A couple of forthcoming books of essays on Lovecraft, dated and with covers.

Dated May 2013, Lovecraft and Influence: his predecessors and successors. This is a 200 page hardback in the Studies in Supernatural Literature series, from Scarecrow Press…

“Chapters in this collection are devoted to authors whose work had an impact on Lovecraft — Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lord Dunsany — and those who drew inspiration from him, including William S. Burroughs, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti” and others.

The first half of this sounds interesting, especially as it’s edited by Robert H. Waugh. I don’t think I’ve seen a really good analysis of the influence of the 18th century writers whom Lovecraft imbibed so heavily (although possibly Joshi has one somewhere, on at least the philosophical influences). I’d welcome a print or Kindle review-copy of this one.

The second is due June 2013, Gavin Callaghan’s H.P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia: the satire, symbology and contradiction is from the mainstream publisher McFarland…

“Gavin Callaghan goes back to the weird texts themselves, and follows where Lovecraft leads him: into an arcane world of parental giganticism and inverted classicism, in which Lovecraft’s parental obsessions were twisted into the all-powerful cosmic monsters of his imaginary cosmology.”

This sounds horribly as though it may be Freudian in some form in its approach: “parental giganticism”? Let’s hope it doesn’t also fashionably suggest little Lovecraft as the subject of unwonted attentions behind the woodshed…