16 Monday Dec 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi reports in his latest blog post that the new Lovecraft Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja volume is now shipping. This being, in 554 pages, a…
revised version of Mysteries of Time and Spirit (2002), with the addition of the letters to and from Howard Wandrei and the letters to Emil Petaja (the manuscripts of which I recently helped the John Hay Library acquire).
13 Friday Dec 2019
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
It’s Friday the 13th so… a post on science and cats. Because, what could possibly go wrong with such a combination?
The book Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics is finally published, from Yale University Press. A history of the cat’s role in scientific revelation. Specifically the study of “cat-turning, the cat flip, and the cat twist”, as cats fall to land on their feet.
06 Friday Dec 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc.
New to me and seemingly to Google, H.P. Lovecraft – The Collaborations in unabridged audiobook from the Historical Society…
The HPLHS is pleased to present the first original audiobook of Lovecraft’s collaborations and revisions, covering 32 stories and comprising more than twenty-three hours of professionally recorded audio. The stories are read by HPLHS founders and trained actors Sean Branney and Andrew Leman, from texts prepared by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi. … Two years in the making… These are NOT dramatizations like our Dark Adventure Radio Theatre.
No Eddy collaborations, though…
The Eddy estate does not wish for any of C.M. Eddy’s stories to appear in any collections of Lovecraft collaboration tales.
The Web page is currently rather confusing, mentioning the “The Collected Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft Audiobook” and also having a link to the purchase page for that, rather than H.P. Lovecraft : The Collaborations.
Once at that page, what you have to do to solve this apparent conundrum is to spot the hidden drop-down of descending delight, and it will reveal the well-concealed eldritch wisdom within…
This then reveals the Collaborations as a £23 download for the UK.
02 Monday Dec 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Dead Reckonings No. 26, now shipping. Includes, among others…
““The Most Poignant Sensations of My Existence”: Visiting the Ladd Observatory at NecronomiCon Providence” by Karen Joan Kohoutek.
“Ars Necronomica 2019: What Drives the Dark Dreams of That Divine City?” by Michelle Souliere. (Presumably a review of the art show at last summer’s convention).
27 Wednesday Nov 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Another scholarly book title that’s new to me, Pulpourri…
a miscellaneous collection of well-written, impeccably researched essays on pulp fiction and how it influenced American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I’m not sure if it’s going to be in series like a journal or is a one-off.
24 Sunday Nov 2019
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
The early years of science-fiction fandom in the USA are fairly well documented by now. Or are they? A new 124-page book usefully expands the easily-available source material for the history, and provides a new and questioning preface. Challenging Moskowitz.
“Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm is regarded by many as the definitive history of US fandom in the 1930s, but several contemporary fans either presented alternative versions of events or took issue with the book’s selectivity (New York-centrism in particular) and partisanship. Rob Hansen has compiled and introduced this collection of relevant fanwriting by Allen Glasser, Charles D. Hornig, Damon Knight, Jack Speer, Harry Warner Jr, Donald A. Wollheim and T. Bruce Yerke.”
Free in various digital formats, but donations are encouraged.
20 Wednesday Nov 2019
Posted in New books
Now shipping from Companhia das Letras in Brazil, a new Biblioteca Lovecraft – Vol. 1, being a 448-page Portuguese translation of Lovecraft’s stories.
18 Monday Nov 2019
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
I’ve managed to get hold of Wandrei’s I.V. Frost story “The Lunatic Plague” (August 1936). The writing is workmanlike pulp…
In the smoky haze that passed as atmosphere, the outlines of buildings shimmered. The tall apartment houses lining Riverside Drive seemed outlined in flame against the sun and shaken by tremors of earth. New York was suffering one of the annual heat waves that made seven million people wonder why they’d ever arrived at or stayed in that infernal congestion of dirt, detestable odors, torrid humidity, and air, street, and harbor pollution. Inspector Frick punched the bell under a brass plate, green with verdigris that almost concealed the name: I. V. Frost.
Once I got past a certain stiffness felt on the early pages, it proved enjoyable and fast-paced. In a pre Marvel/DC era it must have seemed a very weird plot to many readers used to more mainstream detective-mystery tales. I’m not a DC-fan, but I’d suggest that one might glimpse in this story the pre-DC origins of The Joker (introduced Spring 1940). And the later re-invented Joker, via the obvious surmise of what might have happened had the villain of this story actually made contact with the asylum… and taken it over.
I noted a few possible links with Lovecraft. Frost talks like Lovecraft…
Frost stated, “Insanity as such is not communicable in the sense that various diseases are. However, some infections result in mental derangement, and the person contracting an infection of that kind could loosely be said to have caught insanity as a secondary product of a primary disease. Mob hysteria, war fever, lynch-gang fury, and other mass demonstrations have been considered proof by several psychologists that mental disorders can be contagious, but other authorities have challenged the conclusions. In meanings rather than words, there has not yet appeared the slightest evidence that lunacy can be epidemic, or that a normal person can catch it from a victim of insanity.”
He walks like Lovecraft…
He hiked off, his long legs carrying him out at a pace that would have meant a brisk trot for the average man.
Wry and detached, he appreciates “cosmic” irony like Lovecraft…
Frost smiled at the host of detectives who thronged around him in the Grand Central Terminal. A beatific expression lighted his features, as with secret, supreme appreciation of some cosmic jest. He drawled, “Life is sometimes inspiredly lunatic.”
He even looks somewhat like Lovecraft…
Frost sat on a stool at one of the tables. With his great height and thinness, his ascetic face in profile against a window, he looked like a specter or the incarnation of a bird of prey.
Not having access to the rest of the stories, I can’t say if there are more such Lovecraft-like characterisation of Frost. But it may be something to look out for, if you get the new $50 Frost complete collection.
18 Monday Nov 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. On Lovecraft…
Upcoming are the huge volume of Lovecraft’s Letters to Family and Family Friends (the bulk of which consists of his letters to his aunts), a volume of his letters to E. Hoffmann Price and Richard F. Searight, and new editions of the letters to Alfred Galpin and Rheinhart Kleiner, each augmented with letters to several other individuals.
“We have also prepared a new edition of [Samuel] Loveman’s Out of the Immortal Night (2004) — a volume that we thought had included the bulk of his work, but which has now been augmented with a number of additional pieces, along with a long interview of Loveman conducted by a colleague in the 1960s.”
Also what sounds like a useful one-volume collection of Machen’s autobiographical works, now in the public domain…
“I am assembling a volume of Machen’s autobiographical writings (his three formal autobiographies — Far Off Things, Things Near and Far, and The London Adventure, augmented by a few separate essays), as a kind of supplement to my recent edition of Machen’s Collected Fiction.”
One assumes he’s aware of Strange Roads (1924) and will include it.
14 Thursday Nov 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Moi, Lovecraft is a new book illustrated by Yann Sougey-Fils, with texts by Jean-Christophe Malevil. H.P. Lovecraft returns to the hospital on 10th March 1937, and in the five days before his death he “tells his story in the first person”.
It’s from the tiny press Editions des Tourments, and runs 112 pages. It doesn’t seem to be using the letters translated to French, but I’m guessing it may perhaps be counterpointing scenes from Lovecraft’s “death diary” with happier scenes from his life? Nor is it clear how heavily the book is illustrated.
Anyway, Moi, Lovecraft is published in French in about a week’s time. The same artist has a 64-page colour ‘BD’ French comics adaptation of The Dreams in the Witch House, to be published by the same press alongside Moi, Lovecraft. 64-pages is standard in France, and as such it’s not quite what the Anglosphere would call ‘a graphic novel’ (compared to the 130 pages of art one would expect here, in a 152 page trade paperback), more of a long graphic story.
09 Saturday Nov 2019
The Robert E. Howard Foundation has apparently… “decided to re-print the Collected Poetry/Letters, as well as the sold-out books!” This was reported on the Forums after a reading of their Newsletter. Apparently the plan involves going to perpetual in-print print-on-demand for “The Collected Poetry and The Collected Letters”, presumably in indexed paperbacks and at affordable prices.
Great news, and hopefully there may even be Kindle ebooks versions too — but that last point is just my hope.
07 Thursday Nov 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Haffner Press is to publish The Complete Ivy Frost by Lovecraft correspondent and one-time protege Donald Wandrei. A $50 hardcover with 700 pages of mystery-science-detective stories…
Rather than following the usual hard-drinking, trench-coated style of many of his contemporaries, [Wandrei’s] strategy was to mix the logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes with the technology of Lester Dent’s Doc Savage.
I’d never heard of Ivy Frost before, but I like the sound of him. These gun-blazing mystery-science stories all appeared in Clues Detective Stories magazine from 1934-37 (not on Archive.org), so one assumes that Lovecraft was aware of them. One wonders how may ‘little nods to Lovecraft’ Wandrei might have snuck into the stories.
Let’s hope for a Kindle ebook version in due course. In the meantime there’s also I.V. Frost: Tales of Mystery & Scientific Investigation which is a 270-page collection of pastiche stories by later writers, available as a budget Kindle ebook as well as a paperback from Moonstone.
In other news on Wandrei, S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated and he notes that the Lovecraft letters book…
Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja is soon to appear from Hippocampus Press.