The revised and expanded ebook of my Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire, an investigation is now available on Amazon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, you’ll recall, is one of the most famous supernatural tales in English literature.

This book offers a concise overview of the existing Gawain research relating to North Staffordshire, and then adds a wealth of new detail and facts drawn largely from previously overlooked sources. The case is clearly made that one of the most famous works of English literature belongs to North Staffordshire. Obvious new candidates for both the Gawain-poet’s patron and the Gawain castle are suggested, and these are found to fit naturally and almost exactly when compared with the expected dates, castle features, dialect location, social status and life-story. A wealth of surrounding detail is also explored, such as: the history and role of the King’s Champion; English contacts with full-blooded paganism during the Prussian crusades; the two lavish courts at Tutbury; and the history of the Manifold Valley. This ebook is well illustrated and copiously referenced with linked round-trip footnotes.

This should now be considered the definitive edition of my book, which until now it has been available in paper from Lulu. It’s had a number of additions and yet another round of close proof-reading.

The book follows my equally successful sleuthing on the trail of the real identity of the Time Traveller from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, arising from a study of Wells’s formative time spent in Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire. I hope to also have an ebook edition of my ‘young H.G. Wells’ book available sometime later in 2019. Having cracked, to my satisfaction, both the Time Traveller and the Gawain-castle, the next book will be a far larger one that explores the young Tolkien and Earendel in intellectual and historical context. This will also have something to say about the local connections, but mostly Birmingham, since for Tolkien the Staffordshire topography came a little later and was more incidental to his intellectual development.

Newly on the Hippocampus Press catalogue, a chunky book of new Machen scholarship titled The Secret Ceremonies: Critical Essays on Arthur Machen. Not yet on Amazon.

Essays which sound like they might be of vague interested to me, re: the possible Tolkien resonances…

* “Of Sacred Groves and Ancient Mysteries: Parallel Themes in the Writings of Arthur Machen and John Buchan”.

* “Sanctity Plus Sorcery: The Curious Christianity of Arthur Machen”.

A new book on Lovecraft fave Arthur Machen, The Decorative Imagination of Arthur Machen. This draws on 20 years of the Machen journal Faunus, to assemble a survey of Machen’s…

range of interests, including the legends of the Great War [First World War], the Celtic Church, the “real” Little People, the occult, the byways of London …

The book also…

“makes newly available reprints of rare pieces by Machen himself … as a journalist and essayist”.

New from Beehive, The Temple of Silence: Forgotten Works & Worlds of Herbert Crowley. He’s not to be confused with occult loon Aleister Crowley.

It’s an expensive hardcover, and the Society of Illustrators calls it a… “sumptuous, towering monument of an art book”. The buyer gets a 20,000 word biographical monograph within the 108 pages, which I imagine means that the art on the remaining pages is the ‘best of’ rather than a full illustrated catalogue of his works.

‘Krazy Kat meets Edward Lear’ might be one way of summing up the works.

So far as I’m aware, Lovecraft did not see Crowley’s newspaper strips. Even in the reading room of the Providence Public Library he was probably not able to get the New York Herald, where the strips appeared. Though we know he read the New York Post shortly after he returned to Providence, so as to ‘keep up’ with New York. Also, Lovecraft had arrived in New York just as Crowley was leaving that city.

But Lovecraft was aware of Krazy Kat and may have seen it occasionally as it was widely syndicated. In his essay on “Cats and Dogs” he talks of the blind idiot-love owners have for grotesque dogs, comparing it to…

the childish penchant for the grotesque and tawdrily ‘cute’, which we see like-wise embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls, and all the malformed decorative trumpery of the “Billiken” or “Krazy Kat” order, found in the “dens” and “cosy corners” of the would-be sophisticated cultural yokelry.