ecosophia | July is Tentacle Month!

I'm very pleased to announce that, to celebrate the upcoming publication of my new novel The Seal of Yueh Lao, Founders House publishing is offering a series of special prices on my Haliverse fiction: novels set in a madcap reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft's iconic Cthulhu mythos, in which the Great Old Ones are the old gods of nature, those supposedly sinister cultists are a maligned religious minority guarding a wisdom older than the human race, and gods and cultists alike are locked in a desperate struggle with a powerful secret organization of mad rationalists who want to turn all that rhetoric about Man's Conquest of Nature into a bloodstained reality.

The core series, The Weird of Hali, comes to seven volumes, and there are also four additional novels -- The Shoggoth Concerto, The Nyogtha Variations. A Voyage to Hyperborea, and The Seal of Yueh Lao -- which take place in the same fictive setting and overlap with the novels of The Weird in an assortment of ways. It's been a long strange trip to write, but I'm delighted with the result -- and so, to judge by the comments I've received, are a great many of my readers.

Here's the first installment of the special prices: more will be forthcoming.

The Weird of Hali Series Bundle

(For US customers only) All seven novels in The Weird of Hali for a discounted price: $94.99 plus shipping for the print editions, $24.99 for the ebook editions: click here for details.

Special E-Book Deals:

(For everyone everywhere) For those who haven't yet read any of my tentacle storiesand are wondering what the fuss is about, each of the first three novels in The Weird of Hali series is now available in e-book format for $2.99:

The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth

The Weird of Hali: Kingsport

The Weird of Hali: Chorazin

More to come!

Current Mood: jubilant

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

From: (Anonymous)

Congratulations!
Might you say a few words about the weird genre and the strange origins of your works? Or… maybe not… because there is more in store?

From:

ecosophia

Thank you! Weird tales are among the very oldest forms of human literature; there are fine weird tales in ancient Egyptian literature, for example, and a great many of the Noh plays -- the classical drama of Japan -- are weird tales acted out in stylized, elegant form. By the time H.P. Lovecraft got to it, it was an ancient tradition -- and he was well aware of this; his short book Supernatural Horror in Literature is a capable survey of early modern and modern weird tales. As for me, I got deep into fantasy fiction in late childhood, right when the modern fantasy revival was hitting its stride, and read Lovecraft and some of the other classics in my early teens. I didn't put much thought into writing weird tales myseif until 2015.

What happened in 2015 was that the first of my tentacle novels, The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth, basically downloaded itself into my brain over the course of a few days. I got to work, and had a 70,000-word draft written in eight weeks; I have never written anything so large that quickly, or with so few revisions. By the time it was finished I knew there would be a sequel, and thought the whole thing might turn into a trilogy; by the time I was finished with the second book I knew it was going to be bigger than that, but it wasn't until well into the project that I had any idea how big the whole thing was going to be -- close to a million words of prose, all told, in eleven volumes.

As for my sources, a lot of it came from immersing myself in the classic weird-tale literature while I was writing. I read and reread every story by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Arthur Machen, and did a lot of reading in the works of other authors who influenced Lovecraft or who were friends of his. I made a point of not reading anything Lovecraftian written after the Second World War, because I wanted the classic pulp flavor. To that, add a lot of classic Western occultism -- Lovecraft included quite a bit of that, too, but he was a rationalist atheist and, er, I'm not -- and certain works of philosophy that have meant a lot to me, especially Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. I also borrowed certain things from other authors -- there are some deliberate nods to C.S. Lewis, for example.

Finally, a lot of what went into the books was, well, playful. I borrowed names from Lovecraft stories and gave them to characters for ironic reasons -- for example, the three professors who listened to Brecken Kendall's audition in The Shoggoth Concerto have the last names of the three crooks in Lovecraft's "The Terrible Old Man." I put my characters in their historical context -- for example, Randolph Carter, who appears in The Weird of Hali: Dreamlands, was severely wounded in the First World War; I had him recuperate in the same English military hospital as a young English officer wounded at the Somme, whom Carter remembered only as "Ronald something" and who had this astonishing personal mythology full of fairies and gnomes. (He's better known today as J.R.R. Tolkien.) I had enormous fun writing these novels, and I hope that comes across to the readers.

July is Tentacle Month!

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