A new Kindle ebook of 239 pages, just published, surveys Italian Sword & Sorcery: La via Italiana all’heroic fantasy. It’s in Italian, and appears to be from independent scholars. Here’s the blurb translated and tweaked…

Francesco La Manno, aided by Annarita Guarnieri, aims to outline the boundaries of sword and sorcery. The lead essay makes an analysis of the core constituent elements of sword and sorcery. It does this firstly by an examination of the main characters of heroic fantasy as crafted by the Master of Cross Plains (Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and James Allison); then through a survey of the cycles of Clark Ashton Smith (Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Averoigne and Zothique) and Thongor of Lemuria by Lin Carter; then a look at some recent commercialisations of the genre. Finally, there is a survey of ‘the new heroic Mediterranean fantasy’ and its [bishops = authors and curators?]. The volume also contains essays by Adriano Monti Buzzetti, Gianfranco de Turris, Mario Polia and Paolo Paron.

“Edward Gorey: master of the macabre” The Spectator Australia reviews the new book Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. The reviewer echoes the complaint of one of the Amazon reviewers when he says that “There’s a great deal of repetition in this book”, but finds it assiduously thorough.

Perhaps that opens an opportunity for someone to make a heavily abridged graphic novel, or a heavily illustrated abridged version, at some point?

The new book Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States is one of those elite $115 essay collections seemingly aimed at collecting dust in University and (in this case) ecclesiastical libraries.

I’ve only just noticed it, and see that it appeared in the summer of 2018. It’s only of interest here for the one chapter: “Lovecraft’s Things: Sinister Souvenirs from Other Worlds” by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Curiously an essay of the same title, and by the same author, also appeared in the similar (though now rather less costly) book collection The Age of Lovecraft (2016), so the 2018 essay seems to be a reprint — though I suppose it could also be revised and/or expanded version.

For those wondering what’s in that essay, since the new book has no previews as yet… after introductory and theoretical ‘thing theory’ sections, the final third of Weinstock’s Age of Lovecraft essay surveyed Lovecraft’s re-use of the stock Gothic props of the Castle (“Rats”), the Portrait (“Pickman”), and the Forbidden Book (guess), especially in terms of their uncanny quasi-personification in Lovecraft’s texts. It is suggested that such a form of personification might raise in Lovecraft’s readers a dimly resonant recall of a superstitious world, a world in which liminal objects and object-places (such as castles) had once been psychologically ‘enchanted’ with both dread and wonder. Such personification of earthly ‘things’ might also be understood as foreshadowing Lovecraft’s later deployment of monstrous cosmic forces in his fiction, outer entities that indifferently understand humans only as ‘things’. (The essay somewhat feeds into academic theory’s current notions of trans-species psychology, a future eco-animism, and a post-human planet).

A new blog post from S. T. Joshi. He’s planning to travel to Paris in May 2019, for the formal launch of Je Suis Providence, and he notes…

One of the people I hope to meet in Paris is Martine Chifflot, a professor at Universite Lyon who has just issued a charming little book, Howard, Mon Amour (Aigle Botte Editions, 2018). This slim (88 pp.) is a series of 23 scenes [from Lovecraft’s domestic life]

Ah, ‘Paris in ze springtime’…. nice. Hopefully with the scent of apple-blossom and coffee drifting down the boulevards, rather than (as currently seem more likely, from the news) the scent of petrol-bombs.

The book, at 88 pages and originally a play of “23 spooky and musical scenes”, sounds like it might make for the basis of an interesting graphic novel in English translation? The market for ‘Lovecraft’s life as graphic novel’ might seem to be becoming a little crowded, but the three we have so far seem only to have scratched the surface with broad surveys. There are ‘worlds within worlds’ in Lovecraft’s life that could be focussed down on in 120 pages.

Joshi also notes he has a screenplay in progress, which will focus down on Sonia and Lovecraft…

“The appearance of this book is very serendipitous, as it partly echoes the themes in my own screenplay of the film The Lovecrafts on which Ryan Grulich and I are currently working.”