Many of us have gone on job interviews that were odd. But the one that Séverine goes on in Damian Murphy’s occult-themed psychological thriller The Acephalic Imperial (paperback) goes beyond asking what kind of a tree someone would be if they were a tree. In the following email interview about it, Murphy discusses what inspired and influenced this Hitchcockian novella.
Though he was a xenophobic racist, H.P. Lovecraft was also an inventive writer of occult horror stories that have inspired and influenced everything from the Hellboy comics and misspelled Metallica songs to episodes of South Park and, just recently, The Simpsons. And that’s not even counting all the books and comics by Alan Moore, Clive Barker, William S. Burroughs, and many, many others. And yet, attempts to translate his works into the medium of video games have largely fallen flat or just been superficial in their liberal use of tentacles. But in the new adventure game Call Of Cthulhu (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC), Lovecraft’s unique aesthetics are well crafted into an interesting adventure game. Well, if you’re in the mood for observation over action.
When a writer starts an ongoing series of novels, their plan is often for the books to all be about the same character or organization, and for the novels to all have the same style or genre. But in talking to writer David Mack about his new Dark Arts series, which kicks off with the occult World War II tale The Midnight Front (paperback, Kindle), he explained that not only will every book in this series be a self-contained, stand-alone novel, they’ll all employ a different literary style as well.