Friday Links: Ooparts, Dead Roses, and Jacob Isaaczs van Swanenburg

It's Friday, so let's hit it:

• Monster Brains put the art of Jacob Isaaczs van Swanenburg on display.
• At the incalculably invaluable R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton discussed alien abduction, one of my favorite subjects: "But reports of alien abductions similar to those of Reagan and the Hills were taken very seriously by Charles Fort, among others.  He was a renowned early twentieth century specialist in unexplained phenomena who published four books in this broad field between 1919 and 1932.  S.T Joshi notes that H.P. Lovecraft probably read Fort’s first publication, The Book of the Damned (1919) in the spring of 1927, after Donald Wandrei loaned him his copy.  L. Sprague de Camp comments that Lovecraft appreciated the book mainly as a source of ideas for his weird fiction, though he did not take Fort’s material seriously or as fact."
• Zombos' Closet of Horror made The Monster Times issue 12 available for perusing.
• At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, Kit Power gave us another installment of his My Life in Horror series: "13 or 14 – I can be no more precise. Dad had – has still, if I know my old man – a collection of the non- M paperbacks. Beautiful black covers with white artwork and words. That he had a whole set, eight or ten titles at that point, clearly boded well – my Dad reads a ton, but he's not what Mr. King refers to as much of a constant reader – he likes finding new things, new stories, new writing. Very rare that my dad will buy everything someone puts out. I remember too this being one of the few books I borrowed from my dad that was a real loan, and not a 'borrow' that ended up living with me on a more permanent basis. He explicitly asked for the book back when I was done. That was another sign, looking back."
• Terrorphoria showed us some deeply disturbing Easter bunnies.
• Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!! was overgrown with Dead Roses all week, culminating in a review of the eponymous book: "I have been looking forward to this one for a long long time after hearing such good stories about this group’s previous collaboration, Bad Apples: 5 Slices of Halloween Horror. I have read all but one of these authors previously and already know they can produce some very powerful short stories."
• Ghost Hunting Theories delved into Ooparts: "The Klecksdorp spheres are often referred to as an out of place/out of time item. These spheres have been found in mining areas in South Africa in 3-million-year-old deposits. Many believed them to be metallic man-made items of extremely ancient construction. Scientists, however, came to the conclusion that these were made naturally and were formed in volcanic sediments over millions of years and the grooves created by fine grains over time and growth."
• Here, I linked to a review I wrote at Ginger Nuts of Horror for Rejean Giguere's novel Raildogs and celebrated The Blessed Man and the Witch being named Terrorphoria's Book of the Month.

Illustration by M. Wayne Miller for Call of Cthulhu's Beyond the Mountains of Madness supplement.