Justin Howe's Blog, page 11

Red Spectres 11: Man, Rat Swap Souls! Murder Ensues!

Hello,

Here we are with the last story.

It’s been a fun trip. And the last story is a classic of the weird tales type. Not quite soul juicing, but its next door neighbor: soul-swapping.

“Professor Knop’s Experiment” by Pavel Perov (1924)
George Gibbs is a criminal awaiting execution for murder in Sing-Sing. He’s approached by one Professor Knop who asks if Gibbs would like to take part in an experiment. What kind of experiment? The soul-swapping kind! And so Professor Knop gives a ve...

RED SPECTRES 10: THE ONLY WOMAN WHO UNDERSTANDS

Capuchin catacombs, Palermo, 1980 (by Jesse Fernandez)

Only two more stories left, and I appear to have decided to draw them out for as long as possible. 

One thing that’s been interesting reading this book is seeing how these stories shifted style and tone over the decades. The earlier ones owed more to 19th century lit like Pushkin, Hoffman, and Gogol, but by now in the middle of the second decade of the 20th century the style’s as indebted to modernity and advertising as the usual fare ...

RED SPECTRES 09: A BLESSING OR A CURSE?

Welcome back! This week’s story is “The Messenger” by Georgy Peskov, the pen name for emigre journalist Yelena Deisha. A cursory google search doesn’t reveal much about her, which is a shame because her stories are quite good in so much as they sit comfortably alongside The Women of Weird Tales and any of the better than mid-tier stories from Alberto Manguel’s Black Water.

“The Messenger” by Georgy Peskov (1925)

A much reduced husband and wife worry over their son’s fate. He’s away fig...

Mysthead 2 // Who or What Is the Boss?

Hey all,

I’ve put together another issue of “Mysthead” my RPG fanzine. You can get it and the first issue by supporting me on patreon. CLICK THIS TO GO THERE. In this issue you’ll find lore about Mysthead’s elf and goblin populations, a playable gossiping spider race-class (“The Rumormonger Spider”) for Old School Essentials, and tables to generate whispering skulls, hot spider gossip, and elf-goblin political structures. So as not to make this post a complete advertisement, I’ve include...

RED SPECTRES 08: YOU, ME, THE OTHER YOU, AND MY CAPGRAS DELUSION

Beware of Objects! 

That’s the message of today’s story, or at least the one the narrator would have us believe. But this narrator is not to be trusted and something else is going on here. Grin’s an author who was popular enough to get put on a postage stamp. His wikipedia page would suggest he’s in the same mode as Robert Louis Stevenson, which he is, but he suggests JG Ballard, especially Ballard’s stories set amid the decaying pleasure resorts of Vermilion Sands. The bits of Grinlandia...

What Made the Goat Go Wrong?

“The only domestic animal known to return to feral life as swiftly as the cat is the goat.”

There in the barn, biding its time, watching the villagers go about their daily business, the goat waits. Something strange has happened to the goat, and it is no longer right. Yesterday, it was as normal as any other goat in the field. Now an uncanny intelligence burns behind its horizontal pupils.

What happened to the goat? Roll below to find out:

A skyrock landed in the back fields. The c...

RED SPECTRES 07: THE SLEEP OF REASON

Today’s story made me miss the cheap vulgar soap selling style that the American pulps had. There’s a value in being able to write snappy ad-copy and avoid the sweaty intense existential scrutiny Dostoevsky gives us when he introduces the Grand Inquisitor to the Brothers Karamazov. I know some people prefer the latter, but the truth lies in the tension between the two. 

Here’s the link to Krzhizhanovsky’s wikipedia page in case you want to do the homework. 

Also, here’s a content warni...

RED SPECTRES 06: YOU HAVE REACHED THE WRONG SPIRIT

Here we are with our second foray into Mikhail Bulgakov. 

He’s certainly the most pulpy of the writers we’ve encountered so far. If he had managed to emigrate to the UK (he was close after the Russian Civil War but typhus prevented it), I believe his literary output would have been colossal and made him better known. This one is short and wry with tongue firmly in cheek.

“A Séance” by Mikhail Bulgakov (1922)

Various aristocrats are meeting for a séance. All formerly posh, they’re no...

RED SPECTRES 05: “BROTHER, I CAN’T LEAVE THE SQUADRON.”

This is it.

Our first story from The Master & Margarita author, Mikahail Bulgakov. A man with the worrisome fate of being someone Joe Stalin had opinions about. Go on and read his wikipedia page for the details if you want to. 

More in line with the whole yesterweird thing, this story is the first Soviet Gothic story that reads like it could’ve been in Weird Tales.* However it’s one thing to write about being haunted by a ghost after getting hepped up on Edgar Allan Poe and a whole ot...

RED SPECTRES 04: A SUBTLE, CENTURIES-STORED VENOM

Another update, another story about mirrors. 

This one reads a bit rushed, which shouldn’t surprise anyone since it’s dated 1922 London. Emigrating to another country is liable to distract anyone. Again, I’m struck by how much Goethe, Baudelaire, and Pushkin seem to be Chayanov’s foundational trio. Or maybe I should say German Romanticism, French Decadence, and Russian Literature.

“The Venetian Mirror, or The Extraordinary Adventures of the Glass Man” by Aleksandr Chayanov (1922)

Al...