Customer Reviews

The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute To H. P. Lovecraft

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Within the confines of Lovecraftian tributes there are sometimes successes that combine elements of the fantastical with the bizarre, mixed results that couple the failings of one author with the successes of another, or - in the most rare instances - there are failures that can be found utterly without merit. These are the wonderful worlds that we throw ourselves into whenever purchasing a set of names attributed to a larger creator, and its something I normally fear because I've touched the eye of the proverbial oven one too many times. Still, within The Starry Wisdom, you have something of the middle man of the bunch, giving you pieces of the lore that are actually well-written and concise, as well as pieces that have no redeeming qualities, however. Unfortunately that is the lifeblood of many collected pieces, however, and everything has to be taken as such because of this. Happily, though, I have to say that there are some things in the book that I wouldn't want to be without.

Of all the stories within the chronicled tales here, there is an artistic adaptation of Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu done by John Coulthart that is immaculately done. The quality of the work is fantastic and captures the visions within the madness so very well. Few things merit praise as much as this does, and it truly makes the book worth buying by itself. Still, there are other noteable contributions that add to this as well, including a little Robert M. Price (A Thousand Young), some Brian Lumley (The Night Sea-Maid Went Down), David Conway (Black Static), Ramsey Campbell (Potential), William S. Burroughs (Wind Die, You Die, We Die) and a little Allan Moore (The Courtyard). There are also pieces from Grant Morrison (Lovecraft in Heaven), James Havoc and Mike Philbin (Third Eye Butterfly), Henry Wessel (From This Swamp), JG Ballad (Prisoner of the Coral Deep), Dan Kellet (Red Mass), Simon Whitechapel (Walpurgisnachtmusik), DF Lewis (Meltdown), John Beal (Beyond Reflection), CG Brandrick and DM Mitchell (The Exquisite Corpse), Micheal Gira (Extracted From the Mouth of the Consumer, Rotting Pig), Adele Olivia Glawell (Hypothetical Materfamalias), Don Webb (The Sound of a Door Opening), Rick Grimes (Pills Fro Miss Betsy), Peter Smith (The Dreamers in Darkness), Stephen Sennitt (Nails), and DM Mitchell (Ward)that can be hit-or-miss depending on what you demand from your authors. Many of these titles have come and gone through various books in the past, some more than others, and there are many that I really didn't like in the set. Still, the illustrated portion of the book was done in ways that made it seems so wondrously worth obtaining and I'm glad I put it into my collection because of it.

For fans of HP Lovecraft's works, then you might want to look into these titles - provided that you don't own them already. I would also suggest picking it up because of the reason I listed before, noting that the illustrated portions of the book are something done in the most commendable of ways. Even if you aren't a fan of Lovecraft but you love some of the things doe with his ideas, then this would be worth at least looking into because of the tendrils making sweet music in the background of nightmarish dreams. To a point, depending on your ownership already, it comes recommended.

I can't add to what James Stephen Garrett has said about the merits of this book. I shouldn't respond to the negative reactions and I won't go into detail. Suffice it to say that the reactions to this on the UK website are far more balanced and intelligent than those here on Amazon.com. My impression is that many of those who have responded negatively have missed the point of this volume entirely.
This book was an attempt to rescue Lovecraft from the ghetto of 'pulp' or 'genre' fiction and the Role-playing crowd who have, on the whole, trivialised his most important themes - cosmic horror and alienation, the collapse of civilisation, man's insignificance in the vast scheme of the universe.
Those who were turned off by the scatalogical content should realise that this was merely an attempt to reflect the general miserable thanatoptic state of our culture at present. If you want escapism, please read the Hobbit or Winnie the Pooh.
This was an important book and a thought-provoking one. This is not simple entertainment.

"The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H.P. Lovecraft" is far more than a tribute. It is an update, a confirmation of the First Article of Faith of the Esoteric Order of Dagon: that with strange aeons, even Death may Die.

It is a collection of illustrations and poems and wickedly twisted tales that pay homage to the Grandmaster, the Old Man of Providence---and then venture further into the darkness, without an oil lamp. Here you will find stories of a world inverted, of reason cast into the mad grinning abyss of the Universal and Uncaring, of a universe itself unhinged and gone mad. The writing is mad; the illustrations themselves, with which this nasty little volume is peppered, scream their insanity. This is not a safe volume. Here you will find no reclusive bachelor scholars penning correspondence to other sequestered academics.

This book will not comfort you. It will not give you a whiff of the familiar. It will not tuck you into bed at night. Quite possibly, it will pull itself across your floor with its toothy, fleshy suckers, crawl into bed with you, and introduce you to the glory of the polymorphous Azazoth. Here are 21 short tales (two of them pen-and-ink depictions), four "essays" on Lovecraft (penned, evidently, by deranged former academics in rubber rooms) and the collection's crowning glory, John Coulthart's masterful graphic adaptation of Lovecraft's seminal "Call of Cthulhu". This is a black tome of infestation, sexual evil, corruption.

Think back to the first time you read H.P. Lovecraft; what disturbed you? What was it about "At the Mountains of Madness", or "The Colour out of Space", or "The Call of Cthulhu", or perhaps "The Dunwich Horror" that pinioned you with its nasty pinkish-grey suction pads as you lay there reading---what peeled off your skin and got into your system, infected your blood?

For me it boiled down to two things: the uncaring, merciless, godless void of the universe, in which good and evil were meaningless conceits batted aside by the gibbering monsters barely conscious of petty, pathetic man. The other was the strong undertone of perverse, perverted Sex: think of the miscegenation implicit in virtually all of Lovecraft's work, from "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth" to "The Horror at Red Hook" and "The Thing on the Doorstep". There are deep and dark vanities to be sated, perversions to be explored that would not have survived the light of the Puritan day, deals to be struck, bloodlines to be entwined, new works of the Flesh to be consummated.

These Beings---these nihilistic Gods, these savage Beasts---don't just want to eat and rule. They want to breed. They want to corrupt. There lies the horror of Lovecraft: there lies the stink, the deadly pallor, the ripe rot, of this glorious collection.

I hate Lovecraft pastiches; those hollow imitators, happy to rob the Master's tomb and string together words like "eldritch" and "antediluvian". Only Brian Lumley's "The Night the Sea-Maid went Down", "Ward 23", and---surprisingly---Alan Moore's overwrought "The Courtyard" get anywhere near to that territory, and even then skirt the worst excesses of the Lovecraftian pastiche.

By far the best tale in the volume is David Conway's warped, wicked, revolutionary "Black Static", which throws SETI, bio-technology, and virtual reality into the cauldron, mixes thoroughly, sets to boil, and conjures up a black feast of horror that takes the Mythos to its logical conclusion.

Ramsey Campbell's fine "Potential", Simon Whitechapel's "Walpurgisnachtmusik", and Robert Price's "A Thousand Young" are all juicy, gory, nasty little tales of amoral players who find themselves played. J.G. Ballard is at his least obtuse and most shivery in the lyrical "Prisoner of the Coral Deep", while William S. Burroughs conjures up the Interzone, espionage, and horrific corruption in "Wind Die You Die We Die".

Grant Morrison is both sick and clever with his "Lovecraft in Heaven" a delicious literary spurt of rotten, leathery decrepitude, a revelatory little tale of realization achieved on the Old Man of Providence's deathbed, when he realizes his nihilistic little horrorverse is all too real. "Pills for Miss Betsy" actually made me physically ill---not because it's gory, but because it's patently out of its mind.

A few of the stories in "Starry Wisdom" are deranged trash---as you would expect of any Cthulhu cult, particularly at the extremes---upper and lower---of the intellectual bell curve. "Hypothetical Materfamilias", while ambitious, is one of them; "From the Mouth of the Consumer: Rotting Pig" is another. Ignore them. Or submerge yourself in them, if you're that far gone---shoggoths don't care about the sanity of their adherents.

I adore "Starry Wisdom". I adore it because it is the very embodiment of anti-pastiche: it takes everything you know about the Lovecraft Mythos and turns it on his rubbery head. And frankly, Lovecraft himself was a man far ahead of his time---and even he hadn't lived through the horror of World War II, of the atomization of human cities, the development of brutal biological weapons, mass genocide in Africa and Southeast Asia, the insanity of 9/11 and suicide bombers. His lonely New England woods and tottering Yankee farmhouses are paved beneath strip malls and 6-lane superstreets and big box stores that only get bigger and more impersonal: would he write about reclusive scholars now?

"Starry Wisdom" carries Lovecraft to the next level. It is corrupt; it is sexual; it is evil. Inject.

These stroies are fabulous. Deeply, darkly disturbing, grandiose, funny, incredible. Some have Lovecraftian themes, other references, but all are in tribute to him. Any fan of HPL should run to this like Cthulhu runs to sailor's necks. The Graphic Novel of "The Call of Cthulhu" is really a treat. HIGHLY HIGHLY recommended.

I bought this book for two reasons, first I'm a big Lovecraft fan, second I'm a huge Alan Moore fan.
And Moore's three contributions are almost the only reason I'm keeping this book.
Most of the stories in this book are at best mediocre, especially Grant Morrison's piece is terribly weak.
There is some decent stuff, "prisoner of the coral deep", by J.G. Ballard and "Black static" by'David Conway. "The night seamaid went down" by Brian Lumley is allright, and the "Call of Cthulhu"-Comic is really. really good. The last positive mention should go to "the sound of a door opening" by Don Webb, it's writing is okay and it has a really interesting premise. Apart from this, most of the rest is terrible and conceited. Fragmentary, pseudo-intellectual garbage and utterly useless and non-comprehensible poetry. Like I wrote in the title it's all very pretentious, trying to be something special and clearly failing.
The worst part of it all are the four essays. To clear this up, I really hate it when people think Lovecraft's fantasies are reality, they diminish the author's work and to be honest they obviously don't have a strong grip on reality itself.
Now all four of this "essays" treat Lovecraft's writing as if everything in it was actual reality.
The first one is no real essay, but some bloke writing about his trials to channel Lovecraft's dark gods. I won't comment on this.
The second essay is basically about how Lovecraft in his visions and dreams made contact with the spirit of a new age (kudos to the "age of Aquarius" and Aleister Crowley). The problem is his logic is faulty and the sources he quotes are not really sources but very questionable pseudo-mystic books.
In the third essay the author rambles on and on about how Lovecraft, in his (the author's)opinion, sometimes describes fractal mathematics and geometry in his works. Look, to be honest I don't think the describtions are particularly fitting to fractals at all, but even if they were, the question would be: "So what?!?" The author fails miserably to show what good it is for. And that is only the first part, the other two are even worse, some useless rambling about the nature of Nyarlathotep and the dreams he has been send about the Cthulhu cycle, because of his rituals.
The last bit is about the Loch Ness Monster actually being a shoggoth and some more nonsense.
I quote:"As a rational materialist, Lovecraft rejected the possibility of any paranormal elements in such activity.
He was, as we know, mistaken."
Do we? do we really? Or are you just an idiot? Seriously I am so sick of the whole esoteric literature. They do this all the time, there logic is faulty from the beginning, there sources are obscure at best and oftentimes are ridiculed in the scientific community. You can't take a book by a known fraud, full of inconsistencies and often blatant lies and use this work or one passage of it as a serious source for your hypothesis. It's just ridiculous.

Conclusion: The book is quite expensive for a Softcover and there are much better books there if you want to read other takes on HPL's work, for example the "Children of Cthulhu" anthology is available as a paperback for a few bucks and it has lots and lots of good HPL inspired stories.

I am an avid reader of Lovecraft's works, but tend to stay away from many of the extensions to his mythos cycle. Many writers in the mythos tend to twist old stories and introduce concepts such as "good and evil" which are absent from Lovecraft's works. This book though tends to be more independent and with elements which pay tribute to Lovecraft without being direct take-offs. I found the majority of the works fun to read and would definitely recommend this book to any fan of the master of the short-horror.

I'll start with the positive aspects of the volume. Couthart's illustrated version of "The Call of Cthulhu" is really fantastic, and it's honestly almost worth the price of the entire volume. Without it the book would not have been worth publishing. As far as the tributes to Lovecraft go, Lumley's contribution is an interesting take on the encounter at sea theme. Also, Burroughs' "Wind Die. You Die. We Die." is excellent. They both capture the spirit of Lovecraft - there's something that's incomprehensibly terrible close by but never fully exposed. Some readers may find some of the other more traditional Lovecraft adaptations to be worthwhile reading, but these three pieces stick out as the best of the volume.

I didn't like the rest of the volume. Readers' opinions of this volume will vary with their attitudes toward the newer styles of Lovecraft adaptations. Those who like a more traditional and faithful approach will find the rest of the volume lacking. On the other hand, those who like modern, and even postmodern, interpretations of the Lovecraftian mythos will appreciate the rest of the book.

Many of the stories in "The Starry Wisdom" have graphic depictions of the violence and corruption that always takes place slightly out of view in the more traditional Lovecraft adaptations. Other stories have nothing to do with the Lovecraft mythos, and a few are almost nonsensical. While this is fine, the traditional Lovecraft fan should be forewarned. I have always enjoyed Lovecraft and certain of his imitators not because of what they include in stories, but because of what they leave up to the imagination. People who agree with this last opinion will most likely be disappointed by much of the volume.

Of course, any Lovecraft-fan would get this book no matter what any duppy would say about it. It's disturbing, wet and sopping with meat and mass, and it disgusted me at certain points, that great it is! I would say four stars for the stories, yet five stars for the comic and the essays. Go get it! Come on, you know you want to!

This book contains a variety of stories whose quality is wildly uneven. I bought this book several years ago, skimmed though it, and put it on the window sill in hopes that the sunlight might disinfect it.
I finally decided to give it a chance and found, much to my surprise. that that the stories ranged from excellent(Lumley, Cambell, Conway, and the Ctulhu graphic story )to absolute trash. Some of the storied and one illustrated story never exceeded, and sometimes did not reach, the level of quality of the "Poo, Ca ca, 'Your mommy and daddy had sex.' "art" found on the walls of elementary school boy's rooms.

I recommend that you buy the book cheap. Then read every story through because some of the stories start in the style of the least talented and build into truly uniquely worthwhile works (Conway for example).
Additionally, I recommend that after reading each, you annotate individual stories on a scale ranging from excellent, through good, to trash, and finally putrid garbage. In this way, you will be spared the effort of again wading through several cesspools in order to locate the real gems when reading the book a second or third time.
I apologize if I offended any of the authors, but I fail to find sex involving excrement, necrophilia, octopuses, and slithering slime a wee bit off putting.

In "Ward 23", the story that closes out THE STARRY WISDOM, author D.M. Mitchell (also the editor of this volume) discuss a book by a character James, "a dangerous paranoid case", thus: "Supposedly a work of 'surrealism', it comprises a catalogue of violent and scatalogical perversion - paedophilia, rape, necrophilia, coprophagy and murder - all written in a facile free-verse form which James probably thought experimental at the time". Recalling some of (ahem) less successful pieces in this book, I was tempted to suppose that Mitchell was (consciously or otherwise) offering an implicit critique of these works.

Please don't misunderstand me - there are some excellent stories in this book. All of the Alan Moore (Watchmen) pieces are extremely well-written (no suprise there), and I was quite fond of the Grant Morrison (Batman: Arkham Asylum (15th Anniversary Edition)) and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch) pieces, as well as a few others, and as an old fan of horror comics I couldn't help but be pleased with John Coulthart's excellent pictorial adaptaion of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu". But the stuff in here that's bad is just freaking awful; awful as in if I saw some of these stories on a Cthulhu Mythos fanfic page, I would still be embarassed for the author. Folks, merely writing in an "avant-garde" style and piling on the viscera and scatology does not make for good horror fiction; on the contrary, it generally makes for work that is annoying and dull, regardless of genre. That rubbish like this appears next to stories from greats like Moore and Burroughs is unconscionable.