The Gig Economy, which is as of this writing the single post on a WordPress blog entitled Zero HP Lovecraft, is of and about the internet. Specifically, the internet of 2018, its social media and blockchains. What initially appears to be a particularly flowery and rambling blogpost reveals itself as a fictional story at whichever point you start curiously googling its references to invented subreddits and cryptocurrencies.
It’s an ambitious work that doesn’t completely hang together: the strong introduction is let down by an jarring change...
Almost ten years ago, someone recommended I read a horror-comedy web serial called John Dies at the End, the opening paragraph of which read:
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.
About a page later came this exchange:
“Dave? This is John. Your pimp says bring the heroin shipment tonight, or he’ll be forced to stick you. Meet him where we...
Having read enough HP Lovecraft, I’m slowly, unsystematically making my way through his many influencers and contemporaries: writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson and many others mentioned in passing in ST Joshi’s Lovecraft biographies. One such minor influence is Robert W Chambers, particularly his 1895 collection of short stories, titled The King in Yellow.
Chambers, while a popular author in his day, did not prove to be a timeless one and has mostly fallen...
One of my go-to airplane books has for over a year been a collection of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s best stories, as decided by some or other editor. I recently finished the stories in this book and then, interested to find out more about the author, took a look at a biography – A Dreamer and a Visionary: HP Lovecraft in His Time by ST Joshi (a more interesting book overall). My opinion on the man and his writings wavered throughout.
Big elephant-in-the-room...
Apothecia is a short (under a hundred pages), complete (as of Friday 21 November 2014) webcomic about a girl and her eldritch horror from the cold depths of space. It is written by Taz Muir and drawn by Shelby Cragg (also known for her artistic contributions to recent arcs of Homestuck).
Webcomics tend to fall into one of two categories: massive adventure epics (often never finished) or episodic sitcoms with varying degrees of continuity – so, abnormally, Apothecia has a single, focused story to tell, tells it, and then...
