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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: January 2021

Stealing Cthulhu

31 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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This week Miskatonic Debating Club published a new review of Stealing Cthulhu, from a tabletop gaming perspective…

If you’re interested in HPL’s writing technique, there’s a lot here to inform about his process. If you’re trying to write a computer game featuring the Mythos, then this is a solidly number-crunchy architectural overview for that project. And if you’re running or writing a roleplaying scenario, it’s a good foundation to work from, although – in terms of writing one – it’s incredibly simplified and you’ll need to finesse your stories in order to make them convincing. That being said, there’s a lot of good material here about improvisational technique, narrative engineering, refereeing tips, and the addition of colour which can be applied to any campaign, new or ongoing.

Back in 2011 I reviewed it here, but from a ‘tool for story-writing’ perspective.

Here’s a link to the original for the book’s cover, “Silent night” by Korintic.

Not to be confused with Dissecting Cthulhu by S.T. Joshi, which has the subtitle ‘Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos’.

Lovecraft’s Letters – complete by 2023?

31 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated…

The Lovecraft Letters project from Hippocampus is, incredibly enough, winding to a close.

Great news. Joshi names the final five annotated volumes, due either this year or the next, and also comments…

I would very much like to publish the letters by [Frank Belknap] Long to Lovecraft, of which there is a substantial number.

Super. Now might be the time, then, to start to think about how best to fund or crowdfund a public ‘snippet search’ engine. This would be able to digitally search across all the books of letters for names and phrases, with search results providing a few lines of the page at each hit — similar to how Google Books used to work before it went ‘full-page’. It could be public or perhaps subscribers-only.

Marblehead in ebook

30 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraft as character

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I see that Richard A. Lupoff’s long novel Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft is now available as a budget £1.99 Kindle ebook from the Gateway imprint (Gollancz), where it is saddled with the initially puzzling Amazon title of Marblehead: Lovecraft Book 2.

Turns out this is Lupoff’s full 160,000-word version of his shorter novel Lovecraft’s Book, which Gateway is now calling Lovecraft’s Book: Lovecraft Book 1 in an Amazon ebook listing with a price-tag of £2.99. Hence the puzzling title for the second book.

But what is the actual relationship between Book 1 and Book 2? There’s a complex publication history. Originally this tale of Lovecraft-in-1927 was a 160,000-word doorstopper written in a year and destined for the large publisher Putnam, back in the days when short novels were the fashion. A total rewrite was then undertaken, at Putnam’s request, to shorten the book. On getting the far shorter re-write novel Putnam were still not happy, and so the re-write went to the post-Derleth Arkham House and was published in 1985. The original 160,000-word typescript was lost in the shuffle, until a carbon was found in a cellar in 2000. It was then republished in 2007 titled Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft. This appears to have seen a second edition in 2009. Possibly the latter was the paperback, to the earlier hardback?

It’s not stated which edition the current Marblehead ebook originates with, but I assume it’s the second edition. In my experience Gateway OCRs its shovelware from print, and as such I’d guess there may well be quite a few unfixed OCR errors.

The novel purports to cover Lovecraft’s life in 1927, and imagines him being hired as a ghost-writer by the (real) German propagandist and poet George Sylvester Viereck. Sounds good, but the review of Lovecraft’s Book by Darrell Schweitzer in Amazing Stories (Spring 1987) rather dampens my enthusiasm…

the Lovecraft character is no more convincing than the H.G. Wells of the movie Time After Time, a famous name and little more. There is even a scene in which Lovecraft gets drunk (during Prohibition, no less!) … The plot, involving the early Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, makes entirely too much of Lovecraft’s alleged racism. … Lupoff’s novel, while adequate as fiction, only distorts the memory of Lovecraft the man.

The central conceit then throws a curious new light on author Lupoff’s apparent real-life recall of a rooftop conversation with Frank Belknap Long, during which Long is said to have remarked that Viereck was once Lovecraft’s arch-enemy…

It took only the mention of Viereck’s name and Howard’s face would turn beet red, his neck would swell until you thought he was going to burst, and he would practically foam at the mouth!

Readers of Tentaclii will recall that I spotted this item a few weeks ago, while looking at Long’s John Carstairs series. Lupoff had written an introduction to a new collection of these pulp tales, and the Long anecdote was included there.

But surely if this reminiscence were correct, and not just invented to conveniently ‘fit’ with the subject matter of Lupoff’s old novel, we would have something else on Viereck from Lovecraft or Long or his correspondents? So far as I can tell we have nothing, and Viereck is not in the index of Joshi’s I Am Providence.

When exactly did this rooftop conversation with Long occur? It’s stated by Lupoff that it happened some 25 years after the “the early 1950s” publication of the British paperback for Long’s John Carstairs: Space Detective. This had been a boyhood favourite for Lupoff, but had since been lost. Yet that edition was actually published 1959, something the writer of the introduction to the current John Carstairs collection must have known, since he evidently re-acquired it — being able to remark on the text of the paperback in comparison to that of the hardback.

If the young Lupoff had originally sourced that paperback from England circa 1960 (transatlantic shipping took time in those days) then that would place the rooftop conversation with Long in circa 1985, the very year Arkham House issued Lovecraft’s Book. Why then should Lupoff make the mistake of placing the paperback’s publication back in the “early 1950s”? Well, it could fit a narrative he might have wished to imply or bolster — add the stated 25 years and you get to a rooftop interview with Long in circa the mid 1970s, just before Lupoff started writing Marblehead. It’s known that at this time Lupoff did interview many who had memories of Lovecraft, including Long. It’s thus being implied in the John Carstairs Introduction that Lupoff had the Viereck information from Long at that time, and that this nugget of actual fact was what started him researching and writing his novel about Viereck and Lovecraft. Yet the 1959 British publication date of John Carstairs rather belies this.

Ornaments in Jade

30 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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New to me, Ornaments in Jade by Arthur Machen. Now on Librivox as a free 100-minute audiobook read by Chuck Williamson.

Ornaments in Jade is a collection of short narrative experiments from Arthur Machen, ten dreamlike tales that are in equal parts enigmatic, sumptuous, and phantasmagoric…

Interesting. Issued in 1924 by Alfred A. Knopf of New York, in a 1000-copy limited edition. Turn-of-the-century literary decadence was coming back into view at that time, as the taint of the trial of Oscar Wilde faded. With this trend and Knopf’s publicists behind it, one imagines that the bookmen of New York City were at least aware of this edition when Lovecraft first arrived in the city. Lovecraft first discovered Machen’s work in the summer of 1923, so he may well have discovered news of it by himself.

If he was then able to see a copy of Jade must remain debatable. Yet, according to Joshi, he likely learned of Machen through Frank Belknap Long and a letter reveals he was “rereading” Long’s Machen collection in 1926. Long would have had both the savvy and contacts to be aware of the limited-edition being issued on his doorstep in 1924, and would also have had the funds to purchase it. Thus is seems reasonable to suppose that Lovecraft at least perused the book in 1926, if not soon after publication in 1924. It could also have become available for reading circa 1925, in the reading-rooms of the larger libraries in the city. This leads to the possibility that aspects of it may have inspired or influenced his own Dream Quest.

Centipede Press nicely reprinted the book a few years ago, and S.T. Joshi had his copy up for bags at $30 in 2018.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft – Providence at night set

29 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Night in Providence, Picture postals

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Inspired by Lovecraft’s choice of a Providence at night postcard (see last week’s ‘Picture Postal’) I found similar cards. They were mostly seemingly issued in the early/mid 1920s.

His choice of card.

Ideology and Scientific Thought – in English

28 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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Late last year Tentaclii noticed the new book Ideology and Scientific Thought in H.P. Lovecraft. In my initial post I said the book was in Spanish, relying on the Spanish publisher’s page for the book and its use of…

“Idioma: Castellano” (language: Spanish)

But, according to a blog comment made here and labelled as coming from the book’s author Juan L. Perez-de-Luque, the book is actually in English. This appears to be confirmed by the free TOCs and sample pages in PDF. Presumably the publisher’s assistant did not have either this PDF sample or the book itself to hand, to double-check the matter, when setting up the sales page.

Neither Amazon UK or Amazon Spain give details of what language the book is in. I see the book is significantly cheaper from the Spanish Amazon, where it lists at the publisher list-price of 15 Euro, compared to UK price-gouger listings of £27 and £37. It’s not being sold on eBay, at present.

Fiction magazine (France, 1953-1971?)

27 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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Newly on Archive.org, and possibly a rare treat for readers of French, a 1966 selection of not-Lovecraft translated tales from Weird Tales.

This is No. 10 and this book-a-zine began to do quite a trade in French translations of the best sci-fi and fantasy tales from America and Britain. It also carried reviews, and what appear to be occasional survey-essays.

Archive.org has early issues, with No. 2 (above) being 1960. Though No. 1 is said to have been back in 1953. After 1960 it became quite regular and the latest I can find at Archive.org is No. 211 in 1971. Over 200 issues in a decade is very impressive. Did it survive into the age of colour TVs?

Sadly the covers are missing from scans, on almost all of the run. A pity as some were Lovecraftian artists later to work on Metal Hurlant, such as Druillet.

‘I gatti di Ulthar e altri racconti da H.P. Lovecraft’

26 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

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Italian newspaper Il Giornale has a review of the new Lovecraft comics anthology, noticed here before Christmas.

The stories selected by Congedo and Montano all predate the Cthulhu Cycle. There are no cosmic gods screaming from the centre of the universe, no scary, sprawling creatures emerge from the bottom of bubbling abysses. “The Terrible Old Man”, “The Cats of Ulthar”, “The Outsider” and “The Hound” are by comparison (almost) stories of everyday life. And it is precisely this frightening simplicity that help keeps the reader gripped until the last panel. The comic’s colors are acid, the strokes are pulp. … “The Outsider” becomes a sort of literary confession that drops the reader into a labyrinthine abyss and makes him touch the ultimate meaning of feelings such as loneliness and isolation of the truly ‘different’ person. And it is here that Lovecraft literally comes face-to-face with one of the themes dearest to him: the devastating density of the feeling that one is completely ‘out of this world’.

A fine new front-cover is now available, which wasn’t to be had before.

Protected: Getting Weird

25 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Odd scratchings

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Ask Lovecraft: Adjectives

25 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

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A new Ask Lovecraft: ‘Adjectives’. Apparently they’re “a word which qualifies a noun”? Nope, I’m still none the wiser. I attended a Birmingham comprehensive school (read: “crap”) under socialism and left for years of shop-work at age 16. So far as I recall, we never covered such things in the classroom. Never learned it, never will…

The Book of Iod

25 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Nocturnal Revelries extracts Henry Kuttner’s The Book of Iod: The Eater of Souls and other Tales from the vaults and gives it a new review. This was one of Robert M. Price’s usefully affordable ‘cycle’ collections, made for wide distribution by RPG company Chaosium in the mid 1990s.

Not Derlethian formula and not… “hugely original, but they are least varied” […] “Some of the stories are so shamelessly Lovecraftian that they almost read like rewritten versions of Lovecraft’s work. “The Black Kiss” comes directly from “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. “The Salem Horror” is “The Dreams in the Witch House”. “Hydra”, “The Secret of Krallitz” and a few of the other tales also felt remarkably familiar. Still though, Kuttner was about 21 when he was writing these tales, and after he wrote them, he’d send them to Lovecraft in the post. […] Kuttner stopped writing Lovecraftian horror a few years after Lovecraft died, but he continued to write for another 20 years or so. I know Ray Bradbury thought very highly of his writing.

With a little contrast adjustment, an eBay listing supplies the complete TOCs…

Editor & Publisher (1901-2015)

24 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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Now online and useful for researchers of the literary and pressman life of the 1910s-1930s, the complete run of the U.S. trade magazine Editor & Publisher (1901-2015). Also photos of writers and publication offices, and these are not too badly damaged by the microfilming process.

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