Category Archives: New books

Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema

29 Monday Dec 2014

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This may be interesting, for those considering how the cultural climate of the 1940s interacted with the reception of Lovecraft in the decade after his death: Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade…

The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This collection [has an introductory overview of previous scholarship and] chapters focused on Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions operating in 1940s horror cinema, 1940s proto-slasher films, the independent horrors of the Poverty Row studios, and critical re-evaluations of neglected hybrid films such as The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) and “slippery” auteurs such as Robert Siodmak and Sam Neufield.”

Antares No.8

27 Saturday Dec 2014

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Here’s a quick and dirty translation, giving the gist of the scholarly contents in the new Italian journal Antares No.8, 2014 — a freely available H.P. Lovecraft special issue…

Editorial: the Copernican revolution of H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft, or the inconsistency of the real. [?]

Lovecraft and the traditions of New England.

The Key and the Mountain: the dream symbolism in Lovecraft.

HPL and the FBI: the anthrax hoaxes [seems to relate to the cases of hoax letters in Syracuse, USA]

Lovecraft, the quest of the genius who came from outside. [?]

The fall of Sarnath and the fall of Rome.

The “doors of perception” and the “cracks in the Great Wall” [possibly on HPL as the forerunner of psychedelic drug literature?]

“The Master of Cosmicism” – an interview with S.T. Joshi.

“The fantastic is the exception, not the rule” – an interview with Giuseppe Lippi.

Reviews:

* Renzo Giorgetti, Lovecraf e la sincronicita, presentazione di Sebastiano Fusco, Solfanelli, Chieti 2013, pp.128. [Lovecraft and synchronicity]
* Antonio Tentori, H.P. Lovecraf e il cinema, Edizioni Profondo Rosso, Roma 2014, pp.240. [Lovecraft and cinema]
* Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Parola di Lovecraft, a cura di S.T. Joshi, edizione italiana ampliata a cura di Pietro Guarriello, presentazione di Gianfranco de Turris, Societa Editrice La Torre, San Marco Evangelista 2012, pp. 156. [Seems to be a collection of Lovecraft’s autobiographical writings]
* Studi Lovecraftani, a.VIII, n. 13, inverno 2013. [The Italian eqivalent of the Lovecraft Annual]

anteres

Forthcoming, the Bloch-Lovecraft letters

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

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News of a new book of Lovecraft letters, from S.T. Joshi…

David E. Schultz and I are working hard on getting Lovecraft’s Letters to Robert Bloch ready for publication with Hippocampus Press. It will also include letters to Natalie H. Wooley, Robert Nelson, William Frederick Anger, Kenneth Sterling, Donald A. Wollheim, Wilson Shepherd, and Willis Conover. A fat book! This could be published as early as February 2015. After that — the joint correspondence of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith!”

* Robert Nelson (1912-1935) isn’t in The Lovecraft Encyclopaedia. But there is information here. The blurb for a 2012 book collection of his work, Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches and Letters, gives a biographical outline…

Robert Nelson (1912-1935) was a contributor of verse to Weird Tales magazine in the mid-1930s, and of verse and prose to fan magazines like The Fantasy Fan. He was also a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. … Also included [in the book] are five [1930s] letters by H.P. Lovecraft”

* Natalie Hartley Wooley corresponded 1933–37. She was a poet of the amateur journalism movement, with poetry in The Tryout and probably other amateur journals. She also had poetry and at least one “straight ghost story” in The Fantasy Fan, plus a lead essay on “The Adventure Story” in The Californian (Fall 1935) which had an early critical appraisal of a Conan story. Lovecraft’s letters to her appear to have had much to say on race relations, pungent extracts from which have already been published in Selected Letters.

* Wilson Shepherd was a friend of Wollheim, publishing the forerunner (Fanciful Tales?) to The Phantagraph. He corresponded 1936-37, and Lovecraft revised a couple of his poems. He published “A History of the Necronomicon” in pamphlet form in 1937.

Added to Open Lovecraft

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

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* Isabella van Elferen (2014), “Hyper-Cacophony: Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism”, IN Carl Sederholm and Jeffrey Weinstock (Eds.), The Age of Lovecraft, Palgrave 2015. (Pre proof version of the essay. Lovecraft in speculative realist philosophy, with a focus on Lovecraft’s symbolic use of music and more inconceivable sonics).

Appears to be destined for The Age of Lovecraft: Cosmic Horror, Posthumanism, and Popular Culture, a forthcoming book on “Lovecraft’s place in contemporary culture”.

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

30 Sunday Nov 2014

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The earliest Arabic tales of the weird, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, published in English for the first time.

…it lay unread and gathering dust, a ragged manuscript that no one even knew existed, until 1933 when Hellmut Ritter, a German Orientalist, stumbled across it and translated it into his mother tongue. An Arabic edition was belatedly printed in 1956.”

The stories…

dealt with all things that challenged human understanding, including magic, the realms of the jinn, marvels of the sea, strange fauna and flora, great monuments of the past, automatons, hidden treasures, grotesqueries and uncanny coincidences. … The sheer mad inventiveness of “The Story of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle”, with its jumbling of Muslim, Christian and pagan beliefs and rituals would take some beating. Here we have a mechanical vulture, visionary dreams, conversation with a pagan god, magical transformations, thrones of wrath and of mercy, an enchanted gazelle, a herder of giant ostriches, lustful jinn, speaking idols, a queen of the crows, a weeping lion, a fortress guarded by talismans, a crocodile with pearls in its ears, the sacrifice of virgins to the Nile and much else.”

The hardcover seems to have sold out, but a Kindle edition is available.

Reiniger-achmed30-bigStill from Reiniger’s Achmed.

Feline Classics

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Feline Classics (Eureka Productions, Aug 2014, 144 pages), a new anthology. It melds new art and comics with public domain stories and poems. When you flip it over, it reverses into being Canine Classics on dogs — which is not so Lovecraftian. In the kittee section Lovecraft is represented by his poem “The Cats”, alongside an illustration for it. There’s also an essay on cats by Robert E. Howard, “The Beast from the Abyss”, on the rough lives of the semi-wild cats of a Texan oil town.

• Ancient Sorceries – by Algernon Blackwood
adapted by Alex Burrows and Randy DuBurke

• The Beast from the Abyss – an essay by Robert E. Howard
illustrated by Peter Kuper

• Dog, Cat and Baby – by Joe R. Lansdale
illustrated by Lance Tooks

• A Little Fable – by Franz Kafka
illustrated by Vincent Stall

• Tobermory – by Saki
adapted by Trina Robbins and Lisa K. Weber

• The Owl and the Pussy-Cat – a poem by Edward Lear
illustrated by Mary Fleener

• The Cat and the King – by Ambrose Bierce
illustrated by Johnny Ryan

• Fog – a poem by Carl Sandburg
illustrated by Skot Olsen

• The Cats – a poem by H.P. Lovecraft
illustrated by Allen Koszowski

• The King o’ the Cats – by Joseph Jacobs
illustrated by Pat N. Lewis

• What I learn from Cats – a poem by John Lehman
illustrated by Milton Knight

The Lost History of Esoteric Writing

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

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A weighty new book from the University Of Chicago Press looks interesting, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. According to a review, this is is a…

compelling, surprising, and persuasive defense of Strauss”[‘s claim that…] “virtually all philosophers up until the early 19th century wrote their books ‘esoterically’ — that is, using a rhetoric of concealment, with a surface teaching meant for general readers and a hidden teaching for those who were intelligent, clever, and tenacious enough to uncover it.” [The author] “supplies a mountain of evidence in support of Strauss’ claims — quotes from just about every major philosopher (and many other writers) from ancient Greece to 19th-century Germany testifying to the reality of esotericism.” — Damon Linker, The Week.

a landmark work in both intellectual history and political theory” — Wall Street Journal.

Eldritch Tales in audio book form

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc.

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I hadn’t realised that the Gollancz doorstopper collection of less well-known Lovecraft, titled Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre, now has a professional quality audio book version available.

eldritch_audio

It contains readings of a lot of the more obscure Lovecraft items, which I suspect Wayne June may never get around to recording. The items include, among others:

History of the Necronomicon
The Alchemist
A Reminiscence of Dr Samuel Johnson
Memory
Despair
Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme
The Nightmare Lake
Poetry and the Gods (with Anna Helen Crofts)
Ex Oblivione
The Crawling Chaos (with Winifred Virginia Jackson)
The Horror at Martin’s Beach (with Sonia H. Greene)
Hallowe’en in a Suburb
The Green Meadow (with Winifred Virginia Jackson)
Nathicana
Two Black Bottles (with Wilfred Blanch Talman)
The Last Test (with Adolphe de Castro)
The Wood
The Ancient Track
The Electric Executioner (with Adolphe de Castro)
The Trap (with Henry S. Whitehead)
In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walked
The Evil Clergyman

Only “‘Afterword’: Lovecraft in Britain, by Stephen Jones” seems to be omitted, though apparently it’s in the printed volume.