What crouches on you, meditating on your doom? 
Is it fate, the hatred of your enemies, is it the demon 
from your memories? 
What crouches on you, staring into the emptiness?
Is it conscience with black wings, is it the voice
that tells you of your failure?
What crouches on you, silent, becalmed?
It is only time, only the universe
only entropy ushering you along
where you were headed from the start.

23 Lovecraftian Stories

1. The DIY Lovecraftian Story

I like making slotted angles, but they don’t align quite the way they’re supposed to. Now I need to choose between a non-Euclidian plane and a regular hand plane.

2. The Fill-In-The-Blanks Lovecraftian Story

Par s of m are miss ng. I haven t los  them. They’ e just dimens onal y anomal us. Th s  s wha hap ens wh n you mes  w th transdim nsion l creat res.

3. The Erotic Lovecraftian Story

A shoggoth blossomed and was penetrated by tentacles. Now you know why the beast had a thousand young.

4. The Missing Lovecraftian Story

5. The Androgynous Lovecraftian Story

There was once a little girl and her name was Howard Philips.

6. The Foodie’s Lovecraftian Story

In Dunwich, Soilent Green is fish. Want a side-order of ice cream with that?

7. The Dead-End Job Lovecraftian Story

‘My name is Howie. I’m delighted to be selling you your tickets to this vapid cinematic production. I fear it will include the sounds of Negroid minstrelsy and was produced by an individual of Semitic ancestry. Even the popcorn is Native American.’

8. The Missing Lovecraftian Story (For Real This Time)

The missing Lovecraftian was never found. But he kept copious notes right up until the moment he went missing, so we have a pretty good idea of what happened to him. Or we would, if he had the words to describe it.

9. The Racially Integrated Lovecraftian Story

In Red Hook, a number of people from different cultures got together and decided to make a new religion cobbled together from bits and pieces of all their faiths. They were beats before the beats, hippies before the hippies, New Agers before the New Agers. And they threw the best parties ever.

10. The Evolutionarily Accurate Lovecraftian Story

I realised to my horror that chimpanzees and humans last had common ancestors four to six million years ago, so my grandmother probably could not have been one of them.

11. The Theological Lovecraftian Story

To what extent did Wilbur and his brother partake of the diabolical nature of their father? Was Wilbur two parts human and one part demon? Was Lavinia a vessel or was she diabolical too? We should hold a council and decide.

12. The Cyberpunk Lovecraftian Story

When you jack into Cthulhuspace, you’ll never make it back sane.

13. The Hard-Bitten Lovecraftian Story

Never mind the tentacles. That thing had teeth like pneumatic drills. Call me the perforated dick. I blame it all on the client, but what a dame.

14. The Romantic Lovecraftian Story

I wandered the hills around Dunwich in a frock coat, my hair billowing in the winds, one with the elements, my emotions in turmoil, my tentacles awry. Would anyone ever understand the things that lurked in the depths of my soul?

15. The Other Kind Of Romantic Lovecraftian Story

‘Oh, Asenath!’

‘Oh Edward!’

‘Who’s your daddy, Asenath?’

‘I am!’

16. The Surreal Lovecraftian Story

I took up rooms in a house. It was a nice new house and all the lines met at right angles.

17. Another Missing Lovecraftian Story

No, wait, it was actually written by August Derleth.

18. The Forgotten Lovecraftian Story

Also known as Sweet Ermengarde. Best left forgotten.

19. The Splatterpunk Lovecraftian Story

The shoggoth buried its tentacles in his eyes, pulling them out of their sockets in a welter of gore and brain-stuff while elsewhere it clawed at his belly, letting loose the gases and acids and half-digested food within.

20. The Kim Harrison Lovecraftian Story

‘Have we been tentacled again?’ ‘Pop culture reference.’ ‘Sequel hook.’

21. The Richard Laymon Lovecraftian Story

Things really started getting wild when the shoggoths found their way to the sorority house.

22. The 1990s Paperback Horror Anthology Lovecraftian Story

Man, a lot of rock stars are dead. I’m going to quote some of their lyrics. Hey, groupies. Oh, Yog-Sothoth!

23. The Last Lovecraftian Story

Even as I scribble these words crawling chaos is consuming the last few remnants of the physical univer

Ten Indian Metal Songs

This is a sort of taster of some of the better things to come out of the Indian metal scene.

1. First, a lesser known song from the pioneers of Indian metal, Millennium. The first Indian metal band to have a video on MTV and torchbearers for the whole Indian scene as well as the still-thriving Bangalore underground. There are more famous songs like Only Be One and Peace Just In Heaven, so for people who've only heard those big hits, here's something else, one of the most hard-hitting tracks from their self-titled album. I apologise for the sound quality.

2. Another Bangalore band, Dying Embrace brought the extreme metal ethos into the scene. Rude, crude and unafraid, they took it further than anyone else I'd heard at the time dared to. Extremity in Indian metal begins with this doom death band. Again, the sound quality is not the best, although there are better recordings by them on youtube.

3. Myndsnare was India's first and still finest tech death band, that's all there is to it. Yet another Bangalore band, they started out with a fearsome mission to take metal to new realms of precision and complexity. Along the way, they developed the songwriting chops their earliest material lacked. Here is a good example of their style:

4. Threinody stood head and shoulders above the late-90s, early-00s thrash scene in Bangalore with their tight, catchy compositions, musical prowess and hard hitting lyrics. Back after a long hiatus, they could have been titans of what passes for the local scene if they'd stuck it out, but will hopefully make up for lost time.

5. Finally, a Mumbai band! I make no apologies for my parochialism - but YMMV. In any case, this band's King Diamond-inspired horror-tale songs and the mix of thrashy aggression and classic metal in their music, along with a healthy helping of lead guitar glory, make them one of my favourite live and studio acts.

6. Another Mumbai band, Solar Deity has released three EPs of some of the finest black metal from India. They sound truly dark and massive, with a moody, melancholy edge, but without slipping into the lachrymose realms of out and out DSBM.

7. Mumbai's Dormant Inferno play intensely melodic and haunting death-tinged doom. A formidable, all-enveloping experience live, they are currently working on a new batch of recordings. In the meantime here's one of their best songs from their old EP.

8. This isn't the kind of metal I usually fancy but Amogh Symphony's absolutely insane level of technical prowess and compositional maturity make them impossible to ignore.

9. If stoner and doom metal are here to stay in India, Bevar Sea are probably responsible. Here's one of their best songs.

10. And finally, here's some battle-themed death metal in the tradition of Bolt Thrower:

    brief images seen

                in dark places

        penile fish in calm water

                an albino fawn sleeping

brief words flicker

                in a darkened mind

 sad, naïve words

                must not forget

 salt coats the trail of

                these brief things

 these fleet things that would not slow

                or swing low

                      or let me ride

a dark room with windows open wide

                to dark sunlight a darkened

  mind

open wide to receive

                these fleet things

                             a decaying bear’s hide

                                a teeming sky

open wide to remember

                until memory flees

leaving a salted trail

the bit about life is wrong

I should build a still

Like the one in Hawkeye’s swamp

My daily round of death

And life. Hard to forget the

Death easy to

Undervalue the life. Life’s

Only a novelty, like a freeze frame

Snapshot, drop of milk turning

Into a tiara

A gimmick. Gim-crack. Gew-gaw.

I should build a still

Distill oblivion for my convenience

But just one drink goes to my head

Coursing sensations of empty

Bonhomie, flint-spark love and

Joy, then ten minutes later morose and heavy-

-headed, peering into darkness in lit

Rooms until I drink another and another

And only flashes of oblivion

Like glimpses of darkness at noon

And never the night sky at last

I should build a still

Safe place somewhere high in a tree

Or deep underneath a city

I should write my will

But I have nothing to leave

And anyway I leave it all to you

I should build a still

Living beast, a magnificent monster, be

A postmodern Prometheus,

Steal the gods’ secret

Recipe, brew up a new race

Giants. Immortal. Benign.

I should.

I really should.

a poem about my father's death

A room at the end.

Tubes, machines. Mechanical sounds.

My father’s wife sings a religious song.

Faith, tears.

I found tears too.

Faith is over. A stranger from the first.

A room at the end.

Not large. Well lit.

His hair still dark. Dyed?

Still thick. Features?

Used to be handsome. Maybe still is.

Dwarfed by the bed, by all the appliances.

A room at the end.

I look at the room he lived in while

he was dying.

Wheelchair. Respirator.

Vodka bottle.

Books: westerns, history, crime, travel.

A smart brown blazer hanging by the bed.

A room at the end.

I shower in the attached bathroom.

Change into dhoti, don the sacred thread.

Gooseflesh. Shivering. First time.

Conduct the last rites.

Hypnotic. Befuddling.

Fire and water and milk and leaves.

A room at the end.

He slides along the ramp.

Into the chamber.

I go away for lunch.

Come back and am given an earthen pot.

Ashes. Bones. More rituals.

I have no connection to this.

This is not my father. This is not my ritual.

A room at the end.

I dream him into it.

A quiet place. Maybe some Debussy.

Modigliani nudes. Degas.

An easel on which waits a landscape in progress.

A bottle of vodka.

Books. I suppose that would do for him.

A room at the end.

There is always a room. And the end. We are not intrepid. Or immortal.

No mountainsides, battlefields, ocean deeps, daring sports gone wrong.

We are not intrepid in that way. In this

we are alike.

This is 
not my tribute.

scrutiny and long acquaintance

death has more details

to take in

more to say

more to remember

for me life is a series of banal

snapshots

a film school dropout’s montage

of cookie-cutter

characterisation and context

for me life is like wallpaper

i disagree with and

will lose the argument

death is so much more

compelling. consider:

none who ever lived resisted its

compulsion ignored its

call

or evaded its coming

i have seen enough of death to

know

it is never just death

it is never just a number

never just another

death is always fraught

always rife with detail

always unique

death stands out

even in a pack

even in a massacre or epidemic

and the only ones to whom death

can be held at a remove

can be anaesthetised

and dismissed

are neither dead nor alive

but far worse