24 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast veers off the ancient track and dives into a survey of Japanese animation, in the new “Lovecraftian Anime” episode.
Along similar lines is the new “Reading the Bible with Horror” podcast, interviewing the author of a book-length survey of all the ‘monster horror’ bits of the Bible. The blurb for this also reveals a new project, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters.
23 Monday Mar 2020
I don’t normally feature Kickstarters, but I’ll make an exception for a sumptuous one-volume collection of Robert E. Howard’s horror stories. Rattle of Bones is “already fully funded” at $17k and is now adding the fancy trimmings.
22 Sunday Mar 2020
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
The International Walter Pater Society has announced Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism No. 4, which was due to be published November 2019…
The issue includes a cluster of articles on ‘Decadence and the Weird’, guest edited by Dustin Friedman and Neil Hultgren. Friedman questions gay identity in Teleny. Hultgren turns to proto-modernist form in Arthur Machen’s prose. Jessica Straley traces the threat and promise of anthropomorphized flora as depicted in Algernon Blackwood’s stories. Molly Youngkin argues that the women populating Rider Haggard’s tales inspired the later weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
On Haggard, Lovecraft did at least try to dip into the famous author but may have succeeded only in reading She. He wrote to Kleiner in early February 1920 that…
Cook has also been kind, outlining a reading course in Haggard. I shall not tackle the gentleman in question till I am through with Algernon Blackwood, whose rather mediocre fantasies I am absorbing one after another. When I do read She, I will report my critical impressions in detail.
However, it appears he did not go on to assemble and then peruse Cook’s course. Since Joshi notes that Haggard’s most famous work was left unread for many years…
HPL did not read the novel [She] until 1926, and obtained his personal copy of the book still later.
Specifically he had to read She, probably at some speed and along with many others, to prepare his Supernatural Literature survey essay. A letter to Derleth, 31st October 1926, further illuminates…
I’ve recently begun reading the work of Sir H. Rider Haggard for the first time. ‘She’ is very good, & if the others are at all commensurate, I have quite a treat ahead”.
Yet, with the resources available to me, I can find no evidence that he read anything of Haggard other than She. Certainly Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library lists only She, thus I assume there is no other evidence of Haggard to be found anywhere else in Lovecraft’s letters. If Lovecraft had read some of Haggard’s other books, one would have thought he would have mentioned them to at least one correspondent.
But if he did read some after She, what might they have been?
Obvious candidates are the She sequel Ayesha, the Return of She; and the well-known adventure King Solomon’s Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain. The vivid Ancient Egyptian settings of Morning Star and (in part) The Wanderer’s Necklace might have appealed, and their publication dates would have put them on Cook’s 1920 “reading course”. The other possibility that Cook would surely have noted is Doctor Therne (1898), a ‘tormented scientist’ confessional about a plague that sweeps England. It might have been hard to obtain by circa 1926, but Cook was reputed to have a vast library until 1930 and would probably have lent it. It may interest some to know that Therne is told from Dunchester, a name which evokes the similar-sounding Dunwich.
21 Saturday Mar 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Dark Arts reviews Devil’s Advocates: In The Mouth of Madness (2018), a 124-page film studies monograph. The book focuses on Lovecraft’s influence on movie-maker John Carpenter, and specifically his under-studied In The Mouth of Madness (1995). The book’s author, the reviewer finds…
… suggests that In the Mouth of Madness is a critical reading of the way in which audiences of horror often treat the genre with the same ardor as followers of religion do. While the religious discussion in the book was fantastic, I thought it was a shame to have not linked it with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, especially in relation to the dream-like sequences of the film. Nevertheless, the religious argument was highly compelling.
17 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
John Coulthart has posted a full scan of his cover-art for His Own Most Fantastic Creation, in the post “Double weird”.
16 Monday Mar 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Back Issue! #121 (due in two months, 10th June 2020) is in Previews, and will be a special issue on Conan and similar in the comics. Includes among other items…
* the 50th anniversary of Roy Thomas’s Conan #1,
* the Bronze Age barbarian boom,
* top 50 Marvel Conan stories,
* Marvel’s not-quite Conans (from Kull to Skull),
* Joining Roy Thomas are Kurt Busiek, Ernie Colon, Chuck Dixon, Mike Grell, Ron Randall, Dann Thomas, Timothy Truman, Marv Wolfman, and many more.
13 Friday Mar 2020
Posted in New books, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other items mentioned, a 15-volume Greek edition of Lovecraft is underway, with the third volume having been issued in 2019; there is a possibility that the Lovecraft biography I Am Providence could begin a Czech translation; and a set of ‘Providence Pals’ interviews (i.e. pioneer Lovecraft scholars, researchers and editors) is forthcoming in podcast format.
11 Wednesday Mar 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Theofantastique notices a new book-length survey from an academic, Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture…
a comprehensive tour of monsters on film and television, from the much-loved creations of Ray Harryhausen in Clash of the Titans to the monster of the week in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, before looking in detail at the afterlives of the Medusa and the Minotaur.
Also, the latest French open-access journal Leaves No. 9 is a special themed issue on the afterlife of Shelley’s Frankenstein in comics and sci-fi, etc. All in French, but since it’s open-access a translator-bot is only a click away.
10 Tuesday Mar 2020
I don’t usually cover anthology slabs here at Tentaclii, but I’ll make an exception for a fun one that features Lovecraft as a character, edited by the venerable S.T. Joshi. His Own Most Fantastic Creation is a £25 (about $40) hardcover from PS Publishing, and is pre-ordering now for shipping in April 2020.
The blurb is usefully descriptive…
Darrell Schweitzer focuses on Lovecraft’s childhood, when he was plagued with dreams of “night-gaunts” and was left bereft by the early death of his father. John Shirley depicts Lovecraft as a gawky teenager evolving his notions of “cosmicism”, while Scott Wiley emphasises Lovecraft’s devotion to cats. Stephen Woodworth and Donald R. Burleson ring changes on the Lovecraftian theme of personality exchange. Lovecraft famously collaborated with Harry Houdini on a story. Donald Tyson and Jonathan Thomas write very different stories on the association of these two figures. Mark Samuels focuses on Lovecraft’s creation of imaginary tomes of forbidden lore, while the stories by Richard Gavin, David Hambling, Jason V. Brock, and S. T. Joshi supply broader ruminations on the origins of Lovecraft’s revolutionary motifs. While eschewing Lovecraft himself as a character, the tales by W. H. Pugmire and Simon Strantzas exhibit figures who reveal strikingly Lovecraftian elements while probing the psyche of the man from Providence.
Super. It’s perhaps a pity that there’s not also an essay comprehensively surveying the uses of Lovecraft-as-character and Lovecraft-alikes in fiction, comics and poetry up to about 1969. Perhaps also appending the 1970-2020 titles in a simple checklist form. But I guess that might belong in a companion volume collecting such early stories and poems. However, Joshi does mention just a few of them in his short introduction…
Lovecraft the man has served as an inspiration for fiction writers as early as Edith Miniter (“Falco Ossifracus’ 1921), Frank Belknap Long (“The Space-Eaters’ 1928), and Robert Bloch (“The Shambler from the Stars:’ 1935) in his own day”.
05 Thursday Mar 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
In February I missed noticing an update of S.T. Joshi’s blog. (The perils of having no RSS feed on one’s blog, hem hem…) His latest post reveals a new expanded edition of Barlow’s Eyes of the God is being prepared, this being the collected works other than the later ethnographic material…
enormously expanded editions of our previous editions of the writings of Loveman (Out of the Immortal Night) and R. H. Barlow’s Eyes of the God … the Barlow book will probably appear late this year or early next.
It’ll be interesting to see how it’s expanded. Has new material been found, I wonder? I see on Amazon that there’s also set to be a reprint of Barlow’s zines The Dragon-Fly and Leaves in collected book form in 2020.
S.T.’s blog also has news on the ever-growing set of annotated volumes of Lovecraft’s letters…
Letters to Alfred Galpin and Others (including letters to Edward H. Cole, Adolphe de Castro, and John T. Dunn) is imminent. Within the next few months we will release the enormous Letters to Family and Family Friends, probably in a two-volume paperback edition of about 600 pages each. This will be one of the most remarkable volumes in the series, containing his complete letters to his aunts, covering his critical New York years (1924–26) but also his extensive travels in the later 1920s. A volume of Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others (also containing letters to Arthur Harris, Winifred V. Jackson, and others) is also in the offing.
Super. I shall have to start saving up $90 or so for the vital Family and Family Friends door-stoppers then, hopefully to arrive here for Autumn/Fall reading.
04 Wednesday Mar 2020
Posted in New books
From the HPL Historical Society comes a new pocket-book version of The Notes and Commonplace Book of H.P. Lovecraft…
“In 1938, just after HPL’s death, his friend and literary executor, Robert H. Barlow printed HPL’s commonplace book in an edition of just 75 copies. We thought it was high time for a new edition of the Commonplace Book, and here it is. Working from high resolution photos of an original in the Library of Congress, we’ve created a typographic replica of the 1938 edition.”
It should be shipping about now, early March 2020, and is an affordable replica with some new additions.
Note however, that it is not to be relied on for scholarship. Joshi notes…
his edition of the Notes & Commonplace Book, published in 1938 by The Futile Press (run by Claire and Groo Beck in Lakeport, California), is full of errors, although less so than Derleth’s various editions.
03 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new issue of the Italian journal Dimensione Cosmica n. 9, January 2020. My translation of the items in the table-of-contents that don’t appear to be fiction…
Fantastic realism and sense of the sacred.
Beorhtnoth and The Battle of Maldon.
Correspondence.
H. P. Lovecraft: a translation of “The Ancient Track”.
Libraries and initiatory secrets.
The triumph of the fantastic at Lucca Comics & Games 2019.
Stranger Things – strange things happen in Hawkins.
The Library of Elsewhere (book reviews).