iLovecraft 2 Immersive Reading 12+

Just got finished reading the story to my wife, who never read HPL, but who loved the whole audiovisual experience of this app. I remember finding a worn, 50 cent paperback at an old used bookstore called "The Colour Out of Space", buying it, and shivering in fear as I read it, some 50+ years ago. It made HPL my favorite writer as a kid and I voraciously read everything I could find by Mr Lovecraft. (I also remember a terrible movie adaptation of it from the 1960's, starring Boris Karloff, called "Die, Monster, Die" which as I recall didn't even credit this story as being the source for what the movie was based on. If you can find a copy, DON'T!) This app experience reminded me of how I felt reading the story the first time. Wonderful!

Love the vibrating sights and sounds. I almost expected a stench and foul green smoke to emit from my phone or tentacle to break thru during some of those passages of Lovecraft. There’s an eerieness that I haven’t felt since I first saw The Ring. Some of the flying bugs also made me think of The Mist. You really make scary other worldly creatures of Necronomicon lore come to life. They’re like interactive graphic novels. Very cool. And intense. Great pairing of a scary soundtrack to the text. And I like the gothic look to the pages. Sometimes black, sometimes white. And was very inventive with being able to scroll around rooms or move branches. Gave it a nice POV feel with an exciting involved first person reader experience.

Lovecraft was brilliant, but in modern times, his language, setting and context can seem quite alien to readers. That’s what makes this format so helpful and engaging; it utilizes our modern desires for a certain pace, certain highs and lows (and “jump-scares”) and an overall tone or mood. It takes its cues from the past hundred years of suspense and horror tales writ large in cinematic language, and utilizes those tactics and forms to re-tell Lovecraft’s bizarre and lavish stories in a way we can more easily digest.

I will, however, argue that Lovecraft’s particular style is designed to inspire the readers by only telling vague descriptors of monsters, ghouls and forms, and leaving the details to their imaginations, thus making many of the illustrations – beautiful, vivid and horrifying as they are – a bit superfluous. We’re I the creative director of this app, I might suggest illustrating only the “edges” of the horror and never fully revealing what a given horrific thing actually looks like. That’s my one criticism of this format.

I hope to read more stories - and certainly more from Lovecraft - in this way as “new media” integrates with old formats.

Great work, app makers!