H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward 8x LP set ON SALE NOW!
Cadabra Records has opened up sales on an extraordinary 8XLP boxed-set of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward! It is slated to ship out to everyone in early 2025.
Andrew Leman has given the performance of a lifetime voice acting Lovecraft’s essential short novel.
It was an absolute joy and an exhilarating experience to compose the soundtrack for this 6 hour beast! For the score I played a vast assortment of analog and digital synthesizers along with acoustic and electric guitars, piano, banjo, harmonium, electronic string arrangements and drones. Barry Knob has masterfully produced the soundtrack as well as provided some beautiful electric guitar drones and additional keyboard arrangements on some of the themes. Christopher Ashley/Slasher Film Festival Strategy has also composed some amazing themes for select and key passages over the course of the tale.
Weird fiction expert S.T. Joshi has written a wonderful essay contextualizing the importance of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and an overall assessment of the story within Lovecraft’s body of work. An additional Joshi essay will also be included as part of this release.
Jeremy Hush, Karmazid, Santiago Caruso, Zakuro Aoyama and Jason Eckhardt have all supplied hallucinatory, timeless and masterful art for the boxed-set.
Jonathan Dennison, the founder of Cadabra Records has once again aimed for the stars and has reached them with this glorious work of art! I can’t wait for everyone to soon experience all of the hard work that has gone into this release.
Additional information from Cadabra:
ON SALE NOW HERE:
H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward 8x LP BOXED SET - Read by Andrew Leman, score by Chris Bozzone with Slasher Film Festival Strategy. Full Unabridged Reading. Over 6 hours of terrifying, eldritch horror. The magnum opus of Cadabra Records.
Overseas customers can purchase through Psilowave.com
300x sets are available
Package Includes:
* Limited 8x LP pressing on 150 gram colored vinyl
* Full unabridged reading of H. P. Lovecraft's masterpiece
* Tip-on slipcase
* Essays by weird fiction scholar S. T. Joshi
* Map of Charles Dexter Ward's Rhode Island by Jason Eckhardt
* Liner notes by composer Chris Bozzone
* Newly commissioned art by Karmazid, Santiago Caruso, Jeremy Hush, and Zakuro Aoyama
* 24" x 36" promotional poster
An excerpt from Joshi's liner notes:
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was written at almost the exact midpoint of H. P. Lovecraft’s relatively brief literary career. Composed in perhaps as little as five weeks in the early months of 1927, this 51,000-word short novel is a kind of Janus-figure in the Lovecraftian corpus—a work that simultaneously looks backward, both to the tales that Lovecraft wrote in the first decade of his career, beginning with “The Tomb” in the summer of 1917, and looks forward to the dynamic stories and novellas of 1927–36, including his tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.
The longest of Lovecraft’s fictional works, Charles Dexter Ward is also his most personal. Even those readers unfamiliar with the basic facts of Lovecraft’s biography can scarcely doubt that the opening pages, describing Ward’s birth and upbringing in the old colonial town of Providence, Rhode Island, are thinly veiled allusions to his own childhood. Providence, indeed, becomes a kind of character in its own right in Charles Dexter Ward. Lovecraft was well aware of the witchcraft panic that had tainted the early history of Massachusetts, but he was likewise aware that Rhode Island—founded as a haven for the religiously unorthodox by Roger Williams in 1636, and as a counterweight to the Puritan theocracy of its northern neighbor—was, as it were, providentially free of the religious neuroticism that led to the outbreak of the Salem witch trials of 1692. For fictional purposes, however, it was convenient for Lovecraft to allude in his novel to the unsavory history of Massachusetts; indeed, we will find that the Salem witchcraft may have played at least an indirect role in the inspiration and writing of the novel.