Saturday, July 2nd, 2011
Pleased to officially announce “Where’s my Shoggoth?” with Ian Thomas
In short, it’s a horror book for both kids and adults
Last night I finally signed with Archaia (Artesia, Mouse Guard, Okko, Fraggle Rock) witnessed by a public notary with her crazy stamped seals to make it all legal and everything.
And yesterday the cover was also submitted so they can include it in their Spring 2012 catalogue.
So I’m sat here wiping the sleep out of my eyes and the eyes of my account ( and nursing a belly that probably ate too many chillies in his celebratory curry last night ). But I’m writing this blog to whet your appetite with a few piccies of the cover and a couple of the incomplete pages. Over the coming months I’ll be uploading some of the pages I have been working and will be working on.
But what is a shoggoth? I’m sure that a good number of people reading this will at least have heard of H.P.Lovecraft, but for everyone else’s benefit he was a horror writer around during the early 1900s. What makes him stand out amongst other horror writers was the unique way he took note of the prevalent scientific discoveries of the time.
During that period the world had seen the actual full beginnings of astronomy and how the universe works, the acceptance of Darwinist evolution as a model for all life on earth, the most catastrophic Great War ( World War 1 ) the world had ever seen, the publication of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity explaining that the world we see is not the world that exists and the inconstant nature of time… and those are just some of the many fundamentally world changing discoveries that mankind was witness to.
Around 1900 the world changed substantially in a very short amount of time, and H. P. Lovecraft captured all of that fresh uncertainty of man’s ‘place in the universe’ in his horror.
So now you have the context, what is a shoggoth? O.K., O.K. I’ll get on with it.
In Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, millions of years ago our world was colonised by incredibly powerful beings, so powerful and advanced they appear as gods. Just to witness their existence is to lose your mind. Most of them have left though some of them are still here, only sleeping and biding their time to reclaim this planet from it’s fresh inheritors, us. And a shoggoth is one of the creatures they brought with them.
The entirety of ‘Where’s my Shoggoth?’ is fairly simple in nature but through the eyes of it’s young hero(?), Ian and I take the reader on a quick, whistle-stop tour of a number of the monsters of Lovecraft’s absorbing, high concept worlds.
You know that thing that goes bump in the night? Well, it’s in the book and it’s going to apologise for waking you but says it is necessary to rob you of your sanity.
Thanks very much.
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Tags: Ian Thomas, Lovecraft, Where's My Shoggoth