Category Archives: New books

New book: macabre and strange poster art

26 Wednesday Oct 2022

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A new Kickstarter hardback, showcasing what appears to be a personal collection of vintage macabre and strange poster art, 1862-1973 and said to be photographed from originals. 140 pages. It’s currently funded.

I wonder if there’s a gap in the market for a similar book that focuses only on vintage pre-1995 posters and substantial flyers that relate to Lovecraft and ‘Lovecraft inspired’? Though, admittedly, such material would still be in copyright. Still, one could put out a call for submissions, from those willing to dig into their archives in order to see their old work in such a book.

Two new books

24 Monday Oct 2022

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From Portugal, the new ebook Lovecraft e as Tradicoes Esotericas: Influencias do Horror Cosmico no Ocultismo (trans: ‘Lovecraft and the Esoteric Traditions: Influences of Cosmic Horror on Occultism’). In Portuguese.

Here’s my translation of the TOC…

Preface (Dennis P. Quinn Ph.D., Professor and Department Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Cal Poly Pomona, California)

1. The Cold and Dark Vast of the Cosmos

2. Lovecraft: Posthumous Member of the Counterculture

3. From Abnegation to Cosmic Pessimism

4. The Dark Essence of the Cthulhu Mythos

5. The Occult Tradition and its Marks in Lovecraft

6. Cults of Cthulhu, its Fans and Devotees

7. The Culture of Fans as a Creative Microcosm

8. The Cult Still Lives…

References

Appendix

“The Festival” (annotated)

135 pages, September 2022.

I can’t get the cover-artist name, but it’s nice work. I also like the retro mid-1980s thrift-shop feel it has.

The other book is still forthcoming. Due soon-ish is The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games, with Amazon wobbling between late December 2022 / early 2023. It’s one of those academic… now, I was going to say “£80 tomes”. But the standard list-price for such things seems to have now jumped to £120 (roughly $140).

So… it’s one of those invitation-only academic £120 tomes, of the sort that can trap some good academic work in inaccessible volumes.

Discusses a wide array of medial forms, from film and TV to comics, podcasts, and video and board games.

Again. Yawn…

Part of the Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture series. Despite the price, the academic salaries involved, and leftist hand-wringing about academic labour… they’ve used a raw and very obviously AI-generated image for the cover.

New book: The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence

15 Saturday Oct 2022

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A new review by Arciapod of the graphic novel The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence (2022), albeit reviewed from one of those annoying highly-compressed…

free preliminary, and likely unedited copy of this book

…of the sort that gets sent out for a graphic-novel review.

But his review usefully reveals that…

One’s enjoyment of this book is directly proportional to how much somebody likes or knows about H.P. Lovecraft. … people familiar with his works will get a far better appreciation for this story than others, and honestly without knowing a bit about him, the finer points of this may fly right over their heads.

Sounds good. Warning: the review has some big spoilers. The Arciapod review has only just been published, but it turns out the book has actually been out since June 2022. I had noticed it in passing, but until now had not heard about the direct Lovecraft connection.

Now… a while back Tentaclii noted the similar-looking ‘A Bestiary of the Twilight’ (Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule, June 2022), a French ‘BD’ (i.e. oversized graphic novel, often in hardcover) also featuring Lovecraft as a character. The French Lovecraftians had mentioned it, and I assumed it had not yet been translated.

Yet I now see that this ‘BD’ has the same 120 page-count as Mr. Providence, and has the same Parisian artist/writer in Daria Schmitt. A little digging finds European comics sources noting the name change. Yes, Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule has been re-titled as The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence for the English edition, and since summer 2022 can now be enjoyed by English readers.

Only as an ebook, admittedly, but at a very reasonable price (probably around $5, for U.S. readers). If you want the dead-tree version it seems you’d have to get the French ‘BD’ and a phrasebook.

The news of this prompted me to see if there was an ebook of the graphic novel biography Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft. No, still just an out-of-print 2017 hardback.

New book: Theology and H.P. Lovecraft

13 Thursday Oct 2022

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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New to me, the scholarly book Theology and H.P. Lovecraft (August 2022), a multi-author book in the ‘Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture’ series from Fortress Academic.

This collection of fourteen essays is the first sustained academic engagement with H.P. Lovecraft from a theological perspective.

The book follows 2021’s survey Theology and Horror, from the same publisher.

‘The Oblique City’ – Lovecraft in Quebec

11 Tuesday Oct 2022

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“The Oblique City: H.P. Lovecraft, New France and Quebec”, a new gallery exhibition by comics (BD) artist Christian Quesnel. At the Galerie Montcalm in Canada, running until 8th December 2022…

The latest work by Christian Quesnel, ‘La cité oblique’, a free interpretation of the Quebec travelogue by H.P. Lovecraft … sprawling mists, forgotten deities and poignant creatures

Also I found a podcast interview with the artist, though it doesn’t appear to be in English.

The blurb for the podcast usefully reveals that the works are also in a print volume…

his [BD] album La Cité oblique, published by Editions Alto

Tracking this down, one finds that the book appeared in August 2022 and the blurb reveals more…

Christian Quesnel spent several years creating this magnum opus, which is enriched by Ariane Gelinas’s soaring prose … a parallel history of Quebec … [Lovecraft’s] wanderings through “the city of enigmas walled behind the closed shutters of dream” combine brilliantly with a Lovecraftian tale of the brave deeds of Qartier and Loui Heyber. The result is a highly hallucinatory tribute to the father of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as a fascinating reworking of the past.

Sounds great. I look forward to seeing the book appear in English.

Forthcoming McFarland books

10 Monday Oct 2022

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Why do publishers make it so difficult to find out about forthcoming books? For instance, the McFarland website has no way to search by all books + latest, by date. But after some naughty URL-hacking by me, they do now. Though even then you still have to manually open the book blurb fold-away section for each and every page. And then another section to get the publication date. Sigh. Oh, for a unified all-publishers news-feed for all forthcoming non-fiction books in English. Hint: it’s definitely not Amazon, which is rubbish at that and also clogged up with shovelware and ‘blank notepads’ junk.

Anyway, some possible forthcoming or just-out McFarland titles of interest to Tentaclii readers. As always with McFarland, some will be gems, some clunkers…

Ancient Stone Sites of New England and the Debate Over Early European Exploration (2nd Edition)

Reading the Great American Zombie: The Living Dead in Literature

The Dark Side of G.K. Chesterton (“explores the darker fringes of his wild imagination”)

Music and the Paranormal: An Encyclopedic Dictionary

Fantastic Serial Sites of California: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Locations, 1919–1955 (screen filming locations)

How to Misunderstand Tolkien: The Critics and the Fantasy Master

Beowulf in Comic Books and Graphic Novels

The Writer and the Cross: Interviews with Authors of Christian Historical Fiction

The Knights Templar in Popular Culture

New book: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain

22 Thursday Sep 2022

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An open-access review of Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain. “Modern” here meaning early modernity, from the 1870s through to the 1930s…

On the whole we cannot see the turn to psychical research as a momentary lapse of reason on the part of late Victorian physicists. [And] we should not be embarrassed or surprised by the interest that leading physicists had in the occult.

Studi Lovecraftiani No. 21

21 Wednesday Sep 2022

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A new issue of the Italian language Lovecraft journal Studi Lovecraftiani No. 21 (Autumn 2022) is now available. Contents in Italian include…

* A long and detailed article titled “Collecting Lovecraft”, a guide for connoisseurs and collectors looking for the rarest and most sought-after editions, as well as those more difficult to find.

* An articulate essay on the role played by music in HPL’s works.

* An essay on the pseudobiblia of Sutter Cane. [Cane being the fictional novelist in John Carpenter’s movie In The Mouth of Madness.]

* An in-depth study of Jean Robin’s book, H.P. Lovecraft et le secret des adorateurs du Serpent (2017). [Robin appears to be a stylish writer who is well known in French occult circles, in the tradition of Rene Guenon. Title translates as ‘H.P. Lovecraft and the Secret of the Serpent Worshipers’, which appears to claim to be non-fiction.]

* The second and last part of an essay on the “abstraction of corporeality” in the fiction of HPL.

* Unpublished works by the master, newly in Italian. Notes on “Medusa’s Coil” with Zelia Bishop, and the poem [known in Italian as] “A Pan”.

* A detailed review of Joshi’s HPL biography I Am Providence, recently available in Italian.

* News of the latest releases at the international level.

* Two new Lovecraftian stories by contemporary writers.

Cover art by Pietro Rotelli.

New Book: ‘Eyes of the God’, second expanded edition

16 Friday Sep 2022

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Now listing, the revised and expanded Eyes of the God: Selected Writings of R. H. Barlow. It’s gone from a slim 209 pages to a shelf-trembling 596 pages.

Also, the third issue of S.T. Joshi’s megajournal Penumbra is now listing on Hippocampus with table-of-contents. Among others…

“A Baconian Reading of the Weird Tale from Shelley to Lovecraft”.

““I Dream a Golden Dream”: A Brief Dunsany Correspondence — and Friendship”.

“Under the Sign of the Hourglass: Elderly Protagonists in Horror Fiction”.

“Searching for God in the Dark Seas of William Hope Hodgson’s Poetry”.

The blurb also mentions an essay on “H P. Lovecraft’s influence on George R.R. Martin”, though I don’t see it in the TOCs.

Plus my bit of initial archaeological probing on Mary Howitt, to establish the weird outlines of her vast output and save someone a few weeks of work in the future. It won’t be me, as it needs abundant time and travel expenses to visit multiple archives for weeks at a time. If you can get a chunky grant for that, feel free.