Category Archives: New books

New book: Le guide Lovecraftien de Providence

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

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French tourists to Providence now have a new guidebook, Le guide Lovecraftien de Providence (2021). So far as I know this is the first since Jean-Christophe Requette’s in 1993, which had b&w photos from the mid 1980s.

From a review in French…

… the first real book in French on the city of the Master. And this is not a guide to Providence, but a Lovecraftian guide to Providence, listing the sites surveyed by the writer or mentioned in his short stories. The book is beautifully presented, with colour photos and numerous quotes from his correspondence and fiction. Everything is soberly written, but with a personal tone that conveys all the passion felt by the editor during her journey. Well done, and and perhaps we will soon see a Lovecraftian Guide to New York City?

Another review specifies that there are…

… four routes carefully prepared by field research in 2018 and 2019, with maps and original photos, quotes, biographical insights, showing you the historical and topographical landmarks.

Which reminds me, now NecronomiCon 2022 is scheduled, that a suitable fundraiser for the convention would be an ebook of Henry Beckwith’s Lovecraft’s Providence & Adjacent Parts. In paper it’s now become a £70 ‘collectable’.

Clark Ashton Smith in Brazil

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

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A new blog post from S.T. Joshi. Among other items of note, two volumes of Clark Ashton Smith are now available in Brazil in translation.

Talking of South America, new on Archive.org under Creative Commons is Les Historietas: Un Survol De La BD Argentine, being a sumptuously illustrated fannish history of Argentine comics and their creators. There are several pages on Breccia and Lovecraft.

Trans: “The tale you have told is terrifying, Malinche…”

Lacy, push-up Tolkien…

22 Monday Mar 2021

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We’ve all suffered from Amazon’s relentless ‘confusion marketing’, but this is a step too far…

This is what I found on first searching for the new book Tolkien’s Modern Reading on Amazon UK. It’s on the list results too. It’s not a result of an infected Web browser, as it’s the same when seen on a clean browser. Anyway, just one more reason why keyword and title search on Amazon is crap. Their advance/recent listings are even more abysmal.

I had thought the book Tolkien’s Modern Reading wasn’t out yet, but a search reveals Amazon UK has had it in Kindle since the end of January 2021. £13.50, which is reasonable for a 580-page book by an academic. It could have gone to an academic libraries publisher and been pushed out at £80. The well-researched book surveys all the various non-medieval authors Tolkien is known to have read or perused at one time or another. He even dipped into James Joyce, fascinated by the complex language-play and allusions, though tended toward interesting genre books. So far as I’m aware he did not read popular magazine fiction. As such the new book also seems to offer a sort of reading guide to pre-1960s books.

El sonador de Providence: El legado literario de H. P. Lovecraft y su presencia en los videojuegos (2018)

21 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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I find I had overlooked a work from 2018, the Spanish book El sonador de Providence: El legado literario de H. P. Lovecraft y su presencia en los videojuegos (‘The Dreamer of Providence: on the literary legacy of H.P. Lovecraft and his influence on videogames’). Published from Seville by Heroes de Papel.

Said when it appeared to be “a detailed review of videogames inspired by Lovecraft’s work, that have appeared since the 1970s.” However the book runs to 320 pages, and seems to be about more than the publisher’s initial “it’s-for-gamers” marketeering might have suggested. The blurb, in approximate translation, gives a fuller picture…

For many the author H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) represents the definitive point of connection between the gothic terror tale that culminated in Edgar Allan Poe, and the new weird literature and modern science fiction. We all know his creations such as Cthulhu that have now seeped deep into the culture, thanks in part to their powerful impact on fans. But he also raised important points about the place of mankind in the cosmos, the fear of the possible existence of creatures older than Earth, and the discovery of the absence of gods and protective spirits. Aesthetics also meet philosophy in his work and, when woven into innovative narratives, this admixture allures readers with its dreamlike glitter. The Dreamer of Providence is a detailed study drawing on the latest works on Lovecraft, and also a journey through the works of his own masters and his many correspondents. The aim is to build a new and fuller picture of the author for Spanish readers. The book also analyses the influence his creations have had on the language and mechanics used in videogames, and also board or role-playing games. The book especially considers some of the most important videogames, ones that draw most deeply on his philosophy and aesthetic vision.

A Spanish gamer’s recent review indicates that the videogames take a back seat in the first half, and he comments on the clarity of the writing and the clear conveying of a wealth of new-to-the-Spanish information about Lovecraft and his circle. This half also touches on Lovecraft’s distorted Derleth-ian afterlife. It’s in the second half that the games are considered. Apparently Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a Lovecraftian videogame? Well… maybe. It seemed more like a distillation of about 20 old 1970s British sci-fi TV series, to me, with a dash of evangelical Christianity. Some Spanish games are also said to be considered, ones that are rarely if ever considered in the Anglosphere.

“… dear to the small boys of other generations”

11 Thursday Mar 2021

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Now online, a complete run of The Story Paper Collector (1941-66). This was a British title for collectors of the pre-comic-strip era of boys’ story magazines. As such it has some crossover into heroic historical-adventure and even some proto science-fiction, though it looks like interest in Billy Bunter type public-school stories predominate. The final issue has a short obituary for Lovecraft correspondent Arthur Harris and reveals he had contributed a number of articles. The website also has runs of several other titles in the same line.

A recent book has been published on the topic, Edwardian Comic Papers (2021) by expert collector Alan Clark, lavishly illustrated with colour plates.

FHTAGN!

10 Wednesday Mar 2021

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The German Lovecraft Society is now able to provide Germans with the full FHTAGN as a book, this being…

a pen & paper set of [RPG] rules under an Open Game License, with which commercial and non-commercial projects can be implemented by third parties without the need for a separate license or consent. The volume is 172 pages and contains all the rules that Game Masters and players need for exciting hours in the cosmic horror universe of H.P. Lovecraft.

Apparently based on Delta Green.

New book: Progression of the Weird Tale

09 Tuesday Mar 2021

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S.T. Joshi’s new essay collection The Progression of the Weird Tale is now available in an affordable £2.60 Kindle ebook. The second half is substantially Lovecraft and Barlow, plus a critical assessment of two novels by Frank Belknap Long and memoirs of several fellow Lovecraftians. Also many short encyclopaedia entries, but judging by the one on Arnold Bennett they only cover supernatural novels not short-stories.

His latest blog post also reveals a worthy new mammoth project, A World History of Atheism, expected to take about six or seven years. Sounds great. Grab the graphic novel rights now.

Lovecraft was right, part 472: the Stoic Lovecraft

27 Saturday Feb 2021

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H.P. Lovecraft… way ahead of the curve as usual. He was interested in, and read deeply into, the Ancient Roman Stoics and Epicureans. After about 1930 he came increasingly to live aspects of such a life, in a modified personal form well-adapted to shrugging off the turmoils and tribulations of the 1930s.

Now, like Lovecraft himself, these philosophies have become a small industry. The TLS this week reviews a shelf on new books on the topic (e.g. How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life) and reveals that the movement also has its share of get-rich-quick empire-builders…

… the Stoic revival extends beyond the bookstore. … The Stoa-curious can now head to dailystoic.com to have philosophical wisdom delivered to their inboxes or order a “Memento Mori medallion” from the online store. At modernstoicism.com they can sign up to “live like a Stoic for a week”. Real enthusiasts can attend an annual convention, Stoicon, held (at least before Covid) in cities across the world, to hear talks by classical scholars like Long or movement luminaries

Yet the reviewer finds the movement’s recent crop of short manuals and introductions, all from weighty university presses, to be worthy and faithful to the originals…

to a perhaps surprising degree, [these modern] Stoic treatises really are self-help manuals.

So it sounds like you could do worse, if you wanted a modern and readable introduction to this aspect of Lovecraft’s life in the 1930s. The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft is also your go-to book on this aspect of his thought, paired with Joshi’s Decline of the West, though both will be heavy going. Ideally, at some point we need an accessible H.P. Lovecraft’s Philosophy For Beginners book presented in the style of the leftist For Beginners series. Here’s a sample page from Linguistics for Beginners to show the approach I’m thinking of…

Having a cat as a narrator would probably be a useful conceit, since the text would need to draw the parallels between these philosophies and the natural bearing and attitude of cats.

Lovecraft also advises Epicureanism to young sceptics among his correspondents…

As to any especial “creed of speculative scepticism” … I would advise Epicureanism as a base. That old geezer had the right idea, and drew from the right sources, largely my old friend Democritus. Read Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura for the best possible exposition of this unsurpassed philosophy.

New book: Lovecraft: The Great Tales

25 Thursday Feb 2021

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John D. Haefele, August Derleth specialist and author of A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos, has now published a book surveying H.P. Lovecraft’s tales. Lovecraft: The Great Tales is a 760-page doorstopper that (so the blurb has it) “defies critical orthodoxy”. The book is available now, and a perusal of Amazon UK suggests it’s currently paperback-only at £19 (listed at $25 in the USA). No ebook at present. From a mini-review in Publisher’s Weekly…

He provides some surprising interpretations, such as that “The Haunter of the Dark,” which features a lead named Robert Blake, was not inspired by Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars,” as is commonly believed. Haefele even offers a radical take on the twist ending of one of the major long tales, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” suggesting that the alien imposter is in fact Lovecraft himself.