Released tomorrow (Monday 23rd September) in Kindle ebook format, Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham. This is the second and final volume of Klinger’s Annotated Lovecraft and it’s good to see that S.T. Joshi’s corrected texts have once again been used.

The 512-page paper edition has a later release date according to Amazon UK (“25th Oct 2019”). But I’m told that it’s a simultaneous print/ebook release for the USA.

I see that in the ebook and the Google Books preview the annotations are given as endnotes, rather than footnotes. Presumably that’s to allow pop-outs over the page for Kindle Fire readers, and ’round-trip’ links on the older Kindle 3 e-ink ebook ereaders. But I read somewhere that the first print volume had a “1/3 sidebar” for its annotations, so presumably that format will be repeated for the second print volume? Update: Yes, Klinger confirms the same format is used for the second volume.

It’s an amusing touch to have the front cover hint at Lovecraft’s love of spaghetti. The print edition has a different cover.

In order of presentation in the book:

The Tomb.
Polaris.
The Transition of Juan Romero.
The Doom That Came to Sarnath.
The Terrible Old Man.
The Cats of Ulthar.
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.
The Temple.
Celephais.
From Beyond.
Ex Oblivione.
The Quest of Iranon.
The Outsider.
The Other Gods.
The Music of Erich Zann.
The Lurking Fear.
The Rats in the Walls.
Under the Pyramids.
The Shunned House.
The Horror at Red Hook.
Cool Air.
The Strange High House in the Mist.
Pickman’s Model.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

At the back there is a new ‘Lovecraft Gazetteer’ of place-names, as an appendix. This includes invented places, including places in outer space.

The latest edition of The New Ray Bradbury Review, No. 6, 2019 is on Bradbury’s horror.

Do make sure to look at the publisher’s blurb, as it’s a small masterpiece… of cringing defensiveness, something that is surely no longer needed for a master of genre literature in 2019. Nor does the blurb’s lurch into clueless comparisons reassure the potential buyer: Stephen King, the Oxford Lovecraft edition (very questionable), and an apparent Oxford edition of Clark Ashton Smith… but where is that last item? Perhaps the blurb writer was thinking of the Penguin Classics edition.

Yet if one can get past the blurb and the flippant cover-art, then clicks the ‘Look Inside’… the actual table-of-contents reassures.

Time for the journal’s editors to have a few words with their publisher, I’d suggest, about how the journal should be marketed and presented for sale.

There’s also another new journal on one of the greats, whose ‘poetry with a pen’ was of a different sort. The latest issue (#77) of the high-quality Jack Kirby Collector journal is a “Monsters and Bugs” special issue…

100 pages in colour, for just $10.95.

I’m pleased to see a new fannish 64-page magazine with illustrated articles on the history of horror comics and magazines that carried comics. Monster Maniacs #1 (August 2019) is available now in paper only. The focus is on American comics, rather than British / French / Spanish, but I imagine that the editor may welcome such articles as the magazine develops.

The late Stan Taylor’s book-length Jack Kirby biography, now available free at The Kirby Effect: the journal of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center. Complete with colour scans and archival pictures. The last chapter posted was 1st June 2019, and it looks like it sees one new chapter posted every four months or so. As such the online book is currently only missing the final few chapters…

22 – Allegory Of His Life
23 – Why Did The Fourth World Fail?
24 – Once More Into The Breach
25 – Animated
26 – The Animated Artist

Picture: Jack Kirby at the board, from Kirby: King of Comics.

This spurs a fascinating historical “What If? idea” What if… Stan Lee had said to Jack Kirby one day at Timely in the mid 1950s: “Jack, forget these capes-and-tights heroes. They’re over. The kids want monsters and mystery. So I found us the secret sauce for our new Yellow Claw title, it’ll have new types of monster… and these monsters are gonna get us past this new freakin’ Comics Code and let us scoop up all the homeless readers of EC’s horror comics! Take a read of these here Lovecraft stories… yeah yeah I know, ya heard he’s supposed to be about indescribable monsters… but you’re Jack Kirby, you can draw anything…”

Of course it didn’t happen that way. In the end we got the superpowered capes-and-tights heroes vs. the superpowered monsters, and quadruple the fun. But it could have just gone toward creepy mystery monsters — before being swept away by TV and cheap paperbacks.

Les editions Mnemos: Luxury Lovecraft.

7 handsome volumes of the stories and poetry, illustrated. Essays by S.T. Joshi, Patrice Louinet and others, the Commonplace Book, selections from the letters. All in French, though.

Apparently “Delivery is scheduled for the first quarter of 2020”, according to editions Mnemos. The project raised £362,516 ($442,142) on the French equivalent of the Kickstarter site.