Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 142 Pages There are a few things that will guarantee that I pick up a book, for a further inspection, and… A number of those things are on the cover of this book :o) I literally had no choice in the matter, I had to pick the book and take a look. The blurb pretty much sold it to me… A home to reavers and rakes, sorcerers and slayers, undead kings and undying things – expanding a page at a time in the stories added by its authors. In the once lands, a lineage of sorcerous wayfinders work to keep godlike monstrosities locked behind the crumbling walls of cursed cities, by allowing the vengeful ghosts of forest gods to inhabit their living flesh. In the wild wastes, tribes of cannibal huntresses fight to balance the old ways and new in a struggle to keep their culture alive by trading in death. In the sprawling city of Khyber, ambitions dance on sword edges while clans of thieves and reavers clutch at power. Welcome to… Shared World. Yep, I was sold. ‘Shared World’ came ...

  Page Count: 55 Pages H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dunwich Horror’ was originally published in the April 1929 edition of ‘Wierd Tales’ (thanks Wikipedia!) I read it as part of the Vintage Books edition of ‘The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Tales’; you can more than likely pick up any collection of Lovecraft tales and find this story inside. You can also have a quick Google and find ‘The Dunwich Horror’ free to read online, like Here for example. Having watched the movie the other day, and realising that I’d never read the original tale, I thought it was way past time that I gave ‘The Dunwich Horror’ a read. So that’s exactly what I did last night, let me tell you about it… In the half-forgotten Massachusetts village of Dunwich, Wilbur Whateley is shunned by the other villagers and marked for an earth shattering destiny… If he can get his hands on an original edition of the Necronomicon. Wilbur’s untimely death abruptly ends that destiny but his unfinished work leaves Dunwich in grea...

It has been a bit of a week, what with one thing and another, and one of those things was having to have my kids pet rabbit put down on Friday afternoon. I’m a ‘dog person’ normally but Cupcake was the closest you could get to a dog in rabbit form :o) She was always up for having a fuss made of her and when I looked after my ex partner’s house, Cupcake would come and sit by my feet all day while I was working. She wouldn’t take any nonsense from the cat either. Until the arthritis got too much that is. She wasn’t really my pet but I’ll miss her anyway. Anyway… Yesterday wasn’t really a day for reading; more a day for sitting in front of the telly and letting movies happen to me :o) Actually, so was Friday night, come to think of it. Let me tell you about some of the movies that I watched… ‘Empire of the Ants’ (1977) A shady land-developer takes prospective investors on a tour of her latest business opportunity, unaware that radioactive waste has leaked and caused the local ant populati...

Well, this is awkward... My plan for today was to talk about my favourite stories from Stephen King's 'Night Shift' collection and I had a great time reading them yesterday. And then, well... I thought I'd double check the blog and it turns out that all my favourite stories from 'Night Shift' have already featured on the blog. Seriously... 'Graveyard Shift' and 'The Mangler'. 'Grey Matter' 'The Lawnmower Man'. Honestly, I don't know what's going on with me at the moment... Anyway. This wouldn't normally be a huge issue (flat full of books and all that) but I'm house/pet-sitting, at the moment, and I've got nothing with me that I've actually finished. So... Unless I magically come up with something else today (possible but unlikely...). 'Past Me' is stepping in again to help me out. A quick post to kick Halloween off then. Have some thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft's (very) short story 'Nyarlathote...

  This is officially my all time favourite cover art for a Lovecraft collection and it just so happens to be the collection where I first came across 'The Colour Out Of Space'. I'm 95% sure that I still have this book lying around somewhere, I'm going to have to go on a hunt now. But this post has only just begun and I'm already digressing... ;o) I'm trying not to recycle too many posts, from older blogs, at the moment but I've got a lot of work to catch up with today and I didn't want another 'post-less day' so, here we are. I find myself preferring Clark Ashton Smith's tales these days but 'The Colour Out Of Space' is still a favourite Lovecraft tale of mine so I thought I'd recycle a post of mine (from March 2012, if you want to read the original post) and let it have its time here. Regular posting should resume tomorrow (fingers crossed); for now though, lets revisit 'The Colour Out Of Space'... The narrator has been s...

My Halloween usually involves a scary movie and/or some similar reading but this year… When I woke up and realised that I’d slept through half of ‘The Thing’, that told me things weren’t going to plan (and that I could do with more sleep in general). My copy of ‘Shadows over Innsmouth’ hadn’t turned up either (and I didn’t fancy reading anything else) so I went back to sleep and I’ll see if I can do Halloween better next year instead 😊 ‘Shadows over Innsmouth’ actually turned up yesterday so it wasn’t as if I had to wait too long 😉 It was the promise of a Guy N. Smith Mythos tale, that I hadn’t read, that originally had me hitting the ‘Order’ button and even though I’ve already read ‘Only The End of the World’, that was years ago and it’s in this collection so that was an easy decision to make. Quick thoughts again for this post, I hope you don’t mind 😉 These were two very quick reads and I’ve got a few other bits that I need to get done today…  ‘Return to Innsmouth’ – Guy...

So, it's October which means it's the time of year when I start feeling like I should be reading more horror, ghost stories, you know what it's like...We'll see how that goes (the smart person would put money on the 'as well as it ever does' option which is to say, 'could do better'...) but in the meantime, I found this Lovecraft collection in Oxfam, not so long ago, and figured I'd take a look at the contents and see if anything sprang out and demanded that I read it. Well, a title like 'The Evil Clergyman' is all it takes to pique my interest. I've known a few clergymen (and a couple of clergywomen) in my time and they've generally been a quite pleasant bunch; it was time to find out what an evil one was like ;o) As it turns out... Let me tell you about the slightly disappointing read that was 'The Evil Clergyman'. Our narrator is shown the rooms of a clergyman (yep, the evil one) who met a violent end. The narrator is warn...

I've devoted a large chunk of this blog to the stories of Clark Ashton-Smith and while I really need to read more of his original works, it's very clear that Robert E. Howard is an influence around these parts as well. I was thinking about this last night and suddenly realised that H.P. Lovecraft hasn't featured here at all. While there are very good reasons why Lovecraft doesn't get talked about (we all know the ones or rather, the one), it feels a little off to let Ashton-Smith and Howard have their day(s) but not Lovecraft. So here we are :o) I can't promise that this will be a regular thing (for reasons that will become apparent) but I was stuck for a read, last night, and thought I'd give 'The Doom That Came To Sarnath' a go as I'd never read it. It's a funny read, highlighting what I see as Lovecraft's shortcomings, as a writer, but also a story that shows how shortcomings can be turned into a strength... There is in the land of Mnar ...