20 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Some of Lovecraft’s best poetry, now ably translated into Spanish. The leading Spanish newspaper El Pais has a review of the new volume.
Lovecraft is a prophet of human insignificance in the cosmos, yet Garcia Roman finally decides that one of the tonal keys to Lovecraft’s poetry is that… “The poems show an author of maturity. One who is less pessimistic … If Lovecraft opened any doors to hope, he did so in his verses.”
18 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
Kklak!: The Doctor Who Art of Chris Achilleos is due in spring 2020, with large reproductions of paperback cover-art showing classic Doctor Who incarnations. Several of these feature the more Lovecraftian style of monsters, such as the Sea Devils…
15 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in New books
Rather too late to benefit from the movie, Penguin is set to publish an £8.99 paperback of The Colour Out of Space under their Penguin Classics imprint. Amazon lists it as on pre-order for early July 2020.
The contents will be “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”, and one assumes they’ll use the S.T. Joshi texts and annotations from the existing Penguin Classics editions. Penguin has popped two quotes from leftist newspapers on the Amazon page, presumably in the vain hope of quieting a Twitter-tantrum about Lovecraft being published again under the ‘Penguin Classics’ label, aka ‘Modern Classics’.
As is usual with Amazon, the page currently has links that sidetrack the potential buyer onto utter crapware with the same title. The big publishers such as Penguin would do us all a favour of they were to haul Amazon in front of Trading Standards officers in the UK, and put a stop to this underhand practice. But I guess there’s nothing to stop a merry band of readers doing the same, and the political climate now feels right for such a move.
15 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
I’d overlooked a book in summer 2019, Shapeshifters: A History. A short, but seemingly sound, historical survey of this cultural phenomenon. There appear to be no journal reviews of it, but then these days journal editors are increasingly refusing to review titles not published by a university or prestige press.
But looking for such a review led me to discover a new journal I wasn’t aware of, Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from the University of Chichester in the south of England.
It has produced 16 issues so far, balancing articles with a healthy crop of reviews.
The latest Gramarye is issue 16 and has “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth” by Simon Young and “‘A Fairy, or Else an Insect’: Traditions at Fairy Wells” by Jeremy Harte, both topics on which I mused a couple of years ago (“On Jenny Green-teeth”, “‘Lady Wells’ in the High Peak”, “Mothlach”, and “On The Butts, Baggins, and Butterflies”). The same issue also has the review of Shapeshifters: A History.
As such I’m inclined to get No.16, but… it’s not on Amazon in either ebook or paper. It’s available from the university, but instead of a simple PayPal connection the eager buyer goes to one of those annoying clunky “sign-up before you can buy” shopping-carts. Which it appears only takes credit-cards. Then, a departmental assistant manually emails you the purchased PDFs. It’s not ideal.
It’s a pity that departmental journals are not also assigned an ‘impact rating’, in the same manner as a dept’s scholarly article-output. Such a official rating (which affects their taxpayer income) might chivvy up the publicity and distribution for such journals, and see a few summer interns or apprentices assigned to tasks such as getting them all on Amazon as ebooks. But of course the ideal in terms of ‘impact’ would be a big crowd-funder which would ‘buy out’ all the back-issues and make them open access, and then for a small legacy or bequest to ensure the journal continues to be open access.
Anyway, nothing very ‘Lovecraft’ except tangentially in some of the reviews. But other items of interest to me in other issues of Gramarye:
#14. ‘From Ogre to Woodlouse: A Journey through Names’, Jeremy Harte. [Presumably on the noted Gawain word ‘woodwose’].
#13. ‘Tolkien’s style’, Colin Manlove.
#6. ‘The American Fantasy Tradition’, Tom Shippey.
Shippey has always been a bit sniffy about Howard’s Conan, so it would be interesting to see his take on that aspect of fantasy and its place in the American tradition.
A two-year subscription to the PDF version of Gramarye is £20, about $26. The paper edition is not much more. It appears you can’t back-date a subscription and have it start from, say, #13.
13 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Have you been looking for the well-regarded book of Dreamlands tales The House of the Worm (1975)? S.T. Joshi has referred to it as (I paraphrase from memory) ‘an exercise in how closely one can write like Lovecraft’. Which, to me, is a kind of recommendation. Thus I was pleased to discover that the book is now a Kindle ebook titled The Country of the Worm: Excursions Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2013). In early 2020 this ebook edition is currently on a heavy discount, at a somewhat affordable £7.60.
The Country of the Worm is Myers’s long-awaited follow-up to The House of the Worm. It contains that first book in a corrected edition, together with all the stories in the same fantastic vein that Myers has written in the forty-three years since.
“Corrected” because the Arkham edition of 1975, though said to be nicely printed and collectable, was also reportedly riddled with typos.
Note also that recent issues of Crypt of Cthulhu (#111 and #122) appear to have had short Dreamlands fiction by Myers, which I’m guessing from their titles may be new or newly-published post-2013 tales? These issues are also available in ebook format.
In 2012 the Miskatonic Debating Club & Literary Society blog usefully reviewed the original Arkham The House of the Worm, adding some detail on how… “Chaosium has milked it dry for inspiration for their own compilations”, re: commercial RPG game books for the Dreamlands setting.
In Norwegian, there’s also the blog review “Gennem den dybe slummers porte”, which shows some of the interior illustrations from the 1975 edition.
06 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Curious… Amazon UK and USA each have a listing for a paperback of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, issue 10.2, dated 15th December 2019. It appears to be live (not a pre-order) and available to purchase in paperback, but offers no table-of-contents and nothing else has appeared online about it.
03 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Clark Ashton Smith: A Comprehensive Bibliography, newly announced, with details and a draft cover. Among other things…
It also chronicles the burgeoning field of Smith criticism, from books and pamphlets about Smith to newspaper articles from local papers to analyses in academic journals.
24 Friday Jan 2020
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Three anthologies of tales of strange plants and fearsome fungi, which appear to have been mostly culled from the public domain. Available in paperback as Flora Curiosa, Botanica Deleria and Arboris Mysterius. There appears to be no ebook or audiobook editions.
Amazon also reveals the anthologist to be the editor of a journal titled Biofortean Notes. Volume 4 (2015) of this had a survey of “Cryptofiction: A Renaissance”. Only eight pages, but it may interest fiction writers who want to learn what’s been done up to circa 2014, and those seeking adaptable work. “Crypto” here meaning cryptozoology rather than Bitcoin.
But before you go cashing in your $8k Bitcoin to buy copies of the journal at Amazon’s often rather silly prices, note that BioFortean Notes is currently free in PDF, and there are free issues up to 2018.
Perhaps S.T. Joshi would also welcome a survey of cryptobotany in fiction and graphic novels, from 2000-2020, for his new journal Penumbra?
Loosely connected to the theme is this curious twisted pear, in Lovecraft’s time located at the old Dyer residence near Providence. Lovecraft had the Dyer name in his family tree, so may well have visited and seen it. One thinks of Lovecraft stories such as “The Tree”.
21 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
A new article on “Why I Wrote Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery”, by the author. The article opens with some useful signposting to previous worthy attempts at such.
I definitely don’t care for book’s front cover, with a skeleton-warrior seen sporting a curious pose. He looks likes he’s been caught by a flash-photograph at the moment of passing a chalk-turd. But Flame and Crimson is a welcome 290-page book, and it’s published today. The author states that…
Flame and Crimson is an academic study of the genre, principally on its literary antecedents and key contributors. It’s heavily referenced with a lengthy ‘works cited’. I wanted to publish something authoritative and not (solely) opinion-based, that readers could use as a springboard for further research or pleasant Saturday afternoon of Internet searches. [Yet] I didn’t want to write something dry and pedantic. One of my goals was to try and tell an exciting tale of non-fiction. Sword-and-sorcery has a story of its own to tell, of a confluence of pulp talent, a mercurial renaissance, a staggering commercial fall, and a second life in the popular culture. I wanted to write the kind of academic study that I’d want to read — informative, but also entertaining.
Currently only in paperback, and let’s hope the eventual ebook will have a front cover that’s more mighty-thewed and appealing to the masses. As for the contents, here’s the TOC…
21 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Amazon lists a new £3.99 ebook edition of The Xothic Cycle by Lin Carter, for publication 26th March 2020. It’s from Gateway, ebook re-publishers of the Gollancz yellow-covers of yesteryear. It’s possibly not completist, though, as the blurb calls it the first such book…
This is the first collection of Lin Carter’s Mythos tales; it includes his intended novel, The Terror Out of Time.
“First” of two or three? As such I suspect this is not to be confused with the Chaosium title The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter, edited by Robert M. Price. If you can’t wait for the 2020 ebook, then the Price collection can currently be picked up in paperback for £10 inc. shipping, and has an introduction by Price to each story. According to a Table of Contents kindly posted by the late W.H. Pugmire it doesn’t, however, include the “intended novel, The Terror Out of Time” — which the ebook apparently does.
Was Carter any good as a Mythos writer? It’s not all that easy to quickly find out. He was a pro, and yet S.T. Joshi has little to say about Lin Carter as a fiction writer (rather than a scholar and critic) in the book The Rise and Fall. One has to snuffle around in the sparse online comments to get a sense that Carter was post-Derlethian in his free-wheeling and name-spawning approach to the Mythos. I don’t get the sense he was going reverently back to the master and trying to fill in the gaps, in manner that was both relatively seamless and stylistically congruent.
W.H. Pugmire was rather more helpful in giving an opinion, remarking in an Amazon review of the Price book that…
The writing in this book may not be first class, but dang if this isn’t an amazingly FUN book to read.”
He also implied there was no attempt to mimic Lovecraft, with Carter’s…
style being that of a story-teller, plain and simple. I find the writing style in this book extremely pleasant, and the narratives flow easily.
Thus it sounds like a fun book for completists. But don’t expect to encounter Lovecraft’s style, or a Mythos with the Derlethian accretions chiselled off.
Also from Carter, A Look Behind the Lovecraft Mythos seen here in the Panther paperback edition…
12 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in New books
Christophe Thill’s Le Guide Lovecraft, listed as due in French on 20th March 2020. Thill is the lead editor of the French edition of Joshi’s I Am Providence. There was a 2018 edition of Le Guide Lovecraft in affordable paperback, so I’d imagine this might be an expanded second edition… and with a new and more pleasing cover.
23 Monday Dec 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new-ish Italian book that had escaped my notice a year ago. Indagine oltre le tenebre : H.P. Lovecraft e le opere interattive appeared in November 2018. In 134 pages it appears (from the translated blurb) to be mostly a discussion of the videogame Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (2002), highly thought of in gaming circles. Plus the cinema of John Carpenter. Also…
the volume avails itself of the direct contribution of Denis Dyack, author of Eternal Darkness, which comments on the various phases of the videogame telling its genesis and also includes the contribution of Christopher Vogler, screenwriter and professor at UCLA.