A concerned Arkham, MA school board member believes that Nyarlathotep Academy (formerly known as Abraham Lincoln High) inadequately prepares students for the black seas of infinity.

Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the district’s monthly meeting Tuesday.

“Fools!” said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. “We must prepare today’s youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods—not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!”

Read more about his quest to provide students with regular field trips to the Miskatonic University medieval metaphysics department.

Via Mystery of the Haunted Vampire

Apparently fiendish little toys don’t just make themselves. Luckily Christen Haden, a.k.a. NeedleNoodles, has written an instructional guide called Creepy Cute Crochet. From the back cover:

Creepy Cute Crochet features more than 20 unique patterns for totally loveable zombies, ninjas, Vikings, vampires, aliens, robots, and even Death himself. Each easy-to-follow pattern is presented with step-by-step diagrams, hilarious commentary, and full-color photographs of the bloodcurdlingly sweet creatures in their natural environments.

There are also instructions for crocheting Nosferatu, Cthulhu, a devil, and a skeleton bride and groom. You can view photos of completed dolls in the Creepy Cute Crochet Flickr pool. They’re way better than crocheted puppies and bunnies!

If you aren’t the crafty type, finished dolls are available at the NeedleNoodles Etsy shop. No crocheting required.

Do you know the right thing to say when you’ve been deflowered by the elevator operator? What if said deflowering is at the hands of a mustachioed marimba player, a Chinese detective, or a perfect stranger? Miss Hyacinthe Phypps, maven of feminine etiquette, has the most practical of advice in her 1965 guide, The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion.

Illustrations by Edward Gorey are paired with text by Mel Juffe in this simultaneously innocent and hedonistic volume attributed to the delightful Miss Hyacinthe Phypps. Her “simple rules of propriety and common sense have helped a generation of girls over the threshold to womanhood.”

The book is out of print, but a complete set of scans may be viewed on Joey deVilla’s blog. Copies are occasionally available on Amazon and at other online used booksellers.

One final thought: it seems like the text of this book was heavily influenced by the wit and whimsical humor I associate with Edward Gorey. I wonder whether Gorey’s involvement extended beyond illustrating The Recently Deflowered Girl.

Found via The Presurfer

McSweeney’s brings us these brilliant Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter. Included are these Lovecraftian descriptions:

White Chocolate Truffle: What black arts could have stripped this chocolate of its natural hue? The horror of the unearthly, corpselike pallor of this truffle’s complexion is only offset by its fiendish deliciousness.

Nut Cluster Crunch: This eerie candy will test the sanity of all but those who possess the strongest of constitutions. Strange congeries of almonds, walnuts, and pistachios dance hypnotically within, promising to reveal their eldritch secrets to anyone foolish enough to take a bite of these ancient nut clusters!

Dark Chocolate Fudge: Dark! All-encompassing, eternal darkness! Human eyes cannot penetrate the stygian blackness of this unholy confection!

Chocolate Cherry Cordial: What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.

More at McSweeney’s.

via Serious Eats

I found this movie on an old post at Pulp Reader.

If the film has you yearning for derring-do check out this collection of Howard’s Solomon Kane stories.

But they all have two things in common: they’re trying to survive in a world infested with zombies, and they’re blogging about every detail at LastDaysJournal.com.

Finally, a social networking project I can get behind. It’s sci-fi alternate reality meets survival blog meets MySpace meets RPG in a post-apocalyptic multimedia zombie extravaganza. Here’s the premise:

imagine that the world had been afflicted by a terrible pandemic that killed millions and millions of people in just a few short weeks. now also imagine that those millions of people that were killed by this disease had also gotten back up and started attacking and infecting others as deadly man-eating zombies. now finally imagine that somebody on a tiny, remote island had created a web site for the lucky few who might still have electricity and internet access, and that this site was the sole means for survivors of this terrible tragedy to communicate with and get advice from other human beings in similar situations all around the world.

Survivors who register at the site use text, audio, video, and images to describe their circumstances as they fight off the undead and attempt to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

The warning sign at the top of this post was contributed by Agatha, a survivor in Wisconsin who has found herself fostering several orphaned children who have no one else to protect them. Bruce in New York finally made it out of the subway tunnels and has taken up position in the 42nd Street Library. Check out the stories as they unfold at LastDaysJournal.com.

Via The Zombie Notes Newsgroup, of course.

Eli Roth and Rob Zombie are probably curled up in little balls weeping right now (maybe separately, maybe together, I’m not sure), and Clive Barker, the renaissance man of horror, is the reason why. Check out this quote from Barker:

I don’t want horror to become what Eli Roth does and what Rob Zombie does because that would be highly detrimental to the genre.

Read all of this new interview with Clive Barker at Bloody Disgusting.

While Frahm’s pin-ups get points for being campy and kitschy, they’re more the stuff of perverted fantasy than cause for fiendish delight. But somehow James Lileks‘ analysis of these pin-ups makes me truly enjoy Art Frahm’s ladies in distress:

… the falling-panty theme is a staple of his work. These pictures aren’t taken from a calendar he did when hungry and desperate, chafing against the dictates of some gnomish pervert who wanted a year’s worth of falling-panty pictures. These date from throughout the 50s. It’s a theme to which he returned again and again – and you have to wonder why.

Lileks’ observations include the recurring celery motif in Frahm’s paintings, the frequent presence of a silently leering pervert, and of course, the improbability of losing one’s panties. His criticism of each painting makes for a good read. Check out more at Art Frahm: a study of the effects of celery on loose elastic.