Category Archives: New books

New book: Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy

12 Thursday Nov 2020

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Fred Blosser has a new book, the Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy…

The Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy scrutinizes this full range of Howard’s dark fiction by listing, summarizing, and critically analyzing more than 50 tales.

Blosser is also the author of 2018’s Western Weirdness and Voodoo Vengeance: An Informal Guide to Robert E. Howard’s American Horrors, and Ar-I-E’ch and the Spell of Cthulhu: An Informal Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Lovecraftian Fiction. All three would make a pleasing Christmas gift-set in paperback, I’d imagine.

New journal issue: Skelos #4

10 Tuesday Nov 2020

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Weirdletter has the TOCs for Skelos: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy #4 (Autumn/Fall 2020). Of likely interest to readers of Tentaclii are…

* “Innsmouth Bus Driver” – by Mark Maddox (frontispiece)

* “Postcards from Lovecraft” – Cliff Biggers (short story)

* Wandrei on Clark Ashton Smith: An Introduction to “Emperor of Dreams” – Scott Connors

* Dracula’s Descendant: An Interview with Dacre Stoker – Anthony Taylor (Dacre being a leading Dracula expert)

On learning that the title has non-fiction, as well as fiction and poetry, I went looking for the TOCs for #1-3. Easier said than done, and only Amazon’s “Look Inside” saved the day. Amazon also shows me that #2 is in Kindle ebook, the others in paperback only. Here are the items likely to interest Tentaclii readers…

#1

* Nameless Tribes: Robert E. Howard’s Anthropological World Building in “Men of the Shadows” — Jeffrey Shanks.

* From the Cosmos to the Test-Tube: Lovecraft, Machen, and the Sublime — Karen Joan Kohoutek.

* A Sword-edged Beauty as Keen as Blades: C.L Moore and Gender Dynamics of Sword and Sorcery — Nicole Emmelhainz.

#2

* Clark Ashton Smith in Carmel — Scott Connors. (Carmel, California)

* “The Shadow Kingdom” and the Origins of Gothic Horror in Robert E. Howard’s Heroic Fantasy — Charles Hoffman.

#3

* Whispers from the Darkness: An Interview with Lynne Jamneck and S.T. Joshi — by Jason V. Brock.

* The Boys from Atlantis – Bobby Derie (article – unknown topic, but may be of interest).

* “It seemed to be a sort of monster”: Misrepresentations of the Cephalopod in the Fiction of Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft — Jack Staines.

Wormwood / Bare Bones / Providence Tales

08 Sunday Nov 2020

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Wormwood #35 is available, leading with the 200th anniversary of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.

The Italian journal Providence Tales: La rivista dei racconti horror is available in issue #6. One non-fiction item of interest…

“THE WEREWOLF IN THE BRITISH ISLES” by Elliott O’Donnell.

Also out is Bare Bones #3, leading with surveys of the Planet of the Apes novels and adaptations.

New book: Eccentric, Impractical Devils

30 Friday Oct 2020

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Now listing on both Amazon and Hippocampus for 31st Oct 2020, Eccentric, Impractical Devils: The Letters of Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth. 602 pages from Hippocampus Press, edited and annotated by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi.

Additional information is found in a March 2019 blog post by S.T. Joshi…

Recently a previously unknown batch of Derleth’s letters to Smith came to light, causing us to refashion the book almost in its totality — and forcing me to re-index nearly the whole of the book. Gawd, what a nightmarish task! But the job is done at last, and I hope the book will emerge soon — along with the huge Clark Ashton Smith bibliography that Scott Connors, David E. Schultz, and I have edited.

Ouch, it sounds like he indexes by hand. Someone tell him about the automated PDF Index Generator, which would at least take care of much of the heavy-lifting of index-building.

Lovecraft and Nietzsche

26 Monday Oct 2020

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A new Italian book, Mitologi, mitografi e mitomani (Mythologists, Mythographers and Mythomaniacs: traces of myth through the centuries). Many medieval chapters, but the book concludes with Alessandro Fambrini’s “Howard Phillips Lovecraft e Friedrich Nietzsche: sogni di dei e di superuomini”…

Lovecraft read Nietzsche and quoted him repeatedly. This article attempts to investigate the influence and consequences of the German philosopher’s thought in Lovecraftian fiction.

Tales I

17 Saturday Oct 2020

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A Portuguese translated Tales collection from Lovecraft, to be published from Martin Claret, 28th October 2020. It’s one of three such volumes but their page for these is broken, which doesn’t inspire confidence. Still, a very pleasing and clever cover for the first such book.

The bicycle is there because the young Lovecraft was a keen cyclist to about 1908, then it most likely became sporadic, and he marks 1913 as the terminal date for his giving up cycling altogether. For adults to cycle in Providence was not the “done thing” at that time.

It’s cultifectious…

15 Thursday Oct 2020

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A new book, seemingly coming from an occultist perspective, Dark Magic: H.P. Lovecraft, Starry Wisdom and the Contagion of Fear…

explores the contagious qualities of Lovecraft’s tales, with their embedded sense of dread and their dismantling of human reason, and how they have propagated in the near century after his death … the infectious qualities of Lovecraft’s ideas are seen to parallel virology, mass infection, and the fraying state of the human psyche during times of pandemic.

Which blurb leads me to coin the new word “cultifectious”:— the quality had by a certain type of culture that is highly infectious and communicable, but not mere mass-market pop-fluff or some passing propaganda of-the-moment. It carries within it a complex nexus of elements that organically connect things usually divided — low and high culture, the deep past and the cosmic future, or ancient and modern science. Its infectiousness thus comes partly from being connected to ‘the genuine’ at both ends of one of those divisions, and by bringing these lightly into play with each other. Because it has something genuine woven through it, it may be difficult to make into a mass audience commodity unless brutally shorn of many of its intrinsic qualities. Instead it persists and spreads among initiates as a potent ‘cultic’ form of culture. It does not usually, however, gather about it the more oppressive hierarchical apparatus of ‘a cult’ in the religious sense. It naturally fascinates, rather than ponderously recruits.

New book: new edition of Machen’s Hieroglyphics

13 Tuesday Oct 2020

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Ecstasy in Literature: Reading Arthur Machen’s Hieroglyphics…

This handsomely produced new edition of Machen’s book, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature, contains Machen’s “A Note on Poetry” as well as two essays which bookend Machen’s text … an introduction by D. P. Watt (himself one of the leading lights of British weird fiction) …

A new Ken Faig book is forthcoming

11 Sunday Oct 2020

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S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated again. He reveals the forthcoming…

new collection of Ken Faig’s writings on some of the more obscure corners of the Lovecraftian world. Some of these writings have been published in very limited editions by Ken himself as part of his “Moshassuck Monographs” series, but we intend to gather them and others together into a solid volume that will display the depth of Ken’s researches.

I’d known about this planned book via email, but now the good news is public.