Have A Spooky Walpurgisnacht!

[Mick]

Tomorrow is Walpurgisnacht and to celebrate this neglected holiday I present two skins based on two stories by H.P. Lovecraft in which airplanes feature prominently. Alas, they will make no sense to those who haven't read Lovecraft's fiction.

In Lovecraft's novella "At The Mountains Of Madness" the Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition of the Antarctic summer 1930-31 had a small fleet of five aircraft. Their type is not specified but the narrative seems to indicate that they were single engined. The places that they landed indicate that they much have been operated on skis. The Fairchild was first produced in the late 1920s and was operated on skis in the antarctic by the 1929-30 Byrd expedition, so it fits in rather well with the story. This skin is fiction about fiction, as there is no description of it in the story.

There was an airplane in H.P. Lovecraft's novella "The Shadow Out Of Time," the story of the Miskatonic University Australian Expedition of 1935. The story doesn't specify what type of plane or what colors and markings it wore. The type is not specified but the narrative seems to indicate that it was single engined. The F.VIIa was in service since 1925, so it's plausible that the university might have found a used one at a reasonable price.

The skins are for James Hefner's Fairchild FC-2W2 (Byrd) on wheels and skis, and for Jens B. Kristensen's Fokker F.VIIa.

Have a spooky Walpurgisnacht! Watch out for the Old Ones, and don't let the ghouls get you!

[stoney]

Those are very much appreciated Mick, beautiful!

[voyager]

Mick,
Thanks for the repaints. I've read several of his stories but not those. Will read them eventually. Happen to live within a mile of where Lovecraft is buried.

voyager

[Mick]

Mick,
Thanks for the repaints. I've read several of his stories but not those. Will read them eventually. Happen to live within a mile of where Lovecraft is buried.
voyager

Cool. I'm in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, not exactly in Lovecraft country but very close by. Just a short drive up the Interstate brings me to Mass. Rt. 2, which follows the fictional path of the Miskatonic River as it flows to the sea past Arkham towards Innsmouth. Lotta weird s___t went down in and around Arkham Mass. and Miskatonic University.

This past winter I read the complete fictional works of HPL in one big volume. I'd read all the Arkham House anthologies years ago, and this collection showed me why many of his earlier tales were never anthologized - they weren't very good. Still interesting though, showing how his writing developed over the years of his short life. (He didn't make it to fifty - but it wasn't the ghouls that got him, or evil aliens from other dimensions - it was cancer.)

Just saw the new HPL movie, The Color Out Of Space with Nick Cage. I was not impressed. It could serve as an object lesson in why not to try to make a feature length movie out of a short story. They added so much junk to pad it to fill two hours that the original story got buried in there somewhere. I find it interesting that HPL wrote a story that involved building an enormous reservoir in central Massachusetts ten years before Quabbin Reservoir was even a gleam in some engineer's eye.

At least it was better than Reanimator, which departed completely from the original story, keeping only the setting location and the protagonist's name. The only HPL story I recall that translated well to the screen is The Dunwhich Horror. I was impressed that they could make a decent movie, the most visual of media, about an invisible monster. In those days there was no CGI, and it wasn't needed for an invisible horror.