Super news from S.T. Joshi’s Blog…

I have plunged into the treatise that I have been promising for years to write: The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown. In this month alone I have written about 50,000 words — and I’m only up to the year 1980!

Great, we need a good scholarly study digging in to his 1938-1974 ‘afterlife’ in fannish circles, and how he was understood and (often fruitfully) mis-understood in those decades. Ideally that would also survey the early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, and briefly survey the more notable early Lovecraftian artists and book-cover designers and their approaches. But that’s because I’m rather more interested in the history of recognition by the fans, fan-creatives and small-presses than by the sniffy establishment. It would be ‘icing on the cake’ to also get a brisk account of the later 1975-2015 period, in terms of the more easily-surveyed life-research and scholarly criticism, his wide diffusion outside the English-speaking world, and the slow and often reluctant uptake of Lovecraft by university academics and mainstream publishers.

Joshi also reports a fine new set of Lovecraftian fiction, and some essays and letters, due soon-ish in French from “French publisher Mnemos”.