The SFFaudio Podcast #394 –Jesse talks with the great Wayne June, the narrator of Darkest Dungeon and several H.P. Lovecraft audiobooks. Wayne grew up reading science fiction and has both a love and appreciation for H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.

Talked about on today’s show:
he has to be Wayne June, Darkest Dungeon, made in Vancouver, really hard, Chris Bourassa, Tyler Sigman, the script, Stuart Chatwood, PowerupAudio.com, Twitch streaming, stress and post traumatic stress disorder, Dismas, snap out of it, “a mighty blow”, what are you recording?, out of context, YouTube commentary, STURDY SHOVELS!, single player, Wizardry on the Apple II, comics, the sequels to games get better, a community of gamers, a Twitch streamer’s sound-pack, Red Hook Studios, 500 personalized notifications, taking it out of context, worlds of their own, laughing our butts off, a DOTA announcer pack?, professional gaming, millions of dollars in prizes, a groundswell of support for Wayne June, Jesse was a fan of Wayne June fan from the beginning, Jesse made Wayne June the man he is today, a lovecraftian theme, pronouncing all the words, “squamous”ˈskwāməs/, Wayne June grew up on Lovecraft, a lifetime of Lovecraft, it’s better to be non-existent, weltanschauung, you have to feel what the author wants you to feel, Donald Sutherland, great performance advice: don’t lie, live the script, people are going to feel it, Ex Oblivione:

So, happier than I had ever dared hoped to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.

Lovecraft doesn’t give a shit about what other people think of his writing, he’s fully committed, guilty, he’s his own genre, enveloped in a syrup of hopelessness, necessary flourishes, the undisputed master, Edgar Allan Poe, I’m that guy, carrying books of poems around, The Dunwich Horror, the Vermont landscape, ravines of problematic depth?, that’s giving me a problem, subjective vs. objective, here’s the quality of what he thinks it should be judged as, a subjective outline, Lovecraft often has the revelation first achieved through sound, The Thing On The Doorstep, the sound coming before the visualization, Lovecraft is meant to be read aloud, a book of spells, feelings of fear and nausea or dread, The Raven, you can taste a lot of Poe in Lovecraft’s stuff, From Beyond, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, ingesting a story, alliteration and consonance and assonance, so crafted with sound,

And once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins, and ended in a mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a little gate of bronze.

Dreamland, there’s even ghouls in there, Ex Oblivione very succinctly outlines Lovecraft’s whole gloomy view of the universe, rewarding re-reading,

Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly and languorously under strange stars.
Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under the earth till I reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours, and undying roses.

The Dreamquest Of Unknown Kadath, too wise to have ever have been born in the waking world, illimitable space, the realm of the forms, he enters into it joyously, incredibly comforting, yeah right!, awww damn, coffee, Thomas Ligotti, consciousness as an accident of evolution (and not a happy accident), Douglas Adams, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race, tooth and claw, awareness and self awareness, glooming-up a good gloomy book, Chinatown, its good to hear truth, other people are struggling, taking existential dread and experiencing it fully, putting it into a compartment, naming all the guts, fear can be managed, take it in doses, wrestling with fictional takes on real existential dreads, give it names, True Detective, temperament, there’s nothing truer than great fiction, From Beyond, the unseen world, things flopping through us, a monster story, life as tedium vs scientific revelation, The Hounds Of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long, to the beginning of creation, when you invent the microscope, germ theory, telescopes, Galileo, ultraviolet, microbes, confronting how small we are, the endless boundless vistas of space, best expressed,

I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognised sense-organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man, and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.

not just horror, science fiction as well, Lovecraft is the H.G. Wells of weird fiction, the project to get Wayne June to record every H.P. Lovecraft story, packaged in the Necronomicon, slow treading, at the bottom of this ravine of problematic depth,The Call Of Cthulhu, Frankenstein, bringing our own prejudices, whose argument is this?, The Dunwich Horror is a family tragedy, coming from a dimension where aesthetics are different, Jesus and Mary, he has to break into the library to read a book, biased and racist, Wilbur wanted to learn skillz, transparent attic brother, he wanted to help his disabled brother, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a family reunion, living forever under the sea, fishy eyes, he gets his sealegs, aquatic family values, The Tomb, Jervas Dudley likes walks in the woods, the ancestors, reverting to type, atavism, an “evil” ancestor, coming to terms with what’s in your family tree, goth or emo, who’s he hurting?, such a libertarian, let the living lie with the dead, the ending of Annabelle Lee, sleeping with a corpse, a beautiful beautiful poem about a disgusting activity, he could probably find better ways to spend his time, discernment, eating mushrooms, when we get together for pizza, Wayne June owes Jesse a pizza.

Posted by Jesse Willis