Guests
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Featured Guests
Robin D. Laws designed the GUMSHOE rules for Pelgrane Press’ Trail of Cthulhu roleplaying game, and such beloved supplements for it as The Armitage Files, Dreamhounds of Paris, and The Book of Ants. He is the author of the short story anthology New Tales of the Yellow Sign and the editor of Shotguns v. Cthulhu. Other fiction of interest to Cthulhucon PDX attendees includes short story contributions to Letters to Lovecraft and Madness on the Orient Express. Ghouls, byakhee and Nyarlathotep get frequent namechecks on "Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff," the weekly podcast of gaming, culture, and weirdness he co-hosts with fellow writer and game designer Kenneth Hite.
A professional creature effects artist, cinematographer, model maker, and puppeteer, Kevin McTurk has been working in the effects industry for over 20 years. A graduate of Pennsylvania State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film Production, Kevin moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and began his career in special make-up effects at Stan Winston Studios, working on Batman Returns, Interview with a Vampire, and the Jurassic Park films. He has worked for many effects companies over the years, including the Jim Henson Creature Shop, Amalgamated Dynamics, and Spectral Motion. Kevin also worked at New Deal Studios, where he was involved on the miniature effects shots for the Martin Scorcese films The Aviator, Shutter Island, and Hugo.
In 2004, Kevin was contacted by Weta Workshop in New Zealand and moved to Wellington to work on the films King Kong,The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the gory comedy Black Sheep (in which he also played the Weresheep creature).
In 2011, Kevin received a Project Grant from The Jim Henson Foundation and a Filmmaker's Grant from the Handmade Puppet Dreams (a short film series curated by Heather Henson, Jim Henson's youngest daughter) to make his first puppet short film "The Narrative of Victor Karloch." The film was a great success, playing in over twenty international festivals, and winning the 2012 BEST ANIMATED FILM at the DragonCon Film Festival.
Paul Komoda is a sculptor, illustrator, and designer inspired by a lifelong obsession with monsters, dreams and nightmares, medical anomalies, and the weirder side of the zoological spectrum. Over the years he's delved into jewelry, action figures, album artwork, erotic/grotesque illustration, and anatomically inspired body art. In the early 2000s he worked for H.R. Giger, on several jewelry and sculpture projects. More recently, he's done work for Sideshow Collectibles, Darkhorse Comics, Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated, and had sculpted the miniatures for the H.P. Lovecraft inspired game, The Doom That Came to Atlantic City. He's also found himself putting his distinctive mark on some vinyl Kaiju figures for the company Dunk-Japan. Ongoing endeavors include furthere explorations into the realms of fine art and comics, as well as the publication of his sketchbook which has oft been described as a contemporary Necronomicon. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Guests
Alan M. Clark has created illustrations for hundreds of books, including works of fiction of various genre, nonfiction, textbooks, young adult fiction, and children’s books. Awards for his work include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. He is the author of thirteen books, including seven novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. Lazy Fascist Press released his latest Novel, The Door that Faced West. Mr. Clark's company, IFD Publishing, has released six traditional books and twenty-three ebooks by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Jeremy Robert Johnson. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon.
Keith Baker is an author and game designer best known for creating the world of Eberron for Dungeons & Dragonsand the card game Gloom. Lovecraft's work has inspired many aspects of his RPG work, and his Mythos-themed games include Cthulhu Gloom, The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, and Cthulhu Fluxx.
In 1998 Scott Glancy left a perfectly functional career as an attorney to join up with the role-playing game publisher Pagan Publishing, the nerd equivalent of running away to join the Foreign Legion. Today Scott is the man in charge of Pagan Publishing (much in the same sense that the last surviving legionnaire can be said to be in command of Fort Zinderhoff). Pagan’s most recent project is “Horrors of War,” an anthology of scenarios set during the Great War for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. Scott is a contributing author on the award-winning Delta Green series of Call of Cthulhu rpg supplements and has had Lovecraftian fiction published in several short story collections including the recent "Book of Cthulhu II," "Shotguns v. Cthulhu," and the upcoming “Swords v. Cthulhu.” You can hear his recorded games sessions on Role-Playing Public Radio, and listen to him bloviate on the Unspeakable Podcast and Podcast at Ground Zero.
Kenneth Hite has designed, written, or co-authored 100+ roleplaying works, including Trail of Cthulhu, Bookhounds of London, The Dracula Dossier, the Delta Green RPG, Night’s Black Agents, The Fall of Delta Green, and Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition. His other works include the two-volume Tour de Lovecraft, Cthulhu 101, The Cthulhu Wars for Osprey, the “Lost in Lovecraft” column for Weird Tales, an annotated edition of Chambers’ The King in Yellow, and four Lovecraftian children’s books. Half of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast and an Artistic Associate at Chicago’s WildClaw Theatre, he lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and his non-Lovecraftian wife, Sheila.
S. T. Joshi has prepared comprehensive editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s collected fiction, essays, poetry, and letters. He is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), and has edited the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007) and the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian tales.
Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since his days as a Mormon missionary in Omagh, Northern Ireland (1973). He has written for a number of anthologies (Black Wings, The Children Of Cthulhu) and last year had tales reprinted in such anthologies as The Book Of Cthuhlu and New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird. These past few years has seen him writing like an obsessed lunatic, and his many books include The Tangled Muse, Some Unknown Gulf Of Night, Gathered Dust And Others, and Uncommon Places, The Strange Dark One: Tales Of Nyarlathotep, and Encounters With Enoch Coffin (written in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas).
Leeman Kessler is a Nigerian-born actor living in Gambier, OH with his wife Rachel and daughter Amanda. Since 2010, he has been performing as HP Lovecraft on stage as well as online with his web-series Ask Lovecraft. He has performed at NecronomiCon-Providence and at Cthulhucon. You can hear him and his wife on their podcast Geekually Yoked.
Hailing from the writhing mudflats of the Pacific Northwest, Koi has made a 20+ year career of tinkering with necromancy and trading with space elves. Koi's work has appeared in d20 Call of Cthulhu and Unknown Armies 2nd Ed, among others.
Dr. Alex Scully is a historian of Irish Identity and the Victorian Era. Her research into the dusty tomes often intersects with the Gothic literature of the 1800s. She is Senior Editor at Firbolg Publishing.
Andrew S. Fuller writes dark and strange stories. His fiction appears in several magazines, anthologies, short films, and the new collection Constellations of Ruin (2023, Trepidatio Publishing). Since 1999, he’s been editor-in-chief of Three-Lobed Burning Eye magazine. He lives in Portland, OR near two rivers, several extinct(?) volcanoes, and is friends with several crows and spiders. Visit him online at andrewsfuller.com.
Christine Morgan works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility, which plays havoc with her sleep schedule but allows her a lot of writing time. A lifelong reader, she also reviews, beta-reads, occasionally edits and dabbles in self-publishing. Her other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, cheesy disaster movies and training to be a crazy cat lady.
Dan Clore is author of The Unspeakable and Others, a collection of avant-garde Gothic stories, and Weird Words: A Lovecratian Lexicon, a dictionary of the horror/fantasy genre with extensive illustrative quotations, as well as critical essays and poetry.
David Barker's fiction and prose poetry appeared in many small press horror magazines in the 1980s and '90s. He was the founding editor of Midnight Shambler, and edited Ye Olde Lemurian and The Lovecrafter 100th Anniversary Issue before leaving the field in the late '90s. In 2012, David returned to horror with the ebook trilogy, Electro-Thrall Zombies. His work has recently appeared in Fungi, Cyaegha, Spectral Realms, and on Shoggoth.net. In collaboration with W. H. Pugmire, David has two books of Lovecraftian fiction out from Dark Renaissance Books: The Revenant of Rebecca Pascal (2014) and In the Gulfs of Dream & Other Lovecraftian Tales (2015). He is currently collaborating with Pugmire on a novel set in Lovecraft's Dreamlands, to be published by Dark Renaissance Books in 2016.
Derek is the Monster Kid Hall of Famer creator of the Supernatural Solutions: The Marc Temple Casefiles series, as well as the upcoming 6-Week Rotation series of superhero novels. If you can't find him at his website/YouTube channel Monster Kid Writer, you can find him at his award-winning Monster Kid Radio podcast, the weekly podcast celebrating the classic, and sometimes not-so-classic, genre cinema of yesteryear.
Edward Morris is a 2011 nominee for the Pushcart Prize in Literature, also nominated for the 2009 Rhysling Award and the 2005 British Science Fiction Association Award. His Cosmic Horror fiction has appeared in Dark Regions' THE CHILDREN OF GLA'AKI: TRIBUTE STORIES TO RAMSEY CAMPBELL and RETURN OF THE OLD ONES, as well as PS Publishing's THE STARRY WISDOM LIBRARY and Chaosium's LEGACY OF THE REANIMATOR, among many other fine and horrific collections.Mr. Morris also runs a local spoken-word event called The Hour That Stretches at the Clinton St. Theatre: http://the.hourthatstretches.com
Evan J. Peterson is the author of Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag RPG, as well as The PrEP Diaries: A Safe(r) Sex Memoir (Lethe Press). He is a Clarion West alum and author of the horror poetry chapbooks Skin Job and The Midnight Channel as well as editor of the Lambda Literary finalist Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. His writing has also appeared in Weird Tales, Unspeakable Horror 2, Queers Destroy Horror, Boing Boing, and Best Gay Stories 2015. He is the founder of the now-concluded Seattle programs Minor Arcana Press and SHRIEK: Women of Horror Film. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.
FuFu is a German-American comic book artist and illustrator. He studied Visual Communication in Germany and "la Bande Dessinée“ (comics) in Angoulême, France.
Since around 2000 FuFu has worked as a freelance illustrator in various fields. He has done countless illustrations for role playing games, but has also worked on books, stage productions, computer games, and animation. In 2013 he created the Zombie-card game Zombory. His personal comics have appeared in many anthologies and zines in several countries and typically revolve around the surreal adventures of Ray Murphy – Detective of Dreams and his assistant Molluskhead.
Today he lives in Portland, Oregon and Berlin, Germany, with his partner Susanna, who is a painter and a modelmaker for the film industry and their son Rocco.
Garrett Cook is an author with Deadite Press and an editor with Eraserhead Press. His work has appeared in A Breath from the Sky, DOA III, Giallo Fantastique, Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade and more. His next book Crisis Boy comes out October 15th.
Heather Hudson has been a professional illustrator since 1994, working in the fantasy and hobby gaming genres. As the owner of Studio Wondercabinet, she creates traditionally-inspired artwork in traditional and digital media. Heather Hudson received degrees from San Jose State University and the University of Washington in the area of Theatrical Design and production. Subsequently she pursued art studies at the Gage School (formerly the School of Realist Art), Seattle's School of Visual Concepts, and TLC workshops. She is a member of ArtPACT and the Women In Fantastical Illustration on-line community. During her career, Heather Hudson has created artwork for game companies including Wizards of the Coast, AEG, Chaosium and Beamdog. Her work for the game Magic; the Gathering extended to nearly 200 cards. Today she focuses largely on personal projects, including the successful "Cthulhu Christmas Greeting Card" Kickstarter project of winter 2015. Heather is currently working on a Mythos-inspired illustration project and a personal project involving faeries. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
Jason V Brock is an award-winning writer, editor, filmmaker, and artist whose work has been widely published in a variety of media (Weird Fiction Review print edition, S. T. Joshi's Black Wings series, Fangoria, and others). He describes his work as Dark Magical Realism. He is also the founder of a website and digest called [NameL3ss]; his books include A Darke Phantastique, Disorders of Magnitude, and Simulacrum and Other Possible Realities. His filmic efforts are Charles Beaumont: The Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man, The AckerMonster Chronicles!, and Image, Reflection, Shadow: Artists of the Fantastic. Popular as a speaker and panelist, he has been a special guest at numerous film fests, conventions, and educational events, and was the 2015 Editor Guest of Honor for Orycon 37. A health nut/gadget freak, he lives in the Vancouver, WA area, and loves his wife Sunni, their family of herptiles, running their technology consulting business, and practicing vegan/vegetarianism.
JEFF BURK is the cult favorite author of SHATNERQUAKE, SUPER GIANT MONSTER TIME, CRIPPLE WOLF, and SHATNERQUEST. Like the literary equivalent to a cult B-Horror movie, Burk writes violent, absurd, and funny stories about punks, monsters, gore, and trash culture. Everyone normally dies at the end. He is also the the Head Editor of ERASERHEAD PRESS’ horror imprint, DEADITE PRESS and the host of the JEFF ATTACKS podcast. Born in the Pennsylvania backwoods, he was raised on a steady diet of Godzilla, Star Trek, and EC Comics. He now resides in Portland, Oregon. His influences include: Sleep deprivation, comic books, drugs, magick, and kittens.
Jim Smiley has had many jobs. Infantryman, private investigator....and his new career has caused relations to disown him, and made dogs to weep in the zocalo. He is an author of strange things. He is the author of both Girls' Night In and Both Alike in Dignity, is a contributor to Dark Discoveries magazine, and is a submissions editor for Dark Regions Press.
John Donald Carlucci is illustrator and painter strongly influenced by artists such as Mike Mignola, Gerald Brom, Chris Bachalo. Darren Yeow, and Batt Dixon. His recent clients include Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke’s Hollywood Dementia, 20th Century Fox - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Strange Aeons Magazine, LoveCraft Wines, and The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. JDC is seeking to improve his artwork and technique every day. His only desire is to get better and better. To create is an amazing thing and to be appreciated makes it all worthwhile. With several projects underway, such as That Ghoul Ava comic with creator Todd Brown, JDC is looking forward to a busy and productive year!
Justin Steele runs The Arkham Digest review blog, where he shares his love of weird fiction. This love has transitioned into editing, and he recently co-edited his first anthology, The Children of Old Leech with Ross E. Lockhart.
K. M. Alexander is a Pacific Northwest native and novelist living and working in Seattle with his wife and two dogs. He is an avid hiker, wannabe cyclist, and self-proclaimed beer snob. His work explores non-traditional settings within speculative fiction, bending and blending genres to create rich worlds and unique approachable characters.
K.L. Young is an award-winning filmmaker, podcaster, and publisher. He is the author of The Secret Language of Spiders. He lives in a pop-culture museum in Washington State.
Kelly Ward is the founder and Artistic Director of Cirque Macabre, a Seattle based performance troupe specialized in bring dark tales to life through the art of circus. Kelly has been studying circus arts for the past 5 years and performs regularly all around Seattle.
Kelly will be performing Saturday night during the Lovecraftian Variety Show!
Lee Moyer blends classic painting, pop culture, and naturalist illustration - mixing intensity with impish humor.
His art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian and galleries in NYC, LA, and London. Among his acclaimed posters are world premieres for Stephen Sondheim, John Mellencamp, and Stephen King, as well as art for Tori Amos, Amanda Palmer, and the von Trapps. His work includes Laurel & Hardy films, Spider-Man 2, and Call of Cthulhu. In collaboration with Ray Bradbury, George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman, Moyer designed and painted three literary calendars that raised six figures for charity. His essay "The Elements of Illustration" and his Kickstarter White Paper are widely read. His work is featured in many illustration anthologies and annuals. Moyer's games The Doom That Came to Atlantic City and 13th Age are available now. His Small Gods series, a pop culture abecedarium, and several illustrated children's books are forthcoming.
Leslie S. Klinger is the editor of the highly-acclaimed New Annotated Dracula, New Annotated Frankenstein, and the two-volume New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. He also edited the anthologies In the Shadow of Dracula and In the Shadow of Edgar Allen Poe, featuring 19th- century supernatural fiction. Together with Lisa Morton, he’s also edited the anthologies Ghost Stories and Weird Women, both with extensive selections of Victorian horror. Klinger’s annotated editions include the four-volume Annotated Sandman (with Neil Gaiman), Watchmen Annotated (with Dave Gibbons), and Annotated American Gods (again with Neil Gaiman). He serves as Treasurer of the Horror Writers Association and lives in Malibu with his wife Sharon, dog Jenny Calendar, and cat Rupert Giles.
Liv Rainey-Smith was introduced to the art of printmaking at Oregon College of Art and Craft where she received her BFA in 2008. Since graduation, she has worked full time as a xylographic printmaker in Portland, Oregon. In 2013 she took the business name Xylographilia, which translates as “Love of Woodcut,” to reflect her passion for the art form. She is inspired by early European prints, folklore, fiction, and the natural world. In addition to her self-directed work, Rainey-Smith enjoys collaborating with writers and publishers.
Michael Griffin has released a novel, Hieroglyphs of Blood and Bone (Journalstone, 2017), and a short fiction collection, The Lure of Devouring Light (Word Horde, 2016), and the novella "An Ideal Retreat" (Dim Shores, 2016). His short stories have appeared in magazines like Apex, Black Static, Lovecraft eZine and Strange Aeons, and the anthologies The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Autumn Cthulhu, the Shirley Jackson Award winner The Grimscribe's Puppets, The Children of Old Leech and Eternal Frankenstein. He's an ambient musician and founder of Hypnos Recordings, an ambient record label he operates with his wife in Portland, Oregon. Michael blogs at griffinwords.com. On Twitter, he posts as @mgsoundvisions.
Mike Dalager is a hybrid mish-mash of talents and nationalities, born and raised at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. A childhood spent half on land and half at sea in the Pacific Ocean raises questions of possible cohabitation with Deep Ones. This link to the sea continues today, as he serves the Nation as a member of the Coast Guard Reserve. For the past ten years, Mike has collaborated and contributed to the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's mission of creating solid Lovecraftian content, appearing in The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness, and producing conceptual Mythos music as Ogham Waite in "Live at the Gilman House Lounge", and most recently as Executive Producer of "Dreams in the Witch House: A Lovecraftian Rock Opera."
Nathan Carson is a musician, writer, and Moth StorySlam champion from Portland, OR. He is widely known as co-founder and drummer of the internationally touring doom metal band Witch Mountain, host of the XRAY FM radio show The Heavy Metal Sewïng Cïrcle, and owner of the boutique music booking agency Nanotear. His byline can be found in the Willamette Week and the Oregonian. A regular on the weird fiction convention circuit, he has published many short stories and novelettes in critically acclaimed horror anthologies. His first standalone novella, Starr Creek, was recently released by Lazy Fascist Press and currently sits at #1 on the Goodreads list of “Books Like Stranger Things.”
When not occupied whispering to insects and cataloging esoteric ephemera, Nick Gucker is typically perched at his art table conjuring up nightmare visions and freakish delights out of ink, charcoal and acrylic media. His art has frequently appeared in the pages of Strange Aeons Magazine, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, Dark Discoveries and online publications including theLovecraft eZine. His illustrations embellished the innards of works by authors Cody Goodfellow, David Conyers and a few projects with Spectral Press in the UK. His paintings have been used for covers of books from Blysster Press, Sinister Grin, and others. Nick was the winner of the 2012 Pickman’s Apprentice Iron Artist challenge at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland and had the honor of creating the artwork for the 2013 HP Lovecraft Film Festival posters and T-shirts. Nick has also designed images for Skurvy Ink T-Shirts, honoring the works of various genre authors. Nick was featured in a gallery group show in Ketchikan, AK in Oct. of 2012 and his Lovecraftian pieces were on display in the Providence, RI Art Club in conjunction with NecronomiCon 2013. Recent gallery appearances include group shows at Krab Jab Studio and Cloud Gallery in Seattle curated by Yvette Endrijautzki. In addition to his published work, Nick’s unique, one-of-a-kind custom commission pieces grace the walls and limbs of various and sundry patrons of the arts from near and far.
Rhiannon Louve is a freelance writer. Professionally, she writes short stories, video game dialogue, table-top role-playing books, and privately commissioned fiction. She hopes to soon add novels to the list. With her MA in Applied Theology, Rhiannon has taught World Religions at the college level, and published Pagan thea/ology essays. Rhiannon's published short fiction is mostly steampunk so far, while her current video game gig is with State of Decay 2, about surviving post zombie apocalypse. Most of Rhiannon's table-top RPG work is in traditional fantasy, though not without horror and Lovecraftian elements, such as her contribution to the award-winning Elder Evils D&D 3.5 sourcebook. Rhiannon has a strong interest in Lovecraftian fiction, but comes at it from a weird fantasy or dark fantasy perspective, fascinated most by the mythos itself and the psychology of such a world. Outside work, Rhiannon mostly games (table top, analog), including a Bleach-inspired shinigami game, using her own homebrew version of Exalted. Her other hobbies include scholarly study of primate behavior (including humans), and learning languages (she speaks French, some Spanish, and minute amounts of Japanese and Irish). Rhiannon rarely watches television in English, and has written scholarly papers on manga and anime. Do ask her about anime and Lovecraft!
ROSS E. LOCKHART is an author, anthologist, editor, and publisher. A lifelong fan of supernatural, fantastic, speculative, and weird fiction, Lockhart is a veteran of small-press publishing, having edited scores of well-regarded novels of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. He edited the anthologies The Book of Cthulhu I and II, Tales of Jack the Ripper, The Children of Old Leech (with Justin Steele), Giallo Fantastique, Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Eternal Frankenstein, and the forthcoming Tales from a Talking Board (October 2017). He is the author of Chick Bassist. Lockhart lives in Petaluma, California, with his wife Jennifer, hundreds of books, and Elinor Phantom, a Shih Tzu moonlighting as his editorial assistant.
Sean Hoade is a fiction coach and the author of 17 books. He has written thrillers, literary novels, horror, and Penny Dreadful novelettes. He taught creative writing at the university level for almost a decade before he even realized what was going on. He lives in Las Vegas. Sean is always eager to hear from readers and other writers, or just people who want to talk about cool stuff. He is easily locatable and friend-able as hoadewriter on Facebook; always saying strange things on Twitter (@SeanHoade); On Instagram, he’s seanhoadewriter; and on Pinterest, somewhat lazily, he’s once again seanhoadewriter.
The Pulp Stage provides live storytelling for fans of science fiction, fantasy and suspense. Their current project is the creation of Prime Plays. These are stories told through theatrical dialogue and can carry an evening with just actors reading off of tablets. Since the start of project, the company has produced over 35 Prime Plays. Coming up in December, the company will present an epic single-night version of their science fiction trilogy BOX, co-authored by acclaimed novelist, Tina Connolly, and Pulp Stage artistic director, Matt Haynes.
Wade German's poems have appeared internationally in numerous journals and anthologies, including Avatars of Wizardry (P'rea Press), A Darke Phantastique (Cycatrix Press), Dreams and Nightmares, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Nameless, Space and Time, Spectral Realms, Weird Fiction Review and many others. His work has received several Pushcart and Rhysling nominations, and several honourable mentions in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year anthologies. His first collection, Dreams from a Black Nebula, is available from Hippocampus Press.