The Pulp Super-Fan super-swoops, cape rippling in the breeze, down onto the new book L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy…

This is a well-researched work, and I look forward to further works by this author, who is working on a biography of Barlow. […] The whole story about this affair is pretty sad as many people behaved badly. They pulled in others they shouldn’t have, attacked not only Barlow but others, and led to several proposed publications never seeing the light of day. Worse, some of those are lost, as the only copies were destroyed in a fire.

Meanwhile, down in Mexico the Tabasco Herald compares Tolkien and Lovecraft. I thought this was a review of the new Italian book on the topic, but it seems not.

Newly spotted, L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy (November 2023), with a foreword by Ken Faig Jr.

In L’Affaire Barlow, the author examines primary source material in detail never attempted before, clearly explaining how dangerously close Lovecraft’s work was to being litigated into obscurity. Bruised egos, personal vendettas, and Machiavellian plots abound, making control of the Lovecraft literary estate read like a tale from one of the pulp magazines. Lovecraft designated Robert Barlow as his literary executor. Barlow created the Lovecraft archives at Brown University even as a campaign was waged to wrest control of Lovecraft’s work from him. Barlow’s reputation was destroyed among the Lovecraft circle. It was only after his premature death that his unyielding guardianship of Lovecraft’s legacy was fully understood despite the plot against him. L’Affaire Barlow is the story of Robert Barlow’s quest to preserve the Old Gent from Providence for the ages.

The new Dead Reckonings: A Review of Horror and the Weird in the Arts No. 34 is now on the Hippocampus Press website. As well as the reviews, there’s “An Interview with Ellen Datlow”.

S.T. Joshi’s blog announces…

“I have nearly finished a revised edition of Lovecraft’s Library (to appear next year from Hippocampus)”

The folks over on the Moebius Reddit say that Doctor Moebius and Mister Gir is finally shipping, after the years of delay. Supposedly from Dark Horse in early August 2022, but it seems it’s only just now arriving.

Of possible interest to Tentaclii readers, the new multi-author volume titled How Pharaohs Became Media Stars: Ancient Egypt and Popular Culture. Not a MacFarland book. This one’s from Archaeopress, as Archaeopress Egyptology #48. Only on Amazon as a paperback, but I see that the publisher has a free open-access PDF version for no-hassle download. The book leads with a useful overview of “Theories on Pop Culture and Egyptology”.

The otherwise £170 Megaliths of the World Vol. 1 may also interest some Tentaclii readers. Also open-access, it’s free in PDF.

My ideal book, and… it’s in Italian and I can’t read Italian. Urg. Tolkien e Lovecraft: Alle origini del fantastico is newly published in the Historica Edizioni series.

J.R..R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft: the gods of fantastic writing, co-founders of a genre that is both deeply ancestral and very modern. The conventional view would place them at opposite ends of the fantastic ecosystem: light and shadow, black and white, Tolkien synonymous with airy fantasy and Lovecraft with deep horror. Yet in the epic of Tolkien’s Middle-earth there is no shortage of flashes of darkness and terror, just as in the dark Lovecraftian cosmos, populated by unspeakable entities, fairy-tale horizons of enchantment and wonder are also found. By analysing their masterpieces, and the reading that inspired both men, this book aims to read the two great architects of the imagination from a more flexible perspective, one which attempts to frame and understand them within their authentic complexity.

Soon to be available via Amazon Italy, which has a 28th November 2023 publication date though the book is not currently listed as shipping. Amazon UK “knows ‘a nurthing” about the book.