hooray!

"Dreams in the Witch House" is a fascinating story, although many modern scholars dismiss it as one of Lovecraft's "failures"; and, for me, part of the tale's fascination comes from HPL's treatment of occult stereotypes: the witch hag, the Black Man of ye Sabboath, the familiar, &c &c. I remember how shocked I was, when I first read ye tale as a young lad, by the extreme violence and gore of its conclusion. I loved Lovecraft's fiction for its mood and dreamy atmosphere, having no taste for blood-&-guts horror (as perhaps my own fiction shews). I've been enchanted with the idea of beihng a witch since early childhood, and my elder sister and I identified as witches when we were young children. I used to stage "voodoo" rituals in my bedroom for neighborhood boys when I was a kid, dancing evocatively around my bedroom as I played Yma Sumac 45's on ye phonograph. My grandparents had bought me a knife when they visited Germany, ye handle of witch was a goat hoof, and that seemed a perfect ritual tool. 

I've depicted a number of witches in my weird fiction, and thus it delighted me when my charming collaborator David Barker wrote en entire novel concerning witches in H. P. Lovecraft's dreamlands. The novel was originally to be publish'd by Dark Regions Press, who publish'd my other collaborations with David; but they recently passed on the new novel, and so I offer'd it to Derrick Hussey at Hippocampus Press. S. T. Joshi, who assists Derrick in selection of projects, ad read and praised the novel, and went out of his way to copy edit the entire text. They have many other books to bring forth before they can get to WITCHES, so the book may have to9 wait until next year to see publication.

Below is a photo of me at work at the Jones Fantastic Museum in the 1960's. Mine was a rather unimaginative "traditional" approach to ye witch image.