Cody Goodfellow's Blog

My dog eating an In N Out Double-Double

It's taken longer than our usual sedimentary pace to wrap up and reflect on this astounding convention. When you go to a convention a month, they start to blur together, but Mythos Con was a monument, and hopefully a milestone on a new road to Cthulhuoid hegemony.

From soup to nuts, this show was the dream and brainchild of Adam Niswander, with the bittersweet undertaste of a last wish. Adam's health has been fading, but he's worked like a man possessed to bring together the greatest gathering of Lovecraftian writers, editors, artists and fans in history. And for the most part, it came together beautifully, even if the latter group failed to show up in the numbers expected.

Mythos fandom is a rarefied sub-ghetto, but its passionate intensity has made small gatherings like Portland's Lovecraft Fest into magical events supercharged by the shared love of cosmic horror. Even if the con lacked the hoped-for masses of consumers––and there were a lot of factors keeping them away, from the economy and post-Xmas fatigue to the cost of the hotel and the fact that Arizona objectively sucks––the excitement was more than just contagious. It was inspiring and revelatory.

Panels spoke to the whole spectrum of Lovecraftian entertainment, from gaming and films to comics and high literary criticism. Scholarly titans like Robert Price and S.T. Joshi dropped old school weird knowledge, while cool kids Wilum Pugmire, Kelly Young, Peter Atkins and Ramsey Campbell kept it from feeling like school. We were thrilled to finally meet some of our much-cherished colleagues like Matt Cardin, Lois Gresh and Michael Cisco (whose readings should come with a Thorazine chaser) and very sad to miss friends who had to cancel, like Michael Shea and the inimitable Weston Ochse.

For us, Mythos Con was an acid test of our New Millennium Mythos line, and we think we passed. An early debut of our new book, The Womb Of Time by Brian Stableford, met with high praise and brisk sales. We sold almost everything we brought, and Adam and I got to hold an audience hostage in our first panel together. (Apologies to W. Paul Ganley, who had to play third wheel at our solipsistic love-feast.) We were delighted to initiate a strategic alliance with Arkham Bazaar, who should soon begin carrying Perilous Press titles. And we were proud to dedicate ourselves to doing whatever it takes to bring this convention back next year.

If you love the Cthulhu Mythos, you're probably a black sheep even in the fandom circles in your community. If, like us, you're frustrated by the obscurity of this thing of ours, there is now a slate of outstanding events that offer the chance to connect with the best of new Mythos fiction, and to take a hand in shaping its future. If events like Mythos Con are to continue––and Yog knows they deserve to––people need to get out and attend them.

And buy us drinks.

Adam and I are packing our lederhosen and our green cards for the pilgrimage to the inaugural Mythos Con in temperate, tolerant Tempe, Arizona. How excited are we for this unprecedented confluence of arcane insanity? Not nearly as much as this guy, but this con might just be too good ever to happen again, and we've got a lot to celebrate. We'll have copies for sale of our latest release, The Womb Of Time by Brian Stableford, we'll be holding down a table with the inconceivable Mike Dubisch and we'll be blasting a lot of exciting news about upcoming projects with top Lovecraft scholar and inexhaustible party animal S.T. Joshi. And if these guys are any kind of men at all, I'll be signing my gruesome new comic short Stumped! in the latest issue of Strange Aeons. Thanks and praises to Adam Niswander for conjuring up this awesome event, and a Voorish gas face for any self-respecting cultist south of Kadath who chooses to miss it…

One sure sign that the economy is limping back out of the ditch is the long-delayed release of SPORE, the new Skipp & Goodfellow novel. but the details should make it crystal clear that nothing will eveer be like it was, in genre publishing.

Spore was slated to come out in November, 2010 from Leisure Books, and was a casualty of the company's financial troubles. When Dorchester announced its plans to go from mass market paperbacks to an all e-book format, many of the house's signature names pulled their titles. We stuck around, and we're glad we did. SPORE is available now in Kindle and Nook formats, and if the new paradigm works out, they plan to put out a trade paperback edition in Summer of 2011.

But if you're impatient for a dead-tree version of Spore (and one of the lucky few who never got sideswiped by the recession), a handsome signed, illustrated fetish-object edition is coming out any day now from Bloodletting Books. With art by Perilous favorite Steven Gilberts and a limited run of 150 numbered copies, this edition should sell out faster than tickets to that Spider Man musical.

Meanwhile, more Skipp & Goodfellow hijinx are on tap here, here and here, and my latest solo short stuff is out now here and here.

We know we've got them. We're trying to figure out why the banner repeats behind the text, and as soon as we've got the data back from our mission simulator, we'll fix the problem, and probably post more often, too.

The Womb Of Time is currently at the printers… and while getting the limited editions signed will be much more complicated this time around, we hope to have some in time for Mythos Con. Our next project, David Conyers' The Eye Of Infinity, will be out in trade paperback next month, if all goes acccording to plan, for once.

While you're waiting, why not throw in some suggestions for John Joseph Adams' Mythos Fiction Database? Adams is compiling an epic reprint anthology for Night Shade Books, and wants fans to help. Or you can line up in front of this place… Strange Aeons #4 is going to be one sick, stuffed stocking. Behold!

Superhuman Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has teamed up with Centipede Press (publishers of the greatest book ever) to present Weird Fiction Review, a sturdy new scholarly journal of the bizarre. Alongside stories by Marc Laidlaw, Joe Pulver, Jason Eckhardt and me, they've stacked the deck with edifying treatments on Poe, Blackwood and Gaiman, and a luscious full-color gallery of art by David Ho, whose work is so brilliant it single-handedly tricked me into buying three Infected Mushroom disks.

Centipede has WFR #1 in stock now, and a menu of offers bundling it with some of their excellent limited hardcover reprint editions. Amazon can't seem to get its head around offering it right now, and wants you to wait until next April.

Don't.

Sadly, not the actual award

Awards never seemed particularly important to me… it seems to take at least as much work to get noticed for award consideration, as it does to do work that merits one. And "serious" award-grabbing works are often worlds away from real entertainment. But this one means everything to me.

My first collection, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars, received the Wonderland Award for Best Bizarro Collection of 2009 at this year's Bizarro Con in Portland. The voters were authors and fans of Bizarro fiction, with no secret judges' panels or esoteric recommendation regimen, and the other nominees were uniformly excellent. I was so overwhelmed by the moment that I neglected to pour out my gratitude to Alan Clark for his phenomenal cover art, or to my unbelievably supportive and patient wife. I'm pretty sure I just made armpit farts until I was escorted off the stage.

Thank you, Bizarros!

Over at his blog, American Frankenstein, national treasure Norm Partridge is curating a host of Halloween movie recs from horror authorities like Laird Barron, Joe Hill, Ellen Datlow, David Schow, John Skipp, John Langan and… waaaay down the list, me. My piece on The Shining isn't a rec (since everybody's seen it and it rounds out Internet polls of top horror movies every year), so much as an appreciation of what it meant to see the film one miserable Halloween, when I was probably way too young, and stuck in a wheelchair, and its, er, lasting influence on me.

And if you're one of those weirdos who gives out dental floss for Halloween, might I suggest a healthier alternative to getting TP'ed by ten year olds… Norm's Halloween masterpiece, Dark Harvest, is to Halloween what A Christmas Carol is to Xmas, and what that tree scene in Evil Dead is to Arbor Day… and right now, it's cheaper than a bag of candy corn. Johnny Halloween, his new collection of pumpkin-headed humbuggery, Johnny Halloween, is out now, too.

Cthulhurotica cover art by Oliver Wetter

If  Lovecraft didn't have vast and crippling fears of sexual intercourse, his stories wouldn't be half as powerful or as memorable as they are.

To bring an overtly erotic element into a cosmic horror story without swerving into full-tilt silliness takes more than just big huevos. It takes the kind of non-Euclidean genital density ordinary humans aren't even equipped to perceive, except by the warp of its gravity well. If you ever meet any of the transhuman pornographers who donated their skeevy seed to this book, don't look under their skirts, no matter how often they offer.

For Dagan Books' inaugural release, editor Carrie Cuinn has embarked upon a catastrophically foolish plan to gather a singularity of testiculovarian fortitude into one flimsy cup anthology. My contribution, "Infernal Attractors," proceeds from the assumption that Stuart Gordon's From Beyond  wasn't sleazy enough. It appears alongside new monster-sexcapades from Jennifer Brozek, Ahimsa Kerp and twenty-three otherworldly pseudopod-fondlers.

The circular debate about the sexual subtext in the Cthulhu Mythos probably won't get put to bed by this book, but I think it will generate some worthwhile controversy, especially if they shoot "I Heart Tentacles" thongs out of a T-shirt cannon at conventions.

Cthulhurotica goes on sale December 15th. Bring extra deodorant.

Eye Of Infinity art by Mike Dubisch (blacklight remix)

We tried like hell, but eldritch espionage on a cosmic scale like David Conyers does it just won't fit into a standard chapbook. Our double-wide, stuffed-crust chapbook edition of The Eye Of Infinity will feature a Mike Dubisch cover and a dozen illustrations by Nick Gucker, and it'll be available in our store the week of Halloween.

The Eye Of Infinity continues the saga of Harrison Peel, a veteran of covert wars against alien invaders, and fuses Mythos horror, quantum physics and interstellar cloak & dagger action into an instant pulp classic.

Here, try on this jacket copy…

At a remote radio telescope facility in New Mexico, an astrophysicist commits suicide after contracting a hideous mutative plague caused by something he saw… and he won't be the last.

Major Harrison Peel has witnessed his share of cosmic mutations before, but now, he faces a threat worse than death, and a powerful enemy that hides behind a human face.

When a top secret NASA program refuses to heed his warnings, Peel is catapulted into a nightmarish government conspiracy that takes him from Ft. Meade's Puzzle Palace to the launchpads of Cape Canaveral; from the desolate Atacama Desert of Chile, to the very heart of the universe itself, all in a desperate bid to shut…

The Eye Of Infinity. Coming to a mailbox or convention hotel bar near you…

Eldritch evil and beer goggles are a dangerous mix

It's taken a whole week to dig out of the chaos at home, but I don't know how I'd be could face it, if I weren't still aglow from the magical experience of the 15th HP Lovecraft Film Festival & Cthulhucon.

There are bigger conventions in bigger cities, but there are none so charged with brilliant inspiration, and no hosts with more good will and generosity of spirit, nowhere more lifted up by the dreams they gather to celebrate. It's hard not to wax into fruity, metered chains of clauses when you're talking about this fest. It's just that damned good of a show, put on by the best bunch of folks ever to throw a party.

Portland is packed with fans, friends and strategic allies of Perilous Press, so we never want for a couch to crash on. The crews from Eraserhead Press and Dark Discoveries were camped out in the lower lobby, though proud new papa Jeremy only got away from suckling Sasquatch Double Rainbow Johnson long enough to drop off a carton of Swallowdown books.

This year, we held down a table with Mike Dubisch, who came up for the first time to promote his upcoming Black Velvet Cthulhu art book. I don't know what I enjoyed more––seeing people discover Mike's incredible art for the first time, or watching Doob drowning in more overnight admirers at once than he talked to the busiest day of Comic Con. We were staked out back-to-back with Dark Horse, ensuring many idle hours to fling new Creepy pitches at editor Shawna Gore.

The few panels I got to sit in on were uniformly stupendous. The cosmic horror panel I moderated was as agonizing as it was sweet, because what I mostly remember is pacing in front of the theater with a hundred pounds of stuff writhing in my brains like fresh-caught fish, but refusing to come out in discreet canned chunks. I tried like hell not to make a has of it, but got by hiding behind stellar guests Caitlin R. Kiernan, Wilum Pugmire and Michael Shea (and Jason Brock, once he showed up… alas, no Don Webb…).

Adam came down Saturday to help man the table and replenish our stocks, because we sold out on everything I brought, the first day. What really makes this convention my favorite to attend and work is that they're, as the site says, "the only festival that understands." You don't have to explain who Lovecraft was, what Cthulhu is, or why any of this hoary old crap is still worth anyone's time. I was continually flabbergasted by the conversations I found myself in, with folks who strolled up to the table. Whether or not they'd heard of my work, they left me thinking new thought, enervated and inspired. They didn't try to tell me about their own unpublished novel, or the movie they're hoping to get financing for, from people they bug at conventions. They're simply the coolest fucking fans around.

Invasion of the Hipster Bees

And this seems like something uniquely endemic to Portland. It's just cool to be into things. On Saturday night, while lurking in the lobby, I witnessed an invasion of people in improvised bee costumes who swept in to buy tickets for Queen Of The Sun, which they'd mistakenly supposed was playing that night. As they shuffled out with their stingers between their legs, they made me wonder what they put in the water, to make this place what it is.

It was Halloween, New Years and Xmas all rolled into a miraculous four-day blur. In between logging some quality lurking time with Richard and Pat Lupoff, S.T. Joshi, Jason Brock, David Agranoff, Michael Shea and Lynn Cesar, Robert M. Price, Scott Allie, Marc Laidlaw, Andrew Fuller, Nick Gucker and the Strange Aeons gang, I pestered festival founder Andrew Migliore about the future of the fest… because if somebody else doesn't step in, there won't be one.

Andrew has run this asylum for fifteen years, and he's earned a break. But nobody was crying about the fest going away, and any doomsaying was drowned out by manic chatter about who's doing what where, next year.

I got to attend Aaron Vanek's one-day fest spin-off in San Pedro last month, and so did Andrew. He was bowled over by the presentation, and with no responsibilities around his neck, he actually got to enjoy himself. Aaron is a dynamo, and exactly the kind of new batteries the festival needs to survive and grow.

As the Sunday festivities drew to a feverish climax, Stuart Gordon worked the crowd and the winners of the festivals' coveted Brown Jenkin awards posed for pictures with Andrew. The BJ winner for short films was my long-suffering roommate at the luxurious Banfield Motel, Nicolas Simonin. A Frenchman living in San Diego, he wrote and directed the chilling subway set piece Derailed (a.k.a., Detour), and I was probably a little too happy for him. He was a good sport, but he shouldn't have to explain my obnoxious American behavior to his family, so I doctored myself out of the picture. Joe Stalin would've really loved Photoshop.

The morning after, we picked up Ellen Datlow and the Sheas to attend the Survivors' Brunch. Amid much feasting and fawning over my daughter, there were lots of plans and promises thrown out for next year. Whether it comes back to LA or Portland or both, I'll be there, and you should, too.

Andrew Migliore with the Littlest Lurker.