Update: Pre-order information has been added.
Cadabra Records has announced that they will be releasing a spoken word vinyl of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Lurking Fear” with Andrew Leman, co-founder of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, providing the reading. The artwork, which you can see below, was done by Alan Brown.
The limited 12″ will be pressed in a run of 500 of which only 350 will be available for sale (100 are already pre-sold and 50 for personal label reasons) on July 8th. Pre-orders will go live Friday, June 3rd.
An excerpt from S. T. Joshi’s liner notes reads:
Reading Lovecraft can on occasion be a guilty pleasure. When we encounter a sentence like this from The Outsider – “It was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable”- we are inclined to smile as well as to admire the verbal pyrotechnics that can create such a cascade of evocative adjectives. Especially in his earlier years, Lovecraft enjoyed experimenting with this kind of over-the-top horror, and the results are some of his most entertaining stories. The Lurking Fear is one of these.
Written in November 1922, it was the second of Lovecraft’s professionally published stories. Weird Tales, which was the haven for most of his later tales, would not be founded until March 1923; and Lovecraft – who was not even sure he wanted to be a “professional” writer, if that meant churning out hackwork according to market specifications – wrote The Lurking Fear in response to the pleas of a friend, George Julian Houtain, who wanted just such a blood-and-thunder narrative. Houtain had begun a semi-pro magazine (which Lovecraft later called a “vile rag”) entitled Home Brew, subtitled “America’s Zippiest Pocket Magazine.” Most people don’t know that Home Brew was a humor magazine, full of articles, sketches, limericks, and other matter poles apart from Lovecraft’s usual brand of supernatural horror.
From the official press release: “Dark ambient/industrial outfit, Theologian, backs up Leman’s conveyance of the awesome story, supplying an appropriately macabre and unsettling score.“
