News...

Hey folks, just a quick update and some cool news. 

First off, I know monster posts have been a bit slow this year but I've been inundated with commissions (cool problem). However, I'm consciously taking less the second half of the year so I can focus on the final 11 HPL gods left in this project. 

On the monster note, Scott Nicolay and I are gearing up for a third installment of Stories From the Borderland and the tales he picked for this round f*cking bonkers! These are, by far, the weirdest stories and creatures I've read. We were also privileged enough to have Weird Fiction Review online repost our SFTBL focusing on Margaret St.Clair! 

I've also been working hard on 2 pieces for a split gallery show called Growth//Decay. It's a collaboration between Antler Gallery in Portland OR and Paradigm Gallery here in Philly. Each gallery picked artists from their city, then each artist was tasked with making a piece based on the concept of growth and one on the concept of decay. All the growth pieces will be displayed at Paradigm (June 24th) and all the decay pieces at Antler (June 30th). Other artists in the show include these uber-talented nerds plus many more: Paul Romano, Caitlin McCormack, Alex Eckman-Lawn, Jeanne D'Angelo & Jeremy Hush.

For my growth piece I was inspired by William Hope Hodgson's The Voice In the Night, and for my decay piece I chose Arthur Machen's The Novel Of the White Powder. So, get ready for some gloop and some spores!

Lastly, I was interviewed by the show Articulate With Jim Cotter back in November for a segment on H.P. Lovecraft and this yog-blogsoth/illusto obscurum project specifically. Well, it finally aired last night! You can check it out on their site. The HPL segment starts at the 6 minute mark. 

Michael Sakamoto, H.P. Lovecraft, Brandon Ballengee, George Fu - See more at: http://whyy.org/cms/articulate/michael-sakamoto-h-p-lovecraft-brandon-ballengee-george-fu/#sthash.OMFqyYT2.dpuf

THE CRAWLING HORROR

THE CRAWLING HORROR

"It didn't feel like a dog's back. It was the right distance from the floor, but it was slippery, and there wasn't any hair on it. My hand kept moving, but right off I knew that, whatever I was petting, it wasn't any dog. I had the idea that if I pressed my hand down I could push my fingers right into it."

"It was a slimy sort of stuff, transparent-looking, without any shape to it. It looked as though if you picked it up it would drip right through your fingers. And it was alive-I don't know how I knew that, but I was sure of it even before I looked. It was alive, and a sort of shapeless arm of it lay across the dog's back and covered her head. She didn't move."

"I hit at the thing with a poker, and quick as thought the whole mess started sliding across the floor, stretching out as worms do, oozing under the crack beneath the door that leads onto the porch."

"And a few weeks later I saw the dog that looked like Nan, Doctor Kurt. It was Nan, yet it wasn't."

"Two days ago that Peterson kid disappeared, and he hasn't com back. And what's more, he'll never come back! He's part of that thing that began in my walls, with the rats."

"And it seemed to me that, for a second, I saw something slipping down the window-pane something that clung to the window pane like a colorless jelly, almost like a wave of watery foam, almost like a nothingness that moved heavily down the window-pane and disappeared below the sill."

"And I saw that the thing was slowly giving up pretense of human shape. The face was changing-the hands and arms and the contours of the body were dissolving. And in the last second before it melted into shapeless slime, from that vanishing mouth came Bertha Brandt's voice, crying "I didn't do it, Doctor Kurt!"

"It reared erect as a fountain might gush up. It put forth arms, developed breasts, overspread itself with color. In the time that it might take to draw a long breath the thing had vanished and a something that we knew to be that same ghastly entity, but that looked as Hilda had looked in life, stood naked there amid the jumbled clothes."

Thorp McClusky, The Crawling Horror
Read Scott's blog post about this story here.