My book The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth is now available in its expanded third edition. Notes for The Hobbit have been added, as well as many new and expanded additions for The Lord of the Rings. As such the book is now at 28,000 words. It has also had a further two passes of proof-reading, plus Amazon’s own spell-checking (it picked up four I didn’t catch, but Amazon doesn’t know about huorns).

Amazon has had the newly uploaded file for five days now, and they say ‘wait 72 hours’ after successful submission. Thus the new edition (in Kindle ebook only) should by live by now. I’ve also dropped the price a dollar, to $5.99 or around £5 UK. If you’ve already purchased the Kindle ebook edition, a new download to your Kindle should get you the new third edition.

My book seeks to sympathetically identify all the ‘cracks’ and ‘gaps’ in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in which new fan-fiction stories might be told, or where small new gap-fillers might be fitted in.

Three examples of the sort of notes and ideas you’ll find, which track through in the same order as the events of the books…

Rangers hold Sarn Ford

Rangers attempt to hold Sarn Ford against the Black Riders, but many are killed and others are forced to fall back.

In a long-unpublished text, at the moment when Frodo’s luggage leaves Hobbiton bound for Crickhollow, Tolkien has Sarn Ford in the far south of the Shire being defended by the Rangers. They face the Black Riders boldly but are out matched and defeated. Some escape, so the encounter and losses would become known to the other Rangers. There might be a scope for a poignant story set a few years after the War of the Ring, in which some of the Southfarthing hobbits trek all the way to the Brandywine Bridge to petition the King for a stone memorial at the Ford to their fallen defenders, and there meet some of the Rangers who survived the encounter with the Riders.

Gimli and the honey-cakes

Gimli remarks that the waybread of the elves is better than honey-cakes made by the Beornings, a treat they are evidently reluctant to offer to travellers in such wary days.

Gimli thus implies that he has recently encountered the Beornings, as a traveller. Presumably this was on his journey to Rivendell. How did he persuade them to let him have some honey-cakes? This might be a short comedic tale, with songs and mention of some of the bee-lore of the Beornings.

Were-worms and heroes

Evidently Bilbo knows a tale or tales that indicate that in the East of East of Middle-earth there are fierce wild Were-worms in the Last Desert.

This implies that someone fights with these creatures, presumably a hero who defeats or at least escapes from them. Such a tale has most likely been picked up from travelling dwarves, who by that time pass through the Shire on the way to their mines. That Bilbo can use the reference without comment from the dwarves strongly suggests that this is the case. “Were-worms” suggests shape-changing dragon-men, real desert men who can become dragons or dragon-like, just as Beorn is a bear-man or were-bear. There is surely a story here of how a Tookish ancestor of Bilbo manages to winkle such a vivid story out of a passing dwarf, followed by details of the great (dwarf?)-hero involved and the reasons for his epic quest to such a remote and fearsome place.

Newly listed, what appears to be a new book of translations of Lovecraft’s letters… or at least, new to the French in French. Selection de lettres (1927-1929): De vagues fragments d’un reve dans lequel je n’ai rien s faire (‘Vague fragments of a dream in which I have nothing to do’) was due in March but is now listed as shipping in early April 2023…

The translator Vincent-Pierre Angouillant offers us the translation of a hundred letters by Lovecraft. Knowing his impressive letters makes his fictional universe an even richer experience. Never before published in France, these letters are but a fragment of Lovecraft’s surviving correspondence. Often he reveals what seems an ordinary daily life, yet this is described in a style unique to Lovecraft and we can only marvel at the ways in which he interweaves his immense erudition. The reader will also encounter striking accounts of his dreams and nightmares, sometimes amounting to tales in their own right, in which the master instantly transports us into his horrific universe.

A chunky 600-page book, apparently. Looks good, if you’re a French Lovecraftian.

I see the same translator also has Selected Letters of an Anachronistic Gentleman (2022) which collected in one volume his two earlier volumes of translated letters and one booklet of 1925 letters. He seems to have started with his 1925 booklet in August 2021, and is rapidly working his way through the letters from there.

New Book: William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark, billed as…

The first comprehensive study of the works of William Hope Hodgson

Pre-ordering now at a hefty ‘academic libraries only’ price, for what’s currently listed as a 1st June 2023 release.

Javier Calvo has translated Lovecraft’s letters into Spanish, and apparently this is the very first time there has been such a book-length translation. The new book is evidently a ‘selected letters’, focusing on Lovecraft’s labour and growth as a writer…

Edited by Javier Calvo, based on a corpus of more than twelve thousand pages, this first volume, ‘Writing Against Men’, focuses on Lovecraft’s literary career: his projects, goals, successes, and failures; his relationship with his literary circle; and the birth of the momentous mythology of it.

Apparently this is the first of three planned volumes, something which seems almost certain given the strong interest in the man in the Spanish-speaking world. Said to be shipping in February 2023, and listed on Amazon.es under the title “Escribir contra los hombres. Cartas de H. P. Lovecraft, Vol. I”. The Amazon listing reveals that the first volume is a table-trembler at a hefty 544 pages. The price is 35 Euro, which converts to around $38.

Also in Spain, the major newspaper El Pais ($ paywall) had a weekend article on The Commonplace Book of H.P. Lovecraft. I can’t get past the paywall, but perhaps there’s also a new translation of the Commonplace Book in Spain, occasioning the new article?

The French should today be unboxing their sixth volume of the complete H.P. Lovecraft. This is the new French translation from Mnemos. The book shipped last week, if the Amazon UK date can be trusted.

Not quite the final volume in the sumptuous set. The last will be Vol. 7 in March 2023, which is either “About Lovecraft” or “Lovecraft’s Circle” depending on how you translate its title.

The Pulp Super-Fan makes an initial survey of Robert M. Price’s Lovecraftian collections. Since Price’s podcasts have become scarce, I was unaware of his two collections of his own Mythos fiction, in 2019 and a follow-on in 2020.

His main 588-page book one can now be had as an affordable ebook, Blasphemies & Revelations. While the shorter companion of the following year, Horrors & Heresies, still seems to be in paperback only.

A look at his Amazon page also reveals… ahaa… what’s this… Crypt of Cthulhu #114 (July 2022) on Amazon as an ebook. Yes, a substantial new issue of Crypt came out in summer 2022 and is the first since 2019. Who knew? Includes a look at “Lovecraft and Cinema in his Day”, and an interview with David E. Schultz, among others.

The earlier #113 issue is still the latest listed over at the PDF downloads page.

I’ve updated my recent survey of ‘Lovecraft in 2022’ with the new information on Crypt. I’ve also added there the news about Derleth slipping into the public domain in Canada, now that this is confirmed (their new 2023 ’70-year law’ is not retrospective). Idle notion: what if Robert M. Price were to re-write Derleth’s ‘Lovecraft collaborations’ as they should have been… now that would be something to behold!

S.T. Joshi’s new Horror Fiction Index is published…

a listing of nearly 3,300 single-author horror collections from 1808 to 2010. The print edition is a whopping 741 pages, containing a list of the collections (arranged alphabetically by author, and chronologically within a given author’s books) with their tables of contents, followed by indexes of names, collection titles, and story titles (nearly 30,000 of them).

It’s a ‘story finding-aid’, so far as I’m aware, and thus doesn’t also list prefaces, scholarly notes (or not), etc. Now available in paperback and ebook. I was pleased to be able to supply two of his ‘unknown contents’ listings. Joshi reports than only ten such ‘unknown’ collections remained un-solved by the time the book went to print. Hopefully someone will now pick this up and produce an expanded second edition in due course.