Reading the (surprisingly few) Lovecraft blogs was interesting. I was immediately struck by posts written by different bloggers set only a few week apart.
Speculative Fiction Junkie says of his excellent book-reviews that he has: “an increasingly persistent suspicion that touting the virtues of books that few can afford to buy (when they’re lucky enough to find them at all) may not enhance to any meaningful degree the likelihood that those works will end up in the hands of new readers.” […] “$100 books with print runs of 200 make accomplishing this goal impossible as a practical matter”.
Which perhaps begs the question: is the literary Lovecraft really popular any more? Or is he slowly being fossilized in print? I guess as reading fiction on paper (rather than as audio books, ebooks, and online on crisp new LCD screens) becomes a more and more eccentric thing to, the realm of the neatly printed new book is necessarily ceded to investor-collectors and archivists/scholars.
Justin Woodman notes what appears to be a sort of class-based attempt to lift weird fiction out of the realms of the popular, and into the realms of ‘difficult art’. Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses details how this process of obfuscation links with the establishment and maintenance of snobbish social attitudes. Woodman cites… “M. John Harrison[s] claim that ‘it is undignified to read for the purposes of escape’ is sadly all too indicative of broader attitudes emergent within the current ‘New Weird’ “.
I’m not close enough to the publishers and current fandom to know if Harrison’s sentiments are a reaction against a resurgence of escapist reading during the recession, or an attempt at a class-based repositioning of contemporary weird fiction in the light of a ‘flight from the reading of printed books’ by adults?
Yet how rich the trove of popular genre fiction we now have access to if we want it. And often also in audio book form. As someone who came of age just before 1995 (the take-off point for the mass Internet), it’s still amazing to have such riches at one’s fingertips and in one’s ears. And so for the last ten years or so I’ve said we’re living in a new golden age of cultural production. So I was interested to see that Jason Colavito notes a new essay by… “Leonard Pierce, arguing we are in a golden age of popular culture and essentially condemning those who disagree as narcissistic and self-indulgent.”
The essential role in such a situation is then not the scholar or the investor-collector, but the intelligent fannish curator and sifter for curious and shiny nuggets. In that respect, Speculative Fiction Junkie is right to be disquieted by contemporary authors sending their latest works vacuum-packed into the attic boxes of investor-collectors. Perhaps a combination of discerning fannish curators and audio-book stories could play a part in providing more popular outlets for weird and fantastic storytelling, providing a big bank of Lovecraftian audio stories that fans can then mix into anthologies and download as a pack for a small fee?