Category Archives: New books

The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916 – new second edition

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve recently been collaborating with Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., a leading and veteran Lovecraft researcher, on the second edition of his The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916. Ken has very kindly encouraged me to take a co-credit on the title page, although I should point out that the overwhelming bulk of the scholarly work was his. The PDF of this new second edition is now being hosted here, and is available for free in PDF.

Download The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916 (PDF link, 2Mb). Revised second edition, with new illustrations.

Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in New books

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Shipping now, Jason V. Brock’s new collection of essays, Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Sadly it comes from a $80-a-book publisher which aims at sales to university libraries and tenured professors rather than the fans, but Amazon ships it slightly cheaper than the list-price and some used paper copies are now filtering onto Amazon at somewhat lower prices. There’s also a Kindle ebook edition, but it’s a ridiculous $76.65.

brock

I’ve highlighted the items of likely interest to Lovecraftians…

Contents:

Section One: The Darkest Age

The Smoldering Past: The Creation of the Modern from Frankenstein and Dracula to the Great War and Beyond
“Cosmic Introspection”: Lovecraft’s Attainment of Personal Value by Way of Infinite Insignificance
Forrest J Ackerman: Fan Zero
Gathering Darkness: In Appreciation of the Artists of Weird Tales
Frank M. Robinson: First Fandom and Beyond

Section Two: Things Become

The Burden of Now: Welles’s “Panic Broadcast,” World War II, and Creeping Anomie
Ray Bradbury: The Boy Who Never Grew Up
Cinematic Dream Logic: How Movies Permanently Altered the Fabric of Reality
Individual Sexual Liberation Becomes Social Emancipation: Playboy Changes the World
Harlan Ellison: L’Enfant Terrible (Sort Of)

Section Three: The Rise of the Speculative Mind

Rod Serling: Articulating the American Nightmare
A Howling at Owl Creek Bridge: Observations on Two Important Twilight Zone Episodes
George Clayton Johnson: A Touch of Strange
L’Age d’Or to Gotterdammerung: How Bradbury, Serling, Beaumont, and “The Group” Shaped a Pop Future
Roger Corman: Socially Conscious Auteur
Finding Sanctuary: Running from the Zone to Logan
The Long Nuclear Shadow: Atomic Horror, Godzilla, and the Cold War
The Horror of It All! EC [comics] and the Beginnings of Modern Media HOOHAH!
Madly Yours, Al Feldstein
An End, a Middle, a Beginning: Richard Matheson and His Impact

Section Four: Slashers, Blockbusters, and Bestsellers

Riding the Dark Wave: The Role of Dystopian Science Fiction in Popular Culture
Celluloid Asylum: O’Bannon, Romero, Carpenter, and the Liberals Lose (and Find) Their Collective Minds
Terrible Beauty: Slasher Film Connections to Conservatism, Pornography, and Misogyny
King of the Dead: Filmmaker George A. Romero on Politics, Film, and the Future
Dan O’Bannon: Not Gone, Not Forgotten
H.R. Giger: A Darkness Faster Than Light
The Emperor’s New Book [on the decline of horror publishing]
The Doctor Is In: F. Paul Wilson
Sounds Horrific: Art Rock, Soundtracks, and the Zeitgeist

Section Five: A Century of Speculation

Carnivora: The Dark Art of Automobiles
David J. Skal: Monster Kid Ambassador of Horror
Seasons in Hell
Kris Kuksi: Dark Horizons in the Realm of the Senses
Bluewater Comics’s Darren G. Davis: On the Run in the Digital Age of Comics
The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival: Cosmic Chaos on the Silver Screen
S.T. Joshi: Champion of the Weird Tale
Marc Scott Zicree: As Timeless as Infinity

Section Six: From (and Into) the Beyond

Fangoria’s Chris Alexander: Cinephilia, Music, and All the Rest of It
Bruce Campbell: From The Evil Dead to Burn Notice and Beyond
The Inner World of William F. Nolan
The Mammoth Book of Body Horror
Two of a Kind: Lee-Anne Raymond and Demetrios Vakras
“Cthulhu, a Vampire, and a Zombie Walk into a Bar…”: Why These Themes, Why Now, and What’s the Matter with Hollyweird?
John Shirley: The Tao of Identity
Ray Harryhausen: A Note on the Passage of Giants
Kneeling at the Dandelion Shrine: An Appreciation
William F. Nolan and Ray Bradbury: Reflections
Introduction: The Pope of Speculative Fiction
Future Shock? (De)Parting Thoughts

Appendices
Index
About the Author

Kuttner in cheap volumes again

21 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, New books

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A bizzare rider to the history of Henry Kuttner…

Kuttner met his wife, the writer C.L. Moore, through a mutual correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft; when he died, she became his literary executor, then married a non-writer who ordered her to stop writing, and insisted that she suppress future publication of Kuttner’s work”

Sad to say that there appears to have been a similar fate in store for a few of the other writers in the Lovecraft circle, Munn for instance. But in the case of Kuttner, it’s now the case of ‘ebooks to the rescue!’. Gateway (Gollancz, they of the famous yellow dustjackets) re-published The Best of Henry Kuttner in May 2014, along with a number of Kuttner books they still have the rights to. And now Diversion has just re-published 14 further Kuttner titles as Kindle ebooks, including The Book of Iod: Ten Cthulhu Stories.

iod

On H.P. Lovecraft’s 124th birthday

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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

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Lovecraft has inadvertently become rather fortunate, posthumously, in the timing of his birthday. The rush to Halloween now comes so early that, at least in terms of new commercial products and their ever-bubbling pot of publicity, it now seems to start around 1st Sept — a full two months before the actual date. So one wonders if we’re moving toward a situation where the 20th of August will effectively serve as the “starting gun” for Halloween?

But here we are for 2014. Happy 124th birthday HPL, wherever your dark shade lurketh in Providence. What free presents or cool tributes have pitched up on ye Great Interwebs, so far today?

* Pete von Sholly has painted a very handsome new triptych portrait in oils…

triptych 1-3 OIL

* A big Lovecraft Readathon at the Providence Public Library. Also a big slide-show ‘sitting tour’ of Providence which is… “a joint production of Hamilton House, The H.P. Lovecraft Archive, and The Lovecraft Arts and Sciences Council”.

* The city of Phoenix, Arizona stages a big arty Lovecraft party. Play ‘Pin the tentacle on the shoggoth’, anyone?

* 2014 Second Life H.P. Lovecraft Festival, in the online world of Second Life.

* Queen City Gallery, Buffalo, USA, has a Lovecraft themed art show to celebrate the 124th birthday.

* A free tabletop role-playing game adventure for HPL’s birthday, ‘The Serpent Ring’ for the Unbelievably Simple Roleplaying (USR) game system.

* Geoff Gillan’s “The Machine King” is a free “Chaosium Dreamlands book”, launched for the birthday under Creative Commons, that has not seen the light of day until now. It’s for the Cthulhu by Gaslight role-playing game…

machine-king-handout-2-advertisement-grey-fx2

* The Voice Before the Void has completed an audio reading of “Bothon” by Henry S. Whitehead with H.P. Lovecraft (published Amazing Stories, 1946).

* Very possibly a fake, but a nice birthday fake if that’s the case…

birthday

Update:

* Dakota Rodeo visits the Arthur H. Goodenough house with her sister and friend, for H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday, and makes interior photos.

GEDC2989_zps8777848c

Update:

Jason S. Voss of Arizona made a new portrait for the birthday, “Lovecraft: Explorer of Strange Worlds”, which seems to me to capture the flinty side of HPL’s character.

Jason_S._Voss_Lovecraft_Explorer_2014

Update:

NecronomiCon 2015 announced with guest details and more for this major Lovecraft convention of scholars and fans.

Lovecraft and a World in Transition: content list

19 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Full contents list for S.T. Joshi’s forthcoming book of collected essays on Lovecraft, Lovecraft and a World in Transition.

Contents

Introduction

I. Biographical Studies

Lovecraft and Weird Tales
Further Notes on Lovecraft and Music
Lovecraft’s Library
Lovecraft’s Revisions: How Much of Them Did He Write?
Lovecraft and His Wife
Lovecraft and the Films of His Day
The Rationale of Lovecraft’s Pseudonyms
Lovecraft and the Munsey Magazines
Barbarism vs. Civilization: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft in Their Correspondence

II. Philosophical Studies

The Political and Economic Thought of H. P. Lovecraft
“Reality” and Knowledge: Some Notes on Lovecraft’s Aesthetic
In Defence of Dagon and Lovecraft’s Philosophy
Lovecraft’s Alien Civilisations: A Political Interpretation
Lovecraft and a World in Transition
Lovecraft and the “Big Issue”
H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction of Materialism
Lovecraft and Religion
Time, Space, and Natural Law: Science and Pseudo-Science in Lovecraft

III. Thematic and Textual Studies

Autobiography in Lovecraft
Lovecraft’s Other Planets
Textual Problems in Lovecraft
The Structure of Lovecraft’s Longer Narratives
The Dream World and the Real World in Lovecraft
Topical References in Lovecraft
Humour and Satire in Lovecraft
A Guide to the Lovecraft Fiction Manuscripts at the John Hay Library

IV. Studies of Individual Works

Who Wrote “The Mound”?
On “The Book”
On “Polaris”
On “The Tree on the Hill”
Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo
The Sources for “From Beyond”
On “The Descendant”
What Happens in “Arthur Jermyn”
“The Tree” and Ancient History
Lovecraft and Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguez
Some Sources for “The Mound” and At the Mountains of Madness
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Excised Passages from “The Thing on the Doorstep”

V. On Lovecraft’s Essays, Poetry, and Letters

“History of the Necronomicon”
“Supernatural Horror in Literature”
Two Spurious Lovecraft Poems
A Look at Lovecraft’s Letters
Lovecraft’s Fantastic Poetry
Lovecraft, Regner Lodbrog, and Olaus Wormius
Lovecraft’s Essays

VI. On Lovecraft’s Legacy and Influence

The Development of Lovecraftian Studies: 1971–1982
R. H. Barlow and the Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft
A Literary Tutelage: Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft
Passing the Torch: H. P. Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber
Lovecraft at Last
The Cthulhu Mythos
The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft, 1937–2013

Sources

Index

Lovecraft Annual No. 8

18 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Lovecraft Annual No. 8 (2014) is now listed on the Hippocampus Press website.

Editorial

H.P. Lovecraft, Letters to Farnsworth Wright.

R.H. Barlow, “The Night Ocean”.

Dustin Geeraert, “Sanity, Subjectivity, and the Supernatural: Dreams of the Devil in Existentialism and the Weird Tale”.

James O. Butler, “Terror and Terrain: The Environmental Semantics of Lovecraft County”.

Phillip A. Ellis, “Two Poets and Beauty: H.P. Lovecraft and James Elroy Flecker“.

Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., “Lovecraft’s Third Meeting with David V. Bush”.

J.D. Worthington, “Echoes of a Warrior Poet: The Influence of Alan Seeger on Lovecraft”.

Reviews

Briefly Noted

Note that when the store says “SHIPS FREE WORLDWIDE WITH ANY OTHER PURCHASE” it seems to mean anything other than another Lovecraft Annual, since they all have that same rider. I checked, and found the checkout adding $17 extra shipping for two different Lovecraft Annual copies.

One wonders if the “Letters to Farnsworth Wright” include previously unpublished missives?

Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos

30 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in New books

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Excellent news — Bobby Derie’s Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos is set for August publication, according to a new Hippocampus Press catalogue listing. The author had mooted to me a much later date, so I’m pleased to see it due out so soon. I’d welcome a review copy of this book.

sex-mythos

And coming in September from Hippocampus, the affordable paperback of S.T. Joshi’s two-volume Unutterable Horror: a history of supernatural fiction.