Category Archives: New books

Cryptobotany Books

24 Friday Jan 2020

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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”.

New book: Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery

21 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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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…

The Xothic Cycle in ebook

21 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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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…

Le Guide Lovecraft (2020)

12 Sunday Jan 2020

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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.

New book: Indagine oltre le tenebre

23 Monday Dec 2019

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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.

New book: Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei

16 Monday Dec 2019

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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).

Audiobook: H.P. Lovecraft – The Collaborations

06 Friday Dec 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc.

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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.

New book: Challenging Moskowitz

24 Sunday Nov 2019

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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.