rented Barnhill, on Jura. Compare Winston Smith’s version of ‘the Golden Country’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four; see also Orwell’s review of Priest Island, 640. Peter Davison

via Orwell Diaries