Bobby Derie reviews the new pulps-for-academics book Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft.
Weird Tales of Modernity: review
26 Saturday Oct 2019
Category Archives: New books
The far-off Spire
24 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in New books
A tentative date, on the Bowker forward book-ordering database, for the paperback of Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. These appeared in a 500 limited-edition hardcover in 2017. Volume 1 in paperback lists as… “Aug 2020”.
Kittee Tuesday: H.P. Lovecraft Cat Book
22 Tuesday Oct 2019
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, New books
A weekly blog post, celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.
I see that the The H.P. Lovecraft Cat Book is now also at the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society store. It’s also been at Necronomicon Press for a while now. But at the HPLHS you may prefer to combine shipping on it with another HPLHS store item.
“Dimensione Cosmica” returns
20 Sunday Oct 2019
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Dimensione Cosmica has returned to regular quarterly publication in Winter 2018, after being absent for some years. This is an Italian language magazine of non-fiction, reviews and interviews, with a strong focus on the history of the fantastic.
Translated, titles of selected historical and Lovecraft articles for the issues to date…
No. 1.
* Lovecraft at 80. [Perhaps an article on Lovecraft’s ‘baseline’ presence in Italy in either 1970 (age 80) or 1980?]
* The Italian Star Wars.
* J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor with many anniversaries.
* Arthur Machen, scribe of miracles and magical realist.
* James Allison, a forgotten hero. [R.E. Howard]
* Conan and the Ninth Art. [R.E. Howard]
* Gnome Press: when science fiction conquered books.
No. 2.
* Neo-symbolism: features for an exegesis of the fantastic literature of Alex Voglino.
* The Babel Catalog: E. Vegetti: the story of a friend and his endless work.
* The Cosmic Dimension interviews: Alan Lee, the art of Middle-earth. [A leading Tolkien illustrator]
* The damned Bran Mak Morn. [R.E. Howard]
No. 3.
* Challenge to infinity: Futurism and the future.
* The thousand faces of Solomon Kane. [R.E. Howard]
* Welcome to the “Bradbury Center”. [Perhaps a Ray Bradbury museum in Italy?]
* The kingdom of Hyperborea, between horror and decadence [R.E. Howard]
* Is there a fantastic fiction crisis?
* Sounds from deep space: when music meets science fiction.
No. 4.
* Scientification: Alternative History of Italian Science Fiction.
* Ursula K. Le Guin: a true glory?
* Fantastica “Made in Italy” and the foreign market: a conversation with Alessandro Manzetti.
* 1828-2018: Verne is dead, live Verne! [Presumably a history of the reception and afterlives of Jules Verne in Italy?]
* Frazetta: when the flesh becomes art.
No. 5.
* Tolkien between Myth, Symbol and Literature.
* Tale of the Holy Grail and Lord of the Rings: two “intertwining” stories.
* The “Cosmic Dimension” in comics. [inc. Kirby]
* Mr. Urania: memories of Giuseppe Lippi. [Memories of the leading Italian Lovecraftian, by multiple authors]
* Of the attempt to obscure Tolkien. [Perhaps a history of the attempts at erasure by leftist critics, in the 1970s and 80s?]
* “Lo Smeraldo”: the dream-apocalyptic journey of Mario Soldati in the Italy of the future.
* Robert E. Howard and the Italian writers of the fantastic.
* Providence: between Lovecraft and Moore. [Presumably a review of Alan Moore’s completed Providence comic?]
No. 7 (summer 2019).
* Mystery is my job: interview with Alfredo Castelli.
* A nineteenth-century French Tarzan.
* The return of the myths of Cthulhu. [At a total guess, perhaps a survey of how clueless and gullible many modern ‘fans’ are about Lovecraft and his original mythos?]
* “From an enthusiastic Frenchman”: a letter from Jacques Bergier to Weird Tales.
The originals are in Italian, and the above are just my translations. The magazine also carries regular book reviews.
Swamp Monsters
18 Friday Oct 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
One I missed, back when it appeared in spring 2019. Swamp Monsters is a 144-page survey of swamp monsters in American comics, from the days before the Comics Code. With a 15-page introduction and survey.
Related is a forthcoming December 2019 book on what grew out of such schlock… Monstrous Imaginaries: the legacy of Romanticism in the comics. This will look at… “Enki Bilal’s Monstre tetralogy, Jim O’Barr’s The Crow, and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters … Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing“.
Io Sono Providence
17 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Io Sono Providence: la biografia di H.P. Lovecraft is the Italian translation of S.T. Joshi’s monumental biography. The 630-page Vol.1 (of three) is set to ship in October 2019, and S.T. Joshi’s blog has already shown the rather nice slip-cover as an online preview. The publisher’s shop announces that shipping for the store will be suspended 18th to 28th October, which I would guess may be for them to take delivery, unpack, grade and check, re-box and label all the pre-orders for Io Sono Providence. Then they state that their shipping resumes 29th October.
Savage Sword of Conan – properly reprinted
12 Saturday Oct 2019
I’m pleased to see that Marvel are producing beautiful crisp reprint print-books of their black-and-white Savage Sword of Conan magazines and its precursors. The first 1000-page volume is out now, with Vol. 2 due in mid November, and Vol. 3 in January 2020. According to the reviews Marvel have done an excellent job here, apparently marred only by some copyright trolls who are preventing the reprinting of stories featuring certain of R.E. Howard’s supporting characters. Vol. 3 has a bit of a naff front cover, which I’m thinking may be a ‘holding cover’.
These are the old magazines with black-and-white art by the likes of John Buscema, Gil Kane and Barry Windsor-Smith. The art hasn’t been given the usual gaudy re-colour, thankfully, though possibly the paper may feel a bit too bright n’ white. Scripts by Roy Thomas match the quality of the art, and being magazines aimed at an older market in the 1970s and 80s they were not subject to Comics Code censorship. Which means art that can get a lot closer to the Lovecraft-influenced bits that Howard employed in his Conan stories.
The PorPor Books Blog has pictures of interior pages in his review.
The reviews also usefully point out the poor quality of the previous attempt to reprint Savage Sword as collected volumes, and the superiority of the new Marvel books.
While one could tweak up a good .CBZ reader app’s contrast and saturation settings, on scans of old yellowed originals, these new 1000-page slabs seem the ideal — if rather costly — way to view the art in the crispest manner possible. Just make sure to also order a pair of the Conan™ Steel Wrist-bands, so you can heft and hold these slabs.
Lovecraftian Proceedings in Kindle ebook
10 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
I see that the third issue of Lovecraftian Proceedings slipped out as an ebook when I was out in the sunshine, at the start of August 2019. The Proceedings contains the papers presented at the symposium element of NecronomiCon. Issue No. 3 contains the 2017 papers plus abstracts.
I’m pleased to learn they’re all now available to a UK buyer, for just £1 each in Kindle ebook.
Diseases of the Head
07 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in New books
Advance notice of a volume coming in “Winter 2020”, containing essays on “the intersection of speculative philosophy and speculative horror” drawn from the Harman-ised wing of contemporary philosophy.
Diseases of the Head is set to include:
* David Peak / “Horror of the Real: H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones and Contemporary Speculative Philosophy”.
* Chloe Germaine Buckley / “Encountering Weird Objects: Lovecraft, LARP, and Speculative Philosophy”.
* Eric Wilson / “When the Monstrous Object Becomes a Tremendous Non-Event: Rudolf Otto’s Monster-Gods, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, and Graham Harman’s Theory of Everything”.
New book: Of Mud & Flame: A Penda’s Fen Sourcebook
03 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Of Mud & Flame: A Penda’s Fen Sourcebook… “insightful essays by scholars across a range of disciplines including television history, literature, theatre, and medieval studies. … also includes the full revised screenplay of Penda’s Fen, its first time in print since 1975″. To be published 31st October 2019. Penda’s Fen is a classic ‘earth mysteries’ film, originally shown on British TV. A weird coming-of-age tale set in the West Midlands countryside around Worcester, and now very much a cult film.
Blood ‘n’ Thunder returns
02 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
The Blood ‘n’ Thunder journal has re-started, with a new second series. Billed as… “the premier journal for devotees of adventure, mystery and melodrama in American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries”. Illustrated essays by leading scholars of the field, and the focus appears to be summed up by the cover strapline: “adventure, mystery and melodrama” in the pulps, rather than weird and science-fiction.
Les Carnets de Lovecraft
25 Wednesday Sep 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A new 96-page art-story book from France, Les Carnets de Lovecraft: La Cite sans nom (translates as ‘Lovecraft’s Notebooks: The City With No Name’). At first I thought it might be Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book with entries faced with pleasingly traditional pen-and-ink sketches. But it seems it’s a heavily illustrated edition of “The Nameless City” in French translation. The book is due 16th October 2019.
The same young artist did a heavily illustrated “Dagon” book in the same series, released August 2019. This art sample, done in pencil, indicates the approach of the Les Carnets de Lovecraft series. Not an artnovel or a ‘BD’ (short graphic novel), but a heavily illustrated book of a short story.
