Featured Member
Our Member of the Month for June 2018 is Fiacre O'Duinn of Burlington, Canada.
Fiacre says: "I was born in a town containing what was once the largest telescope in the world, the Leviathan of Parsonstown. I played in the the ruins of Leap Castle, the most haunted in Ireland. I walked the bogs where my ancestors sacrificed their kings to appease the gods.
Distant stars, malign entities and ancient deities.
When I discovered H.P. Lovecraft, I knew I was home.
In high school in Dublin in the '80s I had a few friends who were horror fans. When I was fourteen one of them loaned me a forbidden tome called The H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 1 by Panther Books where I read “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”. I was hooked. I quickly tracked down the rest of the omnibus editions and fell in love.
I disappeared down a tentacle filled rabbit hole, discovering Ramsey Campbell, the Call of Cthulhu 3rd Edition RPG, Brian Lumley, Clive Barker, William Burroughs, and so on. It peaked around ‘94 when I walked into a tiny art house cinema, The Lighthouse on Abbey Street, and saw a movie titled Cronos by some unknown Mexican guy, Guillermo del Toro. I still have that ticket stub.
I always felt that “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” had a lasting influence on my life. I moved to Canada from Ireland in the mid-nineties and, after working in the casino industry for a few years, went to university to study new religious movements (or, as they were called before we went metric, cults) and the history of western esotericism. For my graduate degree I ended up doing fieldwork among former members of The Process Church, certainly one of the more Lovecraftian groups from the '70s. I completed a second masters in information science and worked in that most antediluvian and blasphemous of professions, librarianship, for a decade. My later activities included taking a class on how to start your own cult from Ivan Stang and working with Genesis P-Orridge of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth for three years, but those are tales for another time.
And I’m still trying to solve that essential saltes problem….
Last year everything seemed to come full circle as I had the opportunity to visit Providence and pay homage. Guillermo del Toro brought his exhibition “At Home with Monsters” to Toronto and on the opening day I met him, entirely by accident, as he was walking through the museum. I finally got to shake his hand and thank him for the nightmares.
To close, after ten years of marriage my beloved wife, who has to endure my Lovecraft, horror, cult and occult obsessions, has only ever imposed one rule; “No practicing evil in the house!”"