The Shadow Out Of Providence

Description

“Highly entertaining.”

--Sandy Petersen, game designer, Doom, Quake, and The Call of Cthulhu RPG

“…an ambitious, clever, complex and yet still completely accessible project that plays with some of Lovecraft's more obscure literary concerns…  I can't wait for my copy!”

--George Strayton, screenwriter and producer, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, Transformers 2

"...promises to be a worthy and exciting addition to this canon."

--Tavis Allison, The Mule Abides

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“LOVECRAFTICAL?”

The Shadow out of Providence comprises a play and two short stories. Unlike most texts that draw inspiration from the work of the Providence fantasist Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), these do not strive to horrify with revelations the bleakness of an unsympathetic universe, or monstrosities lurking beneath everyday life. The book is thus not "Lovecraftian," in the usual sense.

Instead, it is “Lovecraftical” (to coin a term). It treats Lovecraft the writer, the thinker, and the cultural phenomenon, rather than the sliver of his work on which most writers fixate (one that he sometimes dismissed as “Yog-Sothothery”).

WHY ANOTHER LOVECRAFT PARODY?

This is not a conventional parody, but a metafictional re-working of Lovecraftical material, especially Lovecraft’s intellectual concerns—such as the power of print and visual media, the unknown as a source of fear, and ignorance (willful and otherwise) as a defense against the new.

Framing stories present the three texts in slightly different, counterhistorical worlds. Three separate fictional universes challenge the reader: if the oldest and strongest source of fear is the unknown, what, in each setting, counts as unknown?

WHAT ABOUT MONSTERS?

Don’t worry: monsters lurk in The Shadow out of Providence. Slime, membranous wings, the living dead, and yes, even tentacles all make appearances.