New from McFarland this summer, H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Works, Critical Perspectives and Interviews on His Influence. The cover, and the fact that it reprints (again) various Lovecraft stories, makes it look like yet another shovelware reprint of the stories.
But a closer inspection, via Google Books, shows that it’s not shovelware. There’s an academic section, sitting at the back of the story reprints. Plus some interviews…
I can get a few pages of the essay “The Victorian Era’s Influence on H.P. Lovecraft” via Google Books, and it looks quite encouraging. It appears to be a sound undergraduate primer on late Victorian aesthetic and philosophical movements as they were taken up in America and impacted on Lovecraft in Providence.
As such Selected Works, Critical Perspectives and Interviews looks like the sort of book one would assign to a class of bright and sensible undergraduates in an out-of-the-way American university, students preparing to spend four weeks on Lovecraft as part of a larger 12-week course module on the history of the weird in America. It seems to fit that market, although the high price (£18 on Kindle, $40 paper) is obviously geared to university libraries rather than individual students.
Even the Kindle edition is too expensive for me, though, when all I’d want to read is “The Victorian Era’s Influence on H.P. Lovecraft” and perhaps T.E.D. Klein’s “Providence after Dark” — I’m guessing the latter is perhaps a historically-accurate topographic description of Lovecraft’s long night walks among the antiquated ways and burying-grounds, evoking what HPL would have seen and felt there?
