07 Monday Feb 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The new book Lovecraftian People and Places by Ken Faig, Jr. now has a listing page at Hippocampus Press. $25, and all the essays have been revised and updated for the new volume. Hippocampus’s site has been and still is ‘up and down’ in terms of access from the UK. So here’s a screenshot for those who can’t access it…
03 Thursday Feb 2022
Posted in New books, Podcasts etc.
I’m pleased to see that the Library of America is giving Ray Bradbury the same fine production values they gave Lovecraft a while back. Bradbury gets two volumes, the first being out now as a $40 900-page table-trembler titled Ray Bradbury: Novels & Story Cycles (2021).
It includes “Bradbury’s settled intention” for the final-cut of the famous Martian Chronicles. Google Books can provide no contents list, but according to one interview with the venerable editor this means it includes the show-stopping satirical “Usher II” horror-story, probably best skipped the first time around.
If you want some ‘starter Bradbury’ that’s a little lighter on the wrists, a fine theatrical audiobook version of The Martian Chronicles is the five and a half hour full-cast audio by Colonial Radio Theatre (they use the British spelling for Theatre). Created for direct-to-CD in 2011, rather than lopped-and-chopped to fit a broadcast time-slot. They spent a lot of time making sure the sequence fitted Bradbury’s final intentions. Again, you might do best to skip “Usher II” on the first hearing.
03 Thursday Feb 2022
Posted in Historical context, New books
Lovecraft was not the only one ghostwriting popular fiction for Houdini in the mid 1920s. A new book on the topic is The Zanetti Mystery: Plus candidates for ghostwriting the story (December 2021). The book is a $25 paperback, and is shipping now.
The author republishes the ‘Houdini’ detective thriller novel The Zanetti Mystery (1925), with the original magazine serial illustrations, apparently for the first time since it appeared. He also asks, and with new research… ‘who was the likely ghostwriter?’ Candidates include Eddy Jr. and Lovecraft himself. But they are not the only candidates, and it seems to me a little unlikely that an ‘Eddy + Lovecraft lightly revising’ detective novel could have escaped notice until now. True, Lovecraft was experimenting with speed-writing a detective-like tale at about this time (“Red Hook”), but there was a romance element to The Zanetti Mystery which would not have been congenial.
That said, some Tentaclii readers may still be interested in this new book’s evaluation of the most-likely authorship.
30 Sunday Jan 2022
Posted in New books
Diacritik has a long review by Yann Etienne of volume one of the new French translation of Lovecraft.
Of the former key edition in French, that earlier… “edition remains essential but it sometimes suffers from editorial faults attributable to another era: truncated texts, missing paragraphs, incomplete source text, imprecise translations.”
The new Mnemos edition retains the story-titles of the old one, to avoid future confusions… “…and volume 1 has a focus on the Dreamlands [with 17 stories, fragments or prose poems, including Dream Quest…] ‘This is not a book, it is a territory’ warns David Camus in his introduction. This would be valid for the full range of Lovecraft’s work, yet it resonates all the more more for the Dreamlands cycle. A superb map by Maxime Plasse allows us to savour the terrain.”
On Dream Quest… “we know without a doubt that we are in the presence of a unique text. This is how we recognise great texts: not by their hypothetical perfection, but by their extreme singularity. […] it creates its own space and a genre apart. […] The fairest comparison would be to shelve it alongside Dante’s Comedy”.
Lovecraft was… “a more eloquent letter writer than Voltaire”.
24 Monday Jan 2022
Posted in Historical context, New books, REH, Scholarly works
Amazon is now listing the Robert E. Howard Foundation’s The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 in the long-awaited paperback edition, with a publication date of 22nd January 2022.
Now seems to be shipping in both the UK and the USA. I recall that there was said to be a new cover for the paperback, different than the hardback’s cover. But that doesn’t now seem to be the case.
While you’re waiting for it to arrive you might peruse The World of Robert E. Howard. This website has scans of original letters to read online, and a call for “digital copies of any [original] letters” to show on the page.
20 Thursday Jan 2022
Posted in Historical context, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Deep Cuts has a useful post surveying the response of Lovecraft to the new talent of C. L. Moore, toward the end of his life.
M.C. Tuggle has a short review of S.T. Joshi’s new book The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft.
And S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, including further confirmation on the two Letters volumes planned for 2022…
this year we do hope to get out at least two other Lovecraft letters volumes: Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others (including letters to Zealia Bishop and others), and Miscellaneous Letters (a huge volume of letters to a wide array of individuals, as well as letters published in Lovecraft’s lifetime).
Also very tantalising is news of…
“Ellen Greenham’s fascinating book After Engulfment, a study of Lovecraft’s cosmicism and how it was adapted or amended” by later science-fiction writers.
However, this is still only at the copyediting stage. I assume the author is aware of the influence on Arthur C. Clarke, though Joshi doesn’t mention him in the list of influenced writers.
16 Sunday Jan 2022
Posted in Historical context, New books, Podcasts etc.
Seemingly new on the HPLHS site, and new to me, The Literature of Lovecraft as an audiobook. Forty-three tales admired by Lovecraft and done as readings, with some having to be excerpts or even plot summaries. Delivered on a USB stick, in a nice book-like case for your shelf. Ordering now.
15 Saturday Jan 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Back in print, David E. Schultz’s Fungi from Yuggoth by H.P. Lovecraft: An Annotated Edition. A chunky 288 pages as a new $20 paperback. I hesitate to say ‘shipping now’, as I’m always wrong when it comes to Hippocampus. But it’s certainly listing on the Hippocampus site with what appears to be a live ‘Order now’ button.
Also listed there as new is the latest issue of the poetry journal Spectral Realms, with a book review titled “Born under Saturn Indeed”. Which may be for Born under Saturn: The Letters of Samuel Loveman and Clark Ashton Smith but more likely is for the new and greatly expanded edition of Out of the Immortal Night: Selected Works of Samuel Loveman. Or both.
11 Tuesday Jan 2022
Posted in New books
Glen S. Miranker is a former Apple executive who has collected over 7,000 books, illustrations and letters related to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He has whittled them down into the New York City exhibition “Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects”, opening tomorrow at the Grolier Club in Manhattan. The show runs until 16th April 2022. A catalogue is currently available, which may interest some readers of Tentaclii.
10 Monday Jan 2022
Posted in Astronomy, New books, Scholarly works
The Spanish newspaper El Espanol has an article celebrating the publication of a new Spanish-language book on Lovecraft and astronomy.
04 Tuesday Jan 2022
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, New books
Michael Hutter’s finely printed and made book Dark Dreamlands III. 100 copies, pre-ordering now. III includes “The Cats of Ulthar” and “Hypnos”.
03 Monday Jan 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
New from Sentinel Hill Press, Miskatonic Country Scenarios: A Keeper’s Guide. Meant for RPG game-masters, but also of likely interest to Mythos and graphic novel writers seeking references and inspiration…
An explanation of … the region … A short bibliography … a discussion of all the books from Chaosium’s “Lovecraft Country” series as well as Miskatonic Country-focused scenario collections … a detailed description of more than 60 published scenarios … Concordances for places, entities and tomes encountered.