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More recent Lovecraft scholarship

25 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Another quick trawl for recent Lovecraft scholarship published in out-of-the-way places…

* Micheal Gentry. “Parser at the Threshold: Lovecraftian horror in interactive fiction“. In the book: IF Theory Reader, March 2011. (Online, free.)

Also related to IF (interactive fiction), an English summary of a talk given at the Storyworlds Across Media conference (Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz, 30th June — 2nd July 2011)…

“In a talk on “The Developing Storyworld of H.P. Lovecraft”, Van Leavenworth (Umea) demonstrated that Lovecraft’s works hold two mythical concepts that appeal to his followers who have not only developed a number of textual, audio-visual and interactive fictions but also integrated elements of his stories into obscure cults: the loss of control or ‘cosmic fear’ and humanity’s inability to understand cosmic knowledge. Apparently, these universal human concerns adapt well to different uses and invite recipients to engage in the spiritual and transcendent body of thought that is attributed to the author’s name and persona. Hence, Leavenworth, as the previous speakers, put Ryan’s criteria of consistency and media-exclusiveness of the storyworld up for debate.”

* David Marks (2011). From the will to Wessex to Arkham: Lovecraft’s geophilosophical debt to Hardy. California State University, M.A. dissertation. (Hardy as in Thomas Hardy. Not yet online.)

* Julio Franca (Oct 2011). “Fundamentos Esteticos da Literatura de Horror: A influencia de Edmund Burke sobre H. P. Lovecraft“. (Article in Spanish on the influence of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, on Lovecraft. Online.)

* Matthew Strohack (2011). “The City under the Hill: Allegorical Tradition and H. P. Lovecraft’s America.” A chapter in the book American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey, SUNY Press, December 2011. (Already available to read online at Google Books.)

Cold Tonnage

22 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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I’ve added a new bookseller to my ‘Lovecraft on the Web’ list. It’s Cold Tonnage, whose new list leads off with a new Tartarus Press limited-edition of Robert Aickman’s Dark Entries (originally 1964).

There’s also an article on Aickman titled “Some Notes on Aickman’s Plays” by Douglas A. Anderson, in the Tartarus Press journal Wormwood #17. Just published, #17 leads with “World Gone Wrong: H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology of loss (part one)” by Joel Lane.

Haunter of the Dark wins 2011 Machinima Expo

20 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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A Lovecraft machinima movie has won the Grand Prize in the 2011 Machinima Expo (machinima is amateur 3D animation storytelling, rendered in real-time with a videogame engine). Phil Browne’s adaptation of The Haunter of the Dark was made with the real-time animation software iClone. Here’s the film with the director’s commentary…

[vimeo 32303090]

And here’s the original…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyqoNvcmEcM&w=640&h=360]

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in New books

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Today in the UK both The Financial Times and Guardian Books notice the new wrist-breaker anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Amazon UK currently has the book used for as low as £10.

It weighs in at 4lbs, and 750,000 words. So… can I get a Kindle version? No, of course not. What a waste of great publicity. All those potential sales from newspaper reviews just flushed down the drain or diverted to Pirate Bay, because there’s no Kindle version. Seriously, do we need a mass “one-star review” campaign on Amazon, to force publishers to give readers Kindle versions of new books?

Anyway, the chronological anthology looks interesting (even if the only Lovecraft in it is “The Dunwich Horror”, often regarded as a failure), and Weird Fiction Review has a handy table of contents.

Lovecraft Library Volume 1 – shipping early Dec 2011

18 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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A weighty new 232-page collection of comic book adaptations of Lovecraft, The Lovecraft Library Volume 1: Horror Out of Arkham, due 6th Dec 2011 from IDW. Introduction written by Robert Weinberg.

Volume 2 is currently out as a series of traditional comic-book part-work pamphlets, as “H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror” (includes a 100-page adaptation “The Dunwich Horror”, plus other stories), and these will then presumably also be collected into a single volume at some point in 2012. When put together the two volumes should bring us over 400 pages of new comic book adaptations of Lovecraft tales.

Stranger Magic reviewed

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Marina Warner’s new book on magic and the reception of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, reviewed…

“The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. These dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy became inseparable from “nigromancy”.

Of obvious relevance to much weird fiction from the 1920s and 30s, and Lovecraft’s use of mad Arab wizards, etc. Warner is not your usual theory-clotted lit crit academic, she’s a proper historian and independent scholar.