The Lovecraft Investigations

Get involved in the next series of an audio drama...

The first “In Conversation” I did here was with my friend Julian Simpson, multi-hyphenate writer and creator of TV, movie and audio drama. One of his most exciting ongoing ventures over the last several years has been The Lovecraft Investigations — a podcast dramatizing modernizations of classic Lovecraft stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos. I was chatting to Julian last week about his future plans, and it turns out there’s a chance for people to get involved…

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From Julian —

“The Lovecraft Investigations came to the end of its run with the BBC with “The Haunter of the Dark”, but there’s still a lot more of the Kennedy-Heawood story to tell (and, obviously many more Lovecraft stories to play with). And having built out the Pleasant Green Universe with a few single dramas and the “Mythos” series, I still want to play in that sandpit for a long time to come.

So I figured we could try a Kickstarter to get the ball rolling. Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, has rated more than a few passing mentions in the Lovecraft Investigations seasons thus far, but we have never had the space to devote to really dig down into who he was and what he did. And there’s a LOT crammed into his seventy-two years on Earth; Paris, New York, Sicily, India, drug addiction, rituals and general mayhem.

I was talking about all this to Richard Maclean Smith, who writes and presents the “Unexplained” podcast a while back. Initially, we were talking about doing a documentary series on Crowley as a separate thing, and then we alighted on the idea of doing something a little different; presenting Crowley’s life in as factual a way as possible but having that story told by our fictional Lovecraft Investigations characters; as if they have made a five-part series on Crowley themselves. That allows us to tell the true story but to do it with some personality and some humour, and in a way that references the plotline from the shows and involves characters like Dr Eleanor Peck (Nicola Walker), who can spout exposition with the best of them.

And so that’s what we're doing. And we’re setting it up as a big lavish Kickstarter project with tons of digital and physical merch and making a whole song and dance about it, because if this works, then it gives us a pathway to more audio fiction in the Pleasant Green Universe (not least another full season of the Lovecraft Investigations). And beyond that, I think we could start to build out both the story world and a platform of our own on which to present it...”

The link to the Kickstarter campaign to be a part of this is here. It launches today.