Category Archives: New books

Black Friday round-up

23 Friday Nov 2018

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So Black Friday is upon us. Personally I’d like a few graphics novels in half-price ebook. Especially new biographical graphic novel H.P. Lovecraft: He Who Wrote in Darkness which is still an eye-watering £18 on the Kindle. I already have the latter as a low-res review preview, but a high-res copy would be very nice. Though I don’t expect any of them will be down in price. The new three-volume searchable ebook edition of J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide looks similarly stuck at its standard set price.

Spotted so far…

* Hippocampus Press has a few discounts. Including the three-volume hardcover for H. P. Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition at half-price.

* For gamers, Chaosium has a coupon-code based sale over the weekend.

* PS Publishing has heavy discounts on many anthologies, including a bundle of Joshi’s Black Wings series.

* The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society Store. I can’t see any discount there yet.

* Necronomicon Press has free shipping for paper items, including the Crypt of Cthulhu paper editions not yet in PDF…

Free shipping for all United States orders of $20 or more (*excluding our Rarities, etc., section) – MAKE CTHULHU GREAT AGAIN!

* A pack of big hi-res Lovecraft graphics is at 50% off this weekend. ‘Commercial use’ for print products made by individuals, charities, and sole traders.

* It’s possible that big gallery sites such as DeviantArt will have discounts on its Core membership. (DeviantArt is free, but being Core is a nice non-essential extra). Incidentally, banish the foot-fetishist (singular, as my theory is it’s all posted by one bloke under different names) from DeviantArt, with the free Web browser add-on DeviantArt Filter 5.0.

* Horror and sci-fi artists using 3D and Poser (down modestly, to $90, this weekend) will be interested in the Renderosity store and its coming discounts on affordable 3D content this weekend.

* Oh, and if you were thinking of picking up a heavily-discounted Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, and you want to read graphic novels from it… then I highly recommend the 2017 10″ HD model instead of the 8″. I got one in the Black Friday sales last November, with the help of a little royalties pay-out, and I find it excellent.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Worlds

20 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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I’m always pleased to find another Lovecraft comics adaptation, and have just dug up news of two new volumes. H.P. Lovecraft’s Worlds Vol. 1: The Lurking Fear and Other Tales, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Worlds Vol. 2: Dagon and Other Tales. Both from Caliber Comics, 2018.

Vol. 1 is:

The Lurking Fear
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
The Tomb
The Alchemist

Vol. 2 is:

Dagon
Arthur Jermyn
Picture in the House
Statement of Randolph Carter
Music of Erich Zann

It looks like there’s a lot of heavy adaptation going on here, and apparently the author wrote a lot of new dialogue to ‘compensate’ for Lovecraft’s lack of it. Erich Zann is transferred to America. Dagon is updated to the nuclear submarine era. Harley Warren now works for the FBI. The Lurking Fear is set in the 1990s.

Judging by the pages of art for the “Picture in the House” adaptation that I found, you may want to try the Kindle free-sample before you pay money for copies. It’s not that it’s bad. The layout, framing and expressions are competent, it’s just rather unappealing and 1960s-looking compared to what I’d expect to see from a Lovecraft comics adaptation in 2018.

The Little Mermaid has competition…

19 Monday Nov 2018

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The Lovecraft translation wave continues to reach dreamers around the world. This time it’s Denmark’s slumbering Little Mermaid who hears the call, and wakes to find a Cthulhu-sized tome newly risen from the depths…

“A collection of Lovecraft’s stories is published for the first time in Danish. Cthulhu kalder: Fortaellinger 1926-1928 [‘Cthulhu calls: narratives 1926-1928’] is a book of over 600 pages”.

Published by Kandor, 31st October 2018.

Gou Tanabe’s The Shadow Out of Time adaptation completed

18 Sunday Nov 2018

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Hot on the heels of Gou Tanabe’s English-translation of Lovecraft, The Hound and Other Stories (Dark Horse, due on the Kindle very soon), comes news that in Japan he has published…

“the last chapter of his The Shadow Out of Time (Toki o Koeru Kage) manga on Monday”.

Apparently he also has a lot more completed and waiting for English translation: “The Colour Out of Space”; “The Haunter of the Dark”; and “The Outsider”. Some of these are available in French, Spanish, and Italian translations, but it seems that only the The Hound and Other Stories has yet made it to English.

Javier Olivares does Lovecraft

15 Thursday Nov 2018

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The noted Spanish artist Javier Olivares has produced a heavily illustrated Spanish edition of Charles Dexter Ward. It’s just been published by Anaya in 200-pages, and there’s a free sample in PDF.

Alternate covers? Or made less scary in the hope of a few extra sales to school librarians?

He’s also done Poe, Dracula, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, in a similar format.

The Horror of Lovecraft: Deluxe Edition

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

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Possibly of interest, a new book of Lovecraft in Italian, illustrated by leading Italian illustrators. The Horror of Lovecraft: Deluxe Edition (Lulu, 2018). Squinting at it through Google Translate, I can’t quite figure out what it is: a set of illustrated translations of Lovecraft; or an anthology of Lovecraft pastiches / Mythos stories, illustrated. Mention is made of at least one translation, of “The Dunwich Horror”, so perhaps it’s a mix of Lovecraft originals and stories from Italian writers.

This is how you do a stylish cover. There’s also an affordable ebook PDF version, which will likely be a better medium than Lulu’s interior print for viewing the colour illustrations. Lulu is fine for paperback covers, re: colour quality, but my experience with their colour for interior pages and calendars has been less satisfactory.

Also of interest in Italian and with an equally elegant cover, GARDENS OF THE FANTASTIC: The wonders of botany from myth to science in literature, cinema and comics (2017). A brisk survey across history, including Lovecraft, and with about 40 illustrations. It might make someone the basis of an expanded and more heavily-illustrated English translation?

New book – 21st-Century Horror: Weird Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Censorship, New books, Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi’s new book 21st-Century Horror: Weird Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium is now available in paper. It’s had to be self-published, in order to beat leftist threats of a ‘boycott’ of any publisher who dared publish the book. The threats simply had the effect of moving the title from a limited-edition PS Publishing niche hardback, to an affordable mass-market paperback on Amazon. No Kindle edition is yet visible to Amazon UK, but I expect there will also be a Kindle ebook edition soon, hopefully with a more appealing front cover. (Update: £3 Kindle edition now available).

The book surveys recent weird fiction with the usual Joshi straightforwardness, familiar to readers of similar books such as The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos (2015).

And, by silent implication… “The Unmentionables”.

Europe

11 Sunday Nov 2018

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The long-running Europe literary journal had a Lovecraft and Tolkien special in April 2016 (No. 1044), with essays in French.

J.R.R. Tolkien et Georges Dumezil.
J.R.R. Tolkien et (l’)Europe.
Peut-on (re)traduire J.R.R. Tolkien?
Tolkien et la fantasy, encore et toujours.

H.P. Lovecraft et l’imaginaire Americain.
Lovecraft a l’ecran.
Le jour ou Cthulhu a traverse les Pyrenees.

Une reinvention du fantastique.
Entre la magie et la terreur.

Plus many reviews and lecture reports.

J.R.R. Tolkien and Georges Dumezil.
J.R.R. Tolkien and Europe.
Can we (re)translate J.R.R. Tolkien?
Tolkien and fantasy, again and again.

H.P. Lovecraft and the American imagination.
Lovecraft and the screen.
The day Cthulhu crossed the Pyrenees.

A reinvention of the fantastic.
Between magic and terror.

Theology and horror – call for abstracts

08 Thursday Nov 2018

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A call for abstracts, for the academic book Theology and Horror.

Explorations of the relationship between religion and horror are fairly well established. However, this is not the case for theology and horror. Many times explorations of theology and horror involve simplistic readings in which theological concepts or doctrines are spotted within horror narratives and noted as points of connection. While this approach has its place, great possibilities exist for going deeper and wider in the exploration of horror and theology.

[The book will explore] how theology is present in horror [and suggest] how theology can be changed and shaped by an interaction with horror. [It will be] co-edited by John Morehead and Brandon R. Grafius. Morehead is the proprietor of TheoFantastique.com, and is a contributor, editor and co-editor to a number of books including The Undead and Theology, Joss Whedon and Religion, The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro, and Fantastic Fan Cultures and the Sacred (forthcoming). Grafius is assistant professor of Biblical Studies at Ecumenical Theological Seminary.

Abstracts of 300-500 words with CVs should be sent to johnwmorehead@msn.com and bgrafius@etseminary.edu by 15th January 2019. The submission deadline for drafts of manuscripts of 6,000-8,000 words is scheduled for 1st September 2019.

New Lovecraft books inc. ‘the aunt letters’ in 1200 pages

06 Tuesday Nov 2018

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S. T. Joshi’s blog has updated….

“Our edition of Lovecraft memoirs, Ave atque Vale, is now available for pre-order from Necronomicon Press.”

$30 paperback and a 100-copy limited edition hardback for the collectors. Ave atque Vale: Reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft is billed as… “each essay [annotated] thoroughly to explain obscure references and to correct errors” and thus the volume is a shelf companion to slip in beside the elegant 1998 hardback Lovecraft Remembered.

Ave atque Vale sports a fine cover photo, though the typography laid on top is excruciating. For such an important book I would have been happy to spend an hour fixing the yellow colour-cast, lightly colorising the photograph, and doing something more elegant with better type.

S.T. also mentions that he has been at work adding the Index to a forthcoming Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja volume, and that…

“we have the [Lovecraft] Letters to Family and Family Friends (1200 pp.!) ready to go”.

Wow… that’ll be ‘the aunts’ letters in print in full, at last! Great news. However, S.T. remarks that “ready to go” = “early 2019”, rather than publication before Christmas.